Call the Doctor

by Jack Lessenberry
March 5, 2010

As a young doctor working in Laos during the Vietnam war, Joe Schwarz spent a fair amount of time saving people in impossible situations.

“One weekend I took off six legs of tribesmen who had stepped on land mines laid by the Pathet Lao and Vietnamese. And most of these people were not combatants — they were village people. They would go out to check the dry rice or poppies and step on a land mine. Then they’d lay there for two or three days till someone could get the word out to Air America, and they’d send a chopper and bring them to our place.”

Dr. Schwarz was on track to becoming Battle Creek’s best-known ear, nose and throat specialist, but he also had taken a year of general surgery, and made do. He took off legs, delivered babies, did whatever else he could to show that Americans were decent people.

He served a hitch with the Navy, then spent more time there with the Central Intelligence Agency. When he came back to Michigan, he built two careers, in medicine and politics.

Today, he’s trying to decide whether to take on one of the toughest cases of all — his home state of Michigan, which has not only the worst unemployment rate in the nation, but also what he cheerfully characterizes as a “fractured, screwed-up, term-limited, irrational, quasi-logical, and absurdly dysfunctional political culture.”

What he is thinking hard about is running for governor as an independent, something that would require collecting 30,000 signatures. He is forming an exploratory committee to test the waters. Now 72, he says he’d serve a single term to try to get the state back on some sort of rational track.

Winning election as an independent would be a daunting task. Then again, anyone who spent a few years voluntarily dodging land mines and bullets in Vietnam and Laos is used to daunting tasks.

Once upon a time, John Joseph Henry Schwarz would have been seen as a dream candidate by the GOP, the party that was his natural home. He was Battle Creek’s mayor, then became a champion of higher education during 16 years as a staunch Republican in the state Senate. He masterminded John McCain’s upset primary victory in Michigan in 2000; ran for the GOP nomination for governor; served a term in Congress.

He is a defense hawk and tough on government waste. But when he ran for re-election in 2006, he was targeted as a “liberal” by the right-wing Club for Growth. In the end, he lost the primary to a former Bible salesman. Twenty years ago, that would have been beyond imagining. But despite experience and credentials, Schwarz is largely unacceptable to those who now run the GOP.

Why? For one thing, he believes abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” He strongly supports stem-cell research and thinks “in the United States of America, people should have a right to health care.”

And he believes that it is better in a crisis to raise taxes than to destroy the infrastructure of a state. “Especially the universities. You don’t tear down something you have worked so hard to build.”

Yet, increasingly, that’s not how Republicans see things. But he isn’t at home with the Democrats, either. “I am sort of a center-right guy, and the parties have gotten so polarized that I think maybe 40 percent of voters don’t feel they have a home in either one anymore.” Polls show some evidence that he is right. If he could win 40 percent of the vote, he could indeed be elected governor as an independent. That might not be as revolutionary as it sounds. In recent years, other states have elected independent governors, including Maine, and most famously, Jesse Ventura in Minnesota.

But could that happen in Michigan? The governor’s race is open, and both parties have strong fields of contenders.

Republicans are favored, if only because of the unpopularity of Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat. But that could change — and polls show the GOP-controlled state Senate is even more unpopular.

Schwarz may face another hurdle. Maverick candidates are often charismatic campaigners who later flop at governing. The good doctor was actually a master of legislative coalition building and compromise, though not without a few yelling matches. But he has never been a very effective campaigner. He’s not a spellbinding orator, doesn’t promise things he can’t deliver, and doesn’t suffer fools as gladly as other politicians feel they must.

“I believe an experienced independent could be an asset this year,” he told me, and maybe even win if the voters are in the mood for common sense. But then he added, cheerfully, “what the hell do I know?”

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.