U.S. Senate candidate Clark Durant, a former Niles resident, wants to put an end to the Washington Way of career politicians

and restore the American Way.
The Washington Way is to tax, regulate, subsidize and borrow.
The American Way is to invest, invent, innovate and produce.
The American Way creates jobs and prosperity.
It is secure and hopeful.
The Washington Way “leaves us burdened with taxes, buried in debt, increased unemployment and much despair,” said Durant, who will officially announce his candidacy Friday in Detroit, where he was born in 1949 and founded Cornerstone Schools.
“The American Way is rooted in the promises of the Declaration and framed by We the People and the Constitution. The Washington Way is rooted in broken promises and framed by the bureaucrat and the entanglement of government.”
Durant, 62, of Grosse Pointe Farms, and Susan, his wife of 38 years, lived in a farmhouse on Yankee Street across from nursery owners Doris and Harold Hunziker while he attended law school at the University of Notre Dame.
Susan taught history at Buchanan High School from 1973 to 1976. Their oldest daughter, Hope, was born on the last day of class at what was then Pawating Hospital. They also have Maggie, Clark and John and two grandchildren.
The Durants attended all the high school basketball games. Susan still remembers the fight song, though today Clark is best known as an avid baseball fan.
He spoke to Leader Publications Wednesday night while enroute from Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo for the night after canceling plans to be in Dowagiac and drop by the Dowagiac Daily News.
The former Hillsdale College vice president attended Tulane University in New Orleans after reading a “captivating” book in high school called “Mind of the South” and having his application to Duke rejected. The South sounded like a place he could play golf all year round. He graduated in 1971 with an economics major.
He started two businesses — a coupon book filled with local deals and a birthday cake delivery service. He chuckles now at the memory.
“I had the best prices and the best cakes, but they arrived the day after the birthday. That’s how I learned about logistics.”
In 1990, Durant also ran for Senate, losing the Republican primary to now-Attorney General Bill Schuette, who in turn lost that November to Democratic incumbent Carl Levin.
The day he lost that primary proved lucky for Detroit because the Episcopalian would join with Catholic Archbishop Alan Maida a few years later to found Cornerstone Schools.
Now 20, Cornerstone offers Mandarin Chinese and Spanish instruction in kindergarten, music including choral, strings and piano and a structure environment symbolized by uniforms.
The former State Board of Education president was named  Michiganian of the Year in 1995 by The Detroit News for his work in education.
Durant sees 11-months-a-year Cornerstone as a testament to the idea everyone can learn and that everyone learns differently, rather than the tendency to too quickly write off kids in urban environments.
“I’m a very blessed man to have been present at the creation and be here to see their accomplishments,” he said.
Durant sees 2012 shaping up as a “generational election” and “welcomes” the vetting the Cass County Tea Party is organizing for the five GOP candidates, who include former gubernatorial candidate and 18-year congressman Pete Hoekstra.
“People are hungry for a different kind of conversation” than career politicians such as Hoekstra or Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow promise, Durant said, noting that not only has Stabenow been in the Senate for a dozen years, but legislating for more than 30.
“Real people don’t play Gotcha, they solve problems” with the country on the “brink of economic disaster,” he said of partisan gamesmanship and gridlock which characterize the D.C. discourse.
Durant, who was parking cars near Cobo Hall at 15, is more aware than most that the Motor City once enjoyed the highest per-capita U.S. income.
But “we’ve fallen away from the original ideas of America. Career politicians are building barriers to economic growth that have got to come down. The people have to hold them accountable and give them the retirement gift of living in the world they created for other people.”
America may lag in some categories, said Durant, who during the Reagan administration founded Imprimis, which provided legal services to poor people, but remains No. 1 in a couple — generosity and in being the only country in history “based on a concept rather than religion or tribes. It didn’t make any difference what your geography is or who your daddy was if you were willing to work hard,” said Durant, whose own father didn’t have a high school diploma or college degree when he started law school at 52. The father and son eventually practiced law together.
Though prominent Republicans Betsy DeVos, Spencer Abraham and Saul Anuzis have endorsed him, Durant said the “establishment is arrayed against me,” with Gov. Rick Snyder supporting Hoekstra.
Durant said while Hoekstra from his party and Stabenow from the opposition are both fine people, they are “drenched in the culture” which collapsed the economy in 2008.
Republicans and Democrats alike presided over “enormous increases in debt and spending, ignored warning signs and were asleep at the switch. They must be held accountable. I get animated on this.”
Durant seeks a substantive different “tone” in politics. “Let the first shot come from Michigan,” he said. “It will be heard around the world.”
His preferred GOP standard bearer for the White House was former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who, besides visiting his home, he admired for vision for growth espoused in June in Chicago and for “recognizing the importance of unleashing the private sector.”
Mitt Romney “will be a formidable foe” for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he predicts, and “fabulous for Michigan,” since father George was governor.
Durant also pointed out that the presidential election, as dismal as it looks for Democrats now with President Obama’s approval ratings, will be close.
Durant scoffed at Hoekstra’s makeover into a penny pincher after being part of a legislative branch that spent taxpayer dollars like “drunken sailors.”
A five-way primary will be “healthy” because incumbent career politicians created a system designed to thwart any challenges to the status quo and to protect them.
Durant would like to see a “second Declaration of Independence” from foreign oil by creating thousands of jobs and tax revenues and making Michigan an “energy exporter” with the Keystone XL pipeline transporting tar sands 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Gulf of Mexico refineries.
“I’m grateful I trained as a lawyer,” he said, “and training at Notre Dame made me think differently about my profession and and my life.”