Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, a devoted social conservative from neighboring Kansas, all but announced his plans to run for President in 2008 this morning on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos."I'm very close with announcements," Brownback told Stephanopoulos. "I think there is room on the Republican side for someone that's a full-scale conservative, that's an economic, fiscal and social conservative."
Sen. Brownback added that there looks to be room to develop "new plays on the compassionate conservative" side of the Republican party.
"I can tell from that smile, you're in," Stephanopoulos said to Brownback as the interview closed.
Brownback visited Springfield last spring and spoke to students at Missouri State University. He would clearly be the early favorite of some social conservatives and evangelicals in southwest Missouri.
In the same interview, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin mentioned Sen.-elect Claire McCaskill, when speaking of Sen. Barack Obama's potential 2008 White House run. "I know he and Michelle are sitting down, making hard choices at this point," said Durbin in a satellite interview from St. Louis.
Durbin spoke of Obama's vast influence during the 2006 cycle, and how he campaigned for McCaskill the Sunday night before the election in St. Louis. "He came back the next day bone-weary and told me, 'I think she's going to win.' It just tells you what he means to those campaigns that that was the knock-out punch, the closing act in Claire McCaskill's campaign, in one of the battleground states."
Just a sidenote, I interviewed McCaskill back in the fall of 2005 in Springfield, when she was still putting together the first pieces of her campaign. For fun, I asked her to predict how much she thought she would win by a year later. She said two points. She won by 2.2%.
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