Just to throw a name out there. Unlikely, I know, but there’s no harm…

In this instance, I am happy to be eating my words. As a former critic of Senator Bob Corker, he has turned out to be an excellent representative. In the past, I worked tirelessly against Corker, but he has proven me wrong, and I’m proud that he is my senator, and my former Mayor. This week, he has shown me once again why he has the necessary leadership skills to be a leader of the party.

I doubt that McCain will be calling Senator Corker to be his running mate anytime soon, since Corker has been extremely critical of the Senator from AZ from time to time, but if things don’t work out in 2008 for Republicans, Corker is a man that they should give a long look towards in 2012 as a possible candidate. He has business credentials that are almost as strong as Mitt Romney’s, as he was a self made multi million dollar CEO of the largest construction company in Tennessee, which he expanded into a successful real estate business. He has executive experience in running a government, and was successful. While mayor of Chattanooga from 2001 to 2005, he cleaned up the city. He also served as the Commissioner of Finance and Administration for Tennessee from 1995-2001. By 2012, He will have spent six years as a Senator, and is establishing the conservative voting record to brag about. He will have had experience in both the legislative and executive branch to match, and since he was elected, he’s been talking so much sense conservatively that Fred Thompson would be proud. Lastly, he’s still only fifty-three, and could be around for a while.

From Ramesh Ponnuru, with a hat tip to this blog:

Senator Empirical - Bob Corker takes on climate change.
May 19, 2008
By Ramesh Ponnuru

There’s a question Republican senator Bob Corker likes to ask at town meetings when he is home in Tennessee. “I ask people to raise their hands if they know anything about ‘cap and trade.’ I’m lucky if I get a hand go up,” he says. “But this is going to affect people hugely in their daily lives.”

The Senate is scheduled to debate a “cap and trade” bill in June. It would fight global warming by setting a limit on the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. That’s the cap. Companies that got their emissions below their limit would be able to sell the excess emission rights to other companies. That’s the trade. The theory is that the companies that could most cheaply reduce their emissions would have an incentive to do so. We would get the most emissions reduction possible for the smallest hit to the economy. “It’s a market-based approach,” says Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, who is sponsoring the legislation with Republican John Warner.

By June, Corker hopes, both his fellow senators and the public will know a lot more about cap and trade. He is becoming a leading critic of the bill — and he may be the most effective one in the Senate.

Junior senators rarely play a major role on important legislation. Corker was elected only in 2006. (He was the only new Republican senator elected that year.) Corker had been a CFO for the state, a successful real-estate executive, and the mayor of Chattanooga when he jumped into the race for the seat Bill Frist was giving up.

…

Since winning, Corker has turned out to be more conservative than people expected, particularly on the economic issues that most concern him. Earlier this year, almost all of his colleagues voted for a stimulus bill and a housing bill. Corker, moved by the quaint theory that such bills ought to stimulate the economy and help the housing market, voted no.

Corker is the most pleasant surprise conservatives have had in the Senate since Georgian Paul Coverdell served from 1993 to 2000. Conservatives assumed that Coverdell would be a moderate, but he turned out to be a hard-working champion of free-market health care and school choice until his untimely death. Corker is also hard-working, which goes farther in the Senate than you might think.

I doubt McCain will pick him, since it seems that Corker has been extremely critical of the AZ senator in the past, but he’d be a good pick, and we’d be foolish not to consider him in 2012.

If he can turn one of his harshest critics (like me) into a believer, then he must be doing something right.