Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) Elected 2002, 1st term up Jan. 2007
Born:	Feb. 5, 1959, Vancouver, BC
Home:	Northville
Education:	U. of CA, B.A. 1984, Harvard U., J.D. 1987
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Daniel Mulhern)
Elected  Office:	MI Atty. Gen., 1998-02.
Professional Career:	Prosecutor, U.S. Atty.'s Office, 1991-94; Corporation Cnsl., Wayne Cnty., 1994-98.
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Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, was elected governor of Michigan in 2002. She was born in British Columbia, a Canadian citizen and so not eligible for the presidency--as surely many Democrats wish she was--and moved to California at age 4 when her father's work as a bank teller and branch manager took him there. She lived in Anaheim in the 1960s, where she could watch the fireworks over Disneyland, and then to San Jose and San Carlos, a middle-class suburb on the Peninsula south of San Francisco. She was a popular student in San Carlos High School and won the Miss San Carlos beauty/talent pageant. At 18 she became a U.S. citizen. That year she also moved to Los Angeles to try her luck as an actress even though her parents wanted her to be the first in the family to graduate from college. She graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with Nick Cassavetes but never got a part; she once was a contestant on The Dating Game. She made her living as a tour guide at Universal Studios, taking delivery complaints for the Los Angeles Times and was the first female tour guide at Marine World Africa USA in Redwood City, piloting boats with 25 tourists aboard. "I hated it," she told the Detroit Free Press of her experiences in LaLaLand. It was "a very selfish place to be. The L.A. scene, the L.A. valuesjust wasn't what I was interested in. To be in an environment where I was not using my intellect, or expected towas very disturbing." She returned to San Carlos and in 1980 won admission to the University of California at Berkeley. There she excelled. She spent her junior year in France, where she worked for Jews trying to emigrate from the Soviet Union; she spent two weeks there during the height of the Cold War. She graduated summa cum laude in French and political science, and in these years showed some interest in politics: in 1980 she worked for the Independent presidential campaign of John Anderson but in 1984 supported the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. In 1984 she went off to Harvard Law School where she demonstrated in favor of disinvestment in South Africa and edited the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review. She worked one summer for a big law firm in New York, which she considered a terrible experience. In Cambridge she met her husband, Dan Mulhern, from Inkster, Michigan, a working class suburb near Detroit's Metro Airport. After law school, they moved to Michigan. Thus was a star of Michigan politics born.

Granholm worked as a law clerk for federal appeals court Judge Damon Keith, then got a job in the U.S. Attorney's office in Detroit, where she claims a 98% conviction rate. In 1994 she got what turned out to be her great political break when she was appointed corporation counsel to Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara. McNamara, who obviously has an eye for political talent, has called Granholm a "child of destiny." In 1998 Frank Kelley, Michigan's attorney general since January 1962, announced that he was retiring (the "Eternal General," some called him). McNamara pushed Granholm forward to run for the office. She won the Democratic nomination at the state party convention in August 1998 and was elected in November--the only Democrat to win statewide, as Republican Governor John Engler and Secretary of State Candice Miller were reelected by wide margins. She might not have won except that conservatives at the Republican state convention nominated a little known candidate rather than Engler's choice, Scott Romney, son of former Governor George Romney and brother of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Suddenly Granholm was the most visible Democrat in Michigan state government and an obvious candidate to succeed Engler in 2002, when he would be barred from running by term limits. She claimed credit for setting up a high-tech crime unit and prosecuting an on-line seller of the date rape drug and the proprietor of a child pornography site. But what made her an attractive candidate was less his record than her persona. She is articulate, poised, always able to connect with her audience, enthusiastic, almost always striking a note of consensus rather than confrontation.

She was running to replace Engler, for more than a decade the dominant figure in Michigan state politics. Granholm had serious competition in the Democratic primary from Blanchard and Congressman David Bonior. Blanchard had success as governor in reorienting Michigan's economy and was well-liked by Democrats; Bonior had a strong liberal record on union issues, foreign policy and the environment. But Bonior was little known outside his Macomb and St. Clair Counties district, and Blanchard had spent much time outside of Michigan, as ambassador to Canada and in a Washington law practice. Granholm campaigned as a consensus-minded centrist. Blanchard presented a detailed economic plan and called for repeal of the single business tax, then in the second year of a 22-year phase-out. Bonior campaigned as the champion of the working man and an opponent of big corporate interests. Granholm did not start off ahead in the polls, but her two opponents both targeted her for attacks. Much of the primary was a battle for endorsements. Bonior was endorsed by the state AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers--endorsements that in the 1960s or 1970s would have cinched the nomination for him. But Granholm was endorsed in 2002 by the Teamsters and the Michigan Education Association--now at least as important a factor in Democratic politics. In December 2001, Granholm was endorsed by EMILY's List, which had raised $1.4 million in bundled contributions for Senator Debbie Stabenow in 2000. The legislature passed a law that month limiting bundled contributions to $34,000, the limit for PACs. But it did not take effect until April 2002, by which time EMILY's List had raised more than $400,000 for Granholm. Blanchard and Bonior decided to take state matching funds and accept a spending limit of $2 million in the primary; Granholm rejected the matching funds and raised and spent $5.7 million.

By early 2002, Granholm was leading in polls both for the primary and the general election against the presumed Republican nominee Lieutenant Governor Dick Posthumus (who won 81%-19% over state Senator John Schwarz, the head of John McCain's 2000 Michigan campaign). Michigan does not have party registration, so voters can vote in either party's primary; in August 2002, 1.8 million voted, 58% of them in the Democratic primary, which was much more seriously contested--a turnout of 1,047,000. Granholm won 48% of the vote, Bonior 28% and Blanchard 24%. Blanchard carried Detroit, with strong support from blacks, and Bonior carried Macomb and St. Clair Counties, parts of which were in his congressional district. But Granholm carried Wayne County, and she won 51% in Oakland County. Outstate Michigan beyond the three-county Detroit area played a pivotal role for the first time in a seriously contested primary; it cast an unusually high 48% of the vote, and Granholm won 56% there.

Posthumus, Granholm's general election opponent, was not well known to voters. A farmer from Grand Rapids's Kent County with solid conservative credentials, he insisted he was a blue-collar candidate. He had a detailed program--a three-fifths requirement to raise taxes, more tax cuts and ending the single business tax, sparing school districts from spending cuts. He split with Engler to oppose slant oil drilling under the Great Lakes and opposed school vouchers, which had been beaten in a 2000 referendum. He attacked Granholm for saying she favored "tweaking" Proposal A--evidently allowing school districts to raise property taxes more than the measure allowed--and for opposing changes in welfare. But he concentrated much of his fire on her out-of-state origins. He portrayed himself as "raised in Michigan, went to Michigan public schools." "Let's just say I've got different values than come from Hollywood, Berkeley and Harvard." But most voters did not seem to care that Granholm grew up somewhere else; after all, she chose to live in Michigan.

Then on September 20 a reporter for Channel 50 exposed a memo from Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in August. It promised Granholm that Kilpatrick would work to turn out 275,000 voters in Detroit if Granholm would agree that 20% of her appointees would be black, that all new state office buildings would be in Detroit, and that Detroiters would be named to head six state departments (including welfare, housing, corrections). Kilpatrick said he never sent the memo and Granholm said she never received it. But Posthumus pounced hard on it. "This memo hands over the ATM card to the state budget and says 'unlimited withdrawals.' It turns Michigan state government into a department store window at Christmas time. But this Christmas Santa will only be filling the stockings of Detroit and Wayne County." Granholm said she called Kilpatrick and told him "the only thing you're getting is good government," and attacked Posthumus for bringing the issue up. A few days later Engler brought up the issue of racial reparations. At a July 2002 NAACP meeting, all three Democratic gubernatorial candidates said they supported reparations; Granholm said, "I support reparations. I support the John Conyers bill," which would set up a commission to study reparations. She later said that reparations to her didn't mean money payments. Michigan and national Democrats said that bringing up the Kilpatrick memo and reparations was appealing to racism. Posthumus said they were legitimate issues and part of a pattern: "she has said one thing to the special interests and another to the voters."

Granholm won by a closer-than-expected 51%-47%. Only 220,000 Detroiters voted, but they cast more than 92% of their votes for Granholm and accounted for all of her popular vote margin and more. Granholm carried Oakland County and suburban Wayne County but lost Macomb County. She carried the Upper Peninsula, the Flint-Saginaw-Bay City corridor and the counties containing Lansing, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo; she lost Outstate by only 51%-47%--a good showing for a Democrat. Posthumus showed great strength only in the Grand Rapids area and the northern Lower Peninsula.

Granholm in any case did not seem interested in overturning most of Engler's achievements. As the state faced budget problems, she called for spending cuts and no increase in taxes. She will surely appoint very different kinds of judges and administrative judges and may change Engler's 1994 law that effectively ended teachers' strikes; she favors ending the state takeover of Detroit schools. But bitter partisan differences may be a thing of the past. Term limits insure that almost no legislators or legislative leaders were part of the angry battles of the early 1990s. The biggest cloud on her horizon is the FBI's investigation of Ed McNamara's top appointees over alleged cash for contracts in the construction of the beautiful new midfield terminal (named the McNamara Terminal) at Metro Airport. On taking office in January 2003, her first official act was to issue a code of ethics, with new disclosure requirements for state contracts, a ban on soliciting campaign contributions from contractors and Internet publication of a list of state vendors.

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Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent
2002 general	Jennifer Granholm (D)	1,633,796	51%
	Dick Posthumus (R)	1,506,104	47%
	Other	37,665	1%
2002 primary	Jennifer Granholm (D)	499,129	48%
	David Bonior (D)	292,958	28%
	James Blanchard (D)	254,586	24%
1998 general	John M. Engler (R)	1,883,005	62%
	Geoffrey Fieger (D)	1,143,574	38%