Bishop: Mulhern ‘extremely counterproductive’ (THe Michigan View 12.9.10)

Posted by hpayne on December 9, 2010

In a candid, wide-ranging interview Wednesday with The Detroit News editorial board, departing Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, painted first man Dan Mulhern as a crazy in-law in a dysfunctional Lansing political family that bickered through the last four years even as the state’s fiscal situation imploded. At a time when Michigan desperately needed leadership to address its fundamentals, Lansing instead was led by a feckless Gov. Jennifer Granholm and a split legislature where Democrats and Republicans deeply mistrusted one another’s motives.

“Dan Mulhern was never present during any negotiation I had. He has been extremely counterproductive,” said Bishop in response to Mulhern’s broadside this weekend blaming the senator for his wife’s troubled tenure. “It was like he was scared of her,” Mulhern told the Detroit Free Press. “So how do you negotiate with someone who is scared of you?”

“Gov. Granholm is a very smart lady,” said Bishop, who led the Republican Senate for the Democratic governor’s last term. “But she does not have one important thing: leadership instincts.”

Worse, Bishop described a governor more interested in political intrigue than in building bipartisan bridges. “She had a media machine that constantly attacked,” he said describing the pair’s chilly relationship. “She came at me all the time. It’s hard to build trust with someone who doesn’t’ want to bring down the wall. I couldn’t leave town without fear of being attacked behind my back.”

The result was a state government that shut down twice — in 2007 and 2009 — without a budget agreement. Granholm, Bishop said, would introduce reforms such as a service tax, but always as stalking horses to increase taxes – a non-starter for Republicans who feared tax hikes would send the wrong message at a time in which the state was struggling to retain businesses.

Indeed, the governor’s 12 percent hike in personal income taxes in 2007 did nothing to stem budget red ink, says Bishop. “It did damage to the business environment here and revenues fell off anyway because we were losing manufacturing.”

Meanwhile, Republican proposals also went nowhere unless Democrats extracted revenue hikes in return. Lacking the strategic skills of former Senate leader John Engler, Bishop nevertheless focused his caucus on union pay reform, proposing a five percent pay cut and 20 percent co-pays on health insurance to bring public workers’ costs more in line with the private sector. Bishop says he valued a solid relationship with Democratic House Speaker Andy Dillon – “Andy and I generally saw eye to eye” — though Dillon’s embrace of union reform increasingly cast him as a heretic in his own caucus.

This leaderless, rudderless menagerie of political doctors came at a time when the Michigan patient was suffering severe trauma to its vital signs. Hemorrhaging revenue as Detroit’s auto industry went south, the state budget was being consumed by entitlement costs (“Medicaid has ballooned 60 percent since 2000,” says Bishop) and union benefits. In addition, Granholm was strangling business with increased regulations.

In 2008, when the McCain for President campaign pulled up its Michigan stakes to concentrate elsewhere, Bishop pleaded (to no avail) with McCain to stay. He told McCain that Michigan should be his base camp. He told him that Granholmnomics was Obamanomics in practice.

He told McCain he should warn voters that “if you want your country to look like Michigan, then elect Barack Obama.”

Instead of addressing the state’s fiscal fundamentals, Granholm applied Band-Aids. Treated with budget tricks, tobacco settlement money, and federal stimulus dollars, the patient’s problems were masked. “The governor was never good at dragging the big issues across the finish line,” reflects Bishop.

Now the Snyder administration will inherit the mess. Bishop is optimistic that Michigan is fixable, ticking off a handful of reforms – “low-hanging fruit” he calls them – from holding department heads accountable for budgets to punishing pols who miss votes. “Snyder has a mandate to make big changes,” he says.

The biggest change needed? Leadership.

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