Beyond the Dome

Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina had a helpful suggestion for Barack Obama: If he’s so interested in Afghanistan — the battlefield he’s about to visit — why not hold a hearing on the Afghanistan war in the Foreign Relations subcommittee he chairs?

It was another way for John McCain’s surrogates to tweak Obama for not holding any hearings, on Afghanistan or anything else, in the Subcommittee on European Affairs that he has headed since last year. He has, of course, been running for president the whole time. DeMint, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, sent Obama a letter asking for a hearing and guest-starred in a McCain campaign conference call, telling reporters that “we have missed a lot opportunities to take more responsibility and to bring to public light the problems.”

So this morning, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a potential Obama running mate — gently reminded DeMint that the full committee has, in fact, held hearings on Afghanistan, and argued that a full committee hearing trumps a subcommittee hearing anyway.

“As you are aware, under my Chairmanship the Foreign Relations Committee has addressed most Afghanistan issues at the Full Committee level,” Biden wrote to DeMint. “I believe that this is the best way of ensuring the most comprehensive examination of the complex issues involved, and of ensuring the highest-level Administration participation.”

Biden cited two hearings held during this Congress, one in March 2007 and the other in January 2008, as well as a September 2006 hearing held under then-chairman Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind.

So what did Obama do in those hearings? In March 2007, he asked retired Marine Gen. James Jones Jr., the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, what could be done to make the Pakistani military more aggressive in fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan. That was the only question he got in, thanks to time constraints on Jones’ schedule. (Jones gave a vague answer about the need to find “a way to scratch the itches on both sides of the border.”)

According to the transcripts of the other two hearings, Obama either wasn’t there or didn’t ask any questions.