Jack Lessenberry from Michigan Radio

I thought the wolf hunt last year was unnecessary and barbaric, and was forced on the public by underhanded means.I think hunting wolves for sport should again be outlawed. But I have to say I disagree with the way those against hunting wolves want to get a proposal put on the ballot, and I hope they lose in federal court. I’ll explain in a few moments.But first, a little background. Those who wanted to hunt wolves for sport used one horribly irresponsible Upper Peninsula farmer as an excuse to claim wolves needed to be hunted. That farmer, John Koski, refused to install fencing, even when it was provided to him and left dead cattle lying around. The state gave him three guard donkeys, which actually keep wolves away.But he allegedly gave them no water, and two died of thirst. Koski is now about to go on trial for animal cruelty. But those in the legislature who were bent on their fantasy of killing wolves passed a law authorizing a hunt, after the lawmakers were presented with evidence later shown to be totally false.Governor Snyder signed the wolf hunting law, saying, again incorrectly, that it was scientifically sound. But it turns out the wolves have friends out there. Wolves were almost extinct in the Upper Peninsula 30 years ago, but careful conservation efforts brought the population back to a little over 600.Opponents of the wolf hunt began collecting signatures for a ballot proposal to overturn the wolf hunting law. But in a clearly underhanded move, the lawmakers then passed a second law that shifted decision-making power to the Michigan Natural Resources Commission, where Governor Snyder’s appointees quickly authorized a wolf hunt.The hunt itself fell far short of expectations. The state authorized shooting 43 wolves, but hunters only killed about half that many. Now, abandoning all pretense at sportsmanship, those bent on murdering wolves for fun want to be allowed to use leg hold traps. That sickens me.By the way, it always has been legal for a farmer to shoot any wolf menacing his or her livestock. If the wolf population in the UP is too large, some of the animals should be captured and taken to Isle Royale, where the native wolf population is dying out.Opponents of wolf hunting are now circulating petitions for a second referendum to again ban wolf hunting in Michigan. But they’ve run into a problem. Michigan only allows state residents to ask people to sign petitions. Those who want to protect wolves want to bring in their allies from other states to collect signatures.They’ve asked U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland to throw out this law. Well, I hope he doesn’t. State residents should decide state law. If anybody can come in here to collect signatures, it will make it far easier for people like the Koch brothers to slap all sorts of anti-democratic referenda and amendments on the ballot.Those against the wolf hunt have four weeks to get the less than two hundred thousand signatures they need; if they have sufficient support, they should be able to do that. Wolves deserve a fair chance at survival. Those defending them need to fight fairly as well.

During the Great Depression, some radicals were strongly against helping starving people. They believed only when their condition was so bad and so hopeless that they couldn’t stand it anymore, they would finally revolt and bring about a new society.That never happened, of course, partly because the New Deal kept people alive and gave them hope in the future. For a long time, I thought the idea that you could get people to do the right thing only by making them suffer was heartless.Now, I am not so sure. Common sense has proven to be particularly uncommon. For years, we have heard politicians tell us that we are overtaxed, and we’ve happily backed politicians who refuse to make necessary infrastructure improvements.We have been short changing things like roads and sewers for years, even when we’ve had the money. My theory is that this happened partly because fixing plumbing isn’t sexy.If politicians spend millions on a gleaming new building, they have something they can brag about.Nobody ever thinks about water and sewer mains until they break, or potholes we get a broken axle.Then, maybe we begin to get it.In case you hadn’t noticed, this is turning out to be the worst winter Michigan has had in nearly thirty years. And the unrelenting cold and massive pileup of snow is giving the final shove to roads and pipes we have neglected to maintain. Detroit in particular has been plagued with a series of water and sewer main breaks. Yesterday, a huge thirty-inch pipe broke on the Southwest side, flooding a whole square mile.Officials didn’t seem to know that the pipe may be a century old. Some of the water and sewer pipes beneath the city’s streets date back to the nineteenth century. They should have been upgraded or replaced long ago. This is everyone’s fault.There have been more than one hundred serious water main breaks in Detroit this winter, and others in surrounding older suburbs. Meanwhile, power outages in fifty Detroit schools have kept kids home for dozens of days this winter.The reason is, more and more pressure on aging infrastructure, plus poor quality of power supply from the wretched Detroit Public Lighting Department.Meanwhile, for the last two years, the legislature has steadily refused the governor’s pleas to do something about the condition of our roads. They have refused. This year, Rick Snyder really isn’t even trying. Some say the political will to fix the roads hasn’t been there yet, and that maybe this brutal winter can do the trick.Well, maybe the only way to get people to see the light is through suffering, after all. But leadership doesn’t consist in telling people what you think they want to hear.What I’d like to hear is both parties tell us they are going to raise our taxes to fix our roads, sewers and power plants before the network of civilization falls apart, and then give us a choice of how to pay for it. Because we are going to pay, like it or not. And we will suffer more and pay more the longer we wait.How and when we face reality is up to us. 

If I could have dinner with any corporate executive, I’d choose Mary Barra, who I think is fascinating.She rose through the ranks of the highly macho culture at General Motors to become its first female CEO. And she didn’t do it as a transplanted financial expert, but as the first honest-to-goodness automotive engineer to lead the company in more than 20 years.Were she male, she’d be called a “car guy” by the press.Though powerful, she still impresses people as feminine, and has managed to build an incredible career while sustaining a successful long marriage and raising two children.If that isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what is.Yet I’ve also been fascinated and appalled this week by the ongoing kerfuffle over Mary Barra’s salary.A few days ago, author and feminist Anne Doyle got my attention with a post on her leadership blog, Powering Up.Doyle, who is a friend of mine, was both incredulous and indignant that Barra was apparently being paid less than her predecessor, Dan Akerson. Not just less than he was being paid then, less than he is being paid now, in retirement.The figures seemed to show Akerson would get almost $4.7 million this year in salary and short-term stock incentives, while Barra would get $300,000 less.Seemed like the old gender pay gap is alive and well, even at the highest levels. It seemed especially galling that the retired man was getting paid more in salary than the woman who inherited his job. Well, this certainly set off a tempest at General Motors, and yesterday, a spokesperson said we’d gotten it all wrong.In fact, new figures show that Barra’s total compensation this year will be $14.4 million, way more than the $9 million Akerson got last year.Well, I am glad any time a blow is struck for pay equity, but I’m also uneasy about this: Does anyone really deserve more than a million dollars a month? I am not starving myself and think those who work hard and smart deserve material rewards.But what is the definition of enough?It is certainly easier to justify Barra’s salary than that of Prince Fielder, an overweight and underperforming baseball player who was paid more than $20 million last year.But there are women second-tier autoworkers at GM struggling to support families on less than $30,000 a year, and the single waitress at my local coney island who may make $20,000.I wonder if Mary Barra thinks about them and the fact that there’s no way they will ever be able to buy a new GM product.Incidentally, yesterday I discussed the fact that not a single Republican invited to witness President Obama signing the farm bill at Michigan State Friday showed up.Actually, there was one elected GOP official there – State Representative Mike Callton, R-Nashville. He wasn’t invited; he showed up on his own, and had to fight to get a ticket.He told reporters, “The President deserves our respect, and he is the leader of the nation, whether a Democrat or a Republican.”Well, Representative Callton, that was a classy thing to do and say, and you deserve respect as well.

Once, when Ronald Reagan was President, I was one of a group of writers and editors who were invited to lunch at the White House. The President wasn’t craving our company.He was trying to gain public support for a new and controversial defense program. I was not in favor of that particular program, and hadn’t voted for President Reagan. Still, it would never have occurred to me to turn down an invitation to meet the president, or any president, no matter what their policies.Whatever else you may think of any individual, the President of the United States is the freely elected leader of this nation, and a symbolic representative of the country, and this democracy.Throughout our history, most people have felt that way. But apparently, not anymore. Last Friday, President Obama came to Michigan State University to sign the new farm bill, which is one of the rare truly bipartisan pieces of legislation in recent years.But though at least two dozen Republicans were invited to the bill signing, none of them showed up. Not Governor Rick Snyder, not Speaker of the House John Boehner or any ranking Republican on either the House or Senate Agriculture Committees.Most Michigan farmers are represented by Republicans in Congress, but none of this state’s nine GOP congressmen were there either. When Air Force One landed, the only official who showed up to greet the President was Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero.I think there is something deeply wrong with that, and would feel the same way if the president were a Republican and every Democrat in the state failed to show up.This was not a campaign trip. Not only is the president not running for reelection, he can’t ever run again. Nor is the president in any kind of impeachment-worthy legal or ethical trouble, or a pariah here. He won Michigan by margins considerably larger than his national average in both his campaigns.Politics in a democracy depends on a certain level of civility. My congressman when I was growing up was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican named Bill Broomfield from Oakland County.He served 35 years in the House and rose to become ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, retiring just before his party took back the House. Broomfield saw his job as trying to get things done through bipartisan consensus.He served during four Republican and three Democratic administrations. Ten years ago, I had a long chat with him in which he told me, “I can honestly say I liked working with all the Presidents.” He told me he still cherished letters from all of them, and refused to say which one had been his favorite.Broomfield is almost 92 now, and in frail health, but I have to think he would have been appalled by his successors’ failure to show up to greet the president. When I last talked with him, he told me that he felt not having “a spirit of bipartisanship hurts us a lot.”He added, “The idea that one party can do everything on these complicated issues doesn’t make sense.” You don’t have to be a political scientist to think we’d be better off with more of that spirit in Washington today.Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst. You can read his essays online at michiganradio.org.

Here’s some pretty safe advice: If you go to a party and see someone who looks interesting, try not to say,"Have you studied the details of Governor Snyder’s latest state budget proposal?"Unless you are with a bunch of politicians in Lansing, it's a pretty sure bet that you’ll end up talking to the potato chips.Governor Snyder’s budget is interesting, however, in a number of ways. There are two important things to remember, however. First, this is clearly the budget of a politician running for re-election.That doesn’t mean he is only promising bread and circuses to the masses. But he is looking to sway undecided votes.The other thing about this budget proposal is that it is simply that: A proposal. There is no guarantee – and in fact, very little chance – the legislature will enact all of it.Remember the governor asking last year for a lot of new money to fix our roads?Never happened.This year, he’s not even really asking for more road money, except for a quarter of a billion to qualify for some matching funds. My guess is the biggest battle may be over his tax proposal.Legislative Republicans, under heavy Tea Party influence, want an income tax rollback. Snyder wants an increase in the Homestead Property Tax Credit, which would be of most help to seniors, many of whom were stung by the pension tax increase.But Senate Finance Committee Chair Jack Brandenburg doesn’t think much of this idea. The governor himself said this budget was focused not toward the rich but, quote, “lower and middle income people, wage earners who are working hard.”Well, that’s not quite right.If he had wanted to help the hard working poor and boost the economy, the governor would have proposed fully restoring the Earned Income Tax Credit, which he cut from 20% to 6% three years ago. Studies show the recipients tended to quickly spend that on necessities, which caused a multiplier effect to ripple through the economy. However, the governor said that would not have been "appropriate."Perhaps the hardest to understand is why he included more money for poor kids’ Medicaid dental services in Kalamazoo and Macomb Counties, but not Wayne and Oakland.Probably the most striking thing about the governor’s budget recommendations was a 6% boost in higher education funding, after years of cuts.Those state universities best beloved by Republicans, Grand Valley and Central Michigan, got the biggest increases.Wayne State, not so much.Naturally, the Democratic party chair and most of the unions denounced this budget before they’d even read it. Yet at the end of the day, Democratic legislators seemed to be more positive about much of this Republican governor’s budget than most of their GOP counterparts. However, the Republicans run the show.And I wondered this: Why didn’t Mark Schauer, the Democratic candidate for governor, come forth with an alternative budget? Why didn’t he tell people what he would do differently with our money?But Schauer didn’t,and everyone is talking about what Governor Snyder wants to do next year.Schauer badly needs to start getting people to notice that he’s offering an alternative. The first step might be getting them to notice that he exists.  

Eight years ago, Republicans were smirking with glee. They thought they finally had an image to destroy U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow. They posted video on YouTube showing an unflattering picture of her in the senate, standing next to a sign reading "Dangerously Incompetent." It was followed by all sorts of sniggering comments,many of them essentially misogynistic.Stabenow, they claimed then, was one of the most ineffective members of the U.S. Senate. I talked to smug Republicans at the time who felt sure she was going down.Well, that fall she won reelection by 600,000 votes. Suddenly, Democrats were in the majority in the Senate. Soon Stabenow, the daughter of a car salesman from Clare, was chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee.Republicans rolled their eyes at that, too, until the Michigan Farm Bureau stunned them by endorsing her for reelection two years ago.That time, she won by almost a million votes. This week, her career may have reached an all-time high.After two years of bitter fighting, Congress finally passed a new farm bill, only after Stabenow took the unusual step of lobbying for it on the house floor. Senators do that about as often as the aristocrats in TV's Downton Abbey go downstairs to cook for the servants. But it paid off. To honor her achievement, President Obama is flying to Michigan State University Friday to sign this bill.This is fitting in a number of ways. MSU is the nation's pione land-grant university, and has been helping state agriculture since it was founded in 1855.MSU is also Stabenow's alma mater, though she studied social work, not agriculture, and sang folk songs in a local coffee house. But by virtue of sheer hard work, she has made herself an agriculture expert.There are generally three kinds of U.S. Senators: show horses, nonentities, and a small group of workhorses. Stabenow is one of the leading workhorses.Now, nobody thinks this ten-year farm bill is perfect. Her liberal allies are especially bitter than it cuts money for food stamps by eight billion over the next decade. Harry Cook, a retired Episcopal priest who works with the poor, posted an essay this morning which says, "The farm bill is an outrage and President Obama should veto it."He says Senator Stabenow, "has turned into the worst kind of compromiser, prizing (bipartisan praise) over her duty to provide for the poor." There is no disputing that this bill is not good for those who depend on food assistance. I am not happy about that either. But it should be remembered that Republicans, who control the House, originally wanted to end food stamps entirely.This bill does do some worthwhile things. It eliminates a program that paid farmers five billion a year whether they grew anything or not, a throwback to New Deal days.Instead, this bill helps them with crop insurance, meaning farmers will have to pay premiums and only be paid when they take a loss. This bill isn't perfect, but on balance, it's better than what existed before. You can still find that "dangerously incompetent" picture on YouTube, but nobody talks about it anymore.Sometimes it turns out that actions really are worth more than a thousand pictures.

Yesterday, I talked about the challenges the University of Michigan’s new president faces. One of those is, of course, the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to afford an education.That provoked a lot of reaction from listeners, and I was surprised by the tone of a lot of it. Specifically, many people feel that especially with the lagging economy, it makes no sense for students to study things that won’t clearly pay off in a job.“There’s nothing wrong with art appreciation. There are plenty of books, DVDs and YouTube clips out there,” one man said. But he thought it was outrageous that someone would spend a vast amount of money on something “that will turn out to be a nice hobby,” and then complain about the lack of job opportunities.”He also seemed to think that offering degrees that didn’t immediately promise well-paying jobs were a waste of taxpayer dollars, adding, “we definitely don’t need multiple universities offering the same marginal degree.”Well, I can tell you that many immigrants to this country feel the same way. Just go to graduation ceremonies at nearly any Michigan university and see who gets degrees in what. At Wayne State the lists of engineering grads, for example, are always dominated by students with Asian and Arabic names. Their parents expect education to bean investment that will pay off in the ability to make a living.This isn’t exactly anew idea. During the American Revolution, John Adams wrote, “I must study politics and war so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy … commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”Art appreciation, in other words. Actually, I’ve never met anyone with a degree in art appreciation. But I’ve met many people in what you might call practical occupations who were far deeper and better at what they did because they had learned to appreciate art.Yes, people need away to earn a living. But those who sneer at liberal arts are forgetting two things. First, education is more than narrow technical knowledge. The Taliban has engineers. Education is about the entire human being reaching their full potential.Besides, in my experience, not very many eighteen-to-twenty two- year-olds know what their life’s work should be. To an extent, arguing about what students should study is a distraction from the main point, best expressed to me yesterday by former Congressman and State Senator Joe Schwarz.Schwarz, a Republican, chaired the Senate higher education committee for years. Yesterday, he said “It is truly difficult for me to understand why the legislature and the governor continue to believe Michigan can continue to grossly under fund higher ed.” A physician himself, Schwarz added, “How the hell can we make the claim that Michigan absolutely must have more qualified college grads for high-skilled jobs, then turn around and beggar the selfsame universities that train the people we need?”That’s the real problem, not what students are studying, You don’t have to be Socrates to see that we are starving our future. And doing so, to our own peril.

It’s been ten days since the University of Michigan announced that Mark Schlissel would be the school’s new president.I did not comment then, because I did not know enough to have an opinion, and because I knew Michigan Radio’s news department would do a superb job covering the selectio nand the new president himself. I should say, by the way, that while Michigan Radio is a part of the University of Michigan, I am not an employee of the university, and I neither speak for the university or the station management.But I can tell you that in the ten days since the new president was announced, I have talked to,or been talked to, by a lot of people about it. Roughly speaking, they had twomain areas of concern. The biggest was the rising cost of an education.Current estimates show the cost of four years at Michigan as more than one hundred and eight thousand dollars for students who live in this state, and close to two hundred and twenty thousand for out of staters. Clearly, the cost of an education at Michigan’s best public university is now beyond the means of many of its citizens.This has happened largely because the legislature no longer supports public education the way it used to. Once, Lansing covered about seventy percent of university costs. Now, they need to get that much through tuition. Recently I found an old tuition receipt from my graduate school days at Michigan in 1978. I was enrolled for nine credits, and paid five hundred and fifty four dollars. That’s about two thousand dollars in today’s money, still far less than today’s students pay.How much any university president can do about that is a big question. Other people have told me that they were stunned by the size of the new president’s salary,which, with deferred compensation and other perks, approaches nine hundred thousand dollars a year.The fact is, however,that the job of a university president today is far different from what it once was. Essentially, it involves running a multibillion dollar global corporation under government scrutiny. It is a job at least as hard as that of Alan Mullally at Ford, who made twenty-one million last year.One of my own concerns was best illustrated by a woman wearing a Michigan sweatshirt in a gas station in a town called Dansville. She had a definite opinion about the new president. “He better do something about fixing the football and basketball teams,” she said. For her and many other Michiganders who never went to college,the university is a place where major college sports are played, with some sortof school attached. Keeping athletics in their proper place is always a challenge.African American enrollment has been dropping alarmingly, which is another concern. Finally, it gives me pause that prior to his final job interview. President-elect Schlissel had never set foot in this state, let alone on the Ann Arbor campus. Michigan is a fairly complex place.And, we sometimes forget that this university was created – nearly two hundred years ago — to serve all Michigan residents. If the U of M’s new president can somehow continue and deepen that mission, his presidency will be successful indeed.

Last night I talked to Mary Lou Zieve, who is well known in Detroit as a marketing executive and supporter of the arts. I found out that we had something unpleasant in common.During the last week, we’ve each had a tire destroyed by a pothole. Not on some unpaved road out in the country, but on suburban surface streets. I was driving forty miles an hour on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak or Birmingham, when – bang.This cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. Our roads and streets are bad and getting worse, and our lawmakers have refused over and over again to appropriate money to fix them.But they are now eagerly signing up for something that from a good government standpoint is the height of insanity. They want to give us a tax cut, which means the state will have even less money to do the things it is failing to do.The Senate Finance Committee voted this week to reduce the state income tax to 3.9 percent over the next three years, which, when completely phased in, would leave the state with almost a billion dollars less a year than it has now.This would mean less money for education, infrastructure, and even more potholes. You might end up with a hundred bucks or so a year more. Good luck educating your kids and fixing your car with that. Governor Snyder wants instead to give us some kind of retroactive tax relief which would supposedly be “targeted to where it’s needed the most,” though they aren’t giving us more details.Why are they doing this? Well, some, like State Senator David Robertson, are spouting ideological blather like “we have a moral obligation to return dollars to the public at every opportunity.” Well, even if you believe that, this isn’t that opportunity.Our lawmakers have a moral and professional obligation to give us good government, and maintain the elements of civilization that belong to us all – like clean air, water, schools and roads.But ideology really has nothing to do with this tax cut. This is an election year. The governor and every non-retiring legislator have to face the voters in November. They want to be able to say – “hey, we just gave you this nice juicy tax cut. Please reelect us.”What makes that even easier for them is term limits. If the irresponsible tax cuts they enact today won’t produce devastatingly bad consequences for five years, guess what: Everyone now holding office will be gone. Somebody else will have to deal with the mess. Former Gov. John Engler was a big tax cutter in his day, but he did have principles.Once, he was asked why he opposed the death penalty when polls showed a big majority favored it, he said “a hundred percent of them don’t want to pay taxes.” Well, like almost everyone else, I could use more disposable income.But I want to pay taxes, because I want civilization. So lawmakers, if you want my vote, please keep your tax cut and even raise taxes if you need to, but fix the roads. Experts have run the numbers, and financially, we would all be much better off.

This is an election year, and if you haven’t noticed, you'll soon be engulfed by an inescapable tidal wave of advertising that will make that clear. Last night’s State of the Union speech was, in one sense, a campaign platform.So were all of the various Republican responses. We’ve seen precious little bipartisan cooperation in Washington or in Lansing these last few years, and unless the martians invade, you can probably count on even less this year.But regardless of your politics, there is one area in which we need to cooperate to make changes. Not in for whom we vote, but in the mechanics of how we vote.Many people in Michigan end up not voting because they don’t have the time to wait in line. Unlike many other states, including Ohio, we have no early voting, nor do we have no-fault absentee voting. Voters have to be over sixty, out of town, incapacitated or just plain lie to get an absentee ballot. Not surprisingly, that makes for long lines.And the dirty little truth is that most people who do stand in line to vote do so – to some extent --irresponsibly. Ballots today tend to be very long, with so many candidates and complex proposals.Too many voters either skip races, vote “no” on any proposals they don’t understand, or vote for familiar-sounding names, whether they know anything about the candidates or not.Well, there’s a new bipartisan national report on how elections are run in this country, and Chris Thomas, who has been Michigan Elections Director for decades, was part of the committee that wrote it and sent it to the President. Now, a report on election administration probably doesn’t sound exciting.But there are few things sexier than time and money, and the recommendations in this report are designed to save people both. The report makes it clear that everyone would benefit if we had a system of early voting, where voters could show up and cast a ballot before Election Day.Now, there are some potential drawbacks. If people vote too early, they might choose before some last-minute revelation or policy shift that might have changed their decision.But significant developments seldom happen in the last week or so of any campaign. In any event, Thomas told the Gongwer News Service, it is clear that early voting makes running elections much easier for both officials and voters.Additionally, there are now nineteen states that allow on-line registration. And while some of us old-timers instinctively distrust cyber anything, this report indicates it may actually provide more security safeguards than registration by mail.We don’t know yet how Secretary of State Ruth Johnson will react to these recommendations. But in the past, the real problem with voting reform has been the Republican-controlled legislature.Republicans do better when the turnout is smaller. Secretary Johnson has been in favor of allowing anyone to have an absentee ballot who wants one, no questions asked.But her fellow Republicans have refused. Bipartisan election reform is badly needed, as anyone who has ever waited in line at the polls should know. But sadly, my advice is, don’t hold your breath.

p>The last three years haven’t been great ones to be in the legislature – if you are a Democrat. Republicans are in control, and they’ve rammed through bills whose passage would have been unimaginable five years ago. Right to work, for example.Two years ago, Democrats hoped to win control of the state house of representatives, to gain some leverage. They did gain five seats, thanks in part to a large turnout and President Obama winning Michigan by nearly half a million votes. But they still fell short, thanks in part to redistricting .More than four hundred thousand more votes were cast for Democrats, but gerrymandering meant when the dust had settled. Republicans had fifty-nine seats, Democrats, fifty-one.This year, minority leader Tim Griemel has made taking back the house a top priority. Griemel, thirty-nine, is a red-headed lawyer, who, appropriately enough, is from Auburn Hills.A lawyer and a former school board president, he managed to become his party’s leader after less than a year in Lansing. He’s single, driven, and devoting full time to the legislature and this campaign. Yet though it would take flipping only another five seats, taking the House seems like an impossible dream.For one thing, this will be an off-year election, and more than a million fewer votes will be cast than two years ago. That always favors Republicans. Additionally, while Democratic candidate Mark Schauer could have a shot at the governor’s race, nobody thinks he could win by a margin as great as the President’s.Tim Griemel knows all that. But he still thinks his party has a shot, for a number of reasons. For one, he told me over pancakes yesterday, this governor has been extremely polarizing. “People have been surprised by Snyder,” he said.“When he ran, he pretended to be a moderate, but he’s governed from the far right.” That, he believes, has left Republicans vulnerable to a coordinated, issue-oriented campaign.That approach has a certain logic. Indeed, there is one issue where even Republican polling shows the governor vulnerable: Taxing senior citizens’ pensions. But Democrats think there are at least four other areas where they can separate the public from the GOP. Education is one. There has been a bipartisan effort to put more money into pre-kindergarten programs.But beyond that, spending on education, higher ed especially, has been cut, and it has become harder than ever in modern history for students to afford college.This comes at a time when it is more necessary than ever, for anyone who wants a decent living.Beyond that, Greimel thinks Republicans are vulnerable for eliminating the child tax credit and wiping out the Homestead Property Tax Credit to give state businesses a huge tax break.Add to that the fact that women will now be forced to pay for a special rider to cover abortion in the case of rape or incest, and Greimel thinks Democrats may have a winning formula. That still may be a long shot. Even Griemel concedes that Republicans will have more campaign money. But given that most people don’t know the name of their state representative, a unified campaign on an issue-oriented basis could make sense.It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Yesterday, two special reports were released in Lansing, one calling for action on mental health, the other, on our deteriorating roads. Michigan Radio senior political analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what’s likely to happen next.

This week, Michigan readers of the New Yorker were surprised to find a major profile of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, and in it Patterson is controversial as always. Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry reflects

Buried in the coverage of the North American International Auto Show last week was some disappointing news for the future of mass transit in southeastern Michigan. Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst, reports what happened.

Joe Harris spent three tumultuous years as emergency manager in Benton Harbor, but before that, he spent a decade as auditor general of the city of Detroit. Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst, talked with him recently.