Citizen Lou
Alex Burns does the work of talking to third party organizers to see if any would get behind a presidential candidacy from former CNN host Lou Dobbs, who floated the idea yesterday on former Sen. Fred Thompson’s (R-Tenn.) radio show. Bay Buchanan says yes; no surprise there. Dean Barkley, a shallow independent candidate from Minnesota, also says yes, which is something more of a surprise, as Minnesota’s Independence Party runs on basically no issues at all while Dobbs threatens to run on a platform of know-nothingism.
What reason is there to believe that Dobbs, a bottom-feeding broadcaster who struggled to draw 800,000 nightly viewers, has a ready pool of voters waiting for him? All I see is a 2006 Rasmussen Reports poll suggesting that a third-party candidate who talked about ending immigration, as Dobbs does, would score 30 percent of the vote. A Dobbs boomlet makes more sense that the truly foolish “Unity 08″ boomlet of 2007, when some retired campaign consultants suggested that some combination of independent-minded politicians should run for office, just because.