Has there ever been, in recent Michigan history, a governor’s State of the State Address that had less impact than last night’s speech by the embattled Rick Snyder?
Rather than a hefty analysis of the governor’s proposals, by noon today most news websites had moved on, relegating the annual address to a mere sidebar. The Detroit News’ print product limited the speech to a small spot in the bottom right corner of the newspaper’s front page.
While this was pre-emptively billed as a sobering Snyder message on the need for Michigan to come to terms with its long-neglected, expensive needs for modernization of infrastructure – roads, bridges, sewer lines and water mains — instead we got the governor at his nurdiest.
Snyder relentlessly tried to establish a positive reaction from the Legislature by repeatedly urging lawmakers to give a “shout out” to various forms of good news about Michigan. Over at Electablog, a liberal news site that holds Snyder’s feet to the fire, they pointed out that the governor spent about as much time talking about the “productivity” of Michigan dairy cows as he did discussing the seemingly endless Flint water crisis.
In his fast-talking laundry list of state government programs designed to fix virtually every ailment facing the Mitten State, he sounded not like a Republican governor but more like his Democratic predecessor, Jennifer Granholm, or even the typical State of the Union speeches by then-President Bill Clinton.
Despite the prior billing, Snyder’s spent surprisingly little time on Flint or the sinkhole in Macomb County or Lansing’s inability to face a growing infrastructure crisis across Michigan.
After the speech, Mike Nystrom, executive director of the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association (MITA), sounded rather unimpressed with the relative lack of prioritization of infrastructure in the SOTS. “For decades,” Nystrom said, “we collectively as a state have simply failed to fix what needs to be fixed and replace what needs to be replaced.”
On some news websites this morning, Snyder’s vanilla speech was overshadowed by Warren Mayor Jim Fouts’ racist and sexist statements caught on tape.
I’m surprised Fouts, in his quirkiness, did not claim that Snyder delivered a particularly banal SOTS so that the spotlight would remain on the mayor’s ugly recorded commentaries against women, blacks and the elderly. A few years ago, Fouts began his annual State of the City address by caustically suggesting that Snyder scheduled a major news conference at the same time as the mayor’s speech to limit Fouts’ time in the media spotlight.
Meanwhile, Chris Savage, founder of Eclectablog, framed The Snyder speech this way:
What most blew me away was how little time he spent talking about his biggest failure: the Flint water crisis. After spending 70 seconds exalting Michigan’s cows and dairy industry (“When you see those cows, give ’em a shout out…”), he spent only 95 seconds talking about the ongoing tragedy in Flint, the poisoning of their drinking water with the powerful neurotoxin, lead, by the emergency managers he appointed, a human-made disaster compounded by the ineptitude of the head of the Department of Environmental Quality tasked with protecting our state’s drinking water.
Throw in the time he spent talking about a hog processing company that slaughters 10,000 pigs a day and livestock in Michigan got more time in Snyder’s State of the State Address than Flint did.
More shocking, he bragged about the replacement of “over 600” lead service lines. That represents just 4 percent … replaced and it’s been one year and 110 ten days since he first admitted there was a problem in Flint, and many more than that since Flint residents began to be poisoned by their tap water.
His short shrift of the Flint water crisis is an insult to every resident in Flint, a blatant dodging of his continued failure to make any sort of significant progress in resolving this outrage.
Photo: WOOD-TV
