"Pick up my guitar and play; just like yesterday..."

With elections in Wayne County and at the state and federal level, not to mention what will likely be contentious local races in places like Plymouth Township and Van Buren Township, this campaign season promises to be one filled with intrigue.

One place I did not expect to see it, however, was in the race for the 11th Congressional District, where incumbent Thad McCotter was destined for re-election.

I know one of his Democratic challengers, Dr. Syed Taj, both through my job at Oakwood Healthcare and former work as a newspaper editor who sporadically covered Canton Township, where Dr. Taj served on the board of trustees. While I like and respect Dr. Taj very much, I thought he faced the proverbial uphill battle in taking on an incumbent in a district that so heavily favored Republican candidates—and McCotter's district is so thoroughly Republican that all he really had to do was get his name on the ballot.

Oops.

Well, by now, anyone who cares (and many who don't) know about the issue with McCotter's petitions. For those that don't, about 84 percent of the 1,850 or so signatures turned in on behalf of McCotter were ruled invalid. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said recently that he would investigate the situation and would not hesitate to prosecute if his office found any sign of fraud.

That's a good thing, of course, because the last thing anyone needs is to give voters another reason to be suspicious of the electoral process. (Although one could probably make a case that the gerrymandering that created a district virtually destined to remain in Republican hands, itself, 'undermines the whole validity and credibility of the election process'.)

I will be interested in the outcome of the investigation, which McCotter has said he asked for and will cooperate fully with. I've known McCotter for more than a decade, as I sporadically covered his political career dating back to his time on the Wayne County Commission. As he climbed the political ladder, I thought all he needed to do was work on his people skills and he would be able to do anything he wanted in government. I was happy to see him run for the top office in the nation, actually, and still think he's a better option than Mitt Romney.

I can't believe he had any direct involvement in this petition fiasco. He has too much integrity and too much respect for the electoral process to knowingly allow such a thing and, besides that, he's too intelligent to think that the petitions—if they were as obviously false as they've been described in the news reports—would pass even a cursory inspection.

It's hard to say what the long term and short term fallout will be, who will benefit and who will not; if McCotter will be able to pull off the monumental long shot of a successful write-in campaign or if someone else will. The end result, though, is that McCotter now faces his own uphill battle, and this race got a lot more interesting.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120601/POLITICS01/206010372#ixzz1wYqPPSNW