Chuck Quixote

Nominally anti-war Sen. Chuck Hagel has a plan for meshing his presidential ambitions with his unpopularity among Republicans: Not running as a Republican.

Hagel has not only emerged as a leading critic of the administration's foreign policy, he's also flirting with running for president next year — possibly on a hybrid ticket that would include a Democrat.

"If I decide to get into this, I would run not just to make a statement," Hagel, 60, said in an interview last week.

He said that if he ran he would seek the Republican nomination. Yet he's also talking up Unity08. That's a plan by a bipartisan group of political operatives to draft a bipartisan presidential ticket on the Internet and offer voters an alternative to the Democratic and Republican candidates next year."

I think it's a very intriguing enterprise," Hagel said. He said most Americans are disenchanted with the major political parties.

I want to like Hagel, but this is just egoism. Unity08 is clearly a stalking horse for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the 5'7'' effeminate billionaire who thinks he can be elected president because of that "billionaire" part. While the Kucinich-Gravel and Tancredo-Gilmore tickets grovel to raise $500 million, Bloomberg could write himself a check for that much, or more.