Former state Sen. Cal Cunningham of Lexington, who recently returned from duty in Iraq, is considering challenging Republican Sen. Richard Burr next year.
Cunningham, a 35-year old attorney, has been traveling around the state during the past two months speaking to Democratic groups, Rob Christensen reports.
"I'm having conversations with friends and fellow Democrats," Cunningham said. "North Carolina has a lot of needs right now. We have rising unemployment and a couple of wars. We need someone in Washington who is energetic and who offers compelling leadership."
The favorite of party leaders was Attorney General Roy Cooper, who announced Friday that he would not run.
Cunningham, a captain in the Army reserves and a paratrooper, returned from Baghdad in December after spending a year proscuting contractor abuse in Iraq. In 2005, he also served a year at Fort Bragg.
At age 27, he was elected to serve one term in the state Senate in 2000. But he did not seek re-election after he was thrown into a heavily Republican district.
His wife, Elizabeth, was deputy campaign manager for D.G. Martin's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 1998.
Cunningham was president of the UNC student body and later earned an advanced degree from the London School of Economics. He is a litigator with Kilpatrick Stockton in Winston-Salem.
Blog RSS feed
Re: Cunningham mulls Senate run
John_Burns
First off if you want apologies you should be contacting Perdue, Basnight, Rand and Hackney for their mismanagement of state government and then Roy Cooper for not doing his job to correct the corruption therein.
My comment was in response to one and only one individual. It was not about anyone else living, dead or about to be born.
When someone says they want to become a career politician and as part of their resume states that they were a lawyer in Iraq for the US Army and I say that ain't good enough for me, then so be it.
As far as I am concerned, he needs to apologize for not stepping outside of his safe civilian MOS over there and do the same job my nephew and thousands of other front line military personnel are doing and have done.
Maybe then he would earn my respect!