Representative Peter King (R-NY) revealed in a Friday interview that he is looking at the possibility of running for the GOP nomination for president in 2016. He also said he warned Hillary Clinton that she better “get ready” for a hard 2016 campaign.
King appeared on CNN’s Newsroom on May 16 and talked about his presidential ambitions.
“I’m certainly looking at it,” King said.
He went on to report that he gave Clinton a warning. “[W]hen I saw Hillary Clinton yesterday, I told her to get ready,” he claimed. Both King and Mrs. Clinton were at the dedication ceremony for the September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City on Thursday.
King noted that on June 21 he was headed to New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary state, where he will presumably continue testing the waters.
The Congressman has been a frequent critic of his own party, however, and it is hard to see his path to the nomination.
Showing his belligerence, at one point in the CNN interview, King warned that he’d run for the GOP nomination just to stop a run by Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
“I’m looking at this because I see people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and to me, I don’t want the Republican Party going in that direction,” King said.
It is unclear how a King run would stop either Paul or Cruz.
It isn’t for want of trying, though. In December of last year, King launched a PAC targeting Cruz and Paul and any Tea Party-styled Republican he could find to attack.
Among the many hyperbolic statements that Congressman King has made, last year he called the NSA scandal nothing but “hysteria” and a phony issue, he called Senator Ted Cruz a “con man,” he said Senator Rand Paul was “absolutely terrible” and had “delusions of grandeur,” and he charged that conservatives in the GOP need to be defeated because they were trying to “hijack the party.”
This isn’t the first time that King announced that he wants to run for president. Last September, he told a radio station in New Hampshire “right now, I’m running for president.”
The Atlantic took the occasion of King’s early announcement to scoff at his chances, noting that candidates who rush to announce first never win.But one might think that his constant attacks on members of his own party might be even more of a stumbling block than the statistics of the failures of early announcers.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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