The Leelanau Peninsula on Michigan’s Lower Peninsula’s Northwest corner, juts out into Lake Michigan like ‘the pinky finger’ as locals describe it. It is a blessed place, formed by great glaciers, and features rolling hills and beautiful sandy beaches along Lake Michigan, Grand Traverse Bay and Lake Leelanau. It is a tourist mecca for families from Cincinnati, Chicago and Metro Detroit. But inland, it is orchards up and down the hills, planted with cherry and apple trees. It contains two separate and distinct populations, and as my Dad often said, “never the twain shall meet.” The following story took place last year but your reporter believes it’s worth your while to read at this particular juncture, with the election close and Substack offering several venues to inform voters. Without further ado, The Saga of Mitch Hartley.
“Now @hartofmitch is telling everyone how he's not a progressive, he rejects us and is now calling the Democrats on the board "pinkos." What the heck? This is why people lose hope, because of frauds like Hartley. You work hard to get a progressive elected and they turn into a Libertarian instantly.”
The above is a verbatim quote which appeared on X about a local election campaign on the Leelanau Peninsula. After a great deal of research, much of it from the mouths of babes at the local barbershop, probably the most honest 200 square feet on the peninsula, your reporter decided to share the experience and some of its aftermath with you, faithful reader, in the hope that the lessons learned here might enlighten all our lives and recall Sir Walter Scott’s perfect admonishment: ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive.’
Mitch Hartley is a well known unknown here on the peninsula, if that makes sense. Where he’s from and how he managed to own such a splendid home on the water no one has ever really figured out, though they’ve given the puzzle several hours of their focused attention. His wife Sherry is a medical doctor, retired, so there’s always been speculation that it was her money that afforded them the life they have now. But that’s all just empty conjecture.
In truth, Mitch was a hardworking business man in the right place at the right time to invest a few bucks in a medical device startup that turned into a few millions. Then, as often happens, a few millions became a few more millions and it wasn’t long before Mitch and Sherry had a helluva place on the water, two kids in and out of college, and onto their own lives, and a retirement spent nine months of every year on the peninsula, and three months in a warmer clime. A mundane rags to riches story like this one never ignites the public’s imagination to the proper temperature so is often discarded, just as often as it’s also true.
Along his life’s path Mitch never concerned himself with politics, in the office or out in public. It just isn’t his thing. He voted by trying to discern who was more honest in any election, and failing that he often pulled the lever for one side or the other, whichever side he thought had a better current understanding of the state of things. “Nothing is nailed down,” was how Mitch spoke about politics, and it’s how he practiced it as well.
When a county commissioner seat suddenly opened up last summer, the local Republican masterminds met at Lee Bingham’s place high above the big lake and conceived of a plan to place Mitch on the ballot under their flag. Mitch held no previous post, had no public record of his ideas about policies or issues that anyone could remember, so a perfect candidate. Plus, his wife Sherry was a retired doctor which, with some deft handling, could give could the candidate the patina, at the very least, of being a decent, caring person. Actually, not far from the truth in Mitch’s case.
Incredibly, the Democratic machine kicked into gear at the same time. Led by Deedee Glass, heir to a large industrial fortune and doyenne of the peninsula ‘grey hairs with political smarts’, and her husband Dick, the Democrats also targeted our man Mitch for the same open county commission seat, and for much the same reasons.
Within less than a week, separate parties were held at two of the finest estates on the peninsula where Mitch and Sherry were feted and where Mitch, inexplicably, aided a good deal by some excellent ‘vino’ as he liked to call it, agreed to run for the open seat as both a Republican and a Democrat.
Mitch’s wife Sherry was surprised after Mitch accepted the Republican offer to run for the seat, but then appalled after Mitch also accepted the Democrat’s offer, especially since she was in attendance both times.
She thought Mitch should throw in the towel if he couldn’t make up his mind under which flag he was going to run. But Mitch, never shy to apologize for a mistake, was also always keen, like most businessmen, to find a compromise. “A little back and forth” as several eye witnesses heard him say in the barbershop just a few weeks later, was his way of negotiating the twists and turns of life. While he allowed that the ‘vino’ played some small role in the fiasco of running as both a Republican and Democrat at the same time, for the same seat, he also believed some clever negotiations could resolve the whole messy situation in everyone’s favor.
Meanwhile, the local parties, their competitive fire stoked by Mitch’s lack of allegiance, for how else can we understand it, went into full on campaign mode and gathered enough signatures to place Mitch on the ballot under both flags. A small scuffle broke out in the hallway outside the county clerk’s office when both parties tried to hand in their petitions on the first morning they were to be accepted by the clerk. There were no reports of punches thrown at this first incident, though several participants later publicly stated that they “really wanted to” but held back for the “sake of the system.”
Mitch for his part continued to carry on like he was above the fray. He refused to take a position on any issue currently before the commission, or even those rare issues from the past that had been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. Mitch spoke about the need for civility while dropping hints here and there about both tax cuts and new property millage increases. The barbers even got into the act when one accused the other of cutting Mitch’s hair too short to convey a ‘conservative’ persuasion, while the other accused him back of leaving it unnaturally long to present a ‘liberal’ bent.
This continued to press our little northern community until the last day that candidates could announce for the election. Mitch, after a long, primarily liquid, lunch at the local Dick’s Pour House in Lake Leelanau, made his way, miraculously as many described it, to the County Building. There he presented the whole rigamarole to the Clerk in such a way as to leave her exhausted. This is a woman who has seen the snow in one winter approach 300 inches, and who had worked from the age of seven until, at that moment, a month before her retirement. When all was said and done she put down our Mitch Hartley under the newborn Progressive Libertarian Party. Since he was the only candidate that had put in petitions it was also decided, by default really, that he would run unopposed.
Mitch fumbled around with a name for the new party, looking through various searches on his phone. His first attempt, Liberal Conservative, turned out to be an actual political party in Canada, our peaceful northern neighbor well known for flamboyant hairdo’s and teeth lost to either the puck or the stick. Mitch immediately scotched the idea. Finally after a few other attempts, Mitch came up with Progressive Libertarian, which seemed a little over the top, but he was out of other ideas. After a few eye rolls and raised brows, the assembled jurists accepted the new moniker, and, relieved the whole ordeal was put to bed and they could be out on their boats within minutes, made their hurried way to the parking lot.
This was the day when civility broke. The community was on fire. The elderly farmers had enough of millage increases which only exacerbated their current struggles with an over supply of tart cherries and apple juice due to cheap imports. On the other hand, the retirees from the cities to the south wanted all the nice amenities of their past lives without the economic and social dislocation they had been made to witness over so many years.
However, both sides had been forewarned by Sherriff Rorski, after the scuffle outside the clerk’s office, that punches thrown would lead to time in jail. But everyone knew that something had to be done. Who fastened on to this new idea has been the subject of much speculation, but within twenty four hours the nose clamp, as it is called, took the public’s imagination like Elvis’s hips. Your reporter witnessed two men at a gas station and before either man bothered to pump, they tried to clamp the other’s nose between two fingers and squeeze the life out of it. “They bent our nose, and we’ll bend theirs,” was a common cry by participants. Soon nose clamp practitioners were abundant and one could watch a ‘reddy’, as they came to be called, that lasted a full five minutes, until both men burst forth in uncontrollable tears. It was not uncommon to meet polite, soft spoken men at the local library, for example, who sported a beet red nozzle as big as their own fist.
Reddy Participant
While the general citizenry wallowed in the drama of nose clamps and general mischief concerning the election, our outstanding and stalwart County Clerk Patricia Kowaluk published the following letter in the local paper, clearing up several previously misunderstood facts:
To All Concerned Citizens: As the County Clerk these past 14 years it has been my job and privilege to help document the election processes in our beloved county. Recently a county commission seat election raised a great deal of consternation, and a great many engorged proboscises, when a single candidate landed on the ballot under a new party name. Let me assure you that as a private citizen I am also amazed at what’s taken place; but as the county clerk I followed the letter of the law as I understood it from our own legal representative. I did not make the decisions which led to the current state of affairs with just me and Mr. Mitchel Hartley behind closed doors as many residents appear to believe. To the contrary, Mr. Hartley, the county, and both the local Republican and Democrat Parties were represented by counsel. Mr. Hartley, to his credit was very well versed in election law and not, I repeat Not, inebriated at the time of the recording of candidates. All legal points made by Mr. Hartley were given their proper vetting and in the end none of the lawyers present could master an argument against them. As a result we have the current situation where one candidate runs for the County Commission seat under a party none of us has heard of before. We are all victims here of a system we allowed the lawyers take over, and only they, or a few others with a great deal of law experience, can understand and successfully navigate. I’m leaving for retirement tomorrow, and wish you all the best.
This special election to seat a new county commissioner was not envisioned when June’s cool nights rolled into the warm, long sunny days of July. The bloom this year on the fruit orchards was tremendous and the whole county, farmers and retirees alike, strode about with the relaxed confidence and cheer of men and women who are blessed by God’s grace, and damned appreciative for it.
Vacationing families started to make their way up as schools closed for the summer in cities to the south. It wasn’t long before the local grocer had lines in front of the newly installed self checkout machines. Slowly, the county catches up with the rest of the country.
When word spread of what took place at the county clerk’s office, leaders of each party were apoplectic, to say the least. There were widespread denunciations and defections from every direction. No sooner had the aggrieved of both parties walked out in righteous contempt of a ‘broken system’ than the day to day members were clamping each other’s noses and carrying on as if a second civil war were under way. There were condemnations all around of ‘fascist’ and ‘communist’ and, worst of all, ‘progressive libertarian’. When we learned that no alcohol of any kind played a part in the meeting at the clerk’s office where Mitch’s unopposed run as a Progressive Libertarian crystalized it actually produced a collective wince in the district to think something this stupid happened with all in attendance sober.
As the boredom of blue skies and warm breezes faded into the shorter, cooler days of color season, a late model Subaru perched on the side of one of the peninsula’s highest inland roads. From this vantage Mitch Hartley could see for miles in all four directions. Sweet and tart cherries were behind us, but farms now started to buzz in anticipation of apple harvest. They mowed the grass in the lanes between the trees for a last time this calendar year, followed by trailers full of eighteen bushel apple crates, unloaded at regular intervals. Yards were full of equipment, and last minute repairs and preparation were in full swing. In a matter of days the orchards would be loaded with pickers.
Mitch explained to confidantes that he was the most surprised of all when his candidacy as both a Republican and a Democrat went forward. It wasn’t like he allowed it to move forward like some college boy ruse, just for the laughs; he thought, actually believed, that eventually wiser, cooler heads would prevail and the whole thing would be scuttled and actual candidates chosen to run against each other. That this never happened was reality’s infamous dope slap, and not only for Mitch. Nor was Mitch a completely reluctant candidate either. While he never thought to run a real political race before, the thought of being ‘in office’ had often occurred to him. Once the ball got rolling there was little Mitch could do or say to interrupt its inertia. “Once you plant your orchard, you’re committed, every year, to the seasonal management of it,” Mitch told friends in a rare moment of metaphorical insight.
But like he had done all his life, Mitch straightened up pretty quickly, especially after the district experienced the nose clamp mania, and he got an earful from his wife Dr. Sherry about how disgraceful it was for his candidacy to arouse such behavior, “even at the senior center!” That conversation definitely put a exclamation point on the fact that the candidacy was real and Mitch needed to take it seriously and run a campaign he and the district could be proud of. There were a few missteps, as you’d expect from a rookie candidate, like the lawn signs that advertised Mitch as a ‘Country’ commissioner, but Mitch eventually came around as a ‘serious’ candidate with some ideas on how the county should go forward. The average voter’s rage eventually simmered down to cynical anger, “to hell with all of you,” and eventually evolved to annoyance and finally to amused acceptance, “what other county has a ‘progressive libertarian’?” Whether beside a pole barn, and at one of those crossed leg wine and cheese meetups, everyone shared a chuckle eventually about the unusual candidacy of Mitch Hartley, while also admitting that “he’s not the worst candidate I’ve ever seen.”
However for the elite politicos, the campaign never reached the level of drama they had hoped. A nose clamp ‘reddy’ provided a small spark of interest, but besides that there was no other real scandal, sexual or otherwise, to pique their interest. The election once held such promise of real fireworks for them, they were sadly disappointed at how humdrum it turned out. They became quickly bored with the whole affair and turned back to their own daily routines.
Mitch never picked up any endorsements; in fact, as an unopposed candidate, endorsements never occurred to him. This was mistake that Mitch admitted after the election when it became clear that many voters simply passed up the County Commission line on the ballot because their polestar, whether the Chamber of Commerce, or the local Women’s Group, never gave Mitch ‘the nod’, as they call it. Mitch of course still collected enough votes, but there were several write-in candidates who also took home some votes. A group of local wiseguys who spent the better part of their waking lives before the brown bottle came up with the idea of writing in ‘Lenny Chien’ which 67 of them did. It surprised everyone that 67 of them actually made it to the voting booth.
The Local Media
It is with no small amount of chagrin that we report the dubious role of the local media in this election. Of course they have been accused by partisans, as if they were referees at a ball game, of calling fouls where there were none, and missing other obvious fouls, but their real sins were of omission and tone.
Somehow the roles of the Glasses, Deedee and Dick, and Lee Bingham, the Democrat and Republican kingmakers respectively, were never uncovered by our intrepid reporters, though these three had their hands in this offal pie up to their elbows. And when letters to the editor of the local paper asking about this omission went unanswered and unpublished, the whole district responded by noting a “foul smell in the air.” Deedee normally had a table of 8 for the end summer art show and wine extravaganza, but unable to find compatriots to fill out an eight, she attended with her eldest daughter and the two of them sat together at a deuce, imbibing a fair amount of chilled white wine on a very warm day. They left before the proceedings really got underway, leaning noticeably on each other. Lee Bingham, for his part, became a recluse. Normally the divorcee was the life of the peninsula party, but he was only seen once the whole summer, looking over the meat counter at the local grocer for the special hamburger that our man Mitch had already secured. Locals at the barbershop pointed out that all three of the key players, Deedee, Dick and Lee, were often featured in past editions of the paper, smiling broadly at one charity event or another. Suddenly all three went missing. The bet is that next summer they will re-appear as if nothing happened. I’ll take the over.
When the media did give the election a moment’s notice it was with the air of ‘take your medicine’, as if the average voter was somehow responsible for what unfolded. For the first several weeks the election was always front page and subscriptions increased at an incredible pace, peaking during the nose clamp mania when the paper reported on each individual ‘reddy’ as if it were a sports contest, even declaring winners and losers, and going into great detail about the suffering of individual ‘clampers’ as they were called, with photos to boot. Reporters raced around the peninsula following reports of a reddy, hoping to get there in time to witness at least some of the squalid affair, take photos and interview locals about who won, lost, etc. One sensed it was more cheerleading for mayhem than journalism.
After the mania subsided and it became obvious that those most responsible for the fiasco would once again escape any responsibility, newspaper subscriptions, by all accounts, took a nose dive, and amazingly the paper responded by simply not mentioning the election at all. It was an act of “unremarkable courage” locals said, and to this day the media have not bothered to explain their actions; “above the fray” became their new slogan.
How It Ended
Voting day came and went without even a murmur of an issue. Media types walked around and took photos of the normal lines but found no one interested to say something mean or contemptuous about the voting process on the peninsula. Like always our small population always runs into someone they know, whether at the grocer, the beach or the voting precincts, so voting was also a friendly social occasion. They delivered the ballot totals to the clerk’s office at 8:30 that evening, Mitch was declared the winner of his race, and there you have it. When all was said and done, there were a lot of people who felt like fools after getting carried away during the whole fiasco, and for that everyone felt badly. There were stories of families that no longer spoke because in the prime of the hoopla words were exchanged, and now it was hard to pull them back, a sad fact about words. The local newspaper has yet to find its footing and a couple of reporters were laid off in light of falling sales. It was hard to get a haircut without hearing about some ill effect of the election. One story that made us all shake our head was that Deedee Glass was in alcohol rehab.
In early January Mitch took the oath of office to serve the county to the best of his ability, and then he took his place on the commission. As a former business executive, Mitch was good with numbers, contracts and negotiations, and he was a patient man who always took an opportunity to help others on the commission understand the issues before them. He asked incisive questions that laid bare pretty quickly any tomfoolery before it cost the county real cash. Department heads learned quickly that he was not a soft touch for out of budget revenue requests. Mitch was also adept at putting together voting blocs on the council when he sensed something especially nonsensical about to come to a head. One example was a $250,000 machine for grooming cross country trails. Most skiers didn’t require groomed trails but there was a group of 60 or skiers, not especially avid or good, who wanted a more professional course for themselves because, as in all matters they pressed, they deserved it, and were willing to take names if it didn’t happen. Mitch quickly put together a tight argument including the real cost of the machine with maintenance, and personnel to run it, that added another $25,000 to the annual budget. The council voted it down 9 - 0. People noticed, as this was the first time in a long while that this loud group had heard a resounding NO on any issue. They normally had their way, or with a little bullying procured it.
As for the Progressive Libertarian Party, whatever it was or wasn’t is no longer a question. “It was just a formality,” Mitch told a group at the barbershop, “but we’ve got to start spending money on county wide projects, not the whims of this or that vociferous group.” If that was the main thrust of the new party, just about everyone was for it.
