Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Why Business Supports the Budget - 3.28.11

Governor Snyder’s budget is intended to bring new jobs and business to the state of Michigan. But will it work? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked to some business leaders.

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The changes Governor Rick Snyder wants to make with his proposed budget are hugely controversial. But everyone agrees on this: They are designed to bring new business to Michigan.

The governor believes there is no other way to revitalize our state’s economy. But what does business really think of the governor’s budget? People in business aren’t monolithic. General Motors doesn’t have a lot in common with the mom-and-pop restaurant in my neighborhood with five employees.

So last week, I talked to two business leaders who each represent a broad cross-section of somewhat dissimilar interests. Doug Rothwell is president and CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan, a group of seventy-six of the state’s largest employers. Rob Fowler has the same title with the Small Business Association of Michigan, sometimes known as SBAM.

SBAM has more than ten thousand members, many of whom have fewer than a hundred employees. Fowler and Rothwell don’t always see eye to eye -- but they do on the governor’s budget.

They support it, right down the line. “I think the governor’s tax plan is the right thing to do, even though some of our members are going to pay more,” said Rothwell, who ran Detroit Renaissance before it evolved into Business Leaders two years ago.

Rob Fowler, who has also had small business leadership positions in Indiana and Ohio, put it this way: “You have to understand the moment in time we are in.”

“Sure, there are things in the governor’s plan I am sure, standing by themselves, our members would not support.”

But both men said it was vitally important to pass the plan as a whole, that if lawmakers started picking off pieces, it would fall apart.

I talked to each man separately, and discovered that what both liked most about the plan was that it offers a coherent, comprehensive strategy for Michigan’s long-term economic recovery. Rothwell noted that this was not a budget of quick fixes and one-time solutions, but one with vision.

Critics have said that the governor is just betting an hunch, gambling that slashing taxes will bring new business into the state.

But both business leaders say there’s some hard data indicating that Snyder may be right. Fowler said a survey of his small business members found seventy-two percent said they expect they’d add workers with the governor’s plan and sixty-three percent said they’d expect to pay their current workers more.

Two thirds of the small businessmen said they would be likely to invest in new equipment. Both Fowler and Rothwell oppose the Republican legislators’ proposal to set the corporate income tax higher and exempt those currently getting pensions from tax.

Rothwell said that change would take Michigan from the fifteenth most business-friendly state to the thirtieth. “They are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Fowler added.

That doesn’t mean both men love the entire plan. Fowler’s defense of eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit for the poor was unconvincing. Rothwell doesn’t like seeing cuts to education.

But they are both standing behind the plan, in part, perhaps, for one other reason. Despite all the critics, nobody’s proposed a comprehensive alternative. Michigan’s economy is seriously sick. And as of now, the Snyder plan is the only doctor in the house.

Essay: Defying Age - 3.25.11

Governor Bill Milliken, who occasionally advises Michigan’s current governor, turns 89 tomorrow. That has Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinking about the question of age.

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Former Governor Bill Milliken turns eighty-nine tomorrow. When I talked to him a couple weeks ago, he said, after discussing the current Michigan budget, that I keep getting his age wrong.

“I am actually fifty-three,” he said, before bursting into laughter. Talking to Milliken always perks me up, because I am thirty years younger than the man who I always think of as “the governor.”

And I certainly hope I still have a sense of humor at his age, though by that time I may well want to give up talking about state budgets. I find it very encouraging that there are a great many people who are now living to tremendous ages, and enjoying life.

A week ago, I went to visit former Attorney General Frank Kelley in Florida. He had me hop into his convertible and we sped towards Marco Island, where we had lunch with a tough old Massachusetts politician, Francis X. Bellotti.

Kelley is eighty-six; Bellotti is about to be eighty-eight and looks sixty-five. The two Franks talked about old wars and about John F. Kennedy, who both knew. “When you saw him, you didn’t just think he should be president. You thought he was the answer to everything wrong in the world,” said Bellotti.

Later, on the drive back, Kelley sighed. “It’s hell getting old,” he said. “How would you know?” I wanted to ask.

Now, most of the college students I teach would find the idea that people in their eighties could be interesting, let alone fun, hard to believe. To amuse myself last fall, I stuck an extra credit question onto a midterm. “What is the biggest reason you’re glad you aren’t me?” I asked. The smartest students replied something like …“because now I don’t have to grade thirty midterms.”

But a distressingly large number wrote something like, “Well, sorry to say this, but you are old, and I‘m not.”

One even wrote, “because I‘m at the beginning of my life and you are near the end of yours.” I suppose he thinks I should set a date with the embalmer. On the other hand, there’s Michigan Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly, who legally cannot run for re-election next year because judges in Michigan can’t be re-elected after seventy.

I can tell you one person who thinks that law is unfair: Justice Kelly’s mother, who still lives by herself, but who finally retired from her job as a reading tutor and gave up driving three years ago.

“I could still do it, but at age one hundred I thought it was time to stop,“ she told me last summer.

These folks all still have active, interesting lives. I like talking to them, partly because they can shed perspective on things happening now. They’ve been around for a few budget crises and economic downturns, and I think today’s politicians would be well advised to pick their brains on what to do about them.

Frank Kelley, who served longer as a state attorney general than anyone in American history, reminded me that he can legally serve one more four-year term.

“I think I’ll run next time, when I’m 90,” he said. I think he was joking. If I were the current attorney general, I’d certainly hope so.

Essay: The UAW’s Dilemma - 3.24.11

The United Auto Workers union is holding its bargaining convention in Detroit this week. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says the labor movement is facing big challenges.

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You may not have noticed, but the United Auto Workers union has been holding its bargaining convention in Detroit this week.

Every four years, union leaders get together to plan and map out their strategy for negotiating a new contract with the automakers. Once, this convention was an enormous deal, intensely covered by both local and national labor media. The big question every time was -- which company would be the strike target?

Years ago, the union came up with the concept of “pattern bargaining.” One company -- Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler, would be selected as the target. Union officials would then try and hammer out a contact with that automaker first.

Sometimes they’d have to go on strike to achieve that; sometimes not. Meanwhile, the workers at the other companies would keep working under the old labor agreements.

Once the new contract was finally hammered out, the unions would then go to the other two automakers and say -- “okay; this is what we negotiated with them; this is what you need to agree to as well. No fooling around; take it or leave it; sign or we walk.”

That’s how it’s been done for many, many years. In the past, there were sometimes historic strikes which led to historic settlements that gradually won the workers everything from paid vacations to profit sharing to dental care, on top of high wages.

But as all the world knows, excesses and globalization caught up with the auto companies. General Motors and Chrysler nearly went out of business less than two years ago. They survived in part because the union was willing to make major concessions.

New hires, for example, now make half of what a longtime autoworker does -- $14 an hour, or #29,000 a year. The union decided that and other sacrifices were necessary to keep their employers alive.

Well, the world is different now. Ford and General Motors are now making profits in the billions. Chrysler is believed close to profitability, and at any rate, has a new owner with deep pockets.

Many in the UAW believe it is their turn to be rewarded and compensated for the sacrifices they’ve made. The companies, however, talk as if the concessions need to be permanent. They know the day when they dominated the national and even world auto markets are gone.

Some of the union’s clout is gone, too. Thirty-odd years ago, the UAW had one point six million members nationwide. Today, that’s down to three hundred and fifty thousand. A third of those aren’t even in auto-related occupations. Put another way, ninety percent of the blue-collar, General Motors jobs in the state in 1979 are gone.

When the bargaining talks begin in earnest later this year, the UAW isn’t just out to get a better contract. Union President Bob King knows the union is in a struggle to stay relevant, and survive.

He knows the union’s future depends on whether it can begin organizing workers at the “transplants” -- those factories built by foreign automakers in America. So far, they’ve had no success.

The union’s future depends on changing that. For those interested in the labor movement, we’re likely to be in for a few very interesting years.

Essay: Devastation - 3.23.11

Yesterday, official U.S. Census Bureau figures showed that Detroit’s population had fallen more than anyone had expected. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what the numbers mean.

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Detroit expected to get grim news from the U.S. Census bureau. But the results are, in fact, far worse than expected. They paint a picture of urban devastation unlike any in our nation’s history, a snapshot of the depopulation of a major American city.

Consider this: Since the Republican National Convention in 1980, Detroit has lost half a million people. In the thirty years before that, it lost even more -- another seven hundred thousand.

For years, the term “white flight” had been synonymous with what was happening. Today, it’s mostly about black flight. The black population of Detroit declined by more than one hundred and eighty-five thousand people during the last decade.

What that indicates is that the middle class of both races has given up on the city, in large part because the schools are perceived as being so bad. There have been a number of stories in recent months speculating that, for the first time, the census would find that the percentage of Detroiters who are white was increasing.

Optimists believed that the city was attracting a new generation of young urban pioneers, who were returning to Detroit from the suburbs, living in lofts and creating an artistic and urbane lifestyle.

The census shows that this was a complete fantasy. Sure, there may be a few kids doing those things. There are also a few people who vote for the Socialist Workers’ party. But both groups are statistically insignificant. Nearly half of what white population remained in Detroit in 2000 vanished over the next decade.

There are now only about fifty-five thousand people in Detroit who identify themselves as white. Sixty years ago, when the city celebrated its 250th anniversary, that figure was one point six million.

That means that more than ninety-five percent of the white population has disappeared. That’s not to say that Detroit’s troubles are solely due to the fact that the whites left. In fact, one-quarter of the black population left over the last decade as well.

But the disappearing Caucasians and the census returns from the suburbs tell another story that most of us don’t want to hear: Integration just doesn’t seem to work, at least when it comes to where we choose to live. My friend, the columnist Desiree Cooper, wryly defines integration as that period of time between when the first black family moves in and the last white one moves out.

The census seems to indicate that is sadly true. Southfield, nine percent black in 1980, is seventy percent black today. Highland Park, once a mostly white enclave, is now ninety-three percent black. Twenty minutes away are Oakland County communities like South Lyon, where blacks are still less than two percent of the population.

Michigan’s largest single city is now largely a ruin, with a population barely more than what it was a century ago. Economically, it is hard to see how Detroit can be viable on its own. Nor can I see how our state can prosper until we do something about this.

We need, plainly, some model for metropolitan government. Where we may choose to live doesn’t really matter. That we all have at least minimal functioning services does. That’s essential, if we are ever to be a prosperous state again.

Essay: Devastation - 3.23.11

Yesterday, official U.S. Census Bureau figures showed that Detroit’s population had fallen more than anyone had expected. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what the numbers mean.

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Detroit expected to get grim news from the U.S. Census bureau. But the results are, in fact, far worse than expected. They paint a picture of urban devastation unlike any in our nation’s history, a snapshot of the depopulation of a major American city.

Consider this: Since the Republican National Convention in 1980, Detroit has lost half a million people. In the thirty years before that, it lost even more -- another seven hundred thousand.

For years, the term “white flight” had been synonymous with what was happening. Today, it’s mostly about black flight. The black population of Detroit declined by more than one hundred and eighty-five thousand people during the last decade.

What that indicates is that the middle class of both races has given up on the city, in large part because the schools are perceived as being so bad. There have been a number of stories in recent months speculating that, for the first time, the census would find that the percentage of Detroiters who are white was increasing.

Optimists believed that the city was attracting a new generation of young urban pioneers, who were returning to Detroit from the suburbs, living in lofts and creating an artistic and urbane lifestyle.

The census shows that this was a complete fantasy. Sure, there may be a few kids doing those things. There are also a few people who vote for the Socialist Workers’ party. But both groups are statistically insignificant. Nearly half of what white population remained in Detroit in 2000 vanished over the next decade.

There are now only about fifty-five thousand people in Detroit who identify themselves as white. Sixty years ago, when the city celebrated its 250th anniversary, that figure was one point six million.

That means that more than ninety-five percent of the white population has disappeared. That’s not to say that Detroit’s troubles are solely due to the fact that the whites left. In fact, one-quarter of the black population left over the last decade as well.

But the disappearing Caucasians and the census returns from the suburbs tell another story that most of us don’t want to hear: Integration just doesn’t seem to work, at least when it comes to where we choose to live. My friend, the columnist Desiree Cooper, wryly defines integration as that period of time between when the first black family moves in and the last white one moves out.

The census seems to indicate that is sadly true. Southfield, nine percent black in 1980, is seventy percent black today. Highland Park, once a mostly white enclave, is now ninety-three percent black. Twenty minutes away are Oakland County communities like South Lyon, where blacks are still less than two percent of the population.

Michigan’s largest single city is now largely a ruin, with a population barely more than what it was a century ago. Economically, it is hard to see how Detroit can be viable on its own. Nor can I see how our state can prosper until we do something about this.

We need, plainly, some model for metropolitan government. Where we may choose to live doesn’t really matter. That we all have at least minimal functioning services does. That’s essential, if we are ever to be a prosperous state again.

Essay: Mergers and Acquisitions - 3.22.11

In Grand Rapids yesterday, Governor Snyder proposed a controversial set of new local government reforms. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the ones that got less attention could end up being more significant.

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There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth statewide over the new proposals the governor outlined in Grand Rapids yesterday, the ones especially that will affect local governments.

He proposes to hold back one-third of the revenue sharing money communities get from the state, and release it only if cities, villages and townships adopt certain reforms. Those would include putting all new hires on a pension plan based on what they and their employer put in, a so-called “defined contribution plan.”

Experts feel that too many places now offer what are known as defined benefits plans, which are costlier, and which governments are obligated to honor regardless of their ability to pay.

Under the Snyder plan, new local government hires would also have to pay at least twenty percent of the cost of their health care. There would be certain other rules governing things how much money governments contribute and how fast pensions could rise.

These reforms are, in short, all things public employee unions have strenuously opposed. Predictably, Democrats mostly denounced these proposals yesterday. Republicans and business groups praised them .. but so did alliances of local governments.

As the head of the Michigan Municipal League said yesterday, local governments are desperate today for any tools that will help them get a handle on their spiraling costs.

My guess is that these reforms are likely to become law, given the large Republican majorities in the legislature. However, I am not sure the carrot the governor is offering is going to be large enough to give local governments the incentives to get this done.

Consider this: To start with, the governor is already slashing the total amount spent on revenue sharing by a third. That will cut what Detroit is getting, for example, from a maximum of $178 million dollars to $119 million. They can get two thirds of the new amount basically by just promising to try and do better at consolidating services.

Will the city then find it worthwhile to adopt some terribly controversial measures to get another less than $40 million dollars? Well, maybe. But the Macomb County city of Utica might not. Their revenue sharing incentive will be something like twenty thousand dollars, not enough, perhaps to take on the unions.

But the governor proposed some other reforms in Grand Rapids yesterday which got less attention -- but which, in the long run, could be much more significant. For example, he wants to make it much more easy for governments to merge.

Governor Snyder also wants to clear the way for combined city and county governments, as they’ve done in Indianapolis, Miami and Louisville. In the long run, this may be the only solution for Detroit.

He also wants to streamline the process for consolidating services, as when a city and a township decide to share a fire department. We’re bound to see a lot of this happening soon.

Many of the governor’s reforms are controversial, and probably no one is on board with all of them. But nobody can deny that he is proposing a comprehensive set of solutions to our state’s economic problems, something we haven’t seen in a long time. And if anyone is offering any serious alternatives, I haven’t seen them yet.

Essay: Shortchanging the Future - 3.21.11

A Macomb County Commissioner is leading a petition drive against the governor’s proposal to tax pensions. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says there is a little more to the story.

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Macomb County Commissioner Phil DiMaria is angry about Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposal to tax pension income, and he’s doing something about it. He’s launched a statewide petition drive to oppose the tax, which is key to the governor’s proposed budget.

DiMaria, who has been on the county commission for twenty years, thinks the governor is badly out of touch. “He’s rich. He’s never going to be an old person who has to pinch pennies to try and get by, try and buy milk and bread,” he told me yesterday.

“This isn’t any shared sacrifice. This is one more assault on the middle class so he can give business a big tax break.”

The response so far has been overwhelming, DiMaria said. He’s gotten requests for petitions from as far away as Petoskey and Chelsea. His goal is not to put anything on the ballot. He just wants to collect as many signatures as possible and then use them to try and sway the governor and the legislators.

DiMaria, who is a sixty-year-old Democrat, knows the odds are against his being able to change the governor’s mind, but he may have an easier time with some of the freshmen Republicans in the legislature who would have to face angry voters next year.

I asked DiMaria if he realized that the governor’s proposal would exempt the first $41,000 from taxes. He did, but he doesn’t think any pension income should be taxed.

But what DiMaria doesn’t usually tell people is that he is not exactly a disinterested party. He already collects one pension from the Oakland County city of Troy, where he was a police officer for thirty years. When he leaves the county commission, he will be eligible for a second government pension, on top of the first.

In other words, whatever other motives he may have, he doesn’t want to pay taxes on his income. I asked DiMaria how he felt about the governor’s proposal to drastically cut education funding, and he said he was against that too. “How’s he going to get new business without people properly educated to run these jobs?“ he said. But you don’t see DiMaria, or anyone else I know about, trying to get people to sign petitions to save education.

And that disturbs me. DiMaria and I grew up in a Michigan where our parents had survived the Great Depression and World War II, and in many cases were struggling to get by. Yet they voted to tax themselves to build new schools so their kids could get a proper education. They wanted us to have more chances than they had. Today, adults seem more selfish. It’s as if our slogan was, “we’ve got ours, and we’re hanging on to it. If you are trying to get through school today, that’s tough, kid.”

I suppose I should be on Phil DiMaria’s team, since I am getting steadily closer to pension age myself. But I don’t understand why pension income should be treated differently from any other income. And I am pretty sure that if we think our comfort more important than the next generation’s future, Michigan isn’t going to have much of a future, no matter what sacrifices any governor’s budget should happen to bring.

Essay: Unpopular Votes - 3.18.11

A group called National Popular Vote is lobbying the legislature to change the way we elect presidents. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been considering this.

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For the last two months, Michigan has been consumed with debate over Governor Snyder’s proposed new budget -- and with a number of his other deal-changing priorities as well, such as the just passed tough new Emergency Financial Manager law.

But there are other issues, and a lobbyist for one showed up in Lansing yesterday to urge the legislature to vote to change the way we elect presidents. Tom Golisano, a millionaire businessman and philanthropist, is the spokesperson for a group called National Popular Vote, which is beginning to have some success.

They want to change the laws to make sure that the candidate who gets the most popular votes for president nationwide gets elected, and they think they’ve found a way to do this without amending the constitution.

Here’s how that would work. First of all, chances are that you at least vaguely remember that while we act as if presidents are elected by a nationwide vote of the people, this only happens indirectly. That’s because of something called the electoral college. If you remember your twelfth grade civics class -- or the two thousand election between George Bush and Al Gore -- you know that presidential elections are really like a giant board game.

States have a certain number of electoral votes based roughly on their population. Most states have a winner-take-all rule by which whoever wins that state gets all its electoral votes. The name of the game is to win enough states to add up to two hundred and seventy.

Most of the time, whomever gets more popular votes wins the electoral votes. But that wasn’t the case eleven years ago. Half a million more people nationwide voted for Gore, but Bush won the electoral vote. Four years later, Bush won the popular vote easily, but would have lost the election if John Kerry had won Ohio.

The group called National Popular Vote wants to change that by getting states to pass laws that would require their electors to vote for whomever wins the national popular vote. This change would only take effect when National Popular Vote is adopted by states with enough electoral votes to elect a winner.

The group says that polls show that most people think this would be a good idea, and I don’t doubt those polls are right.

However, I don’t think it is necessarily a good idea, for a number of reasons. The winner of the popular vote does win the electoral vote almost all the time. Some, in fact, think that Al Gore should have won the electoral vote, if Florida had counted its votes properly. In most cases, the electoral vote magnifies the popular result. And if we changed the system to mean only popular votes counted, campaigning would change.

Sparsely populated states like Nevada would never see a presidential nominee in the flesh. Actually, I doubt we’d see much of them in Michigan, either. The candidates would probably just spend all their time on TV, or in heavily populated areas.

The United States is supposed to be a federal system, where the individual states have a distinct role to play. The current system isn’t really broken. We might want to be careful before trying to radically fix it.

Essay: Carping Criticism - 3.17.11

Remember the concern everyone had last year over the possibility that Asian carp might get into the Great Lakes? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been wondering what the government has been doing about that.

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Remember the Asian carp, which migrated up the Mississippi, into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and which experts feared were about to get into Lake Michigan?

That’s where things stood when I first talked about this issue here more than fifteen months ago. Since then, traces of carp DNA has been found in Lake Michigan, though there is no evidence that a permanent breeding population has been established there.

But if that ever happens, it will be an environmental disaster of unimaginable proportions. The carp are huge awful ugly fish. One variety tends to jump and have broken water skiers’ jaws.

Worse, they suck up virtually all the available food supply, which means they starve out other more desirable fish. Once they get firmly established, they are virtually impossible to eradicate, which would mean farewell to the sport and commercial fishing industries.

Plus, that would play havoc with the ecology of the lakes and could cost the economy, depending on whose estimates you believe, between one and seven billion dollars a year.

I wondered what the government has been doing about this, and last week talked to a highly respected environmental journalist about this. The Toledo Blade’s Tom Henry has been following the carp story for years. He has won numerous awards for his reporting, and is on the Society of Environmental Journalists board.

When I asked him what our government was doing to try to protect our lakes, his answer was “dithering.” Canada, he told me, was at least trying. This month alone, their government has levied two huge fines against two firms caught trying to smuggle live Asian carp into Canada, in one case, apparently to raise and breed.

That’s how all the trouble is thought to have started in the first place, when a flood in Arkansas washed some carp from a fish farm into the Mississippi River almost twenty years ago. Since then, they’ve been migrating north, and the federal response, Tom Henry said, has been seventeen years of indefensible inaction. Last year, the governors of most of the Great Lakes states attempted to get Illinois to close the canal.

But Illinois refused, saying it would be too devastating to Chicago’s economy, and the President and the Supreme Court refused to overturn that decision.

What’s happening now? Well, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has given itself another four years to do an “interbasin study,” of the problem and come up with a plan.

By then, the carp may be all the way to Vermont. The key danger zone, Henry tells me, is Western Lake Erie, the area from Toledo stretching on out past Port Clinton and Sandusky.

That is the anchor spot of the fishing industry and, sadly, also the area in which the carp might find it easiest to establish themselves. But when the Corps came to take public comment recently, where did they go? Ann Arbor.

Which, if they didn’t notice, isn’t on the lakes at all. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced a bill to get thing moving faster. “We’re anxious to light a fire under the Army Corps of Engineers,” she said. It would be nice if that happened before muddy-tasting Asian carp are the only things we have left to cook.

Essay: You Never Can Tell - 3.16.11

Some Michigan Democrats are hoping Governor Snyder’s controversial budget means he will be a one-term leader. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says history suggests something different.

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The governor’s made some decisions that are wildly unpopular. Unions are upset. Taxpayers are upset. His own party isn’t too sure he is right.

Behind closed doors, leaders of the opposition party are rubbing their hands in glee. They think they know a one-term governor when they see one.

That’s what’s going on right now in Wisconsin, to be sure, and also, to a lesser extent, in Lansing. Democrats are convinced that if Governor Snyder indeed manages to tax pensions, cut education, and end the Earned Income Tax Credit, he’ll be toast.

Well, maybe. But also, maybe not. One of my more sensitive students asked me this touching question recently: “Isn’t it a drag being old?” To which I said, “no, not really.”

To which he said, “why?”

What I wanted to say was something like, “because we Baby Boomer and Generation Xers have sucked up all the the available jobs, that’s why, and most of us aren’t leaving anytime soon.

“Which means you can look forward after graduation to fifteen years as a Wal-Mart associate.” I didn’t say that, because I am a mature adult. So I said I didn’t mind being old, because ... being old means you know stuff. And one thing I know is that politics is sort of like the weather. If you don’t like the way things are going now, wait ten minutes, or maybe ten months.

Twenty-eight years ago, we had another economic crisis and a new governor named James Blanchard temporarily raised taxes through the roof. Well, he was widely regarded as politically dead, especially after voters recalled two state senators.

But guess what. The tax hike worked; the budget got balanced; the economy picked up, and Blanchard was re-elected by an astonishing margin of more than two to one. That wasn’t all that surprising. Two years before Blanchard’s tax hike, we had a president who angered organized labor big-time by firing every striking member of the Air Traffic Controllers union in the country. If you thought the unions are mad at the governor now, you weren’t alive back then. But three years later, many union members voted to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

Eight years later, we had a new Republican governor who began doing controversial and unpopular things. He closed clinics and mental health facilities and chopped benefits. There was an uproar almost like the one now.

But the next election was a long time away. When it came, John Engler was reelected by a huge landslide, getting more than sixty percent of the vote against a respected former congressman.

Now it’s possible things will be different this time. If Snyder gets his budget passed, and the economy doesn’t turn around relatively soon, he and the Republicans could be in deep trouble. But his next election is more than three and half years away.

Michigan also seems to like divided government. We voted for Republican presidents and Democratic governors throughout the 1980s. We voted for Democratic presidents and Republican governors throughout the 1990s. In politics, it ain’t over till it’s over, and there really are no final victories. Those out of power should be a little cautious about measuring the drapes for their expected return.