Disraeli Gears

You get the feeling the New York Times has endorsed the Iraqi Study Group recommendations...even before they've been released. They sure are polishing Jim Baker's apple.

The last time he dominated the news was in 2000, in Florida, when Mr. Baker — a former secretary of state who has been a friend and a tennis partner of the first President Bush since the current president was 13 years old — led the legal team that delivered the White House to its current occupant. That was Mr. Baker in partisan mode, cementing his reputation as Bush family confidant and Republican fix-it man.

Now, at 76, Mr. Baker is in high diplomat mode, on a mission, friends and supporters say, to aid his country and his president — and, while he is at it, seal his legacy in the realm of statesmen, a sphere he cares about far more than politics.

“I think he’d like to be remembered as a 21st-century Disraeli,” said Leon Panetta, a Democratic member of the group, referring to the 19th-century British statesman and prime minister. “I think deep down he is someone who believes that his diplomatic career, in many ways, helped change the world.”

[...]

Mr. Baker is no stranger to world affairs; he presided over the end of the cold war, the 1991 invasion of Iraq (arguing famously against ousting Saddam Hussein) and was an aggressive dealmaker in the Middle East. He has always been “the quintessential pragmatist,” in Mr. Panetta’s words, a master at intertwining politics with diplomacy, at consulting everyone in the beginning so no one feels left out in the end.

That has been his modus operandi at the commission, where he has functioned almost as a shadow secretary of state, using his vast personal Rolodex to reach out to international figures the Bush administration has shunned — while testing the political waters at home.
[...]

By all accounts, Mr. Baker relishes his encore as elder statesmen.

“Look, he was certainly a very effective politician, a wise political strategist,” said Donald L. Evans, a close friend of Mr. Baker’s who served as commerce secretary in President Bush’s first term. “But that was a means to an end. He’s playing, I think, the role that he should be playing at this moment in life — the distinguished statesman that is there for leaders to go to, and listen to.”

Pragmatist, alright.

When I traveled with Mr. Baker as a member of the State Department press corps, it was evident that he was a good secretary of state, but far from perfect. Like his boss and best friend, President George H. W. Bush, Mr. Baker lacked the vision thing. He failed to foresee the murderous passions unleashed by Yugoslavia's breakup -- and then declared that the United States did ''not have a dog in that fight'' -- or that oil wealth and autocrats couldn't forever contain the anger roiling the Middle East.

But Disraeli?