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George Will, who lives just outside Washington, D.C., can't vote for Mike Duggan next month -- but gives him a re-election boost that is the stuff of candidates's dreams.
The influential politics writer compares Detroit's leader to Fiorello LaGuardia, a three-term New York City mayor (1934-45) who "is acclaimed as one of the greatest mayors in American history," as Wikipedia puts it. LaGuardia ranks No.1 in "The American Mayor," a historian's 1993 book.
George Will: "Attention to the small stuff is having a huge payoff." (ABC News photo)
"In Duggan, Detroit has found its Fiorello La Guardia — a short, stocky, cheerful, plain-spoken incarnation of his city," Will writes in his syndicated column, published Saturday in The Washington Post and distributed to roughly 470 other newspapers.
And get this: The mayor, a Democrat (though the election is nonpartisan) is praised by a conservative columnist who ranks him alongside a legendary Republican. Sweet, right?
Will, writing from Detroit, has no doubt that that "the first white mayor here in 40 years will win a landslide reelection in a city that is 84 percent black."
The columnist, who has authored 14 books about politics and baseball (separately) and won a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, lists Duggan's achievements:
- "Drastically reduced" emergency response times.
- "Fully maintained" parks.
- "65,000 LED streetlights replaced the 40 percent of the city’s streetlights that were broken when he took office in 2014."
- "Demolishing 12,000 abandoned structures since 2014."
"Such granular attention to the small stuff is having a huge payoff," he writes. "Residential utility hookups are increasing. For the first time in his 59 years, the city is expected to grow."
The commentator admires Duggan's "candor about Detroit's past," as voiced in a Mackinac Policy Conference keynote address last spring that has been played 15,400 times on YouTube.
Will concludes the embrace by saying, less than five weeks before Election Day, that Mike Duggan "might be America's most accomplishing politician."
