Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the largest Republican vote-getter in the 2006 congressional elections and the most popular Republican in Texas, said yesterday she would consider an offer to run for vice president next year. "If our party's nominee called me and said we are putting everything in the grid, and we think you are the best person, would I say no? I can't imagine that I would say no," she said. "Would I seek it or do something to promote it? Absolutely not," she told editors and reporters of The Washington Times at a meeting at the newspaper. Kay Bailey's such a disingenue...
Mrs. Hutchison, who garnered more than 2.6 million votes in November and defeated her opponent by 62 percent to 36 percent in an overall bad year for Republicans, attributed her popularity, in part, to her stand on Iraq. "People in my state see me as having a few degrees of separation" from the president. "I do not believe in pre-emptive strikes against foreign countries that have not attacked us, unless they are a threat to our country," she said. But she also said she believes Mr. Bush thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and therefore was a threat.
"I don't think we're in Iraq for the Iraqi people, but for the security of the United States," she said. "The president is against me on this, but I think we should be looking more at the Bosnia solution," she said, which would create in Iraq "semiautonomous regions that hold the country together by the sharing of oil revenues."