Prometheus 6

Lou Dobbs Weighs Senate Run, as a Steppingstone
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

The Lou Dobbs-for-Senate rumor had barely crested when the Lou Dobbs-for-president rumor suddenly overtook it this week.

Mr. Dobbs, the former cable television anchor of the sonorous voice and tough-talking immigration politics, parted ways with CNN on Nov. 11, reportedly receiving an $8 million severance payment, and immediately stirred questions about his plans.

His name was quickly floated as a potential challenger in 2012 to United States Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, an ardent advocate for immigrants’ rights and the chamber’s only Hispanic member. (Mr. Dobbs, 64, lives on a horse farm in rural Wantage, N.J.)

Then, on Monday, Mr. Dobbs said he had been urged to ponder a White House run, and was indeed thinking about it. “Yes is the answer,” he told former Senator Fred D. Thompson, who reached Mr. Dobbs at his vacation home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and broadcast the interview on his radio program.

What’s unclear is whether Mr. Dobbs, who branded himself “Mr. Independent” on CNN and talks prodigiously about his scorn for partisan politicians on a radio program syndicated to more than 200 stations, would run as an independent or seek the nomination of the Republican Party, which he spurned in 2006, switching his registration to independent.