September 27, 2006

Instead of Ideas, Michigan GOP Offers Iacocca

It would be going too far to say Democrats have caused Michigan’s economic problems. But it is becoming clearer every day that Republicans refuse to suggest Republican ideas as solutions.

As a result, Michigan is Blue, and Michigan is blue. While the rest of the nation enjoys healthy job growth and economic expansion, Michigan remains mired in typical Michigan malaise. And if ever an opportunity presented itself for Michigan Republicans, it would seem to be at hand.

But Michigan Republicans excel at nothing like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And this year they’ve found a creative new way of doing so – hitching their star to the symbol of everything the state has done wrong for the past generation.

Welcome back, former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca. Or should we say, oh, you’re back. What do you want now?

The erstwhile Democrat – his former affiliation driven by an understanding of who bailed him out of his most infamous mess – now wants us to elect Republican erstwhile businessman Dick DeVos as governor. Why? Because DeVos knows how to “create Michigan jobs.”

So says the man who knows how to create federal loan guarantees to help preserve American companies to be sold to German ones. Let’s all listen to Lee! He “talks straight,” or so he keeps telling us. He hasn’t “given up on Michigan,” other than not living here anymore.

Iacocca started showing up last week in DeVos campaign commercials. The man who last made headlines a decade ago in a failed hostile takeover of his own former company now presumes to tell Michigan voters who can create jobs for them. The man whose last major accomplishment was the Dodge Aries – you have a 2006 model, right? – thinks he knows who can make Michigan well again.

Michigan Republicans have fallen into a common inertia that tends to paralyze them whenever they start losing confidence in their own philosophical ideas, which for them is quite often.

Get a businessman! That’s who can fix this mess!

And who better than Dick DeVos, who once ran his dad’s network marketing/manufacturing outfit – filling seminars nightly with aspiring soap pushers – and whose family has probably given more dollars to Michigan Republicans than any other? If that doesn’t buy you the right to run for governor, what will?

Michigan’s problems are not the fault of Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, which is not to say she has the right solutions. The DeVos campaign touts their man on the premise that he, with his history as president of Amway Corp., knows how to create jobs because he did so in his business. And if Lee Iacocca agrees, who are the rest of us to argue?

Problem: Governors don’t run businesses. They run state governments, which last I knew was not the place Republicans like to see jobs created. But if there is one worse place for jobs to be created, it would be gigantic automotive manufacturers like General Motors, Ford and Mr. Iacocca’s former employer. Actually, Iacocca once worked for Ford as well, so his resume gets even less impressive as you keep reading.

But you have to wonder if the DeVos campaign really remembers Iacocca’s history. Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1979 when the Carter administration, at the urging of Democratic U.S. Rep. and future Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, bailed out this bumbling private corporation with federal loan guarantees. Blanchard hailed this as a great example of “public/private partnership,” a theme he rode to two terms as governor.

But the propping up of the automotive industry has proven to be Michigan’s undoing. Its unsustainable union contracts, health packages and squeezing of codependent suppliers have killed more jobs than Iacocca’s Japanese bogeymen could ever dream of killing. Michigan lawmakers have operated for the past century under the assumption that anything you can do to prop up the auto industry must be done. Never was this notion applied more dogmatically than in the case of the Chrysler bailout.

Today, Chrysler is German-owned, while General Motors and Ford continue to slash jobs, bleed cash and bludgeon the rest of the state with the inevitable side-effects.

Michigan had a conservative Republican governor, John Engler, who served three terms, cut taxes, slashed regulations and solved problems. One might assume the touting of such ideas would be central to the effort to unseat a Democratic incumbent this year. One would be wrong. Instead, we hear from the least deserving corporate welfare recipient of all time, who now wants us to vote Republican because, it would appear, businessmen stick together.

Around here, you just can’t find a career politician when you need one.

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