Ruling the House: Michigan Speakers Reveal What the Job Is Really Like

Susan J. Demas

Dome Magazine, 1/16/11

The job, if we’re being honest, is a meat grinder.

Sure, you’re lavished with an exquisite chandeliered office, a fancy title and a really big gavel. But you also have the headache of managing hundreds of staff, a couple dozen legislative committees, thousands of bills and 109 other lawmakers clamoring for both your attention and the media spotlight.

“Being speaker of the House of Representatives is one of the most challenging jobs in Lansing, if not the most challenging,” said House Clerk Gary Randall, who’s just entered his fifth decade in the institution. “I’m sure the governor or the Senate majority leader would take issue with that. But the speaker has 110 people to keep focused.”

“The Number One thing a speaker needs to know how to do is count votes, no matter if it’s becoming speaker or passing bills,” says Rick Johnson, a lobbyist with Dodak, Johnson & Associates. “…You don’t create a lot of friends, but you do create a lot of enemies.”

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Double Down: Andy Dillon gambles on big government reforms –– is he willing to bet the house and run for governor?

They had to be the oddest of couples — Andy Dillon, the contemplative, straight-as-an-arrow scion of a Wayne County judge, and Jerry Rubin, the shaggy, larger-than-life member of the Chicago Seven.

But there they were, “running tables” together in New York City nightclubs in 1985. The 23-year-old Notre Dame grad was working as a financial analyst for W.R. Grace when he happened to be invited to Rubin’s house for a party. He hit it off with the founder of the Yippie movement, almost a quarter-century his senior, and the two began a “brief business venture,” as Dillon now describes it. After a few months, he quit, since he had already committed to work as an aide in Washington for then-U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, the Ivy League Democrat from New Jersey.

“But I made more money than I did at W.R. Grace,” the now-Democratic speaker of the Michigan House reveals with a chuckle. “I didn’t know the whole story until it had taken off.”

The whole story, of course, is how Rubin, along with other ’60s radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Michigan’s Tom Hayden, were arrested after the bloody Democratic National Convention riots in 1968. After a theatrical trial (during which Rubin gave the judge a Nazi salute and shouted, “Heil, Hitler!”) he was acquitted of all charges. Rubin had since become a successful entrepreneur, but he maintained that outlaw persona.

“That’s not on my résumé,” Dillon adds, shooting a grin at Dan Farough, his media coordinator, during an interview this month. “There. That’s something no one knows about me.”

Farough’s face blanched slightly. “And now everyone will know in the pages of [Dome],” he murmurs with halting joviality, while moving to quickly wrap things up.

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