Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
{Thanks, AP}
During campaign 2008 as the nation prepared for the vice presidential debate between now Vice President Joe Biden, then U.S. Senator Joe Biden, and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska it was revealed that the debate moderator Gwen Ifill would be writing a book titled, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama”.
Ifill drew criticism for writing the book because of the perception that she’d therefore have a bias toward Obama and his running mate Joe Biden.
Ifill said then that the book would focus on a group of politicians not limited to Obama, but including other African-American politicians who had risen to power locally and nationally in cities and states across America.
If the book had written before the scandal involving former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick then his name would be among those who are celebrated as the new guard of political leaders. The fact is Kwame’s star has faded.
A few weeks ago I had a brief conversation with Johns Hopkins University political science professor Lester K. Spence who offered an interesting observation that Kilpatrick’s actions, and in some people’s eyes that of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon represented a failure by the majority black populations in some of America’s biggest cities to hold their political leaders accountable.
I don’t know how I feel about the good professor’s theory.
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