Felony Charges Keep Obama Super Delegate From Convention

Detroit’s scandal-plagued mayor, a Barack Obama friend and super delegate, will not attend the Democratic convention after all because he has been charged with multiple crimes, has violated the terms of his bond in two separate felony cases and must remain within city limits attached to a monitor.

Up until last week, Detroit’s self-described “Hip-Hop Mayor” (Kwame Kilpatrick) assured that he would attend the Denver convention to support his good pal Obama even though the Illinois senator’s campaign has worked hard to put distance between the friends after Kilpatrick’s first indictment in March.

The self-destructive mayor was charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office for lying under oath to cover an extramarital affair with a city staffer during a police whistleblower trial. Initially, a judge ruled that Kilpatrick could indeed make the trip to Denver and the disgraced politician practically had his bags packed. What an honor for his party.

But Kilpatrick’s trademark thug-like behavior subsequently got him in more trouble and now he must watch the convention on television. A few weeks ago the once-rising Democratic star got charged with two additional felonies for assaulting a sheriff’s detective trying to serve a subpoena on one of his shady friends. The irate mayor pushed the detective and attacked him and his partner with profanity and racial remarks.

Then Kilpatrick became the first mayor in Detroit’s 300-plus years to spend the night in a jail cell for violating the bond conditions in his perjury case by traveling to Canada. He capped that by violating the terms of the assault bond when he spent time with a key witness to the incident.

Detroit’s city council has called on the mayor to resign—which he has ardently refused—and Michigan’s governor (Jennifer Granholm) to remove him. Granholm is supposedly considering holding a misconduct hearing regarding the mayor in the next few weeks. It’s time that the Democrat governor exercises her executive power to rid Detroit of this outlaw politician.

Kilpatrick’s entire tenure has been a disaster. Since being elected mayor in 2002 his administration has been rocked by continuous scandal. He spent the a great deal of his first term partying with strippers at the mayor’s mansion and got busted for charging hundreds of thousands of dollars on his city-issued credit card for personal travel, meals and entertainment. He also used $25,000 of city funds to get his wife a fancy sports utility vehicle at a time when Detroit was in a deep financial crisis and thousands of city jobs were being cut.

Incredibly, Obama has praised Kilpatrick by calling him a “great mayor” who has done an “outstanding job.” Early in Kilpatrick’s tumultuous administration Obama assured that his friend would do “astounding things for many years to come.” The Hip-Hop mayor with the attention-grabbing diamond stud earring certainly came through and now the presidential candidate wants nothing to do with him.