It is time for Romney to remove his rusty Republican training wheels and announce an independent bid for U.S. Senate. A resurgent undulation of optimism began sweeping the Beehive State when Senator Orrin G. Hatch decided to hang up his fighting gloves and call it a career. This seismic shift suddenly triggered a groundswell of support among voters and pundits for the prospect of a Senator Romney.
If Mitt rides this wave, then Jenny Wilson will surely meet her Waterloo in November! However, a GOP Goliath in Utah would be all too boring. Mitt should run as an independent and let Chris Stewart carry the Republican torch to the race, spurring a robust debate on the pressing issues encumbering Utahans and all the world’s citizenry.
Americans are repulsed by the state of anti-governance in Washington. According to seminal research by Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, disruptive innovation is long overdue in a politics industry that has leveraged its powerful self-interested duopoly to set the rules of engagement in elections at the expense of the public interest. The broken system has gutted out moderates in Congress and caused a sharp deterioration of bipartisanship in passing landmark legislation.
The Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and the recent GOP tax bill are all sterling emblems of political elites currying favor to their respective donors, special interest groups and partisan voters, while turning a blind eye to the needs of the rest of their constituents. Long gone are the days where a spirit of collaboration among public servants was evident with the bipartisan support of the Civil Rights Act in the ‘60s and Welfare Reform in the ‘90s.
It is heartbreaking that after a centuries long endeavor to achieve equitable suffrage for blacks and women, the two major parties still get away with barring non-partisans from voting in primaries. It is no wonder how they successfully rig elections! No, the GOP doesn’t need Mitt to save it from an existential crisis. Let it go! Throngs of billionaire CEOs still contribute to its crony coffers.
As the Centrist Project suggests, America needs a handful of independent senators to create a sensible swing-voting fulcrum that blocks both parties from reaching a majority. Then they might stop shoving pendulum-swinging legislation down each other’s throats and actually focus on coalition building, smart negotiating, and driving forward consensus solutions for Americans.
If the parties are destabilized by a new era of competition from independent candidates, then thank goodness—finally America’s largest voting bloc will have a voice that isn’t beholden to hyper partisan ‘representatives’ fanning the fire and fury ablaze inside the beltway with their half-baked, spurious nationalism. The big R’s and D’s aren’t catering to the desires of scores of voters who are clamoring for a major third party. The media’s muckraking and #NeverTrumpers’ political posturing should be a wake-up call to l’état d’urgence of sussing out the situation of how the ostentatious showmanship of a lifelong narcissist has suffocated America’s indispensability to international peace and stability. If you so desire to fill the enormous shoes left behind by Senator John McCain, Mitt, then heed his plea.
Populism is perilous for populists. Don’t be fooled, withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not nearly this administrations coup de grâce in extinguishing America’s hegemony and menacing the progress of humanity. Without your autonomous levelheadedness to steer back this drifting ship, China will surely fill the power vacuum in Asia with its low-values Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, leaving the United States in the dust with an unfulfilled vision of promulgating values of labor standards, environmental protection and intellectual property rights.
No, the highest huckster doesn’t need a fealty lapdog to validate his vain imagination that you once cautioned must not be married to real power. During his farewell address, George Washington forewarned that while political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Sound familiar? Just read every other news article today. Our beloved first president only failed to presage Donald Trump’s amour fou with Vladimir Putin. Senator Jeff Flake sadly stated that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles. He said there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time for Mitt—you have much less to lose than Flake. You are best positioned to bring an end to the state of our disunion, disrepair of our politics, indecency of our discourse, coarseness of our leadership, and compromise of our moral authority.
Although Utahans already crossed the Rubicon by abetting the election of a demagogue who modernizes the meaning of “bully pulpit,” as Evan McMullin proved in 2016, espousal of principled conservatism does not necessitate chaining oneself to the bonds of parochial partisanship. In defiance to the terrible trajectory of the GOP, Utahans have en masse repudiated the disorderly mess of Trump’s hijacked party and launched the United Utah Party as a last-ditch effort to revive true democracy and erase the political industrial complex’s artificially constructed “isle.”
So, Mitt, you may run as a Republican, play Utah voters for suckers, and get your free ride to Capitol Hill and complementary lousy hat—maybe even be awarded an honorary degree from Trump University! But there’s no need to throw another log onto the fire of dysfunction that’s burning there. This improvident choice might further instigate a trade war that induces the businesses you built to flee from America.
Why not, then, run as an independent? You would no longer be beholden to the highest bidding customers of a party, and be free to represent the people of Utah. You could transform Americans’ innovation and ambition to break down the competitive barriers to the politics industry, restore our democracy, and let the United States lead the free world for another century.
Your grandchildren might someday inquire about Teddy Roosevelt’s words that they read in civics class: The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole.
Mitt, will you tell them you were loyal to your principles, like Senators Flake and McCain? Or will you admit your conscience was superseded by loyalty to a man or a party? You cannot serve both Trump and the American people. Consign your (his) party to the ash heap of history and let disruptive innovation level the playing field for healthy democratic competition. Now is the time to dedicate this last chapter to serving generations of fellow citizens who have been swept under the rug by the duopoly. Who’s going to stand up to Trump? The choice is yours. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
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