Snyder Tries to Starve the Media Beast

August 13, 2010

Rick Snyder has a vision. Rick Snyder has a Ten-Point Plan. Rick Snyder has an impressive victory…but Rick Snyder also has a problem: feeding the media beast, which has a monster appetite for controversy.

If he has his way, the beast will be placed on a crash diet and by November could look like Twiggy.

This is right out of the Snyder playbook: stay on your jobs message. Don’t be drawn into a nasty back and forth with your opponent. At all cost stay positive, because the citizens love that while the political press does not. When asked about a social issue, which the media thrive on, deflect it by saying, “This race is about jobs not social issues. Next question.”

It’s not at a frustration level yet, but it’s only a matter of time before these two clashing agendas result in a potential train wreck.

Remember, the media use controversy to give the voters a chance to compare and contrast the candidates — but Snyder could care less.

Take day one of the fall campaign, just after Mr. Snyder ran up a come-from-behind, going-away victory over those four career politicians in the GOP primary. What were their names?

He did it with about 150,000 Democrats who crossed over to vote for him. Whether they stay there is another question for another time.

Mr. Snyder did a ton of post-election interviews and graciously showed up at a Detroit TV station.

A half hour earlier, a guy named Virg Bernero had been in the very same studio, and the Democratic nominee for governor had just called Snyder a “Nasty Nerd.” It was a great sound bite. The producers in the newsroom went, “Man, this is great stuff.”

So, as the media news game is played, it was only natural to seek a reaction from the alleged “Nasty Nerd.”

What did he do?

He laughed and called it “unfortunate” and launched into how this is not what the people want. “Unfortunate.” Oooooh. That wasn’t explosive, but it was vintage Snyder, i.e. not too hot, not too cold, but for him just right.

The follow-up question: Since he calls you the Nasty Nerd, how would you describe your opponent?

“He’s the Democratic nominee for governor,” he smiles.

Stop the presses. Run a bulletin: “Snyder Calls Bernero the Democratic Candidate for Governor.”

Later on the same day. The venue is a GOP unity rally smack-dab in the middle of Virg Bernero territory. “The crowd is getting bigger,” Mr. Snyder correctly observes as the cameras, microphones and correspondents crush closer, hoping for a neat, crisp, controversial sound bite.

Ha.

Snyder abhors the “bickering and sound bite” mentality and, if he could, he would declare it unconstitutional.

Yet the press corps presses onward. Silly. Silly.

Snyder waxes on about the need to reinvent Michigan. Reporters have heard that forever. That’s not news.

He talks about the failed culture in Lansing, and when he takes a breath, someone jumps in with, “Is Mr. Bernero part of the problem.”

Ah, a pithy, go-for-the-jugular, pointed question at last.

A “normal” politician would have jumped at the chance to take a swipe and feed the beast. Not Jenny Craig a.k.a. Rick Snyder.

“Virg Bernero. You can ask him your own questions. I’m staying on my message” of job creation.

Multiply that by three months and you can see how flustered the media will get.

But the masterful Mr. Snyder is onto something. He won’t play the game, and every time he doesn’t, the typical citizen, fed up to here with all the partisan bickering, goes “YES!”

But the relentless and pit-bullish Mr. Bernero is not on the same page, and he will bang away. And at some point, Mr. Snyder admits, “When attacked we will respond.”

And the beast is hoping it’s with something a little more explosive than “unfortunate.”

Don’t hold your breath.

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.

Tim Skubick Extra Extra… (A weekly bonus only for Dome readers)

The Other Winners & Losers
In every election there is the winner and there is the loser. No duh. But when it comes to the two major political parties, there were other winners and losers in last week’s primary.

On the Republican side there were two dead bodies: Michigan Right to Life and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce.

On the Democratic side, and breathing a huge sight of relief, were organized labor, pro-choice groups, gay and lesbian factions, and the Greens all shouting for joy.

First, the body count in the GOP. In an ill-conceived strategy to play kingmaker, the chamber and RTL picked one guy from the GOP field and “anointed him.” Mike Cox got the endorsement of both powerful groups and he played if for all it was worth, which turned out to be third place in a five-person race.

The chamber knew Mr. Cox had some baggage that need not be reviewed here for the umpteenth time. Think “party.”

But, one insider concluded, we did not want to deny a guy the endorsement based on a story that was not proven. While a noble gesture, it defied conventional wisdom: Cox might lose because of it.

The politically correct option for Right to Life was to endorse Pete Hoekstra, Mike Bouchard, Tom George and Cox. But it appears the temptation to play Big Shot trumped common sense, and RTL, the organization, sits here today no longer the 800-pound gorilla but a mere shadow of its former self.

There is even chatter that Barb Listing, the RTL President for Life, may not have much of life left after this debacle.

Such is not the case on the D side, where labor did what it had to do. The boo-birds were ready to declare unions dead as a political force if they had failed to put up for Virg Bernero. He won going away from Andy Dillon, whose campaign got off to a rough start…and got even worse.

So the subtext of the primary election beyond the candidates who were winners and losers is: Democratic special interests 1, Republican special interests Goose Egg.

Mr. Dillon, Que Pasa?
Name all the things that went right in the Andy Dillon for Governor campaign.

Ah, err, um, gee, well, gosh, there must be something? Yeah, his hair looked nice.

But everything else was, well, let’s be kind here, pretty ugly. That’s not kind, you’re right, but the truth does hurt.

“We made a lot of little mistakes,” conceded the Speaker of the Mess, err, House. Yep:

1. He mishandled the abortion issue.
2. The independent vote, masterfully targeted by Dillon, went to the Nerd instead.
3. He pulled a Mike Dukakis, i.e. when attacked, instead of fighting back he clammed up.
4. He never convinced the traditional Democratic base that he was a traditional Democrat. Problem was, he wasn’t and said so.
5. He said he had the fire in the gut to run, but maybe he was the only one who saw the flames.
6. His money-raising skills were overrated.
7. He assembled a cracker-jack team, but that can only carry you so far.
8. And finally, his message of taking on the powers within his own party when it was the right thing to do was a strong general election notion, but in a party where the powers to be are the powers to be, he got whacked by the powers to be.

One is tempted to overplay the abortion issue as the main culprit in this Dillon loss. That may be too simple, but it had an impact.

The campaign made a head-fake to mute it by parading pro-choice Senator Gilda Jacobs around the state to reassure everyone that Andy might be pro-life but not to worry.

Gilda who?

What he should have done was go on camera, look into the lens and say what he said on his website: “I will not turn the clock back.”

He could have said he had stood up to Right to Life on the stem cell issue and could have forcibly made the case that pro-choice women need not be afraid.

Instead, the campaign waited too long to respond, and when it did, nobody seemed to hear it. Chalk one up for the Bernero side, which played the issue perfectly. Dillon? Not so much.

So what’s next?

He does not end up on the ticket as the running mate with Rick Snyder — nor with Bernero, for that matter. How about State Treasurer Andy Dillon? That could happen regardless of who wins.

As for learning from these avoidable miscues? He’s probably done with elective politics.