(intense music) - [Deep Voiced Announcer] Welcome back to this year-end edition of Off The Record with correspondents Zoe Clark, Cheyna Roth, Bill Ballenger and Jim Kiertzner.

We'll look at 2021, the best and the worst of it all.

So sit in with us as we get the inside-out Off The Record.

(intense music) - [Fast Spoken Announcer] Production of Off The Record is made possible in part by the following; Business Leaders for Michigan has a strategic plan to make Michigan a top 10 state in the nation for jobs, personal income and a healthy economy.

Learn more at michigansroadtotopten.com.

And now this edition of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

- Welcome back to Off The Record.

As you are watching this it is New Year's Eve but it's actually December the 17th, try to square those two things together, all right?

In other words we're putting this in the can.

And we have with us in the can as we say, we have Cheyna and Jimmy and Billy and Zoe.

Happy new year to all of you.

I've asked you for a headline to summarize 2021 in a brilliant headline and we'll start with Ms. Roth.

- Well I gotta admit I haven't written headlines in a little while since my job has changed, but I'm gonna go with "Oi" and if you need a little bit more, I'm just gonna go with "Oi, It Continues."

- [Timmy] Mr. K?

- "Political Differences Intensify" driven by the sub-headline, "The election, covid, school safety and money."

- [Timmy] That's a very long headline.

We won't use that.

- That's a sub-headline.

- [Timmy] Yes, sub-headline.

(laughs) Okay, you're off the hook.

Mr. Ballenger.

- "Michigan Government Leaves 2021 Flush with Cash."

- [Timmy] Ms. Clark.

- I recently heard this one, so I'm gonna have to steal it.

I would just call it "The End of 2020, 2.0," - All right, and I like this one, "COVID Takes Up Permanent Residence in Michigan."

You'll like that one, Cheyna.

- I think that one fits perfectly.

That's what my Oi is all about is the ongoing COVID and just the seeming never-endingness of it.

- You know, I went back since I have no life, I went back and looked at the Governor's state of the state and it struck me as I listened to her 27 minutes.

There were seven or eight references to quote, "The end of the pandemic."

Jimmy, not quite.

- No, we're far from that.

We're still seeing everything being adjusted, everything is evolving.

Just a couple of weeks ago ahead of this taping we saw the largest school district in Michigan mandate vaccinations for staffing.

And I can tell you back on November the 29th when the Governor was here in Metro Detroit at an event, I actually heard her move ahead beyond her talking points when it talks about mandates, lockdowns, she was asked that in a gaggle and here's what she said.

This was pretty telling to me, she says, we know that mandates with the population that is resistant aren't as persuasive and that's part of the issue we're confronting here.

That might be her resistance for any more mandates or locked downs.

- All right, Bill, what kind of a year did the Governor have?

- Well, COVID notwithstanding I think she had a fairly good year.

I think she's in better shape now actually in many ways than she was at the end of 2020.

But I think COVID, as everybody's been saying, is gonna be around for a long time.

We're never going to be rid of it.

It's gonna become like the flu.

I said that a year and a half ago, I feel even more strongly about it now.

We better get used to it.

And the Governor is gonna have to be dealing with this all during 2022, a campaign year.

- Zoe, It was a mixed bag though for the Governor at some points, was it not?

- Oh my goodness, absolutely.

And I think any politician, any kind of executive or leader trying to get through this year.

But let's remember a little over a year ago, there was, of course the hostage plot against this governor that made national news.

We started the year on January 6th with an insurrection at the Capitol.

So I think if I was doing a 2020 2.0 into 2021, there was violence and rhetoric that really was sort of underlying all of the decisions that executives made with COVID.

We really saw a different governor vis-a-vis how she wanted to handle lockdowns this year.

And to Jim's point about what she was talking about, that some folks just aren't going to follow mandates.

One thing we've heard from her as well as Elizabeth Portel is look, we have the tools to fix this, the tools being the vaccines, and it's the folks who don't want to get the vaccines and that's where you're seeing things like Omicron come from because they have time to double and become even more strong.

- The critics of the Governor, Cheyna said there was a governor that we had in the middle of the pandemic that was very aggressive and took all this stuff.

And then the new one that we sort of saw there was a change of heart and she's gotten some flack from that.

Dr. Pamela Pugh who's a Democrat, a vice-president of the state board, continues on her crusade to say that the Governor put politics above the science on making these decisions.

That was a storyline, was it not for awhile?

- Yeah, and I think that's a storyline that's going to continue to follow her particularly into the election year.

I think a lot of her supporters, her early supporters, the people who were very much on her side when she was being aggressive early in the pandemic, I think they might be feeling a little abandoned because she has some tools.

I mean, we know that this year there was the court case that said that there are certain things that she personally cannot do, executive orders that she personally cannot do, but she still has her health department.

And her health department is able to issue mandates and different types of things.

So she has tools at her disposal that she's just not using.

And I think a lot of her constituents are thinking that she's not using them for political reasons, not for their personal health reasons.

I think particularly the schools, which is a group that she really needs on her side in order to win I think they're feeling especially abandoned by her.

- Zoe, remember-- - Schools, and I would also add too just quickly, hospitals.

I mean, you have the federal government sending in workers to be able to help in hospitals.

And we have reporters from Michigan radio who have been embedded in hospitals with doctors and nurses and patients begging our reporters for help.

I mean, this is a dire situation here in Michigan in terms of the number and the overload on our health institutions.

- There was some dissension within the ranks of the Whitmer administration.

We had the departure of two people, Dr. Gordon, who was shown the door by the Governor, and then Dr. Khaldun who left on her own accord.

But there was some friction going on there inside the administration as to what to do.

Is that a fair assessment at this read?

- You're talking to me, yes the health officials obviously wanted to take a much stronger approach.

They wanted Governor Whitmer to keep on the same track she took in 2020, as your commentators here are saying, and she didn't do that.

She pulled back.

I think she was tired of being beaten up.

She saw numbers turning against her.

She saw a huge hatred being built up and a hard core opposition, not just disapproval of her as a governor, but general fear and loathing.

And I think she decided I'm gonna peel that back.

I'm not sure anything I've done this far is gonna stand up in historical terms as having been a success compared to the other 49 states.

So let's scale it back a little bit.

Let's take it easy.

And actually, I think that's helped her with a lot of the voters out there.

And I think, yes, it was a political decision.

- Jim?

- I totally agree and I think she's probably watching what other states are doing, which is not a lot either.

Even though we're one of the hottest spots, she always says, we're driving these decisions by science.

But as your other guests have already articulated, we have some signs it's actually worse this year than it was last year.

And remember where we were last year.

Virtually everything was locked down.

Restaurants, bars were takeout only, movie theaters were shut down.

She shuts down the economy that hurts her politically and she's less than a year away from the election.

She doesn't want that baggage, especially, we all know you got to win an election in the middle.

You have your base, you got to win it in the middle.

She's not gonna win it in the middle, at least down here in Metro Detroit with lockdowns and restrictions.

- And then, Zoe, we have the Republican field of 3000 Republicans running for governor.

(laughs) - 3001 to be exact.

- Excuse me, it's 3001.

I missed one.

Nobody has really emerged from this gaggle, have they?

- No, and you and I have talked about this.

I mean, this is fascinating where we're at something like a baker's dozen right now, if we're being accurate now, instead of hyperbolic about the number.

We watched the James Craig rollout over the summer, we have Tudor Dixon, Garrett Soldano.

I mean, these are names all of whom are trying to gain traction.

And what we have to remember is this is gonna be decided in a Republican primary.

And if you end up having four or five, half a dozen candidates in a primary, do you end up seeing that be split?

Rick Snyder in 2010, right?

Where you had a Mike Cox and a Hoekstra and a Bouchard who really split the Conservative wing of the party, and Rick Snyder, a moderate, came through.

And so watching now over the next eight months, 10 months as this heats up is gonna be fascinating.

And you bet that Whitmer is absolutely keeping an eye on who these candidates are.

And political calculus is in all of this.

- Cheyna, how come nobody's emerged?

- I think there's just too many of them.

And they're all fairly similar.

They're all giving very similar talking points about how they would deal with COVID.

They're all very anti-Governor Whitmer and that's a huge point for all of them, most of them are white men of a certain age.

You have one woman, you have one man of color and that's it.

I mean like, it's hard to pick them out of a lineup when you put them all there and say, how are they different?

Like spot the differences.

They're all giving a lot of the very same talking points.

And honestly, I think that at the end of the day, it's not going to matter.

I mean, they're all very similar and at this point you have Republicans who are so anti Whitmer, that they're gonna care more about getting rid of Whitmer than who they're actually electing.

- James, you've had a field day with the chief down there in Detroit.

- Yeah, and the honeymoon is over.

I can tell you this week, the week of December 17th, he actually did a news conference, a news event earlier this week, one television station showed up, ours.

It was a no show.

He wasn't used to that.

And it was over before it started really.

It lasted only about 10 minutes.

He made a couple of comments and that was it.

There were no reporters there from TV asking him any questions.

Of course, we've had our hands full with the Oxford School shooting.

So there are certainly news priorities in play here.

He's gonna have to do a lot of work next year if he wants to maintain that so-called status of front runner.

- Well, that's what they were looking for.

Allegedly, Bill, the leadership ordained this guy as the candidate and I'm told that privately, he's still waiting for the ordination.

(laughs) - Well, you're absolutely right.

Let's look at this historically, Tim.

When previous governors were running for reelection Republican's Bill Milliken had a quality opponent, Sander Levin.

When John angler ran in 1994, he had three or four quality opponents, Debbie Stabenow, Howard Wolpe, Lynn Jondahl.

Look at what Gretchen Whitmer has got facing her right now.

I mean, she's luckier than she is good.

She may have problems at the polls with her numbers and her performance but if this is the best the Republicans can come up with these dozen candidates almost totally unknown with no money, the one X-Factor is Kevin Rinke, if he turns out to be a Rick Snyder type, not only somebody who maybe will have some positions different from the other candidates, but more importantly will spend $10 million as Snyder did in 2010, that could be the difference maker.

- And you can't discount the money that Whitmer has raised.

And some of this was because she became a national figure during the pandemic in the early months when she did choose some of the the toughest lockdowns in this state, she got a lot of support from the left.

And even this year, she was in Texas a few weeks ago, she's flown around the country.

Her profile is such that she has been able to raise money off that, not just within the state, but nationwide.

- All right, let's talk about Donald Trump.

Still has a presence in Michigan, James.

He started the year by telling us that the people that voted for Joe Biden in Michigan, they were hornswoggled.

The election was stolen.

That story got legs, didn't it?

- It did, and he still carries a lot of clout in key areas, McComb County, parts of Oakland County he still has strong supporters.

We had a rally a couple of months ago up there in Lansing about demanding a full forensic audit of the election with probably about a thousand supporters up there.

I went up there to cover that.

But Ed McBroom certainly you shut that down and now he's the target of Donald Trump and his supporters.

But I think over the next year or so, that's gonna start to fizzle out.

I think people are gonna get tired of that and it's not gonna have a lot of legs.

- Cheyna, Mr. McBroom, the Senator from, I love this town, Vulcan.

It sounds like something out of Star, What is it?

- [Cheyna] Vulcan.

- [Jim] Vulcan.

- Yeah, Vulcan.

To many people in this town it looked like an indication of profiles in courage.

- Yeah, and there was that argument that kind of came out that this is a man who is stepping up to Donald Trump and to the sort of incorrect mindset of a lot of Republicans that the election was stolen.

That being said, I think there's also a very strong argument that it was not a profile in courage, it was just him doing the right thing.

And arguably by giving oxygen to this story, by allowing all of these people to come forward and spread their conspiracy theories and give their junk, I don't even wanna say science, their junk whatever to the public, that might've done more harm than good because you're giving these people a platform, a very large platform to spread all of this.

And granted, yes, he did come to the right conclusion with all of this, but these are people that you've given them so much air that they're not gonna let that be taken away from them.

They're just gonna say, you're wrong, sir.

Look at all of this stuff that I have.

So I think it's a mixed bag when it comes to how heroic his actions were.

- Ms. Clark, do you agree?

- Well, Cheyna wrote about exactly what she's talking about in a really, really interesting article.

And so I have to give it to her from being a reporter on the ground who talked about it as it made national news.

I think that you have McBroom, you have Peter Meyer, you have Fred Upton who are making decisions that seem to go against the fire in the belly of the Republican party right now.

And we are in a historical moment where we're still not quite sure what the outcome of those decisions are.

Fred Upton is looking at challengers, including Steve Carra, one of the most conservative members of the state house.

So I think we are in this moment of time where we're trying to figure out, do these historic courageous moments, whether you wanna say that they are or not, we're kind of figuring out are they gonna be deemed, are they gonna stay within the party or not?

- Mr. Ballenger reminds all of us that one of the major stories this year was a boatload of federal money just flowing all over the place.

How did the legislature and the Governor do on that windfall, William.

- Well, I think it's a work in progress.

I mean, they've done, I think reasonably well so far.

They seem to be working with the Governor a lot better than I might've thought so far based on what they've agreed on to do.

Remember they appropriate, the legislature does, but the Governor has line item veto authority, overall veto authority.

So they've got to get her consent and it looks like they're working together.

They got billions more to make up their mind about and they're rolling it out here at the end of the year and it's gonna go on into 2022, which is gonna be a campaign year with new district lines coming out.

I mean, all this is gonna happen at once.

It's gonna be fascinating to look at.

- For all of us who have covered this thing for more than a couple of weeks this was an astounding story in that the normal story out of Lansing is we don't have enough money.

We got to cut services.

Jim, this was Hanukkah, Christmas, and everything else rolled into one.

- Birthday parties.

- Yeah, go ahead, continue the list.

It goes endlessly, yeah.

We had Governor Whitmer on a local broadcast here this week and of course she's taking some victory laps with the partisanship, but with all of this money, she's touting things like $17 billion in the education budget without raising taxes.

That's a big sum of money.

She ticks off several others.

And down here in Detroit, they're glad that the legislature approved $9 million to restart the North American International Auto Show, which has essentially been shut down for a couple of years with COVID.

So yeah, everybody's collecting some of this money and there's a lot more to go.

- Cheyna.

- Yeah, I think one of the things that I just kept following with all of this because we've had this money for quite a while, is just how long it took them to really start distributing this money.

I think at some point the Republicans had to realize that while it may politically be iffy for them to be seen working with the Governor in a way that also benefits the Governor, it was also starting to hurt them by people knowing that you have all of this money from the federal government and it's just sitting there.

We need the money.

So it's good to see that it's actually being spread out.

But it really took them quite a while to start saying, yes, we are gonna go against our Republican historical values and actually start spending money.

- Well, you make a good point here, because if you recall, at the beginning of the budget year, when the Governor released her budget, a gentleman by the name of Tom Albert who chairs the appropriations committee in the house said, I'm not talking to you.

We're not gonna have any, remember that stuff, Zoe?

- Oh my gosh, of course.

We sat around, well, we didn't get to sit around the table.

We sat around the Zooms and talked about this for weeks on end.

It does feel like this past year has sort of been this hurry up and then wait for it.

Weeks go on where there's sort of shots across the bow and then all of a sudden we start hearing there's gonna be a deal and then three days later there's an announcement.

But to the amount of money, I mean, for those of us who have been covering this budget for more than a decade, I mean, I remember starting out as a little baby and watching Granholm have to figure out how to cut a billion dollars right off the budget during the great recession.

We are now talking about historic amounts, billions and billions, almost nearly the same amount of money is coming to this state as our general fund was a few years ago.

And for some of these lawmakers, they will never, again, in their lifetimes because of term limits see this amount of money be able to come into the state again.

- And Bill, the Governor must believe in Santa Claus because she was handed a holiday gift by the legislature that took away the problem that she had by losing that Ford plant going south.

That was a blot.

I mean, that was just a huge blemish on her record being blindsided.

But now she can go into next year saying, you know what, we're gonna get our own battery plant.

And they did this on a bipartisan basis.

I think that is one of the highlights of the year, is it not?

- Absolutely.

It's better to be lucky than good.

And I think everything is coming up roses for the Governor right now and she can go into 2022.

Remember her great campaign theme in 2018 was fix the damn roads.

Well, I got a feeling the roads are gonna be fixed.

They maybe won't be fixed by the time she leaves office, but all the planning and the preparation will be underway and she can point to a success and she'll say, look, I got it done.

And you know what?

The voters don't really care how you got it done or where the money came from, they just wanna get it done.

And the Republicans, I don't think can use that against her, obviously in 2022, the way they thought they could.

- Well, amazing part of the story is that they did it so quickly.

This beast in town does not move with great speed.

It was 79 days from the day of the announcement of Ford to the 79 days that we had the bipartisan vote on this thing, Jim.

Are we gonna land that GM plant, I guess is the question.

And there's others in play.

- Yeah, I think you'll see that follow through.

It's good politics for both parties and it's good politics, obviously for General Motors as well to look good.

If Ford is headed south to Kentucky and Tennessee General Motors can stay put here in Michigan.

Let me ask you guys a question.

I was surprised some weeks ago that the auditor general report that the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency bungled $3.9 billion improperly paid out.

3.9 billion.

We went through two directors.

Obviously we went it through the pandemic.

I'm surprised that isn't getting more traction.

- Well, I think the Republicans have got as much juice out of that as they could squeeze, don't you think, anybody?

- I don't think so.

I think a lot more should be made of that.

It's an outrage.

- Yeah, but I think at the end of the day, when people hear that story, they hear that people got money when they needed money.

I think that's what people, particularly voters are just gonna keep coming back to.

When I needed the money, I got the money and yes, more than $3 billion, incredible amount of money, but it's not necessarily gonna affect them personally because they got the money when they needed it and I think that's what people at the end of the day are gonna be thinking about, and that's probably why it hasn't got much left.

- I think if the RS pin their hopes of beating her on that issue, Zoe, they might need another hope.

- And that's exactly what I was gonna say.

And to your point, I mean, we have seen committee hearing after committee hearing.

Folks being brought up testifying.

It doesn't seem, to Jim's point in some respects, it doesn't seem to, I mean, can you really create a campaign ad off of that?

But to the Republicans trying, I mean, they have tried to make this an issue in the legislature and yeah, $3.9 billion pre COVID if you were talking about that money, sure.

I mean, I think that would just be headline after headline.

But again, because of the past two years that we have lived through stories that used to might have been, just kind of top stories just aren't as much when we have historic numbers of Michiganders getting sick, dying of a once in a lifetime, or we hope once in a lifetime global pandemic.

- Jimmy, we also have to talk about the Oxford shooting which you've been all over in the last couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, that happened and that is one of the stories of 2021 that will live with us for a long time.

- Indeed, and we're still having ripple effects.

We're getting all of these copycat school threats now that are happening.

Earlier this month, earlier this week of December the 17th, we had Garden City High School shut down for several hours with a report of a threat.

And we've seen dozens and dozens of juveniles being charged with making these false threats in the three counties down here, Wayne, Oakland, and McComb county.

And of course just the intense pain still going on in Oxford with the four deaths and seven others injured, including a teacher.

That district is still muddling through trying to figure out how to reopen.

We had a very explosive school board meeting earlier this week where several parents stepped up to the mic and told the school board and administrators, we don't trust you.

There's a lot of healing to be done up at Oxford.

- Good point.

All right, guys, thank you very much.

We go into 2022.

We should indicate that in 2022, this little old program will celebrate 50 years on the air.

Zoe, you weren't even born then, were you?

(laughs) - I was not.

I was not.

And you started the program when you were what?

- 13, 13.

I was 13 when we started.

Listen guys, great show.

Everybody have a happy new year.

Hopefully it's better than what it was this past year and we'll see you on the other side.

- [Fast Spoken Announcer] Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by the following; Business Leaders for Michigan, has a strategic plan to make Michigan a top 10 state in the nation for jobs, personal income, and a healthy economy.

Learn more at michigansroadtotopten.com.

For more Off the Record visit wkar.org.

Michigan public television stations have contributed to the production cost of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

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