A Governor's Story by Jennifer Granholm Dan Mulhern

Author:Jennifer Granholm, Dan Mulhern [Mulhern, Jennifer Granholm, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-07-29T05:00:00+00:00

MICHIGAN’S PROBLEMS DIDN’T EXIST IN A VACUUM. BY DECEMBER 2007, a national recession had begun. And against this somber economic backdrop, the 2008 presidential campaign was in full swing. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Arizona senator John McCain were vying for the Republican nomination in Michigan. McCain had won Michigan in the 2000 GOP primary, defeating rival George W. Bush by a margin of 50 to 43 percent. Now, eight years later, Romney’s message was boastful: “I’ll make a commitment: if I’m president, that one-state recession is over.” McCain’s message was more somber—and more realistic: “Those manufacturing jobs are gone, and they’re not coming back.” McCain recommended community college retraining as a way for adults to transition to the new world.

But as my advisors had warned me during my own campaign, Michigan was in no mood for a straight-talk express; Michigan wanted a savior. Romney won the state with 39 percent of the vote to McCain’s 30 and Huckabee’s 16.

Despite Romney’s pandering optimism, the reality of manufacturing in America was undeniable. The jobs were gone, and they weren’t coming back. And as the election year of 2008 unfolded, the worst recession in memory began to spread across the country, with particular impact on Michigan. As gasoline prices shot up to more than $4 a gallon, people quit driving their gasguzzling trucks and SUVs, and thousands canceled their plans to buy new ones. With the highest-margin vehicles unmoving on dealers’ lots, auto sales figures began a steep slide.

At the same time, a drama of spectacular proportions was playing out in our state’s largest city. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick became embroiled in a riveting sex-and-corruption scandal that absorbed the entire state and came to a head in the summer of 2008.

It had all begun a year before, in August 2007, when the dapper Kilpatrick, dressed in a sharp, dark three-piece suit, a crisp white shirt, and a deep red tie, had taken the stand in a wrongful termination action brought against him and the city by Gary Brown, a Detroit police officer who had been assigned to investigate charges against the mayor. The thirty-seven-year-old mayor was charismatic, six feet, five inches tall, a former football player, married to a beautiful woman, and with three sons all younger than ten. Now that image was cracking. Kilpatrick was accused of having an affair with Christine Beatty, his chief of staff and herself a young mother.

The story was catnip for the media. Kilpatrick denied everything under oath. Beatty also took the witness stand and uttered the same forceful denial.

The denials notwithstanding, after three hours of deliberation, the jury decided that Brown had indeed been wrongfully discharged, and they awarded him a multi-million-dollar verdict. It was a significant embarrassment for Kilpatrick and the city, but it was just the start of the story.

Five months later, at 5:00 in the evening of January 23, 2008, David Hunke, publisher of the Detroit Free Press, gave me a courtesy call to prepare me for the bombshell his paper

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