A few months ago, I was talking to Geoffrey Fieger, who has been Michigan’s best -known attorney ever since he took on the medical establishment by representing Jack Kevorkian, the zany pathologist who made physician-assisted suicide a national issue and gave reporters their best story in years.
I covered that story for a variety of national media, and saw very clearly that the press largely got it wrong. Kevorkian was indeed on to something; modern medicine had made it possible to prolong existence long after people had lost any quality of life; many were in living hell, and wanted to die.
Most people middle-aged or older had seen this, and were hugely sympathetic to the idea of a doctor who would help these folks painlessly end their suffering. That’s why they acquitted Kevorkian in high-profile trial after trial.
In the end, the prosecutors gave up, and for a time Kevorkian and Fieger had made physician-assisted suicide as practiced by Jack Kevorkian, de facto legal in Michigan.
That wasn’t the entire story, however. Kevorkian’s acquittals were all due, at least in part, to skillful manipulation of the juries by Fieger, who arranged for them to see a Jack Kevorkian who looked like a kindly elderly and caring physician in his trademark blue sweater. That was somewhat true.
But the real Kevorkian was not warm and fuzzy; he was essentially a (somewhat mad) scientist who saw us all as walking organ farms for transplants in the future. He didn’t like suffering, though he cared about humanity more in the abstract.
He was also given to screaming, fits of temper and wacky ideas, like coming to court dressed like Thomas Jefferson in order to show that we all have the right to be free, etc.
Eventually, Kevorkian did himself in, along with the movement he founded. He always had a deep self-destructive impulse, and he finally managed to act it out. He fired Fieger, ratcheted things up from assisted suicide to euthanasia, showed it on 60 Minutes, and dared (forced) the authorities to charge him. He got himself convicted of second-degree murder, went off to prison. By the time he got out in 2007, he had been largely forgotten; he lived quietly and died four years later.
Geoffrey Fieger was somewhat saddened by all this. While he certainly didn’t mind the publicity the assisted suicide cases brought him, he actually cared about Kevorkian,
Fieger also cares deeply, believe it or not, about this country. Enraged by what John Engler was doing to the social safety net, he ran against him for governor in 1998. Fieger beat the establishment Democrats’ choice in the primary, but badly lost the general election. This was largely because he was seen as too brash, too identified with the assisted suicide issue, and had never run a campaign before.
Plus, the economy was pretty good then, and Michigan voters haven’t tossed out an incumbent governor since old George Romney narrowly defeated John Swainson in 1962.
However – that was then and this is now. In the last two decades, Fieger has cemented his reputation as one of the nation’s top trial lawyers; fended off a politically motivated attempt to get him disbarred and ruined, and adopted, with his wife Keenie, three wonderful kids and mellowed a bit.
Make that, a tiny bit.
Today, he sees politics largely as a spectator sport – and like most of thinking America, is appalled by the spectacle. Months ago, he told me that he was thinking of maybe running for President. “I’ve got a great slogan,” he told me:
Fieger: A Clear Vision for 2020
Not bad, not bad.
When he first told me about the idea, I thought it was a little absurd. True, he has built a small law firm left him by his father into a sprawling complex (aka the Fiegerdome) that stretches for an entire block along Ten Mile in Southfield.
True, he is used to making high-pressure decisions, and running a large staff. That’s very much like Donald Trump’s resume, except Fieger has never gone bankrupt.
The attorney also reads books, thinks deeply about events, and sometimes takes advice from the experts, something that Trump has been notoriously unwilling to do.
More importantly, Fieger has good values. His late father Bernie used to go down to Mississippi to register people to vote back when that could mean a death sentence.
Whether he could win is another question, though I would willingly pay real money to see a debate between Trump and Fieger; it would be a version of Terminator meets Terminator II, the new version with a heart and brains.
Alas, it turns out that Geoffrey Fieger is too sane to try and run for President, and has no desire to “put up with all the stuff you have to do to get there.” Then again… he likes running his empire, and while he didn’t say so, I have a feeling taking the Oval Office job might, for him, be a pay cut.
But I think whoever the Democrats do run might be able to learn something from Fieger’s in-your-face style. Years ago, he told me that “Democrats need a ‘toxic liberal,’ like me.”
What he meant was defiantly outspoken, which he certainly is. Democrats might also consider someone who won’t soon need a walker. Were he to run and win, Geoffrey Fieger would be 70 years old when he took the oath of office.
But that would count as almost callow youth, compared to Bernie Sanders (79) Joe Biden (78) Elizabeth Warren (71) or the orange man, who will be 74 at the end of this term.
Let’s hope somebody has a clear vision and can communicate it, before we are all destroyed.
***
El-Sayed, trying to stay relevant: Abdul El-Sayed, a politician with more charisma than experience, ran a vigorous campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor this year, capturing the attention of the national media, which were entranced by the idea of his becoming the nation’s first Muslim governor.
Those who knew anything about the state’s politics knew, however, that he never had a chance. He surged a bit at the end, helped by Shri Thanedar’s political collapse and vigorous support from Bernie Sanders, and managed to finish a weak second.
Still, despite raising millions, he lost every county in the state. He’s not going away quietly, though; he announced he is founding a Political Action Committee called Southpaw Michigan, which is designed to work for and “offer monetary support to those (candidates) that represent its (progressive values.)
This is politically shrewd, and a version of what Richard Nixon successfully did after he suffered defeats and was trying to put together a collection of office holders who would owe him.
The question is this: What will El-Sayed run for next? My guess is that even he doesn’t know yet, but it will be something, and soon.
