Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's ending comments from his State of the City speech are the talk of the town. It's a good time to take a step back and make a broad assessment of what's happened.After his speech at the Democratic convention in 2000 his star was on the rise. As the youngest person ever elected as Detroit Mayor, Kilpatrick came into office with hope and optimism. His charisma and oratory skills shone through.
So what happened?
The answer is between him and his God. There very well may be a wide spread conspiracy afoot to take him down. The media bloodhounds may be out to get him. But the reality is that no matter how much he protests most of his most serious wounds are self inflicted.
I won't even touch the so-called text message scandal except to point out that the Mayor's response to Chief of Staff Beatty's alert that Gary Brown had been fired is very telling.
Since when does a Chief of Staff unilaterally fire a Deputy Police Chief without first discussing it with the Mayor and/or the Chief of Police?The published text messages reveal that Beatty received an anonymous memo indicating Brown was conducting a "secret" investigation of the Mayor. Excuse me, but isn't the Chief of Internal Affairs supposed to conduct "secret" investigations?
What did the memo actually say? Why did Beatty shred the memo without showing it to Kilpatrick or Chief Jerry Oliver? Why did Oliver say he knew nothing about the memo? How did Beatty determine so quickly that the memo had merit? Was there ever really a memo?
These are all questions about which we may never know the answers. What we do know is that if the Mayor had handled this initial crisis with more wisdom all of the other drama may have never played out.
But he didn't. Now the city is on the verge of losing a young visionary of seemingly limitless potential because he exercised extremely poor judgment and now he's left the city of Detroit in a lurch.
By American Black Journal producer Tony Mottley
1 comment:
I dislike the idea that Kilpatrick "squandered his potential." He certainly did squander a lot, millions of taxpayer dollars, his family, Detroit's reputation, etc.
But, what was his actual "potential"? For someone who had such persistent, serious problems with judgment, I think it's clear that his potential was quite limited.
It's not enough to be inspiring and enthusiastic and smart. One also has to be able to make the proper choices consistently. Kilpatrick didn't.
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