China Waits

by Tim Skubick
November 13, 2009

Wouldn’t you love to have the frequent flyer miles Gov. Jennifer Granholm has racked up during seven years in office while netting 11,000 new jobs? She makes good on her promise to “go anywhere, anytime” to do that — except the “anywhere” has not included China.

You remember China, the place that makes everything we buy over here? It is a market to be exploited.

So why no Granholm trade mission over there?

First of all, to be fair, the state does have an office there…sort of. There are two Chinese nationals in a joint that features an orange crate, a crank telephone, and a picture of Dan Mulhern on the wall. Not really. But the point is, the office is run by remote control by a person here in Michigan, which, to even the most casual observer, underscores that Michigan’s commitment is not that strong.

“It’s a developing relationship,” confesses Greg Main, who runs the Michigan Economic Development Corporation charged with bringing jobs back here.

“It’s not a top priority,” he goes on, because China is not into what Michigan is looking for, i.e. energy technology. “We’re not ignoring them,” Main suggests, but energy is not China’s bag right now.

China is not an unfamiliar topic to this governor, given that she rode into office on the back of the Chinese three years ago. You must remember the endless attacks on her hapless opponent, Dick DeVos. He never quite figured out how to fend off the blast that he laid off folks in little Ada, Michigan, and shipped their jobs off to China.

Of course, he never did that, but why let the facts get in the way of a campaign theme that was working in Granholm’s favor?

While Team Granholm was elated to do a little Chinese bashing if it meant she would win, the former MEDC director was not amused. And Jimmy Epolito told her so.

During the heat of the 2006 battle, he pulled the governor aside and suggested that future trading relationships with China might be damaged if the attacks went on.

Apparently it was in one ear and out the other as the China thing resonated with voters who were fed up with jobs being sent overseas. There was no way the campaign would abandon that theme.

As for the current strategy, it looks like Team Granholm is being usurped by countless other folks who are going to China. House Speaker Andy Dillon is building his foreign trade gravitas by going there, just in case he has to return as governor someday.

And if House Minority Leader Kevin Elsenheimer (R-Kewadin) and Rep. Pam Byrnes (D-Chelsea) can go to China, why can’t the governor?

The governor does want to go. The MEDC has been there twice, but a crisis back home prevented her visit set for last year.

The administration reports it has no “intent to ignore or avoid” China, but the governor will only make the trip when she can bring some jobs back. Apparently nothing is imminent, since a source explains that “business opportunities require a lot more work in China” because it is not an advanced economy ready to transplant somewhere else.

So perhaps before she says sayonara to Lansing, she can say hello to China. Maybe she could visit the Amway plant over there…if the DeVos family will let her in.

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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Detroit Bashing — Still
It is a time-honored tradition in Michigan campaigns. That does not mean it’s a good one.

You can set your watch by this: whenever an outstate Republican is running for the legislature, someway, somehow, Detroit will be used in order to win votes. Pictures of former Mayor Coleman Young would routinely show up in those GOP TV ads, and not in a positive light.

In case you missed it over the years, there is a strong anti-Detroit sentiment everywhere north of 8 mile; just ask the state’s newest senator, Mike Nofs, who should have known better.

He is the latest practitioner to exploit Motown. The ad he ran against his Democratic opponent noted that Rep. Marty Griffin voted to fund Cobo Hall and continue the “corruption in Detroit.”

The ad was at best misleading. Is there corruption in Detroit? Think Kwame Kilpatrick — but the Cobo deal had nothing to do with corruption, and Nof’s new boss in the Senate told him so.

Sen. Mike Bishop tells Nofs, “It is not the source of corruption. It is actually a bright light in Detroit now that we can all rally behind.”

Nofs was unmoved and said that had he been there, he would have voted against Bishop’s bill, noting that the two would not always agree on everything.

“I would not have voted for it because it took money away from Jackson and Calhoun counties for the next 15 to 20 years,” Nofs explains in his own aw-shucks provincial manner.

Detroit’s Senator Tupac Hunter was not amused with Nofs’ anti-Detroit commercial. “It was unnecessary; it was divisive and it was out of the old GOP playbook…It is not the way to start” your Senate career.

That may be true, but Nofs won with 61 percent of the vote and, in the end, elections are not about doing what is right, but all about winning. Too bad.

The ‘Cush’
He is the only real “character” left in the state legislature.

He’s the chair of the House Appropriations Committee…Rep. George Cushingberry (D-Detroit.)

“Cush,” as he is affectionately known ’round these parts, is from the “tell-it-like-it-is school that he learned at the knee of veteran legislators when he first showed up here in the 1970s. Smart enough back then to keep his mouth shut and his ears open, Cush is now where they were.

As such, he often dispenses his “wisdom” free of charge at the beginning of most appropriations meetings. Most of the time he is quite entertaining as he sounds like the Black version of Garrison Keillor (minus the attacks on Lutherans).

Well, the other day on statewide Public TV’s Off the Record, the chair waxed on about a certain female governor.

“I love the governor,” began his instant analysis after being asked to comment on some of the verbal back and forth he and she have had over the years.

Here’s her problem, he said, as he warmed to the subject. She professes to be a duck, but “sometimes she is a goose.” Translated: sometimes he feels she does not adhere to her Democratic roots and wanders off into GOP la-la land. Without saying it, he wonders sometimes what she stands for.

In her defense, she has to play footsie with the Republicans because they control one half of the legislature. But in his defense, she has danced ’round some issues during her tenure and left more than one Democrat scratching his or her head.

“You can’t be a Democrat and try to out Republican the Republicans,” he reflected on something former Detroit Rep. Matt McNeely taught him.

At some point you should try to be either a duck or a goose, and if you try to be both, you could end up a dead fowl.

Cush himself is part of a vanishing breed of true liberal Democrats, even though when he sided with Democratic Speaker Andy Dillon on cutting state services, some folks at home called him a Republican.

He is a lot of things, but that he is not.

The Experience Card
Four former Democratic speakers of the Michigan House reunited briefly last week to embrace Lt. John Cherry for governor.

Boiling their comments down, the message was: “John Cherry has the experience to be governor.”

And if “experience” were the determining factor, Cherry would be our next governor, since he has more than anybody else in the field on both sides. But alas for Mr. Cherry and Speakers Crim, Owen, Dodak and Hertel, experience nowadays don’t mean squat, and pardon the lousy English.

If experience counted, John McCain would be president; Dick Posthumus and not Jennifer Granholm would be finishing a second term in office; and Hillary Clinton would have been the Democratic nominee for president.

To repeat, experience don’t mean squat, even though it should mean a bunch.

Somewhere between the 1950s, when experience counted for lots, and today, the tide shifted. Citizens began to lose faith in their experienced elected officials, and this culminated in 1992 when state voters delivered the ultimate death sentence to experience by enacting term limits.

“We don’t want professional politicians calling the shots,” the majority of voters said to the “experienced” lawmakers.

So here come the four former speakers foolishly believing they are doing Mr. Cherry a favor by touting his experience in front of an electorate that wants anything but.

For the moment for most voters, Mr. Cherry is a blank slate, much like former Senate Majority Leader John Engler was before he unseated sitting Gov. Jim Blanchard. Being that blank slate is a plus for Cherry, because it gives him a chance to define himself before the Republicans do it for him.

So, if anyone was paying attention to the four speakers, Cherry now has this written on his slate: lots of experience.

The majority of voters who support term limits will love that.