Manipulated in Michigan

What a fine, unpredictable year for spectator politics. Someone asked me for a prediction on Michigan's Republican primary next Tuesday. I haven't a clue. Exciting, isn't it?

I'm not even sure what'll happen when Mike Huckabee speaks today, Friday, at the Detroit Economic Club. That's a power-elite audience — the guys who laid you off, so to speak. Maybe the Huck will impulsively reach over and snatch away some CEO's lunch, a two-fer gesture about weight loss and fighting the power.

That Michigan is briefly important is a pity, in a way. It's an open primary and Democrats have no contest, so they're free to drift over and make trouble in what could be confirmation for Mr. Huckabee or for John McCain or a red alert for Mitt Romney.

The polls don't help. All three guys are about even (Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson are well behind). Things are fluid. On Wednesday, Mr. Romney, the old favorite here, pulled his TV ads elsewhere to spend the money on Michigan.

The theory now seems to be that while Mr. Romney has to win, Mr. McCain may do so by picking up bored Democrats, and the independents he drew in 2000. One man, a retiree in his early 60s who showed up at a Mr. McCain rally near Detroit Wednesday, told a reporter he was there because he felt miffed the Democrats weren't wooing him. His wife said she liked Mr. McCain but wasn't sure which primary she'd vote in. Bear in mind that the Democratic primary is meaningless, the party having stripped the state of delegates for voting too early. Barack Obama's not even on the ballot.

In short, the woman was a walking example of that New Hampshire poll showing that Mr. Romney won among the decidedly Republican while Mr. McCain took the shaky.

Still, despite such mischievous portents, the sorting goes on, all over the state. Mr. Romney's flying to Marquette on Sunday. That's in the Upper Peninsula, which has fewer people than Staten Island and fewer Republicans than NPR's donor Rolodex. Presumably, he's showing he's Michigander enough to know where Marquette is.

Michigan's important to Mr. Romney. It could be important to the Republican party, too: It's an opportunity to try out competing ideas on inimical territory. If the general election will be fought in a country, as pollsters say, that's worried and ticked off, Michigan's a good testing ground. Its economy amounts to a "one-state recession," as Mr. Romney's saying. It's losing population. Its unemployment rate, 7.4%, is the nation's highest. The dominant industry, automaking, has not merely been shrinking but has been delivering the news to hundreds of thousands of Michiganders that their sweet deal — lifetime upper-middle-class pay and benefits for blue-collar work until early retirement — is gone.

In short, Michigan really is as bad off as the rest of us will think America is after 10 months of campaign-driven trash talk.

To this, Mr. Huckabee offers populism. He's got a new TV ad up, one saying he feels Michigan's pain and repeating that line about how he reminds people of the guy they worked with rather than their pink-slip boss.

It probably won't escape some voters' minds that when car-makers closed plants in Michigan, they opened new ones in states around Mr. Huckabee's part of the country. He might remind them of a governor who used tax incentives to lure away the guy who then laid them off.

Probably not, though. Poll-wise, Mr. Huckabee's been on the rise for months. For voters around the rest of America who wanted some alternative to Democrat class warfare, a win for him in a state full of we-wuz-shafted sentiment would stink. It would confirm populism works. Michigan is feeling disenfranchised, and it is — economically as well as politically. But that's partly Michigan's own fault. Populism is popular in such venues.

Mr. McCain was only semi-Republican in Michigan this week, telling crowds he'd give them a "cleaner planet" and would retrain the sorry victims of globalization.

But in keeping with his strength — that his attitude toward last summer's zeitpanic over Iraq was, "Nuts!" — he told Michiganders he likes the higher fuel mileage standards that threaten havoc to automakers.

If he wins because voters are drawn to this insouciance as a sign of authenticity, then that's better than voting Mr. Huckabee for empathy. At least Mr. McCain's authenticity was chiefly based on something important, a belief that we shouldn't lose a war.

As for Mr. Romney, he mainly campaigned this week by telling Michiganders that he grew up among them. But he mentioned, again, a desire to cut taxes.

If he can win on that idea, that Democrats equal taxes equal pain, and if he can do it in a high-tax state where liberal activists just launched a drive to put a right to state-paid health care in the constitution, it would be a conservative triumph.

Mr. Romney seems so appealing on rational grounds, it makes you hope he has an outburst of emotion, if that's what it takes. He needs some guy-equivalent of Hillary choking up — maybe a misty, reminiscing look while visiting his old Little League diamond or something.

Anyway, not only is it unclear who will win, it's even uncertain this is a must-win for Mr. Romney. He's apparently due to win Nevada, which has more delegates than Michigan, and he's got the money to keep going.

Still, he's from Michigan; it would look bad to lose it. Then again, it's telling that to make his fortune, Mr. Romney had to move away from this old social-contract paradise, the model of what Democrats wish to restore. That ought to resonate, too.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.