Maxine Berman Offers Lessons for the Post-Bipartisan Era

New CMU Griffin Chair teaching politics to a new generation

by Eric Freedman
February 16, 2010

Sure, Maxine Berman remains an outspoken, liberal, pro-choice Democratic partisan from Oakland County. It’s hard not to be after 14 years in the House, a key spot on hope-to-be-Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s first campaign staff and seven years as made-it-to-the-governorship Granholm’s special projects director. And don’t let her partisan venting on now-independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman — whom she regards as a traitor to Democratic principles — get to you.

Maxine Berman.
Photos by David Trumpie.

Nor did her 1994 book, The Only Boobs in the House Are Men: A Veteran Woman Legislator Lifts the Lid on Politics Macho Style, win many friends in Lansing, but it did draw attention for its candor — if not its insensitivity to the feelings of many of her male former colleagues.

So what’s Berman doing as the new holder of Central Michigan University’s prestigious Robert and Marjorie Griffin Chair in American Politics, a position that honors the Republican ex-U.S. senator and conservative state Supreme Court justice from Traverse City and his wife?

“They didn’t consider party at all. It was completely a non-factor,” she says of CMU’s selection process. True, the first two holders of the chair—Bill Ballenger of Inside Michigan Politics and Craig Ruff of Public Sector Consultants—are Republicans, but her immediate predecessor, U.S. Rep. Gary Peters of Bloomfield Township, is a 100-percent Democrat.

“Bob Griffin and I came from a different era of politics,” a time when opposing partisan affiliations didn’t require lack of respect for one another, Berman continues. “Yes, we wanted to be the majority party, but we wanted to work together. If this were the Rush Limbaugh Endowed Chair in American Government, Maxine Berman wouldn’t be doing this. Or the Glenn Beck Chair.”

Kathy Wilbur, CMU’s interim president and long-time high-level Engler administration official, says the search process for the Griffin Chair reached out to a variety of people “on both sides of the aisle, in and out of the administration. Maxine was a former elected official and worked for the governor, so her name popped up pretty early in the process.

“She was interested,” Wilbur said. “This comes very naturally to her. With her background, this seemed like a natural.”

The three-year, part-time gig puts Berman back in the classroom — she taught high school English in Oak Park “a few lifetimes ago” — with CMU juniors and seniors who are motivated and engaged rather than alienated by politics. Most aspire to become involved someday in government through politics, jobs or lobbying.

Her first CMU political science course last fall examined changes in the role of political parties in Michigan and nationally. One topic was the transition from days of yore, when parties were far more powerful because they chose candidates, through the present, when party power comes from the ability to raise mega-cash. This spring, her course focuses on how policy is made.

“I try to be impartial on all issues — except for term limits, which were stupid. We’re not going to argue on that,” Berman says.

Although her classroom approach is nonpartisan, she points out that the students did question the GOP move last year to impose what she calls “10 commandments, a creed essentially,” to determine which candidates will get party support. “They were cynical about that, even the Republicans. You can’t help but be a little cynical.”

Her own political career was more happenstance than well-strategized.

After seven years or so of teaching, she sought another outlet for her energy and thought it would be fun to become involved in the upcoming 1976 presidential election. “Like all good teachers and academics, I went to the library to study up on the candidates — no Internet then — and decided in November of 1975 that Jimmy Carter would undoubtedly be the next president, and so I picked him.

“Everyone made fun of me because they said he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell,” she continues. “I signed up with Carter, and since there were so few people in the state that had, we all got titles.” And the last laugh.

That activity motivated her to become politically active in her congressional district, but without plans to seek office herself. Then opportunity kicked in when redistricting left an open seat in Southfield in 1982. “A lot of men approached and asked if I were going to run because otherwise they would,” she says. “This made me think.”

Berman won the race and arrived at the Capitol to find a recession that presaged the current economic gloom — although without the domino effect of collapsing banks. About 35 school districts were on the brink of bankruptcy then, a plight that now threatens a much larger array of districts with the possibility of imposed emergency financial management. “What if they shut down? What will you do with those children?” she asks. “They deserve an education. You can’t just shut down.”

She spent six years on the House Appropriations Committee, chaired its subcommittees on Public Heath and K–12 Education, and was one of the drivers of the Proposal A funding revamp for public schools. More on that later.

She draws on those experiences to put the latest political events and maneuverings into perspective for her students. Class discussion of Cobo Hall legislation, for example, explored the negotiations that convinced northern Michigan lawmakers to support a project that they initially saw benefiting only Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.

She also draws on her Lansing ties for guest speakers, such as ex-Rep Kirk Profit, who’s now a lobbyist with Government Consultant Services Inc., and Paul Long, vice president for public policy at the Michigan Catholic Conference, who recently spoke to her class. The students, she says, “are excited to meet lobbyists.”

Voluntary departure
Sitting in the windowless Romney Building office she uses when in Lansing — its walls mostly bare except for a framed Detroit Jazz Festival poster — the 64-year-old Berman claims no regrets over her decision not to seek reelection in 1996. Feeling burned out, she figured on spending her first six months or so phoning her successor and other lawmakers with sage advice. After three weeks reading and chilling out in a rented Hawaiian condo, she dropped that idea.

She started a consulting firm to help organizations understand the legislative process and how to lobby and launched a 501(c)(3) called the Michigan Women’s Health Network, which she served as executive director.  

She dove into the 2002 gubernatorial campaign with a small band of like-minded folks who held a strategy meeting with Granholm and husband Dan Mulhern in early 2001, and later signed onto the campaign staff. After the November victory, she agreed to serve in the administration but insisted it not be a full-time position in Lansing.

When she bumped into the governor-elect during the transition, Granholm asked why not Lansing. “If I lived in Lansing, I wouldn’t want to be in Lansing every day,” Berman replied. And when Granholm pressed for the reason. Berman’s response: “Because I remember why I left.”

She notes, “It took a few months to figure out what the title was.” Based in the governor’s Detroit office, she gets to Lansing often enough for a necessary breath of the political air and heads home to West Bloomfield and her rescue beagle, Garp. “I wanted a life, not Lansing all the time and not all politics.”

Special projects director means engagement with a variety of issues, from stem cell research to women’s health to suburban municipal collaboration. Her particular interest is in regional collaboration and the future of Michigan municipalities, including ways to more efficiently and economically provide public services.

She tallies 134 communities in the three Metro Detroit counties — most with their own fire and police departments — including a few fully like donut holes surrounded by others, such as Lathrup Village and Highland Park. She favors having counties assume more municipal responsibilities, such as running elections, collecting property taxes and processing payrolls.

At the same time, she’s sensitive to the public demand to maintain local identity, saying, “These are distinct communities.”

Post-bipartisan era
For CMU’s Wilbur, Berman has long been a familiar figure in Michigan politics. While Berman was in the House, Wilbur served as chief of staff to Republican Sen. William Sederburg and then as a member of John Engler’s cabinet before moving to CMU as vice president for governmental relations and public affairs.

“There were certainly issues Rep. Berman and I agreed on. There were probably more that we didn’t agree on, but I always knew where she was coming from. She was straightforward on her position and she didn’t waiver. She didn’t pull any punches and I didn’t either,” Wilbur says.

“There was and is respect for one another,” Wilbur continues, and “with that respect came a certain level of support for women in roles that 20 years prior to that might not have been there. I’m not saying she treated you any easier as a result of that, but there was still a supportive kind of leaning.”

The Catholic Conference’s Long expresses a similar opinion, although he and Berman are 180 degrees apart on the ideological spectrum on many hot-button issues, such as reproductive rights. Long began his Lansing tenure as a part-time House page while attending Michigan State University and has been the conference’s vice president for 15 years.

Long calls her “someone who is very certain about her positions,” but emphasizes that the two have worked together over the years. While Berman was in the House, for example, they were allied in opposition to legislation that would have limited welfare benefits to women who have more children while on public assistance. “We viewed that as an inducement to abortion, and Maxine completely agreed,” Long says. “We worked to make sure that language did not go forward as welfare reform advanced.”

More recently, the Catholic Conference and Berman were on the same side in the unsuccessful 2006 campaign against Proposal 2, the constitutional amendment prohibiting public agencies from using affirmative action programs that grant preferential treatment based on race or gender.

“While we’ve been at odds over the years, we’ve certainly had the opportunity to work together for the public good,” Long says.

They’re on the same page in their dislike for term limits as well. Long says Berman’s students showed great interest in how things work in Lansing, “how I go about doing my job from the perspective of a policy advocate.” When they asked about the biggest obstacle facing lobbyists, he identified term limits. “The most important job for anybody advocating policy is to build up relationships with people,” he continues. “It’s difficult to build those relationships when people are constantly moving in and out of the system.”

For Berman, the disappearance of collegiality at the Capitol in the era of term limits is particularly distressing, manifesting itself in such dramatic ways as the inability to pass an annual budget on time. She reminisces about the days when a bipartisan group of lawmakers hammered out Proposal A and the dramatic restructuring of public school financing.

“We were not smarter,” she says. “We were around longer. We knew how to work the system better.”

Recently, she and three other veterans of that 14-member bipartisan team — Democrats Lynn Jondahl and Bob Emerson and Republican Don Gilmer — met with about a half-dozen members of the Bipartisan Freshman Caucus to draw lessons from the Proposal A experience.

The ballot issue that switched the major source of school funding from property taxes to the state sales tax isn’t inviolable, she emphasizes. “We never meant for it to be permanent. We never thought it would be forever.” And she says the legislature should use the current economic crisis to create a new school aid system.

What advice would she give the new generation of legislators, the here-today, gone-tomorrow crowd?

• Establish personal relationships with colleagues on both sides of the aisle — even if that’s “next to impossible to do.”
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help, including asking staff, but remember that the final decisions are up to the lawmaker.
• “If you came to make an impact” and are in the House, stick around for six years.
• Have a “long-term vision” although you’re there for a short-term stay.

Berman has no plans for another tell-all book but has thought about starting a blog. “I decided to wait until after this year to prevent possibly embarrassing the governor,” she says. “Depending on who the next governor is, I may or may not mind embarrassing him or her.”

Eric Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, is associate professor of journalism and director of Capital News Service at Michigan State University. He and Dome columnist Steve Jones are editors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).