Snyder’s nerdy approach to governing destroyed by Flint water crisis

This 9-year-old protester in Flint was photographed by MLive.

As Gov. Rick Snyder gets pilloried from all sides, from critics across the nation, for the Flint water crisis, his nerdy, technocratic approach toward government is what’s really taking a hit.

Janell Ross of The Washington Post weighed in this morning with a hard-hitting column that provided this emphasis:

“The situation in Flint highlights the very real limits of reducing both the size and cost of government at every turn, of making savings the organizing principle of government. Money truly is not everything, even in a poor city in one of the richest countries in the world. When it is, the crisis in Flint is one possible result.”

Over at MLive, Susan Demas admits that she’s always been a huge fan of the governor’s online dashboard. I agree that the data-driven approach, tracking how the state is doing in terms of health, economics, education, public safety, and other metrics, is a service to the taxpayer. 

But Demas, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, points out the insensitive outcomes that result when taking a bookkeeper’s approach to governing:

“A dashboard, however, is only as good as what it measures. And there's no metric on clean water or lead poisoning, presumably because these are considered such basic human needs that we've moved beyond them.

“But we haven't in Flint.

“… Michigan earns an "F" in government transparency and ethics from a national watchdog group. But the dashboard barely measures anything on that front.

“The list goes on.

“But the biggest flaw in the dashboard approach is this: It doesn't encapsulate the human element to governing. It's not fundamentally about numbers; it's about people.”