Kelsey; Pakis-Gillon
Within the week covered by this print issue — on Tuesday,
December 1st, to be exact — voters in state Senate District 31, a
sprawling area which overrlaps much of Germantown, Cordova, Bartlett,
and East Memphis, will have decided on someone to succeed Republican
Paul Stanley, who resigned last spring after his public
involvement in a sex-and-blackmail scandal.
The contestants are GOP nominee Brian Kelsey and Democratic
nominee Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, and, as the special election race
drew to a close, the two were pursuing quite different strategies.
Pakis-Gillon was appearing virtually everywhere she was invited to
speak and seeking opportunities to confront Kelsey in open debate. That
included even a meeting of the famously ultra-conservative Dutch Treat
Luncheon last Saturday, where one attendee baited her for noting, in a
response to a question about health-care legislation, that she and her
husband had endured financial privation during her first pregnancy.
“Why should I pay for your pregnancy? I didn’t get pregnant!” the man
heckled.
Though her basic appeal was to fellow Democrats (whom she and her
strategists reckoned as more numerous in the district than a string of
Republican victories there would indicate), Pakis-Gillon was soliciting
votes from independents and Republicans, too — citing Kelsey’s
votes in favor of guns-in-parks and guns-in-bars bills and his vote, as
she maintains, “against an amendment to freeze property taxes for
senior citizens.”
Eschewing direct contact with Pakis-Gillon, the well-financed Kelsey
maintained a lower profile, relying on mailouts, door-to-door
campaigning, and all-day vigils at polling sites during early voting.
Seemingly counting on the district’s disproportionately Republican
voting history, Kelsey reminded voters in his mail pieces of his
opposition to “big-spending” and what he called “job-killer”
legislation. Insofar as he mentioned his opponent, he coupled her to
Barack Obama, using the president’s name as something of an
anti-mantra.
Kelsey even embraced the flamboyant reputation that has led
opponents to call him “stunt-baby,” citing with pride the occasion
when, as he put it, “I stood on the House floor and placed bacon into
an envelope to demonstrate my opposition to pork projects for
individual state legislators.”
Another showdown will take place on December 1st, this one between
Republicans Mark White and John Pellicciotti for Kelsey’s
vacated seat in state House District 83. Both contenders are veterans
of losing campaigns in the past and have eschewed intra-mural strife in
expressing traditional conservative platforms.
Whoever wins will face veteran Democrat Guthrie Castle,
unopposed for his party’s nomination, and independent John
Andreucetti in a special general election on January 12th.
Although the White-Pellicciotti race has attracted little attention,
the very fact of a contested GOP primary should benefit Kelsey,
turnout-wise. The Democratic strategists who counseled Ivon
Faulkner to withdraw from his primary race against Castle seemed
not to have conjured with that factor in mind.
• Life is full of surprises. I have followed the right wing’s
recent propaganda war against ACORN (Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now) only casually and more sympathetically
for ACORN than not.
I recall being holed up in a Little Rock hotel late one night in
1982 while I was working on an Arkansas political campaign and
listening to a meeting of the group transpire either overhead or in an
adjoining room. In whichever case, it was like I was right there,
hearing every voice as a passionate argument went on between ACORN
field reps over the best recruiting strategies to pursue in
Arkansas.
What I recall most, beside the aforesaid passion, was the absolute
sincerity and sense of commitment, even zeal, of the participants for
doing something about the living conditions of the poor and
powerless.
Well, here I was Monday morning, looking at an e-mail from the
Tennessee Republican Party noting that one Wade Rathke was due
to speak at the University of Memphis that night.
He was identified as ACORN’s co-founder and was taken to task by the
anonymous GOP scribe for concealing the embarrassing fact that his
brother had embezzled almost $1 million from the group — a
circumstance that supposedly prompted Rathke to resign from ACORN only
last month.
I gather that the point of the e-mail was to entice Republicans to
go heckle Rathke or, at the very least, to monitor his activities. For
myself, remembering the intensity and righteous energy I’d overheard in
that Arkansas hotel way back when, I thought I would go give the ACORN
man a fair hearing, if circumstances permitted.
Later in the day, though, I got another e-mail alerting me to an
entry in the aforesaid Rathke’s personal blog.
Discussing a meeting sometime Sunday with “20 community leaders”
here in Memphis, Rathke went on to deal with a recent controversy
involving developer Harold Buehler‘s ultimately
successful application, under a federal program, to acquire 140 vacant
lots to develop rental property.
Said Rathke: “I found a squib by Jackson Baker in something called
the ‘political beat’ in the Memphis Flyer. Despite Baker’s bias in
favor of Buehler and his contempt for Commissioner Henri Brooks,
and anyone who opposes this project, his piece does confirm the facts
behind the minister’s disgust and my new friends’ revulsion at this
action.”
Whereupon he went on to quote several paragraphs from my coverage of
a commission meeting, and, sure enough, those paragraphs could be used
to support criticism of Buehler’s project. Or mayhap to support the
project, for that matter. Or whatever one chose to think, really, since
all I was aiming to do was, as Rathke would put it, to “confirm the
facts” behind the controversy.
I own up to contributing “squibs” on a regular basis to the online
and print editions of the Flyer. I disclaim, however, any “bias
in favor of Buehler” and, most certainly, any “contempt for
Commissioner Henri Brooks, and anyone who opposes this project.” Au
contraire. I confess to a regard for several opponents of the
project and a genuine respect for Brooks, especially for her
determination to go it alone, if need be, on behalf of causes she holds
dear.
What I have “contempt” for is someone who rolls into town and, on
the basis of a single ex parte conversation and a hasty skimming (and
misreading) of one article, becomes an instant authority on people,
places, and things he knows not of. For the record, Rathke should know
that most of the certifiable progressives on the commission, those who
would be expected to underwrite the goals of organizations like, say,
ACORN, voted with Buehler. Rightly or wrongly.
On the evidence of Rathke’s capacity for blatant prejudgment, I find
myself at least leaning to the notion that the conscientious members of
ACORN might be well rid of him, whatever his contributions of the past.
And that’s the end of this squib.
• Commissioner Brooks,
incidentally, provided the decisive vote in last week’s resolution by
the commission of the stalemated race for interim Shelby County Mayor
between commissioners Joe Ford and J.W. Gibson. Her
switch-over to Ford — which prompted James Harvey to
change his vote, too — was the result, in part, of heavy lobbying
by members of the Baptist Ministerial association and, reportedly, by a
venerable civil rights activist or two.
Commissioner Deidre Malone, a Gibson loyalist to the end and
a declared candidate for the full-time job of county mayor in next
year’s regular election, may have seen her own political chances
affected by a well-publicized dispute with former congressman Harold
Ford Sr. over the import of Ford’s attempted intercession with her
on behalf of his brother Joe.
Though no longer the local force he once was as the dominant
political broker of inner-city Memphis, Ford, now a high-stakes
lobbyist living in Florida, still keeps his hand in, especially when
prompted by circumstances.
• Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam, arguably the
front-running Republican candidate for governor, put in two full days
of campaigning and fund-raising in Shelby County last week. At a
meet-and-greet affair at Neely’s Restaurant in East Memphis, he branded
as “totally crazy” a statement by GOP rival Zach Wamp at a
recent “Pasta and Politics” Republican dinner here implying that
Haslam, might, if nominated, end up running to the left of a
Democrat.
Another Republican gubernatorial candidate, District Attorney
General Bill Gibbons of Memphis, insisted that he was in the
race to stay despite trailing in fund-raising and that he had no
intention of switching to a race for county mayor.
