Jennifer Granholm was Michigan’s last Democratic Governor, elected in 2002 and again in 2006. I liked her, but she didn’t do the greatest job of dealing with the staunch Republican opposition in the state House and Senate, and of course Michigan’s auto industry was hit hard by the impending Great Recession several years before it hit the rest of the country. Granholm desperately attempted to get Michiganders to understand the importance of diversifying our economy so as not to be so reliant on a single industry, but it didn’t work and/or was too late anyway.
Rightly or wrongly, Granholm took the blame, and her name was mud with a lot of the state for years. She was replaced by Republican “nerd” Rick Snyder, who is coming to the end of his own 2nd term.
The frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Governor this November is former State Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (who was most recently Ingham County Prosecutor). Since both Whitmer and Granholm are pro-choice Democratic women, naturally the Michigan Republican Party is desperately attempting to tie the two together.
They’ve thus whipped up a rather creepy Facebook graphic which morphs Whitmer’s face into Granholm’s, next to a list of what are supposedly horrific sins both women supposedly have in common.
Several of the items on the list are good things (ie, Michigan’s charter schools are out of control and mostly part of the deeply corrupt Betsy DeVos machine; the main reason our roads have been crumbling for decades is the GOP’s refusal to raise enough tax revenue to fix them).
Some are utter garbage (there’s no such thing as ‘partial-birth’ abortion).
Others yet are completely unsupported accusations (“part of a corrupt political machine”)
And others yet are oddly meaningless (“supports resistance not results”?)
However, this is the most amusing part of their post:
Yes, that’s right…Gretchen Whitmer apparently voted with Jennifer Granholm a shocking...fifty-seven percent of the time!
...which means, of course, that she voted against Granholm 43% of the time.
I have no idea whether the 57% figure is accurate or in context, of course (for all I know, 40% of the “votes” were for things like naming the official state snake or whatever), but “She voted with someone in her party who we despise 57% of the time!” isn’t exactly an earth-shattering attack.