Sarah Sanders: 'I Feel Like I've Been Called' To Run for Office
In almost two years as White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders was called a lot of things by the liberal media.
She was called a “liar” (and it still bothers her). The word for a female dog was used on social media. The unprintable word for part of the female anatomy was bandied around.
At the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018, “comedian” Michelle Wolf likened her to “Aunt Lydia,” the monstrous collaborator in female oppression from the dystopian series “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
But now, Sanders told The New York Times in a story published Sunday, she feels “called” in a different way — to go into politics on her own behalf.
“There are two types of people who run for office,” Sanders told The Times. “People that are called and people that just want to be a senator or governor. I feel like I’ve been called.”
While The Times article made it clear that Sanders wasn’t making an official announcement yet, her quotes left no question that the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has the state’s politics in her blood.
The governor’s job will open in 2023 when current Gov. Asa Hutchinson will be out thanks to term limits.
Sanders’ husband, Republican political consultant Brian Sanders, said his wife still has plenty of time to make things official.
“You have to make a decision by Labor Day of 2021,” he said. “She has a unique coalition. It’s not just Trump voters. It’s evangelicals because of her dad. It’s women.”
But it sounds like the real decision might have already been made.
Politics, Sanders told The Times, is “the role I’ve been pushed into. I wouldn’t do that if I wasn’t the right person to fit what the state needed at that time.”
Obviously, if she runs for governor, Sanders will have no shortage of name recognition.
Besides her famous father, Sanders herself became a household name while wrangling with the liberals of the Washington press corps and their daily attacks on her boss, President Donald Trump.
Her clashes with CNN personalities Jim Acosta and April Ryan were legendary, and conservative audiences cheered as Sanders stood up regularly to liberal gibes.
As The Times story noted, Sanders is using her sometimes-tumultuous tour of duty at the White House to connect with her audiences in the Razorback State.
“I’m just excited to have people clap when I come up to a podium,” The Times quoted her saying last week at a Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner in Hot Springs. “It’s very different from what I’m used to. All I can say is thank God I’m back in Arkansas.”
It might make a good laugh line in the home state, but in The Times interview, it was clear that some of the bad feelings from Sanders’ time in Washington were still near the surface.
“I was attacked for everything, not just my performance,” she told The Times. “I was called a fat soccer mom, my kids were threatened, my life was threatened. It was a lot. I hate harping on it, but to be in the position I’m in and to have Secret Service, that’s not normal.”
Then, the woman who made national headlines when she was thrown out of a restaurant with her family just because of her job in the White House, added something else:
“I don’t like being called a liar,” she said. “The other stuff bothered me far less.”
If what Sanders hinted at with The Times pans out, the media might be calling her something else before too long:
Gov. Sarah Sanders.
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