By Zachary Gorchow
President of Michigan Operations
Posted: January 24, 2013 2:08 PM

The position of United Auto Workers president has for as long as I can remember been a revered figure in the Michigan Democratic Party.

Ron Gettelfinger. Stephen Yokich. Owen Bieber. Those three men ran the powerful union from 1983-2010, and as far as one could tell from the outside, none faced the type of furious criticism voiced privately by other Democrats that current UAW President Bob King has seen in the past year.

The questioning of Mr. King has begun anew with his push to replace longtime Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer, especially the way he is going about it. For Gongwer subscribers, here’s our story on the topic from yesterday (See Gongwer Michigan Report, January 23, 2013).

Several Democrats have said Mr. King simply decided to make a change and laid little to no groundwork to pull off the task of extricating Mr. Brewer from his 18-year run as chair. No clear-cut successor was identified, nor had Mr. King pulled together a critical mass of key Democratic interests that might have prompted Mr. Brewer to leave on his own without the situation turning into an ugly public fight.

And that’s what we now have.

On one side, the UAW, Teamsters and other key players are maneuvering to oust Mr. Brewer leading up to or at the February 23 state Democratic Party convention at Cobo Center. On the other side are the American Federation of Teachers-Michigan, the Michigan Education Association and other Brewer loyalists. How this will play out is unclear.

But what I have found most interesting working on this story in the last 24 hours are the comments of those Democrats open to the idea of replacing Mr. Brewer, but baffled, and upset, at Mr. King’s methods. And those officials, all speaking on the condition of anonymity because the UAW still swings a huge stick in the party, say it seems part of a pattern for Mr. King in the past year.

In early 2012, Mr. King decided to go for a ballot proposal amending the Constitution to enshrine collective bargaining rights in the Constitution. Many Democrats said they were not consulted about it and were frustrated at the missteps of Proposal 12-2 which was badly defeated at the polls.

Then in the fall of 2012, word leaked that Mr. King was in talks with the Moroun family, owners of the Ambassador Bridge, to have the UAW endorse its Proposal 12-6 to thwart the proposed new bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, in exchange for the Morouns endorsing Proposal 12-2. Virtually every Democrat I contacted on that situation was blindsided and furious with Mr. King. Once word of the talks became public, no deal occurred.

So as we watch the drama play out for the next month, the decision on the next Democratic Party chair looks to loom as just as much a referendum on Mr. King as it is for Mr. Brewer.