If there remain any doubts about Mike Duggan's skills at political messaging, those doubts should be immediately quashed after reading Rochelle Riley's profile of his wife, Lori Maher.
It's not that Maher's story required any spinning, she appears to be a devoted mother and wife who volunteers her time at a local school. Her story makes for good post-election feature copy, but Team Duggan really showed they're pros by handing Riley tears.
Detroit Free Press: Last June 18, when the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld a judge’s decision to throw Mike Duggan off the Detroit mayoral ballot, the candidate turned to his wife, Lori Maher, in the den of their Palmer Woods home and said: “We’re done.” She walked him out to the car. Hours later, she fell into a neighbor’s arms. “... who just held me, and I just sobbed. I felt like that scene from “When Harry Met Sally” and she’s crying into his shirt and wiping her nose.”
Two weeks later, Duggan prepared to announce from his headquarters that he would conduct a write-in candidacy for mayor. Back at home, the car wouldn’t start. “Everybody had already gone to work,” Maher recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t not go.’ So I called the purple cab company, and the nicest man came. I was crying again. You’d think I cried all the time.”
Maher doesn't cry all the time. She's an intelligent adult in control of her emotions. However, like most people faced with emotional stress, she broke down. Normal people, upon hearing that story, would conclude: Of course she cried, she's only human. But giving Rochelle Riley tears of is kind of like floating hanging curveballs past Miguel Cabrera, she won't miss. In fact, she devoted a good chunk of the column to Maher's tears and even worked in a tortured version of the tired, not-clever-to-begin-with "no crying in baseball" cliche.
Crying is like a waterfall flowing from one's soul. Or something.
