Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer made a visit to the Island this past weekend to discuss her new memoir, “True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between,” as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series.
The sold-out event was held in the Performing Arts Center at the regional high school at 4 pm Saturday. Over 800 people came to hear the governor speak.
Whitmer and moderators of the talk, husband and wife Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, were introduced by Suellen Lazarus, director of the author series events. Danson and Steenburgen have a house in Chilmark.
Tickets came out around the time that Whitmer was making headlines for speculation on her presidential ambitions if Biden stepped down. Though she dispelled those rumors before Biden dropped his reelection bid, new reports suggest she may have a larger role in the potential Kamala Harris administration.
She didn’t say whether she would join the Harris ticket as VP if asked Saturday, despite being on a short list of possible picks, and the Detroit News reported that Whitmer said she isn’t leaving Michigan, seemingly removing herself from that narrative.
She has endorsed Harris as the democratic nominee and is currently co-chair of the vice president’s campaign for presidency.
“It’s been one of the most highly anticipated events on the Island this summer,” Lazarus said to the audience. Though all four of the author series events so far have sold out, there was a lot of interest in this particular event, and that had a lot to do with the “political timing,” Lazarus told The Times. It was Whitmer’s publisher who approached the speaker series to include Whitmer as they scheduled her book tour.
There were 630 general admission tickets sold, and 170 sponsors attended the event. Each attendee received a signed copy of Whitmer’s book.
Whitmer is a member of the Democratic party, served in the Michigan House of Representatives from 2001 and 2006, and then Michigan Senate from 2006 to 2015. She ran for governor of Michigan in 2018 and was inaugurated Jan. 1, 2019. She was reelected in 2022. She’s never lost an election.
Whitmer’s a rising figure in politics, and many see her as the future of democratic politics, Lazarus said. But the road hasn’t been easy. Whitmer became known as “that woman from Michigan” when she clashed with former President Donald Trump over pandemic protocols and was the target of a kidnapping plot, both of which she discusses in her book.
The book follows 10 mantras that she’s used to get through the last six years. In the chapter “Never Give Up,” she told the story of when she revealed she was sexually assaulted as a freshman in college. She was trying to block a bill as Michigan’s Senate minority leader that would require women to pre-purchase an abortion rider, extra health insurance that includes abortion coverage. She decided at the last minute to tell her story in front of the Michigan Senate. Though she lost the vote in 2013, she signed the bill that repealed the law 10 years later as governor.
Whitmer decided to write a book because people would always ask her how she’s able to stay so positive and optimistic, and she wanted to put a book out in an election year because she knew rhetoric would be hot and divisive, she said.
“In my first term, I was governor through obviously the pandemic, we had a polar vortex three weeks into the term, which we had to navigate,” Whitmer said. “We had demonstrations for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, we had a historic flooding event that washed out a dam, and we had to evacuate 10,000 people in the middle of the night in the middle of a pandemic. I survived 28 recall attempts. … and a plot to kidnap and kill me. And so people ask the logical question, which is why do you want to keep doing this?”
She kept the crowds laughing despite some heavier topics.
She told a story from when she ran for governor in 2018. She needed something to keep her loose and happy during campaigning, so she pulled a quote from a Kevin Hart stand-up comedy routine that she put at the top of her notes before debates. She wrote “SW, MF,” which stands for, “It’s Shark Week, motherf**ker!”
Attendees were encouraged to submit questions on index cards upon arrival. Her team picked four questions for her to answer at the end of the discussion. One asked if she saw a future where the country isn’t so full of hate and division.
She said she would no longer be in politics if she didn’t think that would happen.
“But it’s not going to happen overnight,” she said. “This is an important lesson that we are on the cusp of, and I do believe that we will see a stark choice in front of us. …And I’m hopeful that we can return to a place where we can have robust debates. But that they be based on the same set of facts and that we don’t target and villainize one another just because we don’t see eye to eye.”
