Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: The Second Spot Curse - 8.26.09

Governor Granholm is supporting her lieutenant governor, John Cherry, in his 2010 Gubernatorial bid. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering if that’s a good idea…

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Jennifer Granholm has sent an e-mail to her supporters across the state, urging them to give money to John Cherry’s campaign to replace her next year. What’s not clear is whether she is doing him more good than harm. In the short run, this will help him.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics, and next year’s gubernatorial race will be expensive. Candidates like Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra are already running hard for their party’s nomination.

Cherry is a seasoned political figure who has spent seven years as lieutenant governor. However, his own campaign for governor has two massive strikes against it. For one thing, the Granholm administration is deeply unpopular. Political insiders have been frustrated with the governor’s inability to lead.

Normal voters know that the economy is horrible, and hundreds of thousands of Michiganders have lost jobs in the last year. Traditionally, voters tend to blame the party in power.

People haven’t liked the way things are going for quite some time. Michigan Republicans suffered for that in 2006, when Governor Granholm was reelected in a landslide, and last year, when President Obama had an even bigger win in Michigan.

Unhappiness with President George W. Bush was largely to blame in both cases. But Republicans are no longer in power. Next year, they intend to campaign hard against Granholm, and are trying to blame her for the economy, and to blame the lieutenant governor for all her failings. In fact, they are already referring to the last seven years as the “Cherry-Granholm administration.”

That may be a bit of a stretch. But in practice, for some mysterious reason, lieutenant governors, like vice presidents, tend to get all of the blame and none of the credit for their administrations.

When they run for the top job, the voters tend to punish them. Dick Posthumus, lieutenant governor under John Engler, lost to Jennifer Granholm in 2002. Twenty years before that, Lieutenant Governor Jim Brickley couldn’t even win his own party’s primary. In fact, in modern times, the only lieutenant governor to get elected to the top job was John Swainson, who won a very narrow victory on John F. Kennedy’s coattails in 1960.

This year, Democrats have made a decision to try to head off a primary fight and circle the wagons around John Cherry as their man. By the way State Representative Alma Wheeler Smith is also running for the Democratic nomination, as is John Freeman, a former legislator. Unfortunately for them, they have little money.

However, the Democrats may get a major primary fight whether they want one or not, if House Speaker Andy Dillon gets into the race. There is one thing Granholm could do if she were really serious about helping Cherry. She could resign.

That would give him a year to compile a record as governor on his own. That’s what happened to Bill Milliken, who was lieutenant governor until George Romney left to join the Nixon Administration.

Milliken went on to win three terms. But Ms. Granholm doesn’t seem inclined to leave. So, John Cherry faces an uphill battle next year, but despite all I’ve just said, we should remember the greatest of all political maxims: You just never can tell.

Essay: Tough Enough - 8.5.09

The possibility of bringing some Guantanamo prisoners to a federal prison in Standish has gotten some politicians upset. Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks our state is up to the challenge.

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My favorite story yesterday was the one about a Dearborn man who was hit by what turned out to be a piece of an airplane as he was standing in his back yard. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt at all.

But what was his first reaction? He said he assumed his wife had gotten mad and thrown something at him. Yes, we are a tough bunch, we Michiganders. We expect to take a few whacks, even from our friends. We also actually have a fair amount of common sense.

That was clear from yesterday's primary election results, especially in Detroit. Only two percent of the voters went for Monica Conyers, the convicted felon. Fewer than six percent voted for incumbent Martha Reeves, who was clearly not up to the job.

I've seen a lot sillier results in the suburbs. Sometimes, the people have more common sense than their leaders.

You can really see that in the way people are reacting to the proposal to move a few hundred of the Guantanamo inmates to a soon-to-be-closed federal prison in Standish, near the thumb.

Pete Hoekstra, a congressman from the west side of the state, has been running around trying to scare everybody about this. "They are some of the most dangerous people on the planet," says Pete, who not-so-coincidentally is running for governor.

Well, yes, some of them are probably dangerous, or were in their natural habitat in Afghanistan. However, here's something the congressman may have overlooked. Nobody is proposing to give them jobs in a Standish day care center. They would be put in a federal maximum security prison there, which is now slated to close.

Virtually no one breaks out of such a lockup. But let's imagine one does. So, you have a guy who doesn't speak English wandering around in an orange jumpsuit. Bet he'd fit right in and start a sleeper cell.

Let's get real. Kevin King has other, more rational fears. He is Standish's mayor. He is afraid of the devastating effects of unemployment on his community. The jobless rate in Arenac County, which includes Standish, is now 20 percent and rising.

The last thing they need is to lose another three hundred jobs if the prison closes. Granted, we all might have some qualms about turning Michigan into the "Penal Colony State." But even that sounds better than something like the "Great Depression State."

The fact is that our international prestige has suffered immensely because of Guantanamo, We don't even know very much about the inmates, since they haven't been given trials or hearings.

What we do know is that when it comes to anything controversial, politicians without much backbone are often quick to yell NIMBY: not in my backyard. They do this with inconvenient energy sources, and waste disposal facilities, too.

What this society needs to do is start taking responsibility for our actions. If this is a job America needs to do, it should be done in America. If there are jobs at stake, we certainly need them in Michigan. After what we've been through lately, keeping an eye on a bunch of international prisoners should be a piece of cake.

Essay: Running in Place - 6.26.09

Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has announced that she will not run for Governor in 20-10. The Republican has, instead, endorsed Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard for the job. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of Land…

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What do Terri Lynn Land and Michael Jackson have in common? Well, they were both born the same year, 1958.

And yesterday, one of them wanted to make headlines, and the other actually did. For a politician, the most maddening thing about the news cycle is that you can never control what else is happening.

Yesterday, Land, who is Michigan’s Secretary of State, decided to end her brief campaign for next year’s Republican gubernatorial nomination and endorse Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

Unfortunately for them, they held their press conference the same day that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died and GM decided to build its new small car at its factory in Orion Township.

The net effect of all this was that Bouchard and Land ended up as a very small story deep inside most Michigan newspapers.

That’s life. On the other hand, you just know that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has to be wishing that he could have held his famous press conference yesterday. Instead, he wound up making his bizarre confession the day before, when virtually nothing else was happening. That left him as the main course on the 24-hour-news cycle menu pretty much all Wednesday.

But back to Terri Lynn Land. When I heard about her announcement I was startled, but not really surprised.

She has been one of the best Secretaries of State Michigan has had. She has improved service in a largely non-political way. She is also a throwback to an earlier, non-ideological era.

She is from Grand Rapids. Her political hero is former President Gerald Ford. I have a sneaking suspicion that she would eventually like to go to Congress from his old seat when the incumbent, Vern Ehlers, retires some day.

But her heart never really seemed to be in the race for governor. She never articulated a vision for this state. I suspect she began running because she was term-limited out of a job after January, and people told her governor was the logical next step.

There is also someone who she really doesn’t want to see as governor: Attorney General Mike Cox. Land and Cox hold each other in, as the saying goes, minimum high regard.

This announcement was calculated to help Bouchard, and it should. Cox, who is a tremendous campaigner, is probably still a slight favorite, but Bouchard is the only candidate who has won a state-wide GOP primary. The party’s other heavyweight, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, can’t be counted out, but is still virtually unknown outside his congressional district.

Some are asking today is whether Land traded her endorsement for a secret promise to be Bouchard‘s pick for lieutenant governor. The answer is almost certainly no, though she would be an excellent choice for gender and geographical balance.

Trouble is, they are both moderates, and their party increasingly leans hard right. In any event, Bouchard would be politically foolish to announce his choice till after he is nominated.

But whatever happens, I think we haven’t seen the last of Terri Lynn Land. Three years ago, she was reelected by a landslide in what was a big Democratic year.

If Republicans are lucky, she’ll be back.

Interview: Chris Christoff - 11/6/06

Tomorrow’s election is shaping up to be one of the most intensely watched midterm elections since 1994. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Chris Christoff about the races we might want to be keeping an eye on.  Chris is the Lansing Bureau Chief for the Detroit Free Press. 

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Essay: Images of Leadership - 10/23/06

We like to think that the era of crafting images for politicians and selling them as if they were diet soda is something relatively new.

Actually, it has been going on as long as there have been politicians. William Henry Harrison was packaged as a hard cider-drinking Indian fighter who had killed the Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh. Actually, Tecumseh was probably more of a hero and statesman than Harrison, who actually didn’t kill him personally.

Matter of fact, Tecumseh, who history ranks as more of a statesman than Harrison, was killed in Canada, after Harrison’s forces had chased him out of Detroit. But that’s politics.

And if you think that modern image making was invented on Madison Avenue, think about this. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president, he was actually a relatively prosperous attorney who had made money by helping railroads acquire land – sort of the eminent domain cases of the day. He loved technology, the more modern the better, and was the developers’ friend. Somehow, even back then, his handlers thought an image of “Honest Abe the poor rail-splitter” would be easier to sell than “Rich Abe, the railroad lawyer.” Imagine that.

In Michigan today, we have one candidate for governor who is attempting to sell the image of himself as an experienced businessman who can get the state’s bottom line back in order. The other is being presented as a caring and compassionate person who has the experience to make government work for you.

The voters I talk to have a great deal of cynicism about such  images, perhaps understandably so. It is also fashionable to moan that thanks to television, we don’t get to see who these people really are.

But I think that may be wrong. We do get to see who they are, not in their slick commercials, but when they interact with the media or the public. We even learn something about them in these highly stylized joint press conferences that we call debates.

Certain revealing moments stick in the national consciousness – John Kerry saying he voted against the $87 billion before he voted against it. The first President Bush checking his watch when he was asked a difficult question during a debate, clearly wishing it were over. That was contrasted against the pure, people-loving warmth that the man who beat him, Bill Clinton, radiated all the time.

So are fleeting visual images of candidates an adequate guide to who to vote for? Certainly not.  Sometimes the image packagers can fool us, as when they convinced even the hardened journalist Mike Wallace that there was a new Nixon in 1968.

And yet seeing these people does tell us something that has some meaning – whether we feel comfortable with these candidates,

We rely on intuition of that sort in our own lives every day, in everything from business deals to dating. Nobody’s antenna are perfect, but sometimes I think if we trusted our instincts more and ideology less, we’d usually be better off. 

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Interview: Nicholas Valentino - 10/23/06

Election day is November 7th.  We continue our election coverage with a look at how image makers are shaping perceptions in the race for governor.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Nicholas Valentino studies political communication at the University of Michigan.

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Essay: The Best Government Money Can Buy - 10/13/06

The other day I talked to Andy Levin, the son of a congressman and nephew of a U.S. senator who is starting his own political career by running for a hotly contested state senate seat in Oakland County.

I asked what he thought it would cost to wage a successful campaign. He said close to a million dollars. 

And he added that he expected his opponent, Republican John Pappageorge, to spend more. For a state senate seat!

Statewide, whether you like it or not, Dick DeVos is, in a sense, attempting to buy the governorship. He’s using his own personal fortune to buy TV advertising on a scale never seen before. The Democrats can’t match that, but are doing the best they can to raise enough to buy the governorship right back. Neither candidate would like my words. They don’t want to talk about “buying” an election.

They say they are doing what it takes to get their message out. But while we live in a complex state with complex problems, you don’t see much of that reflected on the ads.

Instead you learn from DeVos’s commercials that he is a leader who can lead, because he is a leader. And that Jennifer Granholm is responsible for the recession, the collapse of the auto industry, and, probably, runaway inflation in South America.

From Granholm’s ads, you learn that DeVos lives only to export thousands or millions of Michigan jobs to China.

That’s what passes for debating the issues. However you won’t learn much about Carmella Sabaugh, the Democratic nominee for Secretary of State. She doesn’t have enough money to get on TV very much. Ditto for Amos Williams, running for attorney general.

Those are two major party candidates for two important jobs. Yet if they don’t have money to get on the air, they don’t exist.

There’s a solution to all of this. Ban political advertising on the broadcast media, and give all the candidates equal blocks of time to get their message across.

The Federal Communications Commission could make that happen tomorrow, by requiring the networks to do this.

Wouldn’t this violate freedom of speech? No. We sometimes forget that the airwaves are different from the print media. They are public property just like the national parks. The stations and networks are given a license, which they have to reapply for every few years, to use the frequencies on which they broadcast.

In return, the government has the right to set certain rules, and to require them to air public service programming. The FCC actually used to do this, which is why hard rock stations used to have news.

Michigan and the nation are facing hard decisions, and we are about to elect people to make those decisions for us. Currently, campaigning in this state runs according to the golden rule. Those who have the gold, make the rules.

It might be time for a new playing field.            

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Interview: Rich Robinson - 10/13/06

This year’s campaign for governor will be by far the most expensive in Michigan history. Candidates for congress commonly spend millions of dollars, and that pattern is spreading to the state legislature.  Rich Robinson is head of a non-profit, non-partisan group concerned about the influence of money in politics; it is called the Michigan Campaign Finance Network   Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Strange Bedfellows - 10/6/06

I used to think it was silly, even outrageous, to attempt to drag politicians’ spouses into the political arena.  Just because John Doe has a taste and talent for public life doesn’t mean Mary Doe does.

Years ago, I saw several cases where widows had been appointed to fill positions formerly held by dead husbands who were popular politicians. Mostly, they were not intellectually or psychologically up to the job. But they had been cynically appointed so the party could benefit from having a famous name.

Back in the 1960s, George Wallace installed his wife Lurleen as governor of Alabama when term limits forced him out.

For all intents and purposes, she was a puppet who did what George told her to do. What’s worse, we had an episode here that was about as bad, and one of Michigan’s best most famous modern governors was the culprit.  In 1970, George Romney had resigned to become Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Housing and Urban development. U.S. Sen. Phil Hart, an extremely popular Democrat, was up for re-election. For some reason I never understood, it was decided to run Romney’s somewhat shy wife, Lenore, against him.

This turned out to be a total disaster. Lenore Romney proved not to be a master of the issues, or the political process.

She was not only defeated, she was humiliated, getting less that one-third of the vote. Years later, I sat on a couch across from her in the Romney’s retirement home. “I should never have let them do that to me,” she said, showing the only spark of anger I ever saw.

Times are different now, however. The night Lenore Romney lost that election, her husband’s understudy, Bill Milliken, was elected governor. Twelve years ago, Howard Wolpe, the Democratic nominee for governor, asked Helen Milliken, to switch parties and be his running mate. That wasn‘t a stunt. Mrs. Milliken was up to the job.

She had been a fighter for women’s and environmental issues for years. In the end, she said no, partly because she was in her 70s, and partly I think because she would have been a much stronger candidate and campaigner than Wolpe, who was a real dud.

Today, women whose spouses go into politics are likely to be shrewd and savvy partners in the family enterprise. Otherwise, political marriages don’t tend to last. Nobody not into politics could put up with that grinding lifestyle.

Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton, nobody has ever said she was naïve, stupid, or a mere mouthpiece for her husband. Neither, by the way, is Betsy DeVos, who was Republican state chairman and known statewide before her husband was.

Dan Mulhern, the governor’s spouse, is a Harvard-educated lawyer. One would think both candidates would be proudly exhibiting their accomplished spouses to the voters. But for whatever political calculation, they are keeping them in the shadows.

I wonder if it would be different if Betsy and Dan baked cookies.     

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Interview: Hugh McDiarmid - 10/6/06

This year’s gubernatorial race is unique in Michigan history in part because of the candidates’ spouses. Dan Mulhern, the governor‘s husband, is the only “first gentleman” in Michigan history. Betsy DeVos is a former Republican state chairman.  Hugh McDiarmid covered Michigan politics for the Detroit Free Press for many years; he may have some perspective on it all.   

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