Corker will not seek re-election
NASHVILLE — After rising to nearly the pinnacle of power in Washington, D.C., over almost a dozen years, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker says enough is enough.
The 65-year-old chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former Chattanooga mayor announced Tuesday he will not seek re-election to a third term in 2018.
“I’m a business guy,” Corker told Washington-based reporters. “I came up here for a few terms, I told people I couldn’t imagine serving more than two terms.”
Still, Corker struggled for months over the decision, he acknowledged.
“You know, you get up here, you end up being chairman of the foreign relations committee and you have influence, and people urge you to stay. But … for me, the citizen legislator model is the one I came up here with, I think it’s what has allowed me to be an independent voice, and to try to be so pragmatic in what I do.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lauded Corker as an “integral member of our team and confidant of mine during his time in the Senate. His leadership on important issues has helped guide our conference and had a real impact at home and abroad.”
Corker’s chief of staff, Todd Womack, rejected any idea Corker chose not to seek re-election because of hard-right critics seeking to topple him in the 2018 Republican primary.
Andy Ogles, former executive director of the billionaire Koch brothers-supported Americans
for Prosperity-Tennessee, has said he will run for the seat.
“We were fortunate in that we were in a really strong position if he’d chosen to run again,” Womack said, pointing to a campaign war chest of $7.5 million.
The senator and Republican President Donald Trump had been getting along — Trump considered him as a potential vice president and later for secretary of state — but recently jousted over Trump’s remarks about a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which a counterprotester was killed.
Corker said in Chattanooga that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence” to “be successful.”
In a tweet, Trump called the comment “strange,” given that Corker had told him he was struggling over seeking a third term. But Womack said that was all patched up; the president urged him to run again and offered to campaign for him here in Tennessee.
But Trump’s former White House strategist, Steve Bannon, had been working to stir up an opponent for Corker and the political website helms, Breitbart News, has been assailing the Chattanoogan in recent weeks.
Tom Ingram, a longtime political consultant who helped salvage Corker’s 2006 battle with Democrat Harold Ford Jr., said Corker didn’t decide to leave out of “any political fear,” although he added, “That’s not to say it [a third term] was a walk-in.”
Blunt and usually outspoken, Corker, a former construction company owner-turned-real-estate developer, became Chattanooga’s most powerful lawmaker in Washington as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He has reveled in making himself a player on issues ranging from the budget and taxes to the auto bailout and imposing sanctions on Russia. He played a role in luring Volkswagen to Chattanooga and angered the United Auto Workers by coming out against plans to unionize the manufacturing plant.
Corker, who served as state finance commissioner under Republican Gov. Don Sundquist from 1995 through 1997, developed a reputation for getting along with Democrats who ran the General Assembly at the time.
He also did business from time to time with Democrats in the Senate. In a tweet Tuesday, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York called Corker “a friend, fine, conscientious & hard-working. His thoughtfulness & dedication make him a model Sen. We regret him leaving.”
A University of Tennessee graduate who started his own construction company before moving into development and real estate, Corker aimed high in his first political race in 1994: the GOP primary battle to take on Democrat Jim Sasser.
One of his opponents was Nashville surgeon Bill Frist, whose campaign manager likened Corker to “pond scum” for his scrappy tactics.
Frist won, but he and Corker became friends. When he decided not to seek a third term, Frist encouraged Corker, who had served as Chattanooga mayor from 2001-05, to run.
He sold most of his real estate empire in January 2006 before he ran for the U.S. Senate later that year.
In the past few years, Corker, a millionaire, has drawn criticism and public calls for investigations into his stock trading, an issue that Corker has called bogus and spurred by billionaire hedgefund managers furious over the senator’s stance on federally sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.