David French says he actually considered the offer — running for president — but in the end, he had to turn it down.
“I gave it serious thought, not because I think that I’m any kind of big deal,” rather, “the American people have such a dreadful choice” between the two major party candidates, the National Review writer and Army Reserve Major said in a Thursday interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
French made headlines in the first week of June when The Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol announced that he was attempting to recruit the Iraq War veteran to consider running as a conservative independent candidate. Kristol’s aim as a leader of the “Never Trump” movement, was to give conservative voters an alternative to the GOP nominee Donald Trump, and he thought that French was just the man for the job. Ultimately French decided not to run for the highest office in the land.
The Bronze Star recipient explained to TheDCNF, “it’s so bad that even I considered doing this.” French, a Harvard Law School graduate, went on to say, “I looked at it, and I looked at it really hard, and I almost did it, [but] there’s a reality people have to understand about American politics: politics in the United States is a subculture.”
French elaborated that, “it’s not just a subculture, it’s a sub-subculture.” Due to his self-admitted lack of name recognition and the short period of time he had to mount a national campaign, French did not want to “block somebody, who might have superior resources,” as a candidate.
With Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump neck-and-neck in the polls, along with a resilient, determined Gary Johnson duking it out on the libertarian ticket, it’s already quite the full house. Perhaps it’s better French didn’t take a shot.
Then again, we’ll never know.
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