Report: Detroit mayor’s lawyers offered plea deal

COREY WILLIAMS (AP)

- Lawyers for Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick have proposed a deal in which he would resign, plead guilty to two felonies, make restitution and serve five years’ probation in exchange for avoiding jail time, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Detroit Free Press quoted “a source familiar with all aspects of the negotiations” as saying Kilpatrick’s legal team also said he would give up his law license, not run for office for two years and do 300 hours of community service.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy hadn’t yet accepted the offer, the newspaper said.

A person briefed on the talks told The Associated Press on Sunday that the prosecutor’s office would not agree to any type of plea that doesn’t involve jail time. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of not wanting to publicly reveal specifics of the talks.

One Kilpatrick lawyer, James Thomas, told AP on Sunday morning that he had been out of town for a few days and was unaware of the plea deal proposal. He said that even if he had been aware of it he couldn’t comment on it.

Kilpatrick, 38 and in his second four-year term as mayor, is charged with 10 felonies in two cases. He also faces removal proceedings set to begin Wednesday before Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

The newspaper said Kilpatrick would not step down until the sentencing date to allow for a transfer of office and relocation of his family from the official mayoral residence. He also would turn over his state pension to the city; Kilpatrick is a former member of the state House, where he was leader of the Democratic minority. It said he also would pay at least $100,000 in restitution.

The newspaper said that in a letter to Worthy, Kilpatrick’s lawyers proposed having a neutral “legal statesman” assess the offer. It didn’t identity the lawyers.

On Tuesday, Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Ziolkowski is expected to decide whether to grant Kilpatrick’s request to postpone the hearing before Granholm.

The Detroit City Council is asking Granholm to use her constitutional power to remove Kilpatrick from office. It says the mayor misled council members into approving an $8.4 million settlement with fired police officers in a whistle-blowers’ lawsuit. The council says it didn’t know the deal included provisions to keep a cover on romantic text messages between Kilpatrick and his top aide.

Kilpatrick also would be forced from office if convicted of a felony in either of the two criminal cases.

In the first case, he and ex-top aide Christine Beatty are charged with perjury, conspiracy, misconduct and obstruction of justice. They are accused of lying during the 2007 whistle-blowers’ trial about having an extramarital affair and their roles in the firing of a deputy police chief.

Text messages from Beatty’s city-issued pager contradicted their testimony.

The other charges against the mayor stem from a confrontation in July. A sheriff’s detective says Kilpatrick shoved him into another investigator as they were attempting to serve a subpoena on a friend of the mayor for the perjury case.

NAACP board approves contract for new president

AP

- The NAACP’s national board of directors has approved a three-year contract for new president Ben Jealous, the youngest leader in the civil rights organization’s history.

The board voted 35-2, with one abstention, to approve the contract Saturday. Chairman Julian Bond says the two dissenting votes were protesting procedure, not 35-year-old Jealous.

The contract takes effect Sept. 15. Jealous, who was elected in May, will attend his first board meeting as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Baltimore on Oct. 18.

Jealous takes over from interim President Dennis Hayes, who has been leading the group since Bruce Gordon left in March 2007 after clashing with the board.

Party tickets bring American experiences to fore

TED ANTHONY (AP)

- An Irish Catholic guy from a coal town who rides Amtrak home from work each night. A “hockey mom” of five who served on the PTA. A 72-year-old Vietnam vet. A biracial kid with a stepfather and a history of moving around.

Sounds like the ideal focus-grouped audience for a campaign’s town hall meeting. But this is something very different: It’s America as reflected in the 2008 presidential tickets.

Both parties say they want to appeal to “regular Americans,” to steamroll the Washington-insider mentality that doesn’t understand the average Joe and Jane. While that hasn’t happened yet, it’s clear that the four candidates for the nation’s two highest offices look a lot like America — more so than any competing presidential tickets in history.

With Republican John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a woman joins a black man and two senior citizens on the major-party tickets to make one thing certain: For the first time in the history of the republic, there is no chance that either the president or the vice president will be a middle-aged white guy.

These are some of the groups represented among these four candidates: War veterans. Working women. Seniors. Minorities. Christians. Americans who grew up overseas. Small-towners. Parents of young kids. Commuters. Children of divorce. Fishermen.

It’s a laundry list of the American experience, embodied in four people who wear very different political stripes.

Obviously, all four are professional politicians, so a great deal of self-identification is happening. The traits they choose to accentuate are just that — shrewd packaging decisions. None, for example, is struggling to get by.

But tales of personal experience always sell well in America, land of narratives, a fact that Barack Obama acknowledged Friday when he said that Palin “seems to have a compelling life story.” And the filaments linking these four candidates’ experiences to the people they would presume to govern seem much more durable than, say, the connection between John Adams and new Americans living in log cabins in the Cumberland Gap during the 1800 election.

With this group, the entry points just keep on coming. If you can’t identify with a weekend pickup-basketball player (Obama) or a man who has experienced deep personal misfortune (McCain, Biden), perhaps the anti-abortion parent of a Down syndrome child (Palin) links up with your personal experience.

“The parties are both working hard to reach out beyond their stables to offer more descriptive representation on the ticket than we’ve seen in a long time,” says Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University in New York.

Strategists, he says, struggle with this issue because they often find candidates “who are the best possible candidates but don’t really connect with the average American. And this year, it seems like they’re going for people who, for whatever reason, could make that kind of connection.”

Not that politicians haven’t tried before. But it can be dicey.

George W. Bush was cast as a small businessman, but he was part owner of a a business that wasn’t all that small — a major-league baseball team. Jimmy Carter may have been a peanut farmer, but he was also an established intellectual. Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton was more than the fries-scarfing average guy from Hope, Ark., and George H.W. Bush, try as he did, had trouble connecting with regular folks because he was perceived as a privileged easterner.

That instinct to connect is powerful. It taps into the modern American desire to see foibles and life obstacles in our candidates that mirror our lives. And today’s voters live more diverse lives, and come from more diverse backgrounds, than their countrymen of generations past.

Is it a sea change, though? Kenneth Long, a political scientist at St. Joseph College in Connecticut, is skeptical.

“I don’t think we’re going to go back to 1900 where everybody has to be white and male to run for national office,” he says. But “the fact that there are all these entry points to a candidate isn’t really a solution to the question, `Can I relate enough to that candidate?’”

Roger Nemeth, a demographer and sociologist at Hope College in Holland, Mich., sees hints of a changing America in the choices, which he says tap into “a demographic momentum.”

For example, he says, U.S. Census data last week predicted that by 2042, racial and ethnic minorities, if tallied together, will comprise a majority of the population. And that considers nothing about gender, life experiences or age, which is no small issue given the numbers of Baby Boomers poised to become senior citizens.

Additionally, Nemeth says, two major potential voting blocs, women and blacks, were disenfranchised for large chunks of the country’s history. Now, finally, the candidates are catching up.

“What I think you’re going to see in this election is a much more accurate reflection of the voting population, those who actually go out and vote, than perhaps any other time in America,” Nemeth says.

The buffet table of identification points surely makes things more complicated for political strategists, who must parse and interpret a multiplicity of potential voter behaviors.

Will McCain prevail because older Americans tend to vote more? Can Biden offset that? Will centrist supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton turn away from Obama because of the possibilities they see in Palin? Will voters in the two states not attached to the lower 48 show more passion this time around because they have dogs in the race?

Any of these possibilities could happen in 2008, the year America’s top political choices really started to look like America’s people.

Says Panagopoulos: “One way or another, we’re either going to have a president who grew up in Hawaii or a vice president who grew up in Alaska in the White House. How much broader can you get than that?”

Michelle Obama, a target of racism

Sarah Jacob, NDTV

- In Denver, at the National Convention of the Democrats, the challenge was to convince voters that the Obamas are a regular all-American family.

“He knows that thread that connects us, our belief in America’s promise, our commitment to our children’s future. He knows that the thread is strong enough to hold us together as one nation, even when we disagree,” said Michelle Obama, Barack Obama’s wife.

While the strategy was to use Michelle Obama to humanise the Democratic presidential nominee, the speech was also part of her own campaign to win America’s trust.

Being America’s first prospective black first lady, Michelle Obama has been the subject of countless columns and websites and jokes. Fox News dubbed her as Barack’s “baby mama”. It later had to apologise for referring to Michelle’s affectionate onstage fist bump with her husband as a “terrorist fist jab”.

“Michelle Obama unfortunately becomes a very easy target for white racists because she is a Black woman and the whole idea of the first lady is a white woman who is the mother of the country. Can a woman of color ever be the mother of the country?” said Prof Manning Marable, director of Institute for Research, African American Studies, Columbia University.

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Worthington district aims for dismissal in racial discrimination suit

PAMELA WILLIS, Columbus Local News

- A racial discrimination lawsuit against the Worthington City School District has been on the back burner since March, but no court date has been scheduled and district attorneys hope the suit will be dismissed.

The lawsuit was filed by former Worthington Kilbourne High School teacher Kathleen Sharp, who stated in her complaint, filed by lawyer William J. O’Malley, that she is black and “was discriminated against on the basis of race throughout much of the time she taught for the school district.”

More recently, former Thomas Worthington High School Dean Marilyn Hamilton, who also is black, lodged a “discrimination” complaint against the district in July after she was asked to step down from the dean’s position by new Principal Jim Gaskill.

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