Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan could have been the most powerful lawmaker in town if he would have shed his Republican label and run for the Senate as an independent, a Washington Post columnist wrote Monday, adding that Hogan “apparently doesn’t have that kind of courage.”
That was a mistake that will cost Hogan columnist Matt Bai's vote.
“For all his defiance, when it really mattered most, Larry Hogan chose the path of party tribalism over the harder road of going it alone. Which is why I won’t vote to send him to the Senate, and why I’m guessing he’ll never get there,” Bai wrote in an analysis Monday.
He argued that while he feels “sort of badly” about his decision to snub Hogan at the ballot box because of his tenure as “a pretty good governor” and “unfair attacks from the left,” he was left with no choice.
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“I won’t vote for Hogan again anyway, because he faced a fundamental choice for his country and his career, and I think he made the wrong one.” Hogan, Bai wrote, had an option: “he could have formally left his party and run as an independent.”
“This isn’t crazy,” the columnist added, comparing what could’ve been with Hogan’s campaign to former Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and suggested the former governor – a vocal Donald Trump critic – “could have made a bid, essentially, to become the next Joe Manchin III — an indispensable wild card in the Senate, the most powerful lawmaker in town.”
But it was not to be.
“What takes real courage is to break with that party entirely, because you just can’t be in league with these people and still manage to sleep at night. Hogan apparently doesn’t have that kind of courage. He chose, instead, to stay in a party whose zombielike spokespeople continue to berate him.”