WhatFinger


Lisa Brown

Democrats pick The "Wendy Davis Redux" Candidate for Michigan's Lt. Governor



It is not normally worth much news coverage when a candidate picks a running mate, although it usually gets a fair amount because political junkies tend to be obsessed with such minutia. But it's worth taking a look when a candidate chooses a running mate with nothing much to recommend her except the fact that she once angrily mentioned one of her own body parts during a legislative session, and that brings us to Mark Schauer, Michigan's presumptive Democrat nominee for governor, and his new running mate, Lisa Brown:
Brown will bring several attributes to the ticket, political experts say: She’s a woman from southeast Michigan, running with a candidate who is more familiar in mid- and western Michigan. She also was one of the lawmakers involved in getting silenced in the state HOuse in 2012 during an abortion debate because she used the term “vagina.” “There’s a significant number of women who are educated and politically active, or even just voters who are paying attention who are beginning to understand in their core that they have to take a more active role in moving social change,” said Anne Doyle, author of “Powering Up: How America’s Women Achievers become Leaders.” “We’re getting to a moment where it’s unacceptable to have two white guys on the ticket. Where’s the other half of the state?”

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You'll notice that the above analysis from the Detroit Free Press offers no information about Brown's track record of legislative or governing achievements. That's because no such track record exists. For four years, she was an unremarkable state representative with no significant legislative achievements, and for the past three months she has served as Oakland County Clerk. There is nothing in her background that screams out, "If anything happens to the governor, this is the person you want taking over!" But there are two things about her that Democrats like. The most recent is that, during the few days in March when gay marriage was legalized by order of a federal judge (before the order was quickly stayed by an appeals court), Brown was among a handful of Michigan county clerks who handed out marriage licenses to gay couples as quickly as she could. But the real incident that put Brown in the spotlight was the one you can see here:

Once the Republican chair cautioned Brown about decorum because she talked about her own vagina on the House floor, Democrats went full-on with the "war on women" crap, staging publicity stunts designed to give the impression that Republicans were silencing women, blah blah blah. It culminated with Brown and other female Michigan politicos staging a reading of "The Vagina Monologues" on the Capitol steps in Lansing. To be honest, I don't really care what Lisa Brown said on the House floor, and if I had been the chair I would have been more likely to laugh at it than warn her about "decorum," but none of this makes her qualified to be governor or lieutenant governor. It tells you something about where the Democrats are as a party that they think stuff like this gives them the makings of an attractive candidate for office. But it's the same thing they did in Texas, where the highly un-accomplished Wendy Davis is being touted for governor because she got a lot of media attention for staging a talk-a-thon in protest of restrictions on abortion. That's not working out too well, as Davis is way behind in the polls and her campaign has been beset by revelations about her supposedly inspirational life story. But that's what you get when you choose a candidate based on personal media narrative - especially one as flimsly as this - rather than actual qualifications. Mark Schauer is no great prize either. He served one term in Congress before being turned out in the 2010 Red Wave election, but he was there long enough to vote for Obama's massive "stimulus" boondoggle and, of course, ObamaCare. He now spends his time engaging in every conventional Democrat pander of the moment, including demands that the minimum wage be raised and lots of blather about the "middle class" and so forth. And now he's proving that he knows the current Democrat playbooks very well, which is why he has selected the latest so-called victim of the "war on women" on the apparent belief that voters want to put the fortunes of their states in the hands of people whose main claim to fame is having talked publicly about their own sexual organs. In the meantime, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has presided over falling unemployment, reduced taxes on business, passage of right to work and budgets that are not only balanced but are getting completed and passed well ahead of time every year - unlike the annual budget crises we saw when a certain Dating Game contestant was governor. Maybe this is Lisa Brown's next big moment in the sunlight as well. I know Rob would be disappointed in me if I didn't remind you of Michigan's last governor/war-on-women-warrior:



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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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