Enter
A word of warning to anyone
thinking about 2016: Running
for president doesn’t always
help your political career. After unsuccessful presidential
bids in ’04 and ’08, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) later found
himself without a congressional
seat. After he finished sixth in
the ‘08 Iowa caucuses — after
moving his family to the state
— Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) saw
his popularity in his state plummet and decided not to run for
re-election. And after briefly
running for president in 2008,
former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy
Thompson (R) lost a Senate race
four years later. And now you
can add Rep. Michele Bachmann
(R-MN), who like Dodd finished
sixth in Iowa in 2012, to this list.
I’m pretty sure that’s all wrong.
Let’s begin with the spare examples cited, a tiny list of politicians
who found themselves falling on
hard times sometime after they
made presidential bids. As near
as I can tell, none of them experienced a fallow period in their political careers as a consequence of
having run for president.
Kucinich “found himself without a congressional seat” because
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
06.09.13
his district was abolished in redistricting after the 2010 Census,
and he was forced to run against
another incumbent, Rep. Marcy
Kaptur, in a Democratic primary
in a district mainly composed of
Kaptur’s historical constituency.
Chris Dodd’s rough electoral sledding had much more to do with a
The larger lesson here
isn’t so much ‘think twice
before running for president’
as much as it is ‘don’t
improperly use campaign
funds or launder money or
steal email lists.’”
plethora of post-financial crash
controversies — most notably his
flip-flop on legislation that eventually “helped pave the way for
AIG to pay controversial bonuses
to its employees.” Tommy Thompson was a presidential candidate
for a hot minute in 2008, and he
withdrew before the primaries.
Four years later, he ran for the
Senate and lost to Tammy Baldwin. I’m at a complete loss as to
why his brief involvement in presidential politics doomed him.
Was Bachmann harmed by her