Sunday, September 18, 2005

Debate was long on theatrics but short on leadership

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

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En garde.

The debate at the Detroit Economic Club was supposedly between mayoral combatants Freman Hendrix and Kwame Kilpatrick. By sunset, the venue had changed.

And after sunrise Friday (and before the noon TV news broadcasts), Oakland County's L. Brooks Patterson had drawn his electrified sword -- the microphone. Flanked by his two musketeers, the superintendents of Birmingham and Bloomfield school districts, he challenged the mayor to a virtual duel.

Forsooth: He demanded an apology from the Lord Mayor.

Patterson was "insulted." He was "outraged" by Kilpatrick's "irresponsible" remarks -- comments that had "impugned the reputations of two of our finest school districts" and the students therein.

Oh, sure, he was correct about the insult: Kilpatrick had laid aim at Patterson's territory. He had besmirched by name the reputations of not one but two of Oakland County's most hallowed and grassy suburbs in a hyperbolic jab at teenage drug use.

"But in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills and all these places they do more meth; they do more Ecstasy and they do more acid than all the schools in Detroit put together," the mayor had stated.

This is, when you think about it, a race- and class-baiting 21st century equivalent of, "Your mother wears army boots."

However the mayor meant it -- and his spokesperson insists he meant that statistics show that drugs are as problematic in the suburbs as in the city -- it injected an immediate jolt of Metro Detroit's time-tested political adrenalin.

It set off the Eight Mile alarm bells.

By Thursday night, the mayor, recognizing that he'd factually overstepped, issued a "clarification" that stirred things up even more.

What he'd meant to say, he said this time, was that children in Oakland County use drugs "just like in Detroit," language that was maddeningly imprecise.

After all, his original point was that certain drugs -- meth, acid, Ecstasy -- are more common in the suburbs than the city. And now he was saying that drugs are a problem for kids everywhere, in the same way.

Meanwhile, Patterson and Steve Gaynor, the Bloomfield Hills schools superintendent, and John Hoeffler, of Birmingham, argued that their suburbs had worked tirelessly, their students had volunteered "thousands of hours" in community service in the city of Detroit, only to be insulted.

Behind all the rhetoric about defending the honor of "the fine students of these suburbs" lurked the subtext of superiority.

We don't want a competition, they were saying, but if you want to get into it, we're ready to get into it.

Patterson said he demanded an apology because "the citizens of my county expect me to defend Oakland County."

Are we at war here?

Do we need the endless thrust-and-parry, the turf war as turn-on? Dueling over drug use statistics in the name of "our kids" is entertainment, not leadership.

Laura Berman's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Metro. Reach her at (248) 647-7221 or lberman@ detnews.com.