Bill O’Reilly in ’08?
: Verne Gay buries the lead under two feet of set-up in his Newsday piece but he finally gets to talking to Bill O’Reilly about running for President.
“I may take a look” at running and “certainly the option is open if I want it. But what I want to do over the next few years here is clean up the process. We have the bad guys on the run – no question about that.”
While he says there have been “lots of offers” to run against Clinton someday for her Senate seat (there are four years left on his Fox contract), he also quickly adds, “I’d lose…. It’d be a fun race [and] I’d drive her crazy, but she would ultimately win.” Besides, he has no interest in the Senate: “I’m not a quid pro guy” who’d have to play at pork-barrel politics to bring “goodies” back to the state.
The prize would be the White House, but “the country’s not interested in an independent candidacy. Maybe in 10 years they will be, but right now, you have 50 percent of Americans who don’t know anything – they’re totally disengaged from the process, the ‘Mall People.’ They don’t know anything, don’t watch the news or listen to radio or read the newspapers. The other 50 percent – and there was a recent poll on this – are a third crazy left and third crazy right and third in the middle. So the pie you’re going for is a very narrow pie.”
Yeah, maybe he “could mobilize a certain number of independent thinkers who think, ‘This guy could be a … Teddy Roosevelt kind of guy, who could come in and clean up the garbage…'” but “I’m not a vanity player, I’m not gonna go out like Al Sharpton, to get on ‘Saturday Night Live’ to run for president, so unless I’m convinced I could pull it off, I wouldn’t do it.”
Whoa, Bill, you’re sounding like Al Gore (below), dissing the people, otherwise known as the audience, otherwise known as the electorate. That’s no way to win an election (or ratings or book sales).
