San Francisco is run by Democrats, too. My point is that corruption is about the people, not the party. For every Jim Jeffords in Congress, there is a Tom Delay, too.

Kilpatrick dubbed himself the "Hip Hop Mayor". One only need listen to 15-20 seconds of an average Hip Hop song to know that you don't want a Hip Hop mayor under any circumstances (I don't think he was thinking of The Roots when he coined the term; I'm thinking more "boom, boom, get the money; dolla dolla bill, ya'll"). There are rumors that he facilitated drug running, too. The only consolation is that he's going back to jail soon (he's being tried on under the federal RICO law), and hopefully he'll stay there a while.

I don't think that corruptions and party are correlated in any meaningful way, but I get his point about liberal leadership when a law-and-order, fiscal conservative would be good for the city, IMO. Obama won 96% of the vote in '08 in Detroit, so a Republican Mayor is not going to happen (really, we should be saying liberal/conservative, because our municipal elections are non-partisan). Bing is a closet Republican, but he can't operate as such, because he would get lynched (poor word choice?) for doing so. He has changed his tune recently, because people thought he was cooperating with the (GOP) Governor too much.

Gimme 10 years; I'll be the new mayor, the first white mayor in more than half a century. We live in a post-racial world, right?