Interesting and depressing article on Michigan's future

A few prefaces … First, I disagree with the premise throughout this article that our governor is timid. He is, IMO, and in many people’s opinion, doing a great job. Governor Romney is very similar to Governor Snyder in many ways. Timidity really isn’t apparent. I guess that people see someone making a cost-benefit analysis for engaging in a particular debate, or pushing for a particular outcome, and deciding to forgo a particular fight, as being timid. I disagree. You fight the battles that are meaningful, and the battles you can win. You don’t aim for a bridge to far at the outset. Because if you do aim for that bridge to far, you’ll expend far to much political capital needed to accomplish your goals. Accomplish the goals, and then push. Second, I don’t disagree with the authors characterization of the proposals in front of us here. This is pretty accurate. And if they pass in toto or in significant part, business will probably start exiting the state enmasse. Worth considering if you are in Michigan and voting in a few weeks. Make the climate hostile to business, and it will move. Make it more expensive, and it will move. Funny how that works. We will be opening an office in NJ/NY area fairly soon. We are a Delaware C company. If the climate here is made even more hostile than it was during the preceding governor, yeah, we’ll move. We don’t need the drama.

The authors' other points are also probably correct. One of them may alarm or upset some of a particular political persuasion or leanings … but there seems to be a preference cascade gathering steam, even showing up in poorly analyzed polls that don’t actually match voter ID distributions. When someone scores 5 points ahead in a poll biased towards them by 10 points … with voter identification actually correctly about even with no discernible bias either way … that someone is actually behind in the reality. The cascade has been gathering steam, and may not be stoppable at this point. We’ll see. Without further ado, the article is here. Again, the Michigan governor is not bad like the author makes him out to be. Actually he’s one of the best governors we’ve had in a long time. I know only back to Blanchard, whom was largely a no-op, Engler who was meh, and screaming Jennifer Granholm, who if you didn’t see her performance at the DNC, well, you didn’t miss much. She was sadly, an epic failure here. The words hell, and handbasket are relevant to her tenure. FWIW, someone far worse ran against her before her second term, and I had the choice of voting for her, voting for the worse person, voting against her, or voting against the worse person. I chose the last of those. I cannot condone any anti-scientific candidate unable to grasp biology or cosmology as being realistic descriptions of nature. If I have to choose to vote for a completely out of their depth person with a sound understanding of science, or an ok business person with a completely broken understanding of science … I’ll go for the former every time. We can fix a broken economy. Its damn hard to fix a messed up educational system weakened by those whom should know better but choose not to because of a belief system which mistakenly trumps objective reality. You sometimes have to make distasteful decisions, and make hard compromises as a participant in a political process. This is true if you are a voter, or a governor. Just as true if you are a coder. You can’t always get to perfect, sometimes you have to settle. You just need to make sure what you settle for will not bring the rest of situation to a worse state after they leave. This is in part why I think Governor Snyder has done a good job. He’s made hard calls. Not ideologically pure calls. But pragmatic calls. This is why I believe the article is in error over how the Governor is viewed. He’s got lots of political capital left, and he’s carefully expending it. But we could be swamped by union money, forcing us to be a union state in a way no other is. Which will pretty much guarantee economic collapse, exactly the way the author indicates. I am hopeful, but I’ve seen far too many people vote ideology over pragmatism … feelings over intellect. Anything can happen. One must hope and work towards making sure we wind up on the right path. We are getting there, and as the author points out, we can be derailed, in a rather permanent, and unfixable manner. That would not be good. Elections do have consequences. Sometimes they are subtle, sometimes profound. Lets hope we get this right for the state of Michigan. We are getting closer to the right track. The governor is doing a good job. Lets not destroy all that hard work and make it impossible to fix problems going forward.