Every county deserves an election night website like Macomb's

Kudos to Macomb County Clerk Carmella Sabaugh and her crew for taking another step forward in providing easily accessible election returns to the public.

Sabaugh upgraded her election results web page so that voters can discover, in one click, these pieces of information throughout the night on each individual race: the number and percentage of votes received by each candidate; the number and percentage of precincts that have reported; the percentage of the absentee votes that have been counted; the number of votes cast for each candidate -- in each precinct at the polls, and by absentee.

By the end of the night, the Sabaugh site also provides the total number of votes cast and the percentage turnout in each community and school district where elections took place.

But here’s the best part – you can check on several races, learning everything you need to know, in seconds. That’s because the clerk had added a box on the right side of the page called the “Race Selector,” which allows a voter to click on one race after another without leaving the main election-returns page.

Sabaugh

The side-by-side windows are especially convenient in a large county like Macomb, where on Tuesday night we had 35 candidate races and ballot proposals. For those who want to browse quickly, a big red bar graph at the top of each info window portrays the current state of that race. For those who want more, there’s plenty.

For example, without reciting actual numbers, last night someone interested in local politics could learn all of these things in about one minute:

* The Mount Clemens mayor is trailing, 55-45 percent, but there are still absentee ballots to be counted in four of the seven precincts;

* The Clinton Township police and fire millages are off to a fast start, leading by a 63-37 percent margin, but votes cast at the polls in 10 precincts have not come in yet;

* The Fraser City Council race is much too close to call as just 25 votes separate the third-place and fourth-place candidates;

* And the Armada schools’ “sinking fund” proposal is cruising toward approval with 60 percent of the vote secured and nearly all of the ballots counted.

Needless to say, The Macomb Daily newsroom’s election night crew loves the upgraded website. I suspect Sabaugh’s tech-savvy deputy, Todd Schmitz, played a major role in creating the improvements.

And I would suggest that every county and big-city clerk in Michigan might want to give Schmitz a call and find out how he and his colleagues accomplished this upgrade.

Registered Voters:		6,882				Updated:	10:58 PM
Total Voted:		953
Turnout:		13.85%
	UNOFFICIAL ELECTION RESULTS
	November 5, 2013 Election
	Armada Area Schools - Millage Renewal Proposal
	Building and Site Sinking Fund Tax Levy
ELECTION DAY PRECINCTS REPORTED:				7	of	7	100.00%
	ABSENTEE PRECINCTS REPORTED:			7	of	7	100.00%
	Yes	553	58.2%
	No	397	41.8%
	ARMADA TOWNSHIP
		PRECINCT		POLL BOOK	Yes	No
		1A		140	100	40			1
		1A (AV)		240	134	106			1
		2		136	84	52			1
		2 (AV)		119	63	53			1
		TOTAL		635	381	251

Virginia election exposes key weakness for GOP, tea party

 

Ken Cuccinelli’s impending loss in the Virginia governor’s race today to a weak Democratic candidate, the affable Terry McAuliffe, has exposed a major problem on the campaign trail for the deeply divided Republicans as we head into 2014.

The GOP has virtually no campaign surrogates, except maybe Paul Ryan, who can go into a state or congressional district and receive applause from the entire audience. The tea party types would love to see Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Mike Lee campaigning for the Republican candidate in a general election. The establishment Republicans would be happy with Chris Christie or Jeb Bush or even John McCain.

But each of these guys are divisive within the GOP ranks – a magnet for disdain either from the segment on the right or the group closer to the center -- and would hold down the crowd size at any campaign rally. They would dampen enthusiasm for the candidate. They might even draw some boos from a portion of the crowd.

That was a key problem faced by Cuccinelli, a tea party favorite, in his very winnable race.
James Hohmann of Politico points out that McAuliffe has had President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Hillary and Bill Clinton hit the trail for him.
Cuccinelli’s big-name supporters appearing at campaign events were Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Ron Paul.

What a mismatch.

“The striking contrast in surrogates in the home stretch of the Virginia governor’s race is another reminder of the GOP’s larger leadership vacuum and the civil war for the soul of a party still reeling from last year’s thrashing,” Hohmann wrote. “Simply put, the party lacks a single unifying figure who appeals to every wing of the party, let alone matches the star power of the Clinton-Obama tandem.”

Of course, it doesn’t help that Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, was previously associated with right-wing positions such as mandatory vaginal probes for women contemplating an abortion.

It also doesn’t help that the government shutdown was highly unpopular in Virginia.
Worse yet, Cuccinelli is associated with a party that has, in the space of one year, thoroughly failed in its post-2012 election reassessment which called for courting female and minority voters and expressing more tolerance for gays.
A new poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans said it would be a good thing if Congress had more women (and wasn’t dominated by old, rich white guys). In fact, two-thirds in the GOP said the issue didn’t really matter to them.

And then we have the ENDA debate in Congress on legislation to bar people from being fired from their job because they’re gay or their boss thinks they’re gay. Sounds pretty basic. But not when the tea party and ultraconservatives like Cuccinelli are pulling your party members to the right.

A spokesman for John Boehner said the speaker would oppose the bill because it will "increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs." Much like the poll cited above, it sounds like Boehner and the GOP want to protect jobs for heterosexuals but he’s not much interested in preserving employment for the LGBT folks.

Instead of choosing a path toward winning elections, the 2013 version of the Republican Party, the right-wing base, dismissed former President George W. Bush as “a squish.”

But that’s the kind of talk that turns off independent and moderate voters. As he goes down in flames, Cuccinelli has made some bold statements about the stakes in the Virginia election that certainly made the national party leaders cringe.
“Virginia once again has an opportunity … to show the country that conservatism isn’t dead,” he has said. He also claimed that today’s vote in the commonwealth is a referendum on Obamacare, with Republicans sending a message by handing him a victory.

The media, of course, will portray the outcome as a repudiation of those statements.

Yet, I doubt that a parade of semi-popular surrogates, plus an embrace from the tea party, and a heaping helping of Cuccinelli’s brand of politics could possibly lead to the conclusion that the Virginia election shows that people truly do like what they see in Obamacare.

 

Business groups ready to do battle with tea party

The 2014 elections are starting look, more and more, like a showdown with the GOP, with the tea partiers eager to take control and business groups determined to stop them in their tracks.
Today’s elections will offer the first dose of bad news for the tea party folks as ultraconservative Republican Ken Cuccinelli is likely to go down to defeat in his gubernatorial bid in a Purple State, Virginia, and moderate GOP Gov. Chris Christie is probably going to score a landslide win in a Blue State, New Jersey.
The Viriginia race has shaped up as a disaster for Republicans as Cuccinelli’s fundraising was a bust and the contest has demonstrated the GOP’s glaring lack of campaign trail surrogates who can appeal to all factions of the party.

Susan Demas, the new editor of Inside Michigan Politics, has written a column for MLive that outlines the intra-party feud and how it is about to explode into a big-bucks, high-stakes drama in next year's GOP primary elections.

In her piece, Dumas writes:

“The establishment has a new group backed by business interests, Defending Main Street, ready to raise millionsto defeat tea party candidates. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is playing in an Alabama GOP U.S. House primary, something the establishment has resisted.

“Of course, the time to start doing this was in 2006, back when there were still moderates left in the GOP like Michigan former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz. Years before the advent of the Tea Party, anti-tax groups like Club for Growthsuccessfully knocked out establishment Republicans …

“In the primary process, money often can't trump passion. That's why longtime Indiana U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar last year was trounced by a tea partier -- who promptly fell to a Democrat in the general election.

“Now the establishment is sick of losing elections and wants to wrest back control of the party. They used the tea party's passion when it was convenient, but now see it as a destructive force.”

 

Eastwood's 'empty chair' speech just gets more and more weird

Clint Eastwood’s bizarre “empty chair speech” at last year’s Republican National Convention just becomes more and more strange as the details come out.
The incident also demonstrates amply how the Republican fringe is so out of step with reality that they’ve lost touch with what it takes to win national elections.

According to the new book on the 2012 election, Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, one of Romney’s top advisors, Stuart Stevens, was so distraught with Eastwood’s unplanned shenanigans that he vomited backstage when the performance was over.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this story is that Eastwood had no speech planned in advance of his surprise appearance at the convention. His motivation for the chair routine, in which he pretended to talk disparagingly to an invisible President Obama, was a Neil Diamond song.
The tune was "I Am, I Said," which includes these lyrics: “I am, I said, to no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair.”
Eastwood had already balked at delivering a standard convention speech and he heard the song playing in his hotel room before taking the stage.

These two campaign tidbits were previously reported by Dan Balz of The Washington Post and Becky Quick of CNBC, respectively, but the latest installment form Halperin and Heilemann has Washington abuzz.
Beyond the comic aspects, what’s interesting is that Eastwood’s anti-Obama ramblings played well inside the convention hall, and with hardcore Republicans watching on TV, and it was celebrated for days afterward on right-wing talk-radio. The Obama-haters were in heaven.

But the grown-ups in the GOP knew that the Romney campaign had just gone to hell. Viewers and commentators were baffled by Eastwood’s shtick. The former big-screen tough guy became the butt of jokes by late-night TV comics.

The GOP convention director running the show for the party was apparently scurrying around back stage, ready to pull his hair out, as he tried to figure out how the aging actor’s weird ad-libbing ever happened. The Romney family, including all of the sons, was seething after the Eastwood stunt.

But the tea party types, unable to recognize the convention moment for what it really was, were adamant: anyone who criticized “Dirty Harry’s” convention performance was a socialist or a communist or worse.

'Blue Economy' could bring a lot of green to Macomb County

A few decades ago, Lake St. Clair was a place that we took for granted. For many of us, as kids, it was a forbidding place.

Gaining access to the lake on a summer day, when the water wasn’t polluted, required a long, sweaty bike ride to Metro Beach. Sometimes my friends and I would ride straight down Martin Road, sneak behind the St. Clair Shores VFW hall, and take the plunge.

That was the extent of our enjoyment of the Lake St. Clair waters. If you had a boat, you surely didn’t live in my neighborhood. If you had a friend with a boat, you were the luckiest kid for miles around.

 

As I became an adult, I envied and resented the lake access reserved for the few – homeowners who lived on the water or people who could gain entrance to the residents-only beaches. I came to understand that many of the small homes on the water, especially in Harrison Township, were former summer “cottages” for the rich in Detroit and the Grosse Pointes.

Obviously, this was a short-sighted, nonsensical approach toward using valuable land – the result of typically poor planning by Macomb County officials decades ago, long before they could ever imagine sprawling marinas or mini-mansions featuring 10 different views of the water.

Worse yet, a drive along Jefferson still offers barely a glimpse of the lake -- all the way from Eight Mile to the road’s abrupt terminus at South River Road.

 

I don’t think the lake was widely viewed as a county “asset” until the massive pollution outbreak of 1994 shook us all. In time, those working to clean up Lake St. Clair labeled it a “jewel.”

And now we know that our jewel could bring us a whole lot of money.

 

On the heels of County Executive Mark Hackel’s 3-year effort to promote a new “Blue Economy” for Macomb, a study released this past week found that enhancing Michigan’s Blue Economy could generate billions of dollars in economic activity and tens of thousands of jobs.

In Macomb County, we are perfectly positioned to take full advantage. Finally, “cleaning up” could have a positive connotation, and green might no longer be the color of our water but the hue of the money in our pockets.

A report issued by the Michigan Economic Center found that the state’s Blue Economy supports nearly 1 million jobs and $60 billion of economic activity annually. The center also predicts that Michigan’s water-based economic engine is just getting started.

 

The factors at play consist of traditional commercial shipping, recreational boating and fishing. But the study, authored by John Austin, president of the State Board of Education and an impressive policy analyst, also found that a “fast-growing water technology sector” may make some waves. This sector centers on fledgling research companies working with universities on new conservation and purification techniques.

Macomb Community College resides within this mix of brain power, working with Wayne State University on a new water-based curriculum for students. Our county should have a leg up on the competition across Michigan and the Great Lakes Midwest because we can offer firms the opportunity to work with U.S. Army scientists and engineers at Warren’s Tank-Automotive Command, or TACOM, where Pentagon research in water quality technologies is ongoing.

But in Macomb County, our biggest advantages lie in basic recreation, day-tourism and life-on-the-water amenities.

Geography may be our greatest asset.

 

The Clinton River and its chain of public parks – Riverbends, Heritage, Dodge, Freedom Hill (on the Red Run), Budd, Canal, George George, Shadyside -- could offer an abundance of canoeing and kayaking attractions. River travelers already compare the best scenery on the Clinton to traversing the Au Sable River in northern Michigan.

On Lake St. Clair, the impressive vistas, world-class fishing and premier boating experiences represent another huge draw. The award-winning restoration of the Point Rosa marsh at Lake St. Clair Metropark (formerly Metro Beach) will attract nature lovers and bird watchers from across the Great Lakes State with its boardwalk and observation decks.

That’s a good start. But the county, following Hackel’s lead, could do so much more.

 

If Macomb provided more public access and recreational events along the lakeshore, the payoff would be dramatic. Every step of the way, the economic ripples would be felt far and wide.

Imagine rental businesses along the coastline that featured Wave Runners, para-sailing, water skiing, boat rides or charter-fishing expeditions.

I can envision a massive pier stretching out into the lake for a quarter mile or more, similar to the iconic Santa Monica Pier in southern California.

Boardwalks, bike paths, nature trails, more sandy beaches – these are the assets that will kick-start the still-struggling local economy by attracting thousands of people here on a weekly basis. And some of these people will buy into the slogan, “Make Macomb Your Home.” After all, this would be a great place to live.

 

Proceeding with a hike/bike path connection along the Selfridge Base shoreline would also pay dividends. Redoubling efforts to woo more development to the Nine Mile Pier area could be a game-changer.

We already boast of large, sprawling marinas with an array of summertime amenities for members and a few festivals for the public. Perhaps the county could subsidize boat fuel at lakefront locations – a savings of about 20 cents per gallon – on a rotating basis to attract boaters from Oakland County, St. Clair County, the Downriver area and Canada.

Clearly, boosting any section of the waterfront follows the mantra that a rising tide lifts all boats.

The ultimate step for the Hackel administration would require boldly engaging in home buyouts or condemnation proceedings on the lakefront. That’s the only way to break the poorly planned lockout of the shoreline and open up new land for development.

 

Luxury condos and a resort hotel could emerge. High-rise apartments would offer views of the local waterways, boating, shipping and bird life that would trump nearly any other location in southeast Michigan.

The over-sized ponds in Oakland County that L. Brooks Patterson calls lakes are no match for our Lake St. Clair.

On the Clinton River, the county could launch a bidding competition for canoe/kayak liveries that would provide a number of choices on which section of the Clinton visitors want to travel. Food stands offering everything from ice cream to hot dogs to veggie pita sandwiches could set up shop at each river access area.

 

In addition, the river canoeing experience could be tied to the fall Cider Season at Yates Cider Mill. Throughout much of the year, the physically fit could engage in combined biking/canoeing day-long trips.

Think of the possibilities if the dormant Freedom Hill County Park revived its small festival stage to present occasional Saturday afternoon concerts – maybe local acoustic duos or trios – that would be accessible by canoe or bike.

All of this would not come cheap, but it would be a smart investment. The Michigan Economic Center found that each $1 spent to enhance the Blue Economy can generate nearly $7 in economic activity for the surrounding community.

 

Sounds like the days of sneaking behind the VFW Hall to take a dip should be long gone.

If Lake St. Clair is our jewel, it’s time to cash in.

Don't elect Duggan the "gangster?"

I don’t know if I’m behind the curve on this one, but an anti-Duggan ad that ran this morning on Channel 7, created by the Detroit Forward PAC, ended with this tagline: “Detroit doesn’t need another gangster.”

Wow.

The Detroit mayoral campaign ad refers to fines, “kickbacks” and job losses at the Detroit Medical Center while Mike Duggan was serving as CEO. It says that Duggan left that position with a $1.5 million bonus. It also implies that Duggan threatened opponent Benny Napoleon in a recent campaign debate when he said Napoleon will come to regret some of his anti-Duggan rhetoric.

OK. That’s hardball politics. But to make an obvious comparison between Duggan, a former prosecutor, and Kwame Kilpatrick, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in U.S. history, is way, way out of bounds.

 

Hackel gives Patterson a push on Thanksgiving

Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel will have a special role in this year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Detroit – he will push his wheelchair-dependent Oakland County counterpart, L. Brooks Patterson, for the length of the Woodward Avenue parade route.

My colleague at The Oakland Press, Charlie Crumm, reportsthat Patterson and his former driver, both of whom were severely injured in an August 2012 auto accident, will appear in side-by-side wheelchairs. Hackel will push Patterson and Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano will push James Cram, who was left a quadriplegic by the crash.

The idea came from Cram, who suggested he and Patterson should be a part of the televised parade on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28.

Officials from America’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Company could not be reached  for comment but Hackel's office confirmed the plan.