Jenny take a ride

Flashback to a cold New Year's Day in Lansing two decades ago, where newly elected Gov. John Engler has just been sworn in after winning the upset of the century.

Old George Romney, a trailblazing governor from the 1960s, sweeps up, grasps his hand, and offers two words of advice: "Be bold."

Many people would have given Engler, who won by less than 1 percent of the vote, very different advice: Be careful, move to the center, be moderate, woo Democrats in the Legislature.

John Engler didn't listen.

Instead, he was bold. Though Democrats solidly controlled the House when he arrived, he pushed through an agenda that sent Michigan government barreling far to the right.

True, he was able to do so in part because he knew the Legislature better than the back of his hand; he had spent his entire adult life in it before being elected governor. But he was also forceful, and decisively. Politically, I was strongly opposed to virtually everything he accomplished. Nor did I like his brutal style. But he was a very successful governor.

Jennifer Granholm's positions on most issues are much closer to mine — and, I would guess, to those of most readers of this column. Yet two weeks from now, when she leaves the governor's office for the last time, the verdict of history is likely to be harsh. Not because she was governor during a terrible recession; that certainly wasn't her fault. And not because she was in the least bit corrupt in any way — everything I know indicates she is squeaky clean. But she was a howling disaster as a governor, for three reasons.

Nobody knew what she stood for, really, especially as far as the big picture went. Nobody in the Legislature feared her, and as time went on, fewer and fewer even respected her.

But to me, Jennifer Granholm's biggest failure as a leader was simply this: She was anything but bold. Instead, she was weak, vacillating, indecisive and nearly always ineffectual.

We are paying a heavy price for that. The baffling tragedy of all this: It didn't have to be that way. Here's one story that illustrates that, from the long-vanished era of ... December 2006.

Four years ago, soon after her landslide re-election victory, Dan Mulhern, aka the "First Gentleman," called out of the blue and asked if I would have dinner with him in Detroit. That mildly surprised me. After all, I had sometimes been critical of our governor — and even of Mulhern himself.

My questioning of the propriety of some of her husband's consulting gigs caused Granholm, not yet governor, to call up and literally scream at me, an act which made me suspect (correctly) I was unlikely to make the media Christmas Party list if she was elected.

But now, four years later, her man wanted to dine with me. What was this all about? I asked while munching something bland at the Traffic Jam. "The state is really in a mess," he said.

He meant, primarily, state government, which wasn't taking in enough money to pay for the things it needs to do, such as educating our children and fixing Michigan's crumbling infrastructure.

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