Clearing the Air

How the Smoking Ban Was Won

by Peter Ruddell and Emily Gerkin Palsrok
March 16, 2010

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Chapter 1: The Campaign for Smokefree Air

April 2005
With less than 24 hours to go before launching the largest and most organized effort to eliminate smoking in Michigan workplaces, our campaign couldn’t have been in much worse shape. The past couple of weeks had been rocky, nearly ruining an otherwise sunny April. Normally, we’d all have been happy that spring appeared to be coming early. But our newly formed coalition, the Campaign for Smokefree Air, was struggling to get off the ground — and hostile opposition groups were keeping us firmly planted. We were even struggling to find enough lawmakers to support our initial legislation. The daunting task of clearing the smoke from Michigan’s air wasn’t starting out well.

Yet here we were, trying to organize a small group of passionate advocates into what we needed to be viewed as an organized, powerful and successful launch for our campaign and legislative initiative. The core of our group and various legislative staffers were gathered in a lobbying firm’s conference room a few blocks from the state Capitol trying to hash out the details and messaging of the kick-off, planned for April 19 on the steps of the state Capitol. The energy and passion of the previous months spent putting together our campaign were hitting their first major wall — how to craft a message so that the Republican-controlled legislature would not immediately put the issue off as anti-business.

We weren’t breaking new ground nationally with our comprehensive ban, but the odds against us were long. Only eight states had enacted comprehensive smokefree laws by early 2005 — California (1995), Delaware (2002), Connecticut (2003), Florida (2003), New York (2003), Idaho (2004), Maine (2004) and Massachusetts (2004). And in Michigan, only one lawmaker had consistently been focused on smokefree air — Sen. Ray Basham, a Democrat from Taylor in downriver Detroit.

It was the success in that handful of states that provided the motivation to establish a new coalition in Michigan — the Campaign for Smokefree Air — led by the nation’s leading voluntary health organizations: the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association and American Lung Association. And organizing the Campaign came on the heels of another important tobacco victory. In 2004 these same groups had been successful in their “Hike it for Health!” campaign, which raised Michigan’s tobacco tax (or as we preferred to call it, tobacco “user fee” — because it’s not a tax if you can choose not to pay it) for the second time in three years. Michigan was, in fact, leading the nation in one of the three main ways to prevent tobacco use — economic disincentives. The health organizations decided it was time to start focusing on one of the other public policy methods to reduce tobacco use — mandatory smokefree environments.

The campaign hired John Bailey & Associates, a Troy-based firm with an office in downtown Lansing, for the media relations and communications component and Wiener Associates, a medium-size, multi-client lobbying firm specializing in health issues, for the lobbying and legal support. The three health organizations had been working with Wiener Associates for nearly 20 years. The Coalition also leaned heavily on the support of the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, representing all 143 community hospitals in Michigan, and Michigan State Medical Society, which boasts a membership of 15,000 physicians.

Lined up against the Campaign was a larger and far-better funded group that included “Big Tobacco” and the Michigan Restaurant Association, Michigan Licensed Beverage Association, Michigan Distributors and Vendors and three of Lansing’s largest and most powerful multi-client lobbying firms, Government Consulting Services, Inc., Muchmore Harrington Smalley and Associates, and Public Affairs Associates. (A fourth, Karoub Associates, would come in later.) Also in the mix were multi-clients Cusmano Kandler and Reed, and LGI Consulting. Leading the media relations efforts was The Rossman Group.

The absence of additional lobbying firms on the Campaign’s side ran counter to recent trends and was a good indication of the uphill battle ahead. Recent practice in Lansing has been for each side on a major issue to hire as many firms as possible, both to increase firepower and keep important players from advocating for the other side. Quite simply, a lack of financial resources kept the Campaign from using that tactic. It felt more than a little like David vs. Goliath.

Nevertheless, the government and public temperament against tobacco, given the tobacco tax increase and the tobacco settlement lawsuit of the late 1990s, had given the health care organizations new air in their sails. While we could never compete with the big money of tobacco groups, the health groups seemed to finally have won the public’s support for their issues and wanted to keep the momentum going.

Search for sponsors
It was the third year of the Granholm administration and the legislature was controlled by Republicans. Sen. Basham was a possible bill sponsor because of his outspokenness on the issue. But working against him was his status as a first-term senator in the Democratic minority with only two public acts to his name in his first two years in the Senate. The prospects of Senate Republicans approving a Basham bill were slim.

And many of our most enthused advocates were not pleased with Sen. Basham’s Senate Bill 186 of 2003. The legislation had provided numerous exemptions in its proposal to make restaurants smokefree — including bowling alleys and private clubs. Despite the fact that Sen. Basham had earned an early reputation as a champion of this issue, some advocates pushed for a different sponsor. Coalition members were searching for the “perfect” sponsor — someone who would introduce only our “perfect” version of the bill and advocate only for it with no changes. Key coalition members’ passion and commitment to a no-compromise approach were at odds with legislative reality and would, if it continued, provide a tough internal challenge for the Campaign. A serious divide between those who were willing to move a feasible bill and those who would only accept a full ban would weaken and possibly doom the already difficult effort.

One major omission in Sen. Basham’s earlier bill was the creation of smokefree workplaces — not just smokefree restaurants. So the Campaign made a tactical decision to create two bills — one requiring smokefree workplaces and one requiring smokefree bars and restaurants. This decision allowed us to continue working with Sen. Basham and his passion for the issue while developing a bipartisan legislative and public relations campaign by adding another bill. It also created an opportunity for the only doctor in the Senate at the time, Sen. Tom George, a Kalamazoo Republican, to become involved as well.

Interestingly, Sen. Basham’s bill drew three cosponsors. George’s more comprehensive measure attracted only two co-sponsors. One was Sen. Basham. The other was Rochester Republican Mike Bishop — and the irony of that would become clear later.

Senators from both parties had been secured by late February to sponsor a Senate bill, allowing the Campaign to turn its attention to the House to find the same dynamic. The House was just as important, not only for the final outcome but for the launch as well, because we needed the opportunity to start efforts in either chamber. Both chambers were ruled by the GOP, and we weren’t getting a warm feeling from either Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema of Grandville or House Speaker Craig DeRoche of Novi. 

We did not have a natural champion in the House, so we needed to find one quickly. Our first choice was Rep. Barb Vander Veen, a Republican from Allendale, who quickly took on the issue. Her history as a nurse and working in the health care field made her a natural ally, much like Sen. George. Our second House sponsor needed to be a first-term Democratic lawmaker, for several reasons. Under term limits, with its “three House terms and you’re out” rule, lawmakers tended to work more with the members of the class they came in with. That meant we wanted a freshman lawmaker in order to carry the message to that group. And in the event our efforts took longer than one two-year legislative session to bear fruit, we also would need some continuity from one term to the next.

With the Democrats in the minority, we looked first for a representative from a “safe seat,” so as not to cause the name on the bill to throw up another impediment to the legislation receiving a fair hearing. We approached Rep. Lee Gonzales of Flint, who was prepared to sponsor the workplace smokefree bill. But he soon decided the bill was too broad and might have included restaurants. He was not willing, at least at this point in his career, to require restaurants to be smokefree.

As days of sponsor-searching turned to weeks, we shifted quickly into crisis mode. Our press conference with four bill sponsors was one day away, and yet we had only three. We scrambled to find a fourth bill sponsor and looked almost exclusively at representatives with a health care background, believing they were our best, if not only, hope. While our side was feeling some momentum overall, most lawmakers still did not want to touch our issue. Going after Big Tobacco, with its bottomless war chest, and taking on political powerhouses like the Michigan Restaurant Association and the Michigan Licensed Beverage Association were not easy asks.

After much review, two names finally jumped off our list — Reps. Leslie Mortimer and Brenda Clack. Mortimer agreed instantly. We were surprised. Rep. Mortimer, from Horton, was a Republican in a hotly contested district who had barely won her election. Would it be possible that we had turned an issue that was viewed as liberal into one with Republicans as three of the four bill sponsors? While we appreciated Mortimer’s enthusiasm, Rep. Vander Veen was adamant there be a Democratic sponsor and was just as adamant that Rep Clack of Flint be that sponsor. She did become the fourth, without any time to spare.

At the news conference we announced the formation of the Campaign for Smokefree Air and our goal of making all Michigan workplaces smokefree. Upwards of 400 supporters rallied at the front of the Capitol as we officially introduced Lansing to the Campaign and the players who would not give up. Of the four sponsors, Sen. Basham easily dominated the conversation with his history on the issue.

Ironically, a woman who wandered into our news conference purposely sat on the Capitol steps and smoked a cigarette. She knew what our rally and news conference were attempting to communicate and she felt it was her right to smoke wherever she wanted. Her stubborn, in-your-face attitude was symbolic of those who would oppose our efforts for the duration.

Chapter 2: Building the Coalition

Key players
From the onset, the campaign was run by a steering committee made up of representatives of our core members, plus Peter Ruddell from Wiener and Emily Gerkin Palsrok from John Bailey. The two lynchpin members of the steering committee, which made final decisions on all strategy, both legislative and communications, were Judy Stewart from the American Cancer Society and Katherine Knoll from the American Heart Association.

Stewart and Knoll had known each other for years and had worked on many projects together. They complemented each other. Katherine quickly became the person to engage in shuttle diplomacy, while Judy served as the main media contact because of her proven ability to stay “on message” and help keep others on message as well. Both were beacons of tenacity throughout the campaign, moving mountains to make legislative meetings at the last minute and accommodating all media requests, no matter how random. Their energy and commitment never wavered for a moment. The third leg of their tripod was from the American Lung Association — first Carol Christner and later Susan Schechter.

The steering committee met every other Monday, faithfully, in the lower-level conference room of Wiener Associates. Each meeting followed an agenda focused on strategy and updates — legislative, communications and advocacy. As other players entered the Campaign during its course, they too fell into this structure. The first group of individuals who met regularly also included Karen Holcomb Merrill of Tobacco Free Michigan, Colin Ford of the Michigan State Medical Society and Chris Mitchell of the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. We were fortunate to have the support of the health insurers, too, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

The legislative leadership, Majority Leader Sikkema and Speaker DeRoche, made one thing plainly clear: under their watch there would be no action on a smokefree bill. Right out of the gate, we had an instant tall hurdle. The legislature’s leaders wouldn’t take it up, and the governor was not interested in making noise for us despite being a supporter of the issue.

Leadership’s reaction bolstered the advocates within the Campaign who wanted to forgo the legislative route and take it straight to the voters via a ballot initiative. The Campaign’s leaders, however, wanted to make a hard legislative push — something they had never done. Despite the long odds, it was decided early in 2005 to stay focused on a legislative campaign. Knowing it was uphill, we needed to get creative in our messaging and tactics. Adding to our challenge was the political reality of the deep pockets of our opponents. Big Tobacco would spend more than $700,000 in the 2005-06 legislative cycle to effectively push its influence on the GOP to prevent a vote on our issue.

At the same time we were launching the Campaign in April 2005, we also were in the field with our first statewide poll of Michigan voters. While we had seen the polls from other states, this poll conducted by John Bailey & Associates gave us our own local numbers to use with lawmakers. We discussed oversampling in certain legislative districts in order to provide lawmakers with even greater local details, but costs prohibited us from utilizing that tactic.

We weren’t surprised when we saw the results. Of the 600 registered Michigan voters we polled regarding air quality in the workplace, dining establishments and other entertainment venues, nearly two thirds “strongly favored” or “somewhat favored” a law creating smokefree environments in all places. Further, 80 percent felt that it was important to work in a smokefree environment. We were also happy to see that 90 percent of respondents thought that secondhand smoke was harmful to their health. Now we just needed to convince lawmakers of the same.

In addition to our poll, we were gathering every scientific study on the issue we could get our hands on — studies on the effects of secondhand smoke on our health and on the economy. It’s one of the most documented and studied issues of the last 15 years, so we were literally tripping over great data.

It was also at this point we recognized that despite the overwhelming volume of scientific, unbiased evidence on our side, the facts didn’t seem to matter to a large number of the people who pushed the red and green voting buttons.

During this period we made two analogies to other legislation to help legislators come over to our side. First, we compared secondhand smoke to alcohol and driving. Alcohol and tobacco are both legal products, yet the State of Michigan regulates who can drink, where they can drink and how much they can drink before the consumption of alcohol becomes dangerous to the general public. Elected officials trip over the red ribbons to gain attention and respect from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, yet secondhand smoke kills at least five times as many people in Michigan as drunk driving. The second major analogy we used was primary enforcement of seat belts. Here is an issue where the State of Michigan is mandating a behavior on an individual when he or she is the only person in harm’s way.

Unfortunately, both analogies and our early legislative strategy failed by themselves to produce a groundswell of support in the legislature.

Grassroots strategy
For the first two years of the Campaign’s existence, we devoted more time to building the number of coalition partners than to many other areas. The coalition began with only seven organizations — the three voluntary health organizations plus the hospital association, medical society, Tobacco Free Michigan and the Michigan Osteopathic Association. We knew that if we were going to be successful in the legislature we would need a truly grassroots effort. And to mount a grassroots effort that could make a difference in the face of being outgunned politically, we needed as many partners as we could gather.

The name of the coalition itself had been one of the first issues that was hotly debated. The coalition’s public relations team argued successfully that the name should imply a movement or an action, not merely another coalition of do-gooders. The team believed that would attract more advocates to the cause and provide the public with a better sense of our mission.

The Campaign created a website, managed for the duration by Jason Harder of the heart association, www.MakeMiAirSmokefree.org. The website was used to store information, provide the news media with background and in-depth studies, provide a map that tracked national progress of smokefree states, and sign up advocates. We used the database created through the website for our advocacy efforts.

From time to time, we also had those who disagreed with our position contact us through our website to voice their opposition. While the majority were pretty harmless, some folks took a nasty tone and used the opportunity to vent. One gentleman went so far as to make physical threats to us (including a reference to an automatic weapon), and the local police department was called to investigate.

Like most other organization’s beginnings, we conducted significant baseline polling. Even the voluntary health organizations were shocked at the popularity in their respective names — particularly when compared to Lansing heavyweights. The Campaign, wanting to diversify its membership and fend off criticism that the measure was hostile to business, also looked far and wide for any business group to join. We developed an extensive strategy aimed at the Detroit Regional Chamber in particular. Because the Chamber’s board, at that time, was dominated by health organizations, we felt there was a potential hole in the business group’s armor.

We never did get the Chamber to join. But we did land the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG). This was a direct result of the personal relationship and admiration the leaders of AIAG had with Dr. Ron Davis, an East Lansing physician in league with the Campaign. Dr. Davis had a distinguished career at the national Centers for Disease Control as well as the Michigan Department of Public Health during the Engler administration, and he currently ran the Center for Prevention at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. He had become an internationally renowned tobacco expert, and during the time smokefree air was being debated in the legislature, Dr. Davis became president of the American Medical Association. Dr. Davis’s steadfast dedication to making Michigan smokefree and his national position of prominence brought a host of other coalition partners.

Once again proving that Lansing is a small town, lobbyists for the restaurant association happened to attend the same church as the Campaign’s principal lobbyist. One Sunday after reading the story of “Doubting Thomas” to the congregation, Father Mark Inglot related it to many modern day secondhand issues — including secondhand smoke. Fr. Mark went into great detail about the dangers contained in the smoke we cannot see, and how the most popular bar in East Lansing had gone smokefree on its own. Unfortunately, only the lobbyists for the restaurant association had attended that mass, not the Campaign lobbyist. First thing the following Monday, the Campaign’s lobbyist received a series of e-mails accusing him of using the Catholic Church as a vessel to further his crusade against secondhand smoke.

The thought of approaching faith-based organizations had never occurred to us, but thanks to these new, false accusations we pursued faith-based organizations with great vigor.

We immediately scheduled a meeting with Sister Monica Kostielney, president and CEO, and Paul Long, vice president of public policy, of the Michigan Catholic Conference to discuss the issue. We prepped for the meeting by doing research on Catholic theology on tobacco specifically and disease prevention generally. Only Knoll (a protestant) of the American Heart Association was able to join the Campaign’s lobbyist at the meeting. Knoll was both in awe and intimidated by Sr. Monica’s quiet, yet forceful demeanor. She was hardly the first to come under the spell of Sr. Monica. Being threatened by tobacco thugs was less intimidating to her than meeting with this legendary, political-activist nun.

Not only did the Michigan Catholic Conference join the coalition, but so did the Michigan Jewish Conference and a host of other faith-based organizations. While faith-based groups may have seemed at the time like a modest addition to the Campaign, they were a huge help in our struggle to find coalition partners that were not primarily health organizations. As the issue evolved, the full support of Sr. Monica, Long and their organization also took off the table one important exemption — bingo. It halted any traction by Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer, who tried to get Democrats to exempt bingo — a big moneymaker for the party — at every turn in the campaign.

Coffee anyone? Our most successful grassroots tactic throughout the campaign became legislator coffee hours. We developed a sophisticated plan and strategy to have local advocates meet with their lawmaker in the legislator’s district. While we started using this tactic in the early days, we grew more sophisticated in our organization throughout the years and really worked this issue locally better than other grassroots organizations.

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapters 5 | Chapters 6, 7, & 8

Clearing the Air

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Chapter 3: The 2006 Elections
A monumental event in the fight for smokefree air occurred prior to the 2006 elections, when U. S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona issued his landmark report The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke. The report proved that there is no safe level of secondhand smoke exposure and stated that the only way to protect people from the risks associated with secondhand smoke is to eliminate smoking indoors. Two times before, in 1966 and 1986, the surgeon general issued a report on tobacco. In every generation, the evidence became more overwhelming on the dangers of tobacco. The 2006 report, in essence, put an end to the debate over the dangers of secondhand smoke. The surgeon general’s report became a rallying cry around the country and a large focus of a future economic impact study the Campaign planned to prepare on the issue.

Nonprofit organizations are prohibited by the Internal Revenue Service from participating directly in political campaigns. That meant we could encourage our advocates to ask candidates their position on smokefree air, but we could not endorse candidates or in any other way engage in the electoral process. Fortunately for us, however, the news media were interested in this issue and repeatedly posed the question in gubernatorial debates. Governor Jennifer Granholm and Republican nominee Dick DeVos were asked time and time again about their position on the proposed smokefree law. While this media attention did not cause the legislature to act before sine die — the end of the 2005-06 legislative session — it increased interest in the Campaign and boosted our number of advocates.

A series of events that we didn’t realize at the time would have such a large impact on our future was the elections that took place in Ohio, Arizona and Nevada that November. Three counterparts to Michigan’s Campaign for Smokefree Air in those states went to the ballot. Until this point in time, only Florida and Washington had gone to the ballot. Big Tobacco — funded primarily by Reynolds Tobacco (RJR) — decided to fight at the ballot in those three states by putting up competing ballot measures. RJR and its allies spent in excess of $30 million in all three states. By contrast, the Ohio Smokefree Campaign spent under $4 million.

Big Tobacco’s strategy in those states was simple: create a “smokeless” campaign to compete with the “smokefree” campaign. In Ohio, Issue 5 was “smokefree” and Issue 4 was “smokeless.” Issue 4 still banned smoking in certain areas; it just created a laundry list of exemptions. Ohio voters didn’t fall for the trap. Issue 5, the smokefree question, passed by a vote of 58 percent to 42 percent and competing Issue 4 lost by a vote of 64 percent to 36 percent. The numbers were nearly identical in both Arizona and Nevada. What these elections showed us in Michigan was the length, and dollar amount, our opponents would go to in efforts to prevent smokefree policies from taking shape. It also prepared us that we would need to raise as much as $10 million for a successful ballot campaign in Michigan should we ever decide to go down that path.

The November elections passed, followed by the traditional lame-duck session lasting until the end of the year. Lame duck is often the best time to pass controversial legislation that can’t win approval during the regular session, because lawmakers — chiefly those leaving the legislature — are more open to voting how they want rather than how they believe they must vote to win re-election. An unusual occurrence in this lame duck was the number of bills amending the public health code that were sitting on the Senate floor awaiting final action. This is usually a recipe for mischief or disaster. New and possibly unnecessary hospitals are literally built under these circumstances. This year, perhaps, smokefree air could take similar advantage to win approval. Sen. Basham was ready, willing and prepared to attach a smokefree amendment to every public health code proposal.

It was a good strategy, but went nowhere because public health code bills came to a screeching halt on the Senate floor when leadership caught wind of our plans. Sen. Sikkema was not going to hold a vote on any Basham amendment, so he refused to move any public health code bills.

Softening that setback for us was word that came late on the final evening of the session. Sen. Basham received a commitment from the governor that she would include a plea for the legislature to pass a smoking ban in her next State of the State address.

Chapter 4: Hope for 2007
Although we had played through a scenario of the Democrats taking control of one of the chambers in the 2006 elections, it was never really something we thought would happen. But it did, as the Democrats seized control of the House, going from a 52-58 minority to a 58-52 majority. As a result, we started the 2007 legislative session with more hope and optimism than we had to date. With the successful ballot campaigns in Ohio, Nevada and Arizona that same fall, there were now 26 states with smokefree air laws, and our coalition had grown to more than 200 organizations.

Momentum was on our side, with national pressure growing. In three short years, the country had witnessed nearly 20 more states become smokefree and, at that point, half of the U.S. population was living in a community protected from exposure to secondhand smoke.

Following the intense race for a Democratic speaker, Andy Dillon emerged victorious, and Rep. Andy Meisner, who lost the close race for the leadership position, was given chairmanship of the powerful House Commerce Committee. Rep. Meisner had not really been on our radar previously. But the new chairman shocked us in our first meeting when he said we “weren’t asking for enough” in our bills. He was prepared to go beyond all workplaces and take up the issues of smoking in cars with kids present, smoking at public beaches and any other smokefree policy adopted or considered by another state.

Rep. Meisner urged us to write a stronger bill and said he wanted to run it through his committee and really showcase the issue. We couldn’t have been more surprised and pleased. While we didn’t end up adding all his additional items, we worked with him throughout the early spring. Our campaign was able to plan a series of committee meetings in which we brought in cancer survivors, those whose health was affected by secondhand smoke, restaurant owners who supported the legislation and numerous others. Rep. Meisner also was crucial in convincing other House Democrats to support the legislation and helped bring a groundswell of support within his caucus, including some support from Speaker Dillon.

Another bonus was some public support from the governor. Although our issue had popped up a few times during the campaign debates between Granholm and DeVos, it had never been a very public issue for the her. However, during her fifth State of the State address, in February, Granholm asked Michigan lawmakers to enact smokefree workplace legislation, as she had told Sen. Basham she would.

Our original two bills had died along with all the other unsuccessful legislation at the end of the 2005-06 session, which meant we had to introduce them again in the new session. Our three returning sponsors, Sens. Basham and George and Rep. Clack, each introduced legislation early in the year.

Nonsmoking sections
By spring we were able to finally wrap up a research and media project that our campaign had been working on for nearly two years — an air quality test of Michigan restaurants and bars. Our air quality tour, made possible by the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH), which agreed to crunch the volumes of data for us, allowed us to test smoking and nonsmoking sections of the same establishment and prove that nonsmoking sections were not protecting patrons or employees from secondhand smoke. We wanted to shoot down the argument that by choosing the nonsmoking section, customers were protected from secondhand smoke. To us, nonsmoking sections were as silly as saying you could have non-peeing sections of swimming pools. But we needed the data to prove it.

From October 2005 to April 2006, the air quality of 90 bars and restaurants had been measured in eight Michigan cities: Ann Arbor, Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Novi and Saginaw. Each location was measured using the TSI SidePak AM510 Personal Aerosol Monitor, which MDCH had helped us obtain. Looking at the high level of fine particle air pollution in nonsmoking sections also proved that restaurant workers are exposed to toxins every day regardless of whether they work in the smoking or nonsmoking sections.

We received significant media coverage of the study, and we credited it with also helping lawmakers understand that restaurant and bars were places of employment, too — and that the workers there deserved the same protection that workers in hospitals, offices and factories deserved under our legislation. Secondhand smoke exposure at work causes bar and restaurant employees to be 50 percent more likely to develop lung cancer than the general population. It also will cause 12,000 otherwise healthy nonsmokers to die from some form of cancer, 3,000 specifically to lung cancer.

States with part-time legislatures rushed to enact smokefree legislation after the success of the three ballot measures. We watched as six more states passed laws going smokefree, bringing the total in the U.S. to 32.

First big victory
By June, Rep. Meisner had received enough support from his colleagues to start hearings on our House bill. Throughout June and into late July, he held a series of hearings that allowed us to bring in a broad range of supporters on HB 4163, Rep. Clack’s bill, including supporters like Dr. Kenneth Warner, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, Dr. Greg Holzman, chief medical officer for MDCH, various associations, heads of the major health groups and three passionate advocates who answered our call for help time after time.

Passionate advocate one was Dr. Ron Davis, then president of the American Medical Association (and the man we eventually had the law named for, following his death from pancreatic cancer during our campaign). He testified with great emotion about the medical effects of secondhand smoke on everyone in Michigan and the healthcare costs associated with it. Passionate advocate two was Daniel Haberman, owner of the bosco bar and lounge in Ferndale. He was our most outspoken bar owner and helped lawmakers understand that outlawing smoking was no more intrusive than the long list of health code policies he already had to adhere to, and that many bar and restaurant owners in Michigan wanted this bill to create a level playing field.

By far, the most moving testimony came from passionate advocate three, Carrie Klein, a lawyer from Kalamazoo. Carrie brought a picture of her sister to display at the witness stand. She started her testimony by expressing disappointment that she could not bring her sister with her to testify at the hearing. Her sister, a former Michigan newspaper reporter (who had covered her share of smoky government meetings in her stint as a Capitol reporter for Booth Newspapers), died due to cancer caused by secondhand smoke and had never smoked. There were few dry eyes in the committee room after Carrie was through giving her testimony.

It was also at this time that a new partner stepped up internally in the campaign with new funding, ideas and intensity. It was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had developed and was marketing a smoking cessation drug. Additional funding from the pharmaceutical company allowed our campaign to use some creative approaches to messaging our campaign, including podcasts and video vignettes. We were able to capture the passion of our advocates who testified and use their presentations repeatedly through social media channels.

On July 27 our campaign scored its first major victory when House Bill 4163 was reported from the House Commerce Committee, mostly along party lines, 12-4. Most of the attempts by Republicans to weaken the bill were defeated, and the bill emerged with exemptions for only cigar bars and tobacco shops. The Detroit members of the committee voted “yes” with the expectation there would be further discussion on the House floor about how to address the unique issue of the Detroit casinos and their competition from tribal casinos, which would not be subject to a state-imposed smoking ban.

Our opponents felt confident that we would get no further, that we had emerged from committee due only to Rep. Meisner’s influence, but that Speaker Dillon wasn’t going to give us the same opportunity.

We turned up the heat immediately on our grassroots advocates to focus on all House members. What we had not anticipated, however, was the budget fiasco and Michigan Business Tax debate that dominated the fall of 2007. Any momentum we had established in the spring and summer of the year came to halt.

While the legislative leadership was focused on the budget (a “focus” that lasted past the September 30 adoption deadline and resulted in a brief shutdown of state government), we focused on coffee. Our grassroots advocates took to the House districts and met with every House member who was not a solid “yes” already. We also met with many who voted “no,” looking to change votes. Based on our experience in the House Commerce Committee, where a number of members changed their minds after receiving information from constituents, we decided to continue to use our “People Power.”

After the budget was finally resolved in October, we started to gain more traction with House members. We made a push with lawmakers based on the argument that after the debacle of the government shutdown, the legislature needed to pass a bill popular with the voters — smokefree air. On December 5, slipping through on the skin of our teeth, HB 4163 squeaked by the House, 56-46, a one-vote majority. In the lengthy debate that had ensued that day, our campaign fought off exemptions for every organization that feared the bill — bowling alleys, private clubs, hookah bars, restaurants, bars, bars that only serve adults, restaurants that would stop serving kids after a magical hour…the list went on and on. Reps. Meisner and Clack were indispensable in their leadership and their ability to fight off exemptions and amendments from both sides of the aisle. In the end, we emerged with a strong bill that added exemptions for the Detroit casinos, race tracks and charity (read: Democratic) bingo.

We finished the year on an emotional high from our success, and the clarity of needing to intensify our efforts only on the Senate. Another round of newspaper editorials weighed in on why Michigan needed to finally get its act together and pass this issue once and for all. The win also helped us internally with those in our campaign who wanted to make 2008 the year we would go to the ballot. Having the success of moving through one chamber under our belt, we were able to advocate successfully for keeping on the legislative track. We were finally moving in the direction we wanted, and it was important to stay focused — focused on the GOP Senate, a larger hurdle than the House.

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapters 5 | Chapters 6, 7, & 8

Clearing the Air

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Chapter 6: Headed to Conference
We were given the choice by House leadership to either ping-pong HB 4163 back and forth between the Senate and House in hopes of achieving concurrence, or to send the bill to a conference committee to work out the differences in the two versions. We believed that in a lame-duck session there would be a great desire to have the issue resolved. We were confident the speaker would appoint two pro-smokefree air lawmakers from the House Democratic caucus. We were confident that whichever Senate Democrat was selected would be a solid pro-smokefree air vote. The unknown, and the leap of faith we decided to take, was whether one of the two Senate Republican conferees would be inclined to resolve the issue once and for all rather than have it hang out in the next year.

There was a seven-day gap between when the House appointed its conferees and the Senate made its appointments. On the day the appointments were made, rumors in the Capitol pointed to the Senate conferees being Sen. Basham, Sen. Alan Sanborn (R-Richmond) and Sen. Jason Allen (R-Traverse City). Our hearts sank. The gamble failed. Both Sen. Sanborn and Sen. Allen had long articulated opposition to a smokefree law.

While some rumors swirling around the Capitol prove to be true, the one circulating on conference committee appointees was close, but wrong. It was a simple mistake involving three senators who could be called Alan. Sen. Alan Cropsey was the third conferee, not Sen. Jason Allen. In our view this was a great stroke of luck. Sen. Cropsey, a veteran Republican lawmaker from DeWitt, was an effective legislator who frequently solved difficult issues and who clearly understood how this issue did not serve the Republicans if it lingered into the 2010 elections.

The House conferees were predictably good for the cause. Rep. Clack was the bill’s sponsor and Rep. Meisner was an avid supporter. The House Republican conferee was Rep. David Hildenbrand of Lowell, who had been an ardent opponent of our bill but was honest and upfront about his position the entire time. We knew where we stood with him.

It became clear at the first hearing that Sen. Cropsey would be the deciding vote whether the bill was enacted this year or not. In his opening statement, Sen. Cropsey said he was convinced the health concerns outweighed his longstanding property rights concerns with the proposed smoking ban. Whether this was politics or not, to have one of the leading conservative lawmakers, one who voted against the legislation, agree that health rights concerns are more important than property rights was a major messaging accomplishment.

The conference committee held a meeting every day during lame duck. The negotiations centered on one issue — how to treat the three Detroit casinos. One proposal included a staggered effective date — a date for casinos and an earlier one for everything else. Another issue that surfaced regularly was how to tie in the Native American casino compacts — could Detroit casinos be exempt until a time when the compacts were renegotiated and then make all Michigan casinos smokefree? 

We were closing in on a potential deal, or at least we thought so, that would have exempted casino floors. One of the national groups in our coalition was willing to put in more resources here, but needed to be reassured the content of the bill would match the goals of the national office. Another dreaded conference call with “national” ensued. The national office did not want an exemption for casinos, believing it would harm the cause nationwide if Michigan were to exempt casinos. The national office wanted us to oppose our own legislation if there were a casino exemption.

We were so close, and again optimistic that the issue would be resolved. We found it hard to believe that lawmakers, after each chamber had voted to pass a version of smokefree legislation, would fail to find a resolution on an issue the public clearly wanted. But we weren’t desperate enough to resolve the issue by taking any deal put on the table. We continued to push for a comprehensive bill, with no exemptions.

Unfortunately in this case, conference committees are not autonomous creatures. They can end up dancing to leadership’s tunes. And so, despite having two votes in conference from the Senate and two from the House for a clean bill, no vote was ever held in the conference committee. The issue would be back the following year, in yet another new legislative session, with new bills and more new legislators.

Chapter 7: Soul Searching
Following our heart-breaking defeat during lame duck, the Campaign had some serious thinking to do and several core questions to answer for 2009. Did we want to continue the fight, with the same leadership in each chamber that clearly did not want a smokefree air law? Did we pursue a hugely expensive ballot initiative for November 2010? Could we give in on certain exemptions to make some legislators happy without ruining the chances of it still passing the Senate?

In addition to our self-reflection, we were also spending a lot of time guessing what the legislature would be doing. Some thought Sen. Bishop and the Senate would introduce a bill with no exemptions and pass it quickly to the House, sticking to a full-ban approach and putting pressure on the House to come up with votes. Others thought neither chamber would want to do anything and would hide from the issue.

Adding to our woes, we had again lost some of our champions due to term limits. Both Reps. Meisner and Clack were gone, and the House Commerce Committee had a new chairman, Rep. Robert Jones, a Democrat from Kalamazoo. For the first time, the entire Campaign leadership began to look seriously at a ballot initiative. We couldn’t avoid it. The internal pressure from advocates fed up with the legislative process was at an all-time high. In addition, the news media were increasingly encouraging the issue to be resolved by the ballot; and lawmakers didn’t seem intent on resolving the issue legislatively.

Tempering the shift to a ballot strategy was the stark reality of the costs for a ballot campaign. The difficulty of raising as much as $10 million, in an economically challenging year when donations to the voluntary health organizations were already drastically lower than normal, could not be ignored. It was an honest concern that we wouldn’t have the money needed to mount a successful campaign, and losing at the ballot could be more devastating in the long term than would another legislative delay.

We strategized about possible allies that could help fund the issue: Windsor casinos (already smokefree) eager to see Detroit go smokefree; Michigan’s Native American casinos also eager to see Detroit go smokefree (to give themselves a perceived competitive advantage); and the natural anti-tobacco groups we knew would arise.

In the end, the campaign developed its own “great compromise,” where we detailed a legislative timeline and determined that if we couldn’t make any strong progress by the end of 2009, we would have no choice but to look at the November 2010 ballot as a strong alternative.

At this point, our coalition was more than 270 organization members strong, with more than 5,000 advocates signed up on our advocacy alert and e-mail list. In addition, the number of smokefree states in the U.S. had grown to 35.

Race to be first
While we spent most of January embroiled in internal debates, we didn’t realize how many House lawmakers were eager to pick up where we had left off and fill the big shoes left by Reps. Clack and Meisner. Many, many in the large freshman class of lawmakers came to the House having either campaigned on our issue or having heard the following from numerous constituents during their door-to-door outreach: “Are you going to help make Michigan smokefree? It’s about time the legislature deals with this issue.”

We started to get wind that multiple lawmakers were going to make bill requests to introduce smokefree legislation. It was important to us that we not only worked with a lawmaker sensitive to our goals, but one who had a realistic chance of leadership moving his or her bill. We met with several extremely interested lawmakers. They included two freshmen eager to join our cause, Rep. Paul Scott, a Grand Blanc Republican, and Rep. Dian Slavens, a Democrat out of suburban Detroit’s Canton Township; a lawmaker who had turned us down previously but was now supportive of our position, Rep. Lee Gonzales; and a new-to-us lawmaker who had solid support from her caucus and peers, Lansing Democrat Rep. Joan Bauer. 

Unbeknownst to us, lawmakers were already making bill requests. Four smokefree air bills were quickly introduced, including one from Detroit lawmaker Rep. Bert Johnson. The first bill came from freshman Scott, and the Democrats quickly referred it to the House Commerce Committee, as had been done the three previous sessions. However, this committee referral was made before committee chairs were named. Johnson had the ear of Dillon and urged the speaker to let him host the issue in House Regulatory Reform, which Johnson was going to chair. Johnson was supportive of smokefree air, but also wanted to protect the Detroit casinos. All bills introduced after Rep. Scott’s bill were referred to the House Regulatory Reform Committee. Based on our vote counts, there could not have been a more difficult committee for us.

To urge House action we needed more pressure, both from our advocates and the news media. We decided to poll again, certain that the action from the previous lame-duck session and the increase in the number of smokefree states since our last poll in January 2008 had increased our overall support among voters. The poll was commissioned by the Campaign, with funding support from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

In March, EPIC MRA polled 600 Michigan voters on our issue. While we were disappointed that our support had not grown since the last poll, we were still seeing impressive numbers. No other major political issue facing the legislature in 2009, or the previous five years, consistently polled at or near 70 percent support.

Sixty-six percent — two-thirds of those interviewed — favored smokefree workplace legislation. When asked specifically about legislation including making casinos smokefree, 64 percent were in favor of including casinos in the legislation, agreeing that it was only fair that casino employees have the same protection from secondhand smoke on the job as other workers. Less than a third of voters, 30 percent, felt that casinos should be exempt from the law because including them could negatively affect casino business and government revenue.

Rep. Johnson followed much the same approach as Rep. Meisner did in the previous session. He engaged all parties. He allowed every group or individual to have a say. He took his committee on field trips to see casino operations, to see a cigar bar and to visit the pulmonary intensive care unit at a hospital. He spent weeks examining the issue and allowing his committee members to learn as much as possible.

One messaging issue we felt our campaign needed to address was ventilation in casinos. The Detroit casinos had spent significant time during the committee hearings discussing their expensive ventilation systems and assuring lawmakers that patrons were protected from secondhand smoke while gaming in their facilities. We knew this was wrong and needed to be disproved.

We decided to bring back our air-quality testing machine and this time target the Detroit casinos. On April 18, Dr. Ron Davis’s colleague, Amanda Holmes, went to the Detroit casinos to help test the air quality. Not surprisingly, the results from that day showed that indoor pollution levels averaged between the three casinos were eight times higher than outdoor air. Detroit TV coverage was exceptional and our campaign experienced another surge in advocates signing up via our website.

In April, House Regulatory Reform approved House Bill 4377, sponsored by Rep. Gonzales, with exemptions for the Detroit casinos, tobacco specialty shops and cigar bars. While we were not happy with the exemptions, we felt we were in the same boat we had been in before — happy that there was movement on our issue and optimistic we could get the changes we wanted through amendments on the House floor or in the Senate.

To keep it interesting, Sen. Tupac Hunter of Detroit, also frustrated by the lack of resolution of this issue and acting on his own without the Campaign’s concurrence, introduced a bill in early May to place the smokefree workplace issue on the 2010 ballot for Michigan voters to consider. Senate Bill 469 would ask state voters to decide the fate of an issue that lawmakers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deal with. The bill was comprehensive in its definition of workplaces and included restaurants, bars, tobacco specialty shops and casinos.

Hunter’s move put us in an uncomfortable position, although we admired Hunter’s decision. We had complete confidence that Michigan voters would have overwhelmingly approved the issue, but we preferred lawmakers just deal with the issue themselves.

In mid May, two more states enacted smokefree legislation — Wisconsin, our Great Lakes and border neighbor, and North Carolina, the heart of tobacco country. Earlier in the year, Virginia, the home of Philip Morris, passed a smokefree law. Michigan was now one of only 13 states in the country that had not taken action to protect the health of its residents. Lawmakers had been debating the issue for more than 10 years, but had failed to get the job done.

We messaged hard on this — even tobacco states were going smokefree. Michigan lawmakers needed to take notice of the fact that we were being left behind. With our high unemployment, struggling economy, faltering auto sector, high obesity rates and, now, our status as one of a few states still exposing workers to secondhand smoke, we were painting the picture of what legislators were allowing to happen to our great state. Legislators needed to stop debating and take action.

By the end of May, less than a month after it came out of committee, HB 4377 was approved by the full House. The issue had moved much more quickly than in the previous sessions and, unlike last time, we easily cleared the chamber, with more than 75 supporters. While there were amendments offered to exempt bowling alleys, private clubs and the like, none was adopted. Again, the issue of exemptions came down to two — gaming floors of casinos and purveyors of tobacco products.

Again, the budget
Fall 2009 felt a lot like fall 2007. The legislature was moving slowly toward a budget impasse. Smokefree air legislation was still lingering out there, but not complete. It had been months since the House passed the legislation. We could not get lawmakers’ attention when the budget was still all-consuming. So we waited. And waited. Patiently we waited for the budget to be resolved. During times like this we also fought off internal pressure from coalition members who weren’t as patient or as willing to let lawmakers be focused on only the budget. It was another internal struggle to keep coalition members in line with our legislative strategy.

Facebook friends
After Labor Day, we decided it was time to give focus and new tasks to our restless grassroots advocates. The goal was a limited, but intense grassroots campaign. Our plan was to start on October 1 and end six weeks later when the legislature was set to break for deer hunting season, and in time for the American Cancer Society Great American Smokeout in late November.

While the House had passed a bill, it was not the bill we wanted to pass. All of 2009 we focused on House members, telling them that they needed to call the Senate’s bluff. The only way to resolve the issue was for the House to send the Senate a clean bill — no exemptions. We had the votes for such a bill, if only we could get a vote on it.

As Facebook began to dominate the political landscape and lawmakers were rushing to create Facebook pages, we noticed something a bit different about lawmakers’ posts on Facebook. Especially throughout the budget debate, posts were actually being made by the lawmakers themselves. It was not staff-driven. Could this new technology pave the way for our advocates to communicate more directly with lawmakers? We decided that our short grassroots campaign would not only include a social media component but have a major focus on Facebook.

In the end, our Act Now or Forever Hold Your Breath campaign engaged more than 15 powerful organizations from our coalition — each group picking one or two days throughout the six weeks to engage its members. Every day, Monday through Thursday, for six weeks, one group was responsible for rallying advocates to contact lawmakers. Further, we varied the format of communications — letters, calls, e-mails, Facebook and personal visits — so that we employed a different approach each day. Once again our advocates were relentless. If anything, the failure of the legislature to resolve the issue in lame duck the year before had sparked a new anger and insistence — our army would not give up until a bill was signed into law.

It cannot be stated enough how much of a purely organic, grassroots campaign this had become. There was one advocate from Ann Arbor, Kelly Vaughn, who took grassroots advocacy to a whole new level. Kelly is very passionate about smokefree air. She met with her lawmakers. She met with area lawmakers. She reached out to lawmakers on her own. She wanted to breathe clean air and wanted the Michigan Legislature to do something about it. Kelly is of the generation that was plugged into Facebook and social media before the rest of the world understood it. Kelly had decided to start a Facebook group, Support the Smoking Ban in MI, on her own. Kelly’s groups surged to over 12,000 members at one point and dwarfed the “official” Campaign Facebook group.

We recognized early that the only way to be truly successful at Facebook was to bring Kelly, a University of Michigan athletic department employee, into the fold. We needed her to engage her 12,000-strong troops. Fortunately for us, Kelly quickly agreed. One of the American Cancer Society’s top grassroots coordinators, Matt Phelen, worked with Kelly and successfully migrated her Facebook fans to a new fan page to keep them fully engaged during our Act Now campaign.

Chapter 8: The Home Stretch
Much like most areas of the Capitol, the areas outside the House and Senate chambers have black and white floor tiles laid in a checkerboard pattern. Capitol insiders affectionately refer to the area where lobbyists practice their trade as the “black and whites.” Over the course of 2009, the black and whites were the setting for some brief conversations between lobbyists for casinos and cigar bars and their Campaign counterparts on how to reach a compromise and resolve the issue. The conversations never really reached the point where they were meaningful until the Act Now campaign was in full swing.

Part of the reason the opposition forces wanted to talk, we believe, was the intense pressure the speaker was under from members of his own caucus. For many, particularly the first-term women in the House Democratic Caucus, the lack of action on a smoking ban was a major reason and symbol for why Lansing did not work. It was described to us that if the Senate did not act in a reasonable time period on the bill with casino and cigar bar exemptions, the speaker would hold a vote on a clean bill and send that over to the Senate. The Act Now campaign included a major focus on the House members — to ensure there would be 56 votes for a clean bill.

In the course of a series of more intense meetings, the casino lobbyists agreed to a compromise. The compromise was that the gaming floors of the Detroit casinos would allow smoking, and cigar bars/tobacco shops, as we defined them, would allow smoking. That was it. At one point in time, tobacco shops were in our model smokefree bill, so there was no problem there for our group. There were already a handful of states that exempted cigar bars, and if the definitions were strong, we could live with this one, too. Casino floors, as always, presented the tricky point. Exempting them gained very little in the Senate, but the House Detroit delegation would support the bill if casinos were exempt. And a cigar bar exemption gave us the added margin we needed in the House.

It was a hard compromise for many members of our coalition — those who wanted to hold out for no exemptions. The alternative to the compromise was trying the same approach from the year before and rolling the dice we would get a different outcome from Dillon and the House. The other alternative was deciding once and for all that we would go the ballot. We had always pushed to include all workers — that no job would be prioritized over others in the name of health (or political expediency). But it would be as big or bigger gamble to start over again in 2011 with new legislative leaders in both chambers and a new governor, and not knowing where any of them sat on our issue.

The alternatives were judged as too risky. While the two exemptions were hard for some to swallow, the decision was made to support the compromise that so many other groups had come together to make happen.

Red and greens
It was great that the lobbyists had reached agreement. The only problem was that lobbyists don’t get to cast votes. And not all of the lobbyists were in agreement. The tobacco interests — led by Reynolds Tobacco — were still opposed. The restaurant and licensed beverage groups were still opposed. Our loosely-held agreement needed to find a champion in the Senate — one in the Senate Republican Caucus. We needed one who was not already outspoken on this issue.

The first day back from deer season, casino lobbyists and our coalition members met with Sen. Ron Jelinek from Three Oaks to find out where he stood. He indicated he was willing to support the compromise reached by the lobbyists, but he was not asked specifically at this meeting to sponsor the compromise. A few hours later, the cigar bar lobbyist and one of the casino lobbyists went back to ask him if he would sponsor the compromise, and he agreed. All we needed to provide him was the revised bill language and we were off to the races.

Now we waited for the bill to come up. The few days that went by before the vote seemed like an eternity. We continued to meet with senators to ensure there would be solid support for this compromise, while at the same time keeping our friends in the House informed and ready to move if the Senate did not act. At the end of every House session from November 1 until the day the Senate voted, Rep. Bauer would announce a meeting of the smokefree caucus. Many times, it was Rep. Bauer and two or three other lawmakers, but we wanted to give the impression that the caucus was meeting regularly and plotting its strategy. Both Speaker Dillon and Majority Leader Bishop made comments to the press that finalizing the smokefree air issue was something they wanted to accomplish before Christmas.

On December 9, the Senate finally took action. It adopted the Jelinek compromise legislation, but not without some hoopla and debate. Tensions ran high on the black and whites between lobbyists and lobbyists, and between lobbyists and lawmakers. Of course, there were amendments offered. “Permit to Kill” was back again. An exemption-free bill was offered, too. But our compromise held firm, and the Senate voted with nearly the same numbers as before — nine Republicans joined 15 Democrats.

In a telling statement on just how much the issue resonated with the public, the upper chamber’s newest member, Sen. Mike Nofs, a Republican from Battle Creek, delivered a speech on how he had opposed the issue in the past but was ready to cast a “yes” vote after hearing about this issue repeatedly during his special election campaign just a month before. And Sen. Jelinek validated the Campaign’s early decision to make coalition-building a priority, when he took the Senate floor and rattled off only a few of the nearly 300 groups supporting the cause.

In a startling move, rumors began to swirl that the House intended to take up the bill the same day. We were hopeful the compromise language would be as successful there as it had been in the Senate. Media inquiries were building with rapid momentum and the realization started to set in that after nearly five years, the issue might finally be coming to an end. Victory was in sight.

The wait, although less than two hours, seemed like two days. There was a chance Dillon wouldn’t put it up for a vote or that we would have to spend another week convincing House lawmakers of the importance of our issue and the need to finalize it once and for all.

All we needed was a concurrence vote — with no more amendments or games playing — and around 4 p.m. the legislature delivered one of its best Christmas gifts to Michigan residents in the form of a final smokefree air bill. The legislation had completed its years-long, twisted and torturous journey through the Michigan Legislature! The Campaign celebrated later that afternoon at the Harrison Roadhouse in East Lansing, which had already gone smokefree.

We still needed the governor’s signature to transform the legislation into law. But that had not been in question since she went public in her earlier State of the State address. In honor of the importance of the occasion, and the strong media and legislator interest, Gov. Granholm held a “live” bill signing ceremony on December 18 at the recently opened and smokefree Michigan Brewing Company in downtown Lansing.

It was surreal to witness the truly historic event. We joked that 2010 would bring an identity crisis — if we weren’t advocating for smokefree air, what would we be fighting for? Of course, we’ve answered that question each in our own way as we continue to work on advancing other projects.

We credit our opposition for holding off our victory for five years. They were tenacious opponents. We never once seriously doubted, not really, Michigan would go smokefree eventually. It took us longer than we first planned, but in the end we credit our success to the literally thousands of advocates around the state who never gave up. We joked throughout that we had People Power, but it was no joke. When one of our advocacy alerts went out, we knew lawmakers’ offices would receive hundreds of e-mails and phone calls over the next few days. Despite many challenges, our people never gave up.

The Campaign is now transitioning its work to the Michigan Department of Community Health, which is beginning an education campaign for the entire state. The new law’s effective date, May 1, is only a few weeks away, and we’re optimistic Michigan will make an exciting and smooth transition to become the 38th smokefree state in the United States — in law and practice.

Peter Ruddell has been an attorney and lobbyist for Wiener Associates in Lansing since 2001 and previously was a legislative aide in the House and Senate, including service as executive assistant to the Senate majority leader. Emily Gerkin Palsrok is managing director of public affairs for John Bailey & Associates (a Lambert Edwards & Associates company) that she joined in 2003. She served previously as a press aide to the House speaker.

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapters 5 | Chapters 6, 7, & 8
For more commentary see Editor’s Notes

Clearing the Air

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Chapter 5: Gamechanger
With the fight now in the Republican-controlled Senate, we needed new angles to exploit. Our previous polling consistently demonstrated this was not a partisan issue, with identical support from Republican and Democratic voters. Strategically, though, we decided we needed to go beyond our previous research with something direct, targeting Republicans only. We needed a way to convince Republicans that this issue wasn’t partisan, that toeing the line of protecting business owners’ rights wasn’t gelling with what most of the public wanted.

Thanks to an unlikely partnership of Michigan’s Republican and Democratic party chairs to try to make Michigan relevant in the presidential nomination process, our state’s primary was moved to January 15, against the national parties’ orders. Well, it was sort of a primary. The Democrats had Hillary Clinton on the ballot, and the Michigan delegation would not be seated at the Democratic national convention. The Republicans merely lost half of their delegates, but still had the full field of candidates on their ballot. Regardless, it gave us a chance to single out Republicans for a poll on our issue.

We polled Republican presidential primary voters all right — and wasted a bunch of money. The numbers came back identical to what we already knew. Seventy-seven percent of 2008 Republican presidential primary voters favored smokefree worksites; 67 percent favored smokefree restaurants and bars. Different polling firm (EPIC MRA); different target group; exactly the same results. We hoped it would demonstrate that conservatives liked this issue as much as liberals did. In retrospect, though, it didn’t have any effect on the Senate’s support or willingness to take up the issue.

Shutdown cleanup
In the aftermath of the 2007 state government shutdown, Majority Leader Bishop and Speaker Dillon resolved to work better together. As a show of good faith, the duo conducted a series of town hall forums across southeast Michigan in January and February 2008. We paid close attention to the dates of the town halls and encouraged our advocates to attend and ask questions on our issue at each forum.

On Monday, January 28, the Oakland County League of Women Voters held its town hall at Oakland Community College. Oakland County is home to some of our most impassioned advocates. As in most town halls, the event encouraged attendees to submit questions on cards to be selected and read aloud by the moderator. We had numerous advocates in attendance submitting a simple question, “When is there going to be a hearing on the smokefree bill?” On this winter evening, the question was the second one asked.

Speaker Dillon went first. He spoke about how the House had just passed the bill. He spoke about how he supported the bill and the fate of the issue was now in Sen. Bishop’s hands. Applause followed.

Sen. Bishop gave an answer most of the public had heard before. He spoke about how this was Big Government intruding on private businesses. He criticized the version of the bill that passed the House. There were too many exemptions, he argued. It created an unlevel playing field. He finished his answer.

The moderator asked the next question on another topic. Sen. Bishop was the first to answer this time. However, he surprised the audience and particularly our advocates by saying he wanted to add one more statement about the last question. Sen. Bishop then indicated the Senate would be taking up the smokefree issue “this year.” Thunderous applause followed.

More coffee
We credited much of the success we had already experienced in the House to the meetings with representatives back in their districts. We decided it was time to continue those events, especially in the Senate. Days before the Oakland County town hall, we held what in hindsight became our most significant district meeting.

The American Lung Association had hired a new government affairs staff person, Susan Schechter. She wasn’t your normal non-profit lobbyist. The six-foot two-inch Duke Law School graduate had been a stay-at-home mom for nearly four years. She gave up a lucrative legal practice as an expert in employment law to stay home with her three children. After years at home she decided her kids didn’t need all of her time any longer, so it was time to give back.

The Lung Association seemed like a perfect fit, especially since she had lost her own mother to lung cancer caused by smoking. Schechter brought a fresh perspective to our campaign. She also brought tenacity. She was intimidated by no one and approached anyone who looked or acted like a lawmaker to ask for his or her vote. She also brought one final, frustrating and enduring quality to our campaign: naivete about the legislative process. And there was one more thing. We had yet to meet a “soccer mom” in Oakland County who didn’t know Susie Schechter.

At 9:30 a.m. on January 25, Sen. John Pappageorge, a Troy Republican, was scheduled to meet at a local coffee shop with a few constituents about the proposed smoking ban. Some of us had met with Sen. Pappageorge in the past and never walked away putting him in the “yes” column. We felt he needed to meet some of his voters. By 9:45 a.m., Sen. Pappageorge had not arrived for the meeting. His district aide indicated politely that the senator had become tied up and she would dutifully report back to him all the comments from the meeting. Rest assured, Susie Schechter, Sen. Pappageorge will hear your comments, the aide said.

But the Queen of the Soccer Moms did not find 25 local supporters to fill that little coffee shop in order to speak with an aide. Schechter politely argued that these people took time out of their very busy schedules to discuss a legislative issue important to them, and Sen. Pappageorge owed them the respect of attending the meeting he said he would attend.

A brief 15 minutes later, Sen. Pappageorge arrived. He ended up staying another 90 minutes. Every person in attendance was given the chance to speak, and every one of them gave an emotional, sometimes tear-filled, argument why the lawmaker needed to vote for this bill and why he needed to encourage a vote soon. At the end of the meeting, just like our previous meetings, Sen. Pappageorge gave us no reason to mark him in the “yes” column. However, Schechter never gave up on him. Probably no lawmaker received as much attention from advocates as Sen. Pappageorge and, at the end of the day, he voted “yes” on every version of a smokefree bill to come before him.

Video contest
As another way to gain media attention and keep the public’s focus on making Michigan smokefree, the Campaign decided to conduct a video contest among middle and high school students statewide. The MI Smokefree Video Challenge encouraged students to create a short video telling state senators why Michigan should be the next smokefree state. Submissions were accepted for two months, then narrowed by the Campaign to the top five submissions. The public voted via our website for their favorite one.

Again, showing our strength in southeast Michigan, not only were there numerous submissions from Oakland County, but the winners were Bloomfield Hills eighth-grade students. The students received $500 for a trip to a smokefree city, and we garnered good local press on the issue.

In his winning statement, one of the students expressed a point that showed us we needed to continue pushing the health angle of our issue in our messaging — “When people come up with a list of things that kill people, they don’t even consider secondhand smoke. I think it’s completely unfair for someone to die from breathing in secondhand smoke if they have never smoked their entire life.”

Economic study
Another tactic the campaign decided to undertake was to commission our own economic impact study to prove smokefree status would not harm our state’s economy. Our opponents did a respectable job convincing lawmakers that in our already weakening economy, the state could not afford to pass policies that would harm business owners. We knew this simply was not true. We had studies from nearly every state that had already gone smokefree to disprove that. Yet we needed a report that was focused on Michigan, from a Michigan researcher.

Once we decided we needed to do a study, the first person we decided to approach was not only someone we knew would do a great job on the research, but someone who also had a unique perspective on the issue — Ken Sikkema. The former Senate majority leader had joined Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based policy research firm, after he left office due to term limits. While in office, Sen. Sikkema had refused to take up our issue. We were curious if we would consider our research project.

In our first meeting with Sikkema and his colleagues Emily Houk and Peter Pratt, Sikkema admitted that the evidence was stronger than he had given it credit for while in office. Even in his preliminary research, he said, he found that smokefree policies were one of the most researched and documented topics in the nation.

In the end, with a completed report in hand, not only did Sikkema help push the results with the news media and lawmakers, he went further on his own to publicly admit that had he known all the facts while still in office, he would and should have taken up smokefree air.

The report, Smokefree Workplaces: The Impact of House Bill 4163 on the Restaurant and Bar Industry in Michigan, was a review of the common issues surrounding smokefree workplaces, including the health impacts, level of public support, government regulation and economic impact. In conducting its research, Public Sector Consultants reviewed dozens of published studies, legislation in other states, public polls and Michigan’s legislative history on the issue. Highlights of the report included:

• Compelling scientific and health evidence supporting elimination of secondhand smoke exposure for all workers;
• No net economic impact on Michigan restaurants and bars;
• Increasing public support for smokefree air policies statewide and nationwide;
• Government interest and action in protecting state residents from secondhand smoke exposure dates back more than 20 years and does not constitute unwarranted regulation of businesses.

Sikkema’s report gave us compelling, empirical evidence that business would not suffer, which is exactly what we had hoped. Our opponents’ messaging immediately stopped discussing the economic impact and focused instead on the argument that passing this law constituted unwarranted government intrusion.

Cancer Society
One of the most impressive lobby days at the Capitol occurs every spring when the American Cancer Society brings in anywhere from 600 to 1,000 volunteers and staff from across the state. It’s not the number of advocates that makes the event so impressive. It’s the way the event is structured. The Society creates a Relay for Life style of atmosphere, with tents lining the sidewalks leading to the steps of the Capitol. No representative or senator can avoid walking past a cancer survivor or advocate in a purple shirt. The day has come to take on mythic proportions. We never received official word from the Senate that its vote would take place before the event, but it became our hunch that it might.

We always felt we could control the content of the bill better in the Senate than in the House. The entire Senate Democratic caucus — except one member — was committed to a vote on a smokefree bill. We also knew we had at least three Senate Republicans, leaving us needing one more vote to get it passed.

At this point, Big Tobacco was promoting a new idea — a smoking permit. A business could buy a permit and allow smoking. Give the state a mere $250 and the business would be exempt from any smokefree rules.

The Campaign’s response was a no-brainer. Status quo was better than this unhealthy and offensive idea. We took this proposal head on and labeled it either “Pay to Play” or “Permit to Kill.” The venom with which we articulated our position to lawmakers on this issue clearly had an effect. There was never a record roll call on this amendment — despite it being offered and introduced in bill form in the House by Rep. Steve Bieda, a Warren Democrat.

Hoping to have the issue off their plates before the American Cancer Society event, and being able to tell our thousand, passionate advocates that they had taken care of the bill, senators did take a vote on May 8. Although we had been pushing hard for the vote for six months, we were shocked with the outcome.

First came a vote on a Basham substitute, which was a “clean” bill — no exemptions. There were amendments offered, but none was adopted. We were fearful that if the Basham substitute was not adopted, the “Permit to Kill” version would be put up for a vote and garner the 20 votes necessary for passage. But we were astounded, and we’re pretty sure our opposition was, too, that the Basham substitute was adopted 25 to 12 with strong bipartisan support. We cheered, hugged and applauded in the lobby outside the Senate, but we were actually in a state of shock. This was not what we had expected…it was much, much better. Instead of three Republicans voting with us, we had an unimaginable nine. We had the strongest smoking ban possible, far better than the respectable ban passed by the House six months earlier.

To be sent to the governor for final approval, of course, a bill must clear both the House and Senate in identical form. Despite our joy at having a stronger Senate-passed bill, we were skeptical of our chances with it in the House. We only received 56 votes the first time around for a carefully crafted bill. Now the speaker’s two major issues were no longer exempt — cigar bars and casinos. It would be extremely difficult, but we were willing to take on that fight.

We accepted Sen. Bishop’s explanation for insisting on a clean bill, which we preferred all along. Although he was philosophically opposed to a ban, he believed that if there were going to be one it should apply equally to all. However, some of the business groups in town credited him with an ingenious strategy to kill the ban. He and Senate Republicans could take the high moral ground of approving and insisting on an absolute ban, knowing full well House Democrats would never pass such a measure and tick off the Detroit casinos.

Regardless, the Senate vote dramatically changed the debate. No longer was it about whether there would be a smoking ban. The debate was about whether there would be exemptions in a smokefree law. To delve a bit deeper, the debate was no longer about a laundry list of exemptions; it was limited to just two — cigar bars and casinos. The debate over private clubs, VFW halls, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, racetracks, outdoor patios and the like was over. Now the issue was whether to create two narrow exemptions. The line in the sand had been drawn.

Not so close
When the legislature returned from its summer break in the fall of 2008, we were excited and optimistic that our long-sought victory was close. Although our ban had only passed the House a year earlier with a bare-bones majority, we were returning with a stronger bill and believed all of our previous supporters would be with us again.

Editorials from newspapers around the state rang in again — many for the third, fourth, fifth or even tenth time — that it was finally time to end this issue and make Michigan smokefree. Behind the scenes we were constantly counting votes — how many we thought we would pick up with a stronger bill, and the few we might lose from lawmakers who had wanted some exemptions — and recording them on a whiteboard that was transformed into a color-coded spread sheet in one of our computers. In the end, we still felt we had solid support to push us over 60 “yes” votes.

We engaged our grassroots support once more, again focused on the House and asking for a concurrence vote on the Senate bill. But it wasn’t our strongest push. We were overconfident.

Speaker Dillon agreed to put the bill up for a concurrence vote. The board was open for more than an hour, and we sat in the lobby and in the balcony, watching with growing disappointment. Votes we had counted on were not materializing — more people wanted certain carve-outs than we had counted on. The Republican Senate was always supposed to be the tougher hill to climb, but here was the Democratic House throwing up greater obstacles. We had underestimated the challenge of a concurrence vote in the House. And to their credit, our opposition, mostly the restaurant and licensed beverage groups, had rallied their core supporters to fight the issue.

There was a third interest group that entered the fray prior to the vote — the Detroit casino lobby. The casino interests brought their biggest stars to Lansing to try to convince the Detroit delegation of the harm — lost revenues, taxes and jobs — a bill without a casino exemption would cause Detroiters.

There were also several lawmakers who chose not to vote or were noticeably missing from the vote that afternoon. We had always believed that when faced with a vote on a smokefree law, a majority of lawmakers would always vote “yes.” We reasoned that the issue was far too popular to vote “no” a mere six weeks before an election.

We were wrong. When the board closed, we had failed to garner the needed 56 votes. The tally stood at 50-49, with 11 legislators, nearly all of them “yes” votes, skipping out. Majority Floor Leader Steve Tobocman, of Detroit, motioned to reconsider the vote — a procedural move that kept the issue on life support — and the bill was tabled for the day.

We were defeated in a vote that demonstrated, painfully, some exemptions might be needed, and we were fuming. Tempers flamed within the coalition. Those who had always wanted to go to the ballot voiced their position yet again and caused more internal turmoil. We seemed to lose focus. We had one last chance left in the remaining months of 2008 — the unpredictable lame-duck session — and our coalition had some important decisions to make about what type of bill we could or would settle for.

Chapters 1 & 2 | Chapters 3 & 4 | Chapters 5 | Chapters 6, 7, & 8

Joe Schwarz’s Year of Living Dangerously

Surgeon and former CIA operative takes on his latest challenge:
an independent bid for governor

by Susan J. Demas
March 16, 2010

The year was 1965 and all hell was breaking loose in Jakarta. On September 30, six senior Army generals were rounded up and executed in an attempted communist coup in the poverty-ravaged nation. The ensuing battle for Indonesia’s heart and soul over the next few years would eventually claim a half-million lives and give rise to a new president.

Congressman Joe Schwarz campaigns for re-election on the streets in 2006. Photos by David Trumpie

This was the new normal for a 28-year-old doctor-turned-assistant naval attaché from Battle Creek, Michigan. Nearly 45 years later, Joe Schwarz still can’t talk about what he did to help stop the country from collapsing, although he is a fan of the Mel Gibson film about that era, The Year of Living Dangerously (When watching it with his daughter, Brennan, years ago, he told her, “That was your mother and me.”)

“A lot of other people — Americans, the British, Australians — wanted to help the good guy,” he simply says, “and in this case, it was [General] Suharto and the loyal Indonesian military.”

Schwarz would soon come face-to-face with the man who was preparing to take over as Indonesia’s new leader. As the violence was winding down in 1966, he was summoned for a new mission: teaching English to Suharto. Schwarz remembers following him around a big white table in the entranceway of his house, drilling him on basic phrases like “good morning” (“Just the simplest ways to ingratiate yourself in English, because he didn’t speak a word,” he says).

“I was chosen, not because I was the world’s greatest English teacher, but because I was the most inoffensive American — very junior person who couldn’t offend anybody,” Schwarz adds.

He was a long way from home. The youngest son of a World War I and II veteran, Schwarz enlisted with a friend in the Navy in 1965 and asked to be sent to Vietnam after completing an internship at L.A. County/USC Medical Center (“The recruiting officer looked at us and said, ‘Doctors, I don’t think I’m going to have much difficulty fulfilling your wish,’” he recalls). After spending a year suturing up the wounded and treating malaria cases near Da Nang, he received new orders to attend Naval Attaché School, which would lead to a hitch as a CIA operative.

“I showed the Marine Colonel, who was basically my commanding officer, my orders and he said, ‘Who the hell do you know?’ And I said, ‘Colonel, I don’t know anybody,’” Schwarz laughs.

For three years with the Agency, the former University of Michigan offensive lineman darted through Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia, where he met his future wife, fellow operative Anne Ennis (“She used to say, ‘Where else would a girl who grew up in Montana meet a boy from Michigan but in Jakarta?’” Schwarz grins).

He had always known he wanted to serve; indeed, it was the mantra of his father, Frank, a neurologist and psychiatrist. But Schwarz never dreamed he would be recruited by the CIA or see the things he did, even rubbing elbows with John Steinbeck, Charles Lindbergh and David Halberstam.

One weekend in Laos, the surgeon performed six leg amputations of Lao natives who were land mine victims. “You go up to the point of circulation, and that’s where you cut the leg off — sometimes above the knee, sometimes below the knee,” he recalls. “When I finished the fifth one, I thought, ‘God, there can’t possibly be any more,’ but there was another person flown in by an Air America chopper and I did that one, too. It’s not much fun, but basically, you save their lives.”

He always knew he wanted to serve in politics, although he never mapped out a plan for that, either. Within a few years of returning from Southeast Asia, he began another life, serving as mayor of Battle Creek, a state senator for 16 years and a congressman for a single term. The moderate Republican garnered a reputation for getting things done, leading successful fights to boost higher education funding and save the Battle Creek Air National Guard Base from closure.

“You sometimes have to lead people kicking and screaming down the road to do the right thing,” Schwarz says.

The lawmaker’s blunt style, stubbornness and temper ruffled some feathers, particularly on the far right (“He doesn’t suffer fools silently,” offers longtime friend Mike Ranville). But former Senate Majority Leader Dan DeGrow recalls Schwarz examining sick senators in the chamber’s back room, getting their family members into the U of M medical center and saving Sen. Mat Dunaskiss’ life in 2001 after he collapsed at the Senate podium from a seizure.

“He would just help everyone. That’s a side people don’t see as much,” DeGrow says.

Now 72, Schwarz is embarking on one final challenge: seriously weighing a run for governor as an independent. Although he’s never been one to shy away from speaking his mind (“He’s physiologically incapable of pandering,” daughter Brennan says), he seems relieved to have left the world of party politics behind.

“I’m doing this because I love this state and its people and its universities and everything about it. I am a very deep Michigander,” says Schwarz, who was known to absentmindedly doodle maps of the Mitten State while in congressional meetings. “And I think if people get to know me and I get to know them on a little wider basis, they might agree that I might be what’s needed to bring people together and grind down some of the sharp edges that have developed between one political party and the other.

“I think I can do it. And I think I can do it well for four years and then move on. And if I don’t make it, no hard feelings and I will have the personal satisfaction to know that I tried and that I didn’t walk away from something that I thought I should do.”

Michigan man
John Joseph Henry Schwarz could have lived anywhere in the world — that’s not an exaggeration. Instead, he left a high-flying career in the CIA to complete his medical training at Harvard and open up a small otolaryngology practice in Battle Creek.

“I have always felt a great affinity to this state and its people and to my hometown,” he says. “My hometown was very good to me and very good to my family…I came back utterly by choice. I felt I could make a difference.”

Schwarz’s story does not technically begin in Michigan — doctors shipped his mother, Helen, to Chicago to have a Cesarean section on November 15, 1937. Two weeks later, he returned to Cereal City via train (which perhaps birthed his lifelong love affair with railroads). His brother, Frank Jr., was 13 years his senior and sister Janet was a decade older, so young Joe (everyone in the Irish-German clan always called him Joe) was raised for much of his life as an only child.

The family lived at Fort Custer while Frank Sr. served as an Army physician. The sprawling base was home to 40,000 troops and had a mockup village named Hitlerville in the middle of the woods, strewn with live ammunition.

“Our parents always told us, ‘Don’t you dare go to Hitlerville,’” Schwarz recalls, unleashing his trademark short, guttural laugh. “And, of course, we always did. We would ride our bikes out there, but nobody ever got hurt. But as I think about it in retrospect, it was one of those supremely stupid things you do when you’re a kid.”

Schwarz was actually “kind of a straight arrow,” says his best friend, Blair Lyman — other than having a few beers and a few parties in high school when parents went away. At 6-2, the ruggedly handsome, crew-cut Schwarz was the big man on campus as senior class president, swim team captain and a member of the football and baseball teams. Not surprisingly, he was voted most popular by Battle Creek Central brethren, but it was in academics where he really shined.

“The guy is so smart, you can’t believe it,” Lyman says. “I wasn’t in a lot of classes with him. That was when they still marked on a curve, and no one wanted to get in his class, I tell you…A lot of us would go out at night and we’d see the light up in Joe’s room where he was studying. Most times we wouldn’t even stop.”

Throughout his political career, Schwarz has
maintained his Battle Creek medical practice.

At 17, Schwarz was accepted into Princeton, but he opted not to leave the state, instead following in his brother’s footsteps at U of M (“My mother almost had the big one,” he chuckles, noting she wanted him to go to an Ivy League school). He earned a history degree in 1959 and spent a year in graduate school at his alma mater with the goal of being a professor, something he would eventually fulfill at both Harvard and U of M.

But first his urologist brother intervened, as their father had died of Parkinson’s two years earlier. “He said, ‘You do what you want to do, but I think you would better serve yourself and others if you would go into medicine,’” Schwarz recalls. It obviously worked; he graduated from Wayne State University Medical School in 1964.

Following his manic five years in Southeast Asia, Schwarz completed his residency at Harvard, where he joined the junior faculty at the department of otolaryngology in 1973. He and Anne had married two years earlier and their only child, Brennan, was born in Boston in 1974.

That year, the Schwarzes decided to leave the Ivy League behind and make their home in Battle Creek, buying a simple sandy-brick ranch on the historic north side where Schwarz still lives today. Anne “took to Battle Creek like a duck to water,” he recalls, volunteering for everything from the Junior League to the Leila Arboretum. The family would also make frequent trips to her hometown of Kalispell on the edge of Glacier National Park, where Schwarz has since built a cedar summer home on Flathead Lake.

Not much has changed in 36 years besides an addition to the master bedroom; a stained-glass maize and blue “M” glints in the kitchen window and smoky railroad paintings by Howard Fogg adorn the walls, as well as an original C.M. Russell watercolor. A passionate gardener, Schwarz babies the four orchids in his living room overlooking a wooded backyard, where black squirrels routinely ransack his bird feeders.

The one thing missing is Anne, something still palpable in the house 20 years after she lost her battle with breast cancer. Brennan was only 16. It was the hardest thing Schwarz has been through. “He was real quiet,” Lyman recalls. “You’d have to start talking about different topics, because he would be drifting.”

Schwarz had a short-lived second marriage to Patti Woodworth, who served as Gov. John Engler’s budget director. Besides some of his CIA missions, that’s the only topic off-limits with the man known for being candid to a fault.

Political roots
Joe Schwarz has never been a particularly patient fellow. He always knew he wanted to run for office, so in the bicentennial year, he challenged then-U.S. Rep. Garry Brown in the GOP primary and lost (“I wouldn’t say it was arrogance, but it certainly was hubris,” Schwarz says now).

Little did he know that 30 years later, his long-delayed congressional career would end with another Republican primary.

Schwarz came of political age as a “Bill Milliken Republican, an Arthur Vandenberg Republican,” although his favorite president is Harry Truman. The fiscal conservative and social moderate has never voted a straight ticket, but usually favored Republicans for higher office. Schwarz did cast his ballot for John Kennedy in 1960, as he did for Jennifer Granholm in 2006.

His evolution as an independent has been gradual, fueled by the GOP’s rightward swing starting in the 1980s. There is increasingly little room within the party for even the slightest deviation on abortion (he is personally pro-life, but believes Roe v. Wade is the law of the land), gun rights (he thinks Michigan’s concealed weapon law is misguided), embryonic stem cell research (he chaired the pro-Proposal 2 effort in 2008) and gay marriage (he supports civil unions).

All of that has made him a heretic with the Republican Party base, which is fine by him. “I’ve always felt at home as an independent,” he says. “What the party feels about an issue has never influenced me on an important vote.”

In 1979 he won a nonpartisan seat on the Battle Creek City Commission. He went on to serve as his hometown’s mayor from 1985 to 1986 while juggling his medical practice, as he’s done throughout his political career. It was during his successful run for the state Senate that year that he met Ranville, an educator turned multi-client lobbyist, at a Charlotte parade. Ranville’s then-10-year-old daughter, Mara, had talked to Schwarz and shocked her father by coming back wearing a campaign T-shirt.

“She said, ‘Dad, you gotta meet this guy,’” Ranville recalls. “…She asked a couple of questions about K-12 education and he didn’t talk down to her. He treated her with dignity.”

Ranville would frequently lobby Schwarz on labor issues during his 16-year tenure. “He was always a very tough vote,” he says. “You frankly had to have your act together before you went in there.”

Though he’s most proud of hammering out Proposal A, which cut property taxes and instituted a statewide school funding system, Schwarz is probably best known for championing Michigan’s 15 public universities on the Appropriations Committee (“Engler would always say, ‘You guys are spending too much money,’” Ranville recalls). As governor, Schwarz has pledged to restore funding as a key way to turn Michigan’s economy around.

Lyman worked for his old friend for 12 years in the Senate after selling his own printing company. “He was one of the few senators who would actually read the bills,” he recalls. “The others would always come up to him with questions.”

Although many laud the Engler years as the model of legislative efficiency, Schwarz has one big regret. He admits that he and his fellow lawmakers failed to make long-term decisions to shore up the state’s finances, something that’s come back to haunt Michigan during the last decade-long recession.

“The legislature and the governor were very adept at finding places where money had been stashed away in one form or another and spending it,” he notes. “And the conscious reason was not that people wanted to spend all the money that was there. The unconscious reason was that no one could possibly imagine how the bottom would drop out of the economy, the difficult straights in which the automotive industry would find itself and nobody anticipated the general national and international downturn. Nobody anticipated that banks and financial institutions would behave so irresponsibly.”

Meeting McCain
There are some moments that forever change a political career. For Schwarz, it was a fall day in 1999 when U.S. Sen. John McCain arrived to speak at Lansing Community College.

Engler was one of George W. Bush’s biggest supporters, so no one from the administration would be greeting the former P.O.W. That didn’t set well with Schwarz, who decades before had been ordered by the CIA to help locate American soldiers captured in Vietnam and learned of McCain languishing in the Hanoi Hilton. While presiding over the Senate, he threw down the gavel and announced he was leaving to endorse McCain (“I was always the outlier,” he grins).

A day later, the senator invited him to chair his insurgent Michigan campaign, which Schwarz jovially accepted. The pair crisscrossed the state and became fast friends, culminating in McCain’s upset win here in 2000.

That led to McCain endorsing him in his next two big races — governor in 2002 and Congress two years later. Running in the Republican gubernatorial primary against Engler’s lieutenant governor, Schwarz scored only a dismal 19 percent of the vote.

“Organization Republicans were far more comfortable with Dick Posthumus than myself. Certainly Dick comported far more closely with them, especially on social issues,” he says. “But I deluded myself into thinking there might be some independent voters out there who would vote in the Republican primary…In retrospect, I’m not sure how anyone, including myself, could have thought anything else would happen.”

Ranville recalls Schwarz coming to him that year and saying, “‘I’m getting killed. Should I get out?’ I told him, ‘All I know is that you’re raising the level of debate.’” He accompanied Schwarz to an Observer and Eccentric editorial board meeting, where he was asked about fixing the state’s infrastructure. The senator said he’d raise the gas tax — something he still supports — which prompted one editor to ask how he’d get elected governor with an answer like that.

“He said, ‘Getting elected can’t be the end-all, be-all of everything,’” Ranville recalls. “‘Telling the truth is.’”

Schwarz had more success running in a six-way primary in 2004 for the open 7th congressional district seat. He managed to build a successful coalition of moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats, something his campaign manager, Matt Marsden, notes “wasn’t a fluke or luck. A good campaign is looking at the angles.”

Marsden went on to serve as Schwarz’s chief of staff in Washington. “It was a hell of a lot of fun,” says Marsden, now press secretary for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. “It was what working for an elected official should be. It was challenging and there was conflict, but there was also a common understanding of what direction we were going, and as long as we followed that direction with integrity, we’d be all right.”

Schwarz’s two years in Congress were busy ones; he served on the prestigious Armed Services Committee and was named one of the top 10 most effective freshmen. He traveled frequently with McCain to Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan, as well as to national security and climate change conferences in Europe.

“The only thing that saved me in my term in the U.S. House was my friendship with John McCain, because he included me in all sorts of things,” Schwarz says.

That didn’t turn out to be enough to pull him through a brutal, $3-million Republican primary in 2006. Tim Walberg, an ultraconservative former state representative and preacher, enlisted the help of Right to Life and the Washington anti-tax lobby Club for Growth. Round-the-clock ads lampooned Schwarz as being “embarrassingly liberal” for supporting earmarks and tax increases.

“I think it makes a very clear statement about a candidate if they accept assistance — especially money — from an organization like Club for Growth that they are, in my mind, above nothing, will do anything, say anything to win public office and that is precisely, precisely the wrong kind of person that I want representing me in the Congress or in the state legislature,” Schwarz says. “There’s no place in politics for personal attacks.”

Schwarz lost by six points that August, making him the first primary scalp for the Club. His supporters were “more devastated than he was,” Lyman says. Former Sen. John Kelly, one of his strongest Democratic backers, declares that “right-wing fanatics have infested the Republican Party and taken it away from its true roots…You’re defined by who your enemies are and that’s clear when it comes to Joe Schwarz.”

He continued serving as an ear, nose and throat surgeon at the Battle Creek Family Health Center, where 40 percent of his patients are on Medicaid and 20 percent are uninsured. On weekends, he works the New York Times crossword and attends mass at St. Philip’s, but relaxation is something that Brennan says “he doesn’t do very well.”

Schwarz also was asked to lecture at U of M’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Shelley Rosenberg, a West Bloomfield senior, took his public policy class last year and calls him a “phenomenal” professor. “You could ask any of the 52 students in the class and they’d say something along the same lines,” she says.

But Schwarz never got out of the political game. Almost immediately after leaving Congress, Granholm appointed him to her 12-person Emergency Financial Advisory Panel to help steer the state through its fiscal crisis (and promptly ignored the panel’s report). The Pentagon also enlisted the former naval officer in 2007 for its blue-ribbon panel on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And he was active in McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, although it was a blow when he was passed over as campaign chair.

Schwarz also led the Cure Michigan group that successfully won a 2008 constitutional amendment lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research. It’s long been a passion of the surgeon, who convinced then-U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert to let the issue come to a vote in Congress. Once again, he was butting heads with pro-lifers and “conservative theocrats.”

“Nobody in the recent past has been as vocal against our organization,” says Right to Life of Michigan lobbyist Ed Rivet. “Joe is Joe. We’re used to public scorn.”

Dave Maluchnik, spokesman for the Michigan Catholic Conference that also opposed Prop 2, dismissed Schwarz as “an ENT doc, not a stem cell biologist. Anyone who’s been in Michigan long enough knows of his beef with Right to Life folks. Plus, Dr. Schwarz doesn’t debate; he interrupts and talks over people.”

Schwarz admits he has little patience for those more interested in political grandstanding than the science behind stem cells.

“That’s the problem I have with Right to Life,” the practicing Roman Catholic says. “Don’t be my moral judge. I’ll be my moral judge and God will be my moral judge, but you’re not my moral judge.”

Though he was heavily courted to run for his old congressional seat that year as a Democrat (by now-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel no less), Schwarz declined, saying he wasn’t comfortable switching parties. But he did back his old friend, now-U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, the first Democrat to win in decades.

No, Schwarz knew that if he were ever going to run for office again, he would go for governor.

Independent’s day
Schwarz has heard the rap on his independent bid, that he’s still suffering from sour grapes after his GOP primary defeat. And he has a one-word answer ready: “Bullshit.” It’s that kind of straight talk that’s made him a darling with the press for decades.

The majority of voters don’t identify with either party. But he knows it will be an uphill battle, noting that Michigan has no history of independents winning higher office. “I think we’re very close to having a third party in this country,” he says. “It may not happen, but I think we’re close enough that it’s a distinct possibility.”

Still, it’s strained some friendships, like that with Michigan Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser, who was in the war room with Schwarz and Marsden on the night of the ’06 loss. “I don’t think he will be governor,” says Weiser, a fellow U of M alumnus. “I have nothing negative to say about him. He’s just a very, very, very big longshot.”

This time around, Schwarz plans to call McCain and let him know of his campaign, but he’s not asking for an endorsement. “He’s got a little primary bid down in Arizona,” the former congressman notes. “I don’t know that he’d want to do anything that could potentially cost him votes down there. Nor would I expect him to.”

Former Senate leader DeGrow is still a strong Republican, but says he has no hesitation in writing Schwarz a check. The state CEO “has to govern from the center. He’ll treat voters like grownups. I think they’ll find that refreshing,” says DeGrow, now superintendent for St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency. “… If a wrestler from Minnesota can do it, Joe can do it.”

Brennan wasn’t surprised in the least when her dad decided to jump back into the political fray (“It would take a psychic shift in his being for him not to want to run again,” she says). Still, a former lobbyist who describes herself as “definitely” a Democrat, Brennan notes the pitfalls.

“I’ll support him in whatever he wants to do,” she declares. “It’s hard for an independent to win. You have to ask for money and he’s not good at that.”

It’s true that Schwarz is far more comfortable getting things done in the halls of government than hitting the rubber chicken and county fair campaign circuit. He’d rather let his laurels speak for him than sell people on himself. And he’s also known to unload phrases like “there are all sorts of emanations from those penumbrae” in casual conversation, or quote Kipling when discussing the surge in Afghanistan (“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains/And the women come out to cut up what remains/ Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/ An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier”).

Marsden describes his former boss as a good candidate when he’s disciplined, but he “thinks he knows more than anybody else. Campaigns, that’s an area he needs to recognize he may not know as much as what everyone else does.

“If you’re running for governor, don’t say you’re thinking about it,” Marsden adds. “It allows detractors to say you’re playing around, doing it for your ego.”

Schwarz says he is serious and is putting his campaign team together. He’s also vowed to only serve a single term.

“From day one, when you assume an office, the plans for the next election become a distraction,” Schwarz says. “And the governor of this state can have no distraction for the next four years.”

Ready to lead
Job one for a newly inaugurated Gov. Schwarz will be establishing a good relationship with the legislature so the “budget doesn’t turn into a free-for-all.”
  
He sees himself as a strong executive, more in the mold of Engler than Granholm, but adds, “Like any other governor, I have my own style. You have to convince people that everybody’s got to give a little to get a little.”

“He understands state government thoroughly,” says DeGrow. “We’ve tried people who don’t over the last eight years, so maybe it’s time to try someone who gets it.”

Schwarz also isn’t running a lollipops-and-ice-cream campaign by promising a quick economic turnaround if elected. After the state’s near-death experience with the domestic auto industry, he estimates it will take eight to 10 years for Michigan to get on firm footing with a predictable fiscal future to attract businesses. “You get the ship on the right course and you build year after year,” he says.

Getting there will mean painful budget cuts, government reforms, and yes, tax increases. Schwarz says a business tax hike is off the table, but he wants to see the Michigan Business Tax rewritten as a fair corporate income tax.

“I don’t understand how anybody says, ‘We can get out of this and everything’s going to be fine, but we never need to look at anything that raises any tax that raises revenue.’” he declares. “…[Republicans] think that way because they want to get re-elected and they don’t want to go back home and tell people the truth — that the state is in big trouble and if we don’t get the revenue situation straightened out, you madam, and you sir, who are looking at decreased police and fire protection, decreased maintenance on your roads, decreased number of dollars coming into your public schools, are going to be madder than you are now.

“And you’ve got to connect the dots. And the dots are that the revenues in this state right now are totally inadequate even for the basic services that the state is required by law to provide. Now suck it up, legislators, and do what you need to do. Nobody wants to have their taxes raised. That’s the way it is. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

Club for Growth President David Keating says that just proves the group’s point that Schwarz is a chronic tax-and-spender.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” he says. “It’s certainly not what Michigan needs. It indicates he’s certainly not a fiscal conservative. He might be next to the Democrat running, although I don’t know who’s running.”

The physician is equally frank about the cuts he’ll make, some of which will come at the expense of state workers.

“If there’s a great hue and cry, I don’t understand,” he says. “You still have a job. And if you can go home to your neighbors, who used to work for Ford, or used to work for General Motors, or used to work for Chrysler, or used to work for Visteon, and say, ‘Oh, woe is me, I’m going to have my job and my salary’s going to be the same or within 5 percent, but some benefits are going to be cut,’ your GM friend, your Chrysler friend or your Ford friend or your Visteon friend or your Delphi friend is going to say, ‘Piss off.’”

At 73, Schwarz would not be the Wolverine State’s oldest governor (that title belongs to Luren Dickinson). But as for anyone questioning his age, he sighs, “I don’t know what 72 is supposed to feel like. I feel the same as I did 20 years ago.”

Of all the jobs he’s had, the one he’s enjoyed most is being a surgeon in Battle Creek — something he would have to give up as governor. “After 36 years, I’m prepared to,” Schwarz says.

But isn’t he nervous about the last chapter in his political career ending in failure?

“Failure at a material goal is part of the human condition and we all have those types of failures,” he says philosophically.

He looks around the house that he built with the love of his life. It’s where he read to his daughter, pored over legislation and took many a late-night phone call for emergency surgeries. He’s had so many lives, battling against unspeakable horror overseas, coaxing people back from the brink of death on the operating table — and yet he always knew he’d end back here in Michigan, fighting to make it a better place.

Schwarz runs his fingers through his thinning, snow-white hair and smiles ever so slightly. “Failure to do what you think is right and what you think you are able to do to serve a state that you love would be inexcusable.”

It’s the creed he’s always lived by. And for Joe Schwarz, it’s now or never.

Susan J. Demas, a regular columnist and contributor to Dome, is 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.

Searching for Economic Prosperity

by Jean B. Eggemeyer
March 16, 2010

In recent years policymakers in Michigan and in Washington, D.C. have been looking for ways to foster the growth and development of high-tech, new economy businesses in order to provide stable economic growth, reduce unemployment and improve quality of life.

In a new book published by the Kalamazoo-based W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, William Lazonick cautions, however, that we should fully understand what new economy corporations will and will not deliver in the way of economic prosperity before we wholeheartedly endorse the reorientation of our economy toward them.

Lazonick, a Harvard-trained economist and University of Massachusetts-Lowell professor and director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness, spent five years studying how large firms in the information and communications technology sector are creating growth. He also dug into the economic, policy and societal impacts of that growth.

He explains that, in a sense, he looked at the U.S. economy in its best light — at companies in an expanding, highly competitive and globally interconnected industry that provide high-paying jobs — and studied whether or not the major players are delivering stable growth with equitable distribution of income.

He focused on the major actors in the sector — Motorola, Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Google and several others — because the firms control such a large allocation of resources in the U.S. economy.

What he found is not altogether encouraging.

In Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States, Lazonick “catches us up with history,” explaining how the economy’s transformation over the past four decades has impacted employment and what we can expect in the future.

Over the last 30-40 years, the U.S. economy has seen the death of the “organization man” — stereotypically described as a highly educated, white man enjoying secure, career-long employment with one firm that offers generous pension and other benefit programs — and the rise of the new economy business model that, instead, values innovation, globalization, employment mobility and stock price growth.

While the new economy business model has its pros, including dispersing intellectual talent and innovation through a greater number of companies, creating new avenues to create wealth and improving the standard of living in many countries, it has its drawbacks as well. One major one being the jobless economic recovery created by the increased globalization of the workforce; i.e. outsourcing labor — even high-skill labor — to lower-cost countries.

Lazonick argues that another serious and substantial roadblock to sustainable prosperity in the U.S. is the relatively recent focus on stock price, brought about by the advent of stock options as a common compensation component. Stock options have led corporate leaders to employ stock repurchasing strategies, which, Lazonick contends, benefit executives but drain funding from investments in innovation and human resources, which could lead to true economic growth. Lazonick places a lot of the blame for the current state of the U.S. economy at the feet of corporate executives.

He further contends that the overarching public corporation goal to “maximize shareholder value,” is steering the economy downward rather than producing growth.

William Lazonick

To help correct the course of the U.S. economy, Lazonick calls on policymakers to selectively ban the practice of stock repurchasing to stem the economic damage he believes it creates.

The free market orientation in the U.S. — the notion that whatever corporations decide, they should be able to do — is very destructive to the U.S. economy, Lazonick further argues. He believes the political process has been captured by leaders of corporations who are motivated in large degree by personal gain, and that the implications are widespread since large firms control so much of the allocation of financial and human resources in the U.S. economy.

For a state like Michigan, which is suffering from a century-long reliance on the old economy business model and whose largest firms are being remade in the new economy mold, the research the book uncovers will be critical.

Bookworm Jean B. Eggemeyer owns the Williamston-based communications and marketing firm Carillon Communications LLC, serving the business and association communities.

Change Reform We Can Believe In?

by Annie Scott
March 16, 2010

Here’s what’s going on in a land far away but not so far apart from the Mitten …

Amidst a Sacramento firestorm and Hollywood-caliber melodrama, a California judge had to rule the other day on whether a future ballot initiative calling for open primaries (Prop 14) should be labeled as “reform” or merely “change.”

There were a few other words in dispute, too. But the political war over reform/change was way over the top, yet another reflection of the acrimony and dysfunction in the state capital.

How could the meanings of reform/change set off such a spectacle?

The short answer — you don’t want the long one — is that the open-primaries “reform” proposal, or Prop 14, came from a state senator who is one of the few moderate Republicans left in town. The legal challenge came from the solidly Democratic California School Employees Association, which claimed Prop 14 doesn’t constitute “real” reform and shouldn’t be allowed to deceive voters in November. It sued to switch “reform” to “change.”

The Democratic-controlled legislature had put Prop 14 on the ballot as part of a wretched budget deal hated by all. And since they didn’t really like it anyway, the Dems, as soon as they found out about the school employees’ legal challenge, advised the state’s lawyers not to fight the measure they themselves had put on the ballot. Which touched off another round of accusations, name calling and games playing.

The judge ultimately ruled in favor of “reform.” But while the proposition’s backers decried the wording to be a make-or-break factor, most of the people I’ve talked to don’t seem to think it will have any effect on the way they vote.

This is just the latest brouhaha in the Golden State’s quest to reform its failing system of governance. It’s getting a little ridiculous. The People are clamoring for big improvements, not big drama.

Indeed, there is widespread agreement that the system is broken. Exhibit A: the disastrous budget hole. Exhibit B: the pervasive gridlock and absurd, hyper-partisan bickering. C: the still-faltering economy. D: the fact the legislature has failed to pass a budget on-time in 22 of the last 30 years. There is a full alphabet’s worth of alarming, pathetic examples of the state’s failings and flaws.

Fortunately, there’s an abundance of ideas from every sector on the best ways to fix these complex problems. Unfortunately, California’s efforts for reform have gotten stuck in the old one-step-forward-two-steps-back routine.

In case you haven’t been following the latest happenings in the wild west, here’s a basic rundown on the state’s race for reform.

In February the long-shot campaign to call a limited Constitutional Convention was put on hold indefinitely due to a lack of cash. Coalition groups that led the charge, such as Repair California and California Forward, had to wave the white flag and settle for pushing more incremental changes for the time being. Despite widespread Con-Con support among The People of California, proponents just couldn’t raise the millions of dollars needed to get their proposals on the ballot. Many potential deep-pocket funders were more content with the status quo.

Then, there was the excitement over the state’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission. Thanks to the successful passage of Proposition 11 on the November 2008 ballot, the new 14 citizen commissioners will take over the legislature’s former task of redrawing the lines for state Assembly, Senate and State Board of Equalization districts. When applications started rolling in, I thought, finally, a real step toward addressing the culture of uber-partisan-polarity that paralyzes Sacramento. Finally, this may help get more moderates elected so things can get done up there!

I even researched how to apply for a commissioner’s seat. Unfortunately, I was ineligible for several reasons. The goal seems to be finding 14 people in the state who are politically engaged, California-rooted voters yet devoid of a single political tie. Regardless, the idea sounded promising and seemed to be moving forward with real momentum.

Then I heard about Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) and more than a dozen Democratic members of Congress kicking in a total of $160,000 to try to kill the commission in favor of returning this vital task to the legislature, through an initiative called the Financial Accountability in Redistricting Act. You can call it whatever you want, but real people see it as an ugly attempt by those already in power to protect their…seats.

Fortunately, all of this mess, especially the collapse of Con-Con and citizens’ demand for action, has somehow inspired the legislature, after months of holding aimless hearings, to introduce a package of what appear to be real, fundamental reforms. It will take a two-thirds vote of both houses to put the entire package on the November ballot. Included are proposals that would:

• change the budget approval process so that only a simple majority is required instead of the painful two-thirds
• require lawmakers to identify funding sources for any program that costs $25 million or more
• prohibit state government from grabbing local tax revenue when strapped for cash
• rein in the problematic ballot box budgeting by mandating all citizen initiatives specify a funding source
• force legislators to forego their pay if they fail to pass a budget on time
• strengthen legislative oversight of state agencies
• reduce by one-third the number of bills the legislature considers each year.

It’s by no means a perfect package, but it just might be the last good chance for real reform in the near term. If enough Republicans can get on board with Democrats to put it on the ballot, Californians will get the chance to make the call on reforms they’ve been demanding for so long.

There always will be more stumbling blocks that pop up, that’s a given. But for the most part, the wheels are finally in motion here.

I don’t know if that amounts to “reform” or “change,” but I hope we can all agree that it’s progress.

Annie Scott lives and works in San Diego and sends dispatches back to her beloved Michigan.

Compromise Health Insurance Reform Plan Nears Introduction

Legislation rises out of flames of 2007-08 standoff over Blues’ proposal

by John Foren
March 16, 2010

While health care reform remains on life support in Washington, key Michigan lawmakers are preparing to introduce a sweeping new health insurance package, perhaps before the end of March.

The legislation — being crafted by Sen. Tom George (R-Kalamazoo) and Rep. Marc Corriveau (D-Northville) — came out of the flames of the 2007-08 battle over the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan market reform bills.

The powerful Blues lost that bitter fight, undone by well-coordinated lobbying from a coalition of groups and by opposition from key Republicans, such as Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop and Attorney General Mike Cox.

But Blue Cross has been involved in discussions on the new package, joined at the table by its strongest competitors. The legislation appears to be aimed at a compromise that would extend some relief to the Blues in handling high-risk individual market cases while addressing competitors’ concerns that Blue Cross was being greedy and trying to squeeze them out.

George and Corriveau are key players because they head the health policy committees of their respective chambers. The pair largely put talks on hold a few months ago as President Barack Obama’s health care efforts gained steam. But discussions picked up after it was clear Obama’s program was in political quicksand.

“With federal health care reform on…shall we say…pause, it has re-energized folks not only in Michigan but other states that if reform is going to take place it’s going to be state by state,” said Rick Murdock, of the Association of Health Plans, which represents HMOs and aligns with other commercial carriers, such as Aetna.

Murdock, who helped lead opposition to the old Blues bills, predicts a new package any day now.

Others aren’t willing to put a date on an introduction, but they’re clearly feeling optimistic that something will happen soon. Corriveau says it will be in this legislative session.

“We’re looking for incremental changes that maybe will put Michigan out front of the country on things like consumer protection and [covering] pre-existing medical conditions,” Corriveau said.

So, there’s cause for celebration that two warring sides have come together, right? Not so fast.

The trouble is, the opposing sides in the legislature aren’t likely to forget their differences so easily. Given the election season — which means a shortened legislative session — and the gridlock already enveloping Lansing, chances of a complex health reform package sailing through are slim to none, said Bill Rustem, president and chief executive officer of Lansing’s Public Sector Consultants.

“There are all these issues out there and they can’t agree on any of them,” Rustem said. “Hyper partisanship has reigned the last several years, and now we’re into accelerated hyper partisanship.”

At the center of the insurance reform issue sits Blue Cross, vilified by many Republicans and seen as a friend to many Democrats.

Blue Cross has special status as the state’s “insurer of last resort” and is required to sell health insurance to anyone who can afford it, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions and other factors.

In return, the Blues gets non-profit status and tax exemptions worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Its standing also allows it such things as discounts on fees charged by medical providers.

One key component of the proposed plan appears to be forcing other insurers to relax their rules on accepting patients with pre-existing medical problems, such as cancer.

Some involved in the discussions say all companies also would have to offer an inexpensive basic benefits plan aimed at making insurance available for many more people, notably those uninsured and staggered by Michigan’s economy.

Corriveau says there also would be a ban on “reunderwriting,” in which rates are changed after an illness is diagnosed.

In return, Blue Cross would give up cold, hard cash, putting some or all of the money it saves through its tax exemptions into a fund that would help the other companies underwrite riskier cases.

Most of the changes are centered on insurance for individuals, the sector of the market that’s boomed as companies cut loose employees or cut benefits, forcing people to get their own health care.

That portion of customers used to be small back in the days of the Big Three (and Four), when benefits were lifetime and nary a concern. As a result, Blue Cross didn’t need to worry about being the insurer of last resort and picking up the relatively few individuals who weren’t covered by someone else.

In the past couple decades, though, Michigan’s economy has left many individuals out in the cold and fleeing to Blue Cross for coverage. And that’s caused the Blues to ask for help.

“Our biggest issue going forward is we see the individual marketplace growing by leaps and bounds,” said Mark Cook, Blue Cross vice president for governmental affairs. Losses on individuals mounted as out-of-state competitors “cherry picked” healthier customers, he said.

Blue Cross wants the expanding costs and higher-risk individuals spread among other companies and is willing to contribute to a pool to cover some of the expenses, Cook said. It still appears to be seeking changes in how it’s regulated by the state, however, a sore point in the previous legislative fight.

He said the company is happy that there no longer seems to be a debate about the need for insurance reform, only over how to do it.

But, Cook warns, it’s urgent that the legislature take action.

“The reason three years ago that we began pushing this is because we saw challenges on the horizon. Those challenges haven’t gone away. If anything, they’ve grown,” he said. “The marketplace changes that have been driving the need for reform are just increasing.”

Eric Schneidewind is president of the state AARP, which was part of the coalition fighting the original Blues package. Schneidewind, an attorney and former chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, doesn’t view things with the same perspective as Blue Cross, but agrees the new package will distribute the insurance burden more equally.

“A person in our group said it best. Before, we were talking about making the Blues more like the private industry. Now, we’re talking about making the private industry more like the Blues,” Schneidewind said.

Even in Lansing, the bitterness in the previous Blues battle was striking. In an informal poll of two dozen capital insiders conducted by Dome magazine early in 2009, the campaign to stop the blues was most often cited as the best lobbying campaign of the 2007-08 session.

Blue Cross’s power is undeniable; it controls much of Michigan’s health insurance market, has ties to top business groups that sell its insurance, and doles out hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions.

The original package introduced in late 2007 would have allowed the Blues-owned Accident Fund to sell multiple insurance lines, taking in private insurers, and would have limited “cherry picking” by Blue Cross competitors.

Another component would have basically forced commercial carriers to help fund Blue Cross’s high-risk pool of customers.

Opponents called it a power play and said Blue Cross was trying to have it both ways, keeping its tax-exempt status while acting more and more like a for-profit behemoth. Blue Cross cited hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and said it was simply trying to level the insurance playing field.

The package sped through the Democratic-run House, but things slowed when it hit the Senate, then got really sticky.

Cox, flanked by representatives from AARP and Consumers Union, held a news conference in December 2007 to attack the package, contending it would allow the Blues to run rampant and jack up insurance rates with little oversight.

The UAW and Michigan Chamber of Commerce soon signaled their misgivings, too.

Both sides set up their own coalitions of supporters; Consumers for Fair and Affordable Insurance Reform backed the legislation, while Put Michigan People First opposed it.

Put Michigan People First — including Murdock’s and Schneidewind’s groups — used a media campaign and lobbying that put a populist spin on the opposition.

The campaign emphasized the need to expand coverage to the state’s uninsured, a hot button issue during the age of layoffs, and portrayed Blue Cross as money-hungry and trying to shirk its traditional responsibilities as insurer of last resort. It successfully hit that message hard in making the rounds of media editorial boards around the state.

Many newspapers followed by trumpeting the need to slow down and take measure of what Blue Cross was seeking. That gave already reluctant senators just enough pause to slow things to a crawl.

The effort worked.

The package met its death in December 2008 when Senate Republicans let it languish after numerous stabs at a compromise between the chambers.

“We felt the legislation ended up leaving them with all the advantages they had without the burdens,” said Schneidewind, summing up the opposition.

He said the intense work with the coalition — which also included groups representing the disabled and backing from some labor and business organizations — “was sort of fun, because you really felt like at the end of the day that [fighting the package] was a good thing to do.”

Schneidewind doesn’t remember a turning point in the efforts, just an increasing sense among lawmakers that the package wouldn’t lead to more Michigan citizens getting more affordable insurance.

“You’d go through all this agony and end up making the situation worse rather than better,” he said.

Organizers said the coalition’s strategy grew out of the need to join together multiple organizations who couldn’t win the fight on their own but could if they jointly battled Blue Cross’s huge resources and connections.

Opponents accused Blue Cross of overstating its financial woes and of simply pushing too hard, too fast. The Blues never recovered from opponents’ belief that it simply ramrodded legislation through the House without enough time to study the complexities, critics now say.

“They overreached,” said Sen. George, a key legislative figure in putting the brakes on the package. “They asked for too much…They do have a legitimate issue, but I think they overstated it and hurt their competitors too much.”

There also was simple partisan politics involved. As Rustem says, “For Republicans, Blue Cross is viewed as a haven for Democrats.”

For instance, Blue Cross CEO Daniel Loepp is well-known in the Capitol from his days as former Democratic House Speaker Curtis Hertel’s chief of staff.

“Blue Cross is looked at suspiciously,” said Sen. Ron Jelinek (R-Three Oaks), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “They’re sitting there with large reserves, spending reserves to buy other insurance companies…Nobody is perfect in this world.”

Blues supporters say the criticism is misguided that Blue Cross tried to exert its strength and force the bills through.

“It’s hard to imagine that something that started in 2007 and was discussed in double digits of hearings and went all the way to the end of 2008 wasn’t aired sufficiently,” said Blue Cross’s Cook.

Supporters say it’s important not to overlook Blue Cross’s traditional role in Michigan in covering the poor and uninsured.

“They do provide an awful lot of public good to the state,” said Sen. Deb Cherry (D-Burton). She serves as chair of the Greater Flint Health Coalition and cites Blue Cross’s multi-million dollar contribution to the state’s MiChild program of uninsured children.

George says the new legislation seeks a middle ground between what Blue Cross and its competitors originally wanted. And, he said, he still feels it’s important to pursue the issue and not let it drop, especially to avoid a lame-duck effort at the end of the year.

“The timing would be good while there’s all this debate in Washington [right now],” he said.

He also praised, if in a limited way, Blue Cross’s part in negotiations. “I think Blue Cross spent a lot of money trying to get their way. They’re now reassessing. They’re now at the table working fairly. They are making a fair effort.”

Corriveau believes many of the problems that afflicted the original package have been corrected in the new plan.

“It’s interesting that two years later we’re here without any reform,” he said, “and we can’t keep going down the path we’re going on.”

John Foren is the former editor of The Flint Journal and spent years as a reporter for Booth Newspapers in Washington D.C., Lansing and Flint. He is an instructor at the Michigan State University School of Journalism.

Call for a Constitutional Convention

by Craig Ruff
March 16, 2010

I support a state constitutional convention. Whether one will be called is to be decided this November by voters, in accordance with a requirement in the current constitution that the question be raised every 16 years.

The existing document admittedly has no fatal flaws. Fatal is the key word here, as Michigan state government, despite its failings, still has a pulse.

I commend to Dome readers the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s analysis of this issue. Go to http://www.michamber.com/mx/hm.asp?id=concon for answers to many questions you may have about constitutional history and the procedures a call would set in action.

I can posit many problems with the current constitution. It is a bloated mess. Interest groups have riddled it with self-serving protections. This document, with its 31 amendments, handcuffs state policymakers.

My primary reasons for supporting a convention are positive. I want a diverse group of 148 people to take a very long look at the foundations of state and local government; to use this special occasion to rise above the daily political clamor and the attendant sensitivities du jour; to modernize the structures of government; to give Lansing lawmakers discretion to fix problems as they arise; to make it a short, clear, and enduring document.

We’re in the fifth decade of the 1963 constitution, and Michiganians are enduring horrible economic times. We find governance indecisive, root bound, and paralyzed. Our economy and culture have changed much. It is sad to see public governance hobbled in place and incapable of easing change, let alone fostering it.

Elections are about the times. We use the ballot to punish or reward politicians, based on how we feel today. Ephemeral accountability, I call it. In crisis, we may wish to return seasoned hands to the ship of state, but term limits deny us that right. We may wish to place more accountability in one branch or level of government, but the constitution confines us. We may need to dramatically change spending priorities and taxing policies, but the constitution earmarks close to 80 percent of taxpayer dollars.

The problem is not just politics; it’s also how we have shackled the people who must work in that arena. Michigan, like many other states, adopted a very lengthy, highly detailed, and populist document, written in a given era and not terribly adaptable to social transformation.

A science writer, Timothy Ferris, writes of the U.S. Constitution that “it leaves citizens free to experiment.” In its relative brevity, it is beautiful. It permits the nation to have a government sail with it in both stormy and tranquil times while protecting the people’s rights.

Writers of the U.S. Constitution concluded that it should be amended only with great difficulty, and so it is: an amendment may be proposed only by (a) a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the U.S. Congress or (b) a formal appeal by two-thirds of state legislatures. Then, adoption must be approved by three-quarters of the nation’s state legislatures.

Writers of the current Michigan constitution concluded that the document should be amended with relative ease: an amendment may be proposed by (a) a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the legislature or (b) by a relatively small number of voters’ signatures on a petition. In this day of well-funded interest groups, the latter is the road often chosen, and, once the question is on the ballot, with enough additional money the group may sell it to voters.

A huge difference, then, between the U.S. and state constitutions is the relative ease with which a special interest or passion of the moment may trigger significant change.

Great change is underway in Michigan. More is in the offing. To meet these challenges, adaptation, nimbleness, and innovation will be crucial. Government not only should partner in change, it should lead the way.

I am well aware of why there is opposition to a state constitutional convention. It is fear, and it’s not entirely illegitimate. Some number of our 20,000 elected officials could lose their public post via consolidation and streamlining. A new document could remove some groups’ policy protections, or it could grant policy protections to these same groups’ ideological or economic adversaries.

It is only human to fear change, even if the purpose is to alter an unworkable or undesirable status quo.

Constitutional convention delegates are elected, and some voters will send Johnny-one-notes, zealots, and nitwits to a convention, just as they do to public office. But history tells us that the vast majority of convention delegates will be high-minded and humbled by the power and responsibility with which they are charged. If a hijacking occurs or delegates conjure up a document worse than the one we have, voters — who have the last word — will be smart enough to reject what is hatched.

In our wretched economic times, with governments all around the state struggling to do the same or more with less, critics point to the cost of a convention. But I counter that state government has spent about $1 trillion since adopting our current constitution. It spends more than $40 billion a year. The cost of a convention will be chump change. It is a one-time expenditure, and it could lead to revamping government in ways to recover the costs in a week or less. Do the math.

The only thing to fear is not change but rather the absence of it. Risk is all around us. I support the call for a state constitutional convention because opportunity far outweighs risk.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.

Smokefree Sausage

by T. Scott
March 16, 2010

Throw barbs at this Michigan Legislature if you will (and must, because it’s usually justified), but don’t overlook the fact that last December it did produce one of its most important pieces of work in many years.

Whether it was luck (give an infinite number of lawmakers…), divine intervention by a fed-up deity, or simply enough legislators catching up with public demand, the legislature finally enacted a measure to clear the smoke from Michigan’s workplaces (most all of them), including restaurants and bars (most all of them).

Breathe at last, breathe at last. Thank God Almighty, we can breathe at last…

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t without pain, passion and compromise. But when it was done, what was done will mean a healthier Michigan.

Our lengthy cover story this month (“Clearing the Air: How the Smoking Ban Was Won”)  takes us deep inside the last five years of that legislative journey, with its torturous twists, excruciating delays and constant uncertainty. It’s somewhere that, until now, only those directly involved in the fight have been.

Two of the key players, Peter Ruddell and Emily Gerkin Palsrok from the Campaign for Smokefree Air, approached Dome some weeks after the bill signing. They had a question. Would Dome be interested in publishing their account of how the legislation came to pass? They had been going over their notes, talking about the high and low points, and thought it made a compelling story.

They had me from the word compelling.

But the antennae also went up. Dome would not be interested in a simple, self-serving piece, it was explained. Even within the “our story” nature of the article and use of the victors’ viewpoint, accuracy and fairness were paramount. Journalism is often described as the first cut at history, and this would undoubtedly be the first cut at describing how Michigan enacted one of the most important pieces of legislation in its recent history. We needed to get it right.

We all agreed to go forward, something Peter and Emily probably regretted (as did their families) as their draft grew beyond 5,000 words, passed 10,000 and approached 14,000. There are plenty of books out there that aren’t that long.

As it turned out, those initial cautions were not necessary. Emily and Peter, professionals in their careers as advocates, did a great job under a tough deadline, all the more outstanding for the fact they are not journalists, academics or screenwriters by trade. Their concise prose wove together the many elements of the Campaign’s drive for a comprehensive smoking ban. They reported facts, explained strategies and revealed the human drama of the Campaign hitting a new wall every time it started to make progress, pushing its leaders to struggle constantly over whether to keep faith in the legislative process or abandon years of work in the trenches to go to the ballot.

Admittedly, it’s a long story, especially for reading online. But, I promise, your work will be rewarded if you stick with it, even if you must come back and read only a chapter or two at a time. The final product provides an excellent case study for anyone interested in public policy and politics. In this case, what jumps out is the political importance of the thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations that had signed on to the “cause.” The Campaign did indeed run on what the group described as People Power. The story, in addition to being instructive, is also, well, compelling.

In a nutshell, that’s what Dome is all about. We’re here to inform and entertain, and not in bites, clips and blogs that don’t last as long as a hiccup (or have as much substance). We’re not afraid to put up a long article; we know our readers can handle it.

We also know our readers have their own perspective on the smoking ban issue. Many were involved directly. Our cover story can’t possibly be the definitive piece on the subject: it is only a first cut at the history of the legislative action.

As always, we encourage readers to amplify, supplement and disagree with what we’ve published. Posting an informed and thought-provoking comment adds to the richness of the record for all others to read.