McConaughey not running for Governor

Thank God that’s over.

Actor Matthew McConaughey on Sunday removed himself from consideration as a potential candidate for governor after months of toying with a campaign.

In a video posted to his Twitter account, McConaughey, who lives in Austin, said he was honored to be considered for “political leadership.”

“It’s a humbling and inspiring path to ponder,” McConaughey said. “It is also a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.”

McConaughey’s video came just over two weeks before the candidate filing deadline for the Texas primary.

Since earlier this year, McConaughey said he was mulling a run for governor, though he did not specify whether he would run in the Democratic primary, in the Republican primary or as an independent. He has previously described himself as “aggressively centrist.”

Look, there’s a world in which I’d have taken McConaughey seriously as a candidate. We took Kinky Friedman seriously as a gubernatorial candidate way back in 2006, even as he invited us to not take him seriously, because he regularly spoke about his intent to run for over two years before he actually ran. (Seriously, the first “Kinky for Governor” story I saw was in September of 2003.) Like Kinky, McConaughey never developed anything like a coherent policy position, but unlike Kinky he also never seemed to have any motivation to run.

Normally when a famous person or brand-name politician is asked seemingly out of the blue if they might consider running for a particular office, I assume it was a setup, designed to call attention to the prospect as part of an overall marketing strategy. In this case, I’m not actually sure. I mean, I think the subject came up for publicity reasons, just not “run up a flag to see if this candidacy could be viable” reasons. We can (and I do!) blame all of the ridiculous polling on the subject, which allowed McConaughey as a partyless entity that somehow ended up on a ballot against Greg Abbott, for extending this drama way past its expiration date.

But now we can cut all this nonsense out and get on with the real race. Again, it’s not that McConaughey couldn’t have been a serious candidate, but to be taken seriously he needed to address the question of how he was going to run – was he going to file for a party primary, or go the much more challenging independent route – and not just whether. He never did, so this was always annoying background noise to me. And now it’s over and we can get back to whatever we’d been doing before. The Current and the Chron have more.

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