Downtown Detroit isn't exactly the "apocalyptic hellhole" of crime some suspect, but there's still a lot of work to do in Detroit on crime. Unfortunately, the city has had to lay off 150 police officers, not to mention 65 firefighters and 10 battalion chiefs. Detroit has a $300 million budget deficit and the state may have to take over its financial management. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's conduct during his first term has been a frequent source of embarrassment to the city, from his cookie jar raids to a city-produced cable TV attack segment on a TV reporter who got the Mayor's goat. So now, fittingly enough, some of Kilpatrick's supporters - while declining to sing the praises of his casino tax and junk food tax fiscal vision - ARE mounting a vile race-based strategy, emphasizing that his general election challenger Freman Hendrix isn't black enough.

Some Kilpatrick supporters portray Hendrix as a pawn of white suburbia. On blogs and radio shows, they've referred to Hendrix as "Helmut," the first name given him by his white, Austrian-born mother. (His father was an African American who met his mother during World War II.) In recent weeks, an e-mail circulating in Detroit calls Hendrix a tool of the "anti-black-empowerment, Uncle Tom Dennis Archer administration." The e-mail, from the Black Slate, the political arm of Detroit's Shrine of the Black Madonna church, asks for volunteers to work for Kilpatrick's campaign. It claims that Detroit's white voters are "controlling the vote" by backing Hendrix.

The first line of the e-mail pronounces, "Brothers and sisters, WE ARE AT WAR." The e-mail became an electronic chain letter, passed around and posted on several Web sites.

....Ron Hewitt, director of the Black Slate, acknowledged that the group sent the recent e-mail attacking Hendrix. The issues it raised are fair game, he said. "I don't see anything all that inflammatory about it. It's campaign rhetoric," said Hewitt, a former appointee under Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young.

Former Deputy Mayor Hendrix projects a sober, focused and capable image, key for private-sector investors in the city's future. He wants to focus on reducing crime, trimming bureaucracy and fostering economic development. Kilpatrick includes such goals high up in his hoped-for second-term agenda, too. But Freeman is the better choice by far, as both The Teamsters and the Detroit News have already concluded.

TECHNORATI TAGS: DETROIT, MAYORAL RACE, POLITICS

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 14, 2005 12:10 PM