Brian Howey: Sam Nunn Ponders an Independent Presidential Run

By Brian Howey

ODESSA, Ukraine – After listening to all the pros and cons of the Iraq War last week, it really made me stop and ponder how crucial this next presidential election will be. And how important it will be to have a consensus builder in the White House; someone who knows about diplomacy and military affairs. We need someone who is seasoned and who won’t need on-the-job training.

If you look at the current field, none of the declared candidates really cover each of these attributes.

And then there is Sam Nunn, the former 24-year Democratic senator from Georgia who heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He is Sen. Richard Lugar’s partner in one of the most visionary and critical pieces of legislative and diplomatic statesmanship of our times: the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that has turned 7,000 Soviet nuclear warheads into the very energy powering American homes today.

Nunn proposed the program after he literally had a front row seat to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He was attending a conference in Hungary when Soviet Chairman Gorbachev was taken captive. Friends urged him to “Come to Russia” (note that they didn’t say “Soviet Union”). He talked to military people outside of the Russian White House where Boris Yeltsin had made his stand. He listened to the dissolution debate in the Duma. And he realized the Soviet nukes, weaponized pathogens and chemicals were poised to spill out across an array of new borders.

Lugar says of Nunn, “As a leading voice in U.S. defense policy, he has attained a level of credibility and respect that few Americans in our history have ever matched.”

Nunn was approached by Hamilton Jordan, a former aide to President Carter, and Doug Bailey as they pondered a virtual Internet convention in early summer 2008 for what would be the Unity 2008 ticket. I had a fascinating dinner with Nunn in a Yekaterinburg restaurant while traveling with he and Sen. Lugar in August. It was a once-in-a-career opportunity to ponder the dysfunctionalities of the current presidential nominating process, the coming changes in commercial and cable TV, and the impact of the Internet and YouTube, which with one video (Sen. George Allen’s “macaca”) shifted the balance of power in the U.S. Senate in 2006.

“I’m going to look very carefully at what both parties are doing,” Nunn told me during a flight the next day. “I’m hoping that we’ll have some meaningful debate. It doesn’t have to be agreement. But it has to be meaningful debate and discussion on the key issues facing America.”

Those issues include “security right up front.” Of the Iraq War, Nunn calls it “a fiasco which we’ve basically mishandled in all directions. We’ll get over it because we’re a strong country and we’re indispensable in the sense that we’re the world leader. It’s going to take at least 10 years to rebuild U.S. credibility.”

“We’re going to have globalization,” Nunn said. “We’re not going to roll back time. We also have to deal with that issue in terms of its affect on human beings. Along that line, I think we have to deal with the human capital side of this” saying the U.S. will need to invest in digital infrastructure.

Then there’s energy. “I hear people say we’ve got to be energy independent in 10 years and I say to myself, ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about,’” Nunn said. He says conservation and a carbon tax will likely be necessary.

Of America’s two-party system, Nunn explained, “I believe it has served America well and anytime you challenge something like that, you’ve really got to do hard thinking. In the last several elections we’ve not been willing to confront the real issues. But the system itself – the early primaries in other states, the fact that only a limited number of people participate in choosing the two nominees, the fact that all the incentives for money raising address what I call the niche issues that appeal to only certain groups -- those facts are leading me to at least come to a tentative conclusion that the system is no longer working to produce the very best government we can produce.”

Nunn says, “I’m not sure a third party is the answer, but there are Democrats and Republicans who share that frustration and they really want to see the country pull together; they want to seriously consider some alternative in 2008. That’s why I was willing to talk to the Unity 2008 people and ask for the perspective they have. I have not concluded what I will do, but I certainly am open to thinking about it.”

And the time frame? Nunn will see who is nominated – probably by sometime next February – gauge the debate, and then decide sometime next spring. “I think that will be the key time in terms of seeing what we’ve got in the nominees and what they stand for,” he said in his soft, Georgia drawl. “I believe we’ll have good people nominated. The question is what do they stand for and whether they can get back to the center and govern.”

Howey is publisher of The Howey Political Report at www.howeypolitics.com

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