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?

Apparently Walter Russell Mead calls himself a Democrat, so I don't think he is practicing partisan politics here. However, this situation is so complicated, that looking at it through party politics doesn't help much, IMO. For instance, it is an over-simplification to think that the plight of Detroit has only to do with decisions made within the city or the state legislature. The suburbs that surround Detroit have also had a significant impact on what has transpired.

The second factor is more disturbing: there is a pervasive national sense of ennui and despair about urban areas in which African Americans are the majority. ‘We’ expect decline, decay and corruption in these places, so the Kilpatrick story strikes many editors and journalists as just another ‘dog bites man’ story: not news.

This much is true. IMO liberals do black Americans a serious disfavor with their reluctance to loudly criticize irresponsible leaders of black cities. They vote for policies intended to improve the lives of urban black Americans, but don't speak out loudly enough when their efforts are hijacked and squandered. The reason is simple, -it's a major liberal voting block. But, on the other hand, conservatives have not been always eager to embrace and support those responsible leaders of black cities and to help them succeed.