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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s what’s going to happen in tonight’s debate between Dick DeVos and Jennifer Granholm. One of the candidates will make a brilliant plea to replace the now-abolished single business tax by making the state income tax more progressive.
The other will respond with an equally clever and well-thought out formula for extending the sales tax to most services instead, while lowering slightly the overall tax rate. Voters are so inspired by both proposals that thousands instantly resolve to devote their lives to public service.
Yes, and the next day I’ll be the starting pitcher in the baseball playoffs. More than likely, we’ll hear no new proposals from either candidate. Instead, they will circle and push each other within a narrow little ring of disagreement, sort of like skinny sumo wrestlers.
Today’s debates are far more about profile than courage; the real issue is who can put across the better image, especially on television.
Abraham Lincoln, tall and unlovely, with bizarre features and a high, reedy, almost hillbilly voice, wouldn’t have made it. George Washington and Woodrow Wilson would have come off as too stiff.
And Soapy Williams, one of Michigan’s greatest governors – well, just imagine the effect of those buck teeth, goofy grin and green polka-dotted bow tie. Today’s so-called debate is designed to let us decide which candidate we’d be more comfortable with.
That means neither is likely to say anything new or earth-shaking, though they may well say some banalities with great emotion. “I want every child in this state to get a decent education.” "Everyone in Michigan should have a good job.”
You get the idea. Knowing this, and knowing precious little news will be made, the media spend a lot of time at debates hoping to catch one of the candidates having a wardrobe malfunction, or better yet, making a major gaffe. One of the most famous happened in 1976.
Our own President Gerald Ford, in response to some forgotten question, declared bizarrely “there is no Soviet domination of Easter Europe,” and then stubbornly refused to correct himself for three days. That clearly hurt him, in part because it reinforced the totally untrue rumor that he might not have been bright enough for the job. Four years later, Jimmy Carter suffered even more when he appeared to say he consulted with his 13-year-old daughter about nuclear issues.
Sometimes a gaffe proves revealing. Michigan Secretary of State Richard Austin appeared not to understand the difference between pro-life and pro-choice during a 1994 debate with Candice Miller. He then said something like “I’m old and sometimes get confused.” Miller was smart enough to be gracious – and that election was over.
We don’t know of course, what will happen tonight. I don’t remember a single thing about the debates four years ago between Jennifer Granholm and Dick Posthumus. I only know this.
Today, there truly is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. President Ford, you were a man ahead of your time.
The first debate between Governor Jennifer Granholm and challenger Dick DeVos will be televised tonight. It will be followed by two more debates and a joint appearance. But what do debates really tell us about candidates? And how important are they in deciding elections? Jack Kay, provost at U of M Flint, is communications scholar and a former debater and debate coach. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Michigan had a rudimentary legislature of sorts even before it was a state. That meant the politicians were ready to hit the ground running once we were admitted to the union in 1837. That first state legislature cranked out 146 laws and a bunch of resolutions our very first year. Not bad for a state that back then had fewer people than Grand Rapids does today.
The lawmakers moved from Detroit to Lansing ten years later, and haven’t slowed down since. We have ten million people now, and our lawmakers now churn out, on average, about 400 public acts a year, a few profoundly important, others profoundly forgettable.
What state government does has more impact on most of our lives than what goes on in Washington. You wouldn’t know that, however, because they don’t get much media attention. Periodically there are attempts to change the legislature. Some want to make it either a part-time body, as they have in New Hampshire, or have a legislature with only one house, like Nebraska.
Those concepts work pretty well in those small and largely rural states. Michigan, however, is a sprawling, diverse, mini-nation of sorts. We have, however, made one big change in our legislature.
And we changed it for the worse. That’s when we enacted term limits a little over ten years ago. This has worked to ensure that nobody in either the House or Senate has any institutional memory of crises past, and no great expertise at working together.
So we get Speakers of the House who are in their early 30s. We lose seasoned, thoughtful veterans like Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema. And we have given more power to the executive branch, the bureaucrats, the lobbyists and the special interests.
This fall, after the elections, the legislature must come back and do a job more important than any they did all year: They have to find a way to replace the $1.9 billion the state lost --- and desperately needs -- when they did away with the Single Business Tax.
Among those making that decision are some, like Ken Sikkema, who will be out of office a month later and can never serve in the legislature again. Others will be gone in two years, or four. They aren’t going to face the long-term consequences of their actions.
That, to me, is deeply dangerous, and deeply wrong. We always had term limits to begin with. They are called elections. We can vote a lousy officeholder out of office any time we like. We can even impeach or recall him or her earlier if they really screw up. And if we keep electing stinkers, and are too apathetic to find better leaders, we deserve what we get.
That’s how the Founding Fathers meant it to work.
Now, with term limits, we have a situation where the only citizens legally disqualified from holding elective office in Michigan are those who are repeatedly approved of by the voters. What a state this is.
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