STATE REPRESENTATIVE  MARTY GRIFFIN (D - JACKSON)

"Martin Griffin knows how to balance a budget and keep taxes low."

That's the first sentence that greets visitors to Marty Griffin's official campaign website, MartinGriffin.net.  One might assume, then, that the former mayor of Jackson is a fiscal conservative with sufficient nerve to run as a low-tax moderate Democrat, a genuine rarity in the state of Michigan.

But you know what they say about assumption.

That's not to say the paragraph above didn't contain some accurate information.  Marty is a former mayor of Jackson and he is a Democrat.  That much is true.  But he's also a far-left liberal who's doing everything he can to disguise himself in order to keep his seat in the House.

Swept into office by the great Democrat tsunami of 2006 Griffin was immediately installed as Assistant Associate Majority Floor Leader.  Not because he's qualified or even because it's an important position, but because it sounds pretty cool and when casual political observers hear the title they say "oh, wow... fancy!"

Everything with Griffin is carefully crafted after being focus grouped and run through various public opinion polls.  

The House Democrat campaign committee has a lot invested in Marty and they don't want it going to waste.  Especially after eeking out a narrow 1,500 vote win.

So what you get is titles and headlines and canned press releases that proclaim the conservative virtues of the good Representative.  And it's all pretty and happy, sunshines and rainbows and peaches and cream until you let the man start voting and he rips the carefully constructed mask off revealing the tax-hiking monster inside.

The trick for Griffin's handlers then becomes containing the monster and hiding his true nature from the voters of the conservative 64th House District.  They did a pretty good job of that all year right up until the first of October.

His official state website proudly displays a press release right smack dab on the front page.  It's attempting to give Marty credit for crafting the MBT, the tax package that replaced the Single Business Tax.  Every last dollar of it.  But here's how the headline reads:

"Griffin's Bill Passes House: Legislation cuts personal property taxes, rewards investment"

See?  He's a tax cutter.  They told you he was.  Nevermind the fact that the MBT was a dollar-for-dollar replacement.  Those are just pesky details and we shouldn't let them get in the way.

It's all a part of that image, and it was all fine and dandy until the budget crisis shutdown state government.  Then there was no holding Martin Griffin back.  You pay taxes and he was going to make sure you paid more, to heck with his slick marketing, prepackaging, political consultants and handlers.

It was all they could do to keep him from blowing a hole in their finely crafted image earlier in the process, counting it a victory when they delayed his impulse to raise taxes by convincing him to become a member of the Yellow Ten, the group of Democrats who refused to vote on a tax hike one way or the other for days that stretched into nights that stretched into weeks.

When his hometown newspaper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, attempted to contact him about his refusal to do his job they were forced to report the following:

Efforts to reach Griffin, D-Jackson, were unsuccessful...

Some pundits say the non-votes by Griffin... are to provide political cover to avoid being labeled tax-and-spend liberals in the next campaign.

Political cover, slick packaging, conservative marketing.  It was all pretty effective.  The power players at MDP did a good job slapping faux-gold plating a $20 knock-off and making it look like a pure gold Rolex.  

Unfortunately, this one's going to turn your wrist green.  

When push came to shove and the votes had to be counted Griffin bucked his handlers and revealed his propensity for job-killing tax hikes, voting YES on the biggest tax hike in the history of the state of Michigan.  Marty Griffin, long reigned in by his slick marketing team, broke his shackles, raced to the voting board and cast the 56th and deciding vote to raise taxes on Michigan job makers by over $613 million.

If you click back over to Martin's personal website and visit the section titled "About Martin Griffin" you'll find the following sentence:

A shrewd budget planner, he has never raised taxes.

The fact his campaign site lies to the voters of the 64th District is almost certainly only an oversight on the part of his webmaster.  But it serves as a reminder and proof of the age-old axiom Griffin's consultants would just as soon you forget... you can only slap so much lipstick on a pig.