Columns

Jack Lessenberry

Pressing the Governor
for Clemency

November 24, 2010

TRAVERSE CITY — Bill Milliken, who served as Michigan’s governor longer than anyone in history, these days doesn’t usually give his successors advice unless they ask for it.

Except on one issue. There are dozens of women in Michigan prisons who, he is convinced, don’t belong behind bars.

They are women who are of no threat to society, mostly battered and abused women who were either unjustly convicted or got sentences far harsher than deserved. He has joined the members of the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project in asking Governor Jennifer Granholm to commute these women’s sentences.

“There are really some very sad situations here, women who certainly don’t belong in jail,” Milliken said.

Barbara Hernandez, for example, was a runaway teenager, an incest victim who was living with an abusive boyfriend when he killed a man. Though she wasn’t involved in the killing, she was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison in 1992.

Delores Kapuscinski did kill her husband, after years of traumatic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. She’s been behind bars since 1988, as has Melissa Chapman, whose jealous boyfriend killed another man in her presence. Her crime? Helping hide the body out of fear of what her boyfriend would do to her otherwise.

Carol Jacobsen, the director of the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project, says there are hundreds of women like this in Michigan prisons. Nearly a third of the women sentenced for murder did not actually kill anyone themselves. Others killed in self-defense, or to protect their children from abusers.

“Too many of these women were convicted by juries and sentenced by judges who really didn’t understand the battered women syndrome,” she said. For two decades, she and a small group of volunteers have been about the only friend most of these women have. They’ve pored over case files, read trial transcripts, interviewed these women in prison. Many cases they reject.

But they are now pressing Granholm to grant clemency or commutation and early paroles to 28 women whose cases are compelling and who clearly deserve freedom.

All of them, Jacobsen told the governor, “acted in self-defense against abusers, but received neither equal treatment by law enforcement or effective trials that considered their abuse.”

The governor leaves office New Year’s Day, and has the power to commute any sentences before then. But so far, the Clemency Project has heard nothing. This writer also contacted the governor’s office and asked for comment on what the governor might do.

But there was no response by press time. The governor has been, Carol Jacobsen said, a real disappointment.

When she first took office eight years ago, they had hoped she would be more empathetic to the plight of women less fortunate than she. Jennifer Granholm was the state’s first woman governor, and they thought she might have been naturally sympathetic to women less fortunate than themselves.

They reasoned that she had seen plenty of gender-based injustice, especially when she was the state’s attorney general.

But so far, all they have gotten from her are a few token commutations — “a drop in the ocean,” Jacobsen said. “We have succeeded in gaining clemency [from the governor] for four women lifers in the past few years, plus a dozen or more paroles.”

For Carol Jacobsen, this was an accidental calling. Her “normal” career is at the University of Michigan, where she is a professor of art. Twenty years ago, she was doing a documentary film in a women’s prison and became aware of their plight.

That motivated her to get involved. Since then, she and her volunteers have devoted thousands of unpaid hours to the cause.

Michigan’s world of justice is still one of sharp contrasts, she says. “I have attended more than a dozen public hearings for women lifers in the past few years, and have testified for them. The public hearings are racist, sexist exercises in public flogging.”

She thinks the “ignorance by the assistant attorney general and the parole board about domestic violence, incest, and the relationship of abuse to women’s lawbreaking is astonishing.”

She has other concerns, too; she thinks that many women in Michigan’s Huron Valley Prison are being treated inhumanely, and says she has evidence that suicides and suicide attempts are common. Her letters of complaint about this have also gone unanswered.

But she intends to keep trying, because that’s all she knows how to do. She, as well as Gov. Milliken, keep hoping that Gov. Granholm does the right thing at the last moment.

She notes that three years ago, Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher, a conservative Republican, granted early paroles and clemencies to 21 battered women prisoners as he was leaving office, saying, “our legal system is the best in the world, but it’s not perfect.”

If a Kentucky Republican can do the right thing, she wants to know, why can’t a Michigan Democrat?

Update posted approximately 9:30 p.m., November 27
Liz Boyd, a spokesman for the governor’s office, sent a response after this column’s deadline that said three of the women listed as the most urgent cases by the Michigan Women’s Clemency Project had not filed applications for a commutation of their sentence.

The governor’s spokesman added that “in at least three of the Project’s cases (Linda Hamilton, Kinnari Sutariya and Sharleen Wabindato) the Project’s advocacy was somewhat of a disservice to the inmates and its own credibility because the Project either falsely asserted that the inmate was a victim of domestic violence in direct contradiction to the inmate’s own sworn testimony, or the Project was less than forthcoming on critical components of the inmate’s real motivation for murder (i.e. information that the inmate was pregnant with another man’s child at the time she murdered her husband).”

But Carol Jacobsen, director of the Women’s Clemency Project, says none of that is true. She responded that “claims that we misrepresented any prisoner are false, in bad faith, or a misunderstanding of the facts.”

“Assistant Attorney General (Charles) Schettler and the members of the parole board (with the exception of the chair) are astonishingly ignorant about domestic violence, incest and abuse.”

Jacobsen also said that Boyd’s assertions about the three women mentioned are also false in all aspects. She said that the women indeed suffered domestic violence, and acted in self-defense, but that their attempts to tell the truth were “met with contempt and discounted” during the hearing process.

That process, she says, is designed for a “white middle class privileged male point of view,” and is “entirely constructed for violent male prisoners and is unfair and unreasonable for female prisoners.”

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.

Desperate for Diversification

A brief history of Michigan’s economic development strategies

by Rick Haglund
January 16, 2010

Michigan was in big trouble as the decade of the 1980s dawned. Detroit’s automakers, collectively known then as the muscular Big Three, were beginning to see their dominance challenged by imports from upstart Japanese automakers. They were unprepared, and so was their home state.

Many iconic Michigan companies besides the automakers were struggling. Hudson’s downtown Detroit department store, once one of the world’s largest, would soon close. So would historic manufacturing operations of the Stroh Brewery Co. and Vernor’s Ginger Ale. Decline and decay of Michigan’s urban centers accelerated. Workers lost their jobs in record numbers and looked to sun-belt states for new ones.

State government had been engaged in some form of proactive economic development since the 1940s. But the growing threat to the state’s economy, accelerated by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, drove then-Gov. William Milliken to expand business attraction efforts to an unprecedented level. Job training, tax incentives for companies investing in the state, aid to cities and a variety of technical economic development tools were launched by Milliken. It marked the beginning of the modern age of Michigan’s economic development strategy.

“The original intent was instant gratification,” said Keith Molin, who served stints as director of the Labor and Commerce departments under Milliken. “It was a learning experience. The 1970s and 1980s were the initial period in the transition to a global economy.”

Molin said state government’s economic development goal then was remarkably similar to its objective today: diversifying the state’s auto-driven economy while trying to hang on to as many high-paying auto manufacturing jobs as possible.

“Most of the issues we were wrestling with in the late 1970s and early 1980s are still in existence today,” said Molin, who prefers full-time work to retirement and returned to state government last year as executive director of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.

Results mixed
The results of the state’s decades of diversification efforts have been decidedly mixed. Debate still rages over whether the billions of dollars spent over the years in tax breaks, job training and other handouts made any difference to the state’s economy.

Conservatives and free-market think-tank types say the money spent on economic development programs largely has been wasted. They say Michigan would have been much better off by cutting taxes across the board for all businesses, rather than offering targeted tax breaks.

“If these programs actually worked, we’d be fully diversified by now,” Michael LaFaive, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, wrote in 2005. “Instead, we continue to lose the race for jobs while politicians concoct new economic chimeras.”

But an increasingly costly war among the states for jobs demands that Michigan offer tax breaks and other incentives to keep and attract jobs. Virtually no company will make a significant investment without state and local tax incentives. And corporations considering expansions or new headquarters won’t hesitate to bolt from their home state when another state dangles a tasty financial carrot in front of them.

“Politically, we’re in the either-or position of lower taxes and a better business climate, or using incentive programs,” said Greg Main, president of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. “You need both.”

Michigan found that out the hard way when General Motors closed its Willow Run assembly plant in 1992, eliminating 4,300 jobs, at a time when the state had scaled back its incentive programs. (More about that later.)

From an employment pie-chart standpoint, Michigan’s economy is far more diverse than it was in 1980, when manufacturing was Michigan’s largest employment sector. Manufacturing, including autos, now employs just 12 percent of the state’s nonfarm work force, down sharply from 25.2 percent in 1980. Services, retail trade and government each employs a bigger share of today’s work force than manufacturing.

But that diversification has come about more by shedding auto-related jobs than by adding new, well-paying, non-auto jobs to the formerly strong base. That type of diversification, therefore, couldn’t insulate the state from the pain caused by the domestic auto industry’s rapid decline over the past decade.

Michigan lost jobs every year in the last decade in a pattern that eerily paralleled the decline in sales by the Detroit Three automakers during that period.

“This suggests that a stable auto base is needed in the current structural environment to support a growing [state] economy overall,” University of Michigan economist George Fulton said in his annual November economic forecast. “Thus, either the industry must be stabilized or the environment must be changed.”

And while state economic developers have attracted high-wage jobs in life sciences, advanced manufacturing, information technology and other areas, those efforts have not done nearly enough to offset the loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs.

The result is that the state overall is getting progressively poorer. Michigan has fallen from a ranking of 20th among the states in per capita income in 2001 to 37th in 2008. Fulton said he expects Michigan to drop to 40th when the federal government releases 2009 per capita income figures later this year.

New efforts
To their credit, state policymakers saw trouble ahead for the auto industry decades ago, although no one could have predicted back then that General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC would fall into bankruptcy, as they did last summer. (Although Chrysler came close as 1980 began before being rescued by a federal loan guarantee package pushed by charismatic CEO Lee Iacocca and a young congressman named Jim Blanchard).

Milliken launched a multipronged economic development effort to boost the state economy as a deep recession was about to take hold in 1980. The state stepped up its use of tax incentives to try to lure new businesses to Michigan. Milliken also created a High-Tech Task Force to make recommendations on how Michigan could capture jobs in emerging sectors, such as factory automation and computer technologies.

And the Milliken administration tried to save some troubled iconic businesses, such as the Sander’s candy company, by making direct loans to them from the state treasury and pension funds.

“We were the lenders of last resort,” Molin said.

New era
Gov. James Blanchard’s election in 1982 ushered in a new era of economic development strategy, part of a broad and often innovative jobs agenda. It included trying to create the next Microsoft in Michigan by using state pension money for venture capital, a little-known investment tool in a state where conventional bank financing was the norm.

The state rebounded more quickly and strongly than much of the rest of the nation and there were even a few modest successes in the venture capital arena, such as Perceptron Inc., a Plymouth manufacturer of sophisticated factory measuring and inspection equipment. But there also were some well-publicized failures, including the Vixen Motor Co., a manufacturer of fuel-efficient recreational vehicles.

Blanchard also created several other state-backed financing efforts that attempted to leverage private investment to help young, technology-based businesses grow in the state.

“It was the first attempt to think about something beyond the typical economic development strategies other states were using,” said Main, who was a deputy director in Blanchard’s Commerce Department.

MEDC chief Greg Main. Photo by David Trumpie.

Michigan Economic Development Corporation President Greg Main says he’ll continue hunting far and wide this year to bag jobs and business investment for the state.

But he also plans to do more gardening — cultivating the soil to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

“The most vibrant economies in the world are those with strong entrepreneurial bases,” Main said. “It becomes part of the bread and butter of your economic development policy.”

Main, who became president of the MEDC in April, said he wants to find ways of increasing the availability of venture capital for growing companies and to help them solve business problems they inevitably encounter along the way.

A soft-spoken man with a penchant for bow ties, Main said he’s planning to propose changes in the state’s angel investor tax credit to make it more effective.

Angel investors are high-net-worth individuals who invest in young, growing companies. Main said the little-used credit could encourage more angel investing by providing a larger upfront benefit to investors.

“We did this in Oklahoma and got a 10-to-1 return” on investment in new companies compared to tax credits.

A former economic development official in Gov. James Blanchard’s administration, Main also led the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and served as president of an Oklahoma organization that linked entrepreneurs to venture capital.

Efforts in the past to attract venture capital to Michigan had mixed success, in part, because there wasn’t a lot research coming out of the state’s universities to commercialize until a few years ago, Main said.

“Just doing seed capital [to fund start-up companies] wasn’t going to work,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to put these things together.”

Main said he’s also “toying” with the possibility of offering the Kauffman Foundation’s Fast Track entrepreneurial assistance service statewide.

Fast Track programs, which offer educational materials and networking opportunities to entrepreneurs, are offered at several locations in the state, including Grand Valley State University and Wayne State University’s Tech Town.

Main said the MEDC will continue to rely heavily on traditional tax incentives to attract new business this year. But he acknowledged that, this being an election year, criticism about the effectiveness of such incentives will grow louder.

Several Republican candidates for governor, including former MEDC executive committee chairman Rick Snyder, have been critical of the MEDC’s incentive programs and said they need to be reviewed to determine their effectiveness.

The free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland has been a persistent critic of the MEDC’s main tax-incentive program, the Michigan Economic Growth Authority.

MEGA offers business tax credits to companies that make investments that keep and add jobs in Michigan. Last year, MEGA approved tax credits to retain 125,984 jobs and create 139,067 new ones on $2.56 billion of private investment.

But the Mackinac Center says that thousands of new jobs approved by MEGA are never actually created, either because the projects don’t materialize or produce fewer jobs than are promised.

Main said companies that don’t produce the jobs don’t get the MEGA tax credits. He defended tax incentive programs, saying every state has a financial incentive program to try to attract new businesses.

The Mackinac Center and many Republicans argue that lower across-the-board taxes would reduce the need for costly business attraction incentives.

But Main said Michigan must have both a competitive tax climate and a financial incentive program to attract business.

Low-tax states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, often offer the biggest incentives to try to lure new auto plants and other major projects, he said.

“Even in places where taxes are the lowest, the incentives are the strongest.”

Tax incentives are so ingrained in every state’s economic development strategy, Main said there’s little chance that they’ll be eliminated.

“It’s something we’re going to have to live with,” he said. “Companies want to know they’re loved and wanted.”

— Rick Haglund

Availability of venture capital to finance promising start-up companies remains a challenge today. But the venture capital industry in the state has grown from just one company (EDF Ventures in Ann Arbor) during the early Blanchard years to nearly 30 operating in the state.

Blanchard’s administration figured that universities also could play a critical role in modernizing the state’s economy. His initial effort in drawing universities into economic development was in the establishment of three so-called “Centers of Excellence,” created by 1981 legislation passed at Milliken’s urging.

The Industrial Technology Institute worked with faculty at the University of Michigan on developing advanced manufacturing processes. The Michigan Biotechnology Institute joined forces with Michigan State University to grow the budding biotech industry. And the Metropolitan Center for High Technology, housed at Wayne State University, dealt with issues related to creating technology-based industries in urban cores.

Today, only the Michigan Biotechnology Institute, now known as MBI International, remains. But Blanchard was correct in believing that the vast resources inside Michigan’s top-notch research universities could be unlocked to enrich the state’s economy.

It’s an idea that the universities themselves were slow to embrace. Many professors felt their only jobs were to teach students and conduct basic research. The idea of commercializing research into products that could earn a profit was abhorrent to them.

But as Michigan’s economy began to seriously falter at the turn of the millennium, university presidents saw it was in their best interest to play a larger role in economic development. Appropriations from a cash-strapped state government were being cut, making it more difficult for universities to hire top-notch faculty, attract the best students and maintain critical research.

U-M, Michigan State and Wayne State formed the University Research Corridor to broaden economic development efforts — and to lobby for more state funding.

“We came together as the URC because we believe in the unlimited potential of our state to expand upon a rich heritage of invention and to establish itself as a world leader in innovation and creativity,” U-M President Mary Sue Coleman told the state Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education in May.

Last year the URC hired Jeff Mason, a long-time official of the MEDC, as its first executive director, demonstrating the emphasis the URC is placing on economic development.

“These (URC) institutions are producing both innovation and new company spinoffs that rival other major research regions of the nation and returning $16 for every dollar the state invests,” Mason said recently.

Every one of the state’s 15 universities, not just the big three in the URC, now touts efforts to boost the economies of their local communities and regions.

In his eight years as governor, Blanchard also tried to craft an image of Michigan as a state that was moving beyond basic manufacturing into an economy that would reward brains far more than brawn.

He even held a hokey funeral ceremony at the Henry Ford Museum (now called The Henry Ford) that drew dozens of top corporate executives and well-known trend-spotter Faith Popcorn to “bury the Rust Belt.”

Different direction
John Engler, who unexpectedly defeated Blanchard for governor in 1990, regarded Blanchard’s economic development apparatus as little more than a public-relations scheme to ensure his political future.

To the astonishment of many local economic developers in the state, the former Senate leader quickly abolished the Commerce Department and took Michigan out of the business of luring companies with tax incentives.

“We’re going to find out what causes businesses to invest,” Art Ellis, a long-time Engler pal chosen to shut down Commerce, said at the time.

Engler strongly believed that what businesses really wanted was lower across-the-board tax rates, a top-notch education system and less regulation. He followed through on all three, cutting taxes, shrinking the state’s business regulatory structure and getting voters to approve an overhaul of public school financing.

But Engler’s belief that an improved business climate would negate the need for targeted tax incentives was betrayed by GM in its decision to close the Willow Run assembly plant in 1992.

GM pitted the Michigan plant against an assembly plant in Arlington, Texas, as part of a plan to eliminate 74,000 jobs. Although GM said its decision of which plant to close would be based on internal business factors and didn’t ask for incentives, Texas Gov. Ann Richards offered a rich package that included $2 million in tax breaks and $1 million in job training to keep the Arlington plant open.

Michigan didn’t offer a specific incentive proposal, but Engler said the state would match anything Texas offered. In an appearance on the Today show, Engler said he was confident that GM’s decision wouldn’t be based on incentives and that the automaker would choose Willow Run to survive.

But in a crushing blow to the state’s recession-wracked economy and Engler’s political calculation, GM decided to shutter Willow Run, destroying 4,300 jobs.

Engler responded by creating an economic development operation that rivaled — and in many ways mimicked — what Blanchard had built. He replaced Blanchard’s Commerce Department with the Jobs Commission, which housed economic development and job training functions. Engler also put the state back into the financial incentives game, and quietly reinstituted some of the venture capital and business financing programs that Blanchard had pioneered.

But Engler’s most enduring business development achievement was the MEDC, which he established in 1999 to replace the Jobs Commission. Established as a public-private partnership that operated largely outside the strictures of state government, the MEDC was — and remains — governed by an executive committee made up largely of business leaders and local economic developers.

The idea behind the MEDC was to establish an organization that would be insulated from politics and provide Michigan with economic development continuity, regardless of which political party controlled the governor’s office.

That goal has largely been met, although the MEDC has not been immune from political controversy.

In the early years, the MEDC and its hard-charging president, Doug Rothwell, were regularly criticized by lawmakers for running roughshod over the legislature, which provided most of the MEDC’s funding.

And although the MEDC’s executive committee is charged with hiring the corporation’s president, the reality is that the governor plays a major role the selection process. Rothwell, for instance, was recruited to Michigan from the East Coast by Engler. Rothwell’s wife, Sharon, served as Engler’s chief of staff.

Engler, with approval from the legislature, also armed Michigan with one of the nation’s most powerful business attraction weapons — the Michigan Economic Growth Authority.

MEGA has offered companies billions of dollars in tax credits for investing in the state since the authority was started in 1995. Ironically, its creation was vehemently opposed as a costly give-away program by many of Engler’s fellow Republicans, including then-Senate Majority Leader Dick Posthumus, who later became Engler’s lieutenant governor.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank in Midland, was an early and continuing critic of MEGA, saying that the state would be far better off by lowering taxes for all businesses instead of offering targeted tax breaks.

But Engler, as he often did as governor, shrugged off the criticism and plowed ahead.

“The Engler years were marked by taking programs and, through the sheer force of his political will, putting them into practice,” said Molin.

To his credit, the MEDC and MEGA program are considered to be models of economic development that other states, including Indiana, have emulated.

While Republicans generally oppose government efforts to pick “winners and losers,” Engler made several large bets on industries he thought would help diversify the economy.

He established the Life Sciences Corridor and pledged to spend $1 billion of the state’s share of federal tobacco litigation settlement money on research and commercialization in the health, medicine and biotech fields.

Engler also gave millions of dollars to U-M to help a company owned by recently deceased Detroit Pistons’ owner William Davidson develop flat-panel computer and television screens in an attempt to create a new industry for the state. But the effort ultimately was unsuccessful.

And Engler’s administration also failed to capture any of the Japanese auto plants that popped up in the United States during his tenure as governor. The success of those operations has resulted in Michigan’s automakers cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Like many governors before him, Engler presided over a state economy that rebounded from recession and grew tens of thousands of new jobs, only to begin shedding them as the economy reversed toward the end of his stewardship.

Alternative energy
Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat who succeeded Engler in 2003, maintained many of the Engler initiatives and expanded on some of them.

She turned the Life Sciences Corridor into the Technology Tri-Corridor, which split tobacco settlement funds among life sciences, homeland security and advanced automotive technologies.

The move was sharply criticized by leaders of the life sciences sector, who believed the state didn’t have the resources to adequately fund three major business sectors. They proved to be correct as budget problems grew and Granholm cut back on Engler’s financing commitment to the life sciences.

Granholm later merged the Technology Tri-Corridor into an “emerging sectors” strategy that added alternative energy to the mix. The development of an alternative energy industry, including advanced auto batteries, biofuels, and wind and solar power, has become the central focus of Granholm’s economic development efforts.

Greg Main, the current MEDC chief, said Michigan will see groundbreakings involving $6 billion of previously announced alternative energy projects this year, all aided by MEGA tax credits. That will make Michigan one of the nation’s leaders in that sector, according to Main, who said that six of the eight new lithium-ion battery plants opening in the United States this year will be in Michigan.

“We’re going to be the epicenter of it,” he said.

But Granholm has been criticized for wavering in her economic development strategy and for failing to secure funding for what she claims are her top priorities.

In 2004 Granholm said she wanted to improve the quality of the state’s workforce by doubling the number of college graduates in the state, including two-year associate’s degrees, over the next 10 years. But she has consistently approved steep budget cuts for higher education as state revenues have plummeted.

Improving Detroit and other cities to maintain and attract smart young professionals, who experts say want to live in vibrant urban settings, was an early aim of Granholm’s administration.

Her “Cool Cities” initiative was launched in 2003 and provided cities with annual neighborhood revitalization grants. But the grant program has been suspended and Granholm rarely speaks publicly about “cool cities.”

To her defense, severe state budget problems have prevented Granholm from funding an urban revitalization strategy, college scholarships and other programs that could have benefitted the state economically.

In many respects, as Gov. Granholm prepares to leave office and voters prepare to elect a new governor in November, Michigan’s economic challenges are similar to those of the 1980s. The state faces severe joblessness while trying to recover from a disastrous recession.

Michigan’s unemployment rate in November was 14.7 percent, nearly matching the 14.6 percent annual unemployment rate in 1983 as the state was emerging from a steep economic downturn.

Economic developers are touting their diversification efforts, while simultaneously trying to ensure an automotive future by aiding automakers’ electric- and hybrid-vehicle initiatives. But Molin, the former state Commerce Department director, said Michigan must finally shake its stubborn belief that the auto industry and manufacturing will again restore the state’s fortunes.

Economic development efforts must be more focused, he said, on creating a post-auto-industry future.

“We haven’t [as a state] begun to explore what the new economy is going to look like,” he said. “There has to be the ability to see the old is passing away.”

Rick Haglund is a former business writer and columnist for Booth Newspapers who has covered state economic development policy for three decades.

Blown Away

by Tim Skubick
November 20, 2009

Out of the blue, the governor was asked what title she would use if she wrote a book about her tenure in Lansing.

How about Blown Away?

You’ll recall that was the line she used in one of her State of the State speeches as she gushed about how her economic recovery plans would eventually blossom.

“In five years you’ll be blown away,” she confidently reassured everyone.

Sitting at the anchor desk that night, one recalls thinking, “That line is going to be used against her by somebody down the line.”

And true to form, it was and still is — and in retrospect even the governor concedes the line was a mistake.

But those two words capture the essence of this governor, which will be part of her legacy.

You can almost hear her and Team Granholm behind closed doors brainstorming about the lousy state of Michigan’s economy and wanting desperately to say something positive. Being positive is in her DNA, and her troops, eager to please her, know it.

Everyone in the room believed that the seeds the governor was planting would result in a diversified economy long after she was gone. So wanting to strike that positive note, you could see them nodding in agreement that in five years, folks would be blown away.

Here was the rub, and this is what has plagued this governor from the get-go. There was no hard-nosed realist in the room to shake everyone to their senses, someone to stomp on the rose-colored glasses and urge everyone to get real. Far as we can tell, very few of her inner circle advisors have regularly challenged her, taken her on and pointed out the consequences of some of her decisions.

It is not healthy for any governor to have group-think, with everyone on the same page all the time.

Somebody should have said, “Governor, I understand your desire to say something nice, but this line is a ticking time bomb. You may feel good about using it, but it’s going to come back to haunt you. Some opponent is going to say, why do we have to wait five years? Why didn’t you do something before this so we don’t have to wait? Take the line out, now.”

If somebody in the room did say that, apologies to that person, but it’s highly unlikely that happened.

It is widely believed in this town that the governor does not like confrontation, although she has certainly had to confront it and deal with it successfully. But in the political sandbox, sometimes you have to throw sand in the other guy’s eye just to get your toy back and establish who is in charge.

Not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings is an admirable human trait, as is wanting to be uplifting and optimistic, but sometimes that desire gets in the way of reality, which in this case produced the blown-away line.

As for what her book title would be, the governor confesses she has none, but she says the content would focus on leadership in a crisis.

And for the first time, she concludes that her “biggest flaw, my biggest liability” was the lack of legislative experience before she became chief executive to cope with this never ending economic mess.

As for a chapter in her book on another political career, she promises: “I have no intention of running for anything again.” With the exception, she laughs, of a post on the PTA.

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)

Farm Turf War
As long as everybody stays in his or her own lane, life in this town can be tranquil. Alas, when somebody wanders onto someone else’s hallowed ground, you get a turf war.

And we’ve got a dandy one unfolding right now.

In this corner, Gov. Jennifer Granholm. And in that one, the state’s farming community led by the Michigan Farm Bureau.

Seems she wants the power to pick the director of the state Agriculture Department, and the other guys want the status quo, which allows the Agriculture Commission to do the picking.

Granholm has at least one supporter, former Gov. Bill Milliken. Back in the ’70s when his administration was up to its eyeballs in the PBB controversy — cattle eating feed laced with that chemical and then humans eating that meat — Milliken locked horns with B. Dale Ball.

Ball was anointed by the ag commission. Milliken wanted to fire him but couldn’t. Milliken lost.

This governor is not in the middle of any such controversy, but she’s created another one by encroaching on Farm Bureau turf, and the farmers are winning.

Ms. Granholm figures, as did other governors before her, that it makes sense to give the chief executive the authority over appointments so that the buck stops at the governor’s desk.

One could argue that indirectly she has that power now, in that she appoints the commission. So if she wanted person “X” to run the department, she calls her appointees and tells them what to do.

Governors tend to favor direct power over indirect, but the state Senate last week undid what the governor hopes to do.

Now the game comes down to Democrats in the House. Will they side with their governor or the farmers?

Since she may lose this battle, the governor’s folks are making noises about finding a compromise to end this little turf scrimmage. And it is simple: she picks the director with the advice and consent of the board.

Done.

Bouchard the Dancer
Mike Bouchard is no wimp. He proudly packs heat and is not afraid to use his hefty size to his advantage, so you would think he’d be the last guy to be an accomplished dancer.

Ah, but he is.

Watch how he dances around a very sticky wicket unfolding in the GOP primary for governor, namely what to say about Mike Cox, a fellow candidate for gov.

Cox is soaking up lots of free media, but not the kind you would necessarily want, over his role in investigating an alleged party at former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s pad. Cox concluded, “What party?” and tagged it an “urban legend.” But apparently not everyone agrees, although there is no proof to the contrary.

So the issue on the campaign trail is the credibility of Mr. Cox.

Your comments Sheriff Bouchard?

“I’m just focused on my message,” he laces up his dancing shoes.

“So you are not going there?”

“I’m not going there,” he heads for the dance floor.

“Why don’t you want to go there?”

“I’m focused on my issues,” he taps away.

He is pressed further and notes that if other candidates or voters want to comment on Mr. Cox, they are free to do so, as he stands up for free speech just as long as he doesn’t have to participate.

“I’m not worrying about somebody else. That isn’t where my focus is,” he goes on.

Well, if that is the case, then Mr. Bouchard should be willing to promise that he will resist the temptation to exploit the story for his own benefit.

He waltzed away from the pledge, dredging up a line we never heard before, “I’m focused on exactly where I’m focused,” he repeated redundantly.

Points for staying on message, but one final attempt: “Why not make the promise?”

Here’s why not: “Because I’m bigger than you,” he smiles.

Nuf said.