A week or so after its inception, a sudden boom for city councilman Jim
Strickland as a mayoral candidate showed little sign of abating.
And whether first-termer Strickland or somebody else from the council
or County Commission gets in, it seems likely that the field of
challengers to Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, still the
odds-on favorite for city mayor, will increase and increase
substantially.
The council boasts two other mayoral prospects besides Strickland,
whose place in the limelight appears to have derived from his
initiatives on budget cutting and transferring the Memphis Sexual
Assault Resource Center from city administration to that of Shelby
County.
Current council chairman Myron Lowery is considered an all
but certain mayoral entry. In the course of brief remarks at Sidney
Chism‘s annual “Community Picnic” on Saturday, Lowery told the
teeming crowd of politicians and political junkies, “I am not running
today. I may be running soon, though. We’ll have to see.” Yet another
mayoral bid was advertised at the picnic by Shelby County commissioner
James Harvey, who attached a sign to a chain-link fence on the
grounds that said in part, “Memphis Mayor 2011/James Harvey vs. A C
Wharton … “
Another potential entry from the council is Strickland’s fellow
first-termer Kemp Conrad, a special-election winner whose tenure
is but a few months old but who has wasted no time either in making his
mark, exposing boondoggles in city government, and proposing various
reforms.
A former local Republican chairman and a budget-cutter like former
Democratic chairman Strickland, Conrad sees himself as more open to
humanitarian projects than most textbook conservatives. During the last
round of council budget-cutting, Conrad’s intervention was important
and perhaps decisive in saving full funding for programs of the
Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association (MIFA).
But it is Strickland who’s getting the most talk of late for the
mayor’s race, especially if it should materialize as a special election
earlier than its scheduled date of October 2011. Incumbent mayor
Willie Herenton has filed to challenge 9th District congressman
Steve Cohen next year, and there had already been persistent
speculation that the mayor might leave office early for legal or other
reasons.
A special election would give Strickland and the other council
hopefuls free rein to run without fear of surrendering their seats.
Though his chief backer is council-mate Shea Flinn, who is
counseling him behind the scenes, Strickland has won public hosannahs
from other sources as diverse as liberal blogger Steve Steffens
and conservative columnist Marilyn Loeffel. As recently as
Saturday, Shelby County Republican chairman Lang Wiseman gave
the councilman some heady praise (see below). Tom Guleff, a
maverick government-watcher whose “Joe Citizens” dispatches and website
have earned a following in Shelby County, has launched an unofficial
“Draft Strickland” campaign on Facebook.
Conrad himself is something of a Strickland booster. “I consider it
an honor to serve alongside Jim Strickland,” he says.
Both Strickland and Conrad are white males, of course — a fact
of personal identity that could be a handicap in a city in which
African Americans and women have fared better at the polls in recent
years.
Former council member Carol Chumney, already has announced
she will reprise her 2007 mayoral race when the time comes, though it
remains to be seen how much of her impressive second-place finish in
that three-way race was due to anti-Herenton sentiment and how much
support would carry over into a second mayoral race, especially now
that Chumney, a frequent media presence back in the day, is largely out
of the public eye.
The favorite in the race continues to be Wharton, who is already
announced and starts with a forbiddingly huge support base. Moreover,
the county mayor has raised more money than any of the others are
likely to.
Those who believe that Strickland or Conrad, both of whom are proven
money-raisers, could run a viable race in the face of this reality
maintain that they will compete seriously for Wharton’s share of the
Poplar corridor vote and in other predominantly white enclaves.
And with other serious black candidates like Lowery and Harvey
taking sizable hunks of the African-American vote, the county mayor
could have a real race on his hands.
• Addressing the conservative Dutch Treat luncheon group on
Saturday, GOP chairman Wiseman, who was elected to head the Shelby
County Republican Party earlier this year, talked with unusual candor
about his party, its objectives and prospects, and assorted city-county
issues.
At one point, Wiseman dealt frankly with the concept of crossover
voting. The catalyst was a question about the looming Herenton-Cohen
confrontation in next year’s 9th District Democratic primary.
Acknowledging that the race would create a turnout “bad for the
Republicans” and that it would be a “very difficult idea to try and win
for a Republican in that race,” Wiseman began, “I’ll tell you who I
would vote for. You’d have to hold your nose. …” And then, amid
knowing chuckles from his score or so of listeners, let the rest of
that thought go unexpressed.
Wiseman resumed, pondering the question of how best to turn away
Herenton’s ambitions. “You’d have to vote in the Democrat primary. But
who does that hurt? Bill Gibbons,” he said, referring to the
district attorney general’s candidacy for governor in next year’s
Republican primary, simultaneous with the Herenton-Cohen showdown in
the Democratic primary.
The other side of the coin, Wiseman said, was that “there [should]
be a serious Republican in every race” — the idea being that,
should Herenton win the congressional primary, a voter might conclude,
“I’m going to vote for a Republican just to keep Herenton from
winning,” and Republican turnout overall might rise.
“We have to fight the mentality that it’s a lost cause,” Wiseman
said concerning demographic shifts that have begun to favor Democrats
in countywide elections. He noted, without specifying, that four
Republican incumbents in countywide office are reportedly not intending
to run for reelection.
Wiseman considered remedies for county Republicans’ dilemma. “We
have to convince our own people that all is not lost. … People who
have moved from one part of the county to another, we’ve got to get
those people re-registered. We also have to take our message to places
that traditionally we’ve not gone — traditional African-American
areas. I think there’s a lot of potential there. We need to get out and
do service projects. … It might take a year, five years, 10 years.
[We should] go ahead and start planting seeds.”
Such a strategy might not yield “immediate tangible results” for
Republicans, Wiseman conceded. “We have to build trust. They don’t want
to hear what you have to say until they trust you first.” As examples
of Republicans who have built such trust in traditionally Democratic
areas, he named Sheriff Mark Luttrell and U.S. senator Lamar
Alexander, both of whom polled “from 20 percent to 30 percent” in
areas where Republicans normally are held to the 7 percent range.
“The reason is, those guys get out in the community. They go to
areas where Republicans are not traditionally received.”
In the course of arguing that there were many African Americans and
other traditional Democrats “who are Republicans and just don’t know
it,” Wiseman said, “Take Jim Strickland, the councilman. He’s out there
pushing budget cuts so we don’t have to raise taxes. Jim’s a good
friend of mine. I help him all the time he needs help. He needs to come
over to the good side.”
Wiseman attempted to counter some of his conservative questioners’
negative attitudes toward the city of Memphis. “The fact is, the city
cannot live without the county, and the county cannot live without the
city. We’re an economic unit, and if Memphis goes down the toilet, the
county can’t make it. It just can’t, from a civic, educational, safety
[point of view] … and vice versa.
“When businesses come to town, they don’t start at the city limits
and look at just the county. Memphis is geographically positioned in
such a way we should be a Top 10 city.” As for outward migration from
Memphis and Shelby County: “That tide will turn. There’s a tipping
point.” As population builds up in adjoining areas, those areas are
faced with upgrading their infrastructures. “They start to look at
raising taxes. That’s what Tipton County is doing now.”
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