“He’s very funny.”) Mark Burton, who was Whitmer’s principal aide for more than a decade, said, “The Governor gives off a vibe. (“Everyone loves him,” a Republican lobbyist told me. She knows just about everyone in town and is married to a local dentist. Whitmer, who is fifty-one, has worked in the capital for nearly her entire adult life. In small office buildings and well-worn restaurants, lobbyists and legislators shape and reshape the fate of the auto industry and, with it, much of the Midwest. Lansing, like many state capitals, offers a politician real power without much prospect of fame. “They’re the last ones on board-what can they say?” At the meeting, according to an aide, the U.A.W. “Let’s ask them for $3.5 million,” Whitmer told her campaign staff. (“Big talkers,” a Whitmer insider called them.) The word was that the union and its allies were prepared to spend two million dollars on the election. By the end of the primary, Whitmer had outlasted the established alternatives, and went to Detroit to meet with the leaders of the U.A.W. Mark Bernstein, a politically connected Ann Arbor personal-injury lawyer, recalled that, while watching a University of Michigan basketball game at Duggan’s house, the Mayor tried to persuade him to get in the race.
But neither member of Congress wanted anything to do with Lansing. Duggan wanted Senator Gary Peters to run the United Auto Workers preferred Representative Dan Kildee.
When Gretchen Whitmer first emerged as the likely Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, in late 2017, the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, circulated a memo urging labor unions and Democrats to find a better-known figure to lead the ticket.
0 kommentar(er)
