L. Brooks Patterson, Oakland County’s chief executive, has declared, “I love sprawl.” Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

For the past twenty-one years, L. Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit. Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan. Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Clair, at the mouth of the Detroit River, for a party on a yacht. Patterson sat in the front passenger seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough shit.”

The landscape slid past, a jumbled time line of American suburban innovation: big-box districts, fuel megacenters, shopping malls, restaurants with the interior acreage of a factory. “I love sprawl,” Patterson once declared. “I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it.” This credo is now memorialized on Oakland County’s Web site.

Patterson told me, “I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. We’ve got restaurants out here.’ They don’t even have movie theatres in Detroit—not one.” He went on, “I can’t imagine finding something in Detroit that we don’t have in spades here. Except for live sports. We don’t have baseball, football. For that, fine—get in and get out. But park right next to the venue—spend the extra twenty or thirty bucks. And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, __under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.”

“That’s true,” his driver, a retired cop named Tim, muttered. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Patterson just turned seventy-five. Pink-cheeked and silver-haired, he wears rimless eyeglasses and dark suits. His distinctive, slightly slurred baritone is known throughout southeastern Michigan. His sentences often start with “Ah my gad!”

Before becoming the county executive, Patterson, a Republican, served for sixteen years as the county prosecutor. He banned plea bargains to the extent that, as he tells it, criminals knew to avoid Oakland County, because the chief law-enforcement officer was a “crazy motherfucker” who did not make deals. He went after strip clubs and porn shops so zealously that a judge ordered him to stop “Eliot Ness-style raids.” His government career has spanned the terms of seven Detroit mayors; the eighth, Mike Duggan, was inaugurated on January 1st. Patterson is known for being a shrewd tactician who has introduced creative initiatives to keep Oakland County solvent. Oakland is one of only several dozen counties in the U.S. that Standard & Poor’s has given a triple-A bond rating, the highest possible credit score; Patterson maintained the distinction even during the recession, and even as Detroit’s recent collapse into bankruptcy has threatened to destabilize the regional economy. In 2013, an S. & P. analyst said that, if counties were color-coded, Oakland would be platinum.

Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, Oakland County has struggled with a sluggishly rebounding housing market and a high unemployment rate, but its budget is balanced through 2017 and, as Detroit contends with eighteen billion dollars in debt, Oakland has a surplus of more than two hundred million dollars. In October, Governing, a nonpartisan magazine in Washington, D.C., named Patterson one of nine public officials of the year, citing his pioneering use of a three-year rolling budget, which allows the county to plan ahead for problems rather than be forced to triage them in a crisis. One of the magazine’s editors told the Detroit Free Press that Patterson represents the kind of farsighted fiscal management that “should be a model for counties and cities and states everywhere.”

Still, he is best known for his big mouth. When a black Detroit city councilwoman alleged racism during a business dispute, Patterson publicly declared that he’d “rather own a 1947 Buick than own” her. After accusing Detroit of trying to save itself by poaching Oakland County companies, he said, “I don’t see how moving furniture around on the deck of the Titanic helps this region grow.” In 2012, Robert Ficano, the executive of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, became the subject of a federal investigation; when Patterson was asked what advice he’d give Ficano, he joked, “Go in the garage, pull the door down, leave the engine running.” Patterson once compared road reforms to rape. He marked the death of Coleman Young—Detroit’s first black mayor and a former nemesis—by calling him singly responsible for the city’s demise. This past fall, during a political talk show, Patterson obliquely compared Michigan’s Speaker of the House to Hitler, then produced a black pocket comb and pressed it to his upper lip.

Once, he helped host a mock roast that featured a man in a Coleman Young mask and people speaking in what one reporter called a “guttural black dialect.” The Reverend Wendell Anthony, the president of the Detroit chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., complained that the media too often excused Patterson’s “divisive racist antics.” He added, “Mr. Patterson’s failure is rooted in his limited capacity to understand that God’s grace shines on more than one county and on more than one type of human being.” Patterson is opposed to a regional subway system, and Brenda Lawrence—a former political rival frustrated with his refusal to compromise on this position, and with his apparent favoritism toward affluent whites—has referred to him as “an island.” When I asked him how Detroit might fix its financial problems, he said, “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.’ ”

Lewis is Patterson’s first name, but he likes to joke that if a pretty woman in a bar asks what the “L” in “L. Brooks Patterson” stands for, he takes her by the hand and coos, “Lonely.” (Twice divorced, he is single.) En route to the yacht party, he paraphrased Edwin Edwards, who served four terms as governor of Louisiana: “I’ll keep getting elected until I’m caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman.”

As a young man, Patterson hoped to become a writer. For speeches, he creates his own material but also scavenges from the Internet, bending other people’s quips to fit the occasion. When Kelly Sleva, his assistant, transcribes audio recordings of notes that he makes while preparing remarks, she often hears him cracking himself up. He loves to tell a made-up story about parking some distance from a downtown venue and asking a police officer how long he’d have to walk. “I don’t know—no one’s ever made it,” the cop answers. At a recent retirement roast of an employee who had moved to Louisville, Patterson joked, “Mike told me when he went to the Kentucky Derby he saw a bumper sticker that said ‘I miss Detroit.’ So he broke the window, stole the radio, and left a note that said, ‘I hope this cures your homesickness.’ ” He recycles his bits to the point that his constituents can retell them. The first time he made the crack about Indians and corn, he was widely criticized for it, but he does not backpedal. Even if a line is poorly received, he pockets it like a shiv.