If Missouri Republicans are tempted to “own the libs,” or outrage progressives, by nominating the disgraced former governor Eric Greitens as their Senate candidate on Tuesday, they should think again. By elevating Greitens, they would only own themselves.
There are too many arguments against a Greitens redux to count, but the crux of it is that he is a candidate of singularly bad character who would be the weakest candidate in a general election.
Greitens resigned from his post as governor of the Show Me State in 2018, after he was accused of not just having engaged in an extramarital affair, but having bound, stripped, photographed, and blackmailed his mistress and having coerced her into performing oral sex on him (he denied the blackmail). In the span of just two months, Greitens was indicted on an invasion-of-privacy charge for that incident, as well as for having used a donor list from his veterans’ charity to solicit donations for his gubernatorial campaign.
Though charges were later dropped, his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, has filed a sworn affidavit in which she claims that Greitens admitted to mistreating his mistress. She has also accused him of abusing both her and their children. In one instance, she recalled Greitens “cuffing our then three-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”
Obviously, not every allegation in a contentious divorce is true, but it is notable that both Greitens’s former mistress and his former wife agree that he is a violent lout.
It is not as though Greitens is already a general-election candidate, so the choice isn’t between him as a desperately flawed candidate and a Democrat who represents everything that Republicans oppose. There are good and viable alternatives to the Greitens train wreck.
Both Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler and Attorney General Eric Schmitt would be fine senators who would serve Missourians well. For our money, Schmitt is the best choice. His record is strong, and his performance in polling indicates he has a better chance than Hartzler of ensuring a Greitens defeat. He also looks better in polling against potential Democratic opponents than Hartzler, and much better than Greitens.
Greitens maintains that he’s the surest bet for conservatives, but the fact remains that he almost ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2010, and the co-founder of Greitens’s old nonprofit, a Democrat, told a local newspaper that he donated to the Greitens campaign because he wanted a “pro-choice” governor in office, regardless of party.
This puts Greitens’s notorious “RINO-hunting” ad — he playacted an armed home invasion against an insufficiently MAGA Republican — in an even more grotesque light.
This shouldn’t be a hard choice for the Missouri GOP: anyone but the candidate with enough baggage to sink an ocean liner.