A number of recent cases have emphasized a problem at the heart of local emergency-response efforts. There was a delay of several minutes in dispatching an ambulance to the residence of Wyeth Chandler when the former Memphis mayor was felled by what turned out to be a fatal heart attack while cutting his grass early last month. Some weeks earlier, there was a delay in responding to 911 calls from the home of Shelby County commissioner Joyce Avery’s daughter, who subsequently died. Commissioner Avery has since said she does not believe the delay in itself cost the life of her daughter, who succumbed to a chronic, long-term illness. Opinion is divided as to whether Chandler, a county resident, might have been resuscitated if he had been served by an ambulance from nearby Bartlett rather than one dispatched from Arlington, further away in both time and distance.

But there’s another issue besides that obvious one. In an emotional appeal to her fellow commissioners in a session devoted to a review of 911 procedures, Avery talked about the unnecessary stress undergone by citizens who are forced to endure long waits, as her daughter’s immediate family did, when attempting to summon emergency-response units.

As a short-term solution, the Wharton administration and the county commission have concurred on efforts to improve communications between Shelby County’s separate governmental jurisdictions, as well as adding a few ambulances to the county’s inventory. But as Avery told the press after the commission’s meeting on the subject, “Adding ambulances is not the answer. We’ve got to fix 911. It’s broken!”

The most obvious solution to the disjointed emergency-response efforts of Shelby County’s several governmental units is some sort of consolidation; if not full governmental consolidation, then some functional ad hoc version of it, at least for emergency-response purposes. Politics should not be allowed to come before matters of life and death.

Two weeks ago, a curious but illuminating event occurred at the city’s Central Library. The occasion was a meeting, co-sponsored by the Public Issues Forum and the League of Women Voters, involving candidates seeking positions on the proposed city charter commission. The catch was that the election for which these candidates had qualified had already been postponed by a state court of appeals from this year until the next regularly scheduled city election. That’s not until 2007.

One of the anomalies to be worked out in the meantime is the question of whether the list of qualified candidates will be re-opened in the intervening three years. In any case, the reasons for petitioning the election remain valid. Though the original cause that galvanized Dr. John Lunt of Germantown to begin the process — a too generous provision of pensions for 12-year city employees — has already drawn corrective action by the City Council, other issues remain. Several of the hopefuls at the library decried, for example, what they saw as the manufactured urgency behind creation of the Pyramid and the FedExForum. Clearly, the larger issue here is one of keeping citizens from being locked out of decision-making.

As retired federal judge Harry Wellford, a panelist at the affair, observed, charter reforms are needful every few decades. We concur.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes: That’s what we say to a congressman from the other end of Tennessee, 3rd District U.S. representative Zach Wamp (R-Chattanooga). Wamp was one of several Republican House members who broke with their party majority last week to resist a change in GOP caucus rules designed to protect the party position of Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas.

“It sends all the wrong signals for us to change the current rules,” said Wamp, in the course of an unrecorded voice vote which went, however, the other way. The purpose of the vote was to strike a provision in party rules requiring that a member step down from a leadership position if indicted for a felony. That prospect now confronts DeLay, who has been repeatedly admonished by the House Ethics Committee for questionable use of corporate donations to finance partisan political activity and now faces possible indictment by a grand jury that has already returned a true bill against three of his political associates.

The specific rule that was changed dates from the early 1990s, at a time when the GOP was taking over control of the House and wished to make a statement, distancing itself from allegedly improper behavior on the part of the Democrats’ House leadership. (Both Speaker Jim Wright, another Texan, and Democratic caucus chairman Tony Coelho of California had been driven from office by Republicans citing their alleged ethics violations.)

Wamp — an independent-minded congressman who previously has voiced reservations about his party’s policies on Iraq and tax cuts — is right. Especially given the background of the rule, the GOP revocation of it is a wrong signal indeed — one that elevates hypocrisy to a governing principle.

We regret that 7th District representative Marsha Blackburn, whose district includes our own circulation area, felt otherwise. Not only has Blackburn owned up to having voted for the rules change, she relayed a statement this week from Afghanistan, where she’s visiting troops, to the effect that the Ethics Committee was too profligate in its earlier chastisements of DeLay. She has written a letter to House Rules Committee chairman David Dreier of California, seeking restrictions on the Ethics Committee’s ability to issue admonishments in cases like the majority leader’s. More properly, Blackburn went on to say that members should be penalized for convictions but not for indictments alone.

DeLay — who is said to relish his nickname, “The Hammer” — is best known of late as the force behind a special 2003 Texas reapportionment which in effect turned over five safe Democratic House seats to the GOP. He neither gave nor asked for quarter in that instance. We suspect that the resourceful gentleman from Texas can take care of himself, and, if there’s anyone who can stand a bit of admonishment without needing to hide behind his colleagues, it is probably DeLay.

If Representative Blackburn has the time and energy to go on a crusade, we would much prefer that she fight the good fight on maintaining the validity of state sales-tax deductions from federal income-tax returns. This was a concession — extremely useful to her Tennessee constituents — that she and others worked hard to secure in congressional action earlier this year, but it is said to be high on the hit list in the tax “reform” package being prepared by the White House. •

As of this writing, Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen seems to have won the war of nerves over TennCare. Having last week stated boldly (we almost wrote “baldly”; it amounts to the same in this case) that he would end the decade-old state-insurance system unless litigants desisted in their efforts to limit the cuts imposed by his proposed reforms, Bredesen has forced his main antagonist, Gordon Bonnyman of the Tennessee Justice Center, to say “Uncle.”

In a statement released Monday, on the seventh day of the week-long grace period the governor had extended before dropping the ax, Bonnyman announced that the TJC would suspend its litigation for two years, allowing the federal government to grant a waiver, if it chooses, allowing Bredesen’s revised TennCare to substitute for federally mandated Medicaid, as other versions of the program have since the program’s inception under former Governor Ned McWherter.

Bredesen’s formula would limit benefits somewhat, while leaving the number of uninsured and uninsurable Tennesseans covered virtually unchanged. Bonnyman and the TJC had succeeded in getting courts to consider staying the benefit cuts — a fact which finally provoked the governor into issuing his ultimatum. As Bredesen sees it, the continuation of TennCare in its present form would suck up virtually all the funding needed to provide Tennessee’s other basic needs — education, conservation, law enforcement, etc. — if it did not indeed force the state to the edge of bankruptcy.

What both sides agreed on was that a reversion to Medicaid would mean the purging of some 430,000 of those currently insured under TennCare.

Bonnyman’s apparent 11th-hour surrender was not the end of the story. While Bredesen welcomed the concession, he warned against further “guerrilla warfare” and observed warily that Bonnyman’s language might “at a minimum need clarification and at worst undermine what we need to have a chance to succeed.”

What the governor referred to were references in Bonnyman’s statement to a need “of course” to observe “the Constitution” and to heed the ramifications of existing Medicaid statutes. Since such concerns were the legal basis of the TJC litigation, Bredesen was perhaps wise to practice caution.

In this instance, as in others (notably in confrontations with legislators over the shape of lottery legislation and workers’ compensation reforms), Bredesen has indicated that he is no one to be fooled with, that he is willing to practice brinkmanship to achieve his ends. It is still too early to make a complete judgment on the pros and cons of the governor’s position. But that he is prepared to govern, and govern resolutely, is an observable — and not unwelcome — fact.

Changing the Guard

As columnist Richard Cohen notes on page 11 of this issue, Colin Powell was less effective than he might have been in his more or less honorable conduct of the office of secretary of state. Still, he was known to have provided at least a temporary brake on the administration’s reckless and willful plunge to war in Iraq — which continues to rob our nation of its blood and treasure and good name in the world.

And that is more than can be said for Condoleezza Rice, whose performance as national security adviser during the last four years has been seriously negligent, a case of unremitting and uncritical compliance in all the administration’s misadventures. We hope for the best but fear the worst. At least we won’t have Attorney General John Ashcroft to kick around anymore.

With George W. Bush achieving the popular-vote majority that eluded him in 2000, the tumultuous election of 2004 is now in the record books. And while most of the television networks, as we go to press, have not declared the president’s electoral-college victory official, it’s all over but the shouting.

But there should not be too much shouting about a Bush electoral mandate. Not now, not in a country as bitterly divided as ours is at this critical juncture. Election 2004 confirmed all of our worse suspicions, namely, that the polarization that began during the Clinton era has continued. The divisions worsened after Bush/Gore 2000, hardened with the invasion of Iraq, and are now etched in concrete. As NBC’s Chris Matthews observed in the wee hours Wednesday morning: “This was not an election about issues, but one about the kind of country we want to be.”

Much to the pundits’ almost universal surprise, the exit polls demonstrated that the single issue voters most cared about in 2004 was not the war in Iraq, not the state of the economy, not even the specter of “terrorism,” but something they labeled “moral values.” In a nutshell: President Bush swept to victory on the strength of the perception that he was somehow more ethical, and more true to himself, than Senator Kerry. To 51 percent of the voters, the better “man” won.

However correct or absurd that notion may be, it is a stark political reality. Indeed, the hard mathematics that have ensured Bush’s reelection may be the only reality this country can currently agree upon. Otherwise, we Americans dwell in two parallel universes.

Nor do these universes correspond neatly to the now-ubiquitous red-state/blue-state geography favored by the TV pundits. Here in Tennessee, for example, all four major newspapers in Nashville and Memphis (including this one) endorsed Senator Kerry, and while the president carried the state by 15 percentage points, Senator Kerry carried Tennessee’s two most populous counties by 14 points.

The divisions in this country are not as simple as the colors on a map might suggest; we are divided by communities, not states. And unless we’re prepared to indulge in our own version of ethnic cleansing, oversimplifying these divisions, as the national media is wont to do, does no one any good.

In his second term, President Bush must now do the right thing. With his campaigning days officially behind him, he needs to send Karl Rove into graceful retirement and turn his attention to the one problem that dwarfs even the Iraq quagmire in significance. This time around, Bush must become the once-promised “uniter not a divider.” A continuation of the winner-take-all approach so evident in his first administration will make losers of us all.

Senator Kerry, on the other hand, should not be consigned to the dustbin of history. He ran a superb campaign — he will go down in history, for example, as the first candidate to win the presidential debates and yet lose the election — and can legitimately lay claim to the position as spokesperson for the 49 percent of Americans whose views will continue to need representation. Tom Daschle’s defeat in South Dakota creates a natural opportunity for that “leader of the opposition” role to become official. We strongly suggest that the Democrats place John Kerry in the position of Senate minority leader.

But the loser in this race can only do so much. The burden is upon the president to reach across the partisan divide, to work with Senator Kerry and other Democrats to begin the healing process so essential for our future. Should he choose to do otherwise, George W. Bush runs the risk of presiding over “evening in America” and leaving as his legacy a truly dysfunctional nation.

Call it the silly season. With the presidential debates behind us, the candidates now spend their days speechifying in their swing-state bubbles, leaving the media little to report upon except, yes, the polls. As a result, the campaign is now as much sport as news. No pundit show is complete these days until it reports the latest “scores” in ESPN fashion, be the tally “Bush 51, Kerry 46” or the precise opposite. There’s just one little problem: This time around, the pre-election polls may prove meaningless, because this presidential election is the first ever to be contested during the Cell Phone Era.

There are an estimated 170 million cell phones in use in America today, up from just a few thousand 15 years ago. Cell phones have transformed our daily life as much if not more than the Internet and, in the process, thrown political-opinion measurers for a complete loop.

That’s because pollsters are forbidden by federal law from dialing cell-phone numbers. Given that fact, trying to decipher how America will vote while only calling land-lines is a little like calling your neighborhood astrologer to pick the winner.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week, Philip J. Trounstine, a San Jose State media professor, estimated that only 4 to 7 percent of the U.S. population is CPO (“cell phone only”) and that, as a result, cell phones would have little impact upon polling this year. We respectfully disagree. For one thing, CPOs skew heavily to the under-30 demographic, which group, if it swings one way or the other in a close race, could determine the outcome. For another, large numbers of Americans of all ages and all political persuasions are virtually unreachable except by cell, preferring to make their home phones de facto answering machines.

Anecdotal estimates of the size of this group range as high as 25 percent of the total electorate. And while it may not be politically homogeneous, its members are decidedly different — certainly more mobile, for starters — from the group pollsters are managing to reach out and touch in their homes.

In 1936, the Literary Digest was the behemoth of presidential polling, having used a mail ballot to predict the winners of the 1924, 1928, and 1932 elections. The Digest built its sample base from auto-registration and telephone-directory lists and picked Republican challenger Alf Landon to defeat FDR in the latter’s bid for reelection that year. Meanwhile, an upstart named George Gallup did his polling door-to-door, asserting that the magazine’s lists, skewed as they were toward the wealthier segment of American society, were biased toward Republicans. Gallup picked FDR to win. The rest is history.

We’re not predicting a winner or loser on November 2nd. We’re simply saying that our now-traditional methods of measuring public opinion are as antiquated today as the Literary Digest‘s were in 1936. Caveat emptor.

“Besides the omnipresent Presley, Al Green, Jerry Lee Lewis, Alex Chilton, Jim Dickinson, Cordell Jackson, the late, great James Carr, Phineas Newborn Jr., Willie Mitchell, Isaac Hayes, Booker T & the MGs, Stax Records, and Sam Phillips and Sun Records all rose to fame in the Memphis region.”

Although that list by a Chicago Sun-Times travel writer is hardly complete, it is representative of the way the rest of the world looks upon us. And whose name is that smack- dab in the middle of those luminaries? That’s right: Cordell Jackson, the “rock-and-roll granny” whose death last week at the age of 81 gave us our most recent case of the blues. Her raucous guitar and robust presence were yet another gift to the world that we, as Memphians, are proud to undersign.

Outgoing Memphis school-board member Lora Jobe is doing the community a favor by raising anew the long-smarting issue of corporal punishment in the schools. But with all due respect to Jobe and other opponents of what, in its mildest form, goes by the name of “paddling,” a decision on the issue should be made after the November 2nd election and not, as Jobe proposes, at the school board’s meeting of October 18th.

We suggest the delay for the good reason that, with elections in progress, candidates are free to discuss its pros and cons in an abundance of ongoing forums and to be questioned about the practice by parents and other likely voters. It is one of those issues that does not, as the cliché goes, admit of easy answers, and now that it’s on the burner again, it should be allowed to cook some more.

Most candidate responses to the question so far have been notable for their ambivalence. Some have opposed it outright, but most hedge their positions to some degree. The prize in that respect may go to Kenneth Whalum Jr., a candidate for the District 1 at-large position, who averred at a recent forum that he was for the abolishment of corporal punishment — as soon, he added tongue-in-cheek, as the conditions that prompted its use had themselves been abolished. At another forum, a candidate started out with a firm statement in opposition to the practice but, when told that upwards of 70 percent of Memphis parents polled in favor of paddling, promptly hedged on that stand.

One of the objections to corporal punishment in the schools is the contention by some, like board member Carl Johnson, that the practice is applied disproportionately to black male students. Some of that is due to the simple fact that African Americans constitute a majority in the system and that males — for cultural or biological factors or what-have-you — are historically more inclined than female students to run afoul of school authority. But Johnson is probably correct that the numbers do not jibe comfortably with current racial and sexual ratios in the schools.

Even so, some of the board’s other African-American members disagree with Johnson, contending, as did Wanda Halbert, that teachers have privately expressed serious concerns about facing discipline problems if they could not avail themselves of at least the threat of corporal punishment. Up a creek without the paddle: That seems to be the idea.

Participating in one of the recent school-board forums, radio talk-show host Mike Fleming pressed candidates to take a position and led the way by observing that he, as a student, had been paddled. It was unclear whether Fleming meant this as an argument for or against the practice. In any case, he is not alone among the current generation of community leaders to have had such an experience.

Jobe has likened the use of corporal punishment to outmoded forms of behavior in medicine and other fields. It is anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but it is surely less common than it used to be, some generations back, for a mother to put a miscreant child on hold while she went outside to strip a makeshift “switch” from a backyard bush.

Whether paddling is good or bad for the schools or for society at large, it is, and should be, one of the issues of the current election campaign. Let’s start solving it there. •

Pam Gaia, a former state representative from District 89 (Midtown) and a pioneer in reform legislation, died last week, as we were preparing for press. Though we noted her passing on our Web site, we did not have the opportunity right away to say in print that we missed her. One week later, we still do — and will continue to. We are not alone.

Gaia, who served in the General Assembly from 1974 to 1990, was the moving force behind legislation that allowed consumers more ready access to generic, less expensive drugs. She was perhaps even better known for her ongoing crusade on behalf of nursing-home residents, who had been perpetually overlooked until she insisted the legislature focus on improving standards for their care.

She was not one for halfway measures. In pressing for her issues, Gaia was prepared to stand alone, if need be, and was frequently in the doghouse with more cautious legislative leaders. A dispute with then Speaker of the House — later Governor — Ned Ray McWherter in the mid-’70s resulted in her virtual ostracism from the councils of power. But she kept soldiering on. As her legislative colleague, state senator Steve Cohen, said last week, “She was a fighter for the people.”

Gaia made an abortive try for Harold Ford Sr.’s 9th District congressional seat in 1990, then held down a variety of jobs in local government. It must have been frustrating for her not to be in the forefront of the progressive causes she once championed, though she never stopped working on their behalf, even as a private citizen.

On her last night alive, Gaia, who was suffering from cancer, went with her brother Rick to a favorite restaurant, Pete & Sam’s, and ate with gusto. She never gave up.

Asked to characterize her at the height of their feud, McWherter opined, “She’s a fine little lady.” We might quarrel with his well-meaning use of the diminutive, but otherwise that’s a fair assessment.

Whatever the ultimate fate turns out to be for the three day-care workers indicted and tried for first-degree murder in the death last year of little Amber Cox-Cody and whatever reckoning awaits Stephen McKim, father of little Mia McKim, who, strapped within his vehicle in a parking lot, suffered a similar death while he worked at his job as youth minister at Central Church, justice needs to be evenhanded.

Against a background of public anger and media-hyped sensitivity to child-care reform, District Attorney Bill Gibbons was quick to press the maximum charge against the employees who inexcusably left Amber to die in a day-care van. We wrote at the time that we thought first-degree murder charges, though technically sanctioned by the law, were too extreme in the Amber case. Gibbons has been slow to come to any kind of resolution in the McKim case.

We understand the district attorney’s predicament. Only the hardest of hearts and the narrowest of minds would be closed to McKim’s grief. We all sorrowed with McKim and his family, as we did earlier with the family of Amber. McKim will forever endure a self-inflicted punishment that the rest of us can only guess at.

But what charges, if any, he will face from the justice system remain to be seen. It is Gibbons’ unenviable task to pursue such remedies, if any, and to explain how and why the scales of justice should be tilted. He should wait no longer. •