Yesterday outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced he won't be running for president in 2008.
Frist is one of the potential GOP candidates I liked, so I view his announcement as bad news.
Yes, he's a senator, and the dig on senators--only two senators in the last 100 years have moved from the upper house to the White House--is that they're not in a "buck stops here" decision mode. But Frist, in his days as a heart transplant surgeon, had to make plenty of tough choices, for instance, who gets a heart and who doesn't.
Frist had some marks against his record: A sale of of HCA stock from his blind trust last year--before its value tumbled--was a hit on his clean image. He made an impassioned plea on the Senate floor in favor of saving the life of Terry Schiavo--nothing wrong with that--but he based his medical opinion on Schiavo on a video tape he viewed. Some conservatives soured on Frist because they believed that he didn't fight hard enough for President Bush's judicial nominees.
On the flipside, conservatives would've remembered Frist's break with precedence by traveling to South Dakota in 2004 to campaingn against the leader of the opposition party at the time, Tom Daschle. Tim Johnson, by a narrow margin, defeated Daschle.
But the Republican loss of the Senate earlier this month was the final strike, in my opinion, against Frist's presidential hopes. If he ran in 2008, he would've come off as the coach of a losing team.
Still Frist, who is a marathon runner by the way, has plenty to give to society. He's still a doctor.
Technorati tags: Bill Frist Republicans 2008 Elections
No comments:
Post a Comment