By John Bebow - June 12, 2008
Two recent volunteer efforts illustrate the intense, statewide desire for new political leadership. And the Center for Michigan is adding another way for "Michigan's Defining Moment Participants" to interact with state House candidates this summer and fall.
Up North, an effort called "Run, Manistee, RUN in 2008," has recruited numerous fresh faces -- and much-needed ballot choices.
In Lansing, a non-profit group called The White House Project recently held an intensive, weekend-long training for dozens of women interested in running for political office in Michigan.
Here at the Center, brand new outreach coordinators Annette Guilfoyle, Kim Johnson and Nancy Short are prepping for "Candidate Conversations" between candidates in some 45 open House races and local participants in the Michigan's Defining Moment Public Engagement Campaign. And, to broaden candidate interaction with citizens, those outreach coordinators are also working to plan fall candidate forums in competitive swing districts throughout the state. If you'd like to get involved in this effort, please email us at info@thecenterformichigan.net.
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Something for the Suggestion Box that may test the Center's tolerance for "fresh ideas": Einstein used to engage in heuristic mind-play that he called "thought experiments" in order to ventilate his own thinking and to give his colleagues some new ideas to throw stones at. I'd like to attempt to do something like this in this post at the risk of....well, at the risk of taking a risk (something Michigan needs to do more of).
If you ignore the "culture" of Michigan -- which is impossible in reality (but possible in a thought experiment) -- and think of Michigan ONLY AS A BUSINESS, then one of the ways a business nurtures itself back into profitability is to spin off its unprofitable divisions; find buyers willing to pay pennies on the dollar for the right to rehabilitate the asset. There are actually federal tax incentives for doing this; they're generically referred to as "write downs", and when used legally, they are a contributing factor in US economic adaptability.
Applying this technique to MICHIGAN-AS-A-BUSINESS-ONLY, then we could visualize spinning off the City of Detroit--or selling it--to a willing buyer, such as one of those private equity firms that "undoes" the sclerotic effects of public ownership, removes the malignant elements, installs new leadership, etc. etc., so that the expunged element can be nurtured back to economic health. Perhaps all that is needed is to extricate the City of Detroit from the rest of Wayne County into its own county. The re-drawing of county bounaries could repeated wherever the technique would lead to more effective use of the state's resources.
Our thought experiment might lead us to consider re-drawing the state boundaries with Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin; to take advantage of unused synergies therein. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a large change -- maybe just a county here or there on the border (maybe revisit the settlement of the Toledo War!) I'm not sure how this gets done at the federal level but I know others have observed that, economically at least, the US is really 10 different countries (culturally, we are only 5). The white-paper-writing-crowd in that coral reef of policy wonks around the US State Department routinely engages in "thought experiments" about re-drawing national borders of certain Middle-Eastern countries with legacy cultural boundaries that do not match well with present economic imperatives.
Maybe its time our state governors engaged in a thought experiment that included redrawing our own state boundaries along a trajectory that follows the reconfigured global jet stream of capital more efficiently. In many successful, adaptive companies, led by Harvard-Business-Review-reading executives, there actually is a group of strategic thinkers -- INTRA-peneurs, frequently organizational mis-fits -- that are paid to think the unthinkable. As a business, Michigan ought to be continually harvesting possibilities; even those outside its own political construct. Maybe Michigan could be the first....Our state Constitution is up for its automatic 16-year review in 2010; maybe something like re-drawing our political drawings ought to be on the agenda
To Big an Idea for us? Just a thought
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