Down goes Mike Pompeo
For months it was one of the most persistent, and one of the most laughable, narratives in the mainstream media. Current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is up to his neck in the Ukraine extortion scandal and is trying to figure out how to avoid going to prison, was somehow going to pull off running for U.S. Senate in Kansas.
Sure. Maybe Mick Mulvaney could be his running mate. Yeah, we know Senate candidates don’t have running mates, but it’s okay, because we doubt Mulvaney knows that. The point is that it was never, ever going to happen. Just imagine Mike Pompeo trying to run for Senate while the Ukraine criminal scandal keeps getting worse and Donald Trump’s impeachment keeps playing out. Every day of Pompeo’s campaign would be about the Ukraine scandal. The resulting headlines about Pompeo’s campaign would be terrible for him and terrible for Trump. It would have been absolutely calamitous.
Maybe that’s why the media kept pushing the idea so hard. There’s nothing better than a three ring circus of a candidacy, with everything exploding and everyone on fire, when it comes to media ratings. But it just wasn’t going to happen. Mike Pompeo’s buddy, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, even announced on television last week that it wasn’t going to happen, and yet the media still kept pushing the idea as if it were somehow realistic.
That’s all officially over now. Mike Pompeo officially put his imaginary Senate run out of its misery today when he informed Mitch McConnell that he’s not running. So that’s the end of that non-story. What is interesting here is that this probably means the Republican nominee for the Senate seat will be Kris Kobach, a guy who’s so unpopular, the Democrats might actually be able to win the seat despite Kansas’ status as a red state.
