Yesterday I wrote about Gov. Snyder’s new campaign ad called “Numbers” in which he crows about being an accountant and whines about not getting credit for “laying the groundwork” for Michigan’s mythical recovery. In that video, Snyder appears in a t-shirt in front of a hilly, tree-lined road in perfect condition talking about “the Road to Recovery”, a sharp contrast to the actual pothole-ridden roads Michiganders must navigate each day thanks to inaction by our Republican-led legislature.
MIRS news service has discovered that the road in the video is Intertown Road in Emmet County at the intersection with Resort Pike Road. As it turns out, that road was completely overhauled four years ago during the administration of Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, presumably using Stimulus funds, before Rick Snyder was elected as governor.
According to Brian Gutowski, the engineer-manager for the Emmet County Road Commission, the road was redone using 80% federal funds with the remainder coming from state funds. “They should not use Intertown Road as an example,” Gutowski told MIRS.
A Snyder spokesperson told MIRS that, “The road to recovery can be seen throughout Michigan through the elimination of the billion and a half dollar deficit, the billion dollars invested in education since the Governor took office, and the fact that the unemployment rate is at its lowest point in six years thanks to the creation of nearly 300,000 new private sector jobs.”
There is deep irony here. In the video, Rick Snyder complains about not getting credit for Michigan’s so-called recovery, which Snyder admits “you may not feel yet”, and yet he shows a pristine road in the same video that he had nothing to do with.
Michigan has been required by our constitution to have a balanced budget since 1963 so Rick Snyder didn’t eliminate a billion and half dollar deficit. We never had a deficit for him to eliminate. Even the Detroit Free Press called BS on this claim.
Also, our unemployment rate maybe at its lowest point in six years but that’s true of essentially every state in the country, largely due to the efforts of the Obama administration against an unprecedented headwind of Republican obstruction. The fact is we still have the third highest unemployment rate in the country.
That’s not a “comeback” and it can hardly be called a “recovery”.
These are facts. Rick Snyder seems to think those facts are too inconvenient to mention.
One final thing: many folks have commented on how Snyder’s voice was manipulated in this ad to make it deeper and less high-pitched. While Rick Snyder’s squeaky voice drives me up a wall, I generally don’t poke fun at people’s physical qualities. Still, it’s worth noting that, among the other lies in this ad, we’re also getting an “adjusted” version of Rick Snyder because of this manipulation. Sort of a metaphor for his whole campaign when you think about it.
