Back in 2006, when Amway’s favorite son, Dick DeVos, decided to run for governor, he and his team were smart enough to know what he didn’t know, and one of those elements was he did not have a lot of media cross-examination experience.

So they shipped him around to every outstate local newspaper — of those that were left — and let the local news hounds at him.

The failsafe system was that, if he screwed up an answer to a question, there was little chance it would dismantle his bid to beat then-sitting Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

His media chops matured, and he went on to bigger TV markets, where there was more risk involved.

Fast-forward to the first Republican guy to run for governor from Porter Township, over there on the west side of the state.

With 12 years under his belt as a member of the state House and now as the state Senate Republican leader, state Sen. Aric Nesbitt has had plenty of encounters with the capitol press corps and, so far, has not suffered from the political infection of the dreaded foot-in-mouth disease.

So, apparently with a good deal of confidence, he did not go outstate for his first media encounter, but, instead, he sashayed smack dab into the middle of the largest media market in the state: Motown.

The FOX news anchor guy, Roop Raj, welcomed him to the “bigs,” and off they went.

The seasoned senator has an engaging smile, and, right off the bat — and correctly so — he addressed the elephant in the studio: No one in Detroit knew Aric Nesbitt.

“I want to get to know the Detroit area a lot better in the coming months,” he reassured viewers and sprinkled in some gravitas to his desires, noting that his ancestors settled in Monroe back in 1820 and eventually left for West Michigan. There, they established the family farm, and he proudly tells everyone he is a “sixth generation” owner of same. He also has a sister in the city.

He was asked “what was not working” in state government, and, despite a whole host of kitchen table issues he could have talked about, he began with, “Woke and ideologies in schools (and) third-graders can’t read.”

In a swipe at the sitting governor, he opined that she “could care less” about that and seemed more interested in selling her book in “California and Massachusetts.”

Of course, he’s not running against her, since she is term-limited in two years.

Then the question turned to one with some import to the good-government crowd, which is always clamoring for more bipartisan cooperation under the dome.

He was asked to name two accomplishments he had while working with those across the aisle.

The senator says he is one hard worker, but his answer did not seem to fit the question. He noted that Republicans had worked with a Democratic member of the state House to stop the Democrats from their “woke agenda and left-wing, socialist agenda that was wrong and anti-family and anti-business, (and) I appreciated that she stood with the Republicans.”

However, personally, he had nothing to do with that.

A little bit later, he did boast about the bipartisan opposition to a solar energy proposal that could gobble up valuable farmland across the state.

Pressed on his bipartisan skills, he was forceful, saying, “I’m willing to listen and engage” with the other side of the aisle.

“I have a history of confronting problems,” he noted while adding, “I’m going to have a positive vision, more accountability, and put Michigan families first.”

In his defense, some of his answers — a la all the woke stuff — was probably part of his strategy to win the GOP primary before moving onto the general election. He has to feed some red meat to those ultra conservatives first before he launches a campaign with more appeal across the political spectrum.

Finally, he is a President Donald Trump supporter, and he points to how Trump won Michigan by going to groups that traditionally voted Democratic and winning them over, and Nesbitt believes that victory shows the path to “thread the needle to win the governorship.”

But his critics will argue that the needle-threading on that TV broadcast was not a deal-closer, but not a deal-killer, either.

The good news is nobody in the electorate is paying attention to any of that stuff, yet. And, besides, in the first three days of his infant campaign, he raised a whopping one million smackers. And, given a choice between that and redoing some of his answers on the TV broadcast … Well, you know the answer to that.