Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Once to Get Known - 1/31/06

Part of the problem with our instant gratification society is that we forget that politics is a game for the long-distance runner.

That means you have to be prepared to be tackled and have the wind knocked out of you a few times before you get to the Super Bowl. The old pros used to know this. They’d say, you run once to get known, and once to get elected. Personally, I don’t think you can ever tell what a politician is made of until he or she gets her butt royally kicked.

A few years ago, an idealistic young liberal came to ask my advice. He had decided to run against an aging Republican congressman. The district was Republican, but not hopelessly so. The congressman was aging, had gotten a little lazy, and was a little out of touch and a little more conservative than his base.

“I think there is a good chance you can beat him,” I told the young guy, “if you plan to run twice.” He looked at me like I was the man in the moon. “You can’t beat him the first time, but you can lay a foundation. If you do well enough, you may even scare him into retirement.” “Look, I am going to win this thing, this year,” he told me. I didn’t argue. After all, I have been married for a long time. To make a long story short, he blew all his money, lost, got disgusted, and moved out of state. Years later, the old congressman is still there.

Every politician I know who is worth his free parking place suffered a defeat like that, took his licking, popped back up and kept on ticking. George W. Bush lost a congressional race a long time ago. His daddy got badly beaten twice for the senate. Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all lost before they won.

Bouncing back is a little harder now because running for office costs so much. But I still think you often learn more through adversity than through success. Which brings us to Mike Bouchard, who I think is an appealing candidate on a number of levels. He has a good shot at winning the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat this year.

But while anything can happen, the odds also indicate he’ll probably lose in November. If that happens, both Bouchard and the voters needn’t conclude that he needs to be banished forever from the lists of our future leaders. After all, it was only a dozen years ago that a young woman from Lansing lost a tough primary for governor. Later that year, she ran for lieutenant governor, and lost by nearly a million votes.

You may have heard of her. Today, she is United States Senator Debbie Stabenow.

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Interview: Michael Bouchard - 1/31/06

The primary contest for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats is gearing up to be a hot one. Three Republicans are vying for the opportunity to challenge Senator Debbie Stabenow in the November general election. Keith Butler has declined our invitation, Monday we spoke with Jerry Zandstra, and today Jack Lessenberry talks with Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard who is leading in the polls.

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Essay: Of Senators and Statesmen - 1/30/06

When it comes to handicapping the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, Jerry Zandstra is a definite underdog, though not a hopeless one. If he does win the nomination, he will face an even greater challenge trying to topple U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a popular and well-funded incumbent.

But in politics, you never say never. Most of the state’s pundits, including me, thought Freman Hendrix was certain to beat Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick last fall. And think about this.

Imagine that on January 20, 1993, the day Bill Clinton took office, you had gone to Las Vegas and said you wanted to bet that the very next president of the United States would be the son of the outgoing president, who had just been badly defeated.

The son you wanted to bet on had never been elected to anything, and was best known as a recovering alcoholic who had a management job with a money-losing mediocre baseball team. What kind of odds do you suppose you could have gotten - and how big would your yacht be today?

Here’s something surprising about the U.S. Senate. Michigan became a state 169 years ago last week. How many people do you think Michigan voters have elected to the Senate in all that time.

Dozens and dozens? Nope. Only 15. Actually, there have been 40 senators, but until 1916, the people weren’t allowed to vote for them. They were chosen by the state legislature.

Since we started electing our senators, we have chosen some who became statesmen and some who were short-sighted. We’ve had Spencer Abraham, who lasted only one term, and Carl Levin, our longest-serving senator, who soon will have been in office 30 years.

Some of our senators had great promise but proved disappointing, like the brash young reformer who wrote a book about reforming Congress and then ended his career tainted by the savings and loan scandal. And there were some who grew on the job, most notably Arthur Vandenberg, from Jerry Zandstra’s Grand Rapids, Vandenberg was a narrow isolationist when he came to Washington, but matured into a distinguished and far-seeing internationalist who helped found the United Nations. He helped create the bipartisan foreign policy that lead to approval of NATO and the Marshall Plan, and led to our eventual winning of the Cold War.

I don’t know if Jerry Zandstra will make it to the Senate. But in any case, I’d like him to read a good biography of Arthur Vandenberg.

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Interview: Zandstra - 1/30/06

The hottest statewide political race in the primary season this year is likely to be the contest for the U.S. Senate, where three Republicans are fighting over the chance to take on Senator Debbie Stabenow in the November general election.   
Over the next couple days we’ll meet 2 of the 3 candidates.  Keith Butler has declined our invitation. 
       Probably the least well-known of the 3 is Jerry Zandstra.  He is the only Republican candidate who supports the ballot proposal that would outlaw affirmative action in college admissions.
Some think that may give him an edge, since polls show a majority of GOP voters agree with him on that proposal.
Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Solidarity, Not Quite Forever? - 1/27/06

Governor Jennifer Granholm said these things in her state of the state speech Wednesday night. “I want to talk to the father who has worked for 30 years at a manufacturing plant who just got notice that his job as a welder has been outsourced to China. I want to talk to the worker at Delphi, and GM, at Chrysler and at Ford.

“And I want to talk to the worker at the Ford Wixom plant.” In other words, the governor was saying she wanted to talk to union workers who have lost, or are losing, their jobs.

That is what I imagine many of them were hoping she would say. Most of them voted for her, and blue-collar union workers traditionally look to Democrats for help when times get tough. But if Jennifer Granholm ever talked to them in specific terms, I totally missed it. She said she had a “detailed and comprehensive plan to grow this economy. “She said she was working that plan, and that it would secure the opportunity for a good life for everybody in Michigan. Meanwhile, what does the out-of-work Wixom auto worker do?

That’s not at all clear, though the governor seemed to hint that they might need to sit tight for a few years. She did mention one lady who had gone back to school to become a nurse. Naturally, that is totally impossible for many of these folks. They have wives, husbands and children. Many of them have spent their lives on the line, doing a specialized task for which there is no more demand.

For years, they looked to their unions to look out for their interests. The unions did a pretty good job of that – as long as there were jobs where the unions were. But then the jobs started disappearing. First to North Carolina, and then to North Shanghai.

So it seems clear that the labor movement in this country has only two choices. Fight for some form of protectionism, which seems futile and doomed in a world which technology has made flat. Or, labor could tackle the much harder – but critically necessary -- battle for decent wages and living standards for the entire globe.

Otherwise, get ready to return completely to a world of every man for himself. Marxists once believed when the revolution started, it would soon spread all over the world. Not long before he died, Leon Trotsky admitted the possibility that this might not happen.

“If that turns out to be true, what do we do then?” he was asked. He thought hard, and finally said, “Well, I guess we fight for some minimum program for the interests of the wage slaves.” Let’s hope we can do better than that.

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Interview: David Bonior - 1/27/06

We’ve had a lot of bad news from the automotive industry this week. On the heels of that news, the Governor delivered her state of the state address. Blue collar workers were likely to be listening for how her vision for the state’s future will effect them. David Bonior was a staunch supporter of labor unions throughout the quarter-century he spent in Congress as a Democrat from Macomb County. Since stepping down in January 2003, he has been teaching labor studies and advocating for workers rights. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with David Bonior.

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Essay: Will of the People - 1/26/06

State Rep. Alexander Lipsey has some good ideas and an impressive background. I don’t know whether he will be successful at winning the Democratic nomination for attorney general. What I do know is that as a voter, I would like to have a voice in whether or not Lipsey, Geoffrey Fieger or some other candidate gets the nomination. But I don’t have any say, and that really irks me.

That’s because both parties’ candidates for attorney general and secretary of state will be selected by the usual collection of party hacks, also known as delegates, at state conventions late this summer.

That system is not only not Democratic, it doesn’t serve either party very well. Let me give you two examples. In 1998, Gov. John Engler wanted his party to nominate Scott Romney for attorney general.

Romney would have been an impressive choice – handsome and well-spoken – and had one of the most famous names in politics.

Had there been a primary, he would have blown any opposition away. But the delegates didn’t feel he was conservative enough. They instead nominated John Smietanka, who four years ago had been badly defeated by longtime incumbent Frank Kelley.

Smietanka had a good legal record, but was neither a spellbinding speaker nor a charismatic personality. Worse, in the past he’d been late on some child support payments, which isn’t the sort of thing to help a candidate for chief law enforcement officer.

Still, it was a big Republican year, and he almost won. But thanks to his problems, he was narrowly defeated by a woman few had heard of before, a lawyer for Wayne County named Jennifer Granholm.

Had Scott Romney been the candidate, everyone thinks he would have won, and Granholm would never be governor today. Not that the Democrats have done much better with their convention process, Four years ago, they nominated a personal friend of Jennifer Granholm’s for secretary of state and an inept campaigner for attorney general. Each managed to lose races they should have won. The time before that, John Austin, a thoughtful policy expert, worked hard to get the Democratic nomination for secretary of state. He was passed over so they could put an African-American on a ticket. The one they nominated had no qualifications, behaved bizarrely, refused to campaign, and lost every county in the state.

Nobody is paying attention now to how we fill these posts. But consider this. You may never need to talk to the governor. Yet everyone needs to do business with the secretary of state. And with our economy in danger, the state certainly needs a first-rate attorney. We put a lot of things on our statewide ballot these days. Adding a constitutional amendment establishing a primary system for these crucial jobs would be a very good idea.

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Interview: Alexander Lipsey - 1/26/06

In Michigan the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state are selecte at the party conventions rather than in statewide primaries. State Representative Alexander Lipsey wants to be the Democrats nominee to take on incumbent Mike Cox. And if he ends up in the job, he will become Michigan’s first African-American attorney general. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Representative Lipsey.

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Essay: Term Limits - 1/25/06

I haven’t always agreed with Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema’s stand on various issues. But he is an extremely well educated, skilled and intelligent lawmaker. He has a history degree from Yale and an MBA from Michigan. He’s 55, and at the top of his game.

Sikkema spent a dozen years in the state house of representatives and has been in the state senate for seven years – the last three as its leader. And as of next January, it will be illegal for him to serve in either body ever again. That is just plain nuts. But that is the straitjacket the voters of Michigan, almost certainly without realizing the full implications of what they were doing, forced on us in 1992. And we are paying a heavy price.

You can make the argument that in the old days, some lawmakers stayed too long. But you know what? That was up to their voters. We have always had term limits of the best kind, provided by the Founding Fathers. They were, and are, called elections.

Though they didn’t realize it, what the voters did by enacting additional term limits was to proclaim us all incompetent children.

They said, in effect, that we can’t be trusted to pick the best person to represent us in Lansing. We are so stupid that we’ll just pick the same old name each time, so take that name away so that in our ignorance, we at least pick someone new.

Worse, we have also created a system that ruins lawmakers’ ability to concentrate on their jobs. Sikkema says he intends to spend his last year focusing on the state’s problems. I believe him. But he is well connected and has an MBA.

That’s not true for most of our legislators. They have spouses and families. What do you think they are going to be concentrating on in their last few years? Getting their next job, that’s what.

Lobbyists work hard at trying to get lawmakers to support their bills. They know how to do that, because many of them are . . . former legislators. The lobbyists and the bureaucrats now know the system far better than the new representatives.

So tell me. If you knew you were going to be out of work next year, what happens when a lobbyist has a bill that he wants you to support, but which you know isn’t right for your district? You don’t have to worry about the voters – you can’t run again.

But you will need a job, and his firm could hire you. The message is clear. We don’t need to fool around with term limits, we need to get rid of them. Mr. Sikkema, your priorities should be perfectly clear.

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Interview: Ken Sikkema - 1/25/06

Tonight we’ll learn what the governor has in mind for Michigan this year. After the State of State Address, the legislature’s republican leaders will have their say. Ken Sikkema is a Republican from the Grand Rapids area and the Senate Majority Leader. He’s held that job for the last three years. But because of term limits this will be his last year in the Senate. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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