From the heartland, the GOP launches a trial balloon
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the year that former U.S. Senator John Danforth first took office (1968). The Watergate break-in happened the year he was re-elected to that post, as Missouri’s attorney general (1972).
Danforth entered the Senate a year after the fall of Saigon (1975), a day that capped the country’s divisive and deadly role in the Vietnam War. He would serve for three terms, during which time the nation would see the farm crisis in the ‘80s, a debilitating financial period often compared to the Great Depression.
Danforth left office in 1994, the year his Republican party regained control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Such an arc, decades of principled service and experience, has shown Danforth much about the potential of human nature to do either great good or evil. He’s also an ordained Episcopalian priest and author of several books, one dissecting how the GOP honed so far to the Christian right.
Titled Faith and Politics: How the ‘Moral Values’ Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together, the book was published in 2006. Yet even Danforth couldn’t have predicted the extreme politics of 2022.
At 85, Danforth is so mortified by the current state of political incivility and the terror of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that he’s willing to stand with other moderate Republicans behind what could be called a Hail Mary of the upcoming midterms.
The plan is to run a Republican, but one with a sense of ethics, as an independent. Doing so just might keep retiring Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat in conservative — but moderate by current GOP standards — hands..
A few days before Roe v. Wade fell, under the banner “A Better Choice For Missouri,” a committee formed to press former federal prosecutor John Wood to enter the race. He was the senior investigative counsel for the Capitol riot committee. He hasn’t officially announced his candidacy.
The hope is that enough moderates will wrestle a GOP Senate seat from the clutches of the loony candidates currently leading. An independent could strip votes away to shove a Democrat nominee forward.
But the hope for a return to civility and compromise is also on the line.
If it works, the switch to an independent could become a model for other states also trying to circumvent the antics of daffy and frankly un-American far-right candidates.
For Missouri, it could keep the Senate seat from a wretchedly troubled man.
The lead candidate is the disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, who launched a video depicting himself as a battle-hardened warrior with a shotgun and surrounded by an armed squadron. They were on the hunt for RINOs (Republicans in name only.) He claimed the ad was simply “tongue-in-cheek.”
He resigned in 2018 while under investigation for blackmail during an extra-marital affair.
All of this reminds us that there are more principled Republicans out there than what headlines often indicate. Yes, Wood clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who, along with his wife, are now in the spotlight for their extremist views and support for former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Danforth spoke to Missouri political reporter Jason Hancock as news broke of Wood’s possible entry into the race. Take his words as coming from Missouri to God’s ear:
“This campaign has implications that are nationwide,” he said. “It’s very important in our state, of course, but I believe we can send a message by the people of Missouri that we’ve got to change politics.”