You've had a lot of fun . . . you've had an opportunity to attack me and I think I've given as good as I've taken. I leave you gentlemen now. . . . But as I leave you, I want you to know, think how much you'll miss me because you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Gentlemen, this is my last press conference. -- Richard Nixon, 1962
Former mayoral candidate Mike Duggan sounded eerily Nixonian Wednesday morning as he began his news conference announcing his withdrawal from the Detroit mayoral race.
“We've had an awfully lot of fun and you guys in the media are probably going to miss me,” Duggan told his assembled supporters and media.
Duggan didn’t quite lash out like Nixon did at his infamous “last press conference,” but disappointment bitterly bubbled to the surface at moments.
“Tom Barrow’s ambition in life is to be mayor of the city of Detroit,” Duggan said about his former political opponent and legal nemesis. “Letting the voters make the decision hasn’t worked out for him.”
Duggan’s acrimony toward Barrow, a political gadfly and convicted tax cheat, ignores that his own campaign still had one more opportunity to get back on the ballot — an appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. He threw in the towel because, he claims, even if he won, “the political damage has been done.” [Editor's note: Barrow responds to the tax case reference in a comment below this article.]
Just last week, Duggan invoked Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s legal fights for ballot access. Clearly, those battles didn’t cause excessive political damage.
One can’t help wonder if Duggan had begun to believe his own PR. Did he think his mayoral run was a fait accompli; that he was the Churchillian indispensable man so many in the chattering class claimed? Did his time in the DMC executive suite lead him to believe he was now above the gritty parts of this politics business?
Better question: If he couldn’t handle a fringe candidate’s legal challenge — one upheld by two courts — how would he manage the far greater challenges of running a city as troubled as Detroit?
Power Without Glory Is Fleeting
"First-generation millionaires tend to give us libraries,” Garry Wills wrote in his political opus Nixon Agonistes. “The second and third generations think they should give us themselves. Naturally, some people want to look this gift horse in the mouth -- which may be the reason [Nelson] Rockefeller keeps his teeth on display."
No one will ever confuse Mike Duggan with Nelson Rockefeller, but as with millionaires, so too with political families.
His father, Patrick Duggan,was content, through his largely anonymous service on the Wayne County Circuit and U.S. District benches, to leave us a veritable library of legal rulings.
Mike Duggan, wanted to give us Mike Duggan. To believe the official biography, this metro Detroit would be the eighth circle of hell without the junior Duggan. He was then-Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara’s right hand. He fixed SMART. He rescued entire neighborhoods from the scourge of blight during his not-quite-full term as county prosecutor. Then he saved the Detroit Medical Center from implosion. But no one erects statues of hospital administrators in Grand Circus Park.
Duggan’s next act, riding to Detroit’s rescue as the mayor who would deliver the city from the clutches of emergency managers, was to be his shot at the brass ring.
The problem is one simply doesn’t don the proverbial white hat after a career as the power politics operator.
Nixon, desperate for the Eisenhower’s approval, readily volunteered to do the general’s political dirty work during Ike’s eight years in the White House. Nixon could never shake the Tricky Dick image. Despite numerous iterations of the “New Nixon,” he never really changed and it was only when the country sought a Machiavellian figure, did he finally get to the White House.
Similarly, Duggan spent more than a decade trying to shed the guy-behind-the-guy persona and create a "New Duggan" image.
His “I like Mike” slogan cast Duggan as an Eisenhower-like statesman rather than a Nixon-like political animal. Maybe, unlike Nixon, he became a New Duggan and in the process maybe he lost some of his edge.
It’s hard to imagine eligibility issues tripping up Nixon — third-rate burglaries and taping systems are another matter. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine technical details stopping Mike Duggan circa 1997.
Ironically, what the aspiring statesman Mike Duggan needed was a political operator Mike Duggan. If he had that guy, if he was still that guy, he’d likely still be a mayoral candidate.
Actually, that’s but one of many ironies that are almost too numerous to list. Let’s try anyway.
Another CEO-As-Mayor Bites The Dust
Here was a candidate who billed himself as the ultimate turnaround guy, someone who could deliver on Dave Bing’s promise of a CEO-as-mayor righting the ship. Despite the image of a competent administrator who builds a-list teams of subordinates, Duggan’s campaign never anticipated this ballot access issue.
Had Duggan held his campaign paperwork two more weeks, had he just left it on his desk and took a nice vacation, he'd still be presumptive front-runner. Instead, he couldn’t even survive the campaign’s prologue.
The son of an-ex GOP Wayne County Circuit judge was bounced from the ballot by Lita Popke, a John Engler-appointed Wayne County Circuit judge. GOP-appointed Appeals Court judges affirmed Popke’s decision.
That’s doubly ironic because, though he’s long been a Democrat, Duggan was embraced by the Republican-leaning business community like no other mayoral candidate in recent memory. Barrow and the left-wing activist class viewed Duggan as a suburban interloper and tool of corporate/downtown interests. Yet the sort of judges usually considered pro-business ruled against this dream candidate of the Babbitts.
The Election Law Butterfly Effect
Here's the most delicious irony of all and telling example of Detroit's political schizophrenia: The court’s narrow interpretation of Detroit’s charter, to bump a white establishment candidate off the ballot, is a departure from historic precedents that directed election laws to be applied broadly to ensure greater access and participation, something that usually impacts minority voters negatively.
The consequences of this fight go far beyond who gets to sharpen Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s pencils in 2014.
By refusing to even make his case to the Supreme Court, Duggan’s concession lays the foundation for very new application election law in Michigan.
Black and brown citizens improperly purged from the voting rolls? Golly, that’s too bad but you have to be on the qualified voter list to cast a ballot. Rules must be interpreted narrowly around here.
Ok, that example may be a little simple. However, election experts like Wayne State Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson kept saying throughout this thing that these rules are weighed broadly to favor greater participation. It’s hard to imagine this conclusion won’t aid efforts seeking more narrow legal interpretations that will effect future elections in ways we can’t foresee today.
It’s rare for right-wing and left-wing ideological interests to align so perfectly, but that’s what happened here.
Conservatives get an access-restricting precedent that interprets Michigan election law narrowly and to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law. The right, with its great faith in the economic notion that things work out in the long run, received a precedent that may benefit their electoral struggle with shifting demographics over the long run.
Detroit’s black nationalists and left-wingers got to 86 the supposed suburban interloper threatening the natural order of Detroit’s black political power structure. The left, generally more comfortable with the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes, happily takes the victory in the short run because, as Keynes once quipped, in the long run we’re all dead anyway.
Given the potential impact on election law and voting rights, Duggan’s expedient retreat looks even more cowardly.
You almost have to compare Duggan to Nixon because, in the face of adversity, he was no JFK-like Profile In Courage, standing on righteous principle come hell or high water.
Our Short, Municipal Nightmare Is Over
So the battle for the Manoogian Mansion will go on without Duggan. History will remember his campaign, if it remembers his campaign, as a sideshow.
In a sense, the mayoral contest begins for real Thursday.
As much as we may wish to diminish this race because of Kevyn Orr’s presence (see above comment about sharpening pencils), how the next mayor and city council reassume control of city administration is critical.
Elected leadership will ultimately determine if whatever restructuring begins under the EM leads to the kind of resurgence Washington, D.C., experienced post-Control Board, or if Detroit will join companies like U.S. Air on the conveyor belt of perpetual bankruptcy.
The remaining candidates, Benny Napoleon, Krystal Crittendon, Lisa Howze, Tom Barrow, and Fred Durhal, have just a few weeks to distinguish themselves without the luxury of running against a presumptive front-runner anointed by Detroit’s leadership class.
In other words, they don’t have Duggan to kick around anymore.
