Detroit — First, let’s get the water-cooler questions out of the way. Will Detroit’s scandal-plagued mayor, the one-time Democratic prodigy Kwame Kilpatrick, ruin Democratic prodigy Barack Obama’s carefully orchestrated Denver convention by showing up?

No. Kilpatrick is currently before two different courts in two cases involving charges stemming from his alleged perjury in a city whistleblower lawsuit. The mayor, currently on a tether, has fought bond terms that have grounded him in Detroit and would prevent him from traveling to Denver as a superdelegate. A Detroit district court judge recently reaffirmed the travel restrictions and tether, however.

Second, will Kilpatrick’s problems hurt Obama’s efforts to win Michigan?

Unlikely. Though black turnout in Detroit is a key factor in the presumptive Democratic nominee’s strategy to defeat McCain in Michigan, the Kilpatrick machine (such as it is) has never been a big player in Obama’s campaign. As Detroit News reporter Gordon Trowbridge wrote recently, Kilpatrick “has never been particularly close to Obama. Unlike many African-American officials around the country, he did not endorse Obama until after the Illinois senator had clinched the Democratic nomination.”

Detroit political analyst Eric Foster also points to the 38-year-old Kilpatrick’s youth in concluding that he “is not Coleman Young” — a reference to Detroit’s former mayoral heavy who had built power and patronage over his many years in office.

Still, Democrats fear their perennial bogeyman under the bed: race. Republicans, they contend, will associate Obama with Kilpatrick here — putting them on the same ticket, as it were — in order to reinforce the alleged notion among voters that blacks cannot be trusted in office.

“Unfortunately, there are those who have issues with race on a fundamental level,” Democratic state senator Tupac Hunter, an Obama campaign co-chair, told the News. “This is their opportunity to indict an entire people for the very public foibles of a few.”

Democrats point to the Republican National Committee’s mock Facebook page for Obama which highlights Kilpatrick along with Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko and other seedy Democrats with whom Obama has associated. Republicans counter that that is no different than Democratic tactics marrying McCain and George Bush.

But in this, the tenth anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s perjury scandal, the more obvious racial question is: Why is the Democratic Party not rallying to a prominent black mayor the way they rallied to a white president?

After all, the legal troubles of Mayor Kilpatrick and President Clinton are nearly identical.

Embroiled in long-running legal cases, both Kilpatrick (accused of improperly firing two Detroit police officers) and Clinton (Whitewater and Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit) were brought to the political precipice after having perjured themselves over sexual affairs: Kilpatrick for lying about his relationship with chief-of-staff Christine Beatty, and Clinton for lying about Monica Lewinsky. Kilpatrick’s scandal — dubbed “Textgate” after steamy text messages between the mayor and Beatty belied their denials of the affair under oath — even paralleled Monicagate in revealing lurid details of the Democratic leader’s extramarital liaisons.

But whereas Democrats and their media allies staged a vigorous defense of Clinton a decade ago, Kilpatrick is largely on his own today. The fact is, Kilpatrick lacks the key ingredient that helped Clinton turn the tables: a Republican opposition.

In 1998, with newspapers across the country calling for Clinton’s resignation, Washington paralyzed, and the world aghast, Clinton managed to make the scandal about a conservative prosecutor and a Republican Congress. It was a strategy that forced Democrats to choose: A corrupt Democratic president or a Republican victory? Shamefully, Democrats and the mainstream media chose the former.

Feminists talked of Clinton’s “one free grope rule”; liberal lawyers argued perjury was rarely prosecuted; Democratic politicians claimed that “everyone lies about sex”; media titans like Dan Rather referred ominously to the “Republican prosecutor, Ken Starr” — and all agreed they were tired of scandal and yearned for a return to the important business of the nation. Can’t we all just “move on”?

The Clinton forces’ tactic succeeded: He won in the court of public opinion, and remained in office.

Hoping to replicate that success, Kilpatrick has ruthlessly followed the Monicagate playbook to the letter. After the scandal broke, he immediately huddled with sympathetic clergy, he enlisted his wife in public shows of support, demanded respect for his “private life,” and insisted his critics get on with the important business of the city.

But without Republican foils, these appeals have fallen on deaf ears. There is no Newt Gingrich in Detroit. In fact, there hasn’t been a Republican officeholder in nearly 30 years.

So Kilpatrick has played the race card, claiming a white suburban plot to undermine black leadership. But race isn’t much of an argument when your pursuers — prosecutor Kym Worthy and an impeachment-minded city council — are all black Democrats. As a result, Detroit’s Democratic leadership sees Kilpatrick as less a victim than a national embarrassment who needs to be expunged.

The media hasn’t been much help, either. In 1998, the left-leaning Detroit Free Press, Michigan’s largest newspaper, dismissed the case against Clinton in an editorial as an “affair (that) has always been more about morals and politics than about law.” This time the Free Press has assumed the role of Ken Starr, breaking the story of the mayor’s affair and pressing the resulting case for perjury.

Like Clinton before him, Kilpatrick legal troubles have snowballed since the initial charges, as more women emerge and allegations of a cover-up abound.

Clinton, however, could always play the Republican card. Even Clinton-basher Maureen Dowd of the New York Times eventually fell in line.

“Kenneth Starr and the rabid Republicans keep trying to present the President’s behavior as a deep, dark plot. But the more you hear them tell it, the more it sounds like what it was: a powerful but weak-willed guy scrambling not to get caught in a deeply humiliating mess,” wrote Dowd ten years ago. “They have made the case that Bill Clinton is selfish and promiscuous. They have not made the case that two elections should be overturned.”

They are words that any liberal Free Press columnist might write today about their promiscuous two-term mayor . . . if only there were a Republican in sight.

– Henry Payne is a writer and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News.