From The Wall Street Journal;


* OPINION: THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
* DECEMBER 19, 2009

Can Detroit Be Saved?

'Sports gives you a sense of what it's like to win, and how you handle losing and setbacks, which life is full of.'

Dave Bing has just signed on to four years of maybe the most futile and thankless job in America: mayor of Detroit. What in the world was he thinking?

"I wouldn't have taken this job if this wasn't doable," he tells me. "I finished basketball in 1978, then went into my own business in 1980 and did it for 29 years. . . . Now I get to the end of that career and probably should have retired. But there was a calling greater than anything that I ever envisioned, and that was to help bring this city back."

In November, 57% of the Detroit voters bought into his tough-love reform agenda. Mr. Bing replaced the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick, who went to jail earlier this year for spending city funds on his girlfriends—just the publicity boost the city already flat on its back didn't need.

The mayor's office is in the heart of downtown Detroit, which has shrunk to about an eight-block radius of high rise office towers, upscale restaurants and stores. Yet everything in Mr. Bing's office, including the furniture, is, in the words of his press secretary, "spartan." There's no money to be wasted on redecorating, the mayor tells me. He's not taking a salary. At 66, with his horn-rimmed glasses, graying hair and tailored business suits, Dave Bing looks ready for business.
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