The GOP gets gaudy in Michigan

Sept. 24, 2007 | MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. -- Despite the constant efforts of men with shovels, the road to the Grand Hotel, one of America's oldest resorts, stinks of manure dropped by the horses drawing carriages. This is an island without cars or right of passage. Those pedestrians who have not paid $400 or so for a room cannot even walk near the hotel. "This is as far as you can go," bark guards in red jackets. A nearby sign explains that ladies "may not be attired in slacks" and gentlemen must wear coats and ties after 6 p.m.

On its face, this is not the sort of place that Republicans would want to hold a two-day, four-meal banquet celebration of democracy, especially if they want to win any elections in Michigan. The blue-collar state, which is locked in a recession, has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, 7.2 percent. Homes are foreclosing in Detroit at five times the national average, and the state government is broke. As of a week ago, 73,000 employees of General Motors began working without a contract. "The hopelessness that exists is just something I have never seen," said Denise DeCook, a Republican pollster who has worked in the state for decades. In one of her recent polls, 81 percent of residents said Michigan was on the wrong track.

But these facts did not sour the mood this weekend at the 27th Biennial Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, since the state GOP has a new reason to be hopeful. Several weeks ago, the gridlocked Legislature here rescheduled Michigan's presidential primary for Jan. 15, making it the third state, after Iowa and New Hampshire, to weigh in on the 2008 election. Democratic candidates responded to this apostasy by pledging not to campaign in Michigan, diluting the importance of any victory here. But Republicans have vowed to compete, making the state a potentially decisive factor in the Republican nomination battle.

In celebration of their good fortune, Republican ladies donned their fancy dresses and the gentlemen put on their blazers and striped ties. For about 36 hours beginning Friday afternoon, more than 2,000 politicians and party activists passed through the Grand Hotel, boozing and slapping backs in one of America's last bastions of Victorian aristocratic nostalgia. One by one, the leading Republican presidential candidates came as pilgrims to pay homage to the gaudy affair. At times, the scene recalled Jack Nicholson's ballroom hallucinations from the 1980 horror movie, "The Shining."

Built in 1887, the Grand Hotel is columned and cavernous, with a candy-striped interior, a pink hair salon, a maroon wine bar and a jewelry store named "The Colony Shop," which was sold out of canary diamonds for the weekend. The wait staff, imported from Jamaica on temporary visas, was entirely black, and they served food to invariably white Republicans while wearing white-tie tuxedos with jackets the color of AstroTurf. (Brochures left in the guest rooms explained that the Jamaican help is provided with laundry and "recreational facilities" at their on-island dormitories.) Croquet and bocce ball could be played down in the Tea Garden, which was decorated with abundant blooming flowers and bushes shaped like horses. At tea time, a harpist in heels played "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" while women in maid costumes served tea cakes and champagne just a few steps from an exhibit of vintage oil paintings that showed young girls in lace dresses and young boys with spent shotguns and dead birds.

The Republican Party has been coming to Mackinac Island (pronounced mack-i-naw) since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, and the walls are decorated with photographs of Gerald Ford golfing and George H.W. Bush giving a speech. It was a point of considerable pride for the party that each of the Republican presidential candidates had initially planned to attend this year's event. "Michigan has become a bellwether state," declared Saul Anuzis, the state party chairman.

But three of the candidates, including Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo, dropped out at the last minute, evidently daunted by the enormous cost of traveling to the island, which is about 250 miles north of Detroit in Lake Huron. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee went so far as to put out a last-minute press release, explaining that his only option, given his schedule, was to charter a jet, which his cash-strapped campaign could not afford. "Commercial airline schedules couldn't get us there until after things were over Friday," Huckabee explained. "And we would have to have left even before they started on Saturday."

But the four GOP front-runners all made it to the Grand Hotel for long enough to display the eccentric styles that have made the Republican primary so interesting. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who used to stay on the island as a teenager when his father was Michigan's governor, made a grand entrance, shadowed by dozens of young supporters in blue shirts, whom some in the press called "Mitt-bots" for their super-human coordination when chanting Romney's name over and over again for minutes at a time. "I must admit it was a good piece of news, when I heard Michigan would come early," Romney said at a press conference on the hotel's front porch, which the owners claim is the longest front porch in the world. The bots, who'd gathered around him, cheered wildly. Over lunch on Saturday, he debuted a new, finely tuned stump speech, "Republicans for Change," which he read off a teleprompter. "I want to bring accountability back to Washington," he said.

A few hours later, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson walked out of the hotel into a mob of reporters, who pressed around him in a chaotic scene that the Romney advance team, not to mention the Mitt-bots, would have never allowed. He muttered some bland answers to a handful of questions and then fled back inside. His speech at dinner that night was mostly a dry rendition of his life story, which seemed to put the crowd to sleep. "It was the worst speech I've ever heard up here," one local Michigan pol, who wore a Rudy Giuliani pin, told me afterward. "You want to lead the free world, have some passion about it."

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