L. Brooks Patterson, the flamboyant and profane Oakland County executive, is, almost certainly, dying.
Saying that is a big taboo. You are obliged, in polite society, to say everyone is hoping for a miracle recovery. Indeed, when he held a press conference to announce that he has inoperable, stage four pancreatic cancer, Patterson proclaimed that he intended to beat it.
That’s probably a healthy attitude. But the odds against his recovering are huge. His cancer is inoperable, and has evidently spread to other organs. Brooks – everyone always calls him Brooks – is 80, and has never fully recovered from the effects of a terrible car crash in 2012.
You might think his chances would be better if he stepped down from his duties to concentrate full-time on his treatment.
But as far as I can tell, his job is his life. Except for one four-year interval, he has been either county prosecutor or county executive since 1972. He has been in office longer than most people have been alive.
The conventional wisdom about Brooks is that he has delivered clean, honest government that has helped Oakland County flourish economically while avoiding the scandals that have plagued Macomb and especially Wayne.
That’s true enough – though in some ways, he was clearly out of touch; he probably knew less about millennials than marsupials, and literally thinks mass transit means adding another lane on I-75.
And he has been famous for clownish and sometimes churlish behavior, hard drinking of a kind that went out of style decades ago, and Detroit-bashing that had clear racist overtones, and persisted for years after his old nemesis, Mayor Coleman Young, had become bones in a box.
When he told the Detroit Free Press in 1975 that the solution was “to fence off Detroit, turn it into an Indian reservation and throw in the blankets and corn,” that was bad enough. When he repeated that word for word to the New Yorker magazine in 2014, it was a national embarrassment.
Vicki Barnett, a sensible businesswoman and former legislator without much of a campaign budget, held him to his smallest margin ever when he ran for reelection three years ago.
There was a feeling that this may have been L. Brooks’ last hurrah, even though I doubted that he could help himself from running again.
The odds are, sadly, that this won’t even be an option. But the question is – does he owe it to the citizens to step aside now? Being executive of Oakland County is essentially equivalent to being governor of a small state.
Can the county function without its top leader being fully healthy?
The answer is that Oakland County will probably be just fine. Patterson was a master at delegating duties to competent experts who know their jobs.
Gerald Poisson, his deputy, has likely been largely running things day to day; he did for weeks seven years ago, when Brooks was in a coma. Were Patterson to leave, one way or another, Democrats, who have a narrow one-seat majority on the county commission, might get into a war over whether Dave Woodward, the commission chair, or Andy Meisner, the treasurer, should be named as his interim replacement.
Years ago, over breakfast at an IHOP, Brooks and I talked about why he had failed to become governor or senator. “Timing is everything,’ he said.
Love him or hate him ,he was right about that.
