I'm Officially No Longer Planning on Running for US Senate

No offense to those candidates who had previously announced that they were running for the United States Senate seat that is up in 2012, but since none of those candidates really got me too excited or had a big enough name, I was playing around in my mind with running myself for that Senate seat. The 2012 election is going to be more about the President than it is who will be Senator, and although Debbie Stabenow (who currently ineptly fills the office) is a good fundraiser she is good at little else and is able to be beaten if someone lays some solid body blows on her record and character- and I could do those things. I don't have very much money and have few connections to people who do, but once you're a candidate, those things appear, and then it's just about hammering away at the weak candidate that Stabenow is. Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner John McCulloch, activist Peter Konetchy, and former judge Randy Hekman are the only candidates currently running against her, and I've got as good as a shot as any of them, so I was playing around with it in my mind. Now, thankfully, I don't have to.

Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra is expected to jump back into the race against Stabenow as early as today, and he represents exactly the kind of big-name, high-experience, solid candidate that I have been looking and waiting for to get into it against Stabenow. Hoekstra retired this year after serving nine terms in the federal House of Representatives, after his run for Governor was unsuccessful. While in the House, he rose to Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, where he left his mark on key anti-terrorism legislation. Before entering politics, he served as a vice president of marketing at Herman Miller, the office furniture maker headquartered near Grand Rapids. Since leaving Capitol Hill, Hoekstra's worked for Dickstein Shapiro, a top law firm based in Washington, where he has continued to keep in touch with all the issues facing our nation.

Hoekstra is the kind of candidate that we need in the Senate. As I pointed out in my post Graph: Public Debt Over Time, Color-Coded by Party in Power, although the President is important in our nation, having a solid and conservative Congress will go farther to restoring the sanity to our nations finances, so it is good to finally have a solid candidate running for the US Senate against the weak and corrupt Stabenow, who has grown fat on taxpayers for too many years. My post Graph: U.S. Foreclosure Rates, Colored-Coded by Party in Power also indicated that the worse thing for our nation as far as foreclosures go was having a Democratic Congress, and knocking out Stabenow, who represents the farthest extremes of progressives as a Democrat in Congress, and replacing her with Hoekstra, who represents a solid Republican vote, will work to stop the foreclosure crisis that is hammering our nation.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra was honestly my choice for Governor of Michigan last time around- in my post Recommendations for Michigan's Primary Election in 2010 you can read about my struggles with deciding on a candidate, and after much research and analysis I decided that Hoekstra was the best- even better than Rick Snyder, who went on to become Governor. I decided that Hoekstra was a solid candidate, someone who people spoke well of, he had good family values, a solid background in business and government, and he is a good conservative who is friendly to the Tea Party movement (see post Tea Party Express Stop Southeast Michigan: My Report, with Pictures and Video).

And Senator Stabenow is not a good Senator for the people of Michigan. As I wrote in my post 10 Good Reasons Why Senator Stabenow Should Be Re-Elected, the joke was that there was no good reason for her to be re-elected-

She does a poor job advocating for Michigan, she is consistently ranked as one of the weakest politicians in Congress, and according to the National Journal Group she is the most liberal member of the Senate and thus more liberal than any of her constituents in this fine moderate state of Michigan. If she were a run-of-the-mill liberal who did a good job helping constituents and was chair of a powerful committee than I could see her winning re-election, but that describes Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), not her.

Stabmenow is going to be a tough battle in the election, that's for sure. As I wrote in Senator Stabenow at DEC Event Details What a Political Economy Looks Like:

Don’t get me wrong- she is going to be a formidable candidate this election, because her campaign is going to be awash in kickbacks from companies who have benefited from her abilities to distribute favors to politically connected companies, and because unlike the last time she ran, this time she has experience and knowledge on the issues and has passed some legislation.

Whoever the Republicans choose to run against her- whether it is indeed Terri Lynn Land or whether it is Pete Hoekstra- I really hope that they realize that to campaign against Stabenow will require a lot of hard work and determination. She is going to be heavily funded by groups that owe her for all of her hard work redirecting taxpayer money to big businesses that she likes, and she is going to have a strong record to run on of passing policies that look good. It is going to require a lot of educating of voters and connecting with voters to get them to see that her policies are bad for America and bad for Michigan and that she should not be elected to office again.

But I think that Hoekstra is the kind of candidate who can and should defeat her attempt to hold on to her ill-bought seat. He has managed to weather tough and dirty attacks on him before- remember last year when President Barack Obama went into his home district to cut the ribbon of another government-financed battery plant and took the occasion to make a bunch of snide underhanded comments directed at Hoekstra as he stood uncomfortably there? I wrote about it in my post Republican Congressman Visits White House and Insults Democrat President in Front of Friends (which is a joke, because the exact opposite occurred). Hoekstra took in in stride, calmly and dryly moved past it, and didn't lower himself to the levels that the partisan joker who inhabits our White House did. If Hoekstra can navigate situations like that, I have high hopes for him navigating through the negative and mean and bitter and partisan attacks that an incompetent liberal who is out of touch with voters like Stabenow will unleash in her desperate attempt to clutch to power.

So, thank you Congressman Hoekstra, for entering the race for US Senate in 2012, because now I no longer have to think about running for this seat myself. Good luck and you can count on me for anything you need!