Rick Snyder: The Nerd Shall Inherit the State?

Dome Magazine, 6/16/10

The truth is, Rick Snyder wasn’t really called a nerd in high school.

The man who captured national attention for declaring himself to be “One Tough Nerd” in a gubernatorial ad first airing on Super Bowl Sunday wasn’t a misfit at Lakeview High School (“I didn’t have a pocket protector or anything,” Snyder says, adding that he played sax in the band).

His G.P.A. and test scores weren’t sky high, although he can no longer remember what they were.

“I was not the highest high school student,” the silver-haired Battle Creeker admits with a smile. “It was a teenager thing. Basically, I was described as bored and occasionally sarcastic.”

But Snyder was a young man with a plan. When he was 14 he asked his mother about enrolling in an Introduction to Business class at Kellogg Community College. Helen Snyder, who went by “Pody,” told him to hold off because their middle-class family only had one car. So Rick came back when he was getting his driver’s license.

Read more.

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.

Read more.

The Center for Michigan’s 2008 Michigan Scorecard

The purpose of the Michigan Scorecard is to provide benchmark measurements of how well Michigan is transforming its economy, government, and social systems during this complex era of change, challenge, and global competition. The measures included in the scorecard mirror the issues, principles, and strategies for Michigan’s transformation developed by some 1,500 participants in the Michigan’s Defining Moment Public Engagement Campaign.

This scorecard will be used by participants in the Michigan’s Defining Moment Community Conversations Round 2 (in early 2008). For those discussions, the scorecard provides a factual framework that participants can use to consider changes and reforms in the ways in which Michigan conducts the public’s business.

Read more.