by Susan J. Demas
January 16, 2009

New Rep. Tim Bledsoe outside the House chamber.

Photo by Dave Trumpie.

If political history were any guide, Tim Bledsoe would have started the new year by welcoming another class to his first lecture on American Government at Wayne State University.

But his fervent grassroots campaign and a good Democratic year intervened. So instead, he was sworn in as the first Democrat ever to represent the affluent state House district spanning from east Detroit to the Grosse Pointes. He’s taken a leave of absence from WSU’s political science department, but in a nod to his profession, he signs his House correspondence “Tim Bledsoe, Ph.D.”

Still, the longtime professor isn’t waxing nostalgic about academia — yet.

“I just finally finished grading exams and papers from the fall semester, so I don’t miss it now,” he laughs. “But I’m sure I will after time.”

Although the Capitol chattering classes considered Bledsoe, 55, a lock to replace term-limited Rep. Ed Gaffney (R-Grosse Pointe Farms), the bespeckled professor says the mood back home was quite different. His opponent, accountant Mary Treder Lang, raised almost twice his take, thanks to the fact that he eschews money from political action committees (PACs).

“The outcome wasn’t certain to me,” he says.

But sure enough on November 4, Bledsoe walked away with 57 percent of the vote. Now he’s rushing to unpack his new Lansing office, a barren enclave with only a framed Barack Obama poster that’s made it on the wall and a map of the Michigan House District 1 that hasn’t.

“I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but the coffee maker isn’t ready yet,” Bledsoe grins at a reporter. “I’d offer you a cold beverage, but the refrigerator isn’t plugged in.”

Bledsoe isn’t really plugged in to Lansing, either. The Grosse Pointe dad wasn’t recruited by the lobbyist legion here, and his “just say no” policy on PAC money means he’s not a household name in the Capitol. Unlike most lawmakers, he doesn’t hail from party politics or local government. No, Bledsoe is that rare outsider in the fabled mode of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington who came here to clean up the joint.

“What he’s done is pretty unique,” said Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. “He certainly makes a fascinating member of the House, and I hope a very effective one.”

Reformer’s roots
Born in the Mississippi delta in southeast Arkansas on June 18, 1953, Bledsoe still harbors a faint drawl. The memory of growing up in the Jim Crow era and its violent collapse remained, even as he earned degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of Nebraska.

After a teaching stint at the University of South Carolina, where he met his wife, fellow political science professor Mary Herring, the couple settled into tenure-track positions at Wayne State more than 20 years ago. He specializes in urban and legislative policy and is the author of the 1993 book Careers in City Politics: The Case for Urban Democracy; her fields of expertise are parties and elections, public opinion statistics and gender politics, with work appearing in the American Political Science Review. The Bledsoe-Herrings have one daughter, Daisy, 18.

Bledsoe’s political debut was as the Democrats’ sacrificial lamb against the popular Gaffney in 2006, but he suffered a respectable 6-point loss. Bledsoe calls his predecessor “as moderate a Republican as we have in Michigan” and says his own pragmatic outlook isn’t very different. While Gaffney famously voted for the income tax hike of 2007, Bledsoe calls the last-minute process “flawed,” even though he acknowledges revenues had to be raised. But in the current deep recession, he stresses we “can’t afford to raise taxes.”
 
As a teacher, he’s passionate about education and has seen the impact of university funding cuts firsthand, with students struggling to stay in his class amidst double-digit tuition hikes. Bledsoe’s independent streak pops up again as he pointedly notes that “higher education fared better under John Engler than Jennifer Granholm.”
 
In 2008 Democrats sniffed change was in the air in the 1st District, enticing Bledsoe and three other contenders to square off in a hard-fought primary. For the avid sailor, that meant spending the summer knocking on a lot of doors instead of taking “Paradigm” out in inky Lake St. Clair.

After his August victory, Bledsoe encountered choppy waters with the liberal Coalition for Progress PAC, the brainchild of Kalamazoo billionaire Jon Stryker. The PAC poured money into independent expenditures on his behalf, prompting Republicans to cry hypocrisy. After the Democrat’s vocal protest, the coalition finally relented.
 
“It’s the governing that appeals to me,” he admits. “The campaign circus is something I could do without if I could get away with it.”
 
And now Bledsoe has taken that plunge from political science professor to elected official, which prompted U.S. Carl Levin (D-Detroit) to laud him as a “scholarly resource for the practice of government.”
 
“It’s rare for an academic to run for public office,” Bledsoe acknowledges. “But I teach a course on the legislative process and I have some idea how the legislature works and how it ought to work. I came to think at some point that the legislature could benefit from me.”
 
The American Political Science Association has found that it’s more common for its members to take state and local positions than federal ones. In Michigan, a few academics have occupied seats in the legislature over the last few decades, but they’ve typically hailed from different fields — former state Sen. and now U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-Grand Rapids) from physics and former Sen. Jon Cisky from criminal justice. At the federal level, there’s Cornell College political science professor Dave Loebsack, who represents Iowa in Congress.
 
There is a distinguished history of professors-cum-politicians. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan taught urban studies and government at Harvard before joining the ranks of the U.S. Senate, and Woodrow Wilson headed up Princeton University as a prologue to the presidency.

But it’s still more common for politicians to be recruited to academia after retirement. There’s former Sen. Bill Sederburg, now Utah Valley University president, former Sen. John Kelly, who taught at Oakland University, and former Sen. and U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz, who currently lectures at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

“With academics in politics, it brings to mind that wonderful cliché. They see things working in practice and then they ponder if these things could happen in theory,” quips Craig Ruff, a policy expert and former gubernatorial aide turned Ford School lecturer.

House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford Twp.) says for his part, he’s excited to have Bledsoe in the caucus, noting he’s “sharp” and has a “great deal of knowledge about the Constitution as it relates to legislative government.”

Ethics and the economy
Ask any state rep, no matter how green, what the No. 1 issue facing Michigan is and you’ll get an answer with some version of “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Not Tim Bledsoe. His baby is ethics reform, namely requiring candidates’ personal financial disclosures, stricter limits on lobbyists’ gifts and stopping the revolving door from the legislature to the lobbying corps. His model is Louisiana, once a cesspool of corruption and the sultry place he spent his undergraduate years. Still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, the Bayou State’s economy is “in some ways worse than Michigan’s,” Bledsoe notes. And yet the legislature recently passed sweeping good government changes he says we can only dream of.

“It’s hard for people to make the connection that cleaning up state government makes the state a more attractive place for businesses and families,” he says. “But it’s step No. 1 to becoming one of the competitive places of the 21st century.”

He’s had several conversations with elections finance watchdog Robinson, who not surprisingly says he “couldn’t be more thrilled” at Bledsoe’s priorities. Dillon notes reforms are an important part of the Democratic agenda and says the freshman’s successful no-PAC policy showed he had a “powerful message.”

Bledsoe has been studying American political figures for most of his life. So when asked who his heroes are, you might expect a wonky discourse on the greats — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt — or perhaps the more obscure, like 20th century New York powerbroker Robert Moses, although he’s definitely not Bledsoe’s style.

The professor reveals a pensive smile. “It’s an obvious answer you could probably get from a fifth grader, as well as a political science professor,” Bledsoe replies. “Barack Obama. He’s had such a remarkable career.”

Obama, of course, is well known for refusing corporate PAC money and for his leadership on ethics reform both in the U.S. and Illinois senates. Bledsoe was an early supporter.

“We need more people like Barack Obama in Michigan,” the representative declares, while taking a gander at the snow-capped Capitol from his new office window.

His self-described political idol would often proclaim on the campaign trail, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

In this moment of transition from political scholar to politician, Tim Bledsoe is taking it all in. It seems that it hasn’t fully hit him that he’s part of this sea change in the Great Lakes State. Indeed, many are counting on him to help steer the ship.

 

Susan J. Demas is a 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.