A statesman emerges

Joel Thurtell, the man who has done more than anyone to raise our consciousnesses about the troll who owns the Ambassador Bridge, was driving across Pennsylvania last week.

He and his wife were going to visit their son in Connecticut (the boy got a job!), so he wasn't paying attention to the new governor's State of the State speech last Wednesday night.

You can hardly blame him. Throughout eight State of the State speeches, Jennifer Granholm hardly ever uttered a thought that had any more permanence than a soap bubble. What we had every reason to expect from the new governor were cheerful platitudes.

Yet that's not what we got. Rick Snyder stood up, took a decisive stand. "It's time to build the Detroit River International Crossing Bridge," he said flatly. No waffling, no hedging, no silliness.

His reasons were simple. The bridge will be needed for trade and our economy in the future. Building it will produce many jobs. And right now, as the self-styled nerd said, Job One is jobs.

OK, he tripped over his words a bit. His delivery was somewhat wooden, and lacked the tinkling effervescence of his predecessor. He sounded, in other words, like a real person.

But this governor said something worth saying. This governor had the guts to stand up to the social parasite who for years has bought off politicians of both parties with lavish campaign donations, especially his fellow Republicans.

Beyond that, he did something absolutely brilliant. The man who "wasn't a politician" went to Washington and negotiated an astonishingly shrewd deal for the State of Michigan.

Canada, as is well-known, wants and needs the DRIC bridge so much that it has offered to lend Michigan up to $550 million to cover the state's share of the construction costs. No muss, no fuss. Not even any real strings. We don't have to pay it back till the bridge is built, at which time the state will pay it back out of our share of the bridge's toll revenue — amazing.

But the new governor did better. Snyder went to the Obama administration and parlayed that into an arrangement where the money Canada is lending us can count as matching funds for federal highway money. In other words, somebody else puts up $550 million we get to use — and the state gets about $2 billion plus from the feds. How could anybody turn that down?

Perhaps the best indication of how big a coup this was could be seen in the stunned silence coming from the tower of Barad-dûr — oops, I meant the Ambassador Bridge Company.

Normally, a spokesman has been there with spin and outright lies whenever anyone said anything favorable about DRIC. This time, nothing ... until the next day, when spokesman Phil Frame had a simple comment. He was quitting.

Naturally, this had nothing to do with the governor's announcement, he said. That's OK, Phil; I happen to be a virgin too. Actually, whether he was fired or decided to scurry down the mooring rope before the ship sank was neither clear, nor very interesting.

> Email Jack Lessenberry