Endorsements: Whitmer and Calley for governor

Detroit Free Press Editorial Board | Detroit Free Press

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Politics isn't just a lost art in Michigan; it's an under-valued skill.

The worst thing any candidate for public office can be called is a professional politician. Admitting that one has made a career of running for elective office is only slightly less embarrassing than revealing a history of felony convictions. Both confessions suggest a life devoted to unsavory pursuits.

This is nonsense, of course. Michigan, particularly, suffers from an excess of political ineptitude and inexperience, not a plague of professionalism.

Our state's body politic is riddled with disease — a deluge of untraceable special interest money, a gerrymandered political map that marginalizes moderate voters, and a broken primary system that amplifies extremists in both parties. But calling in yet another team of amateur "outsiders" is unlikely to hasten its recovery.

That's why we hope Michigan voters who participate in the Aug. 7 primary elections will choose Democrat GRETCHEN WHITMER and Republican BRIAN CALLEY to represent their parties in Michigan's November gubernatorial election. Michigan needs experienced work-horses, not sleek show-horses bred for for the sound-byte sprint.

Doing the work

Although both are in their 40s, neither Whitmer nor Calley has been very good at generating buzz, that ephemeral currency that attracts national media attention and contributions from out-of-state donors looking to get in on the ground floor of the next Barack Obama or Nikki Haley.

Neither is identified with signature programs that have transformed the lives of their constituents, although both have played a role in some of the more useful things state government has done in the last decade — expanding health care coverage, for instance, and setting Michigan's largest city on a path to solvency and economic revival.

But both Whitmer and Calley boast records of quiet achievement that decisively eclipse those of their respective primary rivals, and each has the temperament required to preside over a state government in which neither party is likely to claim the political monopoly Republicans have enjoyed throughout Gov. Rick Snyder's two terms in office.

Whitmer was just 28 when she was elected to the state House of Representatives as a freshman legislator from East Lansing in 2000, halfway through John Engler's final term as governor. Rarely a political ally of the Republican governor, Whitmer nevertheless concedes that Engler was more effective than either of his two successors, Democrat Jennifer Granholm or Republican Snyder.

Whitmer argues persuasively that her parallel political education — like Engler, she led her party's caucus in the state Senate before running for governor — augurs well for her prospects of moving bold initiatives through a divided state Legislature.

The first Democrat to declare her gubernatorial candidacy, she was at first dismissed by party regulars who worried that a young, female candidate would reawaken the misogyny that bedeviled Granholm. But Whitmer persisted, and when better-known Democrats like U.S. Senator Gary Peters and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan resisted appeals to give up their own sinecures, she emerged as the most credible threat to challenge the Republicans' eight-year domination of Michigan government.

The nerd apparent?

Calley has faced — and, if we are to credit polling numbers, continues to face — a similarly steep climb to the Republican nomination.

Calley was a small-town banker-turned-small-town legislator when Snyder plucked him from obscurity to be his running mate in 2010. Every bit as mild-mannered as his gubernatorial mentor, he broke a tie vote that threatened to derail Snyder's tax plan in the Senate and successfully ran interference for many of the administration's other first-term legislative priorities.

Snyder's second term — punctuated by an unsuccessful ballot initiative to fund roads and a five-alarm health catastrophe in Flint — has been more frustrating for both men.

There's little evidence that Calley played any role in the genesis of the latter debacle, but he's been the point man in the administration's efforts to staunch the bleeding. And while Flint's recovery effort is still in its infancy, lawmakers in both parties agree that Calley's efforts to mitigate the crisis have been more productive than the belated, opportunistic inquisition conducted by his principal GOP rival, Attorney General Bill Schuette.

In a circumspect post-mortem with the Free Press editorial board, Calley defended the emergency manager system many Flint residents blame for mismanaging the city's water delivery but faulted his own administration for failing to respond promptly when residents complained about the taste, smell and appearance of their water.

"When a person says they have a problem, we need to have a default position to believe them," he says. Because Snyder's subordinates were skeptical of residents' complaints, he adds, the next governor will have to repair Flint's trust in government as well as its outdated water pipes.

From promising to preposterous

In the Democratic primary, two unlikely rivals are vying to wrest the nomination from Whitmer.

Abdul El-Sayed, 33, is the charismatic Ivy League-trained physician Mayor Mike Duggan recruited to rebuild Detroit's decimated public health department after the city emerged from bankruptcy. El-Sayed's brief tenure in Detroit was marked by extraordinary energy and tangible improvements in the lives of the city's most challenged residents. He led initiatives to secure free eyeglasses for impoverished schoolchildren and link expectant mothers with resources proven to reduce infant mortality.

Despite his youth, El-Sayed's intelligence and operational prowess arguably outstrip those of any candidate in either party's primary. We will be disappointed, and Michigan will be poorer, if the 2018 gubernatorial race proves his last foray into elective politics.

But despite his incontestable gifts, the politically untested El-Sayed has yet to earn his claim to the state's top executive job. And while we concede that his election would be a powerful reproof to Donald Trump's paranoid nativism, Michiganders need safe roads, effective schools and reliable health care even more urgently than they need to avenge Trump's narrow victory in Michigan's presidential balloting.

Whitmer's only other rival for the nomination is twice as old as El-Sayed, many times wealthier, and infinitely less qualified.

After carpeting Michigan TV markets with months of prime-time advertising, Shri Thanedar has become the unlikeliest of household names — a smiling cherub who is every bit as charming in person as in the whimsical 30-second spots that make comic sport of his name, accent and rags-to-riches story.

But his campaign for the gubernatorial nomination seems like a lark, the self-indulgence of a wealthy man looking to amuse himself in retirement.

A lifelong campaign

Attorney General Bill Schuette is making a more serious, and far more determined bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. His glossy, well-funded primary blitz is the culmination of a campaign that sometimes seems to have begun in utero.

But for someone who has spent a lifetime preparing for this race and role, Schuette is running on a platform nearly as glib and superficial as Thanedar's. He speaks of making Michigan competitive as though it were a fait accompli, but offers nothing more original than hoary promises to cut taxes.

He dwells on Jennifer Granholm's gubernatorial tenure (which coincided with, but was probably not exclusively responsible for, the collapse of U.S.manufacturing and international real estate), but seldom explains how a Schuette administration would improve on (or diverge from) the path charted by Snyder and Calley.

And no Michigan Republican has been more slavish in his fealty to Donald Trump, whose fiscal recklessness and hostility to Michigan's trading partners has endangered the manufacturing jobs Schuette proposes to multiply.

Despite a varied resume that includes legislative experience in both Lansing and Washington, there is little in Schuette's amorphous platform or partisan track record to suggest he would be an effective middleman if Democrats gain control of the state House in November. Too often, he has squandered the attorney general's resources on conservative crusades, including lawsuits to stave off coal plant regulation or transgender-safe bathrooms, that do little to impact the lives of ordinary Michiganders.

Whitmer and Calley, who represent the most pragmatic elements of their respective parties, probably won't have the opportunity to work together on Michigan's most pressing challenges; the current election cycle will likely send one or both of them into at least temporary political exile.

But it is not hard to imagine them working collaboratively, and perhaps even productively, to advance their respective parties' mutual interest in a Michigan that is safer, more prosperous, and more competitive than the one we inhabit today.

That is the lodestar voters in both parties' primaries should keep in mind when they goto the polls Aug. 7.