Speaker Nancy Pelosi is commonly referred to in Washington as a master tactician. But like the partisan impeachment fiasco and the humiliating Iowa caucus disaster, her selection of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to deliver this year’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union address was a major strategic misstep.
The selection of Whitmer was a politically calculated decision to introduce a relatively new name on the national scene from a state that will play a critical role in November. The irony of Whitmer’s selection, however, is that she represents exactly what is wrong with today’s Democratic Party — unrealistic promises, massive tax hikes, and a warm embrace of radical, far-Left policies.
“During my campaign, people told me to fix the damn roads — because blown tires and broken windshields are downright dangerous,” Whitmer said last night. “And we, the Democrats, are doing something about it.”
But if you bothered to watch the speech, you might have noticed that instead of following up with an example of her work to fulfill this campaign promise, Whitmer instead pivoted to what other Democratic governors are doing in other states — for example, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Whitmer didn’t highlight her own work in Michigan to “fix the damn roads,” and that’s because she failed to gather any support, from either party, for her 45-cent gas tax proposal, which would have left Michigan with the highest gas tax in the nation.
After her outrageous gas tax plan failed to materialize, Whitmer decided to take out her veto pen on nearly a billion dollars of the state’s budget. Whitmer cut $375 million for roads, supposedly her top priority. Her vindictive veto pen slashed and eliminated funding to help people with autism, at-risk students, public safety, opioid addiction recovery, veterans, and rural healthcare, to name just a few.
She stated in her speech, “You can listen to what someone says, but to know the truth, watch what they do.”
In that case, what do you say about a person who uses her office to cut funding from vulnerable children and critical services, with the intent of using their needs as leverage to get a gas tax increase?
In the end, Whitmer’s retribution tactics didn’t work. Most (but not all) of the vetoed funds were restored by the legislature months later.
During her own State of the State address last week, Whitmer chose to use executive action to issue a $3.5 billion bond to fix state roads and bridges. With interest, this will cost Michiganders more than $5 billion when it’s paid off decades from now.
Also highlighted in Whitmer’s own prime-time address last week was Michigan’s booming economy — the lowest unemployment in decades and the creation of thousands of manufacturing jobs continuing to come back near Motor City. That’s the same economy she just slammed only days later on the national stage, because Trump. Perhaps Democrats in Washington wrote that part of the speech for her.
The irony of Whitmer’s selection is that she doesn’t have one policy item she has led on that passed through the state legislature. In contrast, Trump spent several minutes of his speech highlighting the passage of the bipartisan United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a replacement for the job-killing NAFTA, that will bring even more manufacturing jobs to Michigan, expanding markets for our second-largest industry and putting Michigan workers first.
Like the Democrats’ partisan impeachment effort, their choice of Whitmer as the face of their party will come back to haunt them.
Tori Sachs is executive director of Michigan Rising Action.
