Texas' senior Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, made an official announcement this morning that she has been foreshadowing for months--she isn't going anywhere:
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said today she will stay in the Senate for the remainder of her term, despite an earlier promise that she would quit this year.
“Something has happened in our country that none of us could have anticipated,” she said, pointing to the policies of President Barack Obama, who was elected a full year before she made her promise to resign after the March primary.
It's fair to ding KBH for being a little disingenuous here. What happened that "none of us could have anticipated" was that she never got traction in her bid to unseat Governor Rick Perry, and wound up finishing an embarrassingly distant second to the incumbent in the Texas primaries earlier this month. Once considered, at a minimum, even money to unseat the incumbent (whose poll numbers are, at best, middling), she failed to even hold him to a runoff, despite the presence of a teabagger insurgent candidate grabbing nearly 20% of the vote.
You might recall that Hutchison originally was planning to resign in advance of the primary, setting up a potentially perilous special election which was to feature popular former Houston Mayor Bill White for the Democrats.
The writing on the wall became obvious in late 2009, when Hutchison began to hedge on her resignation plans. White, sensing the obvious, jumped from the pending Senate special into the gubernatorial race, where he now is locked in a single-digit race with Perry in one of the better pickup opportunities for the Democrats of the 2010 cycle.
What's more, Hutchison's hedging on resignation also gave rise to the growing sense that any momentum she had created for her campaign for Governor had gone into a final and fatal stall. The polls separated further, and the only drama by Election Day was the spectre of a runoff.
What this decision means, in the short term, is that potential candidates like Republican state railroad commissioner Michael Williams and the leading Democrat in the race, former state comptroller John Sharp, will have to stand down for two years, since Hutchison's term does not expire until 2012.
In the long term, however, they will probably still get their chance at running for the Senate. After all, given the fact that she will be nearly 70 years of age by 2012, to say nothing of the fact that she emerged from the primary against Perry badly damaged, it is hard to imagine her seeking another term in Washington.