Remember New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith? Oh-- Nevermind

Yesterday in our chat with Barney Frank over at Crooks & Liars, Congress' wittiest member caught my attention with this response:

First, let’s not make a bad situation worse than it is-- Patrick McHenry and Michele Bachman do sit on the Financial Services Committee, but Virginia Foxx is not one of those guarding this particular chicken coop. As to the very conservative Members who do serve on the Committee, excessive partisanship is part of the motivation, but even more prominent is their passionate commitment to a very extreme form of conservatism. This hard lined ideological rigidity according to which the market is never in need of intervention and regulation is in all cases to be opposed is what keeps them from participating in a constructive way in our work. When you hear Members of the Committee condemn the socialist tendencies of the President and the failure of the President and his appointees to show any understanding of the capitalist system, and you realize that they are talking about George Bush, you get sense of how removed they are from reality.

Well, good news for Florida extremists who buy into the idea that "the market is never in need of intervention and regulation is in all cases to be opposed" because one of its most strident and ridiculous advocates, ex-Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) is running for the US Senate seat being abandoned by Mel Martinez (in Florida) so he can keep "from participating in a constructive way in" congressional work. When Chairman Frank talks about Members who "condemn the socialist tendencies of the President and the failure of the President and his appointees to show any understanding of the capitalist system, and you realize that they are talking about George Bush," he could well have been referring to Bob Smith, a lunatic fringe sociopath who claimed the GOP had drifted so far to the left that he changed his party registration and ran for president as an independent.

While serving his two Senate terms representing moderate New Hampshire, Smith's greatest claim to fame was that he was the furthest right of any member of the Senate. He decided to run against George H.W. Bush in the Republican presidential primary but no one paid any attention so he quit the GOP in anger and decided to run on the U.S. Taxpayers Party ticket. Now they are insane, but not loopy enough for Smith, who a few weeks after joining quit their party too and ran as an independent instead. The only attention he ever got on the hustings was as a freakshow and he withdrew in disgust and endorsed the man he had been reviling for half a year: George Bush. New Hampshire Republicans immediately put him out of his misery by defeating him in the 2002 primary, giving the nomination to John Sununu. At that point Smith renounced New Hampshire and politics and moved to Sarasota, Florida to sell real estate. (Still angry with the GOP he wound up endorsing John Kerry against Bush, Jr in 2004 and then fellow lunatic fringe rightist, Duncan Hunter, in 2008.

The real estate market in Smith's Sarasota area has crashed-- even worse than in the rest of the country. The 13th congressional district, which encompasses all of Sarasota County, had the 13th most foreclosures of any CD in the nation-- with over 18,000 foreclosures so far. Clearly in need of a new job, the hapless Smith filed to run-- as a Republican-- for the Florida Senate seat. (He had been talking about running for the open New Hampshire seat if the hated Sununu tried.) Presumably he wasn't referring to himself when he declared, in a letter to a New Hampshire newspaper that he's running in Florida, needs money and that "It's time for Republicans to start acting like Republicans again!" Well, he's one that's never really stopped acting like one. Maybe he should run in Pennsylvania too; he's always hated Arlen Specter and he'd have a better chance of winning the GOP primary there than Specter does.


UPDATE: How Could I Have Forgotten Smith's Prescience!

Bob Fertig reminded me this evening that it was Senator Smith, before New Hampshire Republicans decided he was too beyond the pale even for them, who first alerted America to the GOP-Military-Industrial complex's intentions in Iraq. Date line: Saturday, April 13, 2002

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The United States should no longer buy oil from Iraq, but steal it, U.S. Sen. Bob Smith, R-Wolfeboro, told hundreds of New Hampshire Republicans gathered last night at a party fund-raiser.

"Why don't we just take his oil?" Smith bellowed to the crowd during a fiery 13-minute speech, referring to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "Why buy it? Take it!"

I think there's a specific Geneva convention devoted to that.