Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the Hurricane Katrina of Mayors

I sat out the 2001 Detroit mayoral election, the vote that would bring the city its youngest elected chief executive and current poster boy for corruption in office, Kwame M. Kilpatrick. Sometime before the general election, Kilpatrick injected the race with a nasty shot of homophobia: “I don’t ever want my children to see that kind of lifestyle,” proclaimed the candidate – as if the mere sight of the so-called gay lifestyle were, say, inspiring the Detroit Public Schools pornographic dropout rate. Whatever the intent of Kilpatrick’s denunciation, it also offered an oblique preview of his public response to criticism (and was itself a prescient, though unwitting, auto-criticism). Just as the mayor doesn’t believe his own lifestyle problematic, nor does he, guilty of perjury but for the legal formality of a criminal trial, see himself as legally culpable party in this case. Kilpatrick publicly charges the Detroit Free Press with having illegally obtained the text messages, and the secret deal to keep them from the public, that may well end his reign as mayor.

But as serious as Kilpatrick’s legal trouble is, his lying under oath does not constitute his gravest breach of public confidence.

The mayor’s shameless assumption of a double standard favorable to him should rightly spark Detroiters’ ire. The United States’ poorest city simply cannot afford public “servants” cursed with Kilpatrick’s appetite for excess on the public dime. While the mayor and his posse party like fey, over-privileged high school kids given run of the mansion, actual DPS high school students suffer along with a substandard education doled out by a system in such dire straits that its operation had to be assumed by the state of Michigan. Kilpatrick’s announcements of significant reductions to city bus service nearly coincided with the revelation that he had used public money to lease his wife a brand-new Escalade. And the firing of the three cops who brought the whistle-blower suit against the mayor once again highlighted the fact that Kilpatrick keeps 21 bodyguards on his security detail.

The mayor’s apparent lack of empathy for the plight of his constituents in their majority, combined with his “tin ear for symbolism” (as Governing Magazine Executive Editor Alan Ehrenhalt described Kilpatrick’s indifference to public perception) oddly echoes the tone deafness of George W. Bush. Remember how Bush’s praise for his highly under-qualified then-director of FEMA, Michael Brown, instantly became an oral metonym for Bush administration nepotism gone tragically awry: “Heckuva job, Brownie.” Kilpatrick’s text messages reveal a similar callow fraternal cluelessness. “I’m all the way with that!” he wrote to Christine Beatty, then his chief of staff and mistress, in response to a text message from her defending their firing former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown, a 24-year veteran of the Detroit force. Brown’s crime? He had begun to investigate allegations of abuse by the mayor’s security detail, including the fatal shooting of Tamara Greene, a Detroit woman rumored to have performed as an exotic dancer at the Manoogian Mansion bash hours before her death.

As the nightmarish images from the internal refugee camp that was the New Orleans Superdome during the fall of 2005 confirmed who was disposable in the eyes of the Bush administration, so do the recently published photos of Greene, a young mother looking to start a business, give the Kilpatrick gang’s expendables a face.

Yet, from the beginning of the scandal, Kilpatrick has sought to portray himself as the victim. “If I was 60 years old, if I came from the 'country club community,' if I came out of an established private firm or something like that, none of these [rumors] would get the lift that they have,” complained the mayor. “I guess it's believable that a 32-year-old black man with an earring would have parties like that.” It is in Kilpatrick’s political best interest to present the case against him as an attack on his surface, his dapperness and swagger, which a significant portion of his electorate no doubt finds inspiring, especially at a moment Detroit faces a perfect storm of economic, social and civil collapse. The disingenuousness of Kilpatrick’s baiting lies not primarily in his attempt to obfuscate the truth but in his knowledge of that obfuscation’s context. The whistle-blower suit would wind up costing Detroit over $9 million, no chump change in a city where over one-third of the children live below poverty level and many quality of life indicators are at Third World levels. Not many Detroiters are part of the country club community, either. The money lost in the suit, essentially another bill racked up by the mayor, could have made an impact on public education or transportation; it could have paid full salaries and benefits to tens of city workers. It could have served as a protective dike of sorts, if you will. But Kilpatrick was willing to exploit his city’s justified fear of racial profiling, all so that he could continue living high, and without consequence, on the labor of predominantly black, mostly poor Detroit. The diamond earrings and oversized gangster couture only costume a soul that is old-school in the manner of the country club community’s starchiest.

And so, no matter the eventual legal and political outcomes of the scandal, Kwame M. Kilpatrick has shown himself to be all he warned of, rightly or wrongly: flamboyant dresser with a flair for jewelry; philandering epicure; fallacious upholder of the unjust end of the status quo.

“Service,” children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman said, “is the rent we pay for the space we occupy.” The quote is a favorite of Kilpatrick’s, one he frequently tosses into speeches. (It is not so ironic from Kilpatrick’s lips if the pronouns are changed, and the mayor’s enormous physical presence considered.) The canonized formulation of the modern social justice movement that more thoroughly damns the Detroit mayor comes from Martin Luther King, and does not need such an ironic twisting: “An injustice against one is an injustice against all.”