(Photo: Mike Bird on Pexels)

Being an incumbent holds significant advantages. It guarantees great photo ops. In most cases, incumbency eliminates the chances of a primary battle. People don’t have to imagine you as president because you are one.

It also holds disadvantages. Most obviously, people generally are tired of the incumbent. Beyond that, it’s inevitable that some,  if not most, of the promises made the first campaign were not kept. Perhaps something that looks the promise was passed, but it falls far short of what the candidate said on the campaign trail.

The reason is that campaigns are aspirational. Or, put it directly, they are sales jobs. All campaigns from all candidates. Every candidate knows that in the vast majority of cases they won’t fully deliver what he or she is implying they will. 

Governing simply is harder than campaigning. There are tradeoffs and compromises. That means there will be a lot of unhappy campers. The candidates won’t say it,  but what they would like to tell disappointed supporters is simple: “This is politics and I am a politician. Grow up.”

Michigan’s Auto Economy: New Tech, Climate Change and a Big Strike

This brings us to Michigan, where the economy and what possibly is the most important question of the times – climate change – are colliding. 

The auto industry is iconic and drives much of the state’s economy. At the same time, it’s an industry making the difficult transition to environmentally-friendly electric and hybrid vehicles. 

The importance of the transition can’t be overstated. From The New York Times:

The push from Michigan Democrats comes as experts say that state action is essential if the United States is to meet President Biden’s target of eliminating the nation’s gas emissions by 2050 to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. Mr. Biden signed landmark climate legislation last year and has proposed regulations to clean up electricity generation and speed the adoption of electric vehicles, but action by states is also needed.

From The New York Times:

The push from Michigan Democrats comes as experts say that state action is essential if the United States is to meet President Biden’s target of eliminating the nation’s gas emissions by 2050 to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. Mr. Biden signed landmark climate legislation last year and has proposed regulations to clean up electricity generation and speed the adoption of electric vehicles, but action by states is also needed.

As if transitioning its processes and products wasn’t enough, the auto industry has encountered a good bit of turmoil. The highest profile event was a strike by the United Auto Workers against the major automobile makers. Biden, who hopes to make inroads with the blue collar and union rank and file demographic with which the Democrats struggle, made his position on the strike very clear on September 26 of this year. 

From The New Yorker:

At lunchtime on Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. President to join a picket line. Outside General Motors’ Willow Run Redistribution Center, in Belleville, Michigan—not far from Detroit—Biden greeted a group of striking members of the United Auto Workers union. He told the workers that they had saved the automobile industry during the economic crisis of 2008-09 and made a lot of personal sacrifices. (These included taking wage cuts.) Now that the auto industry was doing “incredibly well,” Biden said through a bullhorn, “you should be doing incredibly well, too.”

A president on a picket line is no small thing and why working people should look at what candidates do, not what they say.

It’s impossible to separate the financial fortunes of auto workers from the evolution of the vehicles they produce. This is the environmental piece of the pie. Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in 2024, wrote in a Detroit Free Press op-ed piece that the administration is betting on electric vehicles and that this is a mistake. He wrote that hybrids should be the focus. 

That may or may not be so. However, the tacit acknowledgement is that the auto industry is undergoing a massive shift. Managing that change is a difficult task. 

The good news is that transforming an industry creates thousands of new businesses (who had heard of “charging stations” twenty years ago?) and millions of jobs. The administration has taken up that challenge and invested billions (see some examples below).

Trump Says Michigan’s Auto Industry is Doomed

One of the the most interesting things about next year’s election is that both candidates have a recond that can be scrutinized. 

Here is how Politico characterized Trump’s relationship with unions:

Meanwhile, his administration pursued policies that were hardly union-friendly — limiting employees’ rights to organize in certain types of workplaces and lowering the standard to rid workplaces of a union, for example. And when the UAW waged a six-week strike against GM in 2019, Trump mostly stayed silent, even as his administration quietly floated the possibility that he might intervene on the union’s behalf.

Trump comes to the same conclusion as Rogers about electric vehicles, though he characteristically leads with hyperbole and suggests that an inevitable change will be deadly for the state.

From The New York Times:

“A vote for Crooked Joe means the future of the auto industry will be based in China,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, warning that a transition to electric vehicles amounted to a “transition to hell.” He offered tepid support for the striking autoworkers, telling them that electric vehicles would undermine any success with a new contract: “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get because in two years you’re all going to be out of business.

How somebody says something is as important as what he or she says. Please pay attention to both.