Jack Lessenberry: Redistricting's musical chairs

Jack Lessenberry

October 16, 2011

By Jack Lessenberry, Columnist ---- The Record Eagle Tue Feb 21, 2012, 12:41 PM EST

ROYAL OAK — When Gary Peters runs for re-election to Congress next year, there's one vote he apparently has no chance of getting, either in the primary or the general election.

His own.

That's because he doesn't live in Michigan's new 14th District.

Thanks to creative redistricting on the part of the Republicans who control the Michigan Legislature, his house falls outside one of the most oddly gerrymandered congressional districts in state history.

And he doesn't plan to move, at least not before the election.

"My daughter will be a senior in high school next year," and, as a considerate dad, he doesn't want to force her to change schools.

Cynics might say that the two-term congressman also may want to see if he is going to win before he gives up his house.

Legally, there is no requirement that any congressman live in the district he or she represents, and the man who is likely to be Peters' main opponent in this race is another Democratic congressman named Hansen Clarke.

He doesn't live here either.

The only one who does live in the district currently is longtime Congressman John Conyers, and he isn't running here.

He's running in a completely different district where he doesn't live, either.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy, musical chairs world of redistricted Michigan politics.

The state is losing a seat in Congress next year, and the Republicans who control the Legislature want to make sure the congressman who loses his job is a Democrat.

To achieve that, they threw Peters into a district with U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, who has been a fixture in state politics since the 1960s, and has served in the House for 30 years.

Since the new district was mostly Levin's old turf, the younger man's chance of winning was somewhere between very slim and none.

But the 14th District was something else again, "in some ways, more like a microcosm of the state itself," he said over coffee in Royal Oak, a community he represents now, but won't next time.

Indeed, the district snakes through odd combinations of neighborhoods in both Wayne and Oakland counties.

It includes grim slums on the east side of Detroit and the multimillion dollar mansions of the Grosse Pointes; Hispanic southwest Detroit; white suburbanites in Farmington Hills; black suburbanites in Southfield, and Jewish ones in West Bloomfield.

Plus, a few affluent, semi-rural places like Sylvan Lake.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has long been interpreted to mean that the state needs to maintain two districts with African-American majorities.

The 14th qualifies -- barely -- with about 55 percent.

That would seem to make Peters an underdog. But blacks tend to vote less frequently than whites.

Some other black candidates, including Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence, could yet get in the race, which could help him.

On the other hand, Hansen Clarke spans the rainbow.

He is multiracial (his father was from what is now Bangladesh), charismatic and appealing, and is married to an adopted Korean orphan who was raised by a Roman Catholic mother and a Jewish father.

Peters says this is not about ethnicity: "I intend to get at least 51 percent in (the) Detroit (portion of the district)" but about who can do the most for the economy.

He touts his role in the recent fight to save funding for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which Speaker of the House John Boehner wanted to kill.

He said that one of the most bone-chilling moments of his life came in the boardroom at Chrysler while the government was debating the bailout.

Bob Nardelli, who was then the automaker's chairman, "said he was only weeks away from closing down and liquidating the company. I saw visible fear on his executives' faces."

That helped push the congressman to work hard to save the automakers.

On paper, the 52-year-old's pedigree would seem more likely to belong to a Republican. An Episcopalian who lives in affluent Bloomfield Hills, he has an MBA and a law degree, and was a Naval Reserve officer and a vice president of Merrill Lynch before being elected to the state Senate in 1994.

Though not a great speaker, he has become a skilled campaigner, narrowly surviving last year's GOP "tsunami," as he put it, beating a challenger by barely 6,000 votes.

Two years earlier, he had decisively beaten a longtime GOP incumbent in a seat the party had held since the 19th century.

This was a dramatic turnaround from 2002, when Peters lost a race for attorney general after a fumbling, bumbling campaign.

This contest is likely to be the hottest race in Michigan next year -- and will essentially be decided in the primary; the district is regarded as safe Democratic.

The irony is that the two candidates are, by, far, the youngest and most vibrant members of their party's delegation.

All the remaining Democratic congressmen are in their eighties.

But that's how the redistricting game is played.

Jack Lessenberry's email address is bucca@aol.com.