By Zachary Gorchow
President of Michigan Operations
Posted: August 6, 2019 6:41 PM

The late Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson always said what was on his mind – the good, the bad, the ugly.

Some people loved this. Some people hated it. And some people were deeply hurt by it. Clearly, a majority of Oakland County voters, albeit a far smaller one by 2016 than the ones that overwhelmingly elected him in his first wins, respected Mr. Patterson, pluses and minuses.

Mr. Patterson's financial management of the county and leading the county during an incredible period of economic growth and expansion are unquestioned. His knack for hiring extremely capable and smart staff also cannot be questioned. What also cannot be questioned is that he said some horribly bigoted things over the years, like how solutions for Detroit included walling it off like an Indian reservation and throwing in blankets and corn or having one half of the city's residents kill the other half with the surviving half imprisoned.

With Mr. Patterson's turbulent history with African Americans and Detroit, a great surprise was that when it came to state policy, he emerged as something of an ally on a major issue in the latter third of his career: auto insurance. Mr. Patterson denounced what he called the redlining of Detroit as the cause of sky-high auto insurance rates in the city. He was for much of this decade probably the MVP of those defending the no-fault system with its requirement for motorists to purchase unlimited medical benefits.

So in 2013, as his fellow Republicans in the House began pursuing legislation to cap medical benefits under no-fault, Mr. Patterson sent several members of his staff to the House Insurance Committee to testify. After a lengthy hearing, Mr. Patterson's team was never called to the witness table to testify, and he was livid. And he was set to be the guest that week on Michigan Public Television's "Off the Record."

Mr. Patterson's use of a wheelchair following his catastrophic 2012 car crash meant the program would be recorded the opposite of its regular structure. Usually, the reporter panel comes first and then the guest walks onto the set for the Q & A portion of the segment. Instead, Mr. Patterson would start out in the guest's chair to record that segment, then we would break, he would leave the set and then we would record the reporter panel.

And for the first 10 minutes Mr. Patterson took questions, it was pretty routine. But then "Off the Record" host Tim Skubick asked Mr. Patterson if he was concerned about the direction of his Republican Party. He said he was and took a shot at the House speaker at the time, Jase Bolger.

"I've been watching what goes on up here in Lansing," he said. "I'm beginning to wonder if Jase is in control or not as a speaker, some of the stupid things which he has done."

He referenced some of the partisan machinations between Mr. Bolger and the House Democrats and then said he was embarrassed that Republicans were leading the fight on auto insurance "to injure the most vulnerable in society."

Then the questions veered back to no-fault for a bit. But in my mind, Mr. Patterson had lobbed a big piece of chum into the water with his dig at Mr. Bolger. He was obviously fuming about more than some silliness about the committee assignment shenanigans he referenced.

So I asked a question: "What would be your advice to the speaker of the House, Jase Bolger? You said earlier you weren't sure he was running the House very well. What would you suggest he do differently?"

Let's go to the tape.

Even by Mr. Patterson's standards, this was pretty staggering. Comparing the speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives to one of the worst people in the history of the human race, Adolf Hitler, by calling him "Adolf Bolger" and then throwing in a wry, "I think sometimes Adolf steps a little bit to the fringe" to boot.

The whole thing is incredible, amusing and horrible at the same time.

If you watch the full HD clip you can see my eyebrows shoot up. You can see Chris Christoff, then with Bloomberg News, buckle with laughter. You can hear Chad Livengood, then with The Detroit News, start laughing. Skubick, true to form, is totally unfazed and dutifully begins writing notes on his legal pad.

We pressed Mr. Patterson to justify how he could make such a comparison and he went off about how his people didn't get to testify at the Insurance Committee (the chair of the committee, then-Rep. Pete Lund, would later insist he wasn't sticking it to Mr. Patterson).

Then Skubick tells Mr. Patterson he's likely to get a phone call from Mr. Bolger or Mr. Bolger's staff about the "Adolf Bolger" comment and asks him what he would say to them. That's when everything started to go into slow motion. Mr. Patterson reached into his left jacket pocket, pulled out a black comb and held it over his upper lip to impersonate a Hitler moustache and said, "Mr. Bolger..."

This was a huge news story. Mr. Patterson, a legend in Michigan Republican politics and powerhouse in southeast Michigan, had slurred Mr. Bolger, a rising star in Michigan Republican politics, in the worst way possible. And yet, we all had to regroup because now it was time to do the reporter panel. And Chad, Chris and I all wanted to get the heck out of there because we needed to write up stories to post for our readers now, immediately, if not sooner.

What was funny about this in retrospect was Kathy Gray of the Detroit Free Press was backstage to hear what Mr. Patterson said on the show. The show records at 8 a.m. on Fridays, so Kathy could hear what Mr. Patterson said without having to wait for it to be posted to the WKAR website sometime in the afternoon.

Now while the four of us had to pontificate on Mr. Patterson's explosive comments, Kathy could get her story written and posted before the rest of us. This was not lost on Chad from the rival News, who said as we were resetting to record the reporter panel segment something to Kathy along the lines of have fun breaking this one.

When we were done recording, I think I sprinted back to my car in the parking garage next to the Communications, Arts and Sciences building on the Michigan State University campus where the "Off the Record" studio is located.

It's a pretty short drive from there to downtown Lansing, but I frantically called the Gongwer offices in hopes of dictating a story. Then I realized I was going to have to listen to my recording of exactly what Mr. Patterson said. Then I realized I needed to call Mr. Bolger's press office for reaction. Whoever took the call was likely totally bewildered and thought I probably needed to lay off the Mountain Dew.

Ari Adler was Mr. Bolger's communications director at the time. I asked him today what he remembered of that day.

"I was on vacation with my family when my phone started blowing up," he said. "If I recall correctly, Kathy was the first one to call me and left me a message. I ended up on the phone for a while with our team talking about the best way to handle a response or whether there should be one at all."

The thing was even though Mr. Patterson's antics seemed funny, comparisons of almost anyone to Hitler are completely out of bounds and insulting not only to the target but also to the millions Hitler had murdered. Hitler's entire agenda was geared toward the eradication of Jews, and he murdered 6 million of them along with others he deemed a threat to his master race.

Mr. Adler's family lost many relatives to the Holocaust.

"I remember people taking the comment very personally on my behalf, particularly given my family's history (on my father's side) of losing so many members during the Holocaust in World War II," he said today.

Kathy and Chad were kind enough to share some recollections with me today. Kathy recalled (I had forgotten this) that a number of students also were in the studio watching the recording of the show. And they proved critical to her not missing a key moment.

"So while I was busily typing away and not watching the screen, the students gasped when Brooks pulled out his comb," she said. "They couldn't believe what happened, let me know and I was able to get a story out pretty quickly."

Chad remembered today how Kathy had a 20-minute head start on him.

"In the race to file a story for the web, I pulled over in a parking lot on Trowbridge to call Ari Adler for comment. But by the time I got off the phone with him, the Free Press had blasted its story," he said.

So memorable was the event that Chad said he "had the 'Adolf' front page headline pinned to a bulletin board over my desk until the day I left The News in December 2016."

Transcribing the audio from my primitive digital recorder took an eternity, it felt like. I tweeted something at 9:42 a.m. Then I got my story posted a few minutes later for Gongwer subscribers. Then a three-hour wait ensued for WKAR to post the video, and I'm confident there has never been a more anticipated "Off the Record" episode in my time covering the Capitol.

And it was quite the story for the next week until Mr. Patterson finally apologized to Mr. Bolger, saying he didn't want the controversy to distract from the merits of the auto insurance debate.

It was a moment no one who was there will forget.

And no one will forget Brooks Patterson, not the good, the bad, nor the ugly.