I’m not sure what Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is doing this week. Maybe she’s checking another country off her travel bucket list. Maybe she’s cutting a TikTok video or two and tossing a few ceremonial shovels of dirt here and there.
Or maybe she’s just watching the hours on the clock tick down until she can punch out of Lansing for good and get about the next chapter of her life.
What she’s not doing is purposely rushing in her little more than six months left in office to complete her vision for transforming Michigan’s economy and education system. She’s never really had such an agenda, at least not one she’s put her shoulders into. And the deeper she’s gotten into her second term, the less positive impact she’s had on the state’s future.
That’s the nature of second terms. The starch tends to go out of them well before they’re finished.
Whitmer’s predecessor, Gov. Rick Snyder, knocked off in his first four years a lengthy checklist of reforms for making Michigan a better place to live, learn and work. His second four years was supposed to be about ensuring they took root.
But it had barely started when the Flint Water Crisis erupted, preoccupying the Snyder administration with damage control for nearly the entirety of his second stint.
Before Snyder, Gov. Jennifer Granholm had what may have been the worst second term in Michigan history.
For her final two years, she was irrelevant to the conversation about turning around Michigan. Ideas were put on the table with the caveat, “We can do this when we get a new governor.”
There’s a lesson here that Michigan should heed: Four years may not be enough to squeeze out all of the positive energy and initiatives a governor has to offer, but eight years are well beyond the “best if used by” date stamped on any gubernatorial bottom.
There are a lot of reasons a second term isn’t as productive as the first. Governors come into office with a list of priorities that, if they don’t get done while still enjoying the momentum and mandate that come with an election victory, tend to drop steadily lower on the to-do list.
After the first term, governors start losing the staffers who helped carry them into office and shape their vision. They’re the ones who also had the standing to tell them when they’re going off track. Second-term replacements tend to be more sycophantic and less willing to speak truth to the boss.
Michigan could cure second-termism by getting rid of the second term. That wouldn’t require limiting a governor to four years in office.
Rather, the state should consider a ballot proposal that would change the time of service for a governor to a single six-year term.
Six years should be plenty long enough for them to put an agenda in place and nurture it to success. A single but longer term would also free governors from the pandering and promising required of reelection fundraising. That would make them less responsive to special interest checkwriters and more focused on fulfilling their initial pledges to voters.
Before 1966, Michigan limited gubernatorial terms to two years, but there were no limits on the number of terms served. New Hampshire and Vermont still use that model. While it enhances accountability, it keeps governors in constant campaign mode.
Virginia is the only state that holds governors to a single consecutive term, but they can return to the ballot after sitting out four years.
Whitmer is the rare governor whose popularity is greater at the end of her second term than it was at the start of her first. She could easily have won a third term if she wanted and if Michigan law allowed. For reasons I can’t fathom, the less she accomplishes the more voters like her.
Even so, Michigan would have been better off had she stayed focused for six solid years on moving Michigan forward, rather than having spent half her time in office campaigning for her own reelection or positioning herself for the vice-presidency.
Experience has taught us that eight years is too long for a governor to be in office, and, for a good governor, four years is too short. Six years would be just right.
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This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Limit governors to one 6-year term | Finley
Reporting by Nolan Finley, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Nolan Finley, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
