Kwame vs. Freman: A showdown and a draw
For those you who are out of state, this won't mean much, but tonight WDIV TV in Detroit aired a debate between the two candidates for mayor of Detroit - Kwame Kilpatrick, the incumbent, and Freman Hendrix, former vice-mayor under Dennis Archer. This is a job no man in his right mind would want - the city is anywhere from $150 to $300 million in debt, schools are crumbling and the school board has just been purged, they're about 500 cops short of the minimum needed to keep Detroit under control and street crime is rampant, especially in low-income neighborhoods. And the Super Bowl comes in January.
I have written about Kwame Kilpatrick before - he's confident, aggressive, arrogant and resplendent with bling, which he does not make an attempt to conceal. He's as tall as Paul Bunyan, and while I'd hate to meet the mayor in a dark alley, I'm not impressed with his performance in the job, nor, for that matter, in this debate, although I think he won some converts with his radical sense of political style. Kwame said that Freman was too old for the job, too set in his ways, and not as well educated as he - THAT was astounding to hear in a debate between two black political candidates.
All policy talk from Kwame is double talk. Kwame's plan for dealing with Detroit's deficit is that there are other cites in the area that also have deficits like these, and that Detroit is going to flow along with the debt being repaid by the smaller cities. Which means that he isn't really planning to do anything about it. Kwame also took time to take credit for the Federal Government's efforts to reinforce Homeland Security measures in the port of Detroit, a major gateway to the U.S. from Canada. Kwame disgusts me, and makes me ashamed to be a Democrat, which he is - a very noisy one.
Freman Hendrix is an old guard Detroit politician, and has a colorless, undynamic streak that became obvious in the course of an hour. He also has the millstone of the Dennis Archer adminstration hanging around his neck, which did not end popularly.
Even if Hendrix is a bureaucrat, he is an experienced one, and at worst he could keep the city coasting for a time, to untangle the defecit and untwist the skeins of harm the Kilpatrick administration has wrought upon the fair city of Detroit. Hendrix' idea to undertake a regional light rail line is a splendid idea - I've had that one myself. You could get it going in two years and it would benefit the whole region, creating tons of new jobs. This area desperately needs rail - in Los Angeles I could get from Point Fermin all the way to the San Fernando Valley, if I wanted to, in a couple of hours, using a combination of buses and rail - it was actually faster than I could drive the same distance on LA's clotted freeway system. But there is no way that I can get to Detroit from Ann Arbor using public transporatation. I can't do it at all, I'd have to go Greyhound.
The deficit issue should be a slam dunk in terms of unseating Kilpatrick, and Hendrix did beat him in the primaries. But these things can change, it seems, for no reason in today's political climate, and Kwame seems poised to build a political machine of some kind, albeit one destined for receivership. More bad news for Detroit if so.
Kwame Kilpatrick is poison for Detroit. He fired the police chief because the latter was doing his job, investigating the mayor, incidentally. And he appointed Ella Bully Cummings as police chief, a police chief SO unpopular with police and public alike it is impossible for me to transmit its extent in words. When Kilpatrick slips, Bully Cummings falls down. Then in his debate Kwame crows about being the first Detroit mayor to "stand up to the Police Unions." Kwame can do this as he has his own private fleet of bodyguards, whose authority in some matters seem to outstrip those of local law enforcement.
I can't vote in your election, citizens of Detroit, but please Kwame really needs to be out of there. Wherever Kilptrick comes around, money flows and money goes. And no one sees where the money goes. But Kwame knows.
Uncle Dave Lewis