March 29, 2024

Dick DeVos: Symptom or Cure

June 7, 2006
The Pearl Tower in Shanghai is the proud symbol of China’s economic hopes. From the 1,148-foot-high observation deck of this TV tower, you can see modern China bursting with new office towers, factories, freeways and all of the signs of new jobs and prosperity. You can catch a glimpse of the tower in Tom Cruise’s new thriller, MI-III. It looks like a giant pearl attached to a knitting needle.
But look at the tower from ground level across the Huangpu River and you’ll notice something else: a giant Amway banner plastered along the waterfront at the base of the Pearl Tower.
For a visitor from Michigan, the Amway banner stirs bittersweet feelings. Do you feel proud that a Michigan company, launched in 1959 in little old Ada outside Grand Rapids, is doing so well in China? Or do you feel that there must be some truth to the claims of the Democratic Party that Amway outsourced 1,400 jobs to China?
The banner makes you wonder if Michigan workers have been screwed by Amway the same as by other multinational corporations that have fled our state for cheaper labor in Mexico, Korea, China or India.
Dick DeVos, candidate for governor and former head of Amway’s parent company, Alticor, claims that not a single Michigan job has been lost to China. In fact, he says, Alticor’s expansion to China in 1995 actually created 300 high-paying jobs in Michigan.
Sometime between now and November’s election we’re likely to hear more on that score as the Democrats and their union allies get down to serious digging.
The larger concern is that of DeVos literally buying the election with money he’s made in places like China. The company racked up more than $2 billion in sales in the People’s Republic in 2005, according to USA Today. Starting in 1995, it built a $100 million distribution center in southern China and spent $29 million to establish new Amway stores across the country.
One could grouse that Amway could have given Michigan a nice boost by building a $100 million distribution center here, but Americans already have all the dish soap, pot scrubbers and laundry detergent they can handle. That Amway stuff apparently summons a sense of American mystique in China and sells like crazy there.
DeVos is the wealthiest man ever to run for governor in Michigan. Exactly how much he’s worth is unknown, but according to the Detroit Free Press he has a net worth of at least $500 million. His father, Richard, who co-founded Amway, has something like $3 billion socked away.
That has allowed DeVos to spend more than $5 million on TV ads to date in a naked attempt to buy the election.
Some of us are sick of the relentless DeVos ads already. They’re the typical political image ads of a smart guy with his shirt sleeves rolled up, interacting with the usual bunch of just-plain-folks who look like extras fresh from Central Casting. Usually political ads feature a stock group of characters, including a worried looking regular-Joe guy wearing a hard hat, a concerned soccer mom, a generic African-American, and a wise-but-befuddled old farmer in a baseball cap, all of whom nod thoughtfully at what the candidate is babbling about on the brave new direction he’ll take us in... time for a change, etc.
Gov. Granholm is said to be conserving her campaign cash until the late innings. This is a strategy which has been shown to work with voters who tire of hearing all the blah, blah, blah about the candidate who started campaigning early. Professional wrestler and third party candidate Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota this way in 1998 by flooding the airways with ads on the eve of the election. The well-financed Republican and Democratic candidates had grown stale to voters by that time and Ventura emerged as the fresh alternative. There wasn’t time to consider that his populist ideas and administration skills were basically worthless, so Ventura won.
And Ventura spent only $600,000 on his campaign; something for Gov. Granholm to think about.
The irony is that given his background, DeVos would seem to have a good shot at the governorship without spending oceans of cash and boring us to tears all summer. After all, as a business leader he has shown that he can succeed spectacularly in the perilous age of globalization. Anyone who managed to wrangle billions out of the notoriously difficult People’s Republic of China deserves a commensurate amount of respect.
This is also the man who drove Alticor to more than $5 billion in sales before stepping down in 2004. That could mean he’s just the person for the job of retooling rusty old Michigan... or as columnist Jack Lessenberry has noted, it could mean that DeVos’s idea of reviving Michigan, “involves all of us going door to door to sell little bars of soap to each other.”
It makes you wonder, is Dick DeVos the symptom of what’s wrong with Michigan? Or is he the cure? The symptom is our loss of jobs due to corporate outsourcing to foreign shores. The cure might be a savvy global player who can teach us how to win, even in places that play as rough as China.
Of course, being governor requires more than being able to perform magic on the economy. The founders of Amway are infamous for their support of right-wing causes. If DeVosā€˜s ideas on social issues are anything like the medieval attitudes of the Dutch Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, then no thanks.
Crossover Democrats who might be inclined to hold their noses and vote for DeVos based on his managerial skills could be turned off once his stand on social issues, education, the environment, health care and labor are revealed. So far, we don’t know much about DeVos, except that he’s pretty good at selling soap.

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