Daily Caller exclusive interview with Alabama ag commish candidate Dale Peterson: ‘I’m not going away’

Dale Peterson says you haven’t seen the end of Dale Peterson.

The gun-toting, former Alabamian “ag commish” candidate who became a YouTube sensation when his John Wayne-style campaign video went viral this year tells The Daily Caller he’s open to running for office again — and maybe even for president if he thought he had “a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“I’m not going away,” said the retired 65-year old while sipping coffee during a phone interview from Alabama.

“I don’t really know what that means,” Peterson said. “Maybe the Big Guy will give me a hint one day. I’m open to looking at about anything — to tell you the truth — that will ultimately lead to taking care of the people of Alabama and taking care of the people of this country.”

Despite the national notoriety that came with taking it to the “thugs and criminals” who don’t “give a rip about Alabama” in his campaign commercial, Peterson placed third among three other Republicans running for state agricultural commissioner. He has since thrown his support behind opponent John McMillan, releasing a campaign ad for him last week. “The other guy is just rotten to the core,” he said of Republican Dorman Grace. “He’s taking so much money, can you imagine how much money he would take if he got in there and nobody was checking up on him?”

Peterson said he gets “hundreds of e-mails a day saying, ‘Run for president, run for this.’” But not only does he not have the millions to run for president, he said, he knows he’d be “meat out there in a lion’s cage.”

“I talk funny, and the press would eat me alive for my Southern accent, and I’d be a hillbilly from Alabama, but I’m not stupid,” he said to The Daily Caller reporter, whom he repeatedly called “big guy” and “rascal” during the interview.

As for how he feels on national issues: “Obama is not a leader, never has been a leader in his life, never has had any experience being a leader, but he’s the president of the United States.” As for politicians he likes, he said Sarah Palin has “bigger cojones than any other man out there,” and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie “has a lot of balls.”

When it comes to immigration, “nobody seems to have the guts, other than the legislature out there in Arizona and the governor in Arizona,” and he’s mad about the Gulf oil spill, he said, because “no one’s lifted a finger to fix it.” Peterson said he likes to “tell like it is,” yet the country has gotten “so politically correct to the point that it’s killing us.”

Most of the correspondence from fans has been positive, he said. “Of course you always have that one-half of 1 percent of dingbats out there that hate your guts. For some reason, somebody called me a racist. Now how do you get that out of what I’ve done? It just shows that people are really grasping to wear out that word, and it’s not sticking like it used to stick,” Peterson said.