by Tim Skubick
July 16, 2009

There’s a hard and fast rule in politics: never help the other guy win.

Tell that to Mark Brewer and Alma Wheeler Smith. Both are aiding and abetting the enemy in the next race for governor.

Brewer, the state Democratic Party chair, is providing ammo for Republicans to use against Rick Snyder, who announces his GOP candidacy next week.

Democrat Smith, who is running for governor, could be mistaken for a Republican as she tries to link her opponent, John Cherry, to governor Jennifer Granholm.

Brewer is dusting off an old campaign theme that he used successfully against millionaire business guy Dick DeVos in 2006. Maybe you heard about the China attacks.

Now comes millionaire business guy Rick Snyder, and Brewer is accusing him of making “an enormous amount of money by outsourcing American jobs to China. That’s not the kind of governor we need.”

Hey it worked on DeVos, but the Snyder camp is on a big pushback to kill the Brewer charge.

Snyder et. al. accuse Brewer of “political smears” while saying the candidate “did not outsource jobs to China.”

They will have to do better than that.

Reminded the other day that Snyder says none of this is true, Brewer ignored that and stayed on message: “Again, his record is of sending jobs overseas.” And to put a point on it, he calls the Ann Arbor candidate “another wealthy out-of-touch CEO…sounds like DeVos II.”

The other Republicans in the primary couldn’t be happier to have Brewer doing their dirty work. One of them confided that the self-described non-politician Mr. Snyder couldn’t win the general election if the Ds continue the onslaught of China charges.

You can hear the ads now: Democrats won the governor’s race last time by beating up our candidate on the China-outsourcing jobs issue. If Rick Snyder gets our nomination we will lose again…on the same issue. Don’t let the Democrats do it to us again.

Next comes Ms. Smith. Republicans have already begun their campaign to defeat Lt. Gov. John Cherry by linking him at the waist, the neck and feet to Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

“If you liked Michigan’s economy under Jennifer Granholm, you’ll love it under John Cherry,” the GOP theme goes.

Smith has adopted the same strategy. “I’m going to tie him up with her,” she reveals.

She wonders, “How do you separate from the governor?” She will argue that Cherry was there when all the decisions about taxes, spending cuts and policy screw-ups were made.

“If John wants to deny that he was part of this,” Smith says, he can try but it won’t work.

And every time she “ties” Cherry to the gov, the Republicans will record the remarks and, if Cherry gets the Democratic nomination, they will run commercials featuring Smith’s harsh criticism.

You can hear that ad, too: even Democrats admit that John Cherry will pick up where Jennifer Granholm left off if he is elected governor. Respected Democrat Alma Wheeler Smith, who watched both Granholm and Cherry for years, concludes he was part of the problem that pushed Michigan into an economic depression. Really, do we need four more years of that?

If Brewer and Smith were smart, they would send a bill to the Republicans for helping them out.

Tim Skubick is Michigan’s senior Capitol correspondent and has anchored the weekly public TV series “Off the Record” since 1972.

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Whose Job Is It Anyway?
Secrecy is a wonderful thing. Minus any hard and fast evidence as to what is going on, the mind is allowed to wander aimlessly in search of the truth.

Exhibit A is the Don Quixote-like mission for tax reform involving the Michigan legislature, Detroit Renaissance and the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Last February or so, House Speaker Andy Dillon hooked up with the two business groups and Senate GOP Leader Mike Bishop as they joined hands and embarked on a perilous journey to find some way to make Michigan’s business tax more attractive.

“This will be driven by the data,” opined the optimistic and self-assured Doug Rothwell from Motown Renaissance. And from that point on, all the focus groups and survey results went under lock and key.

Who the heck knows what they are up to?

Looks like nothing. Maybe they discovered that finding a consensus within the business community on how it should be taxed is really a hopeless exercise in self-flagellation.

Minus any proof to the contrary, let’s go with that conclusion, because last week out of the blue, the legislature suddenly woke up from its long winter’s nap and reasserted its authority in trying to resolve the tax reform dilemma.

Rep. Kate Ebli (D-Monroe) proudly announced the formation of a 17-person work group to tackle the issue and find a solution, if it can, within the next four to six weeks.

Asked why she has waited until the middle of the summer when lawmakers have supposedly been on the job since last January, Ebli glibly replied her committee has been working all along on this assignment.

Balderdash. She and everyone else were waiting for Rothwell and company to produce something, and now that they’ve produced nothing, lawmakers will finally get down to doing what they should have been doing six months ago.

If lawmakers farmed out every issue to the special interest groups to resolve, why would we need a legislature?

That’s not a rhetorical question.

Stealing Our Democracy
When a column begins with, “In the good ole days,” it’s a good idea to dash for the sports section to see if a new Cold War has broken out over the defection of Red Wing Jiri Hudler to Moscow.

Good-ole-day stories usually degenerate into a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Hopefully this one is different.

In the good ole days, lawmakers solved issues by debating them in front of God and the press corps.

There is still a democracy in the Michigan House but you’d be hard pressed to watch it, because most of the deliberations are behind closed, locked doors in a caucus which in the good ole days was a rare event.

Not anymore. Currently, both parties go into caucus like you breathe air…a lot. Caucuses are now used as a handholding exercise to clue everyone in on issues, since the vast majority of members have no clue what’s going on.

Any robust debate goes on inside and then everyone moves lockstep back to the floor to ratify what was debated out of public view.

It’s a lousy way to run a democracy, but it underscores the inexperience of term-limited lawmakers who don’t want to demonstrate their “stupidity” in public.

Likewise, in the good ole days most of the legislative work was done in a committee where the members were experts. Nowadays, a lot of that is shifted to so-called “work groups.” These are ad hoc and often bipartisan committees, not subject to the Open Meetings law, that try to resolve this issue or that.

The caucus and work groups are insidious viruses that eat away at an open democracy and are designed to cover the political behinds of those who are too afraid or too incompetent to debate out in the open.

It needs to change. Maybe a work group or caucus could study the notion.