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On Tuesday night, the first 9th District cattle
call (don’t blame us, folks: That’s the term of art among pols — the Beltway
sort, especially) went on as scheduled, featuring seven would-be Democratic
successors to current Congressman Harold Ford Jr., now a U.S. Senate
candidate.
The event (a “forum,” as it was actually called) was held
at the IBEW headquarters building on Madison, under the sponsorship of Democracy
for Memphis, one of the new activist groups that surfaced last year and became a
force in the party’s biennial reorganization.
Here’s a brief take on the candidates, including a capsule
intro prepared before the event, coupled with follow-up notes
on how each was perceived to have done Tuesday night:
Previous note:
The prospects of one candidate, NIKKI TINKER, were dealt with at some
length in this space two weeks ago. Suffice it to say here that Tinker has
impressed many with her high-level support and early-bird activity. Growing some
bona fide grass roots remains a challenge for this Alabama/D.C. import.
Tuesday night:
Tinker was a no-show at the forum. A friend read a statement on her behalf and
said later she was “working;” her mother said she had a “prior commitment.”
Whatever the case, it was hard to imagine what other circumstance could have
been so all-important as to keep Tinker away. “She doesn’t know the issues,”
theorized one acquaintance. “She wants to set herself off from the pack,”
guessed another. To judge from the reaction of many attendees Tuesday night,
the still little-known Tinker would have been well advised to have been there.
She remains an Unknown Quantity, and her best way of “setting herself off” would
have been to show well in the give-and-take
Previous note: Also discussed in detail was the
likelihood of a go-for-broke candidacy on the part of state Senator STEVE
COHEN, a major figure on the local and statewide scenes.
Tuesday night: Cohen
stayed away from Tuesday night’s proceedings, too, but nobody begrudged him
that. He’s well-established enough to get away with being absent. Besides, he
hasn’t formally declared yet.
Previous note: Lawyer ED STANTON, JR., son of a
well-known local governmental figure, has been making something of an impression
himself, running a low-key, under-the-radar campaign that is reportedly fueled
by a hefty – and growing – war chest. Stanton is likely to be in for the long
haul.
Tuesday night: In
almost everybody’s estimation, Stanton did well, sounding crisp and even
somewhat original in his call for such staples as education and economic
development. “Live well, then learn well,” is how he accounted for the primacy
of the latter issue.
RON REDWING, now a
free-lance consultant and formerly an aide to Mayor Willie Herenton, has been
running hard and for even longer than Tinker. He has built an organization, it
would seem, and, to judge by the turnout at some of his fundraisers, something
of a following. He, too, will go to the End Game.
Tuesday night:
Though Redwing got some early response from the crowd by addressing it directly
with a hearty greeting, he seemed to lose ground by repeatedly declining to
offer either any specifics or any particularly inspiring rhetoric.
RALPH WHITE, a
minister, musician, and former star athlete, is a bona fide renaissance man –
superbly talented in most of what he does but so far unlucky in politics, a
field whose pros and junkies and facilitators have largely made a point of
looking the other way from nice guy Ralph over the years. Too bad. White is
deserving, though he has contributed to his own loneliness in Democratic ranks
by backing some wrong horses in the past (Republican Rod DeBerry vs. then
congressman Harold Ford Sr. in 1994!) Money may be a long-term problem,
but White intends to stick around.
Tuesday night: In
the judgment of almost everybody who offered an opinion, White didn’t measure
up, offering preacherly platitudes and avoiding anything concrete in his
answers. He seemed surprised at being asked about Iraq and had no prepared
answer. More astonishingly, considering that the venue was a union hall, he
began an answer about his attitude toward organized labor by grousing at length
about corrupt unions. (Helpful hint: Ralph, Ralph!, any voter who would
respond to that kind of answer is going to be voting Republican on primary day.)
JOSEPH KYLES, who
in recent years has been a mainstay of the Rainbow/Push coalition locally,
belongs to a famous local family and has connections to spare at the grassroots
level. A former football player at UT/Martin, Kyles has the requisite
young-man-on-the-way-up look and an appropriately serious demeanor to go with
it.
Tuesday night:
Though not everybody agreed, Kyles impressed many by speaking in his slow,
stately way of specific abuses in the existing social power structure, firing
salvoes at “corporate welfare,” for example, and taking particular exception to
what he perceived as chicanery on the part of MLGW. On a personal level, his
story of suffering temporary paralysis after a violent football hit on
Fourth-and-One resonated with the audience.
LEE HARRIS, an
assistant professor of law at the University of Memphis, is a fairly new
face in local politics, but he’s rapidly acquiring exposure, most recently
alongside some of the major players in statewide ethics reform as emcee at a
Cooper/Young forum on that issue.
Tuesday night:
Harris is another who was well received, making frequent common-sense
connections, such as his response to a question about how to deal with illegal
immigration: “We don’t need to police the Mexicans; we need to police the
businesses.”
All things considered, though, the most impressive
responses Tuesday night came from a candidate whom I had postponed dealing with
for this article, planning to write about him next week, along with
such other candidates who in the meantime might come out of the woodwork (As I
originally put it: “This list is only partial. Stay tuned; more candidates – both
Democrats and Repubicans — will be featured in weeks to come, especially as the
number of potential filees seems to be proliferating.”)
Anyhow, the best showing Tuesday
night might have been that of TYSON PRATCHER, a Memphis native who has
been serving as a state director in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton
and who, much in the manner of Nikki Tinker, is faced with the task of
establishing grass-root connections from the top down.
At the forum, Pratcher gave a good
demonstration of how to do that, making full use of his presumed expertise and
connections (“Senator Clinton and I did some work on this issue….”) but
persuasively rather than presumptuously so, going on in most cases to spell out
exactly what he meant. As in the case of specific labor legislation when faced
with the same question about union rights that appeared to buffalo Rev. White.
Pratcher, too, would seem to be in for the long haul.
One other unadvertised special: a
newly announced candidate named BILL WHITMAN, a young white Memphis
native graduate of Notre Dame and veteran of several public-issue causes. In his
on-line statement, Whitman had given special attention to health care, a
subject that didn’t get much attention from anybody Tuesday night. Whitman came
off as engaging and well-intentioned but not enough so to overcome the
probability that, as a white unknown, his chances in the race are extremely
limited.
To continue from the Previous note: [A]lready something is
obvious from this early-sample hard core. There are good chances for a split
favoring Cohen in the Democratic primary. Partly this is based on demographics,
with most of the other candidates being African-American and likely to carve up
that part of the electorate, a majority in the 9th. But the Midtown
state senator, who has represented a sprawling slice of the district for more
than a quarter-century in the legislature, has a huge name-recognition factor
working in his favor, as well.
Suppose Cohen should win and then defeat his Republican
opponent in the general election. The likelihood is that, in a re-election race
two years later, he’d face only one or two challengers in a primary. His victory
would be anything but certain. But he’d have another option.
Assuming that a Congressman Cohen would attract more than
the usual amount of attention for a first-termer – a fairly safe bet for this
articulate and highly un-bashful and issue-conscious politician – he might be
sorely tempted to leverage his enhanced profile into a statewide race for the
U.S. Senate seat now held by Republican Lamar Alexander and up for grabs
again in 2008.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s going to be
a crowded race for 9th District congressman meanwhile, and it’s
impossible to handicap the outcome at this point. Watch this space.
For those Democrats who want to participate, by the way,
there’s a “straw vote” polling opportunity at the downtown Rendezvous restaurant
from 5 to 7 p.m. this Thursday.
There has been much speculation in political
circles about the possible effect of Ford-family troubles (the state-senate
District 29 wrangle; the upcoming Tennessee Waltz trials, etc.) on the U.S.
Senate candidacy of Rep. Ford.
Two cautions for those who see all that becoming an
obstacle for Ford: (1) While everyone seems to believe there’s a sizeable
population of people who might vote against the congressman either on family
grounds or because of his race, no one has yet unearthed a real live member of
that species; (2) To offset any such backlash, there’s the so-far overlooked
factor of the national media.
Fact: There has never been a statewide race in Tennessee
commanding the amount of national attention the 2006 Senate race will get, and
Ford is the largest single reason for that. Here’s the national-media storyline,
which you can expect to see invoked three of four times every week during the
heat of the campaign on this or that network or cable show or in this or that
major print medium: “Can a bright, charismatic young African-American politician
overcome racial bias and his family history to win election to the Senate in the
border state of Tennessee?”
Count on it: That storyline – which, from the media’s
standpoint, has a directed-verdict ending – will outweigh any of the other
potential issues involving Ford, including his hewing to a blandly centrist line
that unsettles many traditional Democrats.
Not to be overlooked, by the way, is Ford’s still active
Democratic primary opponent, state Senator Rosalind Kurita of
Clarksville, who spent a couple of days in Memphis last week and is making a
point of addressing some of the domestic and foreign-policy reforms some of the
hard-core Democrats want to see addressed.
Many of those selfsame Democrats were on hand Tuesday of last week for a brief
stop at the Hunt-Phelan Home by National Democratic chairman Howard Dean,
following through on his pledge to make frequent outreach visits in the
so-called “red” states that favored President Bush in the 2004 election.
Dean exhorted the party faithful to help him restore
Democratic prestige in Tennessee. The former presidential candidate also proved
a ready man with a quip. When one of the local cadres told him about
such-and-such a woman who had “worked the streets for you,” Dean responded, “Well,
I appreciate that, but I hope she didn’t go that far….”
When the
cadre tried to backtrack and amend his phraseology, Dean, no doubt remembering
“The Scream” from the 2004 primary season, laughed and said, “Trust me, I know
from experience. Once you’ve done something stupid, you just can’t take it
back.”
DATES TO REMEMBER
Deadline for filing, countywide primary races: February
16.
Deadline for filing, state and federal primary races and
for independents in countywide races: April 6.
Countywide primaries: May 2.
State and federal primaries and countywide general
election: August 3.
Deadline for filing as independent in state and federal
races: August 17.
General election, state and federal races: November 7.