“It used to be the print works for the Journal,” Dan Kildee explains as we sit upstairs in the thriving Flint Farmers’ Market. “The Flint Journal was a really, really big newspaper here.”
The Democratic congressman, it quickly becomes clear, is a human LexisNexis when it comes to the social history and economic vagaries of his home city. He points across the parking area to a row of buildings and says “about the same distance beyond is a small office where General Motors was actually formed. GM was initiated in Flint. The world headquarters were in Flint until the 1940s when they moved to Detroit.”
Downstairs, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is holding court along with Josh Shapiro and Tony Evers, the governors for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin respectively. All three made a beeline to Kildee when they entered the campaign room.
Kildee was first elected to public office, at local level, at the age of 18. Earlier this year, he announced that he would not be seeking re-election for Congress, closing 47 years of unbroken public service. Although he ran for governor 13 years ago (and would have had strong support had he decided to contest Whitmer for the primary ahead of 2018), his reputation was forged on decades of painstaking and often frustrating work of trying to help cities like Flint to recover from the swift industrial decline which obliterated so many towns in the upper reaches of the Midwest.
Kildee’s grandfather emigrated from Donegal – he still has relatives whom he visits in Letterkenny and Donegal town. The family moved from Buckley to Flint in the 1910s, when the car industry was beginning to thrive, and have stayed since. Genesee County was once a rock-solid blue county but support has weakened. We talk for a while about what happened to the industrial towns and cities of the so-called Rust Belt: phenomenal growth for 50 years followed by decades when it all just fell out of the sky. Once that plummeting starts, it is difficult to arrest.
“Very tough,” he nods.
‘What Trump seems to be promising is that he is going to wave a wand and we are going to go back to 1950′
“I have devoted a lot of my career inside and outside of politics to trying to figure out the policy prescriptions for communities that have been in long-term decline. Because we have all the planning models of how to grow. You can go to any planning school in America or globally and get chapter and verse in how to thoughtfully and sustainably grow a community. There are lots of difficult arguments as to how to do it – but almost no good information on the process of growth and decline. In other places, cities around the world, there is ebb and flow. Here, we had one period of extraordinary growth and another that has felt like a sustained period of death by a thousand cuts.”
But the teeming, pleasant Farmers’ Market is symbolic of the belief that a corner has been turned. Flint attained international recognition with the 1989 release of Roger and Me, Michael Moore’s runaway hit satirical documentary about the impact of the decisions of Roger Smith, the chief executive of General Motors, on the local community. That film closed with the pointed statement: “This film cannot be shown within the city of Flint. All the movie theaters have closed.”
But just a short walk from the Farmers’ Market now stands a beautiful art-deco theatre, the Capitol. It was originally built in 1928, closed for years and was restored in 2015. Kildee, who has been friends with Moore for decades, gives a fascinating synopsis of the problems which blighted Flint. Its downturn was like Detroit in microcosm – the hollowing-out of the downtown, the “racial avoidance” which created a sort of segregation and the cycle of lay-offs and job losses. Promising a return of American manufacturing – the car plants booming, the steelworks sparking – has been a key element of Donald Trump’s campaign message.
“What Trump seems to be promising is that he is going to wave a wand and we are going to go back to 1950. The only way we can have a future is by intentionally doing it, not just sort of wishing for it. I know globally there is some critique of US policies, but we have a policy that prioritises manufacturing in the United States. I get that some of our trading partners get irritated by that. But all countries that succeed have an intentional policy,” he says.
“What Trump and his allies want [is] to undo the progress we have made to reclaim that future – the Chips and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act, even elements of the bipartisan infrastructure law are the reasons we have a new battery facility being built in Flint, on the Buick site which we called Buick city. It’s a huge industrial brownfield in Flint where 30,000 people used to go to work for Buick every day. My grandfather being one of them. And, until recently, it was just a big, blank slab of concrete. Gone. Everything. And now we have this renaissance which is going to come not by having that factory come back but by the battery facility which is being constructed there.”
‘This is going to be a close race here... One way or the other, we will determine who the president is going to be’
He says there are other shoots of optimism – such as the Hemlock semiconductor plant which, he says, is about to “explode with new jobs” in the coming months. Kildee doesn’t clap himself on the back about these good news stories. But his imprint on the community is easy to see. When Flint became notorious for its ongoing water crisis – lead poisoning in ancient pipes – Moore returned to his hometown for his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. The documentarian did not spare his portrayal of then president Barack Obama for a rare misreading of the public mood when he tried to assuage Flintites at a town hall by theatrically calling for a glass of tap water and (barely) sipping it while on stage, attempting to downplay the crisis.
This April, Kildee marked the 10th anniversary of that crisis with a statement that read: “In the richest country in the world, access to clean drinking water should be a right, not a privilege. Yet, access to clean water has been a decade-long struggle for Flint families. When Flint needed help, I went to work in Congress, working with Republicans and Democrats to pass a $170 million aid package for my hometown, including to replace lead pipes, expand healthcare services and establish the Flint Registry. Flint is resilient. But there is more work to be done to deliver justice to families. Justice will come in many forms, including holding those who poisoned our water accountable, giving residents relief from high water bills, connecting families with healthcare services and investing in our public schools.”
His decision to step down did not come easy. But he has come through treatment for cancer and that took its toll.
“I spent a week when I couldn’t talk at all so I had to relearn to talk a little bit – unfortunately for a lot of people, I succeeded. And I couldn’t eat for a month. My two superpowers! Talking and eating!”
And four decades of back and forth to Washington is a ferocious commitment. His plan is to work for Flint’s philanthropic association and, he anticipates, spend longer periods visiting Ireland, where he and his wife have a lot of friends. But his retirement leaves a congressional seat to be won in Michigan’s 8th district, with Democratic state Senator Kristen McDonald Rivet engaged with Republican candidate Paul Junge in a race that is, according to the polling, neck and neck.
[ Boeing and Intel symbolise America’s manufacturing declineOpens in new window ]
Kildee is good company and although he gives the impression of having all the time in the world, he has to rejoin his governor on a whistle-stop tour of the state. He nods when asked if he feels that the Democratic movement is in an anxious mood in the waning weeks of an extraordinary election.
“I think anxious would be the right term. This is going to be a close race here – and with those three governors, it is going to be a close race in each of those states. One way or the other we will determine who the president is going to be. And so, we feel this incredible responsibility to get it right and do everything we can to not leave anything on the table. But… I’m anxious. The unanswered question here – and this is why the polling is so difficult to read – is: what is the level of enthusiasm we are going to see from our base voters? But there is a quiet resolve. There is a seriousness to this election. That convention exuberance we saw was real. But right now, this is a sober moment and people are thinking about legacy.”
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