OF ALL THE PEOPLE TO RUN FOR THE SENATE…. This has “bad idea” written all over it.
Tim Griffin, who resigned his post as interim U.S. attorney in Little Rock after serving six months under scrutiny, says he’s thinking about running against U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010.
Griffin told The Associated Press on Monday that he hopes to make a decision by early or mid-summer on whether to run against Lincoln, a Democrat seeking her third term in the Senate.
“I am certainly thinking about it,” Griffin said. “I’m going to spend some time going around the state and talking to folks and getting an idea of the interest level…. I’m going to try and hit all 75 counties as soon as possible and I know that’s a tall order trying to hit all of those in the next few months.”
In the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal, Griffin became well known as one of the “loyal Bushies” who replaced Bud Cummins, a federal prosecutor less willing to play ball with the White House political agenda. Griffin served as a U.S. Attorney for six months, but was never confirmed by the Senate.
But that’s only a small part of what makes his possible Senate campaign troubling. Griffin, more importantly, was an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee before joining the White House team as a Karl Rove protege. As an oppo man, Griffin helped dig up footage that wound up in an ad by the Swift Boat Vets who smeared John Kerry. In describing his own work, Griffin once said, “We think of ourselves as the creators of ammunition in a war. We make the bullets.”
And then there’s the “vote caging.” To refresh your memory, it’s a process in which Republicans target eligible voters for disenfranchisement, send them mail knowing it’ll be returned, and then use the “caged” mail to limit those voters’ access to the polls.
Griffin was the research director for the RNC in 2004 and sent a series of confidential emails to Republican Party higher-ups with the suggestive heading “RE: caging.” The emails contained spreadsheets with the heading, “Caging,” with lists of homeless men and soldiers deployed in Iraq.
And now he wants to be a U.S. senator. Great.
