Month: November 2000

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Seer-in-Chief

NASHVILLE — Al Gore must hate being right.

Surely the vice president did not realize that he was predicting the future when, on
his last visit to Nashville prior to election night, he joked that should George W. Bush win the
presidency Americans would awaken to a bleak, rainy day.

The early hours of November 8th , in both Nashville and Austin, were just that.

For the first time since the campaign’s start, both Democrats and Republicans found
themselves in the same boat – tired, cold, wet, huddling together and anxiously clinging to Bernard Shaw’s every word on CNN, cheering and groaning, hoping against hope that the night would just end.

Perhaps it was a sign that at around midnight the election, which had seemed to favor the vice president earlier in the evening, began to take a turn for the worst. Rain polluted the skies that had been so clear and brought with it a cold front that starkly contrasted with the early evening’s perfect, warm, weather. If supporters had looked with keen and critical eyes, perhaps they would have seen that Gore’s prophecy was beginning to come true – or at the very least, that the vice president’s luck was washing away.

Shortly after 1:00 a.m. central time the announcement came that Bush had won Florida and thus the election. Dejected and despondent, the crowd began to clear. People by the hundreds filtered to the parking lots and hotels surrounding Nashville’s Legislative Plaza.
But the die-hard democrats remained, cuddling under umbrellas and tucking their cold arms inside short sleeved shirts, waiting to hear Gore’s concession speech and refusing to
acknowledge aloud that America would have it’s second George Bush in the Oval Office.

These same democrats that hours earlier had crowded not only on Legislative Plaza but in
the neighboring bars and at private parties, all cheering the announcement of each democrat-won electoral vote with a vigor typically reserved for the Super Bowl, now trudged through downtown Nashville, dreading the moment that reality would set in.

Perhaps the signs had been there all along. Perhaps the democratic faithful had been warned by some of the other things that went wrong. Regardless, as the evening progressed, Gore’s luck began to dwindle and bit by bit everyone’s spirits began to fall, eventually drowning and dropping into the bog of let downs and false hopes, the political and emotional roller coaster, that characterized Election Night 2000.

Collectively, the signs were there. Too many things were going wrong. From the obvious disappointments to the random annoyances, tides were turning against the Gore camp. All present knew things were bad when Florida was first being chalked up as a Gore win only to later be snatched back. But there were other, seemingly insignificant problems, too.
The brand new walkie-talkie system purchased by the Metro Nashville Police Department with this event in mind malfunctioned and all of the extra officers brought in from across the city had to work in silence.

Many supporters left the plaza because the public address system was not loud enough nor the giant television screens visible enough for all present to stay abreast of the returns. The 2,000 members of the media on hand, arrived from all over the globe, grew angry when they learned that press would be quarantined to a pen off to the far right of the stage with an obscured view of the evenings festivities and absolutely prohibited from entering the main public area. (This created an interesting dilemma: assigned to gather the “human element” of the event but restricted from access to the citizens present, many reporters took to interviewing each other in the lobby bar of the Sheraton Hotel across the street from the plaza.

The opinions of journalists from Tennessee organizations were held in especially high regard by members of the European and Japanese press.)

However, at 2:30 a.m. the remaining Democrats caught a glimmer of the silver lining on the storm cloud that had parked itself over the War Memorial Building. As everyone awaited Gore’s concession speech, news of his first call to the Texas governor had already been heralded, reports came in that the fat lady had not yet sung. Florida had been taken from Bush and placed once again in the “too close to call” column – all was not lost. People began to reappear, members of the press left their barstools and once again reclaimed space in the media risers, the hearing impaired interpreter waited on-stage, not knowing whose speech she would interpret.

The crowd erupted in chants of “recount,” thrusting posters in the air and hugging each other in expressions of jubilation and hope. The evening takes on a minute-by-minute tone. At 2:45 a.m. it is reported that Gore has made a second call to Governor Bush, this time taking back his concession. Anyone officially associated with the Democratic party, either on a national or state level, is mobbed by reporters, all shoving microphones and tape recorders in the officials faces looking for comments.

At 3:00 a.m. Florida is said to be undecided and the announcement is made that regardless of the outcome there will be a vote recount in that state because the votes are so close. Everyone hangs on everyone else’s every word, afraid to move for fear of missing something. All present are soaked to the bone, shivering and physically miserably but too wound up to seek shelter from the rain and cold.

At 3:10 a.m. it is announced that one hundred percent of the Florida precincts have been reported and that Bush now leads by only 1,210 votes – an audible gasp sweeps the crowd, followed by a gaggle of murmurs, everyone is astonished. Bob Butterworth, the attorney general of Florida, makes the announcement that Florida is officially undecided.
There are 5,000 votes left in, reportedly from Dade and Broward counties, it looks as if these 5,000 votes will decide our next president.

Bill Daley, the mayor of Chicago and Gore’s campaign manager takes the stage, saying with eerie resonance, “Our campaign continues.” People in Nashville, seeing that Gore will not take the stage to deliver a speech on that night, leave the plaza, some going home, some crowding around television sets in hotel lobbies. Everyone is exhausted but afraid to go to sleep.

At 3:30 a.m. there is another announcement from Butterworth, this time saying,
“We do not even know how close the vote is.

At 3:40 a.m.CNN posts it’s most up to date poll. In Florida Bush holds 2,902,733 votes; Gore holds 2,902,509 votes. It is reported that only 220 votes separate the two. The word “momentous,” “legendary,” “historical,” and “unbelievable” are bandied about like ping
pong balls.

In its tally of the total popular vote, CNN reports that Gore leads, taking
47,123,818 votes to Bush’s 47,063,088 votes. One can since that in bedrooms and living rooms across Nashville and elsewhere, democrats are cheering.

At 4:10 a.m. all the networks report that nothing will change until mid-morning.
People began tucking themselves in, the blue glare of a television tuned to CNN fills bedrooms across the nation as we all sleep no knowing who our next president will.

Daylight on November 8th illuminates a gray, rainy, day in Nashville as Bush is still favored the winner. Gore may not have thought himself a fortuneteller, but his position as
Seer in Chief seems secure.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Scattered Splatter

NASHVILLE — It was in the wee hours past election midnight. Two Yellow Dog Democrats stood on the 27th floor balcony of a Nashville law firm. To the west they could see the outline of the hotel where Vice President Albert sat in a room wondering whether he was to be the bug or the windshield in this election.

Far down below and across the street, the two old Democrats could see the crowd huddled in the rain on the Legislative Plaza in front of the State Capitol. For hours this crowd had waited for Gore to walk out onto the steps of the War Memorial Building and tell them that he was, indeed, the windshield. Yes, Gore would assure them, it has turned out, indeed, to be a Bush bug smashed on the windshield of this ever so close election.

But that message never arrived. The hours ticked by and the bug was still smashed on the windshield, and nobody could make out the bug’s name.

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” said one of the tired Yellow Dogs as he dragged his tired frame away from the balcony, toward the door and home and, finally, bed.

“I gonna find Ralph Nader and strangle him,” said the other.

Indeed, it would seem that Nader might be the most despised man in American today. The numbers would seem to indicate that Nader, the Green Party candidate, ate into the Democratic vote enough in three states to tilt the election to Bush. On the surface, this would appear to be the case in Oregon and New Hampshire, and nowhere more so than in Florida.

If Nader’s 96,701 votes in Florida had gone to Gore, the election would be over now, there would be no need for an agonizing recount and possible court fight, and Gore would be President. Thus, the anger of the old Yellow Dog on the balcony in Nashville, and the comparable spleen that might be poured upon Nader’s name in the days to come.

And the Democrats, ask: for what? Nader fell far short of his goal of getting 5% so the Green Party could qualify for federal matching funds in the next presidential contest. The latest figures show Nader polling about 3%.

However, before that Yellow Dog strangles Nader he might want to talk to some of the professionals and do a bit more analysis. It will take several days of sifting through the votes and doing follow up interviews to find out just how damaging Nader really was to Gore.

Greg Wanderman, the Executive Director of the Tennessee Democratic Party, says that Nader was not that much of a factor, at least in Tennessee.

“Our polling,” Wanderman said on the morning following the election, “indicated that not many of Nader’s votes in Tennessee were coming from people who would have otherwise voted for Gore. I think they were mostly people who were disaffected with the system and may not have voted at all. Some of them may have been just people who hate the internal combustion engine and care about little else.”

In addition to the debriefing of the Nader vote, there is also on the morning after renewed speculation about the role and the future of the electoral college system. Among other things, if it turns out that Gore wins the popular vote and loses the electoral vote, there certainly will be renewed calls for a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college.

Another line of speculation that ensued on the morning after was the debate about how much, if any, pressure can be brought to bear on electors to defect from their pledged positions and go with the popular vote. Twenty-three states do not require by law that electors vote the way they have pledged to vote

Some were even toying with the idea that Gore should be encouraged to mount a massive lobbying campaign to get electors to do just that. These speculators mused that, should Gore lose the Florida recount, he certainly should try that in the Sunshine State. What has he go lose, they ask.

Frankly, such a scheme has little chance of success. Each party’s executive committee chooses the electors for that party on the basis of their loyalty to that party. In Florida, for instance, there would be 25 Democrat electors pledged to support Gore and 25 pledged to support Bush.

Since it’s a winner take all system, Gore might have to convince as many as 13 Republican electors that they should bow to the popular vote mandate and force Florida’s 25-vote block to go to him instead of Bush. That’s almost impossible to imagine. Even if the rules allowed the 25 votes to be split up, Gore would face the task of convincing at least 10 Republicans to abandon their party and go with him. Again, not likely at all.

No, Gore’s best bet right now is to hope the recounters examine the bug smashed on the windshield and determine that the word “Bush” is written on its side.

Categories
News News Feature

Disillusioned in Austin

Next to the Billion Bubba March and 6th Street after dark, Austin, Texas is a pretty great place to hang your hat for a couple of days — well, if you can find a coatrack that isn’t guarded by the police. Don’t forget the right credentials. Oh, and it’s a good idea not to be a protester, a Ralph Nader supporter, or the Green Party’s main man himself. The average Austinite trying to go to work, get to school, get on with life as usual, woke up Tuesday morning to their fine city more heavily barricaded than the Alamo.

Austin appears to be Bush country from convenience stores papered in the candidate’s posters to Bush/Cheney litter strewn UT campus. To show its support for the son of Bush, the city council moved to spend a little taxpayer dough to construct looming red, white, and blue plume-like archways to show their patriotism. A friend and student at UT whom I’m slumming with this election night just rolled her eyes at it all, opting to take a longer route to drop me off in the middle of Congress Avenue’s impending circus.

“Nobody that I know cares too much,” she said, sighing. “We’re in the middle of exams. There are probably a lot of students who aren’t going to vote. If I vote for Nader, I’m voting for Bush. If I vote for Gore, I’ll vomit. He’s phony. And Bush is even less an option.”

I don’t know why, but as soon as I got to her campus apartment, I felt like ordering a pizza, putting on a sweatshirt, sleeping late, and forgetting about it all.

Instead I met a group of prominent journalists for drinks at the downtown Hyatt. Reporters always find a way to get together and drink during major news events. One of the hotshots to my right told me that what the UT student had predicted was really good news.

“That’s better than the national average, isn’t it? Or something like that?” He confessed that he doesn’t listen to readers of his D.C.-based national magazine because they distract him.

“Your friend has it probably right on there,” he said. “She’s right; not a lot of people your age are going to the poles tomorrow.” Then he went back to a long pontification about the Green Party’s “subtle introduction of advanced sociology similar to Vladimir Putin’s hoped for regime which is antithetical to Reaganomics contrary to what most pundits are saying.”

I had another drink. I read three story leads in the Austin Statesman newspaper that began with poll results. I listened to the other reporters analyze very deeply and thoroughly the very analytical and deep implications of this election. And when I got back to my friends’ apartment, I wished her good luck on her exam, and said I understood perfectly well why she might not vote. Disconnect between the establishment — the politicians, the well-paid journalists, the pundits and the voters is what will linger long after we know tonight’s election results.

Disillusioned and disappointed in Austin — Ashley Fantz.

(You can write Ashley Fantz at ashley@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

A Last Weekend in Memphis

Hilary J.D. MacKenzie is the Washington bureau chief of the Southam News, a news service for Canadian and British newspapers. Her mission to Memphis this past weekend was simple: make a decision about where to be on Tuesday — election night and the final act of the 2000 presidential race.

With 11 electoral votes and the political bragging rights to Tennessee, Vice President Al Gore‘s home state, at stake, the winsome, thoughtful MacKenzie, a Jane Wyman lookalike, wanted to give Gore one last look.

For the last several months she had been following the presidential campaigns of both Democrat Gore and Republican George W. Bush. She had already made hotel and reservations for both Tennessee’s capital city of Nashville, where Democrat Gore maintains headquarters, and Austin, Texas, where Republican rival George W. Bush has his.

MacKenzie would have some help covering election night, but she preferred to be in the city of the winner herself– which meant that she had to make up her mind which way to go — West or East. Gore’s two weekend events in Memphis — a Friday night rally in Court Square and a Saturday morning prayer breakfast at The Peabody would, in effect, decide the issue.

Friday night: Though some would appreciate outdoors evening rally and the dedication of the thousand or so souls who attended it in an intermittent rain, MacKenzie and others would judge it in retrospect to be a “disaster” or, at the very least, a disappointment.

Strange in a way: Any public occasion which has Al Green doing “Let’s Stay Together” (an almost overtly symbolic song which rocked and, swear to God!, temporarily stopped the rain) ought not be discounted overmuch.

It was an impressive fact, too, that staying together for this occasion — as for events over the last several weeks — were U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr.; his father, former congressman Harold Ford Sr.; Mayor Willie Herenton; Assessor Rita Clark; Shelby County Commissioner Shep Wilbun; state House Speaker Lois DeBerry; register candidate John Freeman; and a number of other potentially disparate types.

Clark, who has proved herself one of Shelby County’s most accomplished politicians, came up with one of the evening’s best lines. “You pray for George Bush,” she urged. “You vote for Al Gore!”

And Gore, when he came out, preceded by wife Tipper and daughter Kristin played a fair game of politiccs, too, adding the phrase “. . .like Willie Herenton” to a reprise of his convention line, “I know I won’t always be the most exciting politician. . . .” and boosting the mayor’s chief rival, young Ford, by intoning the date “2008!” meaningfully.

But when it was all over, almost nobody could remember much else of what Gore had said beyond his standard talking points (“prescription-drug benefits for seniors,” “Social Security-plus, not Social Security-minus,” unjust HMOs, the iniquity of a big tax cut for the “wealthiest one percent,” etc., etc.)

And the crowd, in retrospect, was seen as being too small, rain or no rain.

As a homecoming to the place where, as Gore noted, he and Tipper had summered for a Memphis State session in the dismal watershed year of 1968, it may indeed have been more dampened than fiery.

Saturday morning: All this while, the news of opponent Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest had been given a chance to play, and the next morning, as a sizeable crowd gathered in the Peabody’s Memphis Ballroom for the prayer breakfast, such backers as Shelby County Democratic chairman David Cocke and former U.S. Senator and Ambassador Jim Sasser were hopefully talking up the possibility of further November surprises, more skeletons.

This was a true prayer breakfast, and as the crowd waited for Al and Tipper to appear, Rev. Bill Adkins, the host, and a series of other African-American ministers prayed for victory — or perhaps it was for deliverance — with intensity, proclaiming, in the words of one, that “the vice president must win here,” and in the words of another, reminding the crowd (and the Lord) that Gore had been “called upon to save the Clinton ticket in 1992.”

When the candidate himself came on, he begin with a false start, mistaking Aurelia Kyles, wife of Rev. Billy Kyles, for the wife of Mayor Herenton. But this mistake was indulged with good humor on all sides, and Gore was encouraged by the warmth of his reception.

Indeed, he quickly segued into one of his stump gimmicks of the last few days, whereby he said, “I’m getting warmer” and stripped himself of suit coat.

Soon, this was matched by the phrase, “I believe that we are getting warmer” and followed up with, “I believe that America has a rendezvous with redemption.”

Gore sprinkled some of his usual talking points into the occasion (although “a woman’s right to choose,” among several others, made no appearance at this breakfast, so well attended by black fundamentalists).

But he himself was into what sounded vaguely like preaching, the real kind, and did not obscure his message by the shouting he sometimes affected to simulate a passion that might not actually have been there.

Gore didn’t seem to be faking it this time when he told this group, “I am taught that good overcomes evil” and asked for its help in overcoming the last obstacles to victory in this campaign.

“I have a feeling,” he said, prophesying victory. “I feel it coming.”

This was a group, he said, which surely had not cared that he might of an occasion have sighed overmuch (and, to laughter, he demonstrated the breathy sound that millions of Americans had heard –and been disturbed by — during the televised first debate with Bush. “You have known what is in my heart,” he declared with confidence.

Gore exhorted the crowd to go with him into “the valley of the dry bones,” where the Lord Himself breathed life into that which had been thought dead. “I need your help to breathe life into this campaign. I need to you to lift me up. And Tuesday night I’ll say, ‘Thank you, Memphis!'”

There was real emotion in this (as there had been when Gore preached a secular homage to the principle of the Good Samaritan at Mason Temple a year earlier), but there was a kind of pathos, too, one that the closing, arms-linked mass rendition of “We Shall Overcome” could not altogether efface.

Having lunch in the Peabody later in the morning, Hilary J.D. MacKenzie mused on the “presumptuous” pattern she had discerned of “Number Twos” in America trying to become “Number Ones,” and how it didn’t usually work out. Yet she had been moved by the solidarity of the prayer breakfast, (if not by the Court Square rally of Friday night), and she thought out loud about staying over another night in Memphis while she decided whether she was Nashville- or Austin-bound.

She was still undecided when she went up to her room to write an evening dispatch. When, later on, she read her account over the phone to a newly made Memphis friend, even she was surprised at how fatalistic the events she described had been made to seem.

An hour later, Hilary MacKenzie said her farewells. She had a 9 o’clock flight to Austin.

If Al Gore were to end up, as promised, saying “Thank you, Memphis,” from his Nashville election headquarters on Tuesday night, she would have to catch it remotely, on television, the way the rest of the nation would.

Categories
News News Feature

Advice From Your Friendly Cable Company

Do you think Memphis and the Internet should be in the hands of some tycoons in cahoots with the people who bring you cable TV or some other tycoons in cahoots with the people who bring you tap water and electricity?

A simplification for sure, but not an unfair one, I think, of the debate over Memphis Networx, the fledgling company that wants to horn into the big business of telecommunications.

Offhand, I can’t think of a more interesting, important news story that has been presented in such a boring, overly technical, legalistic fashion. I suspect this is part of the strategy of Time Warner and other opponents of Memphis Networx. If so, it’s working.

Last Sunday, Dean Deyo, president of the Mid-South Division of Time Warner Communications, wrote in The Commercial Appeal that “Memphis Networx is a poorly conceived plan with an underprepared business partner and too much risk for the public to assume.”

Good old Time Warner, always watching out for the public’s interest, whether it’s limiting our “risk” or shoving Howard Stern down our throats.

The recent coverage of Memphis Networx has focused on hearings before the Tennessee Regulatory Authority (TRA) in Nashville. If you want to make a Memphis news editor squirm, propose a juicy story set in the hearing chamber of a regulatory agency 200 miles away. Hold the hearings over a span of several weeks. Let the lawyers run on for hours. Make it difficult for local reporters to cover the story, although, to its credit, The Commercial Appealdid just that.

If it’s all right with Time Warner, let’s review the players.

Memphis Networx is a partnership of Memphis Light Gas and Water and an Oklahoma-based company called A&L Construction. The letters refer to founder Alex Lowe. He wears a cowboy hat and sometimes makes blunt, folksy statements. A&L Construction is a “hole-digging” company that does pipelines and the like. MLGW you already know. The utility company has gobs of real estate and right-of-way, which is a handy thing to have if you’re talking about bringing the Internet to Everyman.

Time Warner Communications is our friendly cable company. If you have a television, you probably send them a check each month for anywhere from $12 to $35 or more for cable. It is the operating philosophy of Time Warner that a customer who wants to watch, say, the Atlanta Braves on TBS should also have to pay for a couple of stations that broadcast church services, black-and-white sitcom reruns, public access programs where people sit in front of potted plants and talk to each other, and Howard Stern, the famous talk-show host who asks his female “guests” to take off their clothes (they usually do). This is the minimally enhanced “basic” cable package.

If you want CNN and ESPN, you’ll have to upgrade to another package that costs more. And of course you will get even more channels you don’t want but Time Warner, in its wisdom, thinks you should have in the bargain.

One way or another, you get what is on Time Warner’s menu, and you pay what Time Warner says you should pay.

Time Warner’s partner — sorry, I almost said partner in crime — is America On Line. AOL also gives its customers a fixed-price menu of channels. You want e-mail, stock quotes, and sports scores. You get recipes, child-raising tips, and vacation destinations for 21bucks a month. And you get AOL tech support for all those troublesome crashes. That is if you can get through to a live person (in Utah). After you do, or while you’re on hold, AOL tells you about some exciting commercial opportunities, usually under the guise of saving money on your AOL bill.

Last year the chairman of AOL, Steve Case, made $326.7 million. The president of AOL, Robert Pittman, earned $134.3 million. Maybe this is what Deyo had in mind when he warned us about “risky ventures” that “duplicate services that are already competitively provided by the private sector.”

Memphis Networx wants to build a fiber-optic telecommunications network. Experts say fiber-optic networks will eventually make using the internet as simple as using a telephone or a television. Those of us old enough to remember black-and-white televisions, rabbit-ears antennas, and shaky pictures can appreciate this even if we don’t understand the technical side.

We have already seen how Time Warner and AOL dole out programming and services to maximize profits. If these guys ran MLGW, “basic” customers would probably have to get Jungle Juice in addition to water, while “premium” service would also include Jack Daniels. Want electricity? Sure, would that be 110, 220, or the special 24-hour movie package?

Is there risk and uncertainty in Memphis Networx? Of course there is. There was risk in The Pyramid, Nonconnah Parkway, and the interstate highway system. Deyo warns that a residential fiber-optic network in Memphis could cost more than $300 million. Gee, that would be $26 million less than Steve Case earned in one year.

But there’s upside too. The participation of MLGW in Memphis Networx brings with it the possibility of universal access, local ownership, the economies of a public utility’s infrastructure, and profit tempered by public interest. Understandably, unions are concerned about who will do the hole-digging and make the connections. But that is a secondary issue, like who pours the concrete for the interstate highways and airport runways.

The bigger issue is whether Time Warner and AOL should tell the public what is too “risky.” Let’s hope the TRA takes that advice with a huge dose of salt.

(You can write John Branston at branston @memphismagazine.com)

Categories
News News Feature

Why I Am Not Going To Vote

Are we there yet?

There used to be this car game I played as a kid. I’m not sure if it had a name or how exactly it started. There was no scoring, no points. There was no winning; it just occupied the time. This is how it went:

“Would you rather eat brussel sprouts for dinner every day for the rest of your life or stand outside the school naked for an hour?”

“Would you rather eat a worm or kiss a band nerd for five minutes?”

“Would you rather be stung by a million bees or never be allowed to talk again?

None of these choices ever sounded very appealing, but you had to choose. No matter what. That was the game. You had to say, I would stand naked in front of the school for an hour. I would kiss a band nerd. I would learn sign language. And then everyone else would squeal with laughter at your choice.

I guess I am what you would call an undecided voter. I’m sure that’s what all the poll takers and politicos would say. And I want to make a choice, I do. But I just can’t.

“Would you rather have a noxious know it all or the class clown for president?”

“Would you rather align yourself with a well-off white guy who pretends to care or a well-off white guy who pretends to care?”

“Do you vote for someone who you literally cannot stomach or the guy who scares the crap out of you?”

It’s the game all over again. I thought about going third party, an out never allowed in the car game, but I feel like my hands are tied. A vote for Perot was once a vote for Clinton; in Tennessee, a vote for Nader seems to be a vote for Bush. While I like the idea of helping the Green Party, I simply cannot bring myself to vote for a major party candidate, even in a de facto way. No thank you.

I suppose it’s my fault. I, like many voters, didn’t wake up during the primaries. I wasn’t ready for the election. Bush? McCain? Sure. Okay. Whatever. I remember hearing someone say that the major political parties had chosen their candidates for this election years ago and that fact was going to come back and bite the American people in the butt when they realized it.

In the car game, you were supposed to come up with horrible choices, the worse the better. That was the point. And I’m hoping it isn’t the point here, but are we really supposed to believe that these were the best people the Democrats and Republicans could come up with? If that is the case, our country is in some serious trouble.

Because of that, I can’t bring myself to the polls. My vote will languish unused. Analysts will say the American people are disenfranchised because we are apathetic, and we don’t know enough about the issues. I can’t speak for anyone else not voting, but me, I’m not voting because there’s not anyone worth voting for. Only people worth voting against but you only get one vote.

The car game was merely a way to pass the time. No one won, no one lost. But this is the election. And someone is going to win, and America is going to lose.

(You can write Mary Cashiola at cashiola@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Deja Vu: Vols Beat Tigers in Final Seconds

This is what its like to be in purgatory.

This is what it must have been like to be Sisyphus.

This is Memphis football.

For the second consecutive season, Tennessee scored the winning points in the final minute of the game as the Vols beat the Tigers 19-17 before 63,121 rain-soaked fans at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium Saturday.

After Scott Scherer hit senior tight end Billy Kendall with a 24-yard touchdown pass with 2:56 to go in the game it looked like a repeat of last season’s final score in Knoxville, when Tennessee scored with a minute to go for a 17-16 win. But Memphis couldn’t make the score stick.

As it has for most of this season of disappointment, Memphis had a special teams’ breakdown in a crucial moment. Leonard Scott returned Ryan White’s kickoff 44 yards to the Tennessee 48. Freshman quarterback Casey Clausen then drove the Vols to the Memphis 17 where Alex Walls kicked his fourth field goal of the game with 13 seconds left.

After the game, just as he did following the disappointing loss in Knoxville last season, Memphis head coach Rip Scherer lashed out at certain members of the Memphis media who he thinks have been negative in reporting about his program.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of this football team. These kids are good kids and they deserve better. I wouldn’t trade this football team for any other team in the country,” an emotional Scherer said after the game. “This week we circled the wagons and hung in there and competed. We didn’t let this negative stuff bother us, divide us, or create doubt.”

Both teams came into the game wanting to play a conservative, ball-control offense. In the first quarter Tennessee did just that, keeping the ball for more than 10 minutes of the period. The Vols average starting position was its own 47; Memphis its own 12.

The Tigers suffered yet another special team mistake when senior punter Ben Graves mishandled a high snap and barely got a punt off from his own end zone. Tennessee got the ball at the Memphis 21-yard-line and Alex Walls kicked a 42-yard field goal with 53 seconds left for a 3-0 lead.

In the second quarter, the table turned. Memphis completely dominated the period with Scott Scherer leading the Tigers on a 82-yard, 14-play drive culminating in a Dernice Wherry touchdown with 9:15 to go in the first half. Tennessee committed a special teams’ mistake of its own and Memphis extended its lead to 10-3 when the Tigers turned a fumbled punt return with 11 seconds to go into a 43-yard Ryan White field goal.

Tennessee came out of the locker room strong in the second half. Walls connected on a 30-yard field goal and Tennessee later drove 93 yards to take a 13-10 lead with 4:54 left in the period. The big play in the drive was a 60-yard Clausen to Donte Stallworth pass.

The Vols seemed about to take control of the game when Clausen hit Memphis native Burney Veazey with a 19-yard scoring strike at the start of the fourth quarter, but the touchdown was nullified by an illegal motion penalty. David Martin fumbled the ball on the next play. Memphis senior Jarvis Slaton recovered at the Tiger 18.

Memphis fumbled the ball back, leading to Walls’ third field goal and a 16-10 lead. But with five minutes to go in the game Ryan Johnson returned a Tennessee punt 50 yards to the Tennessee 36. Five plays later Kendall caught the touchdown pass and Memphis only had to hold the Vols one last time to get their second win in the series.

They couldn’t do it.

Scott Scherer, named the starter just before kickoff, played the entire game completing 15 of 27 for 137 yards. But he often had to run for his life as Tennessee had five sacks. Kendall caught four passes for 57 yards and the touchdown. Sugar Sanders was the leading ball carrier for Memphis with 59 yards.

Neither team could run the ball. Tennessee had 99 yards rushing, with Travis Henry getting 50. Clausen hit 19 of 30 passes for 224 yards and an interception. He was at his best at the end of the game, hitting back-up receiver David Martin three times for 20 yards in the final, decisive drive.

Memphis falls to 4-5, and saw dreams of a seven-win season pass them by. Tennessee, winners of three straight, is now 5-3. Both teams play at home next week, with the Vols hosting Arkansas and Memphis taking on Cincinnati.

GAME NOTES:

As they did in the 1996 upset, Memphis wore blue pants with blue jerseys. It was the first time this season the team had worn all blue. . . . Dernice Wherry’s second-quarter touchdown was the first of the junior’s career. . . . The attendance of 63,121 is the fifth largest at the Liberty Bowl. The record was set in 1996 when the Memphis-Tennessee game drew 65,885. . . . Ben Graves had one of his worst days of the season, averaging 32.4 on 8 punts and mishandling a snap in the Memphis end zone, leading to Walls first field goal. . . . Memphis struggled again converting third-downs, making only 2 of 13. The Tigers were only 43 of 135 (32 percent) on third-down conversions before today. . . . The Tigers rushed for less than 100 yards for the fifth time this season. In those games they are 0-5. In the four games that they surpassed the century mark, Memphis is 4-0. . . . Memphis was worried about containing huge Tennessee defensive lineman John Henderson. The concern was justified. Henderson had two tackles for lost yardage, forced one fumble, and recovered another. . . . Junior Andre Arnold got his 11th sack of the season, setting the single-season record for sacks at the school. . . .Nose tackle Marcus Bell was instrumental in the Vols’ inability to run the football. The senior had four tackles for lost yardage and consistently clogged the middle.

(You can write Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
News News Feature

Louisville Votes on Consolidation

Consolidation is supposedly a political impossibility in Memphis, but Louisville, Kentucky, a city with some similarities, is poised to pull it off next week.

A city-county merger will be on the ballot in Louisville and Jefferson County, and both mayors are supporting it. The last merger vote in 1983 failed 94,612 to 88,823.

This time Dan Crutcher, editor of Louisville Magazine, thinks it will pass.

“I support the merger initiative here mainly because I don’t see how the city of Louisville is going to survive unless it can find a way to grow. And with all those small cities surrounding us and a state legislature that has made annexation very difficult for Louisville, it’s hard to see how else it can grow. My guess is that this time it will pass, barely.”

The population of Jefferson County is approximately 750,000, but the population of Louisville itself is only 250,000. There are 88 small cities in Jefferson County.

The population of Shelby County is approximately 880,000, and Memphis 643,715. At a glance, that might suggest Memphis voters could call the shots on consolidation, but there are other factors.

Two big differences: Louisville’s population is about 33 percent black, compared to nearly 60 percent for Memphis. Some blacks fear a loss of political power if the city and county were to consolidate. And the city and county school systems in Louisville merged in 1975.

(You can write John Branston at branston @memphismagazine.com)

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Who Is Elvis Prez-ley?

A line of attack frequently pursued by Vice President Al Gore‘s Republican adversaries in this year’s presidential race has been that he is only a nominal Tennessean, that he is actually a son of Washington, D.C., and that his contacts with home-staters are only superficial and occasional.

Whether fair or not, the approach has evidently succeeded in sowing doubt in the minds of some Tennessee voters and may be partly responsible for Gore’s recent second-place showing, behind Republican rival George W. Bush, in a variety of pollsters’ samplings of Tennesseans.

The vice president did himself little good in this regard when he appeared Tuesday night on NBC’s Tonight Show with host Jay Leno.

At one point, discussing the annual habit that he and wife Tipper engage in of dressing up for Halloween in elaborate custumes, he noted that members of the press corps surprised him Tuesday at one of his rally stops by showing up in Halloween getups of their own.

One of them was disguised, Gore noted, “as Elvis Prez-ley”– giving the name the pronunciation favored by members of the national media. But not by Tennesseans.

And certainly not by residents of Memphis, site of an eleventh-hour stop this weekend by candidate Gore, who is counting on a Shelby County turnout to give him a chance for victory in Tennessee over Bush.

The late entertainment icon Elvis Presley pronounced his name “Press-ley,” never any other way, and the difference in pronunciations has historically been regarded as one of those divides that distinguish the local sensibility from the national one.

The gaffe is only symbolic, but it prompts two thoughts, neither of which is flattering to Gore. Does he not know the right way to say the name of this late home-state eminence? Or does he know the right way and prefer to accommodate himself to the prevailing error elsewhere?

For those who would consider the incident insignificant, this question might be considered: what would it say of Gore’s home-state savvy if he pronounced the first name of a latter-day artist “Shan-ia,” which emphasis on the first syllable? Or “Shan-ee-ah” or some other wrong guess? This is, after all, a time in which Gore, Bush, and all other major candidates for office make a practice of taking an active part in popular culture and flaunting their knowledge of it.

As the vice president digs in for his last stand in Tennessee and elsewhere, some other moves of his (or of his campaign staff’s) have threatened to backfire. Early Wednesday morning, a Memphis radio reporter was awakened from slumber by a call from the Gore-Lieberman campaign urging him to conduct an interview with former state Attorney General (and current Gore CEO) Charles Burson, who was then placed on the line. (This came a day after someone from the Gore-Lieberman campaign had called the station and carried out a lengthy interrogation concerning its demographics Ñ the idea seeming to station personnel to be, ‘Are you worthy of being the medium for our message?’)

Somewhat grumpily, the reporter obliged by havng a conversation with Burson, a highly personable man but one whom he did not know personally. The reporter made no effort to record it for later broadcast purposes.

To the reporter, the episode– which no doubt had its counterpart in Bush’s campaign here and there– smacked of the artificial and the peremptory.

For all that, it is a fact that Gore has his share of long-term home-state relationships, real ones, and he will be calling on all these during his weekend sweep of Knoxville and Memphis (where a Court Square rally Friday night will be followed by Gore’s appearance at a Democratic prayer breakfast Saturday), to be followed by a return to his headquarters site of Nashville to get the last word from the voters.

“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” is Gore’s song, and any wrong notes here at the end of things could easily create unwanted dissonance instead of the playback he’s looking for.

(You can write Jackson Baker at baker@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
News News Feature

Mr. Ward Goes to Washington

WASHINGTON, DC — It’s not the only house in D.C., but maybe the toughest.

Memphis public defender Mark Ward held his cool under intense pressure Wednesday to present a controversial case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Weathering both sharply critical and insightful questions from the justices, Ward argued that the Tennessee Supreme Court cannot retroactively punish an already convicted person, even if state laws change after the crime.

That’s the legal issue at hand. The details of the case are a bit more messy.

Six years ago, Wilbert Rogers was invited to play cards with one of his buddyÕs wives. His friend was in jail at the time and when Rogers arrived at the woman’s house, he met another man, Ira Bowdery, allegedly the woman’s boyfriend. The three played cards into the night — drinking and smoking dope. Rogers lost about $20 to Bowdery, who eventually retired to the bedroom with the woman.

The following few hours were very sobering. Rogers admitted to bursting in the bedroom door with a butcher knife and attacking Bowdery. One of those swings sliced clean into Bowdery’s heart. While the woman hysterically chased Rogers as he fled the home, Bowdery — bloody and barely coherent — stumbled through the door of a neighbor’s trailer. They took Bowdery to the hospital where he clung to life for over a year-and-a-half before dying in 1995. Rogers was convicted of first degree murder, and is serving a 33-year prison sentence.

Ward argued before the Supreme Court that RogersÕ defense should have been in accordance with the laws on the books at the time he attacked Bowdery. That law in question stipulates that a defendant cannot be tried for first-degree murder if the victim does not die within a year and a day of an assault. It was was written in 1907 and abolished by the state legislature in 1997.

“The law was reasonable a hundred years ago when we didn’t have the medical advances to keep someone alive for that long,” said Ward in September while preparing for his allotted 30 minutes before the high court “A person should be punished under the law existing at the time of his crime. If retroactive application of laws is allowable, then where does that stop?”

In early 1997, Rogers appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court to consider the year-and-a-day law and reduce his sentence. The court rejected the appeal. Rogers then appealed to the state Supreme Court who agreed with the Sixth Circuit. But, most significantly, the Tennessee Supreme Court also ruled that the year-and-a-day law was archaic and no longer applicable in murder trials.

The question before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether the Tennessee Supreme Court can retroactively apply its 1999 ruling abolishing a law for a defendant whose criminal act occurred five years earlier.

Wednesday afternoon Ward had to argue not just the legality of the issue, but why the court should be lenient on a confessed killer, whose only defense is that his victim lived longer than expected.

“There’s an aura of unreality about your case,” Justice Sandra Day O’Conner said. “It seems to me that your client is just taking advantage of this law. I mean, I have to ask, ‘What purpose does it serve to make concessions for a murderer?’ It’s reasonable to assume that he hoped Mr. Bowdery would die.”

Infliction of a mortal wound, the justices could rule, is enough to constitute punishable first-degree homicide.

Tennessee Solicitor General Michael Moore used that rationale, but made it only a minor component of his argument. Moore told the U.S. Supreme Court that the year-and-a-day law was irrelevant, or a “loophole principle,” when reasonably assuming that the first thing on Rogers’ mind was to kill.

Ward referenced Bouie v. City of Columbia which barred retroactive application of any laws pertaining to criminal statutes.

Ward also pointed out that the majority of America’s courts have not applied their rulings retroactively. That fact contradicted Moore’s brief.

He writes that the Tennessee appeals court rejection of the year-and-a-day rule was not “unexpected,” but that common law courts across the country abandoning it should have indicated that Tennessee would have followed suit.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Rogers v. Tennessee is that state prosecutors are already exhuming bodies of individuals who died more than a year after they were attacked. These people were victims of crimes before the 1999 Rogers ruling abolishing the year-and-a-day law.

And it wouldn’t be a day in Washington without talk of politics. The Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has issued a statement in support of Rogers. Because state appellate judges are pressured to maintain a tough-on-crime image with voters, they might be persuaded to apply retroactive laws that seem harsher than the laws in existence when a crime was committed.

A decision of the case is expected before the end of the Supreme Court’s winter session.

(You can write Ashley Fantz at ashley@memphisflyer.com)