L. Brooks Patterson was not, whatever you may have thought of him, Donald Trump. He was fiscally responsible, for one thing, and had a firm grasp of how government worked.
He hired good people and left them alone to do their jobs. He had a wicked sense of humor, and while it and he were frequently crude, he could actually laugh at himself.
Donald Trump is, alas, totally different. The only way in which he might be seen as superior to Brooks is that he apparently doesn’t drink. Patterson’s escapades with alcohol, while never fatal to anyone, were legendary, as in driving a county car on some railroad tracks back in the 1990s, tearing the bottom out of it, and then abandoning it and his passengers.
But in one way, Mr. T and Mr. P were the same – and in that way Brooks was a local forerunner of the man in the White House today: They both made racist appeals a main foundation of their political careers. Racism worked for them, and they kept using it.
Whether they themselves were racist in their hearts is completely irrelevant. Brooks Patterson burst on the scene as the lawyer for NAG, Irene McCabe’s anti-busing group in Pontiac. They would argue, of course, that they weren’t anti-black at all, just anti-busing.
That was, as everyone knew, bullshit.
Yes, there are plenty of reasons to think cross-district busing is not the best remedy for de facto school desegregation. But those who supported NAG weren’t interested in education policy. They didn’t want their kids going to school with blacks, who they seldom called blacks.
They tended to prefer a word starting with N, and it wasn’t Negro. Patterson parlayed that into winning election as Oakland County Prosecutor in 1972. Three years later, he was quoted as saying that Detroit should be turned into an Indian reservation, sealed off, “and we’ll throw in the blankets and corn. Forty years later, he proudly said the same thing when he was interviewed for a profile in the New Yorker, which was called “Drop Dead, Detroit!”
His bashing of first Coleman Young, and then of Detroit in general, was clearly politically motivated racism. Though he loved Oakland County, he – and that national January 2014 New Yorker article about him — helped give the nation a picture of it as an affluent cultural desert.
Personally, I always got along with Patterson, and on those infrequent occasions I talked with him he always complimented me on my knowledge of history and politics. He more than once gave me insights into elections, and once correctly predicted a sitting Republican U.S. Senator could lose at a time when everyone thought he would be re-elected.
He was often, well, sort of a pig. He introduced me once at a celebrity roast by saying that I was “living proof why cousins shouldn’t fuck,” which didn’t bother me.
It may, however, have bothered the women, children and grandmothers present, who then got to hear Oakland County’s leader unleash a torrent of masturbation jokes.
Some of the more honest obituaries have noted that he could, indeed, be racist and crude, though they tend to quickly snap back to praising his economic leadership.
Well, yes. He did an excellent job balancing the books and making the finances work in the present. But when it came to energy and sustainability, he was very much a man of 1959. He bragged that he loved urban sprawl and thought the key to any kind of transportation problem was to add another lane onto I-75 where it breezed through his county.
But he was somewhere behind the dinosaurs when it came to mass transit in virtually any form, the very idea of which he hated and helped to kill. L. Brooks Patterson is dead now, and his legacy has some proud and not-s0-proud moments. Nobody likes seeing someone larger than life leave the scene.
But he was a man of a successful past who did not have the tools to adapt to the present. Michigan’s richest county will soon have a new leader who isn’t him.
Let’s hope the voters choose wisely.
