by Tom Shields
January 16, 2008

There were a few things missing from Michigan’s primary election, other than most of the Democrat candidates — Democrat voters, and real voter enthusiasm for the Republican slate.

You may have also noticed the absence of recall opportunities on the ballot, and the conspicuous absence of petition circulators outside polling places (except one district in Grand Rapids) on vote day.

Three and a half months following a multitude of votes to raise taxes amid the threats to recall every last lawmaker who voted for them — and not a single recall has made it to the ballot. Only one has had petition language approved. It’s doubtful that enough petitions have even been signed to paper the pink pig.

While recall fever and paranoia have dominated the agenda at the Capitol for the last year, the question is whether it has really reached much further.

Recall campaigns are rare, and rarely successful. As we have seen this year, politics often delay getting a recall effort started. And even when language is approved, the rules make it difficult to qualify for the ballot.

While the folks collecting signatures for medical marijuana or state-run medical coverage operate under a set of rules that makes it relatively easy to achieve ballot presence, the recall folks have a much tougher row to hoe. Their signature-gathering time frame is shorter, the signature requirements are greater and other qualifiers add substantially to the challenge.

The rules are designed to make sure a recall effort is locally based. No paid out-of-state circulators. No petitions sitting on the counter at the local diner. In other words, the effort must be driven by local folks so ticked off about the actions of their legislator that they are willing to sit out on street corners, run petitions door-to-door and camp outside every community event to hail potential signers.

Frankly, that’s the way it should be.

Which brings me to question the centralized effort by Mr. Drolet and friends at Michiganrecalls.com to franchise the current recall effort.

The group has targeted 13 lawmakers for recall. That means 13 distinct campaigns to organize. If they qualify the language in all 13 districts, volunteers will have to collect more than 200,000 signatures — in 90 days — during the middle of winter.

Dennis Kucinich had a better shot in the presidential primary than Drolet and his band of recallers have in getting 13 recalls to the ballot, much less winning them.

The moral of the story: never confuse low job approval ratings for the legislature with approval ratings for individual lawmakers by his or her constituency. These are two very different things.

Recalls are not something that can be manufactured and exported from a centralized organization to a local community.

Recalls have to swell up from inside a district when voters reach the point of picking up their pitch forks, pens and petitions and hit the street. That’s exactly what happened the last time a Michigan legislator was recalled more than 24 years ago.

A ragtag group of citizen activists decided that raising the income tax by 38 percent to more than 6 percent was so outrageous that something had to be done. They didn’t care about their odds, or the fact that a state legislator had not been recalled anywhere in the country in more than 50 years.

The successful effort was led by an engineer and an autoworker with no experience in politics. They raised money by holding square dances. They had a rookie attorney fresh from Cooley Law School to battle the now-famous Tom Downs to keep the recall question on the ballot. They had dozens of willing circulators and thousands of willing signers.

More than anything else, they had passion.

Their mission was to send a message to Lansing that they had had enough. It wasn’t a passion packaged and sent to the district from the outside. It bubbled and boiled up from within.

More than a half-dozen recalls were started in 1983, including a recall of Governor Blanchard. Only two succeeded in making the ballot. Both passed with more than 70 percent of the vote.

For the current recalls to be successful, the effort behind them will have to come from within. Of the 13 districts targeted, Mr. Drolet has only eight local coordinators, with one person covering two districts. While Drolet can provide legal advice and run great “boot camps” to train local petition militia, he simply can’t export the local passion. And that’s what is really needed to beat the odds.

Tom Shields is founder and president of Marketing Resource Group, a Lansing-based political marketing and public relations firm.