A COP, A RELEASED FELON, AND TWO JUDGES DEAL CARDS.

Politico's Tim Alberta goes to a picnic in Grosse Pointe Woods.  He meets more than a few leading lights of Southeast Michigan's current political extablishment.

What I learned over the next six hours was as captivating, and surprising, as any reporting assignment I had ever been on. While some of my initial observations were correct—this was the upper crust of Black Detroit, these were elites in business and government who planned to vote no matter what—my expectations of what I would hear from them were very wrong. These were not Black citizens removed from the fury, dispiritedness and contempt for the establishment that [state representative Sherry] Gay-Dagnogo had described. If anything, they explained to me that afternoon, they felt this disillusionment all the more acutely; they knew institutional racism all the more intimately. They had given up on the system not for a lack of political power but because of their proximity to it.

Once upon a time, Grosse Pointe Woods was one of the cluster of sundown suburbs to the north of Detroit.  These days, though, the Michigan economy is not strong enough to support upscale segregation, and there are bargains to be had.  Up to a point, that is.

Grosse Pointe, they explained, had traditionally been an exclusive enclave of the wealthy white upper-class. Only after the Great Recession of 2008 was there an opportunity for Black families to move in. Taking advantage of the foreclosure market, they migrated from the rugged east side of Detroit to idyllic neighborhoods that were just miles away but might as well have existed on another planet.

The transition was difficult, Andre Moore explained. After he closed the purchase of his new house on Severn Road, he swung by to examine the building’s exterior before heading to the hardware store for supplies. A white neighbor called the cops. Because his license didn’t yet match the new address, Moore couldn’t convince the officers that this was, in fact, his home. It was a tense and humiliating standoff. Moore said most of his white neighbors have been welcoming—including, he noted with a smile, the ones he suspects called the police in the first place.

The surprise, though, is that Mr Alberta's interlocutors are in the difficult position of generally arguing with, then voting for, Democrats, despite Democrats, including Barack Obama Himself, making promises they have no intent of fulfilling.  "No matter whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat sitting in that White House, we stay chasing that so-called American dream."

Instructive reading.  Thanks to Power Line for adding the column among their rolling recommended links, earlier in the week.