Month: July 2008

Anyone who owns a set of wheels and can afford the
ever-rising cost of gasoline can drive around Shelby County these days and
encounter almost everywhere, especially in predominantly African-American areas,
an impressive number of portable billboards and other signs touting the
candidacy for county Trustee of one M. LaTroy Williams.

In some of these broadsides Williams is identified as “the real Democrat,” a
claim that he attempts to buttress with an elaborate and cramped-looking
full-color campaign flier that bears the imprimatur of something called “the
Memphis and Shelby County Democratic Club.”

That no such Democratic Party organization exists has been established by
numerous sources, ranging from aggrieved principals of Shelby County Democratic
Party itself (whose party primary Williams skipped) to the blog offerings of
Thaddeus Matthews, who proudly boasts a quarter century of dedicated enmity
to Williams.

Among the signatures listed on candidate Williams’ mystery flier are one,
“Minerva Jonican [sic],” which has been disowned by the real Minerva Johnican,
a well-known former office-holder with a lengthy pedigree in Shelby County
Democratic politics, and two more, “J. Chism” and “N.H. Ford,” unknown
personages whose names are clearly meant to suggest Shelby County Commissioner
Sidney Chism, a longtime force in Democratic Party affairs, and N.J.
Ford, the late funeral-home owner and patriarch of an entire line of
politically prominent Fords.

So far as is known, no member of the political Ford clan is supporting Williams’
bid for office. As for Chism, he pointedly asked Williams to leave the South
Memphis grounds of the commissioner’s well-attended annual political picnic two
weekends ago when the candidate, who appears on the August 7th
general election ballot as an independent, got involved in altercations with
other attendees.

Chism, in fact, is an active supporter of Paul Mattila, the Democratic
Party nominee and current interim Trustee whose appointment by the commission to
succeed the late Bob Patterson was shepherded by Commissioner Chism
himself.

Mattila’s foremost opponent is Republican nominee Ray Butler, a CPA who,
like Mattila himself, was a longtime intimate of Patterson’s. As a white
Democrat with numerous Republican associates (many acquired during his long
service as an aide to Patterson), Mattila would have to be favored in a simple
one-on-one contest with Butler. What makes the race problematic for him is the
presence in it of Williams, with his direct appeal for a share of Shelby
County’s sizeable and traditionally Democratic black vote.

An interesting and ironic sidelight to sometime businessman Williams’ effort is
the fact that a now-defunct company of his, First Supreme Trust Company, Inc.
owes some $67,000 in back taxes to the very Trustee’s office which Williams
hopes to direct. This well-documented fact is reminiscent of a previous
candidate’s run for the Trusteeship, that of then state Senator John Ford in
1990. Back then Ford, now serving time on one felony charge and undergoing
trial for another, was the presiding official of N.J. Ford & Sons Funeral
Home, which owed substantial sums to both the Trustee’s office and the city
Treasurer.

Under the circumstances, inquiring minds want to know just exactly how all those
billboards, signs, and fliers advertising Williams got paid for. They may not
get to know, even though the next financial-disclosure deadline for countywide
candidates is July 10. An employee of the Shelby County Election Commission
explains that disclosures are unnecessary if a candidate for office does not
appoint a treasurer, something that the law requires if campaign funds are
raised – as they normally are – from third-party sources.

The only assumption consistent with legality is that Williams’ campaign is
self-financed – a circumstance that fairly cries out for some sort of
verification.

Republicans are campaigning on their own Audacity of
Hope. They are hoping no one will have the audacity to bring up the
unmentionable: John McCain is The Adulterer and Cindy McCain is The Other
Woman. They are hopeful that voters are so consumed by their struggles of
filling up gas tanks and putting untainted food on the table, that the memory
of that atrocious summer of self-righteousness from ten years ago has long
been forgotten. But what goes around comes around.

It was the Summer of ’98, that the Gladiators of Virtue
were riding high. They were strutting their stuff with Ken Starr and his seven
million dollar witch-hunt. They had Bill Clinton just where they wanted him.
He had done the hot and nasty with a young intern, and was lying about it, so
by God, he was going to pay for his sins. Many of those sultans of sanctimony,
who are now surrogates and staff for the McCain campaign, have strangely
become as quiet as little church mice when it comes to discussing the fact
that John McCain has always had a reputation for being as horny as a
three-balled tomcat. Loving the sinner, but hating the sin, the Moralizing
Crusaders in the Republican party have suddenly laid down their swords.

It is downright hilarious to hear Senator Lindsey Graham
wax rhapsodic about the personal integrity of the senator from Arizona. His
pronouncements of McCain’s principled, virtuous wisdom are as convoluted as a
stand-up routine on The Comedy Channel. This is the same Lindsey Graham who
rose to prominence in 1998 as a manager in the House prosecution and
impeachment trial. Never hesitating to intone with umbrage the moral
malfeasance of Bill Clinton, Graham possessed high-toned puffery that was
legendary. Forced to discuss every subject from thongs to fellatio in the
House impeachment hearings, poor Lindsey shouldered the burden of more
righteous indignation than any one man should ever have to bear. Ten years
hence, however, he stands reverentially beside his buddy McCain, as if fooling
around and family abandonment have simply ceased to be biggies.

After the infamous Senate floor blistering of the
President for his sexual affairs, one might conclude that Senator Joe
Lieberman, a Republican by any other name, would be much too ashamed ever to
support a candidate whose moral compass had directed him to cheat on his wife
and leave his family. Yet, Lieberman, seemingly ever-present on the campaign
trail, advises McCain and lavishes him with such obsequious praise that the
affair between John and Cindy seems considered to be nothing more than a dusty
memory that is gone with the wind.

Imagine, for one moment, that it had been Barack Obama
instead of John McCain who had cheated on his wife by having multiple affairs.
Suppose it was Barack Obama who had married his mistress, a younger heiress of
a billion dollar beer empire only a month after the ink was dry on the divorce
papers. Pretend it was Michelle Obama instead of Cindy McCain who had been so
addicted to painkillers that she stole money from her own charity and had been
investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The vilifications, smears, and berating from
conservatives would be louder than a 747 takeoff. The castigating and
crucifixions by the Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the world would never end.
Faux piety and bellicosity from the pumped up blowhards in the religious right
would flow harder than the flooding waters of the Mississippi.

But the Family Values Party has made new rules that even
Woody Allen could love. “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Judging the
awful personal misconduct committed by a Republican is distasteful and off
base. Judging the awful personal misconduct committed by a Democrat is the
necessary application of social cost. It’s the same Pharisaical stuff we should
always expect, because when it comes to hypocrisy, Republicans are in high
cotton in any season.