Two Losers To Run For Re-Election

There were originally 11 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination -- Pawlenty, Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, Perry, Johnson, Roemer, Paul, Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney. Five of those have abandoned their presidential ambitions for this year (Pawlenty, Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, Perry), and two others are now running for third-party nominations -- Gary Johnson for the Libertarian Party candidacy and Buddy Roemer for the Americans Elect slot or the Reform Party candidacy.

Now we learn that at least two of those whose presidential hopes were dashed by voters are now planning to run for re-election to their old jobs. The first is Rep. Michele Bachmann. She wants to run for re-election to her current seat in Minnesota's 6th Congressional District -- even though no longer lives in that district. Amazingly, a quirk of the election laws is that they don't require a person to live in the congressional district they represent. This is something that needs to be fixed, but until it is Bachmann has the right to run in a district where she doesn't live.

Why doesn't Bachmann want to run in the district where she lives? Because she knows she can't win in that district. When the district lines were redrawn for congressional districts in Minnesota (by a judicial panel), Bachmann's home wound up the the 4th Congressional District. Popular Democrat Betty McCollum also lives in that district and currently represents it in Congress. McCollum is running for re-election, and it is extremely doubtful that Bachmann could beat her. So Bachmann, already a right-wing nut-job, is now going to be a carpetbagging right-wing nut-job. Hopefully, the voters in the 6th Congressional District won't like that.

The other loser running for re-election is Rick Perry, although he'll have to wait a couple of years to do so. Last Tuesday, Perry told the Texas Tribune that he is "leaning toward" running for re-election as Texas governor in 2014. In "perry-speak" that means he will run. He is already in his 12th year as governor (having assumed the office in December of 2000), but sadly Texas has no term limit on the office. Perry can serve forever -- as long as the voters keep re-electing him every four years.

The crazy part of all this is that Perry is not really interested in being governor anymore. He has demonstrated this by largely ignoring his gubernatorial duties since dropping out of the presidential race. Why would he run for re-election then? Well, he was pretty honest about that in the interview. He wants to be president.

He wants to run for the Republican nomination in 2016 (evidently he believes Obama will be re-elected this year, because there wouldn't be an opportunity for Perry in 2016 if Obama lost). And staying in office as the governor of Texas is the best way he knows to stay in the news and launch his next presidential campaign. We can only hope the voters in Texas realize this, and opt instead to elect a real governor.