Essay: Macomb County - 5/5/2008
Macomb County is a deceptively fascinating place, for those of you who don’t know it; a sort of microcosm of Michigan itself.
In 1950 it was largely farm country, and then came the postwar suburban explosion. The freeways opened up, and Detroit started to empty out. For whatever reasons, white-collar workers tended to flow northwest, to Oakland County. Blue-collar workers went to Macomb.
They flowed there so fast that Warren was the fastest-growing city in the United States in the fifties. These were working-class Democrats. Macomb gave John F. Kennedy a higher percentage of its votes than any other suburban county in the nation.
Yet these weren’t counter-culture folks. They were turned off by the excesses of the 1960s. They became the archetypal examples of the Reagan Democrats, of people who still thought of themselves as Democrats, but who increasingly voted Republican for president.
Well, Macomb County was always more complex than the media portrayed it – surprise surprise. And these days it is more complex still. I think of it as something of a layer cake.
In the south, we have blue-collar Warren and Centerline, cities that are increasingly less well off and increasingly diverse. To their north is solidly middle-class Sterling Heights. North of that live the wealthy, in huge new homes in Macomb and Chesterfield Township.
And north of that, around the village of Armada, the county is still rural, and feels more like up north than Metropolitan Detroit.
Today Macomb County has something like 850,000 people, more than the population of the nation’s five smallest states.
Politically it is as diverse as it is demographically. When economics matter, Democrats win in Macomb County, when social and military issues are more important, Republicans do. The county voted for President Bush and Jennifer Granholm.
Oakland and Wayne Counties tend to elect judges with names like Kelly and O’Brian. Macomb elects judges named Viviano and Switalski. The county now gets national attention.
But in Michigan it lacks the clout possessed by its big sisters, Wayne and Oakland counties. And in large part, that has been precisely because Macomb County doesn’t have an elected leader.
Increasingly, Michigan’s three major counties are called on to try and figure out solutions to what are common problems. Such gatherings are dominated by the county executives, the larger-than-life L. Brooks Patterson and, since the passing of the legendary Wayne County boss Ed McNamara, Robert Ficano.
But Macomb, represented by a county commissioner with no independent clout, invariably looks like the weak orphan stepchild.
What it needs -- is a leader, a county executive with the ability to make deals and stand as equals with Patterson and Ficano.
Nobody knows, of course, whether or not Macomb County will vote tomorrow to start moving towards a new system of government.
Yet much of the buzz in Mount Clemens these days is centering on not if, but who the first county executive might be. Based on everything I know, I can reliably report that only time will tell.
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