China Time Again

September 10, 2010

Dollars to donuts the Democratic candidate for governor goes to bed every night praying, “Please Lord, send me a new GM plant any time before November 2.”

Funny how history repeats itself.

Flashback to the last gov’s race between Ms. Granholm and Mr. DeVos. She probably had the same petition, as the Toyota folks were making noises about building a new plant somewhere. Even though she defeated the Amway guy going away, landing the jobs would have been frosting on the cake.

Virg Bernero is not looking for icing. He needs a three-layer cake to beat Rick Snyder, and landing yet another GM plant in Lansing’s backyard would do just fine, thank you very much.

Can’t you see the Virg now at the ribbon-cutting session rubbing elbows with the captains of the very industry he helped to save from ruination? Talk about your political consultant’s wish come true.

No one knows when the decision will be made, and if the Snyder folks have any links into the boardroom of General/Government Motors they could yank a few chains in hopes of delaying the decision.

But on another front, and again involving GM, its activities in China pose a bit of a conundrum for Mr. Bernero.

You may have noticed that the mayor and his partner in crime, Mr. Mark “Tell-Them-Anything-To-Win-An-Election” Brewer, are back at the China-bashing stuff.

Brewer and Gov. Granholm did that number on her last opponent, Dick DeVos, who is still back in Ada trying to figure out the right response to the “He shipped jobs to China” attack.

Snyder, the latest GOP candidate for governor, is getting the same treatment, although Bernero has proven to be a bit more adept at putting a new spin on the old theme.

“Michigan does not need a CEO…(pause for effect)…A Chief Executive Outsourcer,” he told a crowded news conference packed with his supporters recently.

And then he looked surprised when the audience laughed and applauded wildly, as if he did not expect that to happen.

In fact, he was so cocky that the line he invented would be successful that the campaign had T-shirts printed with the CEO slogan on the front. Nobody checked to see if they were made in China.

Here’s the question for Bernero: if it is wrong to ship jobs to China, does the criticism include GM? It has a beachhead in China, and who knows how many jobs that might have gone to Michigan ended up taking a right turn at the Atlantic Ocean and ended up in China.

Just try to get the company to confirm that nifty little piece of insider information. Good luck.

Nonetheless, what’s good for GM apparently is not good for Rick Snyder, and candidate Bernero was forced to confront the apparent inconsistency the other day.

Bernero had just gotten off the stage after making an impassioned speech about his Main Street vs. Wall Street agenda, during which he repeated the CEO line yet another time.

During the post-speech scrum with reporters, somebody asked, “If it’s fine for GM to ship jobs to China, why is it wrong for Rick Snyder? (By the way, he, like DeVos, rebukes the China jobs-shipping charge.) Bernero got that nervous twitch in his right eye and ad libbed this answer: “GM is not running for governor.”

Pithy response, but it doesn’t answer the question.

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)

220 vs. 180
China 220. Michigan 180.

Game over.

Not so fast, intones the governor. She thinks this state needs to go beyond the 180 days that kids spend in school and inch closer to the 220 they have in China. Japan has the same thing, btw.

Ah, yes, it is back to school time, and the governor and other top educators think it is also time to restart the debate on how much time junior spends in the classroom.

We need “more time in seats,” demands the governor, who wants lawmakers to tackle this issue after the November election.

Dr. T.C. Wallace, who used to run the Mt. Clemens school system, is also on board. In fact, before he took the superintendent’s job in the capital city, he administered a 220-day calendar in Macomb County.

“It worked extremely well,” he recalls, and “parents loved it.”

But it cost more money…a bunch more money…about 16 percent more to tack on the extra four to six weeks of learning.

The governor did not address that issue when she embraced the longer school year this week.

As for the opposition to this, besides the students themselves, you can expect to get an earful from the motel-hotel and recreation bunch.

Remember, after years of cajoling, lawmakers finally agreed to keep the schools closed until after Labor Day so owners could squeeze every last red cent out of Mom and Dad before the school bells rang.

Imagine what that lobby would say if Johnny and Janey were sitting in a stuffy classroom in the middle of July. Oh my. Can you say, “There goes my profit margin?”

Consequently, this is by no means a slam dunk.

It might make academic sense to compete with those foreign countries, but at the end of the debate it could be the dollar bill that wins out. And if lawmakers get too much grief from opponents of the longer school year, you know what that means: China 220. Michigan 180.

My Kind of Town
Who does Rick Snyder think he is — the political reincarnation of Gov. Bill Milliken?

You could make a case for that based on the so-called “Detroit” issue. If you have watched any Michigan politics over the decades, you know that anybody who wants to be elected does not cuddle up to Motown, unless of course the candidate lives south of Eight-Mile Road.

State senators don’t do it. State representatives don’t, and you sure as heck stay away from that if you are running for governor.

Not Mr. Snyder.

There he was the other day, standing in front of one of the most conservative, down-home-on-the-farm bunch of guys you’d ever want to meet…members of the Michigan Farm Bureau. The Ann Arbor business guy was giving his stump speech for the umpteenth time — you know, the one about the Ten-Point Plan, etc., etc., etc.

As he often does, he inserted a line about wanting to help Detroit.

Say what?

The silence in the room got even more silencier, if that is a word.

Snyder says Detroit is key to Michigan’s economic growth. He didn’t use the line that former Gov. Milliken used, i.e. “as Detroit goes, so goes the state,” but it was close enough.

His tack is in direct contrast to other Republicans, who score points with the voters in outstate Michigan by running against Detroit. In fact, in some northern Michigan campaigns the pictures of former Mayors Kilpatrick and Young in TV commercials were so pervasive, you thought they lived up there.

Republicans on the west side of the state got so fed up with their tax dollars going to Detroit cultural institutions under a deal hammered out by Milliken and Young years ago that they swiped the money and shifted it to their neck of the woods.

Yet Snyder will not back off. He even made the same remarks at the state GOP convention recently. It’s a risky move that could cost him votes, but then he has not attached any tax dollars to his comments.

So maybe the anti-Detroit crowd won’t go nuts until he does, and that’s not likely to happen during the campaign.

He Said. He Said Back.
Oh boy, this one will be a hoot.

Circle your sked for October 1, ’cause that will be the first and, perhaps, last televised debate between the two guys who would be the state’s next attorney general.

And Republican Bill Schuette and Democrat David Leyton are already going at it, even though they have never met face to face.

“The race is about a prosecutor, me, vs. a career politician, him. He’s been in and out of politics and elective office for 30 years.”

That would be Mr. Leyton speaking about Mr. Schuette.

Not to be outdone, Mr. Schuette suggests: “There ought to be a sign on top of the attorney general’s office that says “Inexperience need not apply.”

And that’s just the beginning.

Schuette goes on to claim that the Genesee County prosecutor has failed at protecting the folks in Flint, noting that local officials wanted the National Guard to come in to calm things down when the shouting got too loud.

Leyton asserts, “I’ve been prosecuting criminals, 20,000 for the last five and a half years, with a 92-percent conviction rate.” And he tosses in for good measure that while he’s been on the frontline fighting the bad guys, Schuette was ensconced on the appeals court bench. Leyton doesn’t say it, but he implies that not many bad guys show up there with their guns drawn.

Undaunted, Schuette rejoins, “My being a judge for six years trumps anybody out there.”

You can see the pattern here. It’s tit for tat, and pretty soon this will degenerate into rat-a-tat-tat, which, of course, will make for a dandy televised debate on WKAR.org. Can hardly wait.