After the news of the lead in Flint’s water supply broke, Democrats were in a tizzy as they looked for a Republican to blame. The obvious target was the governor, Rick Snyder, so that was quickly settled on as the battle plan. One of they key instigators in this effort was Rev. David Bullock, the self appointed chief of the not very subtly named “Stop Snyder” campaign. Rather than simply criticizing the governor over his imagined involvement in planning the disaster, Bullock set out to have Snyder recalled. Under Michigan law that was going to require a hefty number of signatures gathered in a specified time period to pull off. So how’s that going? In short… not very well at all. (WZZM News)

The Rev. David Bullock, the Detroit-area minister who heads the Stop Snyder campaign, told the Free Press he is extending into August his effort to collect close to 790,000 valid signatures, and he gives the campaign about a 60% chance of succeeding.

“We’re still going,” he said. “We are not getting enough support and I think people are satisfied with just expressing disappointment.”

The campaign began on Easter Sunday in late March and was initially expected to conclude May 25. Bullock earlier extended the collection campaign into June and now has extended the drive a second time.

The mechanics of Michigan’s recall law aren’t overly convoluted, but they are designed to ensure there is sufficient mass appeal for such an effort that large numbers of people would be willing to sign on in fairly short order. You not only need nearly 800K signatures, but they all have to be gathered in a period of 60 days. You get six months from the date that the Board of State Canvassers signs off on the recall petition language to organize your efforts, but all of the sheets have to be collected in a two month period during that time. (The clock runs out on that in the third week of August, by the way.) Under those rules, if you fail to get enough on the first go, you can try again, but you have to go back and get the people who signed more than sixty days previously to sign again. This effort has been failing badly for Stop Snyder.

Despite the overwhelming registration advantage that Democrats have in the state, this probably isn’t as surprising as it sounds. Snyder found out about the lead crisis at the same time as everyone else. At that point, he took action to correct it. You may criticize his efforts as much as you like, but trying to pin the blame for it happening in the first place on him is an obviously false attack. The real fault lies with the EPA, the state Department of Environmental Quality and the local administration which should have had their eyes on the ball. Unfortunately those groups aren’t very tempting political targets for Democrats, hence the flailing effort to take it all out on Snyder.

At some point the residents of Flint should be forced to take a good look around and see who the real culprits are in this mess. Decades of failed Democratic policies have turned their state into a wasteland in many respects and knocking one of the few Republicans in power off his perch isn’t going to change anything.