Gary Peters is no wallflower, but in the race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, he’s clearly been overshadowed by his colorful Republican opponent.
It’s not hard to see why. Terri Lynn Land is wealthy. She brings a modified big-rig to campaign events. Some of her interviews and TV ads have raised eyebrows.
By comparison, Peters has been running a fairly low-key campaign filled with the kind of workaday retail politicking that an incumbent might do.
And if he wins the closely fought race in November, it’ll be in part because of his buttoned-down personality, which was forged by his political career.
Democratic consultant T.J. Bucholz, who has known Peters for more than 10 years, said that Peters’ narrow loss in the 2002 race for attorney general, his first bid for statewide office, changed him.
“He learned to be cautious and he learned not to take things for granted,” he said. “That kind of loss is worse than a blowout.”
A native of Pontiac, Peters went to Alma College then earned advanced degrees in law, business and philosophy from three other Michigan universities. He served as a Navy reservist and worked at Merrill Lynch and as a vice president for stock brokerage Paine Webber.
One longtime acquaintance said that Peters could have become significantly wealthier if he’d stayed in the private sector instead of getting into politics. (It’s unclear what his current net worth is, but it’s fair to say it’s far short of the $35 million Land is reportedly worth.)
Peters served six years in the state Senate before his failed bid for attorney general. He then served as state lottery commissioner for Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a low profile political appointment. (The only campaign controversy from that time in his career so far was his approval of a contract for $210,000 in pencils from a Chinese manufacturer.)
When Peters returned to electoral politics in 2008, he returned with a bang, trouncing vulnerable Republican incumbent Joe Knollenberg by nine percentage points.
The state lost a congressional district in 2010, forcing Peters to face off against another incumbent Democrat Rep. Hansen Clarke in a primary. It was then that he made one of the most daring campaign moves in his career by showing up at an Occupy Wall Street rally sporting a “We are the 99%” pin.
“It’s speculation on Wall Street that we’re still paying the price for here, particularly in Detroit that almost brought the auto industry to a collapse because of what we saw on Wall Street,” he told a reporter for the local CBS affiliate at the time. “So we put in restrictions, or put in regulations necessary to rein that in, and right now in Washington I’m facing a Republican majority that wants to undo that.”
It was an unusual moment for a former banker backed by two firms — DTE Energy and Bank of America — that the Occupy movement was targeting in Michigan.
But Democratic consultant Joe DiSano, who is based in Lansing, said it was actually a fairly reasonable move for a Democrat in a primary fight for a district that included part of Detroit.
“Clearly that was a helpful political decision at the time,” he said.
The flirtation with the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to have hurt him in the long run. He still counts Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms among his biggest backers, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
He’s not made any similarly bold moves this campaign, but he may not need to either. Sometimes the best thing to do when your opponent is making headlines is to stay out of them yourself.
