Month: March 2010

• District Attorney General Bill Gibbons

As expected, District Attorney General Bill Gibbons of Memphis announced Friday that he is withdrawing from the governor’s race difficulties in fundraising. Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Nashville (one which he intends to repeat in Mermphis later Friday), Gibbons said, k”To the extent we failed, it was my failure.”

(Here is the Flyer‘s Thursday night article, which may not have appeared on some computers, due to an internal glitch.)

Gibbons also released this prepared statement Friday:

Today, I am withdrawing from the race for governor for one reason and one reason only, and that is lack of sufficient campaign funds to go forward.

For over a year, we have had a specific campaign plan which called for a budget of $2.5 million — substantially less than what one other campaign will spend and at least slightly less than what two others will probably spend. Our initial goal was to have at least $1.0 million of that by the end of 2009. We fell significantly short of that goal. We then set a goal of having at least $1 million by April 1 of this year. It is obvious at this point that we will not achieve that. Our balance on hand has gone down rather than up since our last disclosure in early February. We have no reasonable prospect of paying for any media campaign, a necessity for success in this race.

I had hoped to achieve our financial needs by convincing enough people that this campaign was an opportunity to invest in a movement to tackle the big challenges our state faces of reducing our crime rate, improving our schools, and creating a better climate for more good paying jobs. Those are challenges that are especially critical to my home community of Memphis. My primary responsibility was to successfully convince enough people to make that investment. To the extent we failed, it was my failure.

Since State Senator Jim Kyle and I have both withdrawn from the race, we have no candidate from my own community of Memphis and Shelby County or who understands personally its unique needs and opportunities. We have crime driven by gang activity and drug trafficking which cries out for changes in our state sentencing laws. We have one of the largest urban school systems in the nation with the urgent need for reform. The University of Memphis is a unique urban research university which is being overlooked by state government and deserves its own independent governing board. And state government needs to end its neglect of the University of Tennessee Center for Health Sciences and The MED. I hope the other candidates of both parties will work to learn more about the community I love.

I thank the hundreds of people who did join me in this effort. Many are old friends. Others are new friends I made during the course of the campaign. I will be forever indebted to their support and friendship.

Although raising money has proved most difficult, an extremely heartening aspect of this experience has been the willingness of people across the state who care about its future to give their support and their time to my candidacy. They have reinforced my own faith in the political process.

I commend the campaign staff. I could not have asked for a more talented group of individuals. And I thank my family for their support and tolerance of the many hours I spent on the campaign trail. Frankly, one plus to ending the campaign is that I will be able to spend more time with my wife Julia who has been unable to participate because she is a federal judge.

I’m looking forward to continuing my service as district attorney in Shelby County, our state’s largest jurisdiction. I’m honored to serve with many dedicated public servants. I’ll go to work every day determined to make my community an even better place in which to live. And I will continue to push aggressively for needed changes at the state level in our criminal justice system.

A statewide campaign in Tennessee is not for the faint-hearted. It is both physically and emotionally demanding. I wish the other candidates of both parties well in the coming months. I urge them to focus on the real challenges our state faces and to be bold in proposing ways to meet those challenges.

• JB
• Ford (left), Jackson at Germantown Democrats’ meeting

Employees of Shelby County government got some stroking this week from interim mayor Joe Ford, who promised that a general raise for employees, amount unspecified, would be included in a budget proposal that would not ask for tax increase.

Speaking to a meeting of the Germantown Democrats at Cordova Library on Wednesday night, Ford said more money would also be made available to the Health Department and to the Med. He said, again without specifying the amount, that Governor Phil Bredesen had assured him of adequate funding for the Med, and Ford estimated the hospital facility would be in line for another $7 million from funding included in the just-passed federal health-care bill.

Scoffing at skepticism on the subject from two other mayoral contenders, fellow Democrat Deidre Malone and Republican Mark Luttrell, Ford declared unequivocally, “We have saved the Med.”

Meanwhile, yet another mayoral candidate, General Sessions Court clerk Otis Jackson, who also spoke at the Germantown Democrats’ meeting, responded to criticism of his spending on employees of his office.

Jackson, who stands accused of prodigal spending on employee lunches and parties by county commissioner Mike Ritz, was unapologetic. As he said Wednesday night, the expenditures — including some $7,000 for holiday banquets in 2008 and 2009 — were compensations for his employees’ hard work, ways to “pat ‘em on the back” at a time when they had helped accomplish dramatic increases in office revenues while going without pay raises.

“Would I do it again? Yes,” Jackson said. Calculating that his employees had accounted for an increase of $3 million in collected fee revenues over the same two-year period as the parties and lunches cited by Ritz, Jackson minimized the expenditures by comparison saying, “That’s an average of $10 a year per employee.”

Ford took advantage of Wednesday night’s opportunity to repeat his opposition to, city/county consolidation and to unloose yet another blast at news media coverage. “As I’ve said before, you can believe about 20 percent of what you see on TV, and nothing of what you read in the newspaper,” he said.

• JB
• Gibbons speaking to Memphis YRs last week

It was a vicious circle. People began saying of Memphis District Attorney General Bill Gibbons, whose credentials to be governor were no doubt as good as anyone’s, that he couldn’t raise money; therefore he was not regarded as a possible winner. And because he wasn’t regarded as a possible winner, he had even more trouble raising money. And because he still couldn’t raise money, he was regarded as an even less credible winner. Which meant….

That he couldn’t catch a break. But Catch-22 caught him. And wouldn’t let go.

It got to this point: Zach Wamp, the Chattanooga congressman who was locked into a real scratching match with Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey for dibs on challenging Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam, was lambasting both those worthies right and left (mainly from the right, of course). But he had nothing but nice things to say about “General Gibbons.”

That’s what the others were doing, too. Unloosing shots at their other GOP rivals but sugarcoating everything they said about the man from Memphis.

That may have been the last signal Gibbons needed. But other prompters were the facts that time for the next financial disclosure period, on March 31, is drawing nigh, as is the withdrawal deadline for gubernatorial candidates, just over a week later, on April 8.

As recently as a week ago, when he addressed a meeting of Young Republicans here in Memphis, Gibbons was defiant about his chances. He likened himself to Winfield Dunn, the Memphis dentist who overcame anonymity and long odds to wrest the Republican nomination for governor from several better known GOP contenders, then wreaked an upset win over Democrat John Hooker to become governor.

Dunn, too, had some money problems to start with, but the lineup against him — Hubert Patty, Bill Jenkins, and Maxey Jarman — weren’t as far ahead of him in fundraising as Haslam, Wamp, and Ramsey are over Gibbons. Nor were their names quite as large in the political pantheon of the time.

So, when word came on Thursday that Gibbons had scheduled two major press conferences on Friday — one for Nashville in the morning, another for Memphis in the afternoon — everyone naturally assumed that the mild-mannered lawman knew when to fold up and was planning to. The time and manner of both scheduled events smacked of “I want to thank my friends who supported me…”

Several of the attendees at Shelby County Sheriff Mark Luttrell’s Racquet Club fundraiser on Thursday night reported having “call-me-back” messages from Gibbons on their voice mails. Most of them had been his donors.

Of course, it’s always possible that Gibbons, who needed a miracle, came upon one — a major endorsement, a run of unsuspected fundraising fortune, a mind-blowing new policy initiative… A miracle, in short, because that’s what he needed. And something like that, a combination of it all, especially, would invalidate all of the foregoing.

But it ain’t likely.

After that YR meeting in Memphis last week, Gibbons was asked what he would say if someone suggested to him he should step aside and get out of the governor’s race.

“It would be a short conversation,” a proud and seemingly resolute man answered.

But at this point Bill Gibbons seems poised to have two somewhat lengthy conversations about the matter on Friday.