Michigan governor's future? It's TOAST....

Flint water crisis swamps Michigan governor's future

"He's all done," said one Michigan Republican strategist. "Water's important, you know. It's over."

By Darren Goode and Annie Snider

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, until recently a rising GOP star and potential vice presidential contender, is scrambling to salvage his legacy amid questions about his administration’s role in causing and then fumbling Flint’s water crisis.

Snyder used Tuesday night's State of the State speech to accept responsibility for the contamination in the economically struggling, largely African-American city, which has left thousands of children suffering from potentially brain-damaging lead poisoning. The governor vowed to release the past two years’ worth of his emails relating to the situation.

“You deserve better," Snyder told citizens during the speech before the Michigan state legislature. "You deserve accountability. You deserve to know that the buck stops here with me. Most of all you deserve to know the truth, and I have a responsibility to tell the truth."

But, at the same time, the Republican governor blamed the state’s Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency for “failing to "systematically identify and solve the problem.” Snyder also took a dig at President Barack Obama, saying he plans to appeal the president’s decision not to grant a major disaster declaration — a designation usually reserved for natural disasters, but which would open the door to Snyder’s $96 million request for federal aid. Obama instead declared a federal emergency on Saturday and directed $5 million worth of aid to Flint.

Snyder also detailed plans to spend an additional $28 million in funds he has requested from the state legislature to respond to the crisis, which he said would not be the last such request for Flint.

The speech came as the crisis has turned the once high-flying governor into one of the Democrats’ prime punching bags of 2016, with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders calling for him to resign and Hillary Clinton charging that Snyder “acted as though he didn't really care.” The crisis helped Clinton pick up an endorsement Tuesday from Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, who met later Tuesday with Obama in the White House.

Just three months ago, Snyder was winning acclaim as part a new breed of Midwestern Republican politicians, a governor who might someday run for the White House himself or join the GOP ticket in 2016. But then came the revelations that a cost-cutting move approved by one of his appointees had led to a spike in lead levels in Flint’s drinking water, a problem that state environmental regulators spent almost two years denying.

Now, even some Michigan Republicans concede that Snyder’s national prospects are toast, at least in the short term, and that the emergency could aid Democrats’ prospects for reclaiming the governor’s mansion after his term ends in 2018.

"He's all done," said one Michigan Republican strategist who declined to be named. "Water's important, you know. It's over."

“Politically, this is a goldmine for Democrats,” said Lynn Aronoff, a GOP consultant and former Michigan-based aide for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Snyder has rejected the possibility of resigning, even while conceding in an interview Monday that the crisis is a “disaster” that can fairly be likened to Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to solve this problem,” Snyder said in the National Journal interview. “I don’t want to walk away from it.” But he has also dismissed “political statements and finger pointing from political candidates [that] only distract from solving the Flint water crisis.”

The crisis is largely one of Snyder’s own making, say his critics, who include both the Democratic front-runner and her biggest rival.

"I think every single American should be outraged," Clinton said during Sunday’s Democratic debate, when she brought up the Flint crisis in her closing remarks. “We've had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn't really care.”

Sanders followed up by repeating his call for Snyder to resign. "A man who acts that irresponsibly should not stay in power," the Vermont senator said.

The Obama administration has faced its own questions about its handling of the crisis: Last week, the Detroit News reported that the Environmental Protection Agency had known as far back as April about shortcomings in the city's water treatment process but hadn't gone public with its concerns. But the bulk of the public criticism has focused on Snyder, whose appointees and agencies made key decisions that led to the contamination and then hampered efforts to respond to it.

In 2012, Snyder signed a law allowing the state to appoint emergency managers to oversee financially struggling municipalities, despite voters' rejection of a similar measure. A year later, when Flint was being run by a Snyder-appointed emergency manager, the city began drawing its drinking water from the Flint River, instead of continuing to purchase treated Lake Huron water from Detroit.

That was meant to be a temporary move until a new water supply could come online. But when the notoriously polluted river's water started flowing through the city's pipes in April 2014, the city failed to treat it with the anti-corrosion additives required by federal law. Soon, both lead and iron from those pipes was pouring into Flint's homes.

City and state officials assured worried residents for nearly two years that the water was safe — until independent tests showed it was not. Public acknowledgment by Snyder and other state officials of the problem in October came months after the governor's now-departed chief of staff warned that residents' concerns were being "blown off."

The state's environmental chief stepped down at the end of December over the lagged response, but it took until this month for Snyder to declare his own state of emergency and bring in the National Guard to help distribute clean water. The city also switched back in October to a water source governed by the regional Great Lakes Water Authority.

Snyder has defended the actions his administration began taking in October, when he said evidence was clear about elevated lead levels in the blood of Flint children. "We've tried to be prudent," Snyder said at a Jan. 11 news conference in Flint. But "those actions were not good enough," he added.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin and has long been known to affect brain functions and cause behavioral problems.

The plan Snyder outlined Tuesday includes spending more than $20 million in additional funds for steps such as providing health care for affected children, replacing water fixtures in schools and day care centers and offering financial aid to Flint's utilities, the Detroit News reported before the speech. Weaver, the Flint mayor, has said it could cost as much as $1.5 billion just to replace the aging infrastructure that has contributed to the contamination.

The White House said earlier Tuesday that the Department of Health and Human Services will appoint Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary of preparedness and response, to lead the federal response to the water crisis.

Worries about Flint's water supply got even worse last week, when Snyder announced that the city has been suffering a Legionnaire's disease outbreak that has killed 10 people since 2014. The outbreak may or may not be linked to the water contamination.

Until the Flint crisis, political observers commonly lumped Snyder in with Ohio's John Kasich, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Indiana's Mike Pence as part of a cadre of Midwestern Republican governors who gave the party hope of modernizing and moderating its message to Reagan Democrats and the middle class. That sparked speculation last year that he was seriously considering a presidential run.

“He really could have been the John Kasich of this cycle,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Snyder's record has included signing a law rolling back labor unions' powers — a priority for conservatives — yet also pushing to expand Medicaid, something Democrats favor. He won plaudits for improving Michigan's economy and helping revitalize Detroit, with the latter being the subject of a national tour that Snyder took last year to "explain the Michigan story to the rest of the country," as he noted to POLITICO in December 2014.

"It's hard to imagine why else he'd do such a thing if he wasn't interested in some future in Washington," said Susan Demas, publisher and editor of Inside Michigan Politics.

Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), who represents Flint, is widely considered a potential candidate to succeed Snyder in 2018. The water crisis "may be beneficial in the long run for Kildee politically," Michigan GOP strategist Paul Welday said. "But he would say, and I would say, it’s a hell of a way to get there."

For Snyder, the challenge of addressing the crisis is to exceed expectations from now on, Welday said, while for Kildee it is to show strong leadership for his constituents without appearing overtly political. “It’s a defining moment for both of these guys,” he said.

Kildee has told reporters that Flint's crisis is part of a geographically broader problem of inadequate drinking-water oversight and aging infrastructure. But he also stressed that it's uniquely tied to a lack of oversight by Snyder's administration.

"This is not a case of not enough resources," he said. "It's not a case of even something as sad but explainable as incompetence. This is willfully ignoring warning signs because they didn't want to have a public relations problem."

After the speech, Kildee blasted Snyder’s request for additional state spending as insufficient.

“For those who think $28 million will begin to remedy the Flint water crisis, that is a fraction of the money city residents have paid for poisoned water that they cannot drink,” he said in a statement Tuesday evening. “Flint deserves an immediate response equal to the gravity of this ongoing public health emergency."

Not everyone says it's over for Snyder.

"When you're in the middle of a crisis, people draw conclusions that might not be there at the end of the crisis," said John Truscott, a former spokesman for former Michigan Gov. John Engler, a Republican. "Can he get ahead of the situation? What information comes out, and does it vindicate him or does it have a worse impact on him? I think there's a lot of things that we don't know at this point."

"It's a pretty bad story for him," said Florida-based GOP political strategist Christopher Ingram, who created a media stir in Michigan four years ago with what he calls a tongue-in-cheek blog post speculating that Snyder might be a potential Romney running mate. But Ingram says Snyder could still weather the Flint scandal and stay in the national picture.

"I would have thought Bridgegate would have doomed Chris Christie. I would have thought any number of things would have doomed Donald Trump," Ingram said. "Pick your candidate that's running who has defied all logic in overcoming what used to be an unrecoverable act to overcome."