Columns

Neil Munro

The Motor City Basket Case

April 5, 2012

Why is the Motor City an obvious municipal basket case?

It’s all in the drawing of the lines on the map; city-limits lines.

From the vantage point of an airplane, one sees the crosshatch of streets extending unbroken, by and large, from the Detroit River to Pontiac and west from the river and Lake St. Clair to Ann Arbor. Both those cites are approximately of Detroit’s vintage. The rest is an obvious expansion from Detroit itself over the years.

But that city has been hemmed in as a legal municipality; its boundaries mainly include only the developed region’s oldest neighborhoods and original downtown.

If all the physical expansion of that initial city were officially part of it, those in its city hall, no matter who they might be, would have no problem making ends meet. And that likely would be with a property tax rate far lower than must be levied within its cramped boundaries now.

The gradual physical enlargement of the city finally would have to have been accommodated by the expansion of its legal boundaries; Detroit would be a city of 4 million or more residents, not one of some 700,000.

That is just as New York City would be far smaller if its neighbors, such as the city of Brooklyn, had not been annexed.

To make matters worse for Detroit, much of the wealth generated within its boundaries was most profitably reinvested outside them. Why, for example, pay to tear down and replace obsolete houses when new ones could be built more cheaply on new lots elsewhere?

One result: In 1950, Detroit was the wealthiest major city per capita in the nation. Now it is the poorest.

There are those who would blame that on Detroit having become a city of predominantly black residents. Many, including poor migrants from the South, have settled there over the years. The city has included the region’s oldest, and so most affordable, homes.

But to blame Detroit’s current problems on blacks, including black mayors, would be perverse.

It would be infinitely more accurate to blame the city’s difficulties on the willingness of the state to permit the general encirclement of Detroit by small so-called suburban cities in which blacks felt unwelcome.

So over the years, it became more and more difficult for Detroit to raise enough in local taxes to maintain city services, including its schools. The response was to repeatedly, but hopelessly, increase various taxes that, of course, automatically reduced property values. This made tax rates relatively higher still.

For example, non-homestead property taxes in nearby Royal Oak are about 51 mills, while in Detroit they’re now 84.5 mills as that city struggles to raise enough money to survive. But that widening gap over the years makes the Motor City a less and less attractive place to invest; absent the occasional state or federal subsidy targeted to lure private businesses and other redevelopment.

What becomes obvious is that if Detroit’s city limits included the entire Michigan metropolis it spawned, instead of a just a part, its residents and businesses could be much less heavily taxed.

And that eventually would mean more of both residents and businesses. You’ll recall that when you tax something more heavily, you get less of it, and vice versa.

Detroit now is considered a “black city.” But about 185,000 blacks left it in the decade of 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census, many no doubt for adjoining Oakland County where small cities adjacent to Detroit, such as Southfield and Oak Park, now have mostly black residents.

The point of all this is to state the obvious: Keeping Detroit a relatively poor municipality because of fiscal boundaries that seemed to make sense many decades ago is not smart.

Let’s remember where those suburbs came from—Detroit! Would they consider their municipal borders sacred if the economic tide were running in the other direction?

It’s unwise to let Detroit itself—a large piece of what is one urban settlement—twist in the economic wind mainly on the basis of lines printed on a piece of paper, a map.

Let’s face it. When the nation thinks of Michigan, it thinks Detroit, and it thinks ruinous mess.

What would the nation think if we finally figured out a way to fix it?

Make the city a bargain. Reduce its property tax to a level below those of its neighbors and eliminate its income tax. Reduce its overblown municipal expenses. To the extent necessary, invest some statewide tax dollars, including suburban dollars.

Detroit is reminiscent of the failing merchant who keeps raising his prices to compensate for the dwindling of his customers. A lot of money has been made doing the opposite and Michigan could emulate that.

Neil Munro is a retired editor of The Oakland Press.

Columns

Jack Lessenberry

Colored by Race

April 5, 2012

“On Election Day, I became the goddamn mayor of Detroit. I knew … that this had only happened because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore. They were getting the hell out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some black sucker like me.”
– Coleman A. Young

***

DETROIT – If you want to understand why so many Detroit politicians refuse to face economic reality, and refused to negotiate some kind of reasonable compromise to avoid a state takeover, don’t start by studying what’s happening now.

Start by reading “Hard Stuff”, the autobiography of that city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, who was elected in 1973, and stayed in office for two full decades as the city slowly declined.

Much of the mayor’s retelling of his years in office is the sort of self-serving stuff any politician might write. But what clearly rings truest is the mayor’s account of his early life, in which he was subjected to racism of a sort almost unimaginable today.

During his career in office, few figures were more polarizing than Coleman Young, who died in 1997. By and large, blacks adored him. But many whites, especially those in the Detroit area, saw him as the embodiment of everything they hated.

They blamed him for the decline of the city they had mostly fled. There is little doubt that the former mayor was bitter over the racist treatment he had received, all his life. He could also be spiteful.

The new mayor made a speech calling for “all dope pushers, all muggers to leave Detroit. I don‘t give a damn if they are black or white.”

“I thought that was pretty innocent,” he told this columnist years later. “I was telling the bad guys to get out of Dodge no matter what color they were. But some said I was telling whites to leave the city.”

They did leave, by the hundreds of thousands.

But Young and the city continued to experience uncalled for bigotry even after he was elected. L. Brooks Patterson, now the executive of Oakland County, Michigan‘s most prosperous, was county prosecutor back then. He had begun his career with a demagogic campaign against cross-district busing – and later, Detroit provided a convenient target.

Less than two years after Detroit’s first black mayor was elected, Patterson told a newspaper that perhaps Detroit should be treated like an Indian reservation, fenced off and the inhabitants given blankets and food. Detroiters didn’t forget those comments.

Things like that helped foster a “them against us” mentality, and a determination to go it alone and not accept help from anyone.

That doesn’t mean Coleman Young and his successors didn’t exploit this feeling and run their own demagogic campaigns.

They did. Black politicians ran for office and got elected by bashing racist whites in the suburbs, just as Brooks Patterson and his imitators ran against the threatening image of black Detroit.

This sometimes led Detroiters to elect leaders who were incompetent, criminal, or both. The city suffered, more people of all colors left, and the tax base declined. Services deteriorated.

The whites left. The black upper class left. Then the black middle class followed them to the suburbs. Left in Detroit was a largely impoverished, unskilled group of very poor people.

But Detroit’s politicians – ironically much like the white corporate executives running General Motors – refused to acknowledge that things had changed; refused to make the tough and unpopular financial decisions they needed to make.

For decades, the leaders of both enterprises refused to recognize reality, tighten their belts and fire their under-performing friends. The result was that both the Motor City and General Motors ended up on the rocks. There is one difference, however, that those outside the city might want to keep in mind.

Auto executives did not spend their lives being sneered at, discriminated against, and socially shunned because they were auto executives. Black Detroiters were, for many decades.

That helps explain why Detroit City Council members Brenda Jones, Kwame Kenyatta and JoAnn Watson refused, until the last, to discuss any kind of power-sharing agreement, saying even to raise the topic was “disrespectful.” That doesn’t mean their behavior wasn’t counterproductive, self-destructive and irrational; it was.

However, what it does mean is that in the city’s dealings with the state, virtually everything is colored to some extent by race. Getting beyond that is essential, if Detroit and Michigan are ever again to thrive. But things may get worse before they get better, especially if Detroiters perceive their power is being taken away.

The problem of getting beyond race may, when all is said and done, make solving the city’s financial crisis look easy.

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.

Columns

Eric Freedman

Race and the Race
for the White House

December 19, 2011

Quick — name the heads of six foreign governments. Queen Elizabeth doesn’t count.

Take Moammar Khadafy and Hosni Mubarak off your instant-response list. Who’s that German chancellor at the center of the Eurozone crisis — Miracle or Murky or something like that?

Who’s the incumbent president of France who no longer has to worry about a re-election challenge from Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced, womanizing ex-chief of the International Monetary Fund?

And what about the Italian president who makes the news almost as often for his sexual relationships, fraud allegations and scathing attacks on critics as for his economic and immigration policies?

I have no doubt that most Americans, even many who follow current events and politics, can’t name the current leaders of our closest neighbors — Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada and President Felipe Calderón of Mexico — let alone a half-dozen of the leaders of the world’s other 190-plus nations.

Even what Americans think they know is often wrong — who remembers that Cuba has been headed for almost four years by Raul Castro, not his brother Fidel — or that Vladimir Putin is now the power behind the Russian throne although no longer ensconced on it?

That brings me to Barack Obama, his re-election campaign and the field of Republicans angling for the job.

As I’ve talked to people in the Baltics about the U.S. presidency during the past four months (while on teaching assignment here), I find foreign audiences far more knowledgeable about U.S. politics and politicians than Americans are about politics in any country beyond our own borders. It’s no shock that every member of my audiences and classes abroad appears to recognize the name Sarah Palin, but what does it tell us when a Lithuanian student asks detailed questions about Michelle Bachman?

Not surprisingly, Obama’s personal story resonates globally. His victory in 2008 as the first black president opened a new chapter in our national saga and gave the world new insights into the American people. The election of the son of a black Kenyan father, who left the family when his son was only two, and a white American woman shines light on both the progress the United States has made in race relations and the continuing racial divide that challenges the country.

That fascination overseas with American politics goes beyond Obama himself. A Tallinn University student in Estonia told me earlier this month how she’d followed the 2008 Democratic primary, hoping that Hillary Clinton would win the nomination. Her comment reminded me of the same summer when my wife and I were looking at wall hangings in a gift shop in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and the owner told us that Clinton had ended her campaign that day — news we two Americans hadn’t heard yet.

On one level, it’s fully understandable that citizens of the world follow the contest to lead the world’s only superpower, and that they wonder what that person’s policies and politics might mean for their own countries. Consider our two wars underway during the 2008 election and underway still. Estonian troops fought in Iraq as part of George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” until 2009. They’re still fighting in Afghanistan, where 25-year-old Corporal Agris Hutrof became the ninth Estonian soldier killed in that war.

By the same reasoning, Americans should care enough about our own national interests to know a few facts about the heads of state in China and India, our major challengers for future economic dominance. And of the two countries where more than 6,300 American troops have died, Iraq and Afghanistan. And of at least a couple of countries at the epicenter of U.S. military and diplomatic attention — Israel and Pakistan come immediately to mind.

Meanwhile, race is another attention magnet in foreign scrutiny of U.S. presidential politics.

When I show audiences a photo montage of our presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush, they immediately see that all were white men of Western European ancestry. Thus, the novelty of an African American not only running but winning in 2008 drew even more foreign attention to the campaign than usual.

Now, race is attracting wide foreign interest in the current campaign for a different reason. The anti-immigration rhetoric among conservative Republican presidential hopefuls and their Tea Party supporters carries strong racial undertones, no matter how diplomatically their statements are couched in terms of economics or national security or the cost of public services.

This resonates with many Europeans whose countries confront their own racial attitudes amid the continuing arrival of immigrants for political, humanitarian and economic reasons — especially immigrants from non-white, non-Christian areas of the Middle East, North Africa and China.

What do Europeans see happening in the United States?

They see Tea Party activists who are overwhelmingly white, although Herman Cain had noticeable success in garnering their support until multiple allegations of sexual misconduct toppled his beyond-the-Beltway campaign.

They see differences — some actual and some distorted — between what our laws state and what minorities experience in the United States. To illustrate, I recently spoke about race and presidents at a human rights conference of law students from Lithuania, Poland and Belarus. The topics of participants’ questions included efforts to censor works of literature such as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, high unemployment and low college enrollment rates among African Americans, English-as-official-language policies and racial discrimination in politics.

Meanwhile, the demographics of America are changing as our population becomes more diverse, a trend evident in many European nations as well. The 2010 Census found that more than half the residents in four states aren’t white. That’s also true in 13 of the 40 largest metropolitan areas. Overall, racial and ethnic minorities account for 36 percent of our population.

Tea Party leaders dispute accusations of racism, but a number of incidents demonstrate that racial hatred is part of some members’ psyche. For example, black elected officials have reported that activists shouted racial slurs at them. Movement activists have distributed posters showing President Obama as a jungle savage. And when an informal New York Daily News poll asked readers whether they believe racism is to blame for the Tea Party’s attacks on Obama, an overwhelming 75 percent agreed that racism is a factor in the Tea Party’s disapproval of the president.

Is that surprising in a political environment where Rush Limbaugh tells a radio audience that Obama was “behaving like an African colonial despot,” called him an “angry black man” and played a song, “Barack, the Magic Negro,” to the tune of Puff, the Magic Dragon? Or where signs at Tea Party rallies proclaim “Obamanomics — monkey see, monkey do” and “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African?”

A statement last year by the NAACP asked “all people of good will to repudiate the racism of the Tea Party and to oppose its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.” Tea Party leaders respond to such criticism by blaming a small fringe within their movement.

I don’t see the GOP candidates’ substantially similar views on immigration as the determining factor in who will win the Republican nomination. I don’t see race and immigration as the decisive issues on Election Day 2012. And I don’t see that Obama’s race will be the determining factor in whether he wins a second term — nor is there much he can do about voters who oppose him simply because he is black. His greater problems will be the state of the economy, the national budget and the status of the wars abroad.

Even so, Obama’s race and the immigration debate will help keep the world’s eyes on the election.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Freedman is associate professor of journalism at Michigan State University and director of Capital News Service. He and Dome columnist Stephen A. Jones are editors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).

Departments

BookIt

Great Michigan Read

October 17, 2011

On the first day of her new job as director of the Michigan Humanities Council, Executive Director Katie Wolf learned that a book she had not read yet was selected for the 2011-12 Great Michigan Read program. As she looked over the content of the selection, the 2004 National Book Award Winner Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder In the Jazz Age, she thought to herself: “this is a tough subject and a tough sell.”

Since, she has read former Detroiter Kevin Boyle’s non-fiction look at the 1925 killing in Detroit of a white man by a black man and the ensuing trial that garnered national attention and helped set the stage for the nascent civil rights movement. She admits the book “was emotional at times.”

“I’m ecstatic now,” she said about the selection. “More than 250 communities, libraries and organizations across Michigan from Marquette to Detroit are participating in the program. When I think of all the people engaged in the Great Michigan Read program, it is very fulfilling.”

The success of the program, which kicks off on October 22 in Alpena with a six-city tour by Boyle, has sent the Council back to the presses for reader’s guides, teacher’s guides and the book itself, which the Council has provided free to non-profit groups.

Arc tells the story of Detroit physician Ossian (pronounced Ocean) Sweet and his family, who set off a cascading series of events when he became one of the first blacks to buy a house and move into an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. The times were tense as the influx of Southern blacks moving to Detroit as part of the “great migration” pushed against white society’s standards.

When a mob gathered to protest and started pelting the Sweet home with stones, someone from inside the home fired shots into the crowd, killing one man and wounding another. Sweet and 10 of his family and friends were arrested on suspicion of murder. Most were held without bail until the trial was completed.

Boyle, who was raised in Detroit and studied at the University of Detroit and University of Michigan and now teaches at Ohio State University, is more than an historian. He is a great story teller who can mesmerize you with the nuanced retelling of a trial in which you can easily find the outcome on Wikipedia. “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” becomes secondary.

His research is impeccable, likely due to his studying under the legendary U-M history professor Sidney Fine, who wrote the seminal history of the Detroit Riots, Violence in the Model City, and a three-volume history of one of Michigan’s most illustrious public figures, Governor Frank Murphy.

During his graduate studies with Fine, a little of Frank Murphy’s history may have rubbed off on Boyle. Murphy was the presiding judge at the Sweet Trial and would go on to become governor of Michigan and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The trial, the dynamic and bustling city, the menacing presence of the Ku Klux Klan and the issues of race alone would make the murder worthy of a book. But when crusading attorney Clarence Darrow entered the case, he elevated the trial to national attention. Darrow had already made a name for himself in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial and numerous other high-profile cases typically involving the rights of the underdog.

“He gave enormous life to the story. He doesn’t show up in the book until chapter eight, and then the book really takes off,” Boyle said.

Boyle said the flamboyant Darrow was a “mess of contradiction,” showing the complexity of human life. “He liked to get people pissed. He liked to poke people with a sharpened stick, and if he got it in the eye, all the better.” Darrow, as the book shows, pokes plenty of sharpened sticks at institutionalized racism while in Detroit defending Sweet.

Boyle said the book also looks at the impact of the killing, the trial and its aftermath on Sweet, his family and the community as a whole. He said that in the end, the outcomes for the Sweet family and the murder victim’s family were equally tragic.

The idea of a statewide read program is to get people talking and, in addition to Boyle’s six stops (Alpena, Marquette, Grand Rapids, Flint, Detroit and Lansing) to discuss his book, numerous cities are sponsoring additional programs, including Lansing (Capital Area District Library), Detroit (Charles H. Wright Museum for African American History) and the Grand Rapids Public Library.

In his book, Boyle also indirectly makes the case for the importance of preserving history. While researching the Sweet family in the National Archives, he was able to trace them to their slave experience. In Lansing, he uncovered details about Sweet’s marriage, his medical licensing, and, still playing history detective, he was able to recover some records that were thought long lost.

For history geeks, that in itself is an interesting story. Boyle wanted the police records from the night of the murder and the arrest of the Sweet contingent, but learned they had been thrown out.

Then, while interviewing Michigan playwright Arthur Beer, who wrote the play Malice Aforethought on the Sweet trial for the Michigan Sesquicentennial in 1987, Boyle discovered that Beer had copied some police records. Beer had stored them in his basement and recovered them and mailed them to Boyle. Inside were the complete interrogation transcripts of the alleged murderers.

Boyle said these primary records, which were from conversations only two or three hours after the killing, allowed “all 11 of them [who were arrested] to become real people…. “You can’t top that experience — they give the book a lot more experience.”

What Boyle calls luck was the dogged effort of a trained historian, one who learned from the best, Sidney Fine. Fine’s legacy, Boyle said, was “getting it right.”

Finally, Boyle said he wrote the book for his father, who reviewed the book as he was writing it. He describes his father as a great reader but not an academic man.

“It sounds hokey but true,” Boyle said, describing how he pictured his father reading before bed time, getting ready to turn off the light but saying to himself, “I’ve got to finish this first.”

What Wolf especially likes about the Great Michigan Read is how classrooms as distant and different as Marquette and Detroit are using the book to study the same issues, bolstered by extensive reader’s and teacher’s guides. In addition, inserts in 10 Michigan newspapers recently went out, reaching nearly a half million people.

The Council fully expects more than 1 million Michigan residents to be touched by the book in some way.

Bill Castanier, a retired state government administrator and Michigan State University advertising graduate, writes a weekly literary column for Lansing City Pulse and manages the blog mittenlit.com, a daily look at Michigan literature and authors. He also is a member of the Michigan Notable Book selection committee and the board of MSU Press.

Columns

Craig Ruff

Michigan Cities:
The Race Factor

October 17, 2011

In the first commentary in this series (“Does Michigan Need Cities?”), I opined that cities matter. Cities are a testament to human progress. That many Michiganians have chosen to leave them over the past two generations leaves me pessimistic about our future. The trend here defies much of human history. It’s irrational, pernicious, and terribly draining of talent, investments, and economic vitality that come from close, human interaction.

In witnessing the phenomenon of our urban exodus, I lay some of its roots at the doorstep of a very touchy subject: race.

Racial segregation has contributed to the depopulation of Michigan’s cities. That most intellectual historian, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote in the early 1900s that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line….” A new century and so little to show for it.

Racial tension and segregation in Michigan are overt and subtle. Demography pointedly proves racial segregation to be true. Seventy-two of our 83 counties have black populations below 10 percent; 96 percent of Michigan’s blacks live in our 11 metropolitan areas. In a recent analysis by CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network, the Detroit metropolitan area hosts the nation’s 4th most racially segregated neighborhoods; in years past, I’ve seen data ranking us 1st (worst).

We speak of race in the comfortable confines of our homes. Pacifists in public places disarm themselves of candor and opt to obfuscate. The privately unveiled and publicly concealed attitudes hide an obvious fact: Incontrovertibly, woeful race relations take a particularly high toll on our older, industrial cities.

There’s an old maxim about public policy: If there isn’t a problem, there isn’t a solution. With regard to race relations, there may not be a solution, but there sure as hell is a problem.

A Bit of History
Tens of thousands of southern blacks moved to Michigan cities in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to escape rural poverty and win jobs in the world’s most vibrant industrial economy in Detroit and today’s I-75 cities of Pontiac, Flint, and Saginaw. They were unaccustomed to urban life and were poorly educated. As workers in Southern fields, they were used to crop failures now and again; they could not foresee that car-making like crop-harvesting has its good and bad years. Too, there was a vibrant black middle class of entrepreneurs, professionals, retailers, and artists.

Federal, state, and local lawmakers enacted policies to confine blacks’ housing and neighborhoods and restrict other opportunities. Middle-class blacks faced the same housing discrimination, Jim Crow practices, and even KKK violence as did poor families. Highway and housing policies ravaged black commercial and residential areas in cities, while governments subsidized the movement of primarily white families to suburbs, into which both homesteads and jobs were moving.

The flight of the white population from Detroit started in the 1950s with a growing exodus of employers to cheaper land in the burbs. With it came red-lining real estate practices that denied blacks equal opportunities of housing. Then came civil unrest and rioting in 1967. (Not unprecedented: In 1943, a race riot in Detroit left 34 people killed and required the presence of federal troops to contain.)

In the early 1970s came judicially decreed cross-district busing of school children to integrate schools. The Southern segregationist George Wallace won every white-majority ward in Detroit in the 1972 presidential primary.

In the wake of these economic, policy, and cultural shocks, many whites left Detroit. Detroit’s populace, now homogeneously black, has plummeted from roughly 2 million in the mid-1950s to 700 thousand — probably one of the fastest, vastest mass exoduses in world history not attributable to war, famine, or plagues.

In typical supply-demand fashion, blacks’ homes fell in value as whites, driven by high crime, poor schools, declining home values, and prejudice, relocated to suburbs.

In Michigan, there’s an axiom: If you are poor and white, you live in a mobile home park. If you are poor and black, you live in a city ghetto.

My hometown of Saginaw is just one example of recent history. In 1950, whites outnumbered blacks by nearly a 10:1 margin. Whites still outnumbered blacks 52 percent to 40 percent in the 1990 census. The 2010 census shows that whites now comprise 37 percent and blacks 45 percent of the city’s population. People living in Saginaw Township are 84 percent white, and the township’s residents are close to being as numerous as people today living in the city.

My high school in Saginaw (1964-67) was on the east side of the river. Saginaw High had, as a student body, roughly 45 percent whites, 45 percent blacks, and 10 percent Latinos. On the river’s west side, Arthur Hill hosted a handful of blacks and Latinos. The Saginaw River was Venice’s Bridge of Sighs.

Race relations in Saginaw plummeted from tense to appalling when the Detroit riots ignited a fury of tensions. Blacks rioted on the east side. Our first black mayor went on TV, with a shotgun on his desk, to advise city residents to defend themselves against looting and violence.

A white kid ran for my high school’s presidency on the slogan: Vote Right…Vote White. White teachers, feeling threatened, either moved to other schools or retired. Mom and dad were among the last white holdouts in their east side, two-bedroom, 700 square-foot home, before leaving in the mid-1970s for a trailer park in a neighboring township.

In Saginaw, white denominations sold their buildings to black Baptist congregations. The east side hub for shopping slowly died (malls on cheap land were being built in the suburbs), leaving behind some scattered public buildings, like the bus station and post office.

Saginaw, from the mid-1960s onward, was not a place to come to. It was a place to leave — if you were white.

Urban Lore
Please read the reminiscences of a chum of mine in high school and understand part of the life of being black in a Michigan city.

“We went to integrated schools and our classes were college prep. Most blacks were not in our classes — very few. I played baseball with mostly white teammates. We played against other schools and were friends in the locker room. Our social lives were totally different. We went to separate events. The school events were the exception. Saginaw had very rigid housing restrictions with our own Berlin Wall —the Saginaw River.

“Saginaw High was our refuge. We were Trojans inside that perimeter. The ride home from late practice could include a police shadow or stop.

“Shopping could be an embarrassment. The clerks would service all the white people first. I watched my mother throw down her items and walk out of a store.

“Blacks were restricted from teaching above the elementary level until [a black-centric junior high school] was built. My mother, a University of Michigan grad, refused to get an elementary certification and worked in a grocery store. She was a language arts teacher [French, Spanish, Latin and English] and sat out until I was in seventh grade and [she] was offered a job at the new black junior high school.”

Over many generations, history is written. You don’t forgive or forget quickly. My pal is now a successful businessman. He doesn’t want his stories attributed to him. Neither do a dozen other people to whom I circulated drafts of this essay. People don’t forgive nor do they forget, but neither are they particularly forthcoming, in a public piece, to say what they think…even to say what they experienced.

Today
There is no way to infer from data and behavior anything but that whites leave Michigan cities as those cities become increasingly black. Detroit’s population is 83 percent black. Pontiac is 64 percent black. Flint is 57 percent black. Among Michigan’s largest cities, these have lost the most people.

It’s not entirely a racial one-way exit ramp. Many Michigan cities have lost blacks as well as whites. Of Detroit’s loss of 237,000 residents in the last decade, 185,000 (78 percent) of them were blacks. Many moved into adjacent areas.

The black population of Macomb County tripled to reach nearly 73,000; in Oakland County, the black population rose 36 percent to about 164,000. Many blacks, including a good number of professionals, have moved south, to Houston, the Atlanta area, and the Carolinas. Obviously, race may take a back seat to socioeconomic status and job mobility.

For contrast with Detroit, I look at Charlotte, North Carolina. During the aughts, this banking center gained nearly as many people (190,000) as Detroit lost. Whites comprise about 45 percent of the city’s population, blacks about 35 percent, Latinos 13 percent, followed by Asians, Native Americans, and others. It may be the hottest city in America and one of its most diverse.

Michigan has had, for a half century, a pernicious walking-away epidemic among whites from cities with growing black populations. I rationalize, in part, our cities’ declines to an ugly racial history. While increasing numbers of middle-class blacks have been leaving our cities to avoid crime, find better jobs, and get better schools, even greater numbers of whites flee or have fled not only for the same objectives, but also to avoid blacks. It boils down, in large part, to voluntary racial segregation.

American cities are not immune to racial segregation. But in addition to racially segregating within the city, as is true of places like New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago, many Michigan’s whites have chosen to leave cities altogether. That has imperiled our cities more so than others.

Can Michigan’s cities survive, let alone prosper, when they host neighborhoods that purely are all-white, all-black, or all-Hispanic? Do our cities’ residents welcome immigrants, people of different colors, Native Americans, and people whose native tongue is not English? Perhaps nothing condemns a city so much as its people’s unfriendly eyes fixed upon and making strangers unwelcome.

Within any cultural group, there is a rather stark division of opinion about sharing fate with other groups. Some members would rather team up with other cultures if that means that they would be more prosperous. Some would rather horde their political and economic power, even at the sacrifice of gaining greater prosperity by teaming up with other cultures. This polarized opinion is very pronounced within minority groups.

Without naming names, I think of political shepherds of both flocks within the black as well as other communities.

I’m a policy wonk. I’m not a psychologist or anthropologist. The most obvious anti-black policies of government have been repealed. Public policies of the last 40 years largely have been remedial, though I find examples of black-centered bias in things such as the rollback of the Earned Income Tax Credit and limitations on welfare benefits. What exists, today, in white-black relations is not so much de jure, but behavioral. Behavior is a far harder nut to crack.

Conclusion
Race and cultural divisions are only part of the dilemmas facing Michigan’s cities. We strive to focus on cold, hard, and demographic and economic facts and policy choices. Those are things about which we are comfortable discussing and negotiating in the open.

The problem of the color-line and the culture-line endures. Another problem is how few will touch it. Where it plays the greatest havoc is in our cities. It is our curse.

Here and there, good people and organizations fight the good fight. Let us hope that racial and cultural bigotry, on all sides, gives up the bad fight.

The racial divide, particularly in our cities and their neighboring communities, need not be intractable. But it’s not within government’s sphere of influence and power to change. That race and cultural tension vexes our cities and more aspects of life is far less a public policy problem than a societal and personal problem.

Hope lies in each generation farther removed from an ugly history. Not every young person craves an urban lifestyle. Not everyone seeks out a culturally and racially diverse neighborhood. Yet, in the souls of each generation younger than mine and, optimistically, of those to come, there is a strong heartbeat of not only tolerance and acceptance of, but also fondness for, diversity.

While much of the fate of Michigan’s cities lies within my generation’s leadership skills, a far greater responsibility and opportunity rest on the behavior and attitudes of people not reliving old history, but etching a new one.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.

Getting Down to Business
in 2010 Race for Governor

Congressman Pete Hoekstra plans to bring common-sense,
CEO sensibility to top post

by Susan J. Demas
November 16, 2009

When U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flicked off the lights in Congress last summer instead of taking up the GOP’s offshore drilling legislation, a Twitter star was born.

Pete Hoekstra
Photo by David Trumpie.

Pete Hoekstra, the Republican congressman from Holland best known as the party’s point man on counterterrorism, might have seemed an unlikely tweeter. But the former furniture executive also is known for his brevity, so the 140-character-or-less format proved a good fit. And while Hoekstra was huddled in the darkened chambers with GOP lawmakers, including Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Brighton), he kept the outside world abreast of their “Drill, baby, drill” protest.

“We found it to be an effective way to communicate,” smiles Hoekstra, who’s running for governor next year.

Since July 2008 he’s averaged more than one tweet a day, with 8,704 (and counting) followers. While that doesn’t begin to approach the territory of Twitter top dog/actor Ashton Kutcher (3,978,133 followers) or congressional king John McCain (1,576,416), Hoekstra’s missives certainly have courted more controversy.

On his 11th trip to Iraq, in February, he tweeted details from the itinerary, such as being in the green zone in Baghdad, which Democrats claimed revealed classified information and jeopardized members’ safety. The flap caused the Pentagon to announce it will review congressional communications from war zones.

“There’s been a lot of national attention based on [Hoekstra’s] gaffes and outrageous leaks,” says Alec Gerlach, Midwest spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. “He’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee, but he’s proven he doesn’t know how to handle very sensitive information.”

Former House Speaker Craig DeRoche, a Novi Republican who recently endorsed Hoekstra, dismisses the Democrats’ criticism as off-base and instead plays up the congressman’s national security gravitas.

“The guy isn’t new to the intelligence community,” DeRoche notes. “He has high-level security clearance. He applies his judgment. He knows the rules.”

Hoekstra dubbed it the “twitterversy” on his website and is sanguine about the whole thing (“You get blowback on everything nowadays,” he shrugs).

Then there was this message in June after the Iranian green revolution that brought Hoekstra’s tweeting full circle: “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.”

That gave birth to a sardonic website that netted national attention, Hoekstraisameme.com, that declares: “To Hoekstra is to whine using grandiose exaggerations and comparisons.” It’s littered with illustrated entries from readers, such as: “Just burnt my Hot Pocket in the microwave. Now I know what Chernobyl was like.”

Although his tweets have fallen off in frequency lately, the congressman says the criticism hasn’t affected his candor.

“No, I don’t think so. I hope not,” Hoekstra says. “My staff gets nervous about it. They like running everything through the cycle of messaging. Make sure your press secretary sees it; make sure your policy person sees it. I try to go through it very, very carefully, just to make sure that if anybody really wants to take a cheap shot that it’s hard for them to do.”

“Doesn’t mean that they don’t try,” he adds.

Conservatism and Compromise
Right now, Pete Hoekstra might be better known in the “twitterverse” than Lansing, as he’s never held state office. But all the attention looks to have raised his profile in the crowded six-way GOP gubernatorial primary.

He’s made a surprisingly strong showing in the polls and is basically tied with Attorney General Mike Cox, who’s won two statewide elections. The AG’s high name ID and vote-rich Southeast Michigan power base would seem to propel him as the natural frontrunner. But with Cox ensnared in the civil suit over stripper Tamara Greene’s death following disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s alleged Manoogian Mansion party, the squeaky-clean Dutchman could present an appealing alternative.

Hoekstra, 56, projects the persona of a salt-of-the-earth businessman, not a career politician (his staff often calls him “Pete,” bypassing the traditional, buttoned-up formality of “the congressman”). While in Lansing for a campaign swing on a rainy fall day, he frequently leans over to make his point, as if commanding attention in a corporate boardroom. Decked in a crimson power tie and powder blue shirt that uncannily matches his eyes — the same ensemble featured on his campaign website — he looks every inch the casual CEO, down to his graying cropped coif.

He peppers his answers with plenty of references to his time at West Michigan office furniture maker Herman Miller, though he left for Washington almost two decades ago. And the nine-term congressman often uses the collective “we” to describe his personal actions (“We’re concentrating on raising money now”), underscoring that the Hoekstra enterprise is a team effort.

The father of three notes he won’t throw money away on a tony Washington apartment and has slept in his office for more than 16 years, a well-worn story he repeats with ease. (“It’s just a simple leather couch. At night I throw a sleeping bag and a pillow on it. That’s my life in D.C.”)

However, hailing from West Michigan proved problematic for the last two GOP gubernatorial nominees, former Lt. Gov. Dick Posthumus and Amway heir Dick DeVos, who were perceived as out of touch. But Hoekstra disagrees that geography is destiny.

“I don’t think it’s an east-west thing. If Republicans from the eastside always won, we’d have Republican senators. We don’t,” he says. “We just haven’t had Republican candidates who have been effective, regardless of whether they’re from the east or the west side. They always kind of draw this insulated little picture of West Michigan. I worked for a company that I’ll put up against any company in Michigan in terms of its international reputation, Herman Miller.”

As ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, he notes he’s met with Muammar Gaddafi three times, as well as the late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Bashar Assad in Syria and Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. A native of Groningen, Netherlands, Hoekstra has stepped foot on six continents.

“In terms of having a macro perspective and having a world perspective much bigger than good old West Michigan,” he adds pointedly, “I think I’ve got an international perspective that’s as big as anyone in the field, if not bigger.”

Although he’s a conservative Republican, Hoekstra stresses his practicality, playing up his ability to compromise and his ties to labor, honed while heading Congress’ investigation of the Teamsters in the 1990s. The Hollander refused to sign a no-tax pledge and declared he wouldn’t vote for a ballot initiative on Right to Work, seen as the holy grail by business groups, a powerful Republican constituency.

Even DeRoche, the ultimate partisan, describes him as “a different kind of Republican in how he thinks about issues, gathers information. He doesn’t just recite talking points from what he read in a conservative magazine. He’s a breath of fresh air.”

Hoekstra appears to be running a campaign in the mold of the two men who won the New Jersey and Virginia governorships this fall — Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, respectively — who shied away from their right-wing pedigrees and ran on almost exclusively economic platforms.

There’s fertile ground in Michigan, home of the nation’s highest unemployment rate, with more than 600,000 jobs lost on the watch of Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm. As the GOP continues to struggle against its negative image (only one in five people now identifies as a Republican, according to Pew Research), party elders like former Gov. John Engler are urging candidates to go all economics, all the time.

DeRoche acknowledges that the GOP primary electorate isn’t looking for someone who crosses party lines, but he stresses that Hoekstra “won’t abandon principles.”

“Pete is clearly comfortable in his Republican skin and considers himself a conservative,” he says.

Hoekstra is mindful of the base, having worked to become the go-to guy for Fox News shows like “Hannity” and “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” (“Yeah, we do all right,” he grins of his ubiquitous presence on the right-leaning network). The 2nd District congressman also made sure to show at a September fundraiser in Jackson for former U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Tipton). The breakfast was headlined by U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who became a conservative icon for shouting “You lie!” in the middle of President Obama’s health care address to Congress.

And Hoekstra sends out a few dog whistles to evangelicals, like his parents’ rights constitutional amendment that’s attracted 125 sponsors. Written in response to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, the measure states that parents have the responsibility and the authority to direct the upbringing of their kids. The state can step in for cases of abuse and neglect, but “no international treaty can intervene,” Hoekstra notes.

“It’s important because parents’ rights are slowly being eroded in Washington, D.C. by the legislative process, the judicial process,” he adds.

American Dreams
Aside from spending his first three years in the Netherlands, Hoekstra has never lived outside Michigan, and says he never wanted to.

He’s been back there about 15 times, noting that the Dutch are strong partners in the War on Terror. But Hoekstra doesn’t remember his formative years there, although he can speak the language after being immersed for a couple weeks (“The brain’s an amazing thing,” he grins).

Congressman Pete Hoekstra at the candidates forum held at the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference in spring. Photo by David Trumpie.

The Hoekstras were seeking opportunity for their three kids (“They bought into the American dream,” Pete says) and planned to move to Cleveland thanks to a sponsor family, which was required in the ’50s. That fell through at the last minute, but the Hoekstras found other sponsors in Grand Rapids, who put them up in a house in nearby Holland.

“So that’s the difference between being a Buckeye and a Wolverine,” he quips.

After meeting his future wife, Diane Johnson, at Holland Christian High School, Hoekstra stayed close to home, obtaining a B.A. in political science at Hope College in 1975. The couple has now been married 34 years and has three children: Erin, 27, who works at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington; Allison, 24, who’s married and lives in Holland; and Bryan, 21, a senior at Calvin College.

Hoekstra went on to become a Wolverine, earning an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1977. He then began his 15-year career at Herman Miller, stepping down as vice president of marketing when he won his congressional seat in 1992. Hoekstra still beams with pride about the company, interestingly stressing its commitment to diversity.

“It’s just a very unique company. That’s where I fine-tuned my business skills, my management skills,” he says. “Herman Miller is known around the world for the products that it makes, for the way that it does its business, manages its business. It’s consistently recognized as one of the best-managed companies, recognized for participated management, recognized as one of the best places for women to work, and recognized, I think more recently, as one of the best companies for its outreach to the gay community.”

Republican Renegade
Hoekstra was never supposed to serve in Congress.

He did the unthinkable, toppling Guy Vander Jagt, chair of the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC). But Hoekstra, then 40, thought the silver-tongued 13-term congressman had become a creature of Congress and lost touch with his district.

“I was frustrated with what was going on in Washington,” he says. “I thought that someone with my background — I majored in political science when I was in college — as someone coming into politics with a good, solid business background, some orientation to politics, that I could go to Washington and make a difference.”

Hoekstra sums up his first political campaign as “short, sweet and inexpensive.” The novice spent $50,000 over 12 weeks and not-so-subtly hit on his 21-year age difference with the incumbent. Hoekstra tooled around in a 1965 Rambler (“Built the same year Vander Jagt was elected the first time,” he notes) and embarked on a bike tour of the district.

“What I wanted to demonstrate was that I was going to bring a new sense of energy, vibrancy and grassroots politics to the office,” he says. “The bike kind of sent out the signal that, hey, this guy’s young, he’s energetic and the bicycle says, ‘This guy’s local.’ It’s a big district. It’s 200 miles long and anywhere from 60 to 90 miles wide if you include the lake, and so it was just something at that time that kind of connected with people. It was a memorable image.”

Hoekstra has made it a biennial campaign tradition. For his gubernatorial quest, he’s vowed to pedal 1,000 miles and work 100 jobs. So far, he’s racked up 100 miles and five jobs — picking asparagus, picking cherries, sewing, doing sewer reconstruction in Detroit and unloading bags at Shepler’s Ferry on Mackinac Island — but he says the plan is to go full throttle in the spring.

Another hopeful, Sen. Tom George (R-Kalamazoo), did his own bike tour this summer, to which Hoekstra responds, “Imitation is a great form of flattery.”

“I kind of think the bike thing is mine,” he adds. “It doesn’t mean other people can’t use it. But it’s clearly part of my brand.”

Hoekstra describes that first election night as “kind of a magic moment, where everything comes together.”

“Now, whenever you go to talk to people, they say, ‘I was with you that first year,’” he laughs heartily. “It’s amazing; it’s amazing I only got 47 percent of the vote.”

Hoekstra’s congressional class preceded the storied one of the ’94 Republican Revolution. After knocking out a member of the old leadership team (Vander Jagt stood to become chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee), Hoekstra became one of soon-to-be Speaker Newt Gingrich’s top lieutenants.

Even today, he displays the deference, even awe of a young congressman to party leadership in describing how he came to resolve the dispute over the 1996 Teamsters election between James Hoffa Jr. and Ron Carey. House Judiciary Chair Henry Hyde told the Holland Republican to take a meeting with Hoffa (“I was surprised that Henry knew who I was,” Hoekstra offers). Afterward, Gingrich called to tell him he would lead a national press conference announcing an investigation into fraud and corruption.

“When Newt’s telling you to go do something, you went out and did it,” Hoekstra recalls.

He and Gingrich were on the same page that Republicans were “not going to use this as an excuse to bash all unions.” In the end, it helped Hoekstra build up trust with labor, especially Hoffa, the eventual winner. Unlike other Republicans, he’s happy to sit down with the unions.

“They knew that they could come in, that we could sit down and have a discussion and that sometimes we could find agreement and sometimes there would be disagreement,” he says.

He’s worked with unions on federal prison industries and No Child Left Behind, which he sees as a huge incursion into education by the federal government that’s “worked out miserably.” And the congressman is open to tweaking Proposal A. His record on trade is mixed, having voted for NAFTA, but no on trade relations with China and fast-track negotiating authority, which gives the president more power over agreements.

That’s certainly given Hoekstra an advantage over his fellow GOP hopefuls, but it also might make endorsements competitive even against the consummate union guy, Democratic frontrunner Lt. Gov. John Cherry.

“What I will say is that I won’t concede the union vote to any Democrat,” Hoekstra says.

Transition Time
November 7, 2006, marked the end of an era. After 12 years of Republican rule, the Democrats took back both houses of Congress.

“It’s a whole lot more fun being in the majority,” Hoekstra acknowledges ruefully.

But he says that didn’t influence his decision to run for governor, although he might have stuck it out for another term or two. He never saw himself staying as long as Vander Jagt; in fact, he took (and broke) a 12-year term-limit pledge.

Hoekstra doesn’t make excuses and admits he was wrong (“You find out that term limits aren’t working the way people intended them to”). He also stresses that the GOP instituted a rule that committee chairs could only serve for six years, which he calls a “better system” of term limits.

That also means Hoekstra’s time as ranking member on Intelligence Committee is up in 2010.

He’s conscious of the fact that he’s best known as an expert on international affairs — something of little concern to voters picking their next governor. So he stresses that his initial focus in Congress was education, labor and budget. It was only after losing his bid for Education Committee chair in 2000 that he landed on Intel.

“And then 9/11 happens,” Hoekstra says. “The rest is history…The one thing you can say is at least I was a quick study.”

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer has been quick to link the congressman to former President George W. Bush, whose popularity sank as the Iraq war’s death toll soared.

Hoekstra shakes it off with an effective jab. “I’m a lot less tied to George W. Bush than John Cherry is to Jennifer Granholm.”

Still, his stances on terrorism and foreign affairs continue to irk Democrats nationally, from his 2006 press conference trumpeting that the weapons of mass destruction had been unearthed in Iraq to his opposition to Guantanamo Bay prisoners being transferred to the mothballed Standish prison. Hoekstra maintains that Obama hasn’t given “us a compelling reason to do it.”

Standish City Manager Michael Moran met with Hoekstra three months ago (“We agreed to disagree,” he says), but notes that U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Menominee) — who represents Standish — is in favor. Losing the prison means a 25-percent slice to the city’s $4-million water and sewer budget, Moran notes, and there already have been big cuts and layoffs.

“The majority of the community doesn’t have a problem with them coming here,” Moran says gruffly. “It’s a secure prison. We’ve taken care of worse people in our maximum security prison…There’s a small, vocal group, not only Congressman Hoekstra, but others outside the community who have stirred things up.”

This week, Hoekstra revealed that alleged Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan is believed to have corresponded via e-mail with a radical cleric in Yemen, something liberals again decried as classified information. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly derided the Republican as “a world-class buffoon,” while The Nation’s Christopher Hayes went with “epic grandstander.”

En route to Washington for a November 15 “Face the Nation” appearance on Fort Hood, Hoekstra gets uncharacteristically heated about the recent criticism.

“The left is saying Hoekstra released classified information,” he says. “I was never even briefed yet; I hadn’t received a stitch of classified information on Fort Hood. It’s typical. They’ve done this to me before. The bottom line is that this isn’t about Pete Hoekstra. This is about 13 Americans who were brutally murdered at Fort Hood.”

Next Phase
Hoekstra clocked in third in the influential Mackinac Island GOP straw poll after Labor Day, after Ann Arbor businessman Rick Snyder and Attorney General Cox. But the congressman is unfazed (perhaps because of widespread tales of candidates buying tickets for supporters). “I thought it went great,” he offers.

Another reason for optimism could be the Island fundraiser that former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney held for him. Hoekstra served as a foreign policy adviser on the Michigan native’s 2008 campaign, making four or five trips out to Iowa for the caucuses, especially the Northwest region (“Where all the Dutch are,” he chuckles).

“Mitt’s a good friend. Mitt’s very much a quality guy,” Hoekstra enthuses. “When you drive through the snow in Iowa in January together, or December, in the Mittmobile, you build a certain kind of friendship.”

DeRoche “got to see (Hoekstra) in action for the first time” as a fellow Romney backer. He recalls being on the 20-year-old Romney RV for swings through Lansing and Grand Rapids, as Hoekstra plotted campaign strategy on a rickety, fold-out table. And the former speaker credits him for helping Romney carry West Michigan, and thus the state in the ’08 primary.

“What I’ve learned is that Pete is the same every day, on every issue,” DeRoche says. “He doesn’t put on a different face with different folks, supporters, those who disagree with him, so-called influential people, people he meets on the sidewalk. He has just as much time for everybody.”

If the old Romney coalition comes together, Hoekstra could have the magic formula to wrapping up the nomination — and perhaps the general election. But he knows that after a decade-long recession and budget disasters, there’s a tough job ahead if he and Diane do end up moving into the governor’s mansion.

But that’s where the former executive says he would draw on his years at Herman Miller (“I wouldn’t micromanage, but I would be very much involved in leadership,” he vows). And Hoekstra also goes back to congressional experience, noting negotiations on intelligence reform with U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “We were friends,” he notes. “We trusted each other and looked for common ground.”

For a guy who never moved to Washington, Pete Hoekstra sounds a little like the consummate insider. But he stresses that Lansing is a world away from the high-rolling D.C. scene.

How does he know?

“Diane is OK moving there,” he grins.

Susan J. Demas, a regular columnist and writer for Dome, is 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.

Cherry the Alternative

by Gongwer News Service
November 13, 2009

Right now there are at least 11 people running for, or thinking about running for, governor in 2010, and in the last two weeks the one who has done the most interesting stuff in the still-nascent race is the one who already has a governor tag to his name: Lieutenant Governor John Cherry Jr.

Before reflecting on some of those developments, note how much more publicly intense already the election has become now that there is at least a temporary resolution to the 2009-10 budget and that the 2009 election is done.

On the Republican side alone a potential controversy involving Attorney General Mike Cox and the fallout from the investigation into an alleged wild party at the Manoogian Mansion in Detroit is brewing (and one lobbyist is already taking bets the issue will force Mr. Cox to drop out of the race early), Oakland Sheriff Mike Bouchard is starting to rack up endorsements, and Rick Snyder, a favorite candidate of top business people in the state, is becoming more aggressive in pushing his economic proposals.

Among the Democrats, House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford Twp.) has said he will make a decision on running soon. The speculation on whether he will, in fact, get into the race has led Democratic discussions for some time. He has met with former political officials for President Barack Obama (leading to speculation the White House is worried about Mr. Cherry, something Mr. Cherry’s campaign calls useless rumors). There is no word about whether the White House has met Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith (D-Salem Twp.), former Rep. John Freeman and former Michigan State University football coach George Perles.

But while Mr. Dillon is speculating, Mr. Cherry has taken some significant moves to assert himself more forcefully as a candidate.

He says he will not formally announce his candidacy until early 2010. These days, however, a formal announcement of candidacy is essentially boilerplate to the fact that he is running and making himself a more difficult candidate to catch.

Early on, Mr. Cherry took aim at Mr. Dillon with a completely unsubtle attack on the speaker’s agreement with Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) on the 2009-10 budget. In an email message and web post, Mr. Cherry raised the question of what do Democrats stand for if not for funding education and social services.

Then, practically at the same time Mr. Dillon said he would make a decision soon on running, all four of the last Democratic speakers of the House — Bobby Crim, Gary Owen, Lew Dodak and Curtis Hertel — came together in a press conference to endorse Mr. Cherry. Intentional or not (and why would anyone think it was anything but intentional?), the move was a slap at their successor speaker. It was especially so, given the primary stated reason the four backed Mr. Cherry: experience. He has the experience to understand issues, they said, the ability to work with people, understand their needs and concerns, and work out needed agreements.

In other words, Mr. Cherry has what Mr. Dillon does not.

Mr. Cherry made headlines of his own, with a speech before the Lapeer Economic Club calling for a business profits tax. Should such a tax be enacted it would be one of the most significant changes in state tax policy since the state dropped a profits tax in favor of the value-added Single Business Tax (which was replaced by a similarly complicated Michigan Business Tax).

Okay, it’s fair to say business will always opt for no tax at all if it could get that option, but would they like a profits tax? After all the ahemming and hawing and timid comments about definitions of profits and rates imposed and credits allowed and devils and details and all that, the answer is damn tootin’.

So Mr. Cherry has held out an olive branch to business, and in so doing pointed out another difference between himself and Mr. Dillon. After all, it was Mr. Dillon who in the depths of winter called for the state to change its tax structure, and with another winter approaching what has happened with that call? Mr. Cherry has, at least, tossed out a possible tax alternative.

One last highlight from that Lapeer speech: Mr. Cherry said the current Michigan Business Tax could have been designed by “paranoid schizophrenics.” Now that does include Governor Jennifer Granholm, Treasurer Bob Klein and all the folks in the administration, but it also definitely includes Mr. Dillon.

And Mr. Cherry went further when he told reporters that he doubted the legislature could enact major tax changes, that it had become more risk averse than it was in 2007, and that a solution may come from the public that would go on the ballot. Again, while not specifically directed at Mr. Dillon, it was a criticism that gathered Mr. Dillon into its net.

One of the great ironies with these positions and actions is that Mr. Cherry is helping position himself as the alternative as well as the traditional Democrat. Remember, the knock on Mr. Cherry winning the nomination was that he would be too tied to labor and traditional Democratic interests. Mr. Dillon was the alternative Democrat, willing to challenge labor with his proposed health insurance reform for all public workers.

Mr. Cherry is approaching the alternative label in an alternative way, not by distancing himself from labor but by reaching out to business.

All in all, should Mr. Dillon get into the race, it will make for a lot more fun leading up to the August primary. Should it help Mr. Cherry win the nomination it should also help relieve Republicans who, after all, have spent all this time preparing for a campaign in 2010 against the lieutenant governor. No one wants to waste a lot of good campaign rhetoric in these days when everyone is preaching frugality.

For nearly 50 years in Michigan, Gongwer News Service has provided independent, comprehensive, accurate and timely coverage of issues in and around Michigan’s government and political systems. For subscription information, including a free trial, visit Gongwer online.

Obama Watching Michigan

by Tim Skubick
November 6, 2009

They pretty much bungled it in New York, but did better in New Jersey. So who knows how well they will do regarding the Democratic race for governor in Michigan.

Sources confirm the Obama White House is already watching from the sidelines.

Recall that the Obama team tried to find a new candidate for governor in New York. It was handled with all the grace of a 350-pound ballerina doing Swan Lake.

In New Jersey, with a little more finesse, the pollster for incumbent Democrat Gov. Jon Corzine was quietly dumped. That pollster was Mark Mellman, who, coincidently, did polling for one Jennifer Granholm and one John Cherry. Mellman was shoved aside, according to Politico.com, and replaced with Joel Benenson.

Joel who? Benenson just happens to be the pollster for the Obama presidential campaign.

Of course, the White House has denied that it is sticking its nose into various governor races where the Democrat could lose. (Like they’d confirm that!)

In Michigan, insiders are buzzing about White House “concerns” about Michigan and Mr. Cherry, heir apparent to the Granholm mantle.

Some Ds are worried Cherry can’t win, and since the Obama folks want a Democratic governor in place for legislative redistricting in 2011 and an Obama re-election bid after that, they are watching very carefully — and have been since last January.

This has already been shared with the Cherry team: the president is monitoring Michigan, and somebody named Dillon has huddled with White House advisors who work for David Axlerod, who is sorta close to you know who.

The president knows who House Speaker Andy Dillon is. During a presidential sojourn to Macomb County that Dillon attended, the president walked up and said, “Hi, Andy.”

The concerns about the 2010 contest extend beyond the White House. It was also the subject of a high-level confab involving state Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer and other Michigan Ds. They huddled with the new national Democratic Party chair.

The national guy asked what he could do for them.

Find a job for Jennifer Granholm was the request, so that Cherry could run as the incumbent, which would not help Dillon.

Cherry is handicapped by his incumbent boss, the theory goes, and after the GOP gets done wrapping Cherry up in the Granholm legacy … well, you can see why the Democrats might be concerned. But not Mr. Cherry.

“I don’t buy that,” the L.G. advised the other day.

Dillon won’t make a decision until the end of November. Note that the speaker’s family, minus the 15-year-old son, has signed off on him getting in, but he’s not there yet. An informed guess suggests he’s got fire-in-the-belly issues and most days he wakes up not wanting to run. He’s also haunted by the stress he’d foster within the Democratic Party if he took on Cherry.

Regardless, avid Dillon compatriots will continue to hype this White House-Dillon link for obvious reasons: it makes their guy look good and causes Cherry fits.

Everyone assumes that if the White House wanted Cherry out — and there’s been no signal of that — Dillon would be the pick. However, Axelrod has close ties to a guy who thought about running but didn’t. So could the Obama crew talk to Dennis Archer, former mayor of Detroit?

You’re right that all of this seems far-fetched, but in politics far-fetched has a funny way of becoming reality.

Tim Skubick is Michigan’s senior Capitol correspondent and has anchored the weekly public TV series “Off the Record” since 1972. He also covers the Capitol and politics for WLNS-TV6 in Lansing.

Tim Skubick Extra Extra… (A weekly bonus for Dome readers)

Apathy Winning
Will it work?

The governor continues on her mission to grow the grassroots out there to pressure recalcitrant legislative Republicans to raise more buckos to re-fund college scholarships, aid to firefighters and cops, health care for the needy and funding for K-12 education.

She and her budget guru, Bob Emerson, are calculating that local pressure will build over the next two months to the point that those Republicans will cry “Uncle.”

To be blunt, it’s a long shot — and there is a long history to prove it.

This governor likes to say on the stump that she has cut more state services than any other governor dead or alive. And what has the public said? Nothing.

With more than $8 billion in reductions to date, and now another $1.8 billion on top of that, the governor has sliced every which way to balance the budget. No one knows how many programs have been reduced or just wiped off the books … and there’s been no outcry from the unwashed.

Sure some of the citizens have felt the cuts, but they are small in numbers and if they complained, the gripes never made it into the MSM, never raised concerns in the legislature beyond a “sorry we had to do it” response.

But now the governor figures, hopes and prays that massive cuts to the K-12 budget will change the story line. Take $292 away from every school kid and you might have something. Add to that the veto of $52 million to schools that spend more on students than the rest of the state and you have cuts approaching $600 per pupil. Plus next year, her story goes, if nothing is done now the cuts will go beyond that.

In other words she’s warning: look up Michigan. The sky is tumbling and if you allow it to fall, your kids will fail.

But apathy is alive and well in the hinterland as we moan about the summer that never was and the winter that surely will be. Can this governor with the above-average communicative charm and talent wake the masses to get in the game and demand that lawmakers raise more money for schools?

Believe it when you see it.

George’s Hail Mary
The wily and dumb-like-a-fox former coach of the MSU football team is at it again. Since November of 2008, George Perles has been shopping the story that he may run for governor. And we’ll have an average temperature this winter of 75 degrees, too.

And then this week, an unsuspecting sports reporter got statewide attention as he wrote that Perles was going to announce his candidacy just after New Year’s Day.

The equally unsuspecting scribes at the Associated Press dutifully picked up the story, and Perles got thousands of dollars of free advertising for his impending bid for governor.

The only thing wrong with the story is that it is not true. Other than that, it was a fine piece of political journalism. (Note to sports writers: stay in your own lane, please.)

Once the new angle hit, Tim Staudt, a journeyman sports guy in Lansing, called up the coach on a radio call-in show and asked about all this.

Perles back-pedaled faster than Lance Armstrong in reverse.

Seems Perles really said that he would have an announcement on what he would do after the first of the year. Notice that making a decision one way or the other is not quite the same as saying you are running. That’s a distinction that makes a huge difference.

The A.P., when given a heads-up, to its credit revised the story.

Meanwhile, an entrepreneur on EBAY, the do-it-yourselfer Internet department store, is offering Perles for Governor T-shirts at 15 bucks a pop plus another five smackers to ship it out.

“Show Your Spartan Pride,” the sales pitch suggests.

It even perpetuates the incorrect story line on the impending announcement. But hey, it’s the Internet, where accuracy tends to get in the way of a good story.

So get ’em while they are hot before the true story gets out that the affable jock isn’t running for anything accept maybe his handkerchief to muffle that laughter you hear over at the Perles household.

Oh btw, the shirts are not returnable. How fitting.

Now What!
Oh, oh. Now what are they going to do?

Since the first of the year, the 44 members of the freshman legislative class of Republicans and Democrats have been itching to change the culture in Lansing and, as noted in this space too many times to count, they’ve not even scratched the surface.

So the speaker of the House is giving them a chance to do what they claim they want to do: fix the K-12 budget/funding mess.

What a cruel man that speaker is.

Those poor innocent babes in the woods are about to confront the harsh reality of trying to drain the school-funding quagmire and build a new pond.

First a little history. The speaker has given them until December 20 to come up with something. When Bill Milliken was governor he launched an education reform agenda that began in 1970 and ended two governors later in 1994 with Proposal A.

If the gang of 44 can pull off in two months what it took others who were wiser and had more experience almost 25 years, each should be given the Nobel Peace Prize or something like that.

But undaunted, they are taking this on. “How do you turn down the speaker?” reflected one of the newcomer leaders.

Dillon was not trying to set these guys up for failure. His motives were pure, but still the task is impossible with a capitol I.

But let’s cheer them on. Let’s light a candle. Let’s see what they can do.

A friendly hint, however. This is going to take more revenue, and that may mean a new tax scheme along with reforms to squeeze money out of the bloated education system.

Well, there go the GOP freshmen from the bipartisan fold.

An Uncomfortable Truth

by Stephen A. Jones
October 30, 2009

When former President Jimmy Carter said the most extreme attacks on President Barack Obama were rooted in racism, he ignited a firestorm of debate.

Media pundits fought over whether Carter was right — often distorting his words in the process. Journalists sought to put Obama on the spot, demanding to know whether he considered his opponents racist. Wisely, Obama did not take the bait, shrugging off the controversy with a quip to David Letterman that he’d actually been black before he was elected president. He sought to defuse the issue with humor so it would not distract America’s attention from health care reform.

The issue has faded in recent weeks because of newer hot issues like Balloon Boy and the breathtaking cupidity (and stupidity) of Wall Street executives. But Americans would do well to take to heart the uncomfortable truth that Carter had the audacity to utter.

Are all of those who oppose Obama — on health care reform or any other issue — opposing him out of racism? Of course not. But then, that isn’t what Carter said.

You might be excused for thinking that he did, given the sound-bite mentality of the media debate. Conservatives accused Carter of smearing all of Obama’s critics. But look at Carter’s actual words:

“When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds. … I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American.”

Notice, he’s referring to a “radical fringe” of protesters who took part in the rally in Washington on September 12. Despite all the paranoid quailing about incipient socialism, many of the people at that rally had at least understandable concerns about the potential of excessive government or the budgetary implications of particular health care proposals.

Carter’s critics were arguing, absurdly, that since most of the protesters were not motivated by racism, racism was not involved at all. How, then, to explain the woman with the sign: “The zoo has an African lion; the White House has a lyin’ African”? Or the sign that used Obama’s name as an acronym for “Oppressive, Bloodsucking, Arrogant, Muslim, Alien”?

Maybe just a handful of wing nuts at the fringe of a huge crowd, you say. All right. But what, then, should we make of the former mayor of Los Alamitos, California, who resigned early this year after he distributed via e-mail an image of the White House lawn planted with watermelons, under the caption “No Easter egg hunt this year”? Or the now-famous New York Post cartoon that showed police remarking, after shooting a crazed chimp, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”? Or the widely distributed anti-health care reform image showing Obama as an African witch doctor, complete with a bone through his nose?

Well, you might reply, how is that different from the vicious attacks that were heaped upon George W. Bush? He got portrayed as Hitler, too, and even received some boos during one of his speeches to Congress.

Reasonable point, though it seems pretty obvious to me that heckling the president by calling him a liar goes at least a step or two beyond the generalized negative response that Bush got. And it must be admitted that we have a history of intense and mean-spirited political discourse in this country.

Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” ad that sought to portray Barry Goldwater as a nuclear lunatic was so over-the-top that it was only broadcast once in the 1964 election campaign. Abraham Lincoln’s foes disparaged him as “Abraham Africanus the First” after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and they even invented the word miscegenation for a series of pamphlets and cartoons asserting that Lincoln’s policy was aimed at promoting interracial sex.

So Americans do tend to be pretty rough on their presidents — of all political stripes. But I never saw even the meanest attacks on Bush resort to racial stereotypes like monkeys, watermelons and witch doctors. That’s what makes the most extreme of the attacks against Obama — the ones that Carter was talking about — racist.

What is confounding to me is that anyone considers Carter’s critique surprising or inaccurate.

Perhaps some of the anger directed toward Carter is Americans’ displaced irritation at being disabused of a cherished illusion. It was just a year ago, in the warm afterglow of Obama’s election victory, that some were proclaiming — with straight faces — that we had been transported into a new era, a post-racial America. It should be abundantly clear by now that that is not the case.

The evidence is everywhere, as if the examples above are not enough. It is in the Louisiana justice of the peace who refused, a few weeks ago, to give a marriage license to an interracial couple and then had the nerve to declare, “I’m not racist.” It is in Rush Limbaugh’s gleeful playing of “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song parody by a white comedian imitating Al Sharpton’s voice. It is in the Confederate battle flag that shows up with pernicious regularity on bumper stickers, and even on banners flown from pickup trucks at college football tailgating parties (in Michigan).

Whatever else that flag may represent to some people, as an artifact of history it represents, first and foremost, the defense of two things — treason and slavery. “But wait,” some will cry, “the Confederates would have been considered patriots — like Washington, Jefferson and Adams — if they had won the war, and they were defending states’ rights.” True enough, but they lost the war. And the states’ right they were fighting for was the right to preserve a barbaric system of human slavery.

So before you dismiss Jimmy Carter’s assertion that the extreme critics of Obama are influenced by racism, do two things. First, spend a week paying attention to the cars and pickups you pass on the road to count how many times you see the Stars and Bars.

And second, contemplate the fact that when he was a state senator, Joe “You Lie” Wilson cast one of seven votes against removing the Confederate flag from the pole atop the South Carolina Capitol.

The real question isn’t whether Carter was right. It’s when will we stop hiding from the truth so we can do something to change it?

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).