SOUTHFIELD, MI – Yes, it may be true that politics seem weird these days; after all, nobody dreamed we’d ever have a serious Presidential candidate under indictment who had already been convicted of sexual assault. But don’t think the bizarre is all that new.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, Michigan witnessed a campaign like no other. Hours after his upset victory in the Democratic primary for governor, attorney Geoffrey Fieger said that he intended to run a high-minded campaign, “and therefore I will no longer mention that my opponent, Governor (John) Engler, is the product of miscegenation between humans and barnyard animals.”
You have to admit, not even Donald Trump has said that, at least not yet. Indeed, Fieger, the state’s best-known medical malpractice lawyer, stopped saying that in his speeches, so far as I remember. He did, however, say he would not accept that Engler was the real father of his triplet daughters “unless their diapers are taken off in public and they are found to have corkscrew tails.”
Nobody was very surprised when the governor declined to hold the usual televised debate with his challenger after that.
I had a front-row seat for all this: For years, I had covered Geoffrey Fieger in his role as lead attorney for Jack Kevorkian, the pathologist who launched a crusade for physician-assisted suicide. Fieger was a pugnacious and feisty advocate, and also the most brilliant courtroom attorney I’d ever seen.
Time and again prosecutors charged his client, who admitted breaking the law and helping suffering patients die. Time and again, juries would acquit him. Engler, a conservative Republican, denounced Kevorkian and urged stiffer penalties for what he did.
That didn’t work. But it did earn him Fieger’s contempt, who denounced him almost daily, referring to the governor as “a corn-fed bowser,” a “fat moron” and other generally unprintable things. Then, one day in 1997, he asked me what I thought of his running for governor.
I told him jokingly he should take whatever he wanted to spend on that, give it to me instead, and we’d both be better off. “You don’t think I can beat that fat idiot?” he said.
Well, frankly, I didn’t. Politics is an entirely different arena than the one he knew, and John Engler, who had never lost an election, was a master at it. But I didn’t tell Fieger that. Instead, I said, “You’d hate being governor. Do you know what the governor did today? He appointed people to the cosmetology and asparagus boards. Do you want to make appointments to the asparagus board?
“Hell, no,” he said. That’s what governors do, I explained.
Do you want to meet with some ladies’ society in Traverse City about state cherry week? His response was unprintable. I asked him if he thought he could live on a governor’s salary; he didn’t exactly live modestly. “Well, I’ll keep practicing law as governor,” he said.
I didn’t bother to argue. Most of the media regarded his campaign as a joke, but I thought from the start that he was very likely to win the Democratic primary. The party leadership and unions were pushing a Lansing-area lawyer named Larry Owen, who was little known and had less charisma. Also in the race was Doug Ross, a former state senator and intellectual policy wonk who, to put it mildly, lacked the common touch.
Geoffrey Fieger had enormous star power. He also spent lavishly — something like $6 million — of his own money on the primary campaign. When the votes rolled in, Owen had indeed won most Michigan counties, but they were largely small rural counties with few Democrats. Doug Ross was a distant third.
But Geoffrey Fieger rocked the vote in Metropolitan Detroit, where he was a media star, and that was enough to give him a 41 percent to 37 percent win. Democrats promised unity, and then largely vanished. They concentrated their efforts on their candidate for attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, who did narrowly win after questions were raised about her Republican opponent.
Meanwhile, the Fieger campaign lurched around, one day concentrating on yard signs and the next holding huge “Fieger Time!” rallies. It didn’t help when old stories surfaced in which he said that Jesus “was just some goofball who got himself nailed to the cross.”
On Election Day, however, Geoffrey Fieger won. Wayne County, that is, largely on the votes of Black Detroiters. But he lost every other county in the state, losing by 740,000 votes and getting less than 38 percent of the vote.
Following the election, he vanished for a week. When I later characterized his behavior as “sulking in his tent,” he angrily denied he was sulking. “But you disappeared and never conceded defeat.”
“Why would I concede to that fat nincompoop?” he said. I explained that’s how politics worked. His unprintable reply indicated he would never do that. “But you weren’t sulking?”
“NO!” he said. I decided to take his word for it. Geoffrey Fieger never ran for office again, though he flirted with the idea. He and his wife eventually adopted three children and sent them to a private Roman Catholic school. He was and is, indeed, many things.
And if he wasn’t a politician, he was, at the very least, never dull.
Clarification: My April 13 column quoted Leslie Love, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, as having said actor Hill Harper had never lived in Michigan. In fact, she says she does not know where he lives. Mr. Harper, an Iowa native who has not yet decided whether or not to run, did buy a mansion in Detroit in 2017, but also has an estate in Malibu.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
