Thune "Likely" to Run in 2012
The Weekly Standard reports:
It’s a short drive into town. A green sign announces that Murdo’s population is 679—or at least it was at the last census. It is the seat of Jones County, where there is close to one square mile for each of the 1,193 residents.
This is where John Thune spent the first 18 years of his life. “When I was growing up, my horizons—the world—kind of began and ended at the city limits of Murdo.” It’s a bigger world now.
John Thune is likely to run for president in 2012. If he wins the nomination, it will be because he is an exceptionally skilled retail politician who can communicate a kind of midwestern, common sense conservatism that is ascendant in reaction to liberal profligacy. It will be because of skills and values he learned in Murdo.
It also helps that he’s cultivated the nationwide donor base that gave him $14.5 million to defeat Tom Daschle in 2004. And that South Dakota borders Iowa. And that he’s good on television. And that he’s a devout Christian who can quote Scripture without seeming to proselytize.
“I think he’s the complete package and is the kind of person who could conceivably go the distance in a race for the presidency,” says Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. “I think he’s an extraordinary talent, and I hope that he will run and win.”
But there are many obstacles. He has virtually no national profile. He worked briefly as a lobbyist. He voted for TARP. He is a defender of earmarks. He would be running against Washington from Washington.
Several people close to the senator say they would be surprised if he chose not to run, and Thune allows that he’s thinking about it seriously enough that he’s gamed out his “pathway to get there,” calculated the amount of money it would take to be competitive in early primaries, and even thought about the timing of an announcement. He thinks his family would be on board. “I’m taking a very full look at it,” he says.
And why not. The Republican field is wide open. And Obama is vulnerable.
Thune is a tough critic of the president. He says Obama is “out of his element” on national security issues and the war on terror, and “doesn’t get” America’s history of economic freedom. “I think that is why a lot of Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical about his leadership and his overall philosophy of what America could and should be in the next decade and this century.”
I spent time with Thune in a variety of settings over the course of several weeks this summer, both in Washington and in South Dakota. And regardless of the situation—in meetings with the military on Capitol Hill, at a political fundraiser in a wealthy Washington suburb, eating French toast at his home in Sioux Falls, touring jails on an Indian reservation, talking to farmers at Dakota-Fest, chatting with his staff over dinner, meeting with GOP activists at a county fair—he was always the same guy. That is a rare quality in today’s crop of national elected officials. He does not appeal to blue collar voters one day and disparage them the next as clinging to their guns and their religion.
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