Former New York Governor George Pataki plans to come to Iowa this weekend and there are indications he’ll use the event to announce he’s running for the White House.
Pataki, a three-term Republican governor who left office at the end of 2006, has pondered the presidency before, but decided against running in 2008. In April of last year Pataki said he felt compelled to return to Iowa to drum up opposition to President Obama’s health care reform plan.
“You know, I was happy as a private citizen…but when I see what is happening in Washington…like most Americans, I believe we are seeing a government that is dramatically headed in the wrong direction,” Pataki said in April of 2010.
Pataki formed a group called “Revere America” in 2010. This year Pataki was back in Iowa — and New Hampshire — with a new group called “No American Debt”.
“We have a government in Washington that spends too much, that borrows too much,” Pataki said in Urbandale, Iowa, earlier this year, “that doesn’t listen to the American people.”
Pataki governed as a fiscal conservative, but he supported abortion rights as governor of New York, a stand on the issue that won’t sell with many Iowa social conservatives.
Pataki is due to speak Saturday at the Polk County Republican picnic along with two other presidential candidates — Texas Congressman Ron Paul and Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter.