Gaffe shows neglect of urban issues
Most accounts regard the error as relative minor, which it probably was. But the target constituency including Detroit's mayor and this columnist, didn't think much of it.
Originally published in the Detroit Free Press
ROCHELLE RILEY: Gaffe shows neglect of urban issues
October 27, 2003
BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
It's bad enough that nine Democratic candidates came to one of the blackest cities in America and didn't focus on the issues vital to black America.
But the debate, which was supposed to focus on urban issues, gave one candidate, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, the chance to wrongly disparage its host city by announcing a monthly homicide rate that was off by 265 people.
It showed once again just how hard it is for urban centers such as Detroit to get national leaders to focus on what's real.
"I think it's horrible. I think not only was it grossly inaccurate, but he never really came back and cleaned it up, and then ended the debate with a message of despair," Mayor KwameKilpatrick said after the debate. "I think it's terrible for him to do that in a city that has to work for America to work."
Immediately after the gaffe, Kilpatrick left the auditorium and furiously sent aides backstage to dispute Kucinich's allegation that 300 people died on the streets of Detroit in September.
"Get to them. If not, tell Huel to do it," the mayor said. Minutes later, Fox 2 TV anchorman Huel Perkins, one of the panelists, challenged the figure, and Kucinich said he really meant 35.
Kucinich wasn't the only candidate who missed the point Sunday. The debate's big focus was Iraq and President George W. Bush'sfailings instead ofjoblessness, health care and education.
What the debate really needed was the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Not the aging icon with too much baggage to bear the standard now, but the younger presidential Jackson of the '84 and '88 campaigns who took America by storm and demanded that issues of concern to urban America be debated at the same level as foreign policy.
Without Jackson, Sunday night's debate was mostly a prolonged Bushwhacking.
"I'm tired of hearing about President Bush," Kilpatrick said after the first hour droned on with little discussion of domestic affairs. "With the level of experience they have, they can do better than this in getting to what people need to hear."
If Jackson had been there, his power would have been such that every answer to every question would have been about the impact on urban America.
If he had been there, he would not have been ignored for stretches at a time like Carol Moseley Braun and Jackson disciple Al Sharpton. And you really knew you needed Jackson when watching Sharpton, whose Courtney Love-like transformation from minor activist to national spokesman for black America, from derision to respect, has been nothing short of amazing.
Those who thought that Sharpton could fill Jackson's shoes may have been fooled. He had the moves and he had the jabs ("We're going to have a battle between the Christian Right and the right Christians," he said to cheers).
But Sharptonhas neither the pedigree, charisma, nor the civil rights record of Jackson. And he didn't focus attention on black America when it is, for the first time, not the nation's largest minority group.
Sharpton preached to a choir that needs a new song.
Nine candidates came to one of the blackest cities in America and none spoke directly to black voters until the end.
What does it mean that nine pretenders to the Oval Office offered few solutions in Motown, a struggling microcosm for everything that is wrong in America, but a symbol of how cities are coming back?
What Detroit got -- and the country watched -- was a debate made of Wonderbread, its slices no different from those at the last debate in Phoenix.
Sharpton is no Jesse Jackson. The other candidates are no Al Sharptons.
And urban America is still without a true candidate.
Subscribe to this blog's feed