Sen. Rand Paul's puzzling vote for Chuck Hagel: Smart politics?

And so the epic battle over Chuck Hagel's nomination to become defense secretary ended with a whimper, not a bang. The Senate easily confirmed the former Republican senator from Nebraska on Tuesday, 58 to 41, with four Republicans joining all present Democrats. That was still by far the least amount of support a successful defense secretary nominee has received since at least the Carter administration, and confirmation came only after one successful GOP filibuster and, on Tuesday, an unsuccessful follow-up. For anyone who's been paying attention to the Hagel drama for the past few weeks, the outcome was no surprise.

Spectators may have noticed one unexpected wrinkle to the Hagel denouement, however: Sen. Rand Paul. Fifteen Republicans voted on Tuesday morning to end the filibuster against Hagel but then went on to oppose his confirmation. Only one, the junior senator from Kentucky, voted the other way: Paul was one of the 27 Republicans who voted to continue the filibuster, but then he surprised just about everyone by joining the "aye" Republicans — Thad Cochran (Miss.), Mike Johanns (Neb.), and Richard Shelby (Ala.) — for the final vote.

How unexpected was Paul's U-turn on Hagel? Paul had been a vocal supporter of the Feb. 14 filibuster, and after his vote Tuesday to continue blocking a vote, the anti-Hagelian forces rushed to embrace him — and some on the libertarian right felt compelled to jump in to defend Paul to the conservative foreign policy "realists" who backed his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), and appreciate Hagel's skepticism on foreign interventions. Among the former group, William Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel congratulated Paul for "a pro-Israel vote today," while The Washington Post's resident Hagel-basher, blogger Jennifer Rubin, included Paul among the "principled and savvy hawks who understand that reality (keeping Hagel out of the Pentagon) trumps Senate 'comity.'"

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Paul has a ready explanation for his puzzling votes: He supported the filibuster, he told reporters after Hagel was confirmed, "because I wanted more information and I think that part of what the Senate does is try to get information about the nominees." He voted to confirm Hagel because "I've said all along that I give the president some prerogative in choosing his political appointees." In other words, it's about the principle, not the man. "There are many things I disagree with Chuck Hagel on, there are many things I disagree with John Kerry on, there are very few things I agree with the president on, but the president gets to choose political appointees."

The end result, though, is that nobody is completely happy with him. The Emergency Committee for Israel yanked back its tentative high-five, and Paul only partly mended his bridges to his father's disenchanted fan base. Paul's ultimate support for Hagel was "the outcome that I and a lot of other antiwar conservatives and libertarians were hoping for, but it makes the previous votes even harder to understand," says Daniel Larison at The American Conservative. Hagel was one vote shy of being confirmed before the Senate took a recess, so "Paul was in a position almost two weeks ago to bring debate on the nomination to an end. He didn't do that."

Salon's Alex Pareene puts Paul's against-it-before-he-was-for-it votes a little less charitably:

Whether or not he got the political calculus right here, Paul's mixed message on Hagel is part of his larger challenge to make himself into what The Week's Matt Lewis calls "a younger, saner, more broadly appealing Ron Paul." If Rand Paul, like his father, is going to make a run for the White House — as everybody seems to assume he will — he needs to "solidify his father's libertarian-leaning support, sprinkle in some mainstream conservative backers (folks his dad could never reach), and — voila! — he will have assembled a 'libertarian-Republican' coalition capable of winning a decent slice of the primary electorate." That's much harder than it sounds.