Engler Recall Effort Gets SeriousBy
Deborah Kaplan
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Lansing is only 150 miles from Twining, but it might as well be Timbuktu for all it has to do with the tiny resort town of 500 where Jackie Shrader lives with her disabled husband, Harold, and their three sons, aged 4 to 9. As Shrader describes it, Twining, on the northern rim of Saginaw Bay, has a small grocery, a hardware store, two bars and as many churches. Prayer or beer and a shot can both be fortifying in their own ways when winter comes; Twining's tourist trade dwindles and the only openings are on the welfare rolls. "With no tourists or farm work, it's hard to keep going," Shrader says. "Most people here need help from Social Services to make it through the winter." So when 17 percent state welfare funding cuts reduced Shrader's AFDC checks from $740 to $590 a month, she became what she never dreamed she'd be: a political activist, taking on Goliath government as a coordinator of a statewide petition drive to recall Gov. John Engler. Shrader blames Engler for the 9.2 percent across-the-board cuts that were approved by the Legislature last December for fiscal 1991, saying that the governor could have compromised with the Democrat-led House to come up with a more humane budget-cutting plan. John Truscott, Engler's press secretary, calls the recall effort premature and unfair. "I've seen her comments about the AFDC benefits being cut -- well, the governor didn't propose those cuts. ... She's misinformed, and directing her anger at the wrong person." Shrader, a 27-year-old nursing student at Saginaw Valley State College, is not political, never having so much as canvassed a block or passed out a leaflet during the election campaign. "I vote, that's all," she says. "That's all I've ever done." She had never talked to her state representatives until the welfare benefit cuts went through, and then she hauled out her phone directory and called every state legislator or administration bureaucrat she could find. "I called the governor's office; all they told me is that it's the Democrats' fault," she says. "I called all around Lansing; they all said, 'Thanks very much for calling.' It seemed like nothing was going to happen." Finally, someone in that labyrinth of offices in Lansing suggested that if Shrader wanted something to happen, she had to make it happen. She did. It wasn't politics, she says, but concern for her children that prompted her to submit a recall petition late last month to the Isabella County clerk. "Once someone starts taking things from my kids ... that's what worried me," she says. "Most mothers I know would do anything for their kids. They're ready to do some pretty drastic things to put clothes on the backs and food in the mouths of their kids. "I've talked to mothers who are in worse shape than me -- a lot of them have been evicted from their homes. It just seemed real unfair that Engler should get in there and take over and just right away start cutting away things for poor people." Shrader is working with a Dearborn Heights woman, Sharon Boak, whose recall petition was also approved by the Isabella County clerk, to collect 641,141 signatures, or 25 percent of the votes cast in the governor's race in November, which is the minimum required to put the recall question before voters in a special statewide election. Shrader says she is coordinating the drive, and her petition -- citing state budget cuts in human services, 17 percent cuts in AFDC and General Assistance, 22 percent cuts in foster care and the closing of state mental health hospitals as reasons for wanting Engler recalled -- is the one the two women will circulate. The women first met in the Isabella County clerk's office -- petitions must be submitted to the clerk of the county where Engler resides for approval of their wording. With a husband disabled with crippling arthritis for the past eight years, and not enough money to buy "frivolous things like toilet paper and dish soap," Shrader felt she had no choice but to be there. But Boak, 47, a Dearborn Heights homemaker unaffected by the budget cuts, with a life so exemplary she could have walked out of a Norman Rockwell tableau, simply didn't like the idea of anyone shoving people around. "When (Engler's) people talk about closing mental hospitals, it's as though they were talking about checkers in a checker game," Boak says. "It's 'this one I lost, this one I kinged,' and this isn't checkers. These are people. I don't see him relating to people. ... The two poorest towns in this state, per capita, are Clare and Harrison up north. I'd like to know how many times he's walked through those towns. How many welfare offices has he been in? He's not in contact with the everyday person. ... The people in this state are nothing but a bunch of checkers on a checkerboard to him." Like Shrader, Boak blames Engler for the welfare-funding cuts. Press secretary Truscott blames the Democrats. In mid-January, House Democrats rejected Engler's alternative budget-cutting plan for fiscal '91 as "mean spirited." Engler rejected theirs, which would have drawn from the state's "rainy day" fund rather than slash human services. Because of the impasse, the 9.2 percent across-the-board cuts that had been approved the previous year by legislators, Engler among them, automatically went into effect. "It isn't true that Engler wouldn't compromise with the Democrats," Truscott says. "We've been willing to meet with them any time, any place, but they didn't offer any specifics. They suggested taking $333 million from the rainy day fund, but (because of a $213 million cap) we'd have to change the law to do that. ... It's easier for the Democrats to blame someone than to take responsibility (for the cuts). People are misinformed, and we think the media have contributed to that." To counter the bad press, Truscott says that Engler is going to speak out more, starting later this month with a series of about two dozen town meetings "that will allow us to get our message out. We're going to be much more active and much more public, and hopefully educate the public on what we're trying to do." But Shrader thinks that Engler is the one who needs to be educated: "I don't think Engler understands what it's like to be working class -- or nonworking class. As far as I know, he's never held a real job. He went from college right into being a politician, and has always lived off the state. "But with people like me -- I'm going to college full time, but without being graduated I can't afford to support my family fully. I know there are changes that need to be made in welfare, but most of the people helping me to coordinate this are in college or working or both, and they're trying to get off Social Services. I don't think anyone plans to be on Social Services the rest of their lives -- that's not anyone's dream. So it's not going to help them to just cut them off and leave them stranded." Shrader says she is already organizing the petition drive, appointing volunteer coordinators for 60 of the state's 83 counties so far. But volunteers won't start circulating petitions until May 1, because signatures can't be more than 90 days old to be deemed valid, and petitions can't be filed until Engler has been in office six months, which will be July 1. The state Bureau of Elections has 35 days to certify the signatures once petitions are filed. If the signatures are all valid, then a special election must be held within 60 days of the petitions' certification. Many would say the two women are on a quixotic mission. Although Boak has been involved in a few local election campaigns, both women are relative political neophytes, unused to organizing on a massive scale. To get enough signatures within the 90-day period, they would have to collect more than 7,100 a day. And no one has ever collected enough signatures to force a special election, much less actually recalled a Michigan governor. Shrader would have been the first to agree that they were tilting at windmills, until she was flooded by calls, mostly from other AFDC mothers, volunteering to help in the campaign. "At first, I just wanted to send a message to Lansing," she says. "I had hoped we'd get enough signatures together to at least let Governor Engler know that a lot of people were upset with him, and he'd do something. "But it's gone way beyond that. I knew people were upset, but not this many people. Now I'm sure we'll get enough signatures to put the recall question on the ballot."
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