A strong Republican citizen asked me the other day, “What do you know about John Wood?” And at the end of our discussion, he made an interesting suggestion about him.
John Wood is running for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat as an Independent. It’s far too late for him to file as a Republican but he’s the kind of moderate Republican that former Senator John Danforth has been hoping would give GOP voters an alternative to the crowd of candidates that Danforth considers so closely tied to ex-President Trump that the GOP could lose that seat in November.
My friend thinks Wood would pull votes away from candidates of both parties but would hurt the Republican nominee the most, especially if it’s Eric Greitens.
Here’s a thumbnail description of John Wood.
(This entire discussion becomes academic if he cannot gather 10-thousand signatures of Missouri voters and present them to the Secretary of State by the close of business on August 1. Barely meeting the minimum might say something about his candidacy. Getting thousands more than necessary might say something, too.)
He’s a 52-year old lawyer and is the latest product of the “Danforth incubator.” John Danforth used his election as Missouri Attorney General in 1968 to begin cultivating bright and young Republican assistants whose success in statewide office broke the Democratic hold on Missouri politics and produced the Republican control. Before he was a lawyer, he worked for Danforth. He clerked for U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who had been an Assistant Attorney General under Danforth. He also has worked at the United States Court of Appeals.
President George W. Bush appointed him the federal prosecutor for western Missouri in 2007. He served into 2009. After leaving that job he was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. When John Ashcroft was United States Attorney General, Wood was the deputy associate general counsel in that office. He also filled that job in the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget.
For a time he was the Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. He joined the January 6th Committee as a senior investigator at the invitation of Representative Liz Cheney.
He calls himself “a lifelong Republican” who has told the Post-Dispatch he is not interested in being part of “a race to the bottom” and an effort “to see who can be the most divisive and the most extreme.”
He thinks Greitens will win the Republican primary on August 2 but he thinks he can win in November behind “a coalition of common-sense voters,” most particularly Republicans who won’t back Greitens as well as moderate and conservative Democrats—and independents, of course.
We won’t delve into his positions on issues in this entry except to say they are distinctly mainline Republican. He has said he would support Mitch McConnell remaining leader of the party in the Senate and that he wants to be part of a “governing coalition,” an indication that he might work better across the aisle than many other Republicans (or Democrats) in Washington.
He says he’s not a spoiler, that he’s running to win.
Simply put, he’s a wild card in a race that needs one. He’ll have Danforth money and muscle behind him. But it doesn’t take much searching to realize that John Danforth doesn’t set the philosophical tone for the party that he once did.
All of that might be true, maintains my friend. However—-
Is he really running to gain statewide name recognition so that he can challenge Josh Hawley in 2024? After all, Danforth says supporting Hawley four years ago was the biggest political mistake he’s ever made.
Stay tuned.
(Photo Credit: Twitter)