DETROIT – Reverend Wendell Anthony, the President of the Detroit Branch of the NAACP, fired up the crowd at Detroit’s Cobo Hall on Saturday at the Michigan Democratic Party Convention, giving the party faithful the zeal they will need to take back the country and the state in 2012.
“We are letting Glenn Beck steal the dream of Martin Luther King and turning it into a nightmare,” he said.
Thousands of people turned out fore the winter convention, and they spent the day in constituency and district caucuses, and they heard from Democratic leaders, both state and national. Party faithful had to get over their disappointment in November, and they talked about defending vital programs for the middle class and the poor and look to 2012 to re-elect President Obama and take back the Michigan and U.S. House.
“I say I’m the leader of the Senate Democrats not the minority leader because we are not the minority party in Michigan,” said Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing. “We don’t go from been an overwhelmingly blue state in 2008 to being the minority.”
Democrats simply did not turn out in 2010, and we have to do a better job energizing our base. The fact remains, when more people vote, Democrats tend to win.
“My opponent (in November) got four more votes; four votes more than the college kid who ran against me two years ago; I got 5,000 votes less this time,” said Rep. Mark Meadows,” D-East Lansing. “Now, that may be my fault, but there were 5,000 Democrats that did not come out to vote.”
Thursday will be, to quote extremist Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, like an atomic bomb was dropped in Lansing when Gov. Rick Snyder unveils his Top Secret budget recommendation. He has never said what will be cut, not during the campaign and not after elected, but pundits expect the cuts to be deep and extreme. His opponent in November, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, thanked people for supporting him, but he also said we must fight the cuts that mortgage Michigan’s future for some short term cuts.
“We are not going to let this crew come in and dismantle Michigan,” he said. “They say they are going to take back Michigan; they mean they are going to take it back to before the New Deal.”
Whitmer said the first goal is to defend against the elimination of the popular and effective Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), what former Republican President Ronald Reagan called “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
They have established a web site to protect the tax credit Snyder wants to kill that helps reward 800,000 people who go to work everyday and helps families make ends meet by keeping more of their paycheck.
“He says it’s a handout, but it helps people who work 40 hours a week put food on the table,” Whitmer said. “He wants to take that and give it to his rich friends.”
The situation is not much different on the national level where Republicans want deep, damaging cuts after giving tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent that will deepen the budget deficit.
“Our Congress is in the mode of a reverse Robin Hood; they want to take from the poor to give to the rich,” said U.S. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Flint.
U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, said the situation is not much different in the Senate, but the good news is it is controlled by the Democrats.
“The party of nope has been happy just to stop progress; now, they want to turn back progress,” he said.
Levin also said Republicans are more interested in grabbing more power than solving the country’s problems.
“The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has said his top priority is to make Barack Obama a one-term president,” he said. “The top priority of Senate Democrats are jobs.”
7 comments:
You are living in a fantasy land, but that's all right. That's what pep rallies are for.
So you are saying that the only sane voters in Michigan are too lazy to vote? Interesting.
Whitmer is cooking the books. The vote was down in 2010 because 2008 was a presidential election. The vote is always lower two years later. The true fact is that even with the lower turnout, the Republican still pulled the same amount of votes while she dropped 5,000.
There are and always will be voter swings. But the fact is in 2010, voters said they were fed up with the Dems and voted for the Republicans. No amount of spin can change that, although it's funny that your position is the Democrats are too stupid and lazy to vote. Wow.
Whitmer is cooking the books? How? Mark Meadows said it, and he is basically correct, although his numbers are slightly off. In the last mid-term election in 2006 he won by a vote of 21,965 to 10,485. In the next mid-term, last November, it was 16,782 to 10,452. So, his Republican opponent got 33 less votes in 2010 when voters allegedly “fed up with the Dems.” In 2010 5,183 Democrats did not cast votes for him. Clearly, Democrats stayed home in 2010.That will not happen in 2012.
I said nothing of the kind. Anyone who knows anything about politics knows voter turnout wins elections. Democrats were not energized in 2010 like they were in 2008; that will not happen in 2012.
I owned up to my mistake on another thread and I will do the same here. It was, according to your account, not Whitner but Meadows.
But the point still remains. Why did meadows lose 5,000 votes while the republican total stayed the same? It's because fewer people voted (common for nonpresidential election) and of those who did vote, a higher percentage chose the Republican.
It was a beat down. Both parties suffer them. They are cyclical. That's how voters keep their government in line. You try to lie about it and come up the "non-energized" defense. So, in your world, the future of the state and the nation is at risk (not to mention government handouts), and Democrats can't be bothered to take the time to vote? Amazing. I know you hate Americans who express an opinion not approved by you...but you also have such a low regard for Democrats.
You call that owning up to your mistake? “At least according to your account?” Again, Do you have another account? Again, Democrats stayed home.
The proof is in the numbers, but I do agree that elections are cyclical. The good news is it will swing back in 2012. “Government handouts? What the hell are you talking about? Low voter turnout is a hallmark of American elections. The turnout in Michigan was a near record in 2008, but only 66.2 percent of Michigan voters cast ballots, and that was the most since 1968 when 66.8 percent voted.
It’s funny that Republicans fight and oppose every measure to increase voter turnout.
When they want to, 2 of every 3 registered voters were able to vote. There were no obstacles. Those that didn't vote didn't want to. That's their right. The number might have been higher because your total assumes the voter registration list is acccurate, when most election clerks tell me that they know there are people on their lists who have died or moved. So the number of non-voters may be less.
But I'll accept your numbers. They show me that anyone who wants to vote is voting.
By the way, if you did your homework, you would compare 2010 to 2006. And, in fact, the Granholm-DeVos race drew many more voters, more than half a million, than did Snyder-Bernero.
Here's the thing, though. Had those extra 588,000 people voted last year and if EVERY ONE of them had voted for Bernero, the race would have been a toss up. There's no way Virg would have taken 100 percent of the extra votes. If he had taken 75 percent of those votes, still a pretty big number, he still would have lost by at least 100,000 votes.
It wasn't turnout out that defeated Virg. It was the fact that the voters wanted someone else.
I still don’t consider 66 percent a high turnout, or the 43 percent in November. There were obstacles. No-reason absentee and early voting are just a few things to make voting easier and lift those barriers that have worked in other states and have bipartisan support in Michigan. There are obstacles.
The voter registration list is accurate. I’m an elections inspector, and I can tell you there is not a 34 percent error rate.
I’ll take your word for it on Bernero; after all, it’s rare that the same political party hangs on to the governorship when it’s an open seat; at least in the last 43 years. Senate republicans want to hold down voter turnout for a reason.
You can take my word on it because I'm telling the truth.
You are right about the rarity of a party holding onto an open governor's seat. It's almost as rare in the past half century for a Democrat to get elected governor.
Starting with Romney, during the last 48 years, we've had Republicans 32 years and Dems only 16. That number will go up to at least 36-16 after Snyder's first year.
Now if you back further, you can point out that for the 14 years before Romeny, a Dem (mostly Soapy Williams) was governor.
But here's another interesting point. Only twice in the last half century has an incumbent governor been kicked out of office. Both times it was a Democrat -- Romney over Swainson and Engler over Blanchard. If Granholm could have run this year, she would have been clobbered.
It seems like voters are sometimes fooled into voting a Democrat into the gov's office, but then they learn the error of their ways and remedy the situation.
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