Granholm rising? Ex-gov. gets a fresh look

For conservative Michigan Republicans, I suspect the most distasteful program on TV these days is NBC’s “Meet The Press,” which now offers ex-governor Jennifer Granholm as a leading expert on all things political.

The implication that Granholm has any valuable advice or analysis on state or federal issues is certainly anathema to the GOP – and to many Michigan Democrats. A recent statewide poll found that Democrats feel that Granholm deserved a major share of the blame for the Republican landslide in the 2010 elections.

“Granholm fatigue,” the survey concluded, was a key factor in the outcome that awarded the GOP every branch of state government.

But her “Meet The Press” gig provides Granholm with a big stage in which to artfully alter her legacy.

And she’s receiving plenty of help.

Recent studies, surveys and fact-checks have clearly put the Granholm governorship in a new light, one that portrays a state leader thrown into a fiscal nightmare and desperately trying to find a politically palatable way out.

The fresh view says that Granholm was dealt a bad hand, particularly in her second term, with job outsourcing jumping to a new level and the auto industry tanking, followed by the national Great Recession and then the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies.

The implication is that no governor, no policy, could have prevented the economic downturn that Michigan suffered. And the conventional wisdom that Michigan endured an unprecedented “one-state recession” from 2003-08 is unmistakably shot down by the long range economic data.

Granholm commented recently that the new analyses reach “the logical point that state government policy can do little in the wake of globalization, manufacturing/auto bankruptcies and the national recession.”

Yet, the ex-governor, now a senior policy adviser to the non-profit Pew Charitable Trusts, has never absolved herself of her failures of leadership. In an Aug. 7 tweet, Granholm told her Twitter followers: “Reflecting on gov’ning, 1 big regret is being too nice when the times require confrontation. I hope POTUS (President Obama) will learn it faster than I did.”

All of this is nauseating to Republicans who spent years pointing out the governor’s flaws, particularly her drip-drip-drip approach to budget cuts and readiness to raise taxes. The GOP version of history says that Granholm’s tax increases and failure to adequately cut government spending caused Michigan’s economic misery.

But over the past year, a steady stream of economic statistics and research finds that Granholm is looking better in hindsight.

Here are some of the surprising Granholm highlights:

·     Michigan tied with Minnesota for the nation’s largest decline in unemployment from 2009 to 2010. The state also experienced the nation’s sixth-largest increase in per-capita personal income in that same year-to-year period.

·      State taxes as a percentage of personal income in 2011 are $7 billion lower than they were under John Engler in 2000. The fiscal problems the state faced were magnified by one statistic: Michigan’s overall tax revenues peaked during the prosperous year of 2000 and are not expected to return to that level until 2020.

·     Though the Granholm-backed Michigan Business Tax – the so-called “job-killer” tax – was still fully in place, the state achieved a substantial bounce in manufacturing jobs in 2010, a trend that was projected to continue throughout 2011.

·      Michigan ranks No. 1 in the nation for job creation improvement in a recent Gallup survey of state job markets, and Gov. Rick Snyder took office with some Granholm momentum that is expected to produce 64,600 jobs in 2011.

These are among the facts and figures provided by the University of Michigan Economics Department, the non-partisan Senate Fiscal Agency and a lengthy report issued in recent days by the state’s budget department.

While job losses were substantial, one long forgotten objective fact is that unemployment was not an overwhelming problem for much of Granholm’s governorship — until the national recession hit in 2008. She inherited a 6.8 percent jobless rate from Engler and unemployment remained in the narrow range of 6.7 percent to 7.4 percent for her first five years in office. Not great, but Obama would kill for those kinds of numbers.

As for her Meet The Press moments, Granholm is getting good reviews there that also provide an unexpected fresh look at her administration.

A recent MTP broadcast prompted politifact.org to take a closer look at the Granholm track record. Politifact concluded that Granholm cut more spending, by far, than any other governor from 2003-10 — $1 billion. And the 2007 Granholm increases in the personal income tax and business tax were “hardly the driving force” behind the state’s downturn. Again, the auto industry’s woes and the outsourcing by manufacturers were much more significant. Politifact also points out that, in the face of plummeting tax revenues, the Granholm income tax hike still kept the rate below that of the boom year of 1999.

As a growing pile of research shows that the impact of state taxes on business and economics within that state is widely exaggerated, Politifact quoted Gary Gurless, an economist with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution:

“The plain fact is that state economic growth rates are, in the short run, linked to the demands for products that are produced in the state – products like autos in Michigan, oil in Texas, sunny vacations in Florida, and gambling holidays in Nevada.”

In our state, the warm, sunny days of August make this Pure Michigan vacation time. And perhaps it’s also time that her critics allow Granholm to come in from the cold.

—-TAG LINE—-Chad Selweski can be reached at chad.selweski@macombdaily.com.