Stormin’ Orman

IT IS more than 80 years since an independent politician last turned heads in Kansas, a sturdily conservative state. In the 1930s John Brinkley almost became governor on a non-party platform of clinics for the poor, free textbooks for children and the digging of ponds that he said would make it rain. Sceptics growled that Brinkley’s real goal was to use high office to secure a fresh medical licence, after authorities shut down his lucrative but occasionally fatal practice of implanting goat testicles into the infertile or impotent, earning him fame as “the goat gland doctor”.

Today an independent is planning a more constructive political experiment in Kansas. Greg Orman, a wealthy 45-year-old entrepreneur and avowed centrist (he calls himself fiscally conservative but socially tolerant), is challenging the state’s senior senator, Pat Roberts, a Republican who has tacked hard right in recent years. Kansans, who like limited government for other people, were startled when Mr Roberts voted against a farm bill and tried to block funds for a research centre in Kansas that he had sought for a decade. Mr Roberts also opposed a UN treaty on disabled rights backed by his old mentor, the former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate Bob Dole, saying he did not trust the UN (as Mr Dole, a Kansan, watched from a wheelchair).

Not in Kansas any more

Mr Roberts is not having a good 2014. He struggled to fight off a Tea Party challenger in a Republican primary in August, after his new, fire-breathing style dismayed old admirers, failed to convince hardline critics and did little to quell grumbles that he has forgotten his prairie roots. Always drily acerbic, Mr Roberts has seemed crotchety and off his game, prompting party bigwigs to send him new campaign aides earlier this month, ahead of November’s congressional elections that look set to hand Republicans control of the Senate. Now 78, Mr Roberts has struggled to explain why he has no permanent home in the state, living instead in Virginia and using a house belonging to supporters as his Kansas address. (Embarrassingly, he told a radio station that he headed to Kansas whenever he had “an opponent, uh, I mean every time I get a chance.”) On September 3rd Mr Roberts’s Democratic opponent quit the race, leaving Mr Orman to unite the anti-Roberts vote. Headlines have noted (not very reliable) polls that suggest Mr Roberts is in trouble. This has brought unusual attention to Kansas, which last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1932. Pundits debate whether Mr Orman is a Democrat-in-disguise, or a champion for a fight-back by moderate Republicans.

Actually Mr Orman is attempting something more interesting, even radical. He is asking Kansans to send him to Washington to disrupt two-party politics itself. Democrats have perfected the dark art of painting Republicans as a menace to America, and vice versa, he worries. Rather than building the broad majorities needed to tackle hard problems, each party takes the easier path of vowing to protect voters from the other.

Maine already has an independent in the Senate, Angus King, though he sits and mostly votes with the Democrats. If Kansas sends its own non-party senator, that could be enough to create a “problem-solving caucus” holding the balance of power in a finely balanced Senate, Mr Orman says. His enthusiasm fills his offices in Olathe, south of Kansas City, as he talks of bringing European-style coalition politics to Washington. He cites the outsize sway of the Liberal Democrats in Britain, as centrist swing-voters between the two big parties. (Lexington forbore to mention that entering coalition government has all but crushed the Lib Dems.)

If instead one party wins the Senate convincingly, reducing the bargaining-power of independents, Mr Orman says it would be best for Kansas if he were to ally himself with that majority. But a third way is his dream. He says he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. He has a catchphrase about a “new American paradox”. It is harder than ever for the average American to get ahead, he says, and easier than ever for Americans to do nothing (he frets about the growth of federal welfare programmes). Most Democrats agree only with the first point, while Republicans prefer the second, he sighs. He likes the sound of welfare reforms being pushed by Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House budget committee. Yet he fails many conservative litmus tests: he backs legal abortion and universal background checks on gun sales, and believes in man-made climate change. On immigration, he supports a path to legal status for unlawful migrants who work and pay taxes.

Mr Orman has interesting ideas, in short, though without a record as a politician he is asking for a lot to be taken on trust. Alas, he probably does not prove that a new politics is trumping two-party tribalism in Kansas. Yes, Democrats nudged their Senate candidate to stand down (though Republican state officials insist the Democrat’s name must remain on the ballot, citing legal fine print). But backing an independent for the Senate “is a strategy that Democrats have talked about” for years, says Burdett Loomis of the University of Kansas. In federal races Kansas remains a Republican state (though it sometimes elects Democratic governors, and could even do so this year). If Republicans can nationalise the Senate race and convincingly cast Mr Orman as an enabler of the Obama agenda, he will lose. True, Traditional Republicans for Common Sense, a group of 70 or so former Kansas legislators, recently endorsed Mr Orman. But they do not yearn for European-style coalitions; they just want their old party back. Jim Yonally, the group’s chairman, does not think every state should elect independent senators. His sorrow is that Senator Roberts “isn’t the Pat Roberts we’ve known for so many years”.

Mr Orman is right to explore alternatives to partisan, zero-sum politics. But his very success to date makes him a marked man. He surely faces weeks of brutal attack ads. America’s political tribes are not ready to share power.