"You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille...."

My last conversation with Congressman Thad McCotter was one of my favorites.

I was still in the newspaper business back then and we were discussing the difficulties the U.S. automakers were having in getting loans from the federal government, compared to the blank checks that had simply been given to the banking industry. We had similar thoughts on the issue—it was basically Main Street vs. Wall Street—although his opinions were more well-informed and articulate.

"You know," I said, "maybe I should get a bunch of newspaper guys to come to Washington and ask for a bailout or a loan, too."

His answer: we'd have to ride in on bikes, bundle up the plan, and throw it in everyone's bushes at four in the morning.

I always thought that was a good joke; and his sense of humor was one of the things I always liked about him. That and he always struck me as a voice of reason within the Republican Party which, in my humble opinion, wasn't always easy to find.

I still liked the guy and respected what he's done in office, even as I watched the apparent end of his political career with a growing sense of unease and disbelief. Already strange, it crossed over into the truly bizarre when he abruptly resigned from his office rather than serve out the few remaining months of his term. I don't know if we'll ever know the true reason for that and I might not believe it even if I did.

The end result is that has left Republican voters in his district with not only one conundrum, but two. First, the choice on primary election day, between Kerry Bentivolio and Nancy Cassis, a write-in candidate. I personally can't get behind either of them. I am all for getting more 'regular people' involved in politics, but I don't think congress is an entry-level position--although Bentivolio may get a sympathetic vote or two for having the temerity to run against the Republican machine.

The second conundrum is the post-primary-pre-November election to find someone to fill out the few remaining weeks of McCotter's term. I wonder if that's what McCotter meant when he referred to 'striking a match' in his resignation email—because that aspect of this certainly stinks.

It'll all be over in a few short hours and my mailbox will probably appreciate the rest. Then, it's on to November. What a weird year; politics as unusual.

"Pick up my guitar and play; just like yesterday..."

With elections in Wayne County and at the state and federal level, not to mention what will likely be contentious local races in places like Plymouth Township and Van Buren Township, this campaign season promises to be one filled with intrigue.

One place I did not expect to see it, however, was in the race for the 11th Congressional District, where incumbent Thad McCotter was destined for re-election.

I know one of his Democratic challengers, Dr. Syed Taj, both through my job at Oakwood Healthcare and former work as a newspaper editor who sporadically covered Canton Township, where Dr. Taj served on the board of trustees. While I like and respect Dr. Taj very much, I thought he faced the proverbial uphill battle in taking on an incumbent in a district that so heavily favored Republican candidates—and McCotter's district is so thoroughly Republican that all he really had to do was get his name on the ballot.

Oops.

Well, by now, anyone who cares (and many who don't) know about the issue with McCotter's petitions. For those that don't, about 84 percent of the 1,850 or so signatures turned in on behalf of McCotter were ruled invalid. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said recently that he would investigate the situation and would not hesitate to prosecute if his office found any sign of fraud.

That's a good thing, of course, because the last thing anyone needs is to give voters another reason to be suspicious of the electoral process. (Although one could probably make a case that the gerrymandering that created a district virtually destined to remain in Republican hands, itself, 'undermines the whole validity and credibility of the election process'.)

I will be interested in the outcome of the investigation, which McCotter has said he asked for and will cooperate fully with. I've known McCotter for more than a decade, as I sporadically covered his political career dating back to his time on the Wayne County Commission. As he climbed the political ladder, I thought all he needed to do was work on his people skills and he would be able to do anything he wanted in government. I was happy to see him run for the top office in the nation, actually, and still think he's a better option than Mitt Romney.

I can't believe he had any direct involvement in this petition fiasco. He has too much integrity and too much respect for the electoral process to knowingly allow such a thing and, besides that, he's too intelligent to think that the petitions—if they were as obviously false as they've been described in the news reports—would pass even a cursory inspection.

It's hard to say what the long term and short term fallout will be, who will benefit and who will not; if McCotter will be able to pull off the monumental long shot of a successful write-in campaign or if someone else will. The end result, though, is that McCotter now faces his own uphill battle, and this race got a lot more interesting.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120601/POLITICS01/206010372#ixzz1wYqPPSNW

So long, and thanks for trying

I've been lax at this whole blog writing thing lately (having missed the entire month of December and the last couple weeks of November) and realized I owe a belated thank you to Susan Rowe, a former member of the Wayne City Council.

As my Wayne friends know, Susan served on the council for eight years and, instead of running for re-election, decided to run for mayor when her second term was up. She ran a good campaign but lost to incumbent Al Haidous.

I don't live in Wayne any more or attend those city council meetings, but I always respected what she tried to do as a councilwoman--even though it didn't always make her popular with her colleagues. We didn't always agree on things, but there were plenty of times when she was the only one that I thought made any sense up there. I think the citizens will miss her presence.

I have three distinct memories of her that I would classify as favorites.

The first was when the city council convened in the Wayne Community Center to appoint a replacement for Don Hartford, an outspoken councilman who resigned in the middle of his term to move to Georgia. There was quite a bit of speculation on who would be appointed, and plenty of young 'fresh faces' who put in for the spot. Optimism was high. Before that optimism could run rampant at that meeting--in fact, before anyone could say much of anything at all--the council appointed a former councilman (Al Damitio, who is still serving). No offense to Al or anything (I've since grown to like him) but the energy just kind of sulked out of the room. I swear I could actually hear it dripping down the legs of the chairs, trudging across the carpet and sliding down the drains of the showers in the other part of the building. Here was the old guard, reappointing the old guard.

"Can we at least read the names of everyone else who applied?" Susan asked, a resigned look on her face.

The second was during the tax increase campaign two years ago. John Zech, the city manager at the time, had prepared two budgets--one that was mildly painful in terms of cuts and reduced services and another 'doomsday budget' that would be approved if both millage requests were rejected by voters. Those issues were both approved and the day was saved, sort of. Susan was the only one on the council who advocated to put the 'doomsday' budget in place, anyway, because she alone seemed concerned about the city's history of spending everything it could. I thought that was the smart way to go, too--as painful as it would have been--and editorialized it about the time, too. Six months later, the city was convening emergency budget meetings because Ford Motor was contesting their tax bill and it seemed the city would have been a bit wiser to save money, after all.

The third was more recent, with her questioning of the time frame between (a) the council's approval of a budget that included funds for an economic development specialist, (b) the removal of the 'interim' title from interim city manager Bob English's title and (c) English's hiring of councilman Mathew Mulholland to fill that position--after it had been combined with another part-time position to make a full-time spot. That would have all happened within a matter of weeks, without the position even being posted externally.

I like Matt, too, but wished I still had a newspaper column when all that was going down. Unbelievable.

On a grander scale, Susan was a cautious spender, very conscientious with public money, and I appreciated that, too. She was often the only one who questioned things. She was active outside of her role on the city council, as well, with organizations like the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) and the Michigan Municipal League. Her advocacy efforts recently earned her a Woman of Distinction Award from the YWCA, and I think that was well-deserved.

I also want to thank her for following her words with actions, something sorely lacking in politics today. She said she was still going to be involved in the city and has been working with the Wayne Ripple Effect, a grassroots group of citizens determined to revitalize the town. She's also been sending info to the city administration from the many municipal list services she's still subscribed to--and would have been at the last city council meeting, too, if not for what she described as a terrible cold.

Maybe she'll run for office again in two years, maybe she won't. She hasn't said, but at least she hasn't ruled it out. Whether she does or not, I'm confident that she'll be around town, helping out and trying to make things better--and for that, I say thanks.

"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss..."

For the first time in my adult life, I'm guilty of not voting in an election.

I'm not proud of it, by any means. It was a sequence of things that caused it. A recent move, my even more recent birthday (putting off the annual trip to the Secretary of State), a general lack of organization and missing the deadline to be eligible to vote in the Plymouth-Canton School Board election. Once I missed that, I wondered: should I really vote in a city where I'm still registered but no longer live? I was uncertain of the right answer to that even at 6 p.m. on election night, but I ultimately decided I shouldn't.

So perhaps it is more truthful to say it was a series of flimsy excuses that caused me to miss my first vote in decades. I will probably continue to probe that reasoning for days to come, much the way I would a missing molar.

Both races featured one of my campaign pet peeves, too. In Wayne, bullies were concentrating more on personalities than issues, and in the Plymouth-Canton race, a defined voting block of four candidates shared the same sign and platform and, apparently, backing from a well-funded political group.

In Wayne, the bullies won the day and the one candidate that was actually talking about issues and solutions was defeated because of some controversy in his past; while the greater threat to free speech and transparency of the local government won a seat on the council.
In Plymouth-Canton, the four-person slate was at least partially successful; two of the four earned spots on the school board, and all of the incumbents seeking re-election were defeated.

I'm always fascinated by campaign strategy and usually disappointed that the tried-and-true methods of making voters afraid of someone or something and then throwing money at the problem are usually successful. This time around, social media--the local equivalent of the 60-second news cycle--played its role, too. That was interesting, watching discussion boards on facebook and reading about someone's foibles as they were presented by his opponents--who, as usual, rarely really identified themselves.

Misinformation, or at least the allegations of it, played a role, too. I think this is as much of a symptom of the dwindling budgets of local newspapers with reporters and editors that truly know their communities as anything else. The expansion and availability of the internet is a suspect, too. Information is free-flowing, but context is not. Forgiveness seems a thing of the past, too.

Ironically, I don't think the access to all this new information makes us any more informed as voters. The 60-second news cycle has, in some way, eroded our ability to effectively weigh (or in some cases to even substantiate) actual information. In that way maybe we are all 'karaoke voters,' casting a vote after whatever name we recognize, or against whatever issue we are concerned about, no matter where the actual facts are.

Until we can figure out a way to overcome that, I'm afraid that we will be stuck in a cycle ruled by blame and fear, while true progress eludes us.

It was dark all around, there was frost on the ground, when the TIGERs broke free

I took a step into my old life on Tuesday night when I headed to a public hearing on proposed improvements at the Ford Road and I-275 interchange.

Part of it was curiosity and the hope of seeing my old acquaintances from my newspaper days and part of it was--I admit it--I missed watching government in action. It's refreshing to be able to do that as an interested resident.

This meeting was a little different than the countless others I attended as a journalist. State Sen. Patrick Colbeck (R-Canton), a member of the senate transportation committee, convinced the committee to move the public hearing to Canton Township. The goal was to win support from the committee, along with the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), in order to gain some additional leverage on an application for a Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant from the federal government. The grants were first made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Canton has applied for the grant twice, and twice been rejected.

All they're trying to do is get $22 million in funding to fix up what has statistically been the most dangerous stretch of road in the state. The money would provide for two 'slip' ramps from the freeway that would divert traffic directly to Haggerty Road, as well as a service drive from Cherry Hill to Ford. All would alleviate traffic and reduce the potential for accidents. There have been more than 2,400 collisions along that stretch of road in the past six years, according to Tim Faas, Canton's municipal service director.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? I sure thought so and I editorialized about it back then--each time. I saluted the Canton officials in print, congratulating them on the quality of the application. I'm sure the officials in Canton thought it would be an easy decision, too. As did the police officers that were called there, literally, every day, to write up an accident report or two or three.

But this is the state government, and the state government first required a $450,000 regional study that took three years to complete and then ignored the results of that study.

Fortunately, things look a little better this time around. There is a lot of regional support. Three different mayors spoke. Legislators from both chambers--and both sides of the aisle--were in agreement. Most surreal of all (to me, at least) was Livonia Mayor Jack Kirksey sitting side-by-side with Northville Township Manager Chip Snider. A few short years after Kirksey supported the annexation of a portion of Northville Township, here Kirksey was joking about Livonia being a suburb of Canton. Oh, the irony.

In the end, the committee approved the two resolutions in support of the grant that Colbeck sponsored. That might give this request the weight it needs to get this much-needed project moving. Let's hope so.
Granted, the state and the feds have other projects in mind. This one is just hard to argue against.