Kilpatrick Ain't Resigning.

Kwame Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty are supposed to be arraigned today on perjury charges. Yesterday, Kilpatrick said again that he wasn’t goin’ nowhere.

Depending on your perspective, dude is either standing strong or the perfect picture of obdurance. We’re trying to find a poll to see how much public support Kilpatrick has; Detroiters might have a different take on this whole thing than the press (at least judging from his raucous support during that State of the City speech).

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.
  • You want a Detroiter’s perspective? I’ll give it to you.

    Kwame is an EMBARRASSMENT. This mess has actually reached the BBC, which means the whole damn world knows our mayor not only can’t keep it in his pants, but doesn’t have the decency to admit that he was wrong and step down.

    Before I keep on, let me make one thing clear: Kwame’s philandering was no secret. Long before he was mayor, he was known to be out nearly every weekend with women who weren’t his wife going to restaurants and clubbing downtown. It was an open secret. After he became mayor he was able to do the same thing in other city’s on the tax payer’s dollar.

    Kwame is an embarrassment because he won’t step down. And more over, he’s an embarrassment because he’s STILL trying to play the race card (something his mentor Coleman Young was notorious for). This has nothing to do with race. He lied under oath and was caught. He’s trying to claim this is private when a memo HE sent out in 2001 to his staff stated, explicitly, that any electronic messages sent by over city-owned devices (computers, cell phones, two-way pagers) were to be considered public property and were to be open for public access.

    Now there are folks who still support him, just like there are folks who think that the People Mover is actually useful (it’s not), and that giving the Lions a brand new arena when they haven’t had a decent season in DECADES is a good idea (again, it’s not). The city is pretty well divided. Most of the unions that initially backed him have abandoned him (not just over this, but over the privatising of certain city programs that put unionised workers out of business), and it being that a large number of Detroiters are union workers, that’s a pretty healthy chunk of lost support.

    I just wish he would step down and face this as a private citizen so Detroit can move on. We’re going to be stuck in a holding pattern until either he does, or this is over. Either way, for a city that’s struggling to make ends meet, in a state that is so cash strapped that it’s prison officials chose to take major pay cuts over lay offs, this is bad going on worse. I can’t see too many major investors wanting to come and establish a presence in Detroit so long as this is going on.