Gretchen Whitmer Could Have Been Kidnapped
The vulnerability of strong women in politics
I live in Michigan. Gretchen Whitmer is my governor. She’s tough and qualified and singularly for the people. She was a State Rep before she was a Senator before she won the Governorship in 2018, so, going in, she knew where all the bodies were buried. She roared in like a righteous bulldozer, shoving her naysayers out of the way as she prepared to fix the mess left behind by Rick Snyder.
Remember him? Rick Snyder was the Republican governor who botched the Flint Water crisis and turned it into a deadly debacle.
He was the governor who took over the duly elected governing bodies in majority-black cities like Flint, Benton Harbor, and Detroit and put his own people in place in an audacious and unconstitutional power grab.
He was the governor who ignored voter referendums on Emergency Managers and who turned Michigan, with their proud labor history, into a Right-to-Work state.
He was a terrible governor, completely at odds with what we stand for in Michigan, but you know what never happened? Nobody ever threatened his life.
