Granholm Reflects on Palin Act

June 4, 2010

70 million and one viewers watched the V.P. debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin on October 2, 2008. That “one” had a huge vested interest as she watched intently from her Lansing home with her hubby and friends gathered around the tube.

Periodically there were shouts: “We anticipated that!” “He nailed that!” “We practiced that!”

As everyone now knows, days earlier Governor Jennifer Granholm had actually been impersonating Gov. Sarah Palin during Mr. Biden’s prep for the debate of his life.

Now that it’s debate season again and the bestseller Game Change is out, the authors talk about the Michigan governor’s role in all this. But they don’t reveal the whole story. Now, for the first time, she does.

At first, the governor, who has been on the national stage more than any other Michigan chief executive, treated it like any other gig.

“It didn’t quite hit me how historic this was until we arrived at the hotel and saw the amazing set-up. Then it became really clear that this was very historic,” she reflects.

Team Obama created an exact replica of the debate stage, down to “every inch and color.” Granholm remembers it as “breathtaking” when she sauntered in for five “intense” days of debate prep.

First, the Obama folks drilled the governor in a pre-prep prep against a fake Biden.

The ultimate competitor, Granholm was on her game. The authors of the book report she “glutted herself on YouTube videos of Palin’s Alaska debates.”

“I became a Palintologist,” the stand-in reports, and authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write, “The result was a perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined, flirty…and mean.”

Granholm confirms, “We were tougher on him in practice than Palin was in the actual debate.”

She went to school on both Palin and Biden. She learned that one of his soft spots was his family, and when Granholm/Palin made cracks about his son Hunter’s lobbying history, “Joe turned defensive.” And when Granholm “dangled bait by playing dumb, he turned scornful and chauvinistic,” the authors contend.

Initially, campaign insiders David Axelrod and David Plouffe were “scared.” If he couldn’t beat Granholm, what would Palin do to him?

As some 40 persons looked on, Granholm did practice questions in the morning and two full dress run-throughs each afternoon and evening.

“It was also a challenge,” the governor reveals, “to be tough on Joe Biden, ’cuz he’s such a nice guy, but we had to prepared for all possibilities.”

But why Granholm?

“I was the only other woman governor with kids still at home. It wasn’t that difficult a stretch to go from ‘basketball mom’ to ‘hockey mom.’” Plus Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, had been a classmate with Granholm at Harvard Law School. Need more be said?

The governor, a consummate Democrat, admits the “toughest part at first was parroting all of the standard Repub lines convincingly! I’m pretty sure I said ‘maverick’ a lot.”

But when the debate was over, Mr. Biden was on the horn to his sparring partner.

“We laughed at how we had anticipated so much of the debate,” she recounts. “He had to be knowledgeable but not patronizing, not defensive, gaffe-free, and gracious. He succeeded on all counts,” the stand-in concludes.

But they did miss one thing, Ms. Granholm sheepishly admits.

“I didn’t anticipate that she would wink so much.”

What a hoot. How could this governor winker have possibly missed that?

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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Larry the Lobster
John Engler had his nickel. Pete Hoekstra has his penny and Mike Cox has his lobster.

Symbolism counts for a lot in political campaigns.

Recall that when candidate Engler ran for governor the first time, he carried around a five-cent piece, and whenever the issue of property tax relief came up, out came the nickel to demonstrate the weekly savings on incumbent Jim Blanchard’s property tax relief plan.

Current GOP candidate for governor Hoekstra carries a penny in his pocket and whips it out to prove he can “make a penny squeal,” which is just another way of saying he is a West Michigan tightwad.

And now you’re probably wondering what in the world GOP governor candidate Mike Cox is doing with a lobster suit.

He intends to use “Larry the Lobster” to taunt Mr. Hoekstra.

If you’ve been watching the tube, you’ve seen the reference in the recent Cox commercial to the congressional money that went to a lobster institute in Maine. And, sure enough, the ad contends Mr. Hoekstra voted for that.

Never mind that “tightwad” Hoekstra has an explanation. Cox is fixin’ to sic this “symbol” on his opponent and perhaps “claw” him to death with the imagery.

Now the Cox folks will not confirm any of this, but let’s just say it would not be appearing in print or on the air if it weren’t so.

Of course, how you use the lobster can be a dicey issue.

Do you ask Larry to show up at the docks on Mackinac Island for all the big shot business leaders disembarking for a leadership confab this week?

Do you ask Larry to work the crowd at Hoekstra events beginning this week as Hoekstra and Newt Gingrich rally near by?

Or do you just ask the lobster to weasel his way into a photo opportunity with Hoekstra, which most assuredly would end up in another Cox TV commercial?

This could get interesting and nasty, depending on how the Hoekstra team responds. Do they try to escort the lobster out of the rallies and make a scene for the TV cameras?

Which raises the question, does Larry have free-speech rights?

Not So Favorite Son
Oakland County’s favorite son turns out not to be much of a favorite in the contest for state attorney general. This is not good news for the Mike Bishop for A.G. campaign, which continues to play second fiddle to front-runner Bill Schuette on the GOP side.

In the latest polling data (from The Rossman Group, The Perricone Group and Denno Noor Research), which are not statewide but focused only on Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, undecided wins in a landslide, with 42 percent of the folks in that column. No big shocker there, since finding a replacement for Mike Cox is not exactly making headlines these days.

Nonetheless, you would expect that Mr. Bishop, who has served Oakland County in both the House and Senate, would gobble up more than the “whopping” 19 percent he got from his home county. Schuette, who did not grow up anywhere near Oakland County, is within striking distance at 12 percent of the Oakland County tally.

However, it is not all bad news for the “favorite son.” With hardcore GOP voters in those three areas, Bishop rounds up 33 percent of the vote to Schuette’s 20 percent. And that finding is significant in that those hardcorers (if that is a word) are the ones who will pick the A.G. nominee at a GOP state convention this August.

On the gender front, Bishop does better with males as 45 percent of all female voters sit comfortably on the fence.

At this juncture, to be frank, any polling is not only a snapshot, it’s probably no indicator of the outcome, because the candidates are not vying for the public’s attention. They need delegate support, since those are the ones who will pick the winner.

BTW, the lone Democrat, David Leyton, who defeated Richard Bernstein for that party’s convention nomination, beat both of the Rs — by a 29-17 percent margin over Bishop and 29-9 percent over Schuette.

Leyton is the Genesee County prosecutor, in case you’re wondering who the heck he is, too.