Bill O'Reilly Says He'd Consider Presidential Run

"I may take a look. Certainly the option is open if I want it," the Fox News star told Long Island's liberal Newsday. "But what I want to do over the next few years here is clean up the process. We have the bad guys on the run - no question about that."

But all that's way off in the future, he said, noting that "the country's not interested in an independent candidacy. Maybe in 10 years they will be, but right now, you have 50 percent of Americans who don't know anything - they're totally disengaged from the process, the 'Mall People.' They don't know anything, don't watch the news or listen to radio or read the newspapers. The other 50 percent - and there was a recent poll on this - are a third crazy left and a third crazy right and third in the middle. So the pie you're going for is a very narrow pie."

Though O'Reilly's many leftist critics say he is one of the most outspoken voices of the "crazy right," O'Reilly steadfastly declines to identify himself as a conservative.

It's possible, he told Newsday, that he "could mobilize a certain number of independent thinkers who think, 'This guy could be a ... Teddy Roosevelt kind of guy, who could come in and clean up the garbage. ...'"

But, O'Reilly quickly adds, "I'm not a vanity player, I'm not gonna go out like Al Sharpton, to get on 'Saturday Night Live' to run for president, so unless I'm convinced I could pull it off, I wouldn't do it."

In the immediate future, O'Reilly has been urged to take on Sen. Hillary Clinton when she comes up for re-election in 2006.

O'Reilly has shot down that speculation by predicting that it would be a lost cause. "I'd lose. ... It'd be a fun race [and] I'd drive her crazy, but she would ultimately win," he said. Besides, adds Newsday, he has no interest in the Senate: "I'm not a quid pro guy" who'd have to play at pork-barrel politics to bring "goodies" back to the state.

Fueling talk that O'Reilly may have political ambitions is O'Reilly's lastest new book, "Who's Looking Out for You?" which Newsday calls "(at times) a political reformist's manifesto."

By the way, O'Reilly's nemesis Al Franken is saying he might move back to Minnesota and run for the U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Norm Coleman. We expect that Coleman will pay for the lying liar's moving van.

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