Fresh ideas shape campaign of governor hopeful

Ann Arbor

Now for something completely different.

Rick Snyder is not a career politician. He's not a Republican Party ideologue short on solutions. He isn't the scion of a wealthy west Michigan family. He's not a foreign-born product of elite coastal universities who "married Michigan," as Gov. Jennifer Granholm has been known to say, nor is he tied to organized labor.

Which is why the 50-year-old father of three, a computer industry executive turned venture capitalist, may be the most interesting candidate to emerge from either party so far in the 2010 race to replace term-limited Granholm. In a state laid low by the toxic mix of tired politics, anti-business sentiment and an imploding auto industry, Snyder is the only one who can credibly say he's not one of them.

"I don't care where an idea comes from," he told me in an interview Wednesday, "if it's a good one, we're going to do it. It's time for this era to end. It's time for innovation. It's time to reinvent Michigan."

He calls it "Michigan 3.0," the second version being the post-war industrial boom that has been withering steadily for more than 30 years. He envisions comprehensive tax reform and a state government reoriented to customer service, with the customers being the taxpayers who pay the bills and the private-sector businesses whose payrolls provide tax-paying jobs.

Frustrated by stories of business owners struggling with regulation and bureaucratic inertia, for example, he's mulling what amounts to a reversal of state permitting: Businesses would file for permits and, barring objections from the state in timely period, the permits would be granted.

That would give the state an incentive to act instead of giving business the burden to wait. And wait. And consider other alternatives. And go elsewhere, an all-too-familiar experience for would-be Michigan employers.

"It's not hope and change," he says of his incipient campaign, complete with its own "Team Culture" printed on green, blue and white cards and signed by everyone on the campaign -- boss included. "It's vision, plan and action. We need builders and problem-solvers."

I confess to being skeptical of Snyder's bid, which seems OK with him, roughly a year from the GOP nomination. He's a Republican outsider with no known political chops and scant interest in hot-button social issues who is trying to win blue-state Michigan's governorship in the Age of Obama.

If the social conservatives among the GOP grass-roots don't get him, the thinking goes, the old pros running against him -- a sitting member of Congress, a sitting state attorney general and a sitting county sheriff, among others -- probably will.

But that's conventional analysis and Michigan's predicament, nearing the end of its "lost decade," is anything but conventional. Historic and failed would be more accurate descriptors, as would slavish adherence to old models that cannot be resuscitated by raising the minimum wage 35 percent, as the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party suggested recently.

Spend two hours talking with Snyder, as I did, and it becomes clear that his unconventional bid for the GOP nomination boils down to a few things: new ideas and the economy. He ticks off his stance on the hot-buttons -- pro-life, pro Second Amendment, anti gay marriage but pro civil unions, pro stem-cell research under certain conditions.

"But they're not on my agenda," he says. How 'bout right-to-work, a surefire way to galvanize labor support against whoever backs it? "A divisive issue. Union is not a lens I use."

His lens, if it had a label, probably would carry two words well understood by successful business people: What works? Because the simple fact of Michigan today is that none of the social issues matters much if jobs keep disappearing, if a Michigan family leaves the state every 12 minutes, if college grads remain the Big Mitten's top export.

In the tour to announce his candidacy, Snyder made 26 stops over five days. He hit every county in the Upper Peninsula. He listened to officials in Oxford complain that the state Department of Transportation failed to install a traffic light until four teens were hurt in an accident.

"It shouldn't take two years," he says, describing the tone he encountered on his statewide swing. "It's not unhappiness. It's not frustration. It's fear. Are they going to be able to take care of their children? Are they going to be able to stay in their home?"

Snyder didn't pay the usual political dues to get a shot at the governor's office. He may not, depending on a bruising primary. But if his fresh ideas and economic literacy help shape the campaign, that would be a public service all by itself.

dchowes@detnews.com">dchowes@detnews.com (313) 222-2106 Daniel Howes' column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays