In the wake of his sudden departure from CNN, former anchor Lou Dobbs is considering a future in politics -- with his eye reportedly towards a third-party run against New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez in 2012. (Dobbs has also declared that he's not ruling out a presidential run.) To prepare for a potential race against Menendez -- the Senate's only Hispanic member, and a staunch advocate for immigrants' rights -- Dobbs is now trying to reach out to the Hispanic community.
Dobbs has never been shy about his anti-immigration stance, but in a recent interview with Spanish-language network Telemundo, he softened his message, as he attempted to position himself "as a champion of that fast-growing ethnic bloc."
Mr. Dobbs told Spanish-language network Telemundo he now supports a plan to legalize millions of undocumented workers, a stance he long lambasted as an unfair "amnesty." [...]
"Whatever you have thought of me in the past, I can tell you right now that I am one of your greatest friends and I mean for us to work together," he said in a live interview with Telemundo's Maria Celeste. "I hope that will begin with Maria and me and Telemundo and other media organizations and others in this national debate that we should turn into a solution rather than a continuing debate and factional contest."
The Wall Street Journal notes that Ms. Celeste, an immigration advocate, has long called for Dobbs ouster from CNN.
Dobbs' spokesperson described Dobbs' run for Menendez's seat as a possible "intermediary step" before his run against Obama. Though as TPM's Josh Marshall points out, the math here doesn't quite work out.
[T]here is the problem of Menendez being up for reelection in 2012 rather than 2010. So I'm not sure how that's an intermediate step for running against Obama in 2012. Or maybe I just don't understand the math.
In any case, please don't tell me I'm the only one who remembers Dobbs and Space.com. In case you don't, this isn't the first time Dobbs left CNN. He left in 1999 to found and run internet start-up Space.com. Alas, like so many boom era ventures, Space.com had a fiery reentry when the dot.com market collapsed. And Dobbs was back at CNN a year or so later.
All of which tells me that the night is still young.