With just nine days until the filing deadline, Mayor Dave Bing is getting a lot of advice on whether he should run for a second term.
And it’s mostly unenthusiastic, negative and framed with the assumption that Bing, 69, will retire.
Bing, at this point, “is a chicken running around with its head cut off,” wrote Aaron Foley on Jalopnik Detroit.
“I still think the odds are that he won’t run. Nor, frankly, should he,” Jack Lessenberry wrote this week in the Toledo Blade.
Charlie LeDuff, on the Fox 2 website, calls Bing “Do-Nothing-Dave, “ and says that when Bing recently complained that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr wasn’t listening to him, “he sounded as shrill as Reese Witherspoon at a traffic stop.”
The tone has been significantly less lacerating at the two Detroit newspapers. In fact, in Sunday's edition, Stephen Henderson, who runs the Free Press editorial page, writes he believes Bing should run again and provides a list of his accomplishments, including his persuading cantankerous City Council members to support the Cobo Hall regional authority and a regional oversight structure for the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, and his work with the city’s legislative delegation to support the Regional Transit Authority and a lighting authority.
(Henderson makes it clear he is not endorsing the mayor.)
Detroit voters at this point appear to have had enough of Bing. Perhaps the worst news for Bing lately were the results of the most recent mayoral poll of likely voters. He finished with just 11 percent, far behind frontrunners Mike Duggan and Bennie Napoleon. Bing’s score, which is similar to his standing in earlier polls, is abysmal for an incumbent.
Lessenberry, a veteran Detroit journalist who writes about Michigan issues for the Blade, noted a detail about Bing that has been evident from his first days in office: He is tone deaf when it comes to politics.
That’s not surprising for someone who had never held political office and rarely voted in local elections before he became mayor. Local elections, that is, in his hometown of suburban Franklin, where he lived in a gated community.
Other big-city bosses, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have trasnitioned seamlessly from the tidier world of business.
When he last talked to Bing, Lessenberry wrote, he asked the mayor where he liked to eat. “Troy,” Bing answered. And he asked Bing, a sharp dresser, where he bought his clothes. “Windsor,” Bing replied.
Wrote Lessenberry: “When a mayor of Detroit is happy to tell a reporter that he eats in the suburbs and buys his clothes in another country, it doesn’t seem too farfetched to conclude that he isn’t running for re-election.”
The headline on Lesseberry’s column said: “The job of mayor of Detroit no longer seems to suit Bing.”
While Bing has stumbled frequently in office, he always could fall back on his integrity and the notion that his clean administration represented a 180-degree turnabout from the remarkable corruption of his predecessor, Kwame Kilpatrick.
But even that concept suffered a hit last week when LeDuff reported that the Bing administration appears to have looked the other way as Emmett Moten, a close Bing friend and political ally, fell behind on a nearly $19 million loan to redevelop the Hotel Fort Shelby, leaving taxpayers to make the payments that Moten has been unable to make.
In recent weeks, Bing had made a favorable impression among observers for his willingness to buck opposition in Detroit's political establishment to the emergency manager and repeatedly emphasize the need to cooperate.
Then, as LeDuff noted in his column, the mayor suddenly flip-flopped and complained in an interview with the Free Press that Orr – whose powers supersede those of Bing and the city council -- spends an inordinate amount of time with Lansing officials, ignores Bing and his aides and is moving too slowly.
Foley, at Detroit Jalopnik, ridiculed Bing for talking to the paper and not saying anything newsworthy, other than complaining about his boss. "This was just another opportunity to say, 'hey, I'm still here!'" the blogger wrote.
Whining is a default position for Bing. For four years he has talked about the difficulty of the mayor’s job, though while campaigning in 2009, he repeatedly expressed confidence he could find creative ways to repair the broken city.
“It can be fixed over time,” he said when he ran for mayor. “We are going to get the job done.”
When Bing, who will turn 70 Nov. 24, pulled the nominating petitions late last month, he did not sound like someone who was chomping at the bit for four more years, particularly when that would include taking orders from Orr for at least the first year of that term, if not more. He talked about how he wanted to get his life back.
“I have not been able to enjoy myself for the past four years because of the circumstances,” Bing said.
Those were circumstances he could have perceived in 2009, and they are circumstances that have only grown worse in 2013.
Bottom line: Bing acts like someone who will be only too happy to hit Eight Mile Dec. 31, when his term, at last, comes to an end.
