After openly signaling his interest a few weeks ago,
it's now official:
Ricardo Sanchez, who rose from a childhood of grinding poverty in South Texas to become a three-star Army general and commander of coalition forces in the Iraq war, planned to file paperwork on Wednesday to run as a Democrat for a Senate seat.
"Unfortunately, Washington is mostly focused on scoring partisan points and winning elections," Sanchez said in a statement on Wednesday.
"I believe that Texas needs a strong, independent voice to address the enormous challenges we are facing. I can think of no better way to continue my record of public service than to represent Texas in the Senate."
This contest is going to be an extremely tough nut to crack: the last Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 (while he was simultaneously running for VP), and no Dem has won statewide in any race since 1994. The question for Sanchez, a first-time candidate, is whether he'll wind up more like Rick Noriega... or Jim Webb, both of whom were fellow military men who ran for office. Noriega unsuccessfully ran against Texas Sen. John Cornyn in 2008, never really raising enough money to be competitive. Webb, on the other hand, caught lightning in a bottle and beat George Allen in 2006 (thanks to a little help from "macaca"). Both, like Sanchez, were rookie pols running their first (and in Webb's case, last) races.
Still, it's not every day a retired general decides to seek office. (Though, believe it or not, another one did yesterday, also for the Dems: Air Force Gen. John Douglass announced he'd run against Frank Wolf in VA-10.) That pedigree alone should open some doors for Sanchez. To win, though, a lot of things will have to go right, perhaps most if not all of the things on this list: He'll need demonstrate considerable political chops to earn establishment support, raise a ton of cash, hope that the GOP primary clown car melts down in ugly recriminations, win over progressives who may mis-trust him for his role over-seeing Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, and drive Hispanics to vote in huge numbers. A tall task indeed, but at the very least, we can hope that someone of Sanchez's stature will at least be able to pin down whomever the Republican Party nominates and force them to spend real money here. Denying Republicans a free shot would be a win in its own right.
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