Michigan Dopers: Did you watch the Gub. Debate?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sad person that I am, I noticed it was on the other night, so I DVRed it.

First let me stake out my poistion on both candidates so we get all of my biases out in the open:

I think they both suck. Granholm is a political manipulator of great skill. She seems to have the ability to avoid any crap flung at her, and manages a lot of weasely stuff that many folks don’t hear about. Devos was the CEO of Amway. To me, that says enough about him right there…he was a CEO at a company whose reps pride themselves on annoying the living shit out of all their friends, is a large pyramid scheme, and also who shipped over a thousand jobs from Michigan to China.

So, how did the debate go?

Granholm was poised, calm, and had, for most questions, pointed answers. When asked if her opponent was lying in his campaign ads, she point blank said “yes” and then went on to detail where he was lying. When Devos was asked the same question, he dissembled about how dissapointing the campaign had been because it had turned dirty, etc. This was the pattern throughout most of the debate.

Devos didn’t answer ONE question with anything concrete, with any substance whatsoever. Granholm did, but I’m not sure whether to beleive her or not based on some of the answers she gave later in the debate. Also, some of the questions were such softballs that I, as a viewer, was insulted. It seemed like it was the Detroit News representatives job to toss easy ones to Devos and then try to nail Granholm to the wall, while the main questioner dude was pretty objective in presenting questions to both sides.

All in all, while I really don’t like what Granholm has done with the state since taking office, Devos looked like so much of a weasel that I can’t possibly vote for him. I have no idea how he expects to compete when he shows up to a debate so completely unprepared. He makes Bush in the Bush/Kerry deabte look like … well, someone who can debate worth a darn.

What did you think?

2

So apparently you have all decided? Or maybe I should have posted this in Great Debates (even though the debate was not so great?)

3

I think the floor in the WKAR studio was spotless after Jennifer mopped the floor with Dickiepoo. What a hard hitting smackdown. Tricky Dicky couldn’t answer a single question directly even after being asked repeatedly by Tim Skubick. And Tim asked some tough questions- like asking Devos if Granholm was responsible for the Ricky Holland murder. DeVos has built an entire campaign of saying he’s going to bring jobs but doesn’t tell us all, he doesn’t tell us his plan to replace the SBT, it’s all smarm and charm. What a smelly weasely pile of cat puke this guy is.

4

Didn’t see the debate. After what the Republicans have been doing, it’s going to be a long, long time before any of them will get my vote again. Besides, CEO of Amway? I’ll vote for him right after I get my UK Lottery check.

5

I hate both of them. I missed the debate, but I now permanently hate Devos more because of what I heard the morning after.

I was listening to WWJ and they had Devos on to talk about the debate. They asked him who he thought the winner was.

I don’t care that he’s a politician and thus is expected to weasel out of giving a straight answer to anything. As soon as I heard him trot out “Well, I believe the people of Michigan were the true winners last night”, I mentally lost it. DON’T FUCKING TRY TO GIVE SUCH A SNIVELLING BULLSHIT LINE. Christ almighty! Especially when he went on to basically say that the people of Michigan were winners because we could see what a mess Granholm is and how she sucks blahblahblah, but worded extremely passive aggressively.

At least Granholm gave a straight answer (can’t recall the exact answer, but obviously she won’t short change herself, heh). That bullshit Devos pulled? Permanently made me detest him.

6

Is that a Christian channel: “Where Was Jesus”?

Bear with me for a moment: yes, that was most likely a cowardly answer; however, after a very good debate, the winners would indeed be the people/voters.

I’m just sayin’, is all. :smiley:

7

I turned it off. It wouldn’t have swayed my vote (a grudging one for Granholm, considered by me to be the lesser of two pretty unattractive choices).

I read later that the moderator asked about their spouses’ role in policymaking. That seemed like a real WTF? question to me–apparently both of the candidates blew it off.

8

Why does a billionaire want to be Gov. Something wrong there. The employment problem in Michigan,Indiana,Ohio etc are due to machine tool ,and automotive goiing to China and India.That is due to national politics. Govs have very little impact on jobs.
Devos is head of a pyramid scheme. They were fined 100 000 twice for lying about how much their distributors make.
Grandholm at least is a good speaker.Im tired of stumblebums talking.

9

AM 950. Mostly a news radio station, traffic and weather every 10 minutes, that sort of thing.

You must be in a REALLY small city :slight_smile:

10

Be glad you didn’t watch the debate. That’s all he did. I swear I’m going to have to write myself in for Governor the same way I did during the Presidential election.

11

I didn’t watch the debate, but it wouldn’t have swayed my vote because I know I’m voting for DeVos. I don’t care if he’s not a good debater. We desperately need a change in leadership. Granholm sat around doing nothing for the first three years of her term, and then just before the elections she went out and brought in a small handfull of jobs, and is now claiming to be a great creator of jobs and champion of the working man.

Sorry, babe. Too little, too late. I figure, DeVos can’t possibly be a worse governer than Granholm, so let’s give him a shot. The fact that DeVos layed off people in the past means nothing to me. I’m not the most business-savvy guy around, but I know full well that the alternative to laying people off is going out of business, which would have thrown everybody at his company out of work.

Granholm, like Kwame Kilpatric and Coleman Young, is apparently content to be Lord of the Slums, so I want her out of office.

12

Ex-MI doper here - I met with another ex-MI doper from California over the weekend, and he told me that the drive to move businesses back into MI is huge. Granholm has (according to him) done a tremendous job of recruiting from the California market. There’s a blitz of TV commercials there advertising MI, there’s a buzz in the bay area that MI is the place to go for creating a startup, or to find a workforce that shows up on time and works hard. The fact that Google is opening an office in Ann Arbor speaks to the success of the campaign. While I haven’t seen anything on that scale here in WA, I have seen Granholm continue to stay in the news, portraying MI positively and keeping the state in the national consciousness as a viable place to start a business. (Contrast that to other states in the region, like Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois, who seem to have no buzz whatsoever.)

Granholm inherited a horrible situation from Engler, who had enjoyed the 90’s boom without doing any serious work to ensure continued economic stability for Michigan’s future. Granholm may be a repulsive slimeball, but from over here she appears to be doing a respectable job. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done better, but she is clearly working her butt off on achieving the right goals.

DeVos is a joke. His comments on Intelligent Design already have half the country making fun of him. The business practices of his company can be summed up by the fact that they were successfully sued by Proctor and Gamble for trying to link P&G with Satanism. That’s not the resume of someone who will successfully pull Michigan back into recovery.

13

Stop De voss now .He wants to be president. We dont need another religious conservative telling us how to live our lives.Keep your damn religion to yourself. keep your anti darwin crap to yourself.
Our government says we need to mgraduate engineers. Why.? The jobs for them are gone. In Mich. the engineers,designers,computer techs are waiting tables and pumping gas. The skilled factory workers are doing the same.
When a persons unemployment runs out .they are eliminated from the unemployment statistics. The unemployed rate is seriously understated.Nobody can tuern that around.