A key passage from the column:  "....Detroit News Editorial Page Editor Nolan Finley cited the mid-May collapse of a 2007 budget agreement between Granholm and state Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop as a recent example of the Mulhern Effect.
'The majority leader and House Speaker Dillon sat down with the governor on a Friday afternoon, and a deal was reached,' spokesman Matt Marsden told me when I asked him to amplify Bishop's remarks. 'By Monday morning, it became clear the governor was no longer onboard.'"

Dickerson's central premise seems to be that, by golly, critics in the state Legislature and elsewhere just aren't giving the Governor her due, by portraying her as her husband's puppet. What sexism, he cries, to suppose that a woman can't make stupid decisions on her own:
"To accept that Mulhern (or some other clandestine alpha male, such as chief counsel Keenan) is not secretly calling the shots is to accept a world in which real men take time off from their jobs and women make their own decisions, mid-course corrections and outright blunders.
For a lot of people, that's still scarier than any fiscal crisis."

Now, this is an astonishing column for all sorts of reasons. But let's take a couple of the most obvious: Dickerson wrote an entire column to make the point that the Governor's stupid decisions and lack of leadership are her own fault, not Mulhern's. The real problem is not with the Governor, he implies, but with the sexist jerks who don't take her seriously.

Brian, did you ever suppose that the reason she's not taken seriously is that the Governor is just not effective?  And that the supposition which you find so offensive -- that her husband or someone else close to her is calling the shots behind the scenes -- is far less important than the fact that the state is going down the tubes under her leadership?

But no. Dickerson's not concerned with genuine leadership, as evidenced by this column in yesterday's Freep:
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070610/COL04/706100598/1085

At least Dickerson shoots down the Governor's pretense that she is obligated to fill open judicial seats, needed or not. But his main beef seems to be that he hasn't found anyone, except Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Whitbeck, to come up with a more plausible reason for retaining the judicial status quo:
"The truth is that judicial appointments are among the most desirable rewards in any governor's arsenal, and Granholm is loath to yield one without a fight.
I wish everyone defending the judicial status quo were as rigorous as William Whitbeck, a conservative Republican who has been chief judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals since 2002. Whitbeck insists he has the data to prove that his court's 28 judges are working more efficiently than ever and that any reduction in their numbers could return Michigan to the days when litigants waited years for a decision."