Month: August 2006

The Web site Raw Story is reporting that the U.S. Justice Department will monitor today’s Shelby County elections. Raw Story says the Department indicated in a release today that it, “will watch and record activities during voting hours at various polling locations in the city to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act.”

We’re not sure whether to be comforted or depressed, but given last night’s stolen ballot box caper, we suspect they’ve come to the right place.

Two big winners in Thursday’s voting in Shelby County were 9th District congressional candidate Steve Cohen, winner of the Democratic primary, and Steve Mulroy, winner of the pivotal District 5 position on the Shelby County Commission. Cohen will be heavily favored in the coming November general election against Republican Mark White and independent Jake Ford. Mulroy has won his position outright, and his victory over Republican nominee Jane Pierotti reverses the current 7-6 partisan breakdown in the Democrats’ favor.

Incumbent Democratic county mayor A C Wharton easily won reelection, as did Sheriff Mark Luttrell and District Attorney General Bill Gibbons, both Republicans. Several countywide positions were won narrowly by Republican incumbents on the basis of the final precincts counted, dashing the hopes of several Democrats who led for much of the night.

Judicial elections saw most incumbents and other pre-election favorites triumphant – though incumbent judges Michelle Alexander-Best and Donn Southern were defeated by Karen Massey and Karen Webster, respectively. (For more, go to “Political Beat”.

In the last week of the various pre-election campaigns,
Shelby County Republicans drew a visit from a dignitary whose name wasn’t on the
August 3rd ballot but may well be again in, say, 2008, when
presidential primaries are held in various states, including Tennessee.

This was Bill Frist, the outgoing majority leader of
the U.S. Senate, whose seat is up for grabs this year and has been hotly
contested by Republicans Bob Corker, Ed Bryant, and Van
Hilleary and by Democrat Harold Ford Jr.

Before going to the Oaksedge grounds in East Memphis for an
“Ice Cream Social” sponsored by the local GOP, Frist sat down at the Wilson Air
Terminal for an exclusive interview with The Flyer to discuss his current
situation and future plans. Here are excerpts:

Flyer: Do you see your possible presidential race
as being conflicted between conse4rvative and moderate positions, or between
those wings of the Republican Party?

Frist: We will see. I’m convinced that the party,
including the nominating groups, are going to be focused on who can lead with
principle, and that ultimately will be what distinguishes me in my service as a
United States senator and if I decide to run for president of the United States.

And I think leading with principle is what has
characterized me both as majority leader as well as being in the Senate itself
— whether it’s on issues like the judges and a commitment to use their “nuclear
option” if it came to that, to leading on Medicare, to entitlement-type reform
issues, which traditionally Republicans don’t do, or stands on stem cells where
the principle of ethics has an interplay with science. Those are so crystal
clear in my mind.   

And so we’ll see. But I think that leading on principle
will be what the Republican caucuses will be attracted to, and partly because
the times are challenging as we go ahead whether it’s how you address
entitlements in terms of  their impact on the deficit or on the debt – all
driven by health care.

Issues like the Islamic movement that we see today which
will so color our generation. I feel pretty good about that. I think my
leadership style has been very different compared to previous leaders by a
willingness to take certain risks in certain areas based on principle and acting
on those principles.

The left didn’t like your position on the Terri Schiavo
issue, and the right didn’t like your position on stem cells. Does that present
a political problem?

Yeah, but I think that each of the issues, whether it’s
HIV/AIDS, whether it’s reform of entitlements, whether it’s Schiavo, whether it
is stem cells, whether it is tax cuts, [there’s]  a consistent principle. You
look at stem cells. I did exactly what I said I was going to do six years
ago…before the president came out, and that’s right where I am right now. That’s
what people want. I’m a citizen/legislator. I said I was going to serve 12
years, and I’m not like most politicians who get in it and stay forever and say
I didn’t really mean it. I do what I say, and that’s what people want.

How do you think you’ll do in the early primaries?

Well, again, this is all hypothetical,  if I decide to run,
but I think in particular  New Hampshire and Iowa, those two states look right
in somebody’s eyes and see the person, and then they make a judgment. Most
people understand [that], being  majority leader, my responsibility is, unlike
other senators, to lead that upper legislative branch, the United States Senate.
That’s what I get elected to do. And  particularly the 55 Repubvlicans, where I
act and take into consideration those broad range of views in a way that gathers
the strength and the leadership and minimizes the weaknesses of that group.

Places like Iowa and New Hampshire are very sophisticated
in that regard. And they basically want to know what makes the person tick. Is
it a person of principle? Is it a person who’s got the appropriate experience
and the heart and soul to lead the country?

Has being majority leader become an impediment to your
campaign for the presidency?

Well, my goal in life has never been to be president of the
United States. It’s just not what’s driven me. That’s not why, you know, I got
into politics 12 years ago when you and I met. And it hasn’t been, in being in
the United States Senate.  And I think, being majority leader, people toss your
name out a lot more, because you’ve risen to the top of the United States
Senate, which is an interesting group of people and a separate branch of
government.

Putting that another way: Regardless of your intentions,
has being majority leader, a very partisan position, become a possible handicap
to running for president?

You know, it’s hard to say. You don’t see majority leaders
become president. You don’t see United States senators become president.
To have the opportunity to serve the country and lead in the capacity of
majority leader which is the highest elected position in the legislative branch
of the government. Branch of the govt. when one’ motivation is not to be
president, you certainly wouldn’t – or I certainly wouldn’t have become majority
leader when my colleagues came to me to do something that really hadn’t been my
goal in life.

           

Thoughts on the ongoing Middle Eastern crises – Iraq and
Lebanon?

With the current events, with the terrorist activity that’s
going on right now in Israel and along that southern Lebanese border, with the
rise of Hizbollah, a terrorist organization that is threatening the sovereignty
of Israel, I think people are getting a much better understanding that the war
on terror is not just a war on terror, it’s a war against a radical Islamic
fascism that is not just in Afghanistan, is not just in Iraq, is not just in
Lebanon, not just in Syria, not just in Iran but throughout that entire region.

And the importance of us recognizing that surrender is not
a solution and that retreat is not an option when we have this growing,
burgeoning entity whose purpose is to take down the West, whose purpose is to
destroy your future and the future of all Americans. Specifically in Iraq we 
should stay and do exactly what we’re doing now. We need to train the Iraqi
forces

We need to continue supporting that now sovereign
government, with the the full resources and the full moral might of the United
States of America. We need to continue to focus attention on Iran, which is at
this point in time an even greater threat to the United States  because of its
commitment to nuclear proliferation. And then most acutely and most recently we
‘re going to need to focus increasing attention on the northern Israel,/Southern
Lebanon border.

           

Some worry that we’ve given a blank check to Israel. Do
you agree?

No, we just passed a resolution on the floor of the Senate
last week that condemned Hizbollah and supported Israel’s right as a sovereign
state to defend itself, and so I don’t believe so. We have a long-standing
relationship with Israel as an ally, and we will support them as an ally, and if
their sovereignty is being threatened and being attacked, they need to defend
themselves, and we will continue as we would with any ally.  We have many, many
allies, not just Israel.

How have you kept up with the medical side of your life?

I read the New Eng Journal of Med every week. I talk to
medical scientists and colleagues on a regular basis every week. I have not done
a heart transplant in 12 years. I have done surgery. I do surgery every year for
a couple of weeks in Africa. I really keep up on the public health arena, things
like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and I underestand and participate in
active discussions, of policy discussions of how we address that. Issues like
clean water. 1.2 billion people don’t have access to clean water. Half of all
the hospital beds in the world are being occupied right now because of the
disease related to not having clean water. Those are the sorts of issues that
people are not adequately addressing today that I would consider addressing, all
related to health and medicine and health care.

Could you perform a transplant operation tomorrow if you
had to?

Sure.

(A briefer version of this  interview was published in
the Flyer print edition of August 3.)

Front Porch Politics: “Money can’t buy you
love,” said the Beatles a generation ago. In a striking demonstration of
commitment to the cause of “clean money and clean elections,” a goodly-sized
crowd gathered Sunday in the front yard of District 29 state Senate candidate
Steve Haley to hear him and two other speakers – Democracy for Memphis
activist Brad Watkins and state Representative John DeBerry (see
“Viewpoint,” p. TK) – insist that money can’t buy you good government, either.

In an obvious reference to a highly public campaign or two
going on just now, the stem-winding DeBerry commented,  “Thousands upon captive
thousands of dollars are being pumped into Memphis and Shelby County to tell us
that people we’ve never heard from before are better than those that we know.”

In his remarks, Haley stood on his literally planked
platform and unveiled political planks like strong handgun legislation, an end
to regressive taxation, a further strengthening of predatory lending law, and,
most importantly, publicly financed elections. “Clean money and clean
elections,” said Haley. “That’s why we’re here. That’s the centerpiece of my
campaign.”

Some 80,000 Shelby Countians availed themselves of early voting. Logging campaigning time at the Agricenter location were (l to r) Linda Russell (wife of Circuit Court Judge James Russell); Criminal Court Judge Mark Ward; and Chancellor Arnold Goldin.

In the last two weeks of the 9th District congreessional campaign, Candidate Steve Cohen, the presumed leader in the 15-strong Democratic field, has come in for attack after attack from his opponents – ranging from a push-poll (Ed Stanton) asking the district’s predominantly Christian black voters how they feel about the religious views of their representative (Cohen is Jewish) to a suggestion that Cohen’s willingness to consider involving himself, if elected, with the Congressional Black Caucus is based on a scheme to divert money to Israel (Julian Bolton) to a scattershot attack across the board of the longtime state senator’s reputation (Nikki Tinker, via Emily’s List mailouts).

The beleaguered candidate hasn’t exactly cried foul at the nature of his press coverage, though several observers think he has ample reason to. But he did respond to the allegations about his record, both in a press conference, and in an email. The latter follows:

From
Steve Cohen

Outsiders Are Trying to Buy
Your Vote

During my 30
years in public service, I’ve made a lot of friends in this city. I appreciate
each of the thousands of calls and emails I have received in support of my
campaign. They came in from every neighborhood in Memphis. Because of my
experience, people know they can rely on me to stand up for issues that affect
regular people every day. That’s why my pro-education, pro-jobs, pro-health care
message has built so much momentum.

The field of congressional candidates is full of drive and ambition. They are
bright, energetic, and many of them are youthful. Each has a goal of making
Memphis even better and most have stayed on message sharing their vision with
voters.

And that is the way elections should be. They should be about candidates and
their issues.

If I’ve learned one thing in politics, it’s that you have to stand up for what
you believe in order to get things done. And people can disagree without being
disagreeable. That’s why when one of my opponents questioned my faith, I set
that aside. When another ran negative ads against me and the Tennessee Lottery,
I moved on with a positive message of hope and opportunity. But last week,
another one of my opponents, who, by her own admission after spending hundreds
of thousands of dollars was still far behind in the polls, took a road so low
that I had to speak up and say “enough.”

These mailings have attacked my commitment to education. For nearly two decades
I fought to pass the lottery which has provided more than half a billion dollars
for education in Tennessee and has helped more than 60,000 students reach their
goal of getting a college education. Very few people in the history of Tennessee
have worked as hard for education as I have. Only an outside group with no
knowledge of this state and this community would question that.

Likewise, they have attacked my attendance record as a legislator. Again, those
who know Tennessee and what happens here, know I have one of the best attendance
records in the legislature and have put my livelihood as an attorney second to
being a good senator. I have missed votes only because I was called away on
state legislative business or because of serious medical issues.

The return address isn’t a real office in Memphis but a small Post Office box at
a UPS store. The images on its pages, not those of Memphians families and
children, but paid models and actors in other states. This type of campaign
tactic is an affront not only to the people of Memphis, but to every one in
public service from the PTA to the State Capitol who believes in honest
government and giving back to the community.

It sends a message that any DC special interest group can come into our city,
set up a post office box, spend hundreds of thousands of out-of-state dollars
filling our mailboxes with lies and expect Memphians to buy them.

Well as lifelong Memphian, I can tell you the votes of Memphis are not for sale.

Please visit my website for ways to show outside special interest groups you
will not be fooled by phony groups with phony pictures making phony attacks.
Help me go to Washington to clean up this type of dirty politics that has put
this country on the wrong track.

www.cohenforcongress.com

Thank you for your support.

Steve

The whole to-do
has generated a goodly amount of blog attention. See several articles at The Flypaper Theory and The Cue.

On Monday, July 31 The Commercial Appeal ran a Page-One story focusing on conflicts in the 9th District congressional race that, in the judgment of many observers, was so filled with contextual distortions that it very nearly resembled a work of fiction. 

Candidates Steve Cohen and Ed Stanton, it said, had a “disagreement” over whether or not pro-Stanton push-polls asked if voters preferred Christians or Jews. Julian Bolton’s wildly anti-Semitic claim that a Jew is unacceptable at the 9th District’s representative was described simply as “Bolton’s assertion.”

The story’s author Halimah Abdullah wrote that Cohen had a “quarrel” with financial frontrunner Nikki Tinker, and that Tinker had subsequently become the “target of attacks.” Who was attacking Tinker and how? That somewhat important piece of information was left entirely to the readers’ imagination. 

“Nobody [in the Tinker campaign] said we were under attack,” Tinker spokesperson Josh Phillips says. When asked if he felt that the campaign was, or had been under attack Phillips added, “That’s not what we’re focusing on, and there’s been no discussion of attacks.” So we’re left to wonder, where did the reporter get the information around which her thesis was formed? 

Throughout Abdullah’s story Cohen was presented, not as the victim of Bolton’s negative, inarguably anti-Semitic TV ads, but rather as a lightning rod for controversy. On the other hand Tinker—the only candidate not directly quoted in the story—was presented as an innocent victim caught up in a swirling political cesspool.

The article suggested that these alleged attacks on Tinker were the result of a successful fundraising drive that’s made the previously unknown candidate, a relatively new Memphian, the financial frontrunner.  Notably, the story failed to mention that a glossy anti-Cohen mailing sent out by the powerful women’s organization Emily’s List was stamped with Tinker’s official campaign logo.

OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING, Steve Cohen has been the only 9th District candidate repeatedly singled out for attack by his opponents. Last Friday Cohen responded by holding a press conference to address these attacks, including the mailing from Emily’s List. Abdullah’s coverage of Cohen’s conference is misleading at best, and subtly laced with a dollop of good old-fashioned Jewish stereotyping. It implies calculation and suggests perversion.

“Cohen moved a chess piece forward during a Friday morning press conference at his home to discuss what he termed a distortion of his record on sex crimes[our italics] and other issues,” Abdullah writes. 

The interesting thing about this is that Cohen wasn’t pushing anything forward. After weeks of enduring racially divisive attack ads that misrepresented his record on everything from education and prayer to the use of medical marijuana, he apparently just decided enough was enough.

It’s particularly interesting that Abdullah’s story had room enough to work in some of the Tinker campaign’s talking points — including the often repeated story about how the candidate was raised by a single mom. And yet the conversation never returned to Cohen’s supposed “record on sex crimes.” Readers were left to wonder about both the accusation and Cohen’s actual position on this dark, dirty-sounding matter. 

The Flyer’s senior political analyst Jackson Baker specifically asked the Tinker campaign last week if they wanted to put distance between themselves and the anti-Cohen propaganda bearing their candidate’s name and face. They declined the offer.

Speaking on Tinker’s behalf, Phillips continues in that vein this week: “From the beginning Nikki has said she would run her own, issues-based campaign…And we’re not going to comment on what other groups do.” Clearly, the Tinker camp doesn’t put much stock in that old, true-cutting saw: Silence is a vote of complicity.

Does it bother Tinker’s Campaign that the hit piece on Cohen bore Tinker’s image and campaign logo? According to Phillips, it’s not against the law, so no.

In addition to misrepresenting the dynamic existing between the Cohen and Tinker campaigns, Abdullah allowed to stand unchallenged (and without any substantive proof at all from the two candidates) both Stanton’s push-poll denial and Bolton’s claim that Cohen only wanted to go to D.C. to get more money for Israel.

THE APPARENT DISTORTIONS in Abdullah’s story raised a number of eyebrows among several Cohen supporters. Those eyebrows shot up even higher when it was discovered that both the writer, Abdullah, and the candidate, Tinker, attended the University of Alabama and were both members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. 

That revelation alone is circumstantial, of course.  So, for that matter, is Tinker’s August, 2005 announcement that, as an outsider candidate, she was counting on the aid of her friends, colleagues, and (yes), her sorority sisters. 

From The Hill, a newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress (and the one that first propagated the concept that the then unknown quantity, with no Memphis roots or known network of supporters, was the congressional-race “frontrunner”):

           “Tinker has spent her time sizing up support within Memphis’s business community, churches and plaintiff’s bar. Like most other first-time candidates, she is reaching out to her sorority sisters and friends.”

 
Abdullah hasn’t responded to interview requests, but Commercial Appeal Editor Chris Peck acknowledges that Tinker and Abdullah are, in fact, members of the same sorority. 

“Our reporter, Halimah Abdullah, isn’t a classmate or friend of Nikki Tinker,” Peck says. “They joined the same sorority, but didn’t know each other at the University of Alabama and in fact, graduated five-to-six years apart.”  

That five-to-six-year time frame, however, could be more than a little misleading.  According to an accreditation study pertaining to the University of Alabama, Abdullah came to UAB in 1994 by way of a minority journalism workshop. 

Meanwhile, Tinker, after her 1994 graduation, remained at Alabama for law school, and, as we have seen, began “reaching out to her sorority sisters” for networking purposes once she began her congressional campaign.

Coincidence? Maybe. It would be difficult to describe the errors in Abdullah’s stories as outright lies. They conform more to what late-night satirist Stephen Colbert has dubbed “truthiness,” whereby semantics and contextual distortions converge to create a warped interpretation of actual events.

When truthiness and conflicts of interest (real or apparent) appear together within the pages of a major metro newspaper, you don’t have to be in Houston to see that there’s a problem.