Detroit – To be a Kilpatrick or a Conyers was once political gold in Detroit. “The Detroit Kennedys,” some called them. Reference their legacy on your application and you were all but guaranteed admittance to public office. But the young scions have brought shame to the family crest. Suddenly, the Kilpatrick and Conyers names are radioactive — and, in a remarkable twist of fate, the political careers of the family elders are now in peril.
In 2002, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick rode the coattails of his mother, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, and his politically connected father, Bernard, to become, at age 31, Detroit’s youngest mayor. Self sure and media savvy, Kwame’s tumultuous two terms attracted plenty of charges of political corruption. But c’mon, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
Only when Kilpatrick was caught in text messages negotiating a multimillion-dollar, city-financed payoff to cover up a sex scandal did the wheels come off. Kwame became a national embarrassment, a pariah at the 2008 Democratic Convention, and very nearly deep-sixed his mother’s re-election last fall (she won with 39 percent, only because two challengers split the rest of the vote). Now, with 2010 looming, a mere 27 percent of voters in her Detroit district want her re-elected.
Rep. John Conyers has reason to be nervous, too. A fixture in Congress for four decades, the 80-year-old has maintained office in recent years with nary a challenger. On name recognition alone, his wife, Monica Conyers — 36 years his junior — was elected to the Detroit City Council in 2005. Like Kwame Kilpatrick, she navigated her office as if there were no guardrails and ultimately ran off the road this year when the FBI caught her on tape taking a $6,000 bribe from a city contractor. Naturally, Big John professed ignorance of the extra cash showing up in the family bank account, and has also denied that his flip-flop on approving a waste-disposal contract had anything to do with another alleged bribe (this one worth $10,000) his wife took from a contractor. But the news has planted seeds of doubt, and in a Detroit Free Press poll this past weekend, an unheard-of 44 percent of Detroit voters said they would consider someone else as their Washington representative.
If all this family intrigue makes Republicans salivate, it shouldn’t. Republicans are so scarce in Detroit’s heavily black districts that next year’s August Democratic primary is the de facto fall election. But if Detroit is ever to rinse out its culture of political corruption, flushing a Kilpatrick or a Conyers would be a good start.
– Henry Payne is a writer and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News.