Greg Orman is not going to be Kansas next governor, but he probably will determine who is.
His presence on the November ballot as an independent candidate, the closeness of the contest between Democrat Laura Kelly and Republican Kris Kobach, and the fact of Kobachs extreme-right orientation means that any votes for Orman would likely be votes that would go to Kelly in a traditional two-candidate race.
Therein lie irony and opportunity.
Orman, like many perhaps most Americans, is fed up with what he calls in the subtitle of his book A Declaration of Independents, the two-party stranglehold on American politics.
He is determined to use part of his considerable personal fortune to help break that stranglehold.
He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as an independent four years ago, winning 42 percent of the vote against incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. (The Democrat candidate dropped out.)
He is bright, at 49 full of energy and from all appearances genuinely yearns to build a new American political structure divorced from the extreme ideologies that have the major parties at war with themselves and often oblivious to the needs and interests of a majority of Americans.
The irony is that by continuing in a race that, according to all polls, he cannot win, he is likely to give Kobach the edge needed to defeat Kelly. Most opinion polls show Kelly and Kobach dead even and Orman at about nine percent.
Kelly and Orman are closer to each other on the issues and are less polarizing than Kobach, who acts and talks like a Trumpist as much as a Kansas Republican.
So voters attracted to Ormans crusade would be draining far more votes away from Kelly than from Kobach.
If Ormans support actually approaches nine percent, thats likely to propel Kobach to the governors mansion with the approval of a minority of Kansas voters perhaps as little as forty percent, which sounds distressingly like the 2016 presidential results.
Thus Ormans incremental 2018 contribution to the long march toward a new and better American politics would result, tragically, in solidifying the very political stranglehold that he condemns.
Few Kansans or Americans would argue that change to the system isnt needed; and change inevitably will come.
he new American political way could be a multi-party system that includes a viable Independent Party, perhaps a Nationalist Party and a rejuvenated Libertarian Party.
More likely, based on the last couple of centuries, the change will be a realignment of the two existing major parties such as last occurred in the sixties and seventies when southerners switched from strongly Democratic to strongly Republican, persuaded by the Barry Goldwater-Richard Nixon southern strategy.
