Roger Clemens (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Pitching great Roger Clemens didn’t shy away from many battles in his major league career, but politics is something he’s not willing to take on.Clemens had been encouraged to run as a Republican candidate for the seat of Texas Republican Rep. Pete Olson, who announced his retirement last month.
The 57-year-old Clemens said he was honored but had “no interest” in running for office.
“The climate in politics at this time is much more than I would want to undertake, along with my family considerations,” Clemens said in a message to Olson that was obtained by ABC News.
“I am a Republican and I support our President and will continue to do so,” Clemens said. “No matter who our President may be, I will continue my support of them and root for them to be successful, just as I did when President Obama was in office.
“I will … do all I can to continue to promote the quality of life issues that we respect and try to maintain as citizens of the State of Texas and the United States.”
I’m not on vacation, but this still resonated with me:
2/2 Great thing about finally taking a vacation is that you get to open your phone once a day and experience the total disorientation that comes with being dropped into the center of a weird-ass news cycle with no context or background!
— Emma Baccellieri (@emmabaccellieri) 9:36 AM – 21 August 2019
Anyway. The Chron version of this story notes that Clemens would have been the second Republican to run for CD22 if he had gotten in, following Pearland City Council member Greg Hill. I checked the FEC finance reports page, and they missed a few potential wannabes:
Greg Hill
Matthew Hinton
Thaddeus Walz
Kathaleen Wall
Yes, that Kathaleen Wall. We are both blessed and cursed. The Chron did note her candidacy in a separate story.
One more thing. Compare that list to the lineup from the 2008 Republican primary in CD22. CD22 wasn’t open that year, but it was held by Democrat Nick Lampson after his win over write-in candidate Shelley Sekula Gibbs, which was the fallout from Tom DeLay’s resignation that he tried to paint as withdrawing from the race because he was no longer eligible after “moving” to Virginia. In addition to eventual winner Olson (who had been on John Cornyn’s staff) and the immortal Shelley, that lineup included the former Mayors of Sugar Land (Dean Hrbacek) and Pasadena (John Manlove), former State Rep. Robert Talton, and future SBOE member Cynthia Dunbar. To say the least, the people lining up now to keep CD22 red have a whole lot less gravitas than the 2008 bunch. Put another way, the Republican bench is looking thin. I don’t know about you, but the lack of interest in this once solid GOP seat tells me something.
He has plenty of issues in his past that there’s no reason to currently delve into. If he were to get into politics, there would be plenty of reason to delve into them.
No reason to sign up for a (deserved) character assassination.
Maybe Rocket Man will run for POTUS instead – I could see him staffing a Cabinet with Andy Pettite, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Rafael Palmeiro. Imagine the work they could done while in full on ‘roid rage !
One other thing of note: a hallmark of traditional GOP practice in Texas, especially in the Bush era, was making nice with Latinos; the result was low turnout & pro-Democratic voting in the 60-40 range, easily nullified by white rural, exurban and suburban votes. In the last ten years the right-wing hostility to everyone not White Anglo boiled over; and Trump’s policies and rhetoric have done the rest. The Sleeping Giant of Texas has begun to wake, at last (and 2018 turnout showed its potential. The Republicans may eventually win back many of the defecting college educated white suburban ladies, but probably not Latinos (any more than they are ever likely to win back African Americans).
Clemens would be a great GOP congressman.
Doesn’t he already have a good track record of being untruthful in front of congress? Isn’t that the modus operandi for the GOP?