When I was growing up, the offices of Michigan’s Secretary of State and Attorney General were owned by the Democrats, and had seemingly perpetual incumbents.
Frank Kelley, the attorney general, was a crusader against consumer fraud who was appointed to the office early in the Kennedy Administration, and stayed well into President Clinton’s second term, winning election an astonishing ten times.
James Hare was elected Secretary of State when I was two, stayed sixteen years, and was then replaced by fellow Democrat Dick Austin, who was elected in 1970, the year after he had lost a cliffhanger election for Mayor of Detroit. Austin was there 24 years, and would have stayed longer, except a televised debate made it painfully clear his powers were slipping.
These are far more important jobs than many people realize, something that is easier to see now that we don’t have incumbents who last decades.
Since Kelley and Austin left office, term limits have kicked in, and nobody can now hold any state office longer than eight years. That has changed everything.
A lot of people like term limits, but I prefer the natural ones we’ve always had, namely, leaving it up to the voters to throw the bums out when they’ve had enough of them.
Besides forcing good people to sometimes leave before they should, there’s something else bad about term limits. They encourage politicians to be thinking about their next job, not the one they are in. Since Frank Kelley left office in 1999, his three successors – Jennifer Granholm, Mike Cox, and Bill Schuette all used the job at least partly to try to run for governor.
Granholm succeeded; Cox failed. We’ll know in November about Schuette. Frank Kelley, on the other hand, made being Michigan’s attorney general his career. Ten years after he first took the job, he did run for the U.S. Senate. He lost; went back to being attorney general, served another twenty-six years and never, ever, ran for another job.
Instead, Kelley fought successfully for a consumer protection act, was a pioneer in environmental enforcement, and devoted himself to making his operation the best in the nation. Not surprisingly, he never had any trouble getting re-elected.
It’s obviously important who the attorney general is, for reasons ranging from civil rights to the environment. But if anything, the secretary of state’s office is even more important. You could live your entire life without connecting with a governor or needing the attorney general’s services — at least not directly.
But if you drive a car, a boat or vote, you’ll be dealing with one of the many functions of the secretary of state’s office. The Department of State was Michigan’s first branch of government, and today does many things you likely didn’t know about, from document certification to maintaining the state organ donor registry.
Additionally, the secretary of state is next in the line of succession after the governor and lieutenant governor, and it is she who is in charge if both of them are out of town.
We’re coming up on what is bound to be a hotly contested election for both these seats.
But before you vote, I ask you to disregard most of the insults and irrelevancies, look at the candidates and ask yourself who could do the fairest and best job administrating and directing what are, in both cases, multi-billion dollar organizations.
If we do that, we’ll all win.
