Month: July 2014

UPDATE:Whatever conversations congressional candidate Ricky Wilkins or any of his surrogates may have made with members of AFSCME’ Local 1733, it is becoming ever more apparent that the Wilkins campaign’s decision Monday night to announce an endorsement by AFSCME of his candidacy was premature, at best, and unlikely or simply untrue, at worst.

The putative endorsement was vouched for in a press release from the Wilkins campaign which further announced that an 11 a.m. press conference would be held Tuesday at AFSCME’s Beale St. headquarters. Came 11 o’clock Tuesday morning, reporters were on hand, and so, in front of the building, were Wilkins and some of his chief supporters.

But there were no AFSCME representatives on hand, and a visibly angry Wilkins was reduced to saying that, up until an hour before the press conference, an endorsement of his candidacy by Local 1733 had been locked in but that “bullying” and “intimidation” by Cohen had evidently caused a delay in the union’s plans to announce the endorsement.

Keith Johnson, an employee of the city Sanitation Department and a vice president of Local 1733, categorically denied that an endorsement of Wilkins by AFSCME had ever been scheduled. “The membership will meet on Thursday to consider the matter of whom to endorse, but there has been no vote so far,” Johnson said Tuesday afternoon, noting further that Wilkins had inquired of the union’s plans before his campaign issued any press release and had been told unequivocally there had been no action.

Johnson seemed especially irritated by the implication that Cohen or anyone else had managed to intimidate the local union leadership. “We don’t bully,” he said. “That’s a bad spin for him to say.” He acknowledged having talked to Cohen since the Wilkins news release was made public but said the congressman had not put on any pressure, merely asking what the union intended to do.

Apropos the forthcoming Thursday meeting of the Local 1733 board, Johnson said, “We know Cohen’s actions supporting the union. We’ve been knowing about that for years.” He added that Wilkins had almost certainly reduced his chances of getting an endorsement by the statements he had made.

After the completion of Tuesday morning’s press conference, Danielle Inez, Wilkins’ communications aide and the author of the original press release, contacted members of the media with an email that said, “I’ll have text messages regarding the endorsement from our campaign political consultant shortly.”

As of late Tuesday afternoon, though, nothing had been received.

Cohen had been contacted by members of the media Tuesday morning while the n press conference was still pending and said, “We don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said he had always been endorsed by AFSCME, both nationally and locally, and acknowledged that it would be “disappointing” if Local 1733 should make another decision. But he said he would in any case continue to support the union’s objectives.

Original story; Below is the first Flyer report of Monday night, based on a Wilkins press release:

No one doubts that lawyer Ricky Wilkins is running hard for the Democratic nomination in the 9th congressional district — least of all incumbent Steve Cohen, who continues to maintain confidence in winning but has been careful not to claim anything like his usual 4 to 1 edge over primary challengers.

Cohen has a formidable financial advantage over Wilkins, he has a record of performance in Washington and constituent service at home, he knows the track and knows how to run on it, and he has an abundant corps of supporters.

So he is not going to push the panic button if Wilkins demonstrates some strength of his own; Cohen more or less expected that.

Still, a press release circulated Monday night by the Wilkins campaign announcing that Local 1733 of AFSCME intends to hold a press conference on Tuesday morning to announce its endorsement of Wilkins had to come as something of a surprise. After all, as the press release noted, the congressman has been including the union local on his fairly lengthy endorsement list and did so as recently as last week.

Cohen could not be reached for a reaction late Monday night, and presumably a press conference scheduled by the AFSCME local at its Beale St. headquarters Tuesday morning will amplify somewhat on the situation. So far the only word of a possible endorsement of Wilkins has come from the Wilkins campaign itself.

JB

Wilkins group at AFSCME Tuesday morning

Some political ads of the attack variety employ the age-old technique of “guilt by association” — the idea being So-and-So is bad. Or Such-and-Such is bad. And you’re (he’s/she’s) connected to So-and-So, so you’re (he’s/she’s) bad, too!

EXHIBIT ONE: Here’s a first-class example, in a mailer sent out last week by the Dan Michael for Juvenile Court Judge campaign.

The ad builds on the established reality that “Judge Joe Brown,” the Democratic nominee for District Attorney General announced his support, early on, for the campaign for Juvenile Court Judge of Memphis city Judge Tarik Sugarmon, Brown’s fellow party nominee.

Moreover, Sugarmon was glad to have Brown’s support, seeing it as a real boost, especially earlier in the campaign year. Probably Sugarmon is still pleased at the endorsement, which no doubt continues to be worth coattail votes in certain quarters of the electorate.

In others….not so much, particularly after Brown’s off-the-cuff-gone-viral assertions — shocking and oh-so-uncorroborated — earlier this month about the imagined sexual and social predilections of his opponent, incumbent D.A. Amy Weirich.

In those other quarters — containing Republican and an indeterminate number of Democratic, swing, and independent voters— Brown’s act was a No-No that, along with other provocative acts by the former Criminal Court Judge and TV eminence, makes him something of a fright-wig and a GOTV stimulus.

Brown is unique this year in apparently having the effect of a getting-out-the-vote agent on both sides of the party line, for utterly opposite reasons.

EXHIBIT TWO: But if guilt-by-association is a long-established ad variety, the opposite kind of ad — call it credit-by-association (which, by the way, was what the original Brown-Sugarmon connection was supposed to be about) — has a lengthy pedigree, as well, usually in the form of simple endorsement ads: Joe Good-likes-Candidate-X; there Candidate-X is good.

An ad put out this month in a mailer for General Sessions Judge Lynn Cobb’s reelection campaign employs the principle in a novel, even creative way. Cobb, a Republican of long standing, is attempting to run a broad, middle-of-the-road campaign (judiciary races are, after all, supposed to be non-partisan).

To that end, the jurist signed on two campaign-chairs, one Republican, the other Democratic. The latter, County Commissioner-elect Van Turner, is in fact the immediate past chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party. He is, moreover, African American and, as such, a possible bridge into a constituency that Cobb could certainly not take for granted and that could be expected to learn toward his opponent, Sheila Bruce-Renfroe.

Hence, perhaps, this mail piece:

In one sense, this is a conventional endorsement ad, with Turner saying his I-Like-Lynn-Cobb piece. But the close juxtaposition of Turner’s image with the name of Cobb and with the office he seeks surely communicates to the casual observer the idea that Lynn Cobb is black.

Nwr, let’s face facts: This ain’t an accident. The ad, as the supporters of Bruce-Renfroe have said in so many words (some of them unprintable) is pure chutzpah.

Have at it, readers: Which of these two ads will best succeed in boosting the election chances of the sponsoring candidate?

In a season of marathon political forums — especially grueling, surely, for judicial candidates, who must often have been tempted to quit law for something serene like animal husbandry — the one sponsored by the NAACP Sunday at First Baptist Broad was among the most taxing.

Though it dealt only with the candidates for judgeships and the Shelby County School boards — with an unexpectedly brief and somewhat anti-climactic interlude for congressional candidates — the NAACP affair lasted four hours and seemed even longer, though there were animated moments, to be sure.

One came from Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan — the firebrand pixie who only last week spotted a motorist beating his lady friend in an adjoining lane and hailed him down, calling him by a name (initials “M.F.”) that was not on his birth certificate.
Skahan was only slightly more tender Sunday with her main election opponent, Nigel Lewis — “young Nigel ,” as the veteran jurist called him, challenging his experience.

Skahan burlesqued an extended handclap after suggesting that Lewis had just begun handling a jury trial by himself “in the last few weeks” and expressed the sarcastic hope that he might equip himself to run for judge “in eight years.”

Lewis billed himself as “a product of this community” and had said, “We can do better than the status quo,” noting further that 80 to 85 percent of current defendants were African American — not the first nor the last time that particular disproportion figured in Sunday’s event.

He objected that other judges could attest to his acumen and experience, and Skahan drew laughs as he spoke by pantomiming an appeal to the crowd, palm upward, as if seeking out corroboration from judges in attendance.

Another moment of theater came when judicial candidate Sheila Bruce-Renfroe, candidate for a General Sessions judgeship (Civil, Division 1) took to task her absent opponent, incumbent Judge Lynn Cobb, for an ad of his featuring, over a fine-print identifying paragraph, the visage of Cobb’s campaign co-chair Van Turner.

Said Bruce-Renfroe of Cobb, who is white: “He was trying to give the impression that he was African-American. He looks more like Elmer Fudd.”

One aspect of the forum that slowed down proceedings was the posing to candidates of written questions received from the audience. (These dwindled down considerably as the evening wore on.)

A staple question early on regarded whether the candidates had ever been disciplined, either publicly or privately, by a regulatory body.

For those who had, especially by the state Board of Professional Responsibility, their methods of dealing with the question varied. Venita Martin-Andrews, a candidate for Circuit Court, Division 8, bit the bullet, owning up forthrightly to having been sanctioned for allowing a proxy to oversee a minor in a case where the child’s supervision had been assigned to Martin-Andrews herself.

On the other hand, Alicia Howard, candidate for Criminal Court Judge, Davison 6, adopted, perhaps inadvertently, a different approach to her previously well-publicized suspension by the Board of Professional Responsibility for 18 months (12 of which were probated) for the dual offense of forging a client’s name to a document and soliciting pay from the state for work which a surrogate actually performed.

Since the question about sanctioning was in a two-parter that also asked about trial experience, Howard dilated so long about the latter matter that she was at the end of her allotted period for answering when time was called on her just as she began to speak regarding the details of her suspension.

The matter of excessive absenteeism reared up when Myra May Hamilton, a contender for the General Sessions Civil Division 2 judgeship, (without naming her opponent, incumbent Judge Phyllis Gardner), cited a Sunday Commercial Appeal article in which Gardner was listed as having the most absences of any General Sessions judge. “I don’t know how you cannot show up for your job,” said Hamilton.

Gardner, who had preceded Hamilton, had not mentioned the article but had spoken at some length about her high rating in a Memphis Bar Association poll of lawyers and her experience and credentials, including an ongoing effort to establish a civil mental health court.

The absentee issue surfaced again, even more indirectly, when Betty Thomas Moore, the incumbent judge in General Sessions Civil Division 5, commented, while addressing her credentials, that “you’re not always going to get the truth of the matter” from TV or newspaper accounts. Moore had been listed in the CA article as being just behind Gardner, among General Sessions judges, in the number and frequency of absences.

Midway of the appearances by judicial candidates, the debate sponsors made space on the agenda for four congressional candidates — in District 9, incumbent Steve Cohen and Ricky Wilkins, Democrats, in a rare joint appearance, and Charlotte Bergman, Republican; and, in District 8, Rickey Hobson, a Somerville native and Democrat.

Bergman, who spoke first, and Hobson, who concluded, elaborated on their backgrounds and political outlooks. So, essentially, did Cohen, who conspicuously omitted mention of lawyer Wilkins, his latest challenger, but Wilkins would go on the attack.

Cohen, like opponent Wilkins a life member of the NAACP, referred to the sponsoring organization as “the conscience of the United States Congress.” He recounted some of the grants and programs he had brought to Memphis and noted that he had been endorsed by both President Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Wilkins, who followed, spoke of his climb upward from an impoverished background in the inner city and offered himself as a “role model.” Suggesting, as often before, that Cohen had slighted local issues and “done nothing” to alter power relationships, Wilkins said, “The status quo does not work for us.”

Tarik Sugarmon, the Memphis city judge who is a candidate for Juvenile Court Judge, received the most audible applause of the evening after a presentation in which, reading from a report of a meeting of the Midtown Republican Club, he quoted his absent opponent, Dan Michael, as having said, “I’m a strong critic of the federal program of the deinstitutionalizing of minority confinement.”

“That means he wants to lock African American kids up,” said Sugarmon.

The main fireworks from the final portion of the forum, involving SCS candidates, came when Damon Curry Norris, a candidate for District 9, denounced “special interest groups…trying to hold our School Board hostage.” He later indicated that he had been referring principally to “Stand for Children,” a group which has endorsed and donated funds to one of Norris’s two opponents, Roshun Austin.