Durant Enters Michigan Senate Race
LANSING (WWJ/AP) - Charter school executive Clark Durant on Thursday joined the race to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow in 2012, taking on former Congressman Pete Hoekstra and increasing the chances Republicans will have a hard-fought primary next August.
Durant has been talking for a month about entering the race. He told WWJ Newsradio 950 he filed the paperwork Thursday and plans to officially kick off his campaign after Labor Day.
Durant was active in politics in the 1980's, but has spent the last two decades running Cornerstone Schools in Detroit.
Talking to WWJ's Tim Kiska, Durant said he felt it was "time to get out of the stands and onto the playing field."
"We need to get back to the American way, not the Washington way of higher taxes and higher regulations and more intereference and more unemployment in the economy," Durant said.
The 62-year-old Grosse Pointe resident is president of the New Common School Foundation in Detroit and helped found Cornerstone Schools. He last ran for U.S. Senate in 1990, narrowly losing the GOP primary and the chance to take on Democratic incumbent Carl Levin.
Besides Durant and Hoekstra, the field of GOP Senate candidates also includes former Kent County Probate Judge Randy Hekman, Roscommon businessman Peter Konetchy and Midland resident Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan. Glenn was instrumental in getting a constitutional amendment passed by Michigan voters in 2004 defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, effectively banning the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.
Hoekstra came in second last year in a bitter GOP gubernatorial primary and announced in April he wouldn't run for the U.S. Senate. But he changed his mind last month, causing Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner John McCulloch to drop out of the race and endorse him.
Despite Hoekstra's popularity with some Michigan Republicans stemming from the Holland Republican's 18 years in Congress and his gubernatorial run last year, it has never appeared that he or any other GOP candidate would be able to avoid a primary.
The splits in the GOP ranks that emerged over the federal debt limit fight are just as noticeable in Michigan, where tea party activists, social conservatives and more moderate Republicans continue to wrestle over the direction of the party. If anything, the split has only grown since businessman Rick Snyder, selling himself as a moderate, beat out Hoekstra and three other more conservative rivals for the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year.
The infighting is sure to help Stabenow, a two-term Lansing senator Republicans consider vulnerable because of Michigan's double-digit unemployment rate and sluggish economy. She already has $4 million campaign cash on hand and easily won re-election in 2006 with 57 percent of the vote. An early July poll, however, showed she had some work to do to shore up her job approval and favorability ratings, and she has to contend with voter disgust with congressional incumbents in general.
Hoekstra spent much of his congressional career focused on intelligence issues and now works as senior adviser at Dickstein Shapiro LLP, a law and lobbying firm in Washington, D.C.
He has the backing of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and scores of other GOP activists, and is expected to get the governor's endorsement when the two hold an Aug. 29 news conference. He also recently got kind words from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who noted that "Pete is an intelligent, capable, business-savvy leader, who would make a terrific senator."
But Durant also has some party heavyweights on his side. He received the endorsement last week of three former heads of the Michigan Republican Party: current Republican National Committeeman Saul Anuzis, Betsy DeVos and Spencer Abraham, who held the Senate seat Durant is running until being upset by Stabenow in 2000. The trio of former GOP leaders didn't mention Hoekstra in their letter of support for Durant, but they did take an indirect swipe at the former congressman.
"Clark Durant is not a creature of Washington," they wrote. "It is his breadth of experience outside Washington that will allow him to be leader we need in the Senate."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
