Truth in Advertising

by Tim Skubick
February 26, 2010

When the Snyder for Guv guys were fact-checking their notorious Nerd commercial, they missed one huge error. The announcer claimed that business guy Snyder had a Ten-Point Plan that the typical career politician would not understand.

Turns out, every politician will understand. That’s because much of the Snyder blueprint contains some of the very same verbiage career politicians have been uttering for years.

The Snyder education reform paper, for example, contains such insightful revelations as, “The state needs to adapt by aggressively working to develop a populace that is better trained and prepared to compete in a global economy.”

Or how about this one: “Michigan’s high school graduates should be prepared to succeed at the next level of instruction and in their careers.”

To be fair, he does deserve credit for issuing a series of white papers on how he would change government. While others are searching for the pithy 10-second soundbite, Snyder is grinding out pages of here’s-what-I-would-do material. Good for him — and for you if you read them.

But frankly, there isn’t a ton of specifics on how he would do all this. Or as Walter Mondale wondered years ago, where’s the beef?

His campaign, which gets paid to defend him against critical media pieces, contends there will be more beef down the road and, get this, “the level of detail on most of these is something that candidates shy away from.”

The reason they shy away from details is that if you don’t give any out, you can’t be held accountable later on for not delivering on your promises.

For a guy who sells himself as a non-career politician, he sounds an awful lot like…dare we say…a career politician.

Snyder also glosses over stuff he apparently does not want to address. In the section on states that are doing well on education, he highlights Minnesota for making a “strong commitment to education and investments that have yielded formidable results” and his data is spot on. What he forgot or did not want to point out is that Minnesota has one of the highest tax rates in the country. Geez, someone running in a GOP primary sure as heck wouldn’t want to admit that a high-tax state was actually successful…unless, of course, he or she wanted to lose.

In another shot at career politicians, Snyder laments that lawmakers put off to the “last minute” finalization of the Race to the Top state legislation to qualify for more federal aid for schools. That’s an uninformed charge. Lawmakers wanted time for input from all the interested parities and did not want to jam any reforms down anybody’s throat. It’s called a democracy.

He also wants to “reverse recent trends of under-investing in universities…” Don’t we all, but where is the next sentence on how he proposes to raise the money to start the reversing?

In fact, you would expect that as a seasoned business guy he would be meticulous in costing out each of his recommendations and then explaining how he would raise the bucks.

But even he admits he did not do that, saying it was “premature” to figure out how to pay for this stuff. So, voter, it looks like you will just have to trust Mr. Snyder. Go ahead and vote for him, and if he is elected he’ll be glad to fill you in on the details later on.

The last guy who ran for governor and said that was Dick DeVos. And he, last time we checked, is still selling closet organizers.

Bottom line: Mr. Snyder gets high marks for issuing these documents, which do contain some food for thought, but his Ten-Point plan is not the grandiose blueprint for change that his commercial makes it out to be.

Tim Skubick is Michigan’s senior Capitol correspondent and has anchored the weekly public TV series “Off the Record” since 1972. He also covers the Capitol and politics for WLNS-TV6 in Lansing.

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Darn Good Debate
The audience loved it. And rightly so. It had humor, dramatic differences were apparent, both guys demonstrated some passion, and no mud was slung or hostages taken. In other words, it was a darn good debate.

Credit Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra with putting on a good performance in front of a bunch of independent insurance agents over in Grand Rapids the other day.

It did not start out to be a mano a mano meeting, but it turned out that way when Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard and Ann Arbor Rick “The Nerd” Snyder both bailed out.

So for the first time, the media got a peak at the two front-runners in the GOP primary.

They both would go after state government employees to squeeze them for more concessions, starting with a scheduled 3-percent negotiated pay raise for unionized workers.

Kill it, A.G. Cox and West Michigan Congressman Hoekstra said. Then Hoekstra added, I’ll see your 3-percent cut and raise it by another 5-7 percent, for a grand total of a 10-percent cut in the take-home pay of state civil servants.

Cox says he’s already seeking a 5-percent rollback for those in his office, and he would extend that to everyone else if elected.

But then the sharp contrasts emerged.

• The federal bailout for the banks.

Cox would have voted no. Hoekstra voted yes, saying he had no choice because “no one knew what would happen” if Congress did nothing. “It saved the financial system,” he argued.

Cox, who did not have to vote, said the bailout was wrong regardless of what the consequences might have been.

• “Race to the Top” school reforms to win federal funds to help failing school districts.

Hoekstra would have vetoed the thing. Cox would have signed it.

“Race to the Top. Hell no,” Hoekstra declared, delivering the soundbite of the debate and bringing instant applause from the audience. He is loath to let the feds dictate education policy to the state.

Cox sees thousands of failing school kids in Detroit and elsewhere and he believes Race to the Top is a way to unfail them. Sure he was for local control, but this federal program he likes.

So the audience actually got to see some clear distinctions between the two. That’s what good debates do — which is something those gawdawful TV political commercials will never do.

Ditch the Blackberries
Ya gotta wonder how many of the players in this town are rejoicing that this is the last state budget cycle involving the Three Amigos — Jennifer Granholm, Andy Dillon and Mike Bishop. Enough already, some folks must be thinking, as the trio has produced tons of drama, rhetorical ruffles and flourishes, but not much cooperation as they provided “leadership” on deciding how to spend your tax dollars.

In fact, in 2007 they managed to pull off something that had not been done in recent history: an abbreviated state government shutdown. And here was part of the problem: much of the chatter between them was not face to face, but key pad to key pad via their text-message machines.

During the height of the march toward a government shutdown in 2007, the governor disclosed, she was texting her two “friends” at least six or seven times a day — and that number seems low.

Yes, texting is expedient.

Yes, texting beats smoke signals.

But what texting prevents is the ability to read the other guy’s body language, eye contact, pitch of the voice and a host of other non-verbal signals that could enhance the negotiation process.

The instant communication between two parties sometimes means the third party is left out. You probably had the situation where Bishop and Dillon were complaining how difficult it was for them to deal with her, and maybe she confided to Dillon that she and Bishop were not hitting it off. And by the time they sat down in the same room at the same time, all this back-channel back-biting had probably elevated the rancor between them so that grinding out a compromise was even more contentious and challenging.

Years ago, somehow, lawmakers and governors managed to iron out budget difficulties with no cell phones and no texting exchanges. They did it the old fashioned way, by meeting, talking and giving and taking.

Since the relationship between these key players is not so hot to begin with, maybe they can agree on something up front: let’s chuck these texting crackberries into the Grand River.

And since they are addicted to those things, it’s unlikely they’ll do it…but they should.

Blues vs. Browns
It’s one of those hush-hush sort of things in the law enforcement community; the less said the better. But there is no denying the fact that a turf war is always at the ready when it comes to state troopers, sheriffs and other local police officers.

Years ago the troopers’ union published a statewide survey that showed the state cops were more widely respected than any other agency in the state. The in-your-face stuff was not well received by others who wore a badge. But the story goes beyond that.

When it comes to crime fighting, the Who-Is-In-Charge and Who-Got-The-Bad-Guy first is a constant internal game between all the cop shops.

Now comes one that threatens to strain relations just a tad more as the governor has opened up a can of budget worms. She wants to save state trooper jobs by reallocating (a.k.a stealing) $2.2 million from secondary road patrols, which is money going to local sheriffs and others.

The secondary road patrol fund goes back 30 years and was the subject of a ferocious battle as the State Police tried to block state dollars from going to sheriff patrols. The troopers lost, mostly because the chair of the Senate budget committee at the time, Sen. Jerome Hart (D-Saginaw), wanted to help the sheriffs.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to back her state troopers, and if the sheriffs lose out, so be it.

Not so fast, cries GOP Senator Valde Garcia, who chairs the law enforcement budget. He grasps the essence of this debate: “It pits the State Police against the sheriffs and local police at a time when they need to be working together.”

Garcia wants to avert trooper layoffs, recalling the flap last year when 120 troopers fresh out of trooper school found themselves, for awhile, fresh out of work. It was not pretty.

The problem for Garcia is a tough one: if not money from the secondary road patrols, where does he get it?

“I have no alternatives at the moment,” he confesses, but his search is underway as he hopes to avert another shootout between the cops in blue and the ones in brown.