All South Dakota voters should be so excited they can hardly hold their water. Mike Rounds is considering a run for the US Senate. He will make up his minds next Fall. How can we wait without busting our seams in anticipation of his momentous decision?
The insurance agent includes some fine print in his unannouncment. He will NOT sign the idiotic Grover Norquist pledge that retrograde Republicans Thune and Noem have signed. I guess that bit of fine print is supposed to make Rounds look like a moderate.
I have never been impressed with Tim Johnson as a US Senator or anything else. Johnson is not stupid or ignorant, but he has not made a persuasive case for any remotely controversial idea in his whole life as far as I know. (If he did venture close to a serious issue, it was his labeling of Republican strident mythologists as "Taliban Republicans" and then waltzed away from that rather than giving examples.) He may have displayed courage in the face of nearly debilitating health problems (repairs paid for by US taxpayers), but I doubt any Profiles in Political Courage will include Johnson as a prairie statesman. The banks and insurance companies he has pandered to might want to put up a brass bust of him in their lobbies however.
Despite all that, if Johnson is a tool of the special interests (see his statements on Glass-Stegall for example), Rounds would make Johnson look like piker panderer. Just what the US does not need is an integral part of the insurance industry in Congress. Nor do we need somebody silly enough to build a house on a river bottom literally inches above the low water mark of the Missouri below Oahe.
Another careful viewer of SD politics wondered aloud if Rounds was just trying to determine how many family members he could put into federal jobs before he got really serious. Nothing quite like a Republican who shuts down a library and converts it into space for more bureaucrats. I don't know if any of his family ended up in that building or not, but it would not be a big surprise. The answer won't however be found in the dispersed resource collections spread all over South Dakota.
*** Stay tuned even if you haven't yet started holding your breath in breathless anticipation of another Rounds campaign.--- Doug Wiken
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