Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: The Ethics of Office Seeking - 8/24/06

Michigan has a long history of elections that are not only clean, but well-run. That’s due in part to two crises that happened long ago. In 1950, the governor’s race was so close we had multiple recounts and huge arguments of the kind made famous in Florida half a century later.

In 1970 Detroit became one of the first large cities in the nation to try using – you guessed it – punch cards. The hanging chads clogged the counting machine; experts had to come from out of state to get it open, and it took days to learn who the new governor was.

Those two events led to a lot of attention being paid to election reform. Since then, anytime we have had a recount, it has pretty much been a mirror image of the original result.

Even so, there is a somewhat unsettling appearance of conflict of interest when a county clerk, in charge of counting the votes, is a candidate in her own jurisdiction.  Something about it just looks funny. Of course, they would applaud your integrity if you had to announce your own defeat. 

Richard Austin did have to do just that. He was Secretary of State back in 1994, a year that was bad for Democrats everywhere. It was particularly bad for Austin, who had been the heavy favorite.

That is, until a disastrous performance in a televised debate in which he seemed rambling, confused and forgetful. He ended up having to officially certify his own loss – which he did with great good grace.

Politicians, in fact, often rise to such occasions.  The idea that Ruth Johnson or Terri Lynn Land could somehow corrupt an election and get away with it strikes me as absurd. But I do think there is an ethical problem when people who were elected to do one job spend a lot of time campaigning for another job.

Jennifer Granholm spent a great deal of time as Michigan attorney general running for governor. Ruth Johnson is about to spend a lot of time running for lieutenant governor. Now think about this.

What would happen if you told your boss, “I’m really not going to be very available till mid-November, because I am working hard to try and get a better job. But I need the pay and the bennies, so I expect you to keep me on the payroll.  Just don’t ask for me to be around.” I suspect you don’t want to think about your boss’s reaction.

I think Ruth Johnson should take an unpaid leave of absence for the time she spends campaigning. So should Macomb County Clerk Carmella Sabaugh, if she ends up the Democratic nominee for Michigan Secretary of State.

And at the very least, every clerk or other official in charge of elections should designate someone else to handle election decisions whenever they are a candidate for any office that is on the ballot.

That would look and feel better. And there is nothing more important in a democratic society than the integrity of the vote.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

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Interview: Dave Waymire - 8/25/06

This afternoon, a protest is being held in Pontiac demanding that Ruth Johnson step down from her job as county clerk.  Last week Dick Devos picked her to be his running mate on the republican ticket for governor.  The protester think no one should be allowed to run for office and be in charge of counting the votes in that election.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Dave Waymire about this issue.  He is a longtime Lansing journalist and political consultant.

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Essay: More Than Fair - 8/23/06

The first time I went to the Michigan State Fair was when I was about six, and I have vivid memories of eating pancakes with my father, watching newborn baby pigs, and seeing, for the first time, the governor.

Of course, I doubt I had any idea what a governor was. But I was fascinated because he was a tall, kind of goofy-looking guy with a green polka-dotted bow tie, and a funny name. It was Soapy Williams.  I thought it was very funny that an adult man was named Soapy, and I think for some time I had him confused with Soupy Sales.

Soapy doesn’t show up any more, nor does my father. But the pancakes and the baby pigs will still be there. The Michigan State Fair has been giving generations of kids similar memories since 1849.

It started in Detroit, if you don’t count a failed effort in Ann Arbor ten years earlier. Though it moved around a lot in the early years, through Kalamazoo, Jackson, Battle Creek to Adrian, Saginaw, Lansing, and Grand Rapids, the fair has been on its present site at the Detroit fairgrounds on Woodward Avenue for the last century.

I don’t go to the fair every year, and at this point, don’t usually go unless I can grab small children to take with me.

But I like knowing the Michigan State Fair is there. And I think many of us like knowing that it will be back every summer. What we don’t realize is that we came close to losing it entirely, like Bob-Lo Island or the Belle Isle Aquarium or other icons of our past.

The fair was struggling in 1993, when Governor John Engler, a Republican, appointed John Hertel, a Democrat, to run it.  The place had gotten a little tacky, rundown and a bit sad. The fair perpetually lost money, and the state was running out of patience.  Had that been the case the last few years, with the state budget in perpetual crisis, it is easy to imagine the politicians deciding that we just couldn’t afford the fair anymore.

John Hertel seemed an odd choice for Engler at the time – a Republican governor appointing a Macomb County Democrat.

But it was a brilliant move. Hertel seems to be a rare creature – a politician who tends to accomplish more, not less, than he is usually given credit for. And he revitalized, and probably saved, the Michigan State Fair, by a combination of shrewd financial stewardship and intelligent planning. Add to that marketing savvy, an instinct for showmanship, and a real love of what is at the heart of the state fair – agriculture and animals. Hertel’s hobby is breeding draft horses.

One thing’s for sure; he will have a lot on his plate in his new job, which will be nothing less than to invent a regional transportation system. But if he is as successful there as with the state fair, we all may be taking some form of light rail to work pretty soon.

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Interview: John Hertel - 8/23/06

The Michigan State Fair opens today in Detroit. It is nation’s oldest fair.  And in recent years it has become profitable.  It’s General Manager John Hertel has gotten high marks for revitalizing it. But this year’s fair will be a bittersweet one for Hertel, who is leaving after 13 years to head a new regional transportation agency.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Horse Trading - 8/22/06

When longtime Grand Rapids Congressman Gerald Ford learned he was about to became President, he called his golfing buddy, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, to invite him to his swearing-in. They were political opposites. O’Neill was a staunch liberal Democrat from Boston. Ford was West Michigan conservative to the core.  Yet they were good friends.

The gruff old Irishman said he’d like to say that Congress would be happy to cooperate, but the new President would have to work with Congress too. Ford told him that would be entirely appropriate.

The Speaker paused, and said, “Christ, Jerry, isn’t this a wonderful country? Here we can talk like this and you and I can be friends, and eighteen months from now, I’ll be going around the country kicking your ass in.” And the men both laughed.

Politics used to be more like that.  You could differ on the issues but find a way to get along. That system sometimes led to corruption. There have been times when legislative bodies resembled gangs of thieves. Republicans would steal from the north side, Democrats the south, and everybody winked and split the booty in between

We don’t want to return to that. But in these ideologically polarized times, every old timer who has ever covered politics knows that a certain amount of collegiality has been lost. Democrats and Republicans too often stare at each other across red and blue barricades. They are unwilling to compromise, to do anything that might violate their ideological purity or -- even worse -- make the other guys look good. That might be a good attitude for a sports team. But it is not a sensible way to run a rambunctious, highly diverse state. Thirty-eight percent of us voted for left-wing headbanger Geoffrey Fieger when he ran for governor. Four years later, a different thirty-eight percent voted for conservative Republican Rocky Raczkowski for U.S. Senator.

The other one-quarter of us are politically in between. Most of the time, the political arts call for effective and sensible compromises. That’s what’s going on now in Michigan, as Republicans and Democrats in Lansing try to wheel, deal and compromise on issues ranging from the governor’s scholarship program to minimum wage rules.

We haven’t had much of this horsetrading in recent years, and that’s a shame.  That’s partly why the state is in the shape it is in.

Hopefully, the House Speaker Craig DeRoche, Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema, and the governor’s people can come to n agreement on these various issues.

They’ll need to do it soon, before all rationality is erased by the general election campaign. Once that gets going, all Democrats will be labeled incompetent America-hating liberals, and all Republicans warmongering greedheads. Yet a new crop with some of each flavor will have to run the state for the next four years. 

Let’s hope they agree to get together and reform the broken way the state budget works. Who knows – for once, common sense might just be worth a try.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

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Interview: Rick Pluta - 8/22/06

The art of political horse-trading may not be dead. Democrats want the legislature to agree to an earned income tax credit and to Governor Granholm’s proposed Merit Scholarship Plan. Republicans want Democrats to agree to exempt some workers from the new minimum wage rules. The question is, can they do a deal?  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rick Pluta.  He is the State Capital Bureau Chief for Michigan Public Radio.

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Essay: Welfare Reform - 8/21/06

So, has welfare reform been a success?  That clearly depends on how you measure success. There are certainly a lot fewer people on assistance now than a decade ago.

In Michigan, there are less than half as many families on welfare as there were. Nationally, the decline is even steeper.

But where did they all go? Mary Bradford, a single mother of three who had been on welfare for years, went to work filling orders in a warehouse in Missouri when the reform process began. Today, according to USA Today, she is a supervisor for the company, making more than $30,000 a year. Pushing her into the labor force was clearly a good thing.

On the other hand, we don’t know how many single mothers and children have fallen through the cracks. I have seen some of them living on the streets in Detroit.

What seems to be clear is that welfare reform hasn’t turned out to be nearly the disaster many liberals predicted that it would be.

Lots of people who were considered unemployable -- or saw themselves that way -- are working today. But I don’t think very many people who were on welfare have ended up as project supervisors or software designers, either. 

Many more of them are like a woman who Michael Moore profiled in Bowling For Columbine. They work several minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet. Meanwhile, their kids are raised by others, or by the streets. I knew one of these women.

I wrote a magazine profile of her after her son became famous. His name is Nathaniel Abraham, and at age 11, he put a bullet in someone’s head and was convicted of murder.

When we talk about measuring the success of welfare reform, we need to start by asking a very basic and simple question.

What are we trying to accomplish? It seems very clear that the old welfare system was badly dysfunctional. It was meant to supply temporary relief for those suffering hard times.

It turned into something that ended up creating a culture of dependency and fostering the growth of an underclass who lived permanently on the dole, generation after generation. That needed to be destroyed, and it has been.

But the real question today ought to be . . . what about the children?  The whole point of welfare was to enable mothers of young children to provide for them. Does welfare-to-work leave those children adequately cared for?

Welfare reform was also begun during a boom economy. The world is different now, especially in Michigan. Will there still be jobs for these women after the next rounds of layoffs kick in? What, if anything, are we doing to try to address why we have so many single-parent families without adequate support structures?

Ten years from now, when a substantial number of children of welfare reform families start reaching maturity, we’ll start to know a lot more about how all this has really affected our society.

I hope we are pleasantly surprised.    

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Interview: Kristin Seefeldt - 8/21/06

Ten years ago this week, President Clinton signed a welfare reform act.  The goal was to move people from welfare to work – and the number of people on the rolls dropped dramatically.  But a decade later, how is welfare reform working for the needy – and for the country?  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Kristin Seefeldt.  She is Assistant Director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.

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Essay: Preserving Freedom - 8/18/06

He was a Virginia slave owner when he wrote the words that would create the United States, and eventually help end slavery:

“All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Those were Thomas Jefferson’s words, and that was the Declaration of Independence. That led to the Constitution under which we govern ourselves.

Two hundred and thirty years later, U.S. District Judge  Anna Diggs Taylor, a descendant of slaves, rebuked the President of the United States for a clandestine eavesdropping program that she found to be both illegal and unconstitutional:

“We must first note that the Office of the Chief  Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. “There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” she wrote. 

President Bush exceeded those powers, and violated the  guarantees of free speech and privacy, by ordering secret electronic surveillance without a warrant.

That’s something he did even though he could have asked the secret the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, or FISA court, to approve his wiretaps. In the past, FISA courts have almost always let presidents bug whomever they wished to bug.

Even the President is not above the law, she said. Suddenly, I felt as though I had gone back in time, to 1974. when I was young and thin. But the issue was very much the same.

We had a President who thought the laws didn’t apply to him, that he could defy a government subpoena to turn over taped records of his conversations.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he was wrong, and that this is a government of laws, not men. Within days, that President was no longer president.

Now, we are facing a similar situation with a case that began in Michigan, where some of those under secret surveillance live.

Some of them look like the men who brought terror and death on September 11. Some may even be sympathetic to them. But in our system, everybody, from Mother Teresa to Mohammed Atta, is entitled to the due process of law.

This battle will go on, of course, all the way to the Supreme Court. But before it gets there, President Bush, who is not a lawyer, might do well to read the words of another former Republican governor of a western state, a man who was one.

His name was Earl Warren, and he went on to become one of the greatest chief justices in Supreme Court history. “Implicit in the term national defense is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this nation apart,” he said.  “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of those liberties which make the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

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Interview: Kary Moss - 8/18/06

Yesterday a federal judge in Detroit declared the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping unconstitutional.  It is a program in which the government monitors international telephone and Internet communications.  Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the program violates people’s Constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.  Jack Lessenberry spoke with Kary Moss, the executive director of the ACLU of  Michigan about the case .

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