Radio talker Jason Lewis will not run for office in 2014
Jason Lewis, host of the political radio talk show "The Jason Lewis Show" heard locally on Twin Cities News Talk AM1130, announced this evening on his show that he would not be running for any political office in 2014.
Jason Lewis from his show:
We have one political party: the Establishment Party. And that, my friends, is the reason that I have chosen not to run for political office. That I have chosen to stick right here where I am liberated and can speak my mind and not have to carry the Party line.
As many of you know, I've been toying with the idea â and it actually became much more than toying. This is the most serious I've been about running for public office since I actually ran for public office all the way back as a youthful indiscretion in 1990. I've been talking with people for weeks and months; many of them haven't been talking back, but I've been talking with people.
And I've come to the conclusion that at this point in time that what I would have to leave on the table, the price of this would be too great for my family, too great for my profession. I've sort of climbed atop a perch I don't want to give up, I'll be the first to admit that, but I was willing to do it. But, when it comes to family and what's best for them, that was a different calculation: the time way from home. The time way from the people I love. I didn't not enter that lightly.
And then I would be remiss if I didn't simply tell you the truth, and the truth is that for all the talk on talk radio, for all of the talk about changing the country, there is an amalgamation of special interests in this country to whom Big Government has been good, whether it's Big Government of the Right or the Left. They don't want to change.
They jump from political office to political office. They're career politicians. Worse than that, they're career staffers that go from one â you know â from Tim Pawlenty to whoever else they can get to pay them. We are governed in so many ways my a mercenary of public bureaucrats, of staffers, of congressional staffers, of committee staffers, and they don't care about ideology.
And I've got news for you: The people that fund so many of these campaigns that raise the money necessary to defeat somebody who is going to be awash in cast like, say, Senator Al Franken, they don't care about ideology either.
They care about access. They will only fund you if you can win, because what they're paying for is not a Barry Goldwater firing that shot across the bow in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1968. The establishment money wants access. And so they want you to be malleable. They want you to make certain you're not too far out there.
They want you to have a good shot of winning and the only way to win is to get on board with immigration reform, subsidizing student loans, Medicare Part D, war in Syria, going after the NSA leaker, all of the things the political parties agree on. And they are Legion.
The biggest lie is that there's a polarization of the body politic. Special interests have homogenized the parties. There's not a dime's worth of difference between them except in degree; except as to how fast the country will be bankrupt â not whether or not we're going to be bankrupt â Detroit comes to mind.
So, there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is, depending on your point of view â those of you, many of your e-mails were encouraging me to throw my hat in the ring â that bad news is it's not the right time for me. It's not the right time for the country to take the message of real change; we still haven't gotten there yet.
There's still more education that needs to be done and hopefully I'll continue to do it here.Â
And it's not the right time for my family.
Lewis then starts talking about a project he plans on doing instead of a campaign for public office.
