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A Rising Star Makes a Choice

John James 3.png

My post today, like yesterday's, will update you, dear reader, on one of the state level campaigns that will have their collective denouement in November.

John E. James is going for the Senate, not the House.

James is a rising star within the Republican Party. We know this because President Donald Trump briefly considered him as a possible nominee for the US Ambassador to the United Nations after Nikki Haley left that post.

James, pictured, is a veteran, a West Point graduate who was with the US Army in Iraq. After discharge, he went to work in a company his father had founded, James Group International. (Hmmm, one can see his appeal to Trump -- although Trump surely feels superior in that, in HIS family, one gets bone spurs rather than going to war.)

Last June, almost a year ago, there were reports that different groups of Republican were trying to recruit James for two distinct career opportunities. One group wanted him to challenge incumbent Democrat Haley Stevens for the House seat from Michigan's 11th district, an oddly shaped district swinging around but staying outside of Detroit. Another group wanted him to run for Senate, to take on incumbent Gary Peters.

The House seat would have been a safer choice, a more likely win. But Mr James wants to swing for the fences and is running for the Senate.  He has a primary foe, but at the moment he seems the prohibitive favorite for the GOP nomination.

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  1. HenryMay 15, 2020 at 10:09 AM

    Regarding your (and many others') reference to Trump's claimed bone spurs, if he supported the war in Vietnam, then he was a hypocrite. But, apart from that, there was nothing wrong with dodging the draft in any way possible, because the Vietnam war was a war of aggression. The heroes were those who refused to go and went to prison as a consequence. But we can't all be heroes, and anyone who did not go to kill innocent Vietnamese (and Laotian and Cambodian) people did the right thing. (I dodged the draft by joining the Army Reserves, which, unlike during Bush's invasion of Iraq, was in no danger of being called up to fight in Vietnam, because the draft supplied the government with enough cannon fodder.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherMay 15, 2020 at 10:59 AM

    I very much doubt that Trump's claim of bone spurs had anything at all to do with principled opposition to the war.

    ReplyDelete

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