Joe Biden’s re-election bid remains on life support, the casualty of an indelible senior moment on the debate stage. Biden says he’s not quitting but polls show him falling behind. The moment has cast a spotlight on the alternatives, including a passel of Democratic governors seen as the party’s future.
Among them is Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, who reportedly confided that Biden can’t win her state. But she has since announced that even if he were to drop his re-election bid, she would not run.
And she denies that she wants Biden to quit.
“Joe Biden is our nominee,” she posted on X. “He is in it to win it and I support him.”
As it happens, Whitmer – the non-candidate – is out with a memoir: a traditional marker of ambitions for higher things.
Like most campaign memoirs, True Gretch is about image improvement. As expected, Whitmer describes personal growth and political ascent. A light read, True Gretch’s underlying message is simple: “Don’t you forget about me.”
Given Michigan is a swing state, that’s unlikely. Regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election, it will matter again in four years.
First elected in 2018, Whitmer’s time in office will expire on 1 January 2027. She will need a new gig. Why not the White House?
On the page, Lisa Dickey, author and ghostwriter, provides a valuable assist. Her client roster includes Jill Biden, George Stephanopoulos and Newsom. She “melded so well into Whitmer world” that she received “honorary ‘Half-Whit’ status”, according to the governor.
Whitmer also reminds us of her familial familiarity with conflict and politics. She pays tribute to Dana “Dano” Whitmer, her grandfather. In the early 1970s, as school superintendent of Pontiac, a city north of Detroit, he implemented court-ordered desegregation. It was rough.
The Ku Klux Klan threatened him and his family. Whitmer chronicles school bus bombings and the abuse suffered by her grandmother. “The phone would ring … someone on the other end would say, ‘Your husband’s dead.’ Dano was unflappable through all of it.”
Whitmer’s parents were lawyers. Richard Whitmer, a Republican, served in the administration of William Milliken, a Michigan governor, then became chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Sharon “Sherry” Reisig, the governor’s mother, worked for the state attorney general.
Years later, in the depths of Covid, Whitmer faced death threats and a kidnap plot, the affair of the “Wolverine Watchmen”. Charges under state law yielded five convictions. Federal prosecutors charged six more men, four of whom were convicted. Two pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors.
Whitmer describes a protest in April 2020 outside her office: “Swastikas. Confederate flags. AR-15s.” Masked men in balaclavas abounded. This spring’s campus demonstrations come to mind. Anonymity cloaks the coward with strength.
“One man had tied a noose around the neck of a brown-haired Barbie doll, dangling her from a pole.”
Taking a page from his Charlottesville playbook, Donald Trump called the mob “good people” and urged Whitmer to “make a deal”. He tweeted that she should “give a little, and put out the fire”.
Negotiate over the barrel of a gun. “That woman from Michigan,” he called her.
In hindsight, all was prelude to January 6. Four years on, Trump still won’t rule out violence if he loses.
True Gretch contains lighter notes, including an 18-song playlist. Not Ready to Make Nice by the Chicks is top. Other contributors include Aretha Franklin, Taylor Swift, Alanis Morissette, Guns N’ Roses, Eminem, Elton John and Prince.
Think of it as jogging music. A good politician, Whitmer gives Motown and Michigan their due. Franklin and Eminem grew up in Detroit.
Reminiscing about high school, Whitmer says she spent more time partying than studying. “I ran with a fast crowd,” she confesses. As a sophomore, she passed out drunk after a bout of exuberant tailgating.
Whitmer also tells of hanging out, as governor, in a dive restaurant – and violating Covid social-distancing rules. Ostensibly regretting her sin, she mentions that Newsom of California, another ambitious Democratic governor, did the same thing, albeit at a pricier joint. Jab noted.
Whitmer has been fortunate in her opponents. The US supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion, has proved a gift that keeps on giving.
Tudor Dixon, Whitmer’s Republican challenger in 2022, spoke of the upside of a 14-year-old rape victim carrying the child to term.
“The bond that those two people made and the fact that out of that tragedy there was healing through that baby, it’s something that we don’t think about,” Dixon told an interviewer.
Whitmer won by double digits – and the Democrats flipped both houses of the state legislature. For the first time in 40 years, the party held a governing trifecta.
The generational shift within Whitmer’s family crystalizes the cultural and political trajectory of the country as a whole. Teddy Roosevelt, once a Republican president, then a third-party challenger, is one of Whitmer’s heroes. She quotes from his “Man in the Arena” speech, at length.
“Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today – except for two things,” she writes. “The ‘man’ may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.”
True Gretch: What I’ve Learned about Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
