Gretchen Whitmer Is Swimming With Sharks
Among the big gambles in book publishing is picking a publication date months in advance of a book’s release, a process that is half tea-leaf reading and half wild guesswork. Will a new book drop in a week when a scandal blots out all media coverage? Or will it coincide with a news event that gives the book a peg and its author a huge boost in visibility?
Back in the spring, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her team at Simon & Schuster chose July 9 to publish True Gretch, her new memoir–slash–inspirational guidebook. “I wanted to put it out early enough in this election cycle that it gave me something positive to talk about,” Whitmer, dressed in a cupcake-pink dress in the lobby of the midtown Hilton, told me brightly the day after its release. “And give people a laugh, or some hope, in this hard and heavy election year.” It would be a distraction for politicos in advance of Donald Trump’s scary party convention in Milwaukee and far enough ahead of the Democrats’ own August convention that it would not make it seem as though she were trying to bigfoot her heat-seeking peers.
However, Whitmer told me she’d had her heart set on the second week of July for another, electorally unrelated reason. “We really pushed to make sure it came out this week because it was Shark Week,” she said. Whitmer has loved Shark Week since she heard comedian Na’im Lynn’s riff on how women no longer use demure euphemisms to refer to their periods but rather proclaim to would-be sexual partners, “It’s Shark Week, motherfucker!” She found the line so funny that — partially in response to a male debate coach who’d told her to smile more when speaking publicly — she started writing “SW, MF” in her notepad prior to speeches. During the 2020 Democratic convention, Whitmer was standing at the podium waiting to go live with her remote address to the nation, and she loosened up by joking, “It’s not just Shark Week, it’s Shark Week, motherfuckers,” mouthing the last word silently. Though she hadn’t been on-air, the video quickly leaked, obscuring any memory of her actual written remarks.
This book has definitely landed in the middle of Shark Week — the one happening on the Discovery Channel, and the one happening in the Democratic Party.
Twelve days before True Gretch’s release, as her publicity blitz was ramping up, Whitmer watched President Joe Biden — whose reelection campaign she co-chairs — debate Donald Trump, an event that provoked a feeding frenzy. Within hours, pundits and donors were clamoring for an obdurate Biden to step down, and many were naming Whitmer, widely acknowledged as one of the party’s future presidential hopefuls, among their ideal alternates.
I asked her if, in the crush of critical press immediately following the debacle, she were already quietly thinking, “Oh … fuck.”
“Yes,” Whitmer replied without pause. “Yes, I was. Because I knew I had a ton of media set up, and I knew that, sadly, the terrible debate performance was going to be still a subject of conversation. Obviously, that’s continuous.”
Everywhere Whitmer went to talk about her book, she was met with questions about Biden: Did she still support him (yes), would she like to see him take cognitive tests (“It wouldn’t hurt”), did she think it would be cool to be Kamala Harris’s running mate (“Never say never”), each one of them turning into its own small news break.
The book’s timing is widely understood as fortuitous for Whitmer. Stephen Colbert joked, “A lot of times a memoir from a politician is a trial balloon for a presidential run, and I’m just curious: At what point in the last 12 days did you write this?” But for a gal on a book tour, with an aged incumbent’s presidential campaign to co-chair, a state to govern, and democracy in the balance, it may not be as much fun as it seems. A first-time author wants attention, though, as she said to me with a slightly stricken look, “the right kind of attention.”
One Politico item about a call she reportedly made to express concerns to a Biden aide cited as its source “someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.” “It was just mind-boggling,” Whitmer said of that article. “There’s a downside to having my name in these articles, that you have to deal with crap like that.”
It’s a conundrum. As an ambitious politician — and what politician is not ambitious? — you don’t want to see your name in stories that fantasize about replacing the man you’re supposed to be helping. But you don’t want to not see your name in those stories, either.
“As a leader,” Whitmer told me carefully, “it is a huge compliment for people to be putting my name out as someone they think could take on a crucial role like that. It’s also a real distraction from the campaign that I am a part of, that I am committed to. And I don’t like that part of it.”
I asked if she perceives a double standard in the ways she, versus some of her male peers (like J. B. Pritzker or Gavin Newsom), is framed as striving or in the ways she is pitted against Kamala Harris, the vice-president, who is the most obvious successor to Biden, when the men are not. “Oh, I’ve felt it and it’s a bummer,” she said.
Whitmer spoke warmly of Harris, noting that the vice-president, who has led the post-Dobbs reproductive-justice messaging for the White House, has spent time in Michigan, where Whitmer turned her state blue and won a legislative trifecta for the first time in nearly 40 years in part by running hard on abortion protections. “We did reproductive-rights roundtables together,” Whitmer said. “She is the best advocate at the national level, incredibly strong on this issue in particular, but on a variety of them. We have a good relationship.”
As the political waters churn with blood and Whitmer continues a book tour that will take her through the summer — she will almost certainly be a speaker at August’s convention in Chicago; “One of these days I think they’ll put together the agenda,” she cracked — she continues to communicate in a very different style than that of the generation of Democratic politicians that has sat atop the political power structure for decades.
She is direct and profane, willing to talk like a human being about abortion and sexual assault and beer and Ultimate Fighting Championship. True Gretch is not your nana’s ponderous political memoir; it’s a short episodic handbook of upbeat aphorism and advice about powering through some pretty terrible experiences. Whitmer writes that she cannot bear to listen to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” because it reminds her of the night she was raped as an undergraduate. She writes of her team’s successful “Lil’ Gretch” social-media campaign, in which they dressed a Barbie in a pink suit, but also of how a protester brought a brunette Barbie to the state capitol, put her in a little noose, and hanged the governor in effigy. (Whitmer was famously the target of a 2020 plot by a group of men to kidnap and assassinate her.)
Among the most arresting stories is about Whitmer’s wild-child days, which hit their nadir during a high-school football game where she got so wasted that she passed out in the parking lot, waking up just in time to vomit all over the principal and earning herself a suspension. “Although tailgating is a great Michigan tradition,” Whitmer writes dryly, her intoxication was “clearly a bit much for a sophomore in high school.” (The ’80s were a different time, kids.)
Whitmer included the anecdote, she told me, “because it was a terrible thing that I inflicted on myself” but also a moment that turned out to be “pivotal for learning from the mistake and then seeking out people that were going to help keep me challenged and focused.” The next year, she earned the award for Most Improved Student: “It was an incredible growth period in my life, and I don’t know if it would’ve happened the way that it did but for me royally screwing up like that.”
Which brings us back to the Democratic Party’s ongoing quagmire. What might her advice be for a party that has, metaphorically speaking, passed out and vomited in public? How could it go on to win Most Improved Student? “This isn’t fantasy football,” she replied. “You can’t just erase the board and put new players on it. We are in July. We have a binary choice here, and we’ve got to mobilize and get President Biden reelected.”
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