The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Mike doesn’t mince words
My email friend Michael Signer is certainly in the national spotlight. For good reason.
He is the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, scene of violent clashes fueled by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who descended on the college town 100 miles southwest of Washington to protest plans to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Signer (pronounced SIG-ner) has been quoted in print and on line and interviewed on television and radio.
Mike — the name he used in his emails to me — comes across in the news media as calm, but he doesn’t mince words.
He denounced the white supremacists and strongly criticized President Donald Trump for blaming “many sides” even after a female counter-protester was run over by a car and killed.
Trump “had his opportunity and he whiffed,” Mike said on CNN’s “New Day.”
Some parading protesters chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Mike is Jewish.
Mike’s future mother, who was then Marjorie Brahms, was the maid of honor when my wife Gail and I were married in 1969.
Marjorie later married Robert Signer, a newspaper journalist. Gail and Marjorie stayed in touch.
Mike, now 44, earned a B.A. from Princeton, a Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley and a J.D. from the University of Virginia, which is in Charlottesville.
In 2009, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for Virginia lieutenant governor.
In 2015, he was elected to the Charlottesville City Council. The council then elected him as mayor, a part-time position that includes a council vote.
As mayor, he voted against removing the Robert E. Lee statue. His side lost 3-2.
He favored erecting new monuments as a “counter-narrative” to the celebration of the Confederacy.
Mike and his wife Emily Blout, who has lectured on communications at American University in Washington, have twin sons.
Mike’s mother alerted me to his first book, “Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies,” published in 2009.
His second book, “Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father,” was published in 2015.
Mike and I started an email correspondence after I read “Demagogue.”
We exchanged messages about Trump when the billionaire declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, promising to “make America great again.”
With my advice, Mike drafted a lecture proposal he could send to a university. Entitled “Demagogues in America,” the lecture would begin by asking whether Trump was a demagogue — meaning someone who seeks power by arousing people’s anger and resentment.
That “remains to be seen” Mike would say at the end of the lecture.
It didn’t take Mike long to decide.
A few months later, I saw a piece by him on washingtonpost.com. The headline was, “Donald Trump wasn’t a textbook demagogue. Until now.”
Mike wrote that Trump came close to sanctioning “inflammatory language” and “violent behavior.”
As I said, Mike doesn’t mince words.