Endorsement: Why Gretchen Whitmer should be Michigan's next governor

Politics shouldn't be this hard.

Sure, we have serious disagreements about important things. But it shouldn't take a massive terror attack or a natural disaster to remind us that those differences are neither as numerous nor as important as the priorities we share.

We all aspire to lives as good or better than our parents', and hope that our children's good fortune will exceed our own. We all want safe roads, safe schools and safe drinking water. We all want to live in a society that rewards hard work, penalizes cheating and treats innocent victims with compassion.

So it shouldn't be so difficult for our elected leaders to locate the many places where our interests intersect, then marshal our state's financial, intellectual and political capital to improve our collective lot. And even in these fractious times, happily, Michigan's political system occasionally rises to this worthy enterprise.

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At least twice in Gov. Rick Snyder's eight-year tenure, critical masses of Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together to tackle problems generations of elected leaders before them had ignored.

Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer was an indispensable partner in both those efforts — and the contrast between her record of constructive collaboration and her Republican opponent's legacy of obstruction makes GRETCHEN WHITMER the sensible choice to be Michigan's next governor.

How they got here

Whitmer, 46, and Attorney General Bill Schuette, 65, are both seasoned fixtures of Lansing's political landscape.

She began her elective career 18 years ago as a state representative from Ingham County and served the maximum three terms in the House before winning election to the state Senate. Her eight-year Senate tenure culminated in her election as leader of that chamber's Democratic minority, making her the first woman to lead a party caucus in the Senate. It's a trajectory similar to the flight path John Engler (who Whitmer calls the most politically skilled of the three governors she has served with) took to the state's top job 28 years ago.

Schuette's career has lasted nearly twice as long as Whitmer's. He represented the congressional district encompassing his native Midland from 1985 to 1991, then left Washington to become Engler's Agriculture Department director for four years. He rounded out his tour of state and federal government with two terms in the state Senate and six years as a Michigan Court of Appeals Judge before winning an election to succeed Mike Cox as state Attorney general. 

Both candidates have been key players in Snyder's 8-year gubernatorial tenure. But Schuette, who rode to office on the same Republican wave that took Snyder to the governor's mansion, has ironically been the greater obstacle to Snyder's ambitions for Michigan.

In 2013, even as Republican lawmakers in Washington (including Michigan's own GOP representatives) strove to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act, state legislators in both parties voted to extend health care coverage — newly available under the provisions of the controversial ACA — to more than half a million Michigan residents who had previously gone without. 

The following spring, more than a year after Snyder appointed an emergency manager to shepherd Detroit through history's largest municipal bankruptcy, Republican and Democratic state legislators narrowly approved the state's $195-million participation in a grand bargain that set the state's largest city on a path to solvency and economic renewal.

While Attorney General Bill Schuette, her Republican opponent in this year's gubernatorial race, was filing lawsuits to stymie the ACA (a law that, among other things, made it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to Michiganders with pre-existing health problems), Whitmer was working with the incumbent Republican governor to make sure more Michiganders got coverage. 

Schuette repeatedly sandbagged Snyder and Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr by issuing legal opinions that complicated Detroit's bankruptcy. His intercessions on behalf of city pensioners and the DIA delighted constituencies the AG sought to cultivate but created new obstacles in Orr's negotiations with Detroit's creditors. Meanwhile, Whitmer was brokering the legislative package that gave the city a new lease on life.

Some Republicans (but not Snyder) pooh-pooh Whitmer's role in either of these affairs, noting that her Democratic colleagues were predisposed to champion both state aid for Detroit and expanded health care coverage.

But one need only recall how Republican legislative leaders have stonewalled  Democratic chief executives in the recent past to appreciate how great a difference Whitmer has made.

Remember the delight former state Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop took in gutting Gov. Jennifer Granholm's initiatives? How about the way U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used his formidable tactical skills to sabotage Barack Obama's second term? Hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents would be far worse off if Whitmer had more interest in frustrating Snyder than in helping his most worthy initiatives succeed.

An uphill climb

By the time she won her party's nomination three months ago, Whitmer's ascendancy to the leadership of her party seemed inevitable.

In reality, it was anything but.

When she announced her candidacy for governor in January 2017, Michigan had just delivered its 16 electoral votes to Donald Trump, and Whitmer was considered a dark horse in a Democratic field chock-a-block with higher profile pols like Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Flint Congressman Dan Kildee. 

Then came the Trump administration's assault on civility, the Republican congress' redoubled campaign to gut Obamacare, and a #metoo movement many women heard as a clarion call to political engagement.

Whitmer exploited the long interval between her early announcement and primary triumph to sharpen her policy chops as well as her campaigning skills. Today, she exhibits a granular command of complex issues ranging from infrastructure finance to the future of the Line 5 oil pipeline. Her defense of Michigan's Medicaid expansion and determination to repeal Snyder's pension tax (which Whitmer says reneged on Michigan's promise to its first-responders) has forced Schuette to stage a tactical retreat on both issues.

At war with his own words

Like his amorphous platform and shape-shifting persona, Schuette's campaign has been a study in contradictions. 

He warns incessantly that Michigan faces economic and political marginalization if it fails to grow its population. But he would curtail the flow of legal immigrants that have been a vital source of the state's economic vitality. 

He concedes his Republican predecessor's urgent assertion that lawmakers are grossly underinvesting in the maintenance of Michigan's roads, bridges, sewers and water mains. But he promises to deliver unrealistic tax cuts that would leave even less money to stem the deterioration of critical infrastructure.

He exudes civility and insists his administration would put an end to discrimination of every kind. But he unapologetically embraces a president who revels in bigotry and applauds violence against his political critics. Schuette belittled his GOP primary rival for condemning Trump's infamous video defense of sexual assault. And his advertising campaign has been an exercise in misogyny, exploiting his predominantly male base's distrust of female political leaders.

He acknowledges the existence of climate change, but offers no coherent strategy to mitigate global warming climate or PFAs contamination, both of which pose imminent threats to Michiganders' well-being.

From magical thinking to bridge-building

Schuette's conviction that tax cuts can be the panacea for nearly everything that ails our state seems especially delusional in the light of tangible evidence that Michigan's roads are disintegrating.  But candor compels us to confess our disappointment in both candidates' reluctance to confront the consequences of long-term disinvestment in its physical infrastructure and human capital.  

After adjusting for inflation, the state’s $10.4 billion general fund expenditures are 30% below where they were when Engler took office; the School Aid Fund, which pays for most K-12 funding, is 2% below 1999-2000 levels.

Public polling indicates that most Michiganders are ready to pay more for concrete, measurable improvement in both arenas. The fact that neither Whitmer nor Schuette has put forward a realistic plan to reverse decades of neglect doesn't mean either will be able to avoid the conversation as governor. 

Like Snyder, Michigan's next CEO will struggle to build bridges across partisan, cultural and geographical divides. Schuette's long history of exploiting wedge issues like gay marriage, transgender identity and abortion, combined with his ongoing fealty to the most divisive figure in American politics, makes him an especially inappropriate choice for that difficult assignment.

Whitmer, with her more sophisticated understanding of where Michigan needs to go and where the interests of its diverse residents coincide, is the candidate more likely to summon our state to its better angels.         

Correction: This endorsement has been updated to reflect that Whitmer was the first woman to lead a party caucus in the Michigan Senate. Dianne Byrum, as a state representative, was the first woman to lead a party caucus in either chamber of the Michigan Legislature.