Month: January 2008

With Super Tuesday less than a week away, Memphis gets to
share in the national suspense.

It was only a couple of weeks back – a startling fact to
reflect on in this lightning-like season of -breaking primaries and caucuses.
The Republicans of South Carolina, together with some independents in that
open-primary state, had just cast their votes for president, giving Arizona
senator John McCain a narrow victory over former Arkansas governor
Mike Huckabee.

That outcome continued the resurrection of the old
warrior’s candidacy and gave him the opportunity, no matter what happened in the
intervening Florida primary this week, to hold off the persistent and
well-heeled ex-governor of Massachusetts, sometime moderate, sometime
conservative Mitt Romney, and to seal the deal for the GOP presidential
nomination in the 22 states, including Tennessee, that are set to hold primaries
on Tuesday, February 5th.

The next day, January 20th, was a Sunday, and
another presidential aspirant who keenly needed the breath of new life for his
candidacy returned to the state of his birth to begin one of his patented
round-the-clock campaign tours, the kind that few others had the stamina to
pursue.

This was John Edwards, the former senator from North
Carolina and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee of four years ago. Edwards
had finished second in the Iowa caucuses, actually edging out the heavy
favorite, Hillary Clinton, there and coming in second behind the surprise
winner and ipso-facto man of destiny, Barack Obama.

jb

Edwards in South Carolina

Edwards had fallen back to a weak third five days later in
the New Hampshire primary, though, and, given the Blitzkrieg pace of the
2008 primary calendar, it had begun to seem that his hopes for the presidency
and for his unprecedentedly populist platform could now be reckoned in
half-life terms.

Looking around at several score townsfolk who had crowded
into Stephen W.’s Bistro on Main Street in mid-state Newberry, not far from
Edwards’ birthplace in nearby Seneca, sharing space with a sizeable media
contingent and awaiting the candidate’s pending arrival at high noon, it was not
hard to see what his main problem was.

The locals here were all white folks, and while their
presence here gave credibility to the oft-proposed theory that Edwards was the
most saleable Democrat to white Southerners in a general election, the problem
remained that it was not white Southerners who counted most toward a Democratic
nomination in today’s highly diversified party.

Still and all, it was refreshing to listen to a retired
construction executive named Otis Salem give his reasons for favoring Edwards.

“I’m an old man, so I’ve already voted. I voted for him
last Saturday,” said Salem. Why? “He best represents what I think the gospels
teach. He stands for the disadvantaged, and I think that’s exactly what the
gospels say.” What about the Republican evangelic, Huckabee? “I think he misses
the essence of the gospel,” said Salem, explaining,”I’m pro-life in every way
you can imagine. You don’t put guns in the cribs, for example.” But he sighed in
self-recognition. “I’m a rarity.”

Was he worried that Edwards had fallen too far behind to
catch up? “That doesn’t matter. You have to do what you think is right,” Salem
said. And just about then the candidate’s bus arrived, and, after a little
commotion outside, there he was, John Edwards, coming through the glass door in
his Sunday blue suit and shaking hands with the faithful.

He would speak to the crowd with brevity but intensity,
ladling out his populist pledges rapid-fire, almost like a catechism:

New jobs. Health care. Get rid of the carbon-based
economy, get on a green economy. Watched my father go to the mills every day for
36 years. Trade policy that works for this country. Get investment capital into
towns and communities like this.
National broadband policy. A candidate of the people. Stand up for the middle
class. Fighting to end poverty. Glad to meet with y’all on this Sunday
afternoon. Thank you all.

And after handshaking his way out, the same way he came in,
Edwards was gone, ready to do the same thing all over again in dozens of other
South Carolina towns.

It would not avail. South Carolina would see another
third-place finish, 18 percent of the vote behind Obama’s 55 and Clinton’s 27.

AND SO IT WAS THAT EDWARDS ADEPTS like Kate Mauldin,
an officer in the College Democrats and history major at the University of
Memphis, looked into the future and, with the Super Tuesday vote of February 5th
drawing ever nearer, saw her choices changing and narrowing.

She explained her presence at last week’s local
headquarters opening for the Clinton campaign this way: “I came out of the gate
a major John Edwards supporter, and I feel, frankly, it was just be throwing my
vote away to go that way.”

So why Clinton? Mauldin said she, like almost everyone
else, had found Barack “impressive” but, like many others as well, wondered if
the first-term Illinois senator’s campaign for the presidency wasn’t somehow
“presumptuous.”

The clincher, though, was a reading of Senator Obama’s
book, Dreams from My Father, which convinced her that he senator was a
self-absorbed type who would become “another president who would have trouble
admitting mistakes,” and “that’s the last thing we need after George W. Bush.”

Mauldin’s reasoning was idiosyncratic, perhaps, but her
respect for Clinton’s experience and her comfort level with the known quantity
that was Hillary Clinton was not all that far from the thinking of Clinton’s other local
supporters, many of them longstanding activists like the three local members of
the New York senator’s Tennessee steering committee: state party secretary
Gale Jones Carson, Shelby County Commissioner Sidney Chism, and state
Senator Beverly Marrero.

jb

A button being sported these days by Clinton backers

Carson and Chism were well-known member of the local
Democratic faction associated with Mayor Willie Herenton, and they were
now working in close harmony with the likes of David Cocke and David
Upton, members of the sometimes bitterly opposed Ford faction.

Clinton, both through her own established persona and as
the spouse of the reigning Democratic eminence, ex-president Bill Clinton,
could definitely connect such dots – one reason why even the wipeout in South
Carolina did not dispel her chances on Super Tuesday and afterwards.

As was well known, the former First Lady still had beaucoup
backup in the way of state organization, as well as a more-than-formidable
campaign war chest. And, as her surprise comeback victory in New Hampshire had
demonstrated, she had something else – a possible reserve of support among women
voters.

Former city council member Carol Chumney spoke to
that aspect of things at a Clinton-campaign press conference on Monday of this
week.

Recalling her own frustrated ambition to become the first
woman mayor of Memphis in the 2007 city elections, Chumney said: “The truth is,
there are some who will support any man over electing a woman as executive,
because the change will affect every single family and the way men and women
relater to each other, both in the workplace and at home.”

Women voters owed it “to our ancestors, but also to the
young girls of this country” to help elect Clinton, Chumney said.

But, even in that moment of steadfast exhortation for
Hillary Clinton, there was an element of uncertainty. Mayor Herenton, so
recently victorious over Chumney in a bitter mayoral fight, had been billed as a
co-endorser at the Monday ceremony, but turned out, for whatever good reason, to
be a no-show.

“Commitments elsewhere,” said former mayoral spokesperson
Carson, who spoke for Herenton and reaffirmed his support for the cause.
Whatever. In any case, the promised joint public pledge to Clinton by 2007’s Odd
Couple did not materialize.

ONE THING THAT CLINTON HAD GOING FOR HER, at least in
Tennessee, was that she had beat rival Obama to the hustings here, making it
clear that she regarded the Volunteer State in the way Tennesseans themselves
like to see it, as a bellwether state.

Even as South Carolinians were giving her a resounding No
on Saturday night in a count that was still proceeding, Senator Clinton was
appearing at a rally at Tennessee State University in Nashville.

There was, to be sure, a certain irony in the affair. There
were two odd things about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s appearance at
Tennessee State University in Nashville Saturday night. Early in the event,
Clinton looked into the filled rafters of the school gymnasium and offered a
hearty verbal thank-you to the “students of Tennessee State University” for
welcoming her and being on hand.

The fact was, however, that in the sea of thousands, both
upstairs where she was looking and in the dense seated rows down the floor, the
number of bona fide students at the historically black college – or of African
Americans of any kind — was almost infinitesimal.

Given that this first of two planned Tennessee stops before
Super Tuesday – the other was at Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis on Sunday
— had surely been scheduled to rekindle her (and her husband’s)
long-established standing among African Americans, and that Barack Obama, almost
despite himself, had become a new black icon, the ratio of whites to blacks in
her Nashville crowd — 20-to-one, at minimum – could not be regarded as fully
reassuring to Clinton.

Another odd circumstance was Clinton’s response, late in
her extended Q-and-A session with the crowd in Nashville, to a point-blank
question about the devastating two-to-one trouncing she’d just experienced in
South Carolina.

After a perceptible pause, she began awkwardly: “I was
honored to run in South Carolina… and it was very close….” What came after
that startling denial of reality was a series of stated resolves about keeping
on keeping on, mixed with hopeful platitudes aimed at the larger Democratic
constituency.

One issue is that, unlike her husband, who can famously
glad-hand, orate, small-talk, and bond away with people indefinitely, Senator
Clinton has a tendency to wilt in he course of a prolonged personal appearance,
and, however warm and personal her beginnings, begin to sound mechanical and
repetitious.

She had got to that stage at Tennessee State when she
experienced a brief revival. Asked what her plans might be for husband Bill, she
answered that he might well take on the task of straightening out the country’s
wounded relations with the rest of the world.

Either because the crowd agreed on the appropriateness of
the assignment or because they merely wanted to applaud an explicit mention of
the ex-president, a resounding cheer went up.

That circumstance was a reminder of the growing ambiguity
surrounding the Clinton campaign. Whether fairly or not – and there were good
arguments either way – former President Clinton, and to a lesser extent the
senator herself, had been accused of subtly introducing reminders of Obama’s
race into the campaign.

It was surely wrong to suggest that there was a racial
motive in Bill Clinton’s use of the term “fairy tale” to describe Obama’s claim
to have consistently opposed the Iraq War. But the former president’s pointed
comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, who had also won a primary in South
Carolina once, was something else. jb

Hillary in the pulpit at Monumental Baptist

All that was on the back burner for her Sunday appearance
at Monumental Baptist. Speaking from the pulpit, Senator Clinton demonstrated
again a personal touch that rarely comes through via the electronic medium,
though a glimpse of it on TV a day or so before the New Hampshire vote had, by
general consensus, done her much good there.

Clinton regaled the mixed congregation of parishioners and
media with a tale of representing the United States in the ’90s at the
inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, describing how she
kept bouncing from group to group in an effort to avoid, at State Department
request, the indignity of being photographed with the ever-approaching Fidel
Castro.

And she gave her own tribute the honor of Martin Luther
King – though this may have been overshadowed by the powerful oration that
followed from the church’s pastor, the Rev. Billy Kyles, who had been with Dr.
King at the moment of his assassination and, in the presence of the large media
contingent shadowing Clinton, may have felt compelled to render his most
evocative account of that fact ever.

IT REMAINS UNCERTAIN TO WHAT DEGREE Hillary Clinton and
husband Bill still retain the loyalties that for so long had bound America’s
black population to them, though Super Tuesday will undoubtedly provide
something of an answer to that.

jb

Obama on a Nashville stop last year

What is a fact is that the Obama has already begun to
harvest some notable apostates from the Clinton cause. And, already used to
being likened to the figure of John F. Kennedy, the Illinois senator was
publicly embraced and endorsed by three prominent Kennedys this week – daughter
Caroline; nephew Patrick a Rhode Island congressman now; and the reigning
patriarch of the one Democratic family that can compete with and likely outweigh
the Clinton clan, Senator Ted Kennedy.

And whether the Clintons did it through purposeful
mischief, or Obama did it himself through his stepped-up mentions of Dr. King,
beginning in earnest in New Hampshire, or it is a phenomenon that would happened
anyhow, one important simulacrum is now virtually complete. If is the ripening
bond between candidate Obama and black aspirations and between him and a black
electorate that will count for much in the South and in the cities of the rest
of the nation

This is one of the ironies of a campaign year rich in them.
Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansas mother, had campaigned for
almost a year and entered the primary season without much emphasis on his racial
identity.

That was then, however. This is now, after the opening of
local Obama headquarters in the Eastgate Center two weeks ago drew a crowd that
represented the far corners of Memphis’ African-American community. Clinton
supporters concede privately that the Illinois senator will capture Memphis’
primary vote on a tide of black votes and hope that results in Middle and East
Tennessee can offset them.

Whether or not that happens will be determined on February
5th, as will the likelihood of a protracted struggle that could
continue all the way to late August when the meet in convention in Denver.

Though with the dropout of homestate favorite Fred Thompson
and the perceptible fading of former Arkansas governor Huckabee’s chances, the
Republican drama in Tennessee has been spiked somewhat, even that – a
mano-a-mano now between McCain and Romney – may generate suspense into the
summer.

In any case, Memphis and Tennessee are for once smack dab
in the middle of the decision-making process for a presidential contest that is
still very much up in the air and is:

To Be Continued.

Predictably, there was wide variety in reactions to
President Bush’s final State of the Union address from Tennesseans in Congress.

9th District congressman Steve Cohen issued a
lengthy statement reviewing the terms of the bipartisan stimulus-package
agreement between Bush and the Congress, but made it clear he thought the
package could – and should – be improved.

“While the stimulus package
provides some good news for taxpayers,” Cohen said, “I believe we need a
progressive plan which includes provisions to extend unemployment benefits,
increase food stamps, promote summer youth jobs programs, and provide rebates
for the seniors without earned income.

” I also believe there needs to
be a cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security beneficiaries – something
that is long overdue. Prominent economists agree that extending tax rebates to
the Americans who live from check to check is the most effective means of
boosting the economy during a downturn because that money is spent quickly on
consumer goods. I will continue to work with other members of Congress toward
these changes.”

In his address, Bush
specifically cautioned against the possible delaying effect of such efforts to
include more benefits in the package.

Cohen also took exception to
Bush’s remarks concerning “earmarks,” contending that Congress had enacted
serious reforms after six years in which the president had done nothing” to slow
their growth.”

The assessment from 8th District congressman
John Tanner, a Democrat, was also harsh – especially on economic points.
It is clear, he said, “that the economic and fiscal
policies enacted in 2001 have been disastrous for our country, resulting in an
unprecedented amount of borrowing over the last 72 months and transferring a
large portion of the U.S. tax revenue base from spending power to interest
payments, much of which we are sending to foreign sources..”

Tanner said that “to continue
that level of fiscal irresponsibility represents an economic vulnerability and a
national security concern,” and added, “I hope the President will truly work
with Congress to address these economic concerns before he leaves office.

A far more enthusiastic review
of the president’s remarks and proposals came from 7th District
representative Marsha Blackburn, who was the only Tennessean to second Bush’s
call for immediate “FISA reforms” (e.g., stricter security methods that many
Democrats regard as questionable, even unconstitutional).

Blackburn also approved both Bush’s
estimate of the current military surge as successful and his determination to
stay the course in Iraq. Like Cohen, she wanted additions to the stimulus
program, but in her case that meant “tax and regulatory reform.”

She also joined in Bush’s call
for action to make his tax cuts permanent, and, like the deputy whip which she
is, called for action on “items that require Congress’ immediate attention.”

The state’s two Republicans
senators issued cautious statements, and, in the case of freshman Senator Bob
Corker, criticism.

Corker commended Bush for
sounding “serious” about “reining in wasteful spending and irresponsible
earmarks, increasing our energy security by implementing policies that
incentivize innovation and market-driven technology, and making health care more
affordable and accessible for all Americans.”

But he cautioned: “I do have
strong reservations about the economic stimulus package. I find something
inappropriate about a deficit-ridden federal government borrowing money from our
grandchildren and sprinkling it across the country for a short-term fix that
will do little, if anything, to jump-start our troubled economy.”

Like Corker, Senator Lamar
Alexander praised the president’s resolves on restoring health to the economy;
he also said Bush was “on the right track” to offer $300 million in scholarships
to low-income families and to continue supporting Pell grants.

The former Education Secretary
offered his own parallel preference for additional educational choices.

Beyond this point of
concurrence, Alexander stressed his own concern for offering Americans more and
better jobs and “access to qualify, affordable health insurance.”

Perhaps tellingly, neither
senator, both of whom have called for a shift in priorities in the Middle East,
had a word to say about Bush’s foreign initiatives, including the president’s
continued reliance on military surge efforts.

None of the Tennessee
representatives or senators made mention of Bush’s almost casually mentioned
hopes of securing an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians to end a half
century of division and conflict in the Holy Land.

A PLUS FOR COHEN: Some observers have been fascinated by the degree to which first-termer Cohen has eclipsed the penchant for positive publicity of his 9th District predecessor, Harold Ford Jr., who was no slouch.

Ford had an uncanny ability to get himself seen on TV in friendly conversation with Bush in the aftermath of State-of-Union addresses. But Cohen went him one better Monday night.

In full view of a national television audience, the Memphis congressman was seen handing the president a University of Memphis booster cap and successfully getting Bush’s autograph.

And one at least one network, the one coincidentally seen by U of M basketball coach John Calipari, Cohen and Bush were heard to be discussing the forthcoming cage contest between Memphis and Houston. (Both agreed the game would be a likely mismatch.)

–Jackson Baker

NASHVILLE –There were two odd things about presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton’s appearance at Tennessee State University in
Nashville Saturday night.

One came early, when Clinton looked into the filled rafters
of the school gymnasium and offered a hearty verbal thank-you to the “students
of Tennessee State University” for welcoming her and being on hand.

Fact: In the sea of thousands, both upstairs where she was
looking and in the dense seated rows down the floor, the number of bona fide
students at the historically black college – or of African Americans of any kind
— was almost infinitesimal.

Given that this first of two planned Tennessee stops before
her February 5th Super Tuesday primary contests against new black
icon Barack Obama was surely designed to appeal to African Americans, the ratio
of white to blacks in the crowd – perhaps 20 to one, if not more lopsided — could be regarded as
embarrassing.

The high side of that, of course, was that the
overwhelmingly Caucasian crowd was enthusiastic in its reception of Clinton,
greeting her extended – maybe over-extended – remarks with enthusiasm and
peppering her with questions until she had been on her feet answering for well
more than an hour.

Like Obama in his appearances since last week’s stormy
televised debate involving the two chief Democratic contenders and the still
hopeful John Edwards, Clinton avoided direct attacks on rivals and concentrated
her fire on the Republican incumbent in the White House, George W. Bush.

The second odd thing about Clinton’s appearance came during
that extended Q-and-A period when someone, late in the going, finally asked her
to comment on the just-concluded South Carolina primary, in which Obama had
trounced her by a margin of two-to-one.

After a perceptible pause, she began awkwardly: “I was
honored to run in South Carolina… and it was very close….” What came after
that startling denial of reality was a series of stated resolves about keeping on
keeping on, mixed with hopeful platitudes aimed at the larger Democratic
constituency.

By that time, Clinton – who had begun her appearance with a
freshness and animation that, under the circumstances of her grueling campaign
pace and the new defeat in South Carolina was truly admirable – had begun to
wilt. But, in the style of her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton, she stayed
behind after she concluded and lingered, down on the gymnasium floor, to talk to
such members of the throng who wanted to greet her personally.

At her Memphis
appearance on Sunday at the Rev. Billy Kyles’ Monumental Baptist Church on
Parkway, Clinton was assured at least of having a predominantly
African-American crowd. That would give her the opportunity to try to work some of the
magic that she and her husband had been thought to possess with black audiences before this year’s contest with
the surging Obama.

There’s no doubting that one of the most ubiquitous – and
controversial – figures in local politics is David Upton, who, since his days as
a Memphis State University Young Democrat in the ’80s, has been a prime mover
and dealmaker in Democratic Party affairs.

Other than races for YD positions in the ’90s and for state
and local Democratic Party committee contests, Upton himself has not been a
candidate for public office since a respectable run in 1988 against Karen
Williams, now a Circuit Court Judge and then an incumbent Republican state
representative.

But since that one-and-only try for public office himself
there has hardly been an election involving Democratic candidates in which Upton
was not at least a significant background figure. And in 1990, the last year of
non-partisan countywide elections, Upton played a role there, too – as one of
the point men in the late A.C. Gilless’s successful race for sheriff.

Actually, the political involvements of Upton, now 43, go
back further – to student government politics at the University, when some of
his active contemporaries were David Kustoff, Alan Crone, Maura Black, and Jim
Strickland. The first two of those made names for themselves in Republican Party
politics, both of them as party chairmen, while Kustoff went on in addition to become the current U.S. attorney.
Strickland, a former local Democratic chairman, is now a city councilman, and
Black (now Maura Black Sullivan) is a former Democratic Election Commissioner
and the wife of Jeff Sullivan, who ran for state representative in a special
election in late 2003.

Upton, with then state Senator, now Congressman Steve
Cohen, backed Beverly Marrero, the eventual winner, against Sullivan, in a
bitter, take-no-prisoners contest that left his longstanding friendship with the
two Sullivans in shreds. And, though he stoutly denies having an animus against
recent city-council candidate Desi Franklin, an intra-party rival, his efforts
in favor of rival candidate Mary Wilder are considered by Franklin and others to
have been aimed at preventing her ascension to office.

It is Upton’s willingness to pull no punches that has from
time to time earned him the reputation of a tough, almost Soprano-style
infighter – “Tony Up,” he’s been called by one wag (okay, by me) – as well as
the animosity of certain party figures. Always a partisan of the Ford wing of
the Democratic party, Upton has often been persona non grata with members of the
party faction closely associated with Mayor Willie Herenton – especially with
longtime party broker and now Shelby County Commissioner Sidney Chism and former
Herenton spokesperson Gale Jones Carson, both of whom he had been publicly
critical of.

It came as something of a surprise, then, when Upton was
credited by Carson herself as having been instrumental in gaining for her the
post of Democratic National Committeewoman in last weekend’s party
reorganizations in Nashville. Though Upton had been boosting state Senate
Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry for that position, he quickly switched to Carson
when DeBerry counted herself out.

The victory of Carson, who was vigorously opposed by other
party candidates, including one or two from Middle Tennessee, was by no means
guaranteed, and Upton’s nonstop lobbying for her with fellow state Democratic
committee members, as well as his willingness to work alongside Chism, was an
important factor in insuring that she did come through.

The collaboration between Upton and Carson drew this rave
review from blogger Steve Steffens on his well-read LeftWingCracker weblog: “Yes,
they have worked together before on state races, but this is a new level of
cooperation and I love it. I applaud both of them for this, and think this is a
sign that Republicans in Shelby County may as well give up on getting anyone
elected in August or November. It’s the best I’ve felt about our local party in
years….”

That remains to be seen, of course, and Upton still has some fences to mend. But
if Tony Up is willing, in the interests of party unity, to subordinate his
well-known zeal for infighting and intrigue, and to emphasize his equally
acknowledged talents both for nuts-and-bolts politics and for strategy at large,
he could indeed be a major factor in the politics of 2008

Tennessee is now being regarded as a key battleground state in the hotly contested contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That contention was made most recently by Chuck Todd, former publisher/editor of The Hotline, a leading Web-based political newsletter, and now political director for NBC news,

As Todd noted in remarks aired on Saturday morning, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama will all likely be much in evidence before the state’s Democratic primary vote takes on February 5th

.

Clinton is the early bird. Even as South Carolina counts in primary ballots on Saturday night, the New York senator will be in Nashville for a “town hall” appearance at Tennessee State University, an historically black institutions. She’ll follow that up with an appearance at Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis on Sunday morning.

Edwards, too, will shortly be campaigning in the state – with two Monday appearances, one in Chattanooga at IBEW union headquarters, another in
Nashville at USW union headquarters.

Obama’s itinerary, as of Saturday morning, had not yet been released, but, he, too, is expected to make appearances in the state before February 5th.

–Jackson Baker