Sam Brownback 2008 presidential campaign
The 2008 presidential campaign of Sam Brownback, a U.S. Senator from Kansas, began on December 4, 2006, with the formation of an exploratory committee. Several weeks later on January 20, 2007, Brownback officially announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States. Brownback had first been elected to the Senate in 1994, previously having been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He was popular among social conservatives and positioned himself as a compassionate conservative, often using his Catholicfaith to justify some of his policy positions. From the start of his announcement, media outlets noted that his candidacy was a long-shot and highly unlikely to succeed, and throughout the campaign, Brownback struggled with both fundraising and rising above single-digits in opinion polls.
On October 19, 2007, after several months of campaigning Brownback announced the end of his campaign, with many speculating that he would instead focus on running for Governor of Kansas in 2010. In November 2007, Brownback endorsed fellow U.S. Senator John McCain, who later went on to win the Republican Party's nomination. Brownback was later elected to the Kansas governorship in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014 before being appointed as an ambassador-at-large by President Donald Trump in 2017.
Sam Brownback grew up on a farm outside of Parker, Kansas and received a law degree from the University of Kansas in 1982, after which he served as an attorney at law in Manhattan, Kansas.[1] From 1986 to 1993, he also served as the Kansas Secretary of Agriculture, during which time he spent one year as a White House Fellow. In 1994, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives as part of the Republican Revolution that gave the Republican Party (of which Brownback was a member) control of both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. Brownback would later be elected to the Senate in 1996, filling the seat vacated by Bob Dole, who had resigned as part of his failed presidential campaign. He was reelected in both 1998 and 2004.[2] Following his second reelection, he stated that he would only serve two terms and vowed not to run again in 2010.[1]
In government, Brownback aligned himself with conservatives and the Christian right in particular (Brownback himself was a Catholic, converting from Methodism in 2002), opposing abortion, same-sex marriage,[2] and research on embryonic stem cells.[1] He has self-described himself as a "bleeding-heart conservative" and has discussed several of his positions as being in agreement with the consistent life ethic.[3] In a 2006 article, The New York Times described him as an advocate for compassionate conservatism and called him "one of the Senate’s most frequent travelers to Africa" and an advocate for victims of HIV/AIDS. In an interview with Congressional Quarterly that same year, Brownback, regarding compassionate conservatism, said "I’m really mining the area, whether it’s prison reform, reconciliation — particularly with African Americans, poverty reduction."[4]
