ABOARD THE SNYDER CAMPAIGN BUS – Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder has had a message for groups and organizations representing interests in Lansing as he has met with them in recent months about his expectations should he become the state’s next governor.
“Do not walk in my office and ask for funding,” Snyder said in an interview Monday with Gongwer News Service. “You should walk in and say, ‘Here’s an outcome or result that’s important to achieve,’ and then we should have a discussion about how that gets measured, why it’s important, where it’s a priority and then to the degree it’s appropriate, we’ll have a discussion about funding and resources.”
Asked for the reaction he gets to that statement, Snyder said, “They go, ‘Wow.'” With a laugh, he said, “I view that as common sense.”
If the polls, which show Snyder with a huge lead, hold up on November 2, Snyder will have run the most successful outsider campaign for governor in modern Michigan political history. Even the closest comparison, former Governor George Romney, had been significantly involved in politics when he won the governorship in 1962, having played a key role in winning voter approval for a Constitutional Convention and then serving in a leadership role at the convention as one of the delegates.
Snyder has spoken for more than a year of a broken culture in Lansing and made a point of refusing to accept any campaign donations from political action committees so that voters can know he has no baggage. For months, Snyder labored in the low single digits in polls, an unknown business executive. But as 2010 progressed, he steadily rose in the polls, stunned much of the Republican establishment by winning the party’s gubernatorial primary and has enjoyed a seemingly impregnable lead in the polls over Democratic nominee Virg Bernero.
The way interest groups have responded to him has evolved, Snyder said.
“It’s been funny to watch the progression of the body language and their thought processes because I could tell when I first ended up in some of the meetings they would look at me and say, ‘This guy’s got to be kidding,'” he said, laughing. “‘He’s not going to be here, so this was a nice meeting, now we’re going to go back to our offices.’ And then after a little while, this wasn’t even after the primary, all of a sudden, you could see it switched to more than half the people started recognizing there is a long-shot opportunity that this person may be showing up in Lansing. I describe it as they started working on Plan B. Hopefully, we’re starting to reach a point where Plan B is becoming Plan A for a lot of people.”
In a wide-ranging interview aboard his campaign bus between stops at a Liberty Township farm in Jackson County and a Quincy business in Branch County, Snyder touched on his leadership style, how he will approach state employee compensation, overhauling the budget negotiation process, his growth as a candidate, negative advertising against Bernero and his interest in increasing mental health funding.
Snyder, expanding on past comments about ending the so-called target-setting process, in which the governor, House speaker and Senate majority leader finalize a budget deal, said he wants more legislators involved. He said he would like to see the legislators from the Appropriations subcommittees participate in the final negotiations on their respective budgets.
“It shouldn’t just be a few leadership people saying just because it’s been there for 30 years it’s the right answer,” he said. “These are good, well-intentioned people, regardless of their party. They’ve worked hard to get there. And if you go really look, have they actually been that much engaged in the process? In fact, they go off and work on other things that they probably shouldn’t be working on.”
To that point of continuing to do something because that’s the way it’s always been done, Snyder said he had a standard response to such statements when he ran Gateway.
“I would throw them out of my office because if you can’t say in common-sense language why we’re doing it that way, the best answer is you leave, you go think about it and my experience was usually when they come back they’ll have an improvement of how to do things,” he said.
MAJOR BUDGET ITEMS: Snyder also said his business tax proposal – to replace the Michigan Business Tax with a 6 percent corporate income tax – would have to be melded with writing the 2011-12 fiscal year budget as opposed to a stand-alone policy item.
“It really has to be married with value for money budgeting,” he said, using the phrase for his approach to budgeting. “We need to balance the budget, so (the business tax reform) can’t be done in a premature fashion. It has to work in tandem with value for money budgeting.”
State employees have made a number of concessions under the administration of Governor Jennifer Granholm. Most employees now pay 20 percent of the cost of their health insurance and given up scheduled raises (although unionized employees did get a 3 percent raise in October). Snyder has long singled out public employee compensation as an area he will target for savings.
Snyder said he would not take a piecemeal approach to public employee compensation.
“I don’t want to just come in and just say I’m asking for this number,” he said. “I’m going to come in and say here are the facts. Let’s put the facts on the table as to what the situation is and based on these facts we need to sit down and come up with a solution that’s good for at least 10 years or longer on how we do total employee compensation for the governor, the Legislature, for all state employees. How do we build a model that then we should ask local jurisdictions and schools to look at?”
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has been unable to win major concessions from city employee unions and is close to imposing a new contract. Asked how he would confront what surely would be a fierce effort to resist givebacks under a Snyder administration, Snyder noted that polling shows him winning support among union voters and union households.
“And I’ve been talking about this for over a year,” Snyder said. “So it’s like a lot of people understand that we need to do something together on these issues. Let’s just do it in a much more constructive context instead of the old broken, nickel and diming, dragging this thing out.”
THE CAMPAIGN: Snyder put more than $6 million of his own wealth into his winning primary campaign, but has instead raised money for the general election only from individual donors.
Asked why he had put away his wallet for the general election, Snyder said, laughing, “My wife Sue to start with!” Turning more serious, Snyder said, “No, the support’s been great. We felt we made a major investment in the future of Michigan already, and in fact, people are being great about supporting our campaign.”
Snyder has run an unorthodox general election campaign, generally avoiding attacks on Bernero save for the fairly tame criticism of him as a career politician. But he’s been able to take the high road, in large part, because the Republican Governors Association has served as the attack dog on Bernero, airing a number of negative ads.
One of those ads claimed unemployment rose 88 percent in Lansing under Bernero’s tenure as mayor (a figure that does not appear to have any supporting documentation, and, if true, would put Lansing in better shape than a number of Republican-led jurisdictions). The ad generally casts the city of Lansing as a wasteland full of residents consumed with anxiety about the economy.
Asked about the ad, Snyder said, “I don’t like that. I would not run that ad.”
Snyder said he is pushing for changes to state campaign finance law to require more disclosure about the sources of funding for such ads.
And Snyder had particular enmity for robocalls.
“Even more than
