Archives: Media Appearances

Spoke with Dave Akerly on Lansing’s WILS 1320 about John McCain’s fight with brain cancer, the race to be Michigan’s next governor and Democratic candidate for Congress in the 8th District Elissa Slotkin. Follow Dave on Twitter at @DaveAkerlyOnAir

On a recent Monday afternoon, in an almost empty office in downtown Detroit, the youngest and least politically experienced candidate for governor of Michigan is tossing a lacrosse ball against the wall. Abdul El-Sayed is full of nervous energy, fueled partly by lack of sleep because he was up late observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and partly because for the past couple of hours he’s been welded to a phone doing tedious but essential fundraising calls. But the thing that has him really keyed up is the big goal for the afternoon and the reason that he is standing in front of two campaign aides in a room decorated with nothing more than a couple of “Abdul for Michigan” posters: He needs to learn how to get his message across to large crowds, specifically large crowds of people who he knows are more likely to vote for Donald Trump than a progressive Democrat, and a Muslim one at that.

At 32, El-Sayed has amassed an impressive résumé. He was a three-sport athlete in high school and then played on the lacrosse team at the University of Michigan. He won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, got his medical degree at Columbia and then taught at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health before returning to Detroit to serve as the executive director of the health department for the city of Detroit, the city’s top public health official. But he’s got one big gap on his CV: He has never held elected office. Energetic or not, he knows he has a lot to overcome if he has a prayer of winning the Democratic primary in August 2018.

“It’s easy to point at him and laugh, but I think you laugh at your own peril,” Democratic strategist Joe DiSano, who is not affiliated with the campaign, said of El-Sayed. “Because this guy has more actual real world experience than almost anyone.”

Joe DiSano, former advisor/private consultant to Warren, Michigan Mayor Fouts, calls in to Jim Norton & Sam Roberts on SiriusXM. He says that the mayor was certainly romantically involved with his assistant at one point. He also said he regularly used the n-word and racially charged language. He even witnessed him dancing like a monkey. He also describes how difficult it was to work with Fouts.

WARREN, Mich. – Joe DiSano, a former advisor and private consultant to Warren Mayor Jim Fouts, spoke Tuesday on the Jim Norton and Sam Roberts radio show about the most recent audio tapes leaked.

DiSano told the show hosts he has seen Fouts dancing like a monkey and using the N-word in casual conversation.

“Everyone records him,” DiSano said. “There are more tapes out there.”

DiSano talked about Fouts’ alleged relationship with his assistant and other scandals in the Warren mayor’s office.

“The guys got a lot of problems,” DiSano said.

Audio recordings were leaked Monday as Fouts was attending a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event.

The full show is available below:

Candidates often publicize the amount of money they have raised by including it in press releases or newsletters. But with campaign financing often criticized for it’s ability to sway candidates based on who is funding them, why would candidates willingly draw attention to how much they have received?

Joe DiSano of DiSano Strategies in Lansing says these numbers are targeted at potential donors and their opponents, not ordinary voters.

He compares it to the venture capital industry.

“The more money you raise, the more money you attract,” DiSano said.

He says it’s psychological.

“A lot of it is basic human nature, that folks want to be associated with a winner,” he said.

There’s also an intimidation factor.

If one candidate can successfully raise more money than the other, it can be an “attempt to break the will of your opponents and publicly force them to admit that they can’t keep up on the fundraising end of things.”

But could publicizing these numbers hurt candidate’s chances with the average voter?

“I think the general assumption is that all politicians, at some level, are bought and paid for,” DiSano said.

That doesn’t mean that’s how he believes it should be. DiSano sees the larger problem being “dark money” or funds from super PACs that aren’t publicly available.

It can be hard to know how to make a difference, and DiSano says, “It’s just so depressing that no one knows where to start.”

“I don’t think voters spend much time at all really worrying about campaign finance numbers and where the money comes from. If they did we would have a real conversation about campaign finance reform in this country,” DiSano said.

Until then, DiSano says candidates will continue to publicize these numbers until it doesn’t work.

Detroit — Although two prominent contenders in Detroit’s mayoral race are threatening to sue the state over failures in city finances and public schools, legal and political experts say they make good campaign fodder but lousy lawsuits.

Mayor Mike Duggan said late last month he may sue the city’s lead bankruptcy law firm Jones Day on claims that Detroit’s former emergency manager Kevyn Orr and his team “concealed” assumptions used in the city’s court-approved debt-cutting plan to project future contributions to the city’s pension system. Jones Day told The Detroit News on Wednesday that it denied “there was any effort or intent to mislead anyone.”

At his candidacy announcement in late February, state Sen. Coleman A. Young II vowed to sue the state over the city’s troubled school system which, until recently, had state-appointed managers since 2009.

Under the state’s emergency manager law that took effect in March 2013, Orr and other state-appointed managers were given broad powers over finances and the ability to reject, change or end contracts, amend and revise budgets, and spend federal, state and local funds.

If Detroit takes on the global firm Jones Day, it would face significant hurdles and legal bills, said Douglas Bernstein, a Bloomfield Hills bankruptcy lawyer.

“The review and the approval of the plan as proposed was, to me, not just a rubber stamp,” said Bernstein, noting the attorneys, actuaries, creditors, federal judges and experts who helped negotiate the deal. “Everybody knew the importance and that they had to get it right. There was too much risk to approve something that wasn’t feasible.”

Laura Bartell, a bankruptcy professor with Wayne State’s law school, doesn’t believe anything was hidden and said Duggan’s argument is “a loser.”

“It’s absolutely true that Detroit has a massive pension obligation that is going to come due in the future and they have to be planning for it. (Duggan) is doing that. It’s a very prudent thing to do, but he was not misled about it,” said Bartell, who suggested Duggan’s claims are political. “(Orr) disclosed it. Everything was disclosed.”

Joe DiSano, a Democratic consultant at Lansing-based DiSano Strategies, said there’s value in Duggan’s argument.

Taxpayers paid Orr during the bankruptcy and Jones Day collected about $57 million in fees for its restructuring work, DiSano said. The state Treasury Department paid Orr’s $275,000 annual salary, while Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s now-disbanded nonprofit NERD fund paid for the emergency manager’s expenses.

“Mayor Duggan going after them with a vengeance is good policy and good politics,” DiSano said.

Suing state ‘counterproductive’

Duggan, who first raised the concerns last year, said Orr’s team adopted the “most optimistic” assumptions in the plan and “it made the numbers work.” But those discussions, the mayor contends, were kept from him and Detroit’s Chief Financial Officer John Hill, leading him to question whether Orr had “a legitimate right to do this.”

Jones Day fired back at Duggan in a statement first provided to The News, warning it would “vigorously defend itself against any claim in this regard and pursue any and all remedies that are available as a result of these false claims.”

Young promises to pursue a similarly ambitious lawsuit. He told a group of supporters just over a week ago that if elected, he would sue the state of Michigan to hold officials accountable for the public school district’s failures.

The district continued to hemorrhage students, lose money, lay off employees and close schools under five emergency managers until the state approved in June a $617 million bailout that pays off $467 million in operating debt and provides $150 million in startup funding for a new debt-free district.

“I will use my office as mayor to sue the state to make sure that we hold them accountable for every single dime that they took from the city and every single school that they close,” Young said. “I will fight to the very end to make sure that justice is done for the city of Detroit.”

The threats of legal action come after Snyder’s Civil Rights Commission last month released a report proposing reforms to Michigan’s emergency manager law, implying it is focused on cutting costs at the expense of people’s well-being.

Suing the state over the Detroit school district would be “counterproductive” since the city still needs the state’s help to fix the problem, DiSano said.

Bernstein said it is difficult to weigh the strength of a potential Young lawsuit until the lawmaker reveals his legal justification, but noted any mayor has an interest in a viable school district because it is an important part of Detroit’s true renaissance.

“You wouldn’t get much argument that the school district has not performed well just by the results,” he said. “But the question is, what do you do differently and what’s actionable?”

Peter Hammer, a Wayne State University law professor who heads the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights, said he had no opinion on the viability of the lawsuits because the litigation is complicated. But any effort to highlight the lack of checks and balances in the emergency manager law is welcome, he said.

“Anything that sort of brings the workings of an emergency manager into a greater system of transparency and accountability is a good thing,” he said. “In an election year, anything is fair game.”

Duggan denies political motives

Duggan has insisted the city will only proceed with a lawsuit if it has a strong chance of success, and he won’t be filing “for the purpose of scoring political credit.”

The Michigan Treasury Department said the emergency manager was a part of Detroit’s recovery.

“Emergency manager oversight helped the city return to fiscal stability supporting the revival taking place today in Detroit,” Treasury spokesman Ron Leix said.

Under the city’s bankruptcy plan, the pension payment projected in fiscal year 2024 was first contemplated at $113.9 million. But officials later said the estimates were off because they were based in part on outdated mortality tables.

If earnings meet the bankruptcy plan’s assumed return rate, the city’s contribution in 2024 will be closer to $167 million. If there are no earnings, it could soar to $344 million or more.

To prevent a problem, the Duggan administration is proposing a dedicated Retiree Protection Fund to pull together $377 million in the coming years to help address the shortfall that comes due in 2024. The mayor has said he wants to shift $50 million in surplus funding from the current fiscal year to the fund.

Martha Kopacz, the East Coast financial specialist appointed in 2014 by Detroit’s bankruptcy judge to assess feasibility and projections for city’s plan, said pension calculations are “assumptions piled on top of assumptions.” The city, she said, is doing what it should — dealing with the future problem now.

“The long and short of it is, any time you do a pension estimate, you are going to be wrong. It’s just a matter of how wrong you are,” Kopacz said. “They are aggressively trying to solve a problem before it becomes very difficult to solve.”

cferretti@detroitnews.com

It’s already been a month since Election Day, but Democrats in Michigan are continuing to sort out just what happened.

It’s fair to say it wasn’t all bad for Democrats.

Gary Peters won the open U.S. Senate seat, and their candidates won seven out of eight seats on higher education boards.

But other than those wins, it isn’t too rosy for Democrats in Michigan.

Is Michigan getting redder? Are Republicans just doing a better job of getting their message out? Do Democrats in Michigan have strong enough candidates?

Former Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Mark Brewer and Democratic strategist Joe DiSano join us later today to assess the future of their party.

DiSano believes Democrats need to get tougher, “There is a tentative streak where Democrats feel that they have to present both sides of an argument. I’m sorry Democrats… you don’t.” And, as Brewer notes, Democrats in Michigan have, “a credibility problem.”

But, how fixable are those problems for Democrats in Michigan? And, will their problems be solved in time for Election Day 2016?

Four Michigan representatives will exit the U.S. House in January, leaving their congressional seats with wide open races after years of stability.

Democratic Rep. John Dingell and Republican Reps. Mike Rogers and Dave Camp are retiring from Congress. Democratic Rep. Gary Peters is leaving the House to run to replace Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, who’s also retiring. Democrats and Republicans are expected to keep their seats, but primary fights are brewing in all but Dingell’s district. Less than two weeks before the April 22 filing deadline, the fields could get more crowded.

The races in Camp and Rogers’ districts look similar, with a few Republicans declared in each race, many other Republican possibilities and limited Democratic options.

“The fact that there is no credible candidate tells you that the Democrats have done their own research and have determined that it’s highly improbable that a Democrat can win,” said Ed Sarpolus, a nonpartisan political analyst and executive director of Target-Insyght.

Democratic turnout is typically low in midterm election years, and there’s no indication Democratic governor candidate Mark Schauer could draw a wide enough voter margin to combat that trend in Republican-leaning districts, Sarpolus said.

Camp gave potential successors little time to consider running for the 4th District when he said he wouldn’t seek re-election on March 31. He was term-limited as chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and his decision was somewhat expected. He won with 63 percent of the vote in 2012.

State Sen. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, jumped into the race the next day, and Paul Mitchell, a Saginaw County businessman, announced his bid on Monday. Roscommon County businessman Peter Konetchy had said in July he would challenge Camp for the Republican ticket.

John Barker of Isabella County is the only Democrat who has declared.

Tom Shields, a Republican consultant working on Moolenaar’s campaign, said Mitchell’s wealth “may scare off a bunch of people.” Mitchell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative causes, according to a statement by his campaign.

Rogers announced just before Camp on March 28 that he would leave his 8th District seat to launch a radio show. He’s opting out despite a boost in his national profile as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett is running for the Republican ticket against former state Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, whom Rogers endorsed. Rogers won with 59 percent of the vote in 2012.

Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, got into the race on Thursday after Sen. Joe Hune, R-Whitmore Lake, said he wouldn’t run. McMillin is term-limited in the House and had been running for state Senate.

“He’s a wild card,” Shields said. “He helps split the vote in Oakland County, but he also has a strong following among the Tea Party activists.”

Sarpolus said state Rep. Gail Haines, R-Lake Angelus, was a potential “dark horse” in the race because she is well-financed and female. Haines’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Some Democrats hoped Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum would try for the difficult district. But Byrum said Tuesday she wouldn’t run after meeting with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Emily’s List in Washington, D.C.

“While partisan gridlock in Congress prevents anything meaningful from being accomplished, my work here in Michigan has a real effect on people’s lives and that’s what drives my commitment to public service,” Byrum said in a statement.

Byrum’s decision doesn’t change the race much because “a Democrat is handicapped in that seat,” said Democratic consultant Joe DiSano of Main Street Strategies.

Sarpolus said that’s true of both the 8th and the 4th Districts. If President Barack Obama couldn’t win those districts in 2012, “who says a Democrat can win now?” he asked.

Democrats would need someone with high name recognition and a base in Oakland County to be competitive, said Shields, the president of Marketing Resource Group. Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown “could have opened some eyes” if she’d gone for the seat, he said, but Schauer named Brown as his running mate last week.

Ingham County Democrats Susan Grettenberger, a Central Michigan University professor, and Ken Darga, a former state demographer, are the only Democrats running.

“The folks who are running as sacrificial lambs, I have a lot of respect for,” DiSano said. “They’re doing the party’s work in the face of almost certain defeat.”

The party roles reverse in Dingell’s Democratic district, which is the most predictable of the bunch. The longest-serving congressman ever said he was retiring in February. His Democratic wife, Debbie Dingell, quickly got into the race.

State Sen. Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, wrote on her Facebook page that she “had an amazing time” exploring a run for the seat, but “there’s unfinished work in the state Capitol, and I am just not ready to let it go.”

Dingell said Friday she has raised more than $500,000 in a little more than a month, and 93 percent of donations came from individuals. Still, she said she’s not a shoo-in, and candidates who think they are “get into trouble.”

Political strategists disagreed. Dingell has “inherited” the seat and it would be “an act of frustration” to run against her, Shields said.

“Debbie Dingell can start measuring the drapes in her congressional office,” DiSano said.

Her endorsements include the Michigan Teamsters and the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council. John Dingell won with 68 percent of the vote in 2012.

Republican Terry Bowman is one of the few who have said they’re taking her on nonetheless. The right-to-work champion and United Auto Workers member is running against the federal health care law that John Dingell helped write.

Democrats also rule the 14th District, which includes half of Detroit. Peters, a Democrat, won with 82 percent of the vote in 2012.

The Democratic primary will be crowded. At least seven candidates have said they’re in. Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence is the front-runner, and state Rep. Rudy Hobbs, D-Southfield, is also a contender.