Swing State Swing: Michigan

We asked our chief political writer, David Paul Kuhn, to get in a car and drive from Portland, Maine to Portland, Ore., via all the Battleground States – those states expected to be the most hotly contested in the presidential election. Armed with a pen, laptop, camera and plenty of No Doz, Kuhn is sending back dispatches that will offer impressions and snapshots of a country making up its mind.

Kinderhook

Fire chief Bill James is dressed for his day off as he looks around the local bait shop and hardware store. Donning a green John Deere hat, he mentions as he leaves that he's always been a Republican.

"They're conservative," he says, and when Republicans are in office "things are decent."

Bill is doing errands a few blocks from the fire station. The department is currently investigating a string of three "suspicious fires," including a barn just this week.

Things have been tough in these rural counties of south-central Michigan. Standing at the center of Kinderhook, a town of about 10,000, Bill explains: "We are a border town and Indiana has different worker's comp laws, so they go over the state line, businesses do. So we have a tough time competing."

Named Kinderhook in 1843, in honor of President Martin Van Buren's birthplace, this area was originally settled by Dutch immigrants from New York. More than a century later, Michigan was booming – the car industry thrived, union work abounded, jobs in Kinderhook were plentiful.

It's this period, 1969 specifically, that Bill's dad, who worked for Standard Oil, moved the family from Detroit to Kinderhook. "After the riots," Bill says.

Today, Standard Oil is long gone. Nearly everything is, around here. It's quiet. The sky is overcast. The air's cool and damp. The downtown hardly hums with traffic.

"It's pretty tough," Bill continues, shrugging slightly. "Most of our young kids, our future leaders, they go to college and then they move out of the area because there's nothing here for them."

Wal-Mart is the center of Sturgis, Michigan. In the parking lot, 35-year-old Stacy Ogg talks about how "we are kind of leaning toward Kerry."

Stacy goes to Wal-Mart often. She has two adopted children, two of her own and one with her new husband. Two of the girls stand beside her: Hannah, a smiling 10, and Hollie, a shy 7-year-old.

"The job market in general has been horrible in Michigan," says Stacy, pushing her curly brown hair off her face. "Everybody has been go down to Mexico. It's cheaper down there. We just kind of like to bring some manufacturing back here to Sturgis."

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the country. After decades of industrial cutbacks, the giant retailer offers this community badly needed jobs. Michigan's unemployment rate has hovered as high as 7 percent since 2003. There are 910,000 people receiving public assistance; 250,000 more than in 2000.

But the Wal-Mart is thriving. People from Indiana cross the border to buy bananas in the same place you can buy guns.

For Stacy, it's less convenience than good prices. She and her husband are real estate appraisers. But she says, "Everyone is leaving Sturgis." It's the job market. "We've lost a couple of manufacturing facilities here. So everyone is having to leave.

When they leave, Stacy continues, they put their houses up for sale. But "there's no one coming in to buy because there is no place to work. So we have all kinds of houses on the market with no one purchasing. Without them purchasing they don't need a real estate appraiser to appraise the homes."

Stacy has voted Republican her whole life, including for Bush in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore carried Michigan by 5 percentage points. Bill Clinton well exceeded that margin in 1996. To win Michigan this year, Democrats will need the unions, specifically the United Auto Workers.

For Bush to take the state, he must carry nearly every town – every Kinderhook, every Sturgis – outside Detroit.

"My parents were Republicans so I pretty much followed the same suit," Stacy says. "It's just the sign of the times right now. I'm not real into the politics that much. But I've seen everything go down here in Michigan. I'd like to see it change. I'd like to see more manufacturing come into Michigan, specifically Sturgis."

For now, her family is "just kind of watching everything right now and we're watching all the commercials on TV, just listening, seeing what they are going to come up with, what their plans are."

But, she adds, "We are definitely leaning toward Kerry. We kind of feel like we need a change right now."

She says she likes Kerry, as if positive sentiments toward him are unusual. And from several days of interviews, they are: most still don't know him.

"I like who he had chosen for his vice presidential candidate," she says, referring to Sen. John Edwards. "They're both young. They'll kind of go toward our age group and move things up a little bit."

The Gills are Bush-then and Bush-now voters.

Nancy: "I think everything [President Bush] has done has been okay."

Kurt: "Yeah," nodding.

Nancy: "He's trying to fight for everything we got. He's trying to get the guys home from Iraq. Get out of that army stuff. The economy and stuff."

And what do you think Kurt?

"The healthcare, all that, and education for the kids," he replies.

Clasping his thick hands in his lap, Kurt half smiles. He says he just had back surgery. He's been unemployed most of the winter and all through the summer. Up here it feels like autumn. It nearly is, and Kurt still can't find a job.

He says he hurt his back at work but they didn't have any worker's compensation.

"I was working at Pizza Hut here in town. I slipped and fell on black ice.
I was taking out some trash."

Nancy, 60, says her "father was a Democrat so we've always kind of voted both ways."

Waving his hands back and forth, 34-year old Kurt adds, "Here, there, here, there." In the 1990s, they backed Bill Clinton; in the 1980s, they backed the Ronald Reagan.

"I flip flop all over," Nancy says with pride.

What do you think about John Kerry?

"I don't know," she responds. "I don't know very much about him."

Kurt: "We know more about Bush than we do Kerry."

Nancy tells of hard times in Sturgis. "Jobs are terrible, 800 people went out the door at one of the big factories," she says. "We're having trouble keeping up with bills and stuff like that."

And what do you think of George Bush?

"I just like how he's trying to run things," she answers. "He's trying to keep jobs alive."

But then Iraq comes up and Nancy opens up a little, her voice cracking. "It's terrible," she says. "The reason I say that is I lost a brother in Vietnam. I have great memories of him. And I think it's terrible to lose somebody," she continues, stiff lipped.

"Danny Allen Weber," was his name. "He and a twin cousin of mine, Terry Weber, they both hit a landmine and blew them all over."

The newspaper obituary reads that the local church overflowed at the funeral. They were the first boys from the area to die in Vietnam. It was 1968. The community was wrecked by the news.

"He just went in," she explains. A beloved local athlete, the article says Danny had rented a limo with a friend near Alexandra, Virginia, just before leaving. It says they did the city "up right." Soon after turning 20 he arrived in Vietnam. A year later, he died.

"It's terrible how they kill people, and they send the bodies back and you have nobody," she says.

"I just feel it's terrible how they shoot our people and blow them up, and all of that. But we're looking for the guy that caused all the problems," Nancy adds, certain and serious, "Somebody has to be over there, to help clean the clocks."

By David Paul Kuhn