What Does SHE Want to Be Called? (It might surprise you.)
What does HE want to do about Tom Jones. (It WILL surprise you!)
Why is HE grinning? (Or is he grimacing?)
Why’d HE vote that way?
What’s new — brand new — with HIM?
Pssst! Answers on Sunday.
Q: What do loose morals, the Black Panthers, and the Third Reich have in common? A: They were all evoked in an unforeseen controversy that erupted in Monday’s biweekly meeting of the Shelby County Commission. The argument, over county funding of a contraceptive program, was one of two issues — the other concerned a zoning matter — that underscored the tendency of the current body, elected in August, to cross partisan and racial lines more freely than previous commissions had.
Said Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham: “Are we not encouraging loosening up promoting promiscuous sex legalizing morality — or the lack of it? [It] does give the girl and her partner free rein, doesn’t it? If guys know they can pay without paying the price, they’re going to.” Said Commissioner Marilyn Loeffel: “To me, it’s a moral issue. It’s a matter of core belief, not a debate over financial responsibility . It’s not our place to promote birth control. They can’t remember to do homework, to make their beds, to catch the bus on time.”
These sentiments had to do with a resolution initially considered so innocuous that it was placed on the commission’s “consent agenda,” which normally lists a plethora of routine matters that are voted out of the way early in a meeting so that the real controversies, if such there be, can come later and get all the time and attention they deserve.
It read this way: “Resolution approving expenditure of funds in the amount of $66,000 for the purchases of Depo Provera Prefilled Syringes from Pharmacia Corporation for the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department’s Family Planning Program.” In effect, the syringes in question provide temporary inoculation against pregnancy, and that fact made the resolution an anathema to Loeffel, a longtime activist on social-conservative issues — especially since the category of potential subjects necessarily includes females who are formally classified as minors and who are students in the county’s junior high schools and high schools.
In asking that the resolution be taken off the consent agenda and placed on the commission’s regular agenda, Loeffel intended only to be given the opportunity to vote against the measure, she said, adding, “I had no intention of provoking a debate.” The debate ensued, however, sometimes heated, sometimes bizarre, and, as indicated, irrespective of the usual partisan lines.
One strong opponent of Loeffel’s view, for example, was newly elected commissioner Joyce Avery, who turned out longtime commissioner Clair VanderSchaaf this year largely on the strength of her advocacy of tighter fiscal restraints for county government. Indeed, Avery, the sponsor of the disputed resolution, defended it as a classic instance of financial responsibility. “These are people who are already sexually active, are they not?” she asked Yvonne Madlock, county health department director, who concurred and added that, in her view, it was “the right of every individual to make rational decisions about reproductive life.”
Avery attempted to mollify Loeffel by saying that, “as a Christian,” she sympathized with the Cordova commissioner’s views but added, “I agree to disagree.” She said she felt that society was being unfairly burdened by “children having children” and that “a sense of fiscal responsibility” required making the contraceptive syringes available. In any case, said Avery firmly, she was determined to see the matter come to a vote without being deferred.
In the end, the commission would approve the expenditures by an 8-4 vote. Voting for it were Republicans Avery, Linda Rendtorff, Tom Moss, and David Lillard and Democrats Deidre Malone, Michael Hooks, Cleo Kirk, and Joe Ford. Voting with Loeffel and Willingham were newcomer Bruce Thompson, a Republican, and vintage Democrat Walter Bailey, who currently serves as chairman and who asked Loeffel to take over the chair briefly while he articulated his position — along unanticipated lines, it’s fair to say.
Some decades back, when he was a member of the board of an American Civil Liberties Union chapter, Bailey recalled, he had supported positions taken by the Black Panthers, a radical group prominent in the late ’60s and early ’70s, opposing state-supported birth-control programs on the grounds that, as a means of “population control,” they were aimed at blacks. Asked after the meeting if he regarded that as a live possibility in today’s circumstances, Bailey said he did, throwing in what was arguably a non sequitur: “Who could have foreseen what Hitler would do?”
The other matter Monday that operated independently of party structure was precipitated by Commissioner Hooks’ request to reconsider a zoning proposal that was defeated two weeks earlier when it could not get a majority vote. This, a project by developer Kevin Hyneman to build 50 new homes in the Cordova area, received a 6-6 vote on September 23rd, when a coalition of Republicans and Democrats resisted two new subdivision proposals aimed at families with children.
One of those was that of Hyneman, who, along with brother and fellow developer Rusty Hyneman, has abundant political contacts. One of those on a number of former occasions was Hooks, who, to many of his colleagues’ surprise, took the lead at the previous meeting in holding the line against the proposed new developments on the ground that, until reliable means of financing future school construction could be assured, it was folly to approve new family-oriented subdivisions.
Buttressing the argument, which is a staple of what is coming to be known as the “Smart Growth” concept, was the presence at that meeting of Maura Black, director of planning for Shelby County schools.
Black was absent from Monday’s meeting, and so, crucially, was the united “Smart Growth” front of Hooks, Malone, and GOP add-ons Avery and Thompson, who, with members picked up from the other commissioners on the key proposals, were able to hold the line last time.
At the start of Monday’s session, Democrat Julian Bolton, an absentee on September 23rd, asked Hooks if he, as a member of the prevailing side in the Hyneman vote, would mind moving to reconsider the proposal. To the discomfiture — and raised eyebrows — of some of his new allies (a couple of whom had skeptically predicted such a move two weeks ago), Hooks agreed, and the motion to reconsider, coupled with another that deferred renewed voting on the measure until the commission’s next meeting, duly passed.
“He was very kind to me during my recovery, and he would have done the same thing for me,” Hooks, who made a dramatic return to action after a widely publicized bout with cocaine addiction, would say later, justifying his decision to honor Bolton’s request. “I am not so unmindful as not to know how Julian will end up voting,” said Hooks, who, like everyone else, saw the former 6-6 deadlock on Hyneman’s subdivision turning into a 7-6 vote of passage next time out.
Though no one professed any doubt about Hooks’ motives for the record, two of his colleagues, commissioners Thompson and Lillard, the latter of whom had voted Hyneman’s way in September, expressed displeasure at the result and suggested that a better option for Bolton, who had an opportunity to see the September 26th agenda in advance, would have been to seek deferral of the measure before its initial vote, not to have it resurrected for a second try later on.
Malone, however, saw no reason for distress. The “Smart Growth” faction, so far equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, would hold together as a unit in the future, she predicted.
• “I’m probably not going to make the list, ever, of the 50 most beautiful people, but there’s a list of 50 I think I can make!” So said former Nashville mayor Phil Bredesen after being introduced by 9th District U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. to an overflow Peabody ballroom crowd of several hundred supporters Monday.
Of course, Bredesen’s list — of U.S. governors — depends not on People magazine’s arbiters of style but on the Tennessee electorate, which both Democrat Bredesen and his Republican opponent, 4th District congressman Van Hilleary, are assiduously courting just now. The two, currently regarded as being in a dead heat, were in Memphis for a weekend debate on WREG-TV Channel 3, and though some sparks flew in that one, neither candidate prevailed, in the view of most observers.
Each, however, scored off the other’s positions — Bredesen casting doubt on Hilleary’s arithmetic and consistently regarding the economic benefits of drastic TennCare reforms and Hilleary making some telling points regarding the financial arrangements, signed onto by Bredesen, between Nashville and the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. As Hilleary pointed out, Memphis made a better, more cushioned deal with the NBA to get the Grizzlies.
• Last month, when Young Republican chairman Rick Rout was asked by his fellow members of the Shelby County Republican steering committee to am-scray, by a vote of 18-8, Rout’s answer was “Thanks, but no thanks.” On Thursday night of last week, a month later, the committee voted in Rout’s absence to begin his removal by impeachment.
That vote was even more decisive, at 26-7, but as committee parliamentarian Jerry Cobb pointed out, Article C of the state Republican bylaws mandates that a majority of the 43-member committee — or 29 members — must vote in favor of such a removal, and therefore, the whole process would have to be repeated at the committee’s November meeting.
Cobb would say later on that he had no intention of party-pooping, stressing that his motive in raising the quibble was merely to make sure that any impeachment process, once completed, could not be reversed on a technicality.
In the meantime, committee members had wrangled amongst themselves over the nature of the process, the order in which steps had to be taken, and whether — as member Scott McCormick and others suggested — the local committee’s bylaws, which explicitly disallow Article C’s constraints in case of “open and notorious” support of Democrats, permit a simple majority of the quorum present to do the deed.
But unlike the case at September’s meeting, there was no serious argument or discussion about whether Rout deserved the punishment. It was taken as a given, even by his nominal supporters.
As Bob Pittman, not a supporter and one of several members who, like Rout, aspire to the local party’s chairmanship, put it, “We’ve got the rule [prohibiting such ‘open and notorious’ apostasies], and we either ought to amend it or enforce it.”
What Rout did, of course, was send out indiscreet e-mails during the late county election period advertising his discontent with the Republican mayoral nominee, George Flinn. When his e-mails surfaced in public, Rout, son of then-Mayor Jim Rout (who was also unenthusiastic about Flinn but more cautious about expressing it), made halfhearted and somewhat disingenuous claims that he’d only been joking.
The committee votes against him have followed, initiated by a motion last month from John Willingham (who, as the two tallies surely have indicated, was no Lone Ranger in the matter).
Stay tuned; this one may require as many installments as the lingering death of Francisco Franco did in Saturday Night Live‘s “Weekend Update” segments of the 1975-’76 season. Ultimately, maybe in February or March, the GOP executive committee would have to conduct a trial.
Rout retains his membership — and his seriously compromised chairmanship candidacy — in the meantime. Declared or likely chairmanship candidates include Ray Butler, Bob Pitman, Kemp Conrad, and Arnold Weiner.
• Two local legislative races to watch are those for districts 89 and 93, in which Democratic incumbents Carol Chumney and Mike Kernell are being challenged, respectively, by Republicans Ruth Ogles and John Peliciotti. More of these anon.
CROSSING THE LINES
Q: What do loose morals, the Black Panthers, and the Third Reich have in common? A: They were all evoked in an unforeseen controversy which erupted in Monday’s biweekly meeting of the Shelby County Commission. The argument, over county funding of a contraceptive program, was one of two issues — the other concerned a zoning matter — that underscored the tendency of the current body, elected in August, to cross partisan and racial lines more freely than previous commissions had.
Said Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham: “Are we not encouraging loosening up …promoting promiscuous sex, ..legalizing morality — or the lack of it?…[It] does give the girl and her partner free rein, doesn’t it?…If guys know they can play without paying the price, they’re going to.”
Said Commissioner Marilyn Loeffel: “To me, it’s a moral issue. It’s a matter of core belief, not a debate over financial responsibility…It’s not our place to promote birth control…They can’t remember to do homework, to make their beds, to catch the bus on time.”
These sentiments had to do with a resolution initially considered so innocuous that it was placed on the commission’s “consent agenda,” which normally lists a plethora of routine matters that are voted out of the way early in a meeting so that the real controversies, if such there be, can come later and get all the time and attention they deserve.
It read this way: “Resolution approving expenditure of funds in the amount of $66,000.00 for the purchases of Depo Provera Prefilled Syringes from Pharmacia Corporation for the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department’s Family Planning Program.”
In effect, the syringes in question provide temporary inoculation of women of child-bearing age against pregnancy, and that fact made the resolution an anathema to Loeffel, a longtime activist on social-conservative issues — especially since the category of potential subjects necessarily includes females who are formally classified as minors and who are students in the county’s junior high schools and high schools.
In asking that the resolution be taken off the consent agenda and placed on the commission’s regular agenda, Loeffel intended only to be given the opportunity to vote against the measure, she said, adding, “I had no intention of provoking a debate.”
The debate ensued, however, sometimes heated, sometimes bizarre, and, as indicated, irrespective of the usual partisan lines.
One strong opponent of Loeffel’s view, for example, was newly elected commissioner Joyce Avery, who turned out longtime commissioner Clair VanderSchaaf this year largely on the strength of her advocacy of tighter fiscal restraints for county government.
Indeed, Avery, the sponsor of the disputed resolution, defended it as a classic instance of financial responsibility. “These are people who are already sexually active, are they not?” she asked Yvonne Madlock, county Health Department director, who concurred and added that, in her view, it was “the right of every individual to make rational decisions about reproductive life.”
Avery attempted to mollify Loeffel by saying that, “as a Christian,” she sympathized with the Cordova commissioner’s views but added, “I agree to disagree.” She said she felt that society was being unfairly burdened by “childen having children,” and that “a sense of fiscal responsibility” required making the contraceptive syringes available.
In any case, said Avery firmly, she was determined to see the matter come to a vote without being deferred.
In the end, the commission would approve the expenditures by an 8 to 4 vote. Voting for it were Republicans Avery, Linda Rendtorff, Tom Moss, and David Lillard, and Democrats Deidre Malone, Michael Hooks, Cleo Kirk, and Joe Ford. Voting with Loeffel and Willingham were newcomer Bruce Thompson, a Republican, and vintage Democrat Walter Bailey, who currently serves as chairman and who asked Loeffel to take over the chair briefly while he articulated his position — along unanticipated lines, it’s fair to say.
Some decades back when he was a member of the board of an American Civil Liberties Union chapter, Bailey recalled, he had supported positions taken by the Black Panthers, a radical group prominent in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, opposing state-supported birth-control programs on the grounds that as a means of “population control” they were aimed at blacks.
Asked after the meeting if he regarded that as a live possibility in today’s circumstances, Bailey said he did, throwing in what was arguably a non sequitur: “Who could have foreseen what Hitler would do?”
The other matter Monday that operated independently of party structure was precipitated by Commissioner Hooks’ request to reconsider a zoning proposal that was defeated two weeks earlier when it could not get a majority vote.
This, a project by developer Kevin Hyneman to build 50 new homes in the Cordova area, received a six-six vote on September 23, when a coalition of Republicans and Democrats resisted two new subdivision proposals aimed at families with children.
One of those was that of Hyneman, who, along with brother and fellow developer Rusty Hyneman, has abundant political contacts. One of those on a number of former occasions was Hooks, who, to many of his colleagues’ surprise, took the lead at the previous meeting in holding the line against the proposed new developments on the ground that, until reliable means of financing future school construction could be assured, it was folly to approve new family-oriented subdivisions.
Buttressing the argument, which is a staple of what is coming to be known as the “Smart Growth” concept, was the presence at that meeting of Maura Black, director of planning for Shelby County schools.
Black was present at Monday’s meeting but did not play as conspicuous a role as at the earlier meeting, nor, crucially, did the united “Smart Growth” front of Hooks, Democratic newcomer Malone, and GOP add-ons Avery and Thompson, who, with members picked up from the other commissioners on the key proposals, were able to hold the line last time.
At the start of Monday’s session Democrat Julian Bolton, an absentee on September 23, asked Hooks if he, as a member of the prevailing side in the Hyneman vote, would mind moving to reconsider the proposal. To the discomfiture — and raised eyebrows — of some of his new allies (a couple of whom had skeptically predicted such a move two weeks ago), Hooks agreed, and the motion to reconsider, coupled with another that deferred renewed voting on the measure until the commission’s next meeting, duly passed.
“He was very kind to me during my recovery, and he would have done the same thing for me,” Hooks, who made a dramatic return to action after a widely publicized bout with cocaine addiction, would say later, justifying his decision to honor Bolton’s request.
“I am not so unmindful as not to know how Julian will end up voting,” said Hooks, who, like everyone else, saw the former 6-6 deadlock on Hyneman’s subdivision turning into a 7-6 vote of passage next time out.
Though no one professed any doubt about Hooks’ motives for the record, two of his colleagues, Commissioners Thompson and Lillard, the latter of whom had voted Hyneman’s way in September, expressed displeasure at the result and suggested that a better option for Bolton, who had an opportunity to see the September 26 agenda in advance, would have been to seek deferral of the measure before in its initial vote, not to have it resurrected it for a second try later on.
Malone, however, saw no reason for distress. The “Smart Growth” faction, so far equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, would hold together as a unit in the future, she predicted.
Last month when Young Republican chairman Rick Rout was asked by his fellow members of the Shelby County Republican steering committee to am-scray, by a vote of 18-8, Rout’s answer was (literally) “Thanks, but no thanks.” On Thursday night, a month later, the committee voted in Rout’s absence to begin his removal by impeachment.
That vote was even more decisive, at 26-7, but, as committee parliamentarian Jerry Cobb pointed out, Article C of the state Republican by-laws mandates that a majority of the 43-member committee — or 29 members — must vote in favor of such a removal, and therefore the whole process would have to be repeated next month.
Cobb would say later on he had no intention of party-pooping, stressing that his motive in raising the quibble was merely to make sure that any impeachment process, once completed, could not be reversed on a technicality.
In the meantime committee members had wrangled amongst themselves over the nature of the process, the order in which steps had to be taken, and whether — as member Scott McCormick and others suggested — the local committee’s bylaws, which explicitly suspend Article C’s constraints in case of “open and notorious” support of Democrats, permit a simple majority of the quorum present to do the deed.
But, unlike the case a month ago, there was no serious argument or discussion about whether Rout merited the rebuke. It seemed to be taken as a given, even by his nominal supporters.
As Bob Pittman, not a supporter and one of several members who, like the dogged Rout himself, aspire to the local party’s chairmanship, put it, “We’ve got the rule [prohbiting such “open and notorious” apostasies], and we either ought to amend it or enforce it.”
What Rout did, of course, was send out indiscreet emails during the late county election period advertising his discontent with the Republican mayoral nominee, George Flinn. When his emails surfaced in public, Rout, son of then Mayor Jim Rout (who was also unenthusiastic about Flinn but more cautious in expressing it), made half-hearted and somewhat disingenuous claims that he’d only been joking.
The committee votes against him have followed, initiated by a motion last month from John Willingham (who, as the two tallies have indicated, was clearly no Lone Ranger in the matter).
Stay tuned; this one may require as many installments as the lingering death of Francisco Franco did in Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segments of the 1975-6 season. Ultimately — maybe in February or March, the GOP executive committee would have to conduct a trial.
Rout retains his membership — and his seriously compromised chairmanship candidacy — in the meantime, but the temper of the times in GOP-land would seem to offer something less than a vote of confidence to either Rick Rout or any other member of the erstwhile Republican first family.
CENTER RING
The first of five planned debates between the two major-party U.S. Senate candidates is now in the can, after a televised encounter Monday night in Chattanooga, and it is clear that Democratic candidate Bob Clement, currently the congressman representing Nashville, has his work cut out for him in hoping to overtake his Republican opponent, former governor Lamar Alexander.
One of the ironies of Clement’s situation was highlighted by polls taken during the past few weeks, showing his political future ebbing and flowing on wildly fluctuating findings. One day’s survey would show him almost 20 points behind Alexander, another only eight, and the Clement camp’s chief lobbying point was that, as the candidate himself urged on a recent evening in Memphis, “when our name-recognition is the same with a group of voters, we come out even.”
What is astounding about this is that Clement has run for – and held – statewide office before, has been the capital city’s man in Washington for more than a decade, and is the son of one of Tennessee’s most legendary governors in modern times, Frank Clement, a magnetic orator whose keynote speech at the 1956 Democratic Convention mesmerized the nation’s listeners.
The senior Clement was still serving as governor during the late ‘60s when an automobile accident terminated his life and career simultaneously. Indeed, it was almost entirely on the basis of the family name that son Bob was able to launch his own political career in the years following his father’s death, winning election as a Public Service Commissioner and mounting a credible challenge for governor.
As the Democratic nominee for the 7th District congressional seat in 1982, he was upset by a Republican who later became governor, Don Sundquist, but his race that year, followed by his subsequent service in the Nashville-based 5th District, should have guaranteed wide name recognition in the state’s two most populous areas.
The fact is that Clement, though arguably in possession of a quite lustrous vita (he also served terms as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as president of Cumberland University), has a persona problem that stems not from any dearth of ability (his gifts are generally recognized) nor even from his diminutive stature (he stands at considerably less than six feet) but from the fact that he seems low-profile by nature, almost bashful – an introvert in an extrovert’s profession.
One difference between himself and Alexander was dramatized during the televised debate Monday night in the periodic cutaway shots of either candidate reacting to what the other was saying. Alexander appeared to have the actor’s gift of knowing when he was on camera; he seemed polite, attentive, shrewd, and skeptical as needed. When he smiled, it was in good-natured acknowledgement of the developing plotline.
Clement, on the other hand, seemed to pout and glower whenever his adversary was making a point that he deemed off the mark or unfair in what it suggested, and to purse his lips when he was just listening. At several points the camera caught him rolling his tongue in the hollow of his right cheek – a maneuver that in closeup looked huge and almost volcanic.
In short, Alexander at all times had his public face on, while Clement’s private self kept wandering into the proceedings like a lost child. It was a situation that could be interpreted to either man’s credit or to either’s blame, but in an age when appearances count for as much as issues, the cosmetic edge clearly belonged to the former governor.
Even the logistics of the TV studio in Chattanooga worked to Clement’s disadvantage: Those who have seen them both in the flesh are aware that Clement is as ruddy of complexion as Alexander is, but the side of the set on which the congressman sat seemed to be bathed in an antiseptically yellow light, while the former governor had the benefit of pinker and more natural-looking hues, a state of affairs that somewhat equaled out on those rare occasions when Clement was able to stand center stage and field a question from a guest in the studio audience.
Echoes of the Primary
From time to time, Clement has picked up and hurled at Alexander one of the barbs thrown at the Republican nominee by his erstwhile antagonist in the GOP Senate primary, U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant.
The kiss-and-make-up etiquette of partisan politics requires that intra-party rivals support each other even after the most bitter of primaries, and that between Alexander and Bryant was one such. Speaking at a recent luncheon meeting, the outgoing 7th District congressman dutifully endorsed – and sported the stickers of- both Alexander, whom he so recently was chastising on an almost daily basis, and congressional colleague Van Hilleary, the GOP gubernatorial nominee with whom Bryant played Alphonse-and-Gaston a few seasons back, when both men, equally ambitious, were eyeing both a Senate and a governor’s race for 2002.
Though Bryant was no doubt sincere, the exercise had a bit of a pro forma feel to it, and Clement, perhaps over-optimistically, has frequently made appeals on the stump to the erstwhile Bryant voters, professing to represent their populist interests against the putatively more elitist and establishmentarian Alexander.
In any case, Clement has, as indicated, appropriated some of Bryant’s weaponry, repeating the 7th District congressman’s charges that Alexander was out of step with the Senate, which passed by a 97-0 vote a corporate reform measure that Alexander disapproved of, and strongly suggesting, as did Bryant, that the former governor had amassed his fortune by means of sweetheart deals that may have leveraged his governmental connections.
In Monday night’s debate, as previously, Clement made much of a recently renewed $102 million contract between the state and Education Networks of America (ENA), a company on whose board Alexander sits for an annual salary of $60,000. Alexander should give the money back, Clement suggested, “but it hasn’t happened.”
For the record, Alexander has denied anything improper and has noted, as in the televised debate, that Clement, like himself, is a “multi-millionaire.” He made an attempt to turn the tables by recalling what he said was Clement’s membership in the ‘70s on the board of directors of a bank owned by the Butcher brothers, Jake and C.H., once prominent Tennessee Democrats whose banks later failed, leading to federal fraud convictions for both men.
An apparently surprised Clement denied any such membership, but the Alexander campaign later emailed to reporters copies of a photograph from the 1973 annual report of the City and County Bank of Knox County, showing a youthful Bob Clement as one of several “directors.”
Though Clement quibbled about the meaning of the picture – and the nature of his relationship to the bank and to the Butchers, whom he ended up on the wrong side of, politically, losing to Jake Butcher in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1978 – and Alexander has pooh-poohed the nature of his ENA involvement, the fact is that both men have profited from private-sector opportunities that their public prominence made easier for them.
There is no great surprise in this – it is one of the unspoken perks of public life, conspicuously so in the careers of most recent American presidents, for example – and there is nothing necessarily improper about it. In any case, the fallout from Monday night may make it more difficult henceforth for Clement to link Alexander with “Enron capitalism” – though the former governor seems to have been measurably more active in the corporate sector than the congressman.
Clement may have more luck with another stratagem inherited from Bryant. In the primary the GOP congressman made much of a remark made by Alexander early in the year to Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Tom Humphrey, who quoted the two-time presidential aspirant as saying, “I wanted to be president. The Senate will have to do.”
Bryant interpreted the remark as demonstrating the arrogance of a lordly Alexander deigning to go slumming for what he regarded as a consolation price. This is how Clement would prefer it be seen, as well.
As it happens, Alexander first learned of the possible repercussions of his statement while on a visit to the Flyer office during the primary. Informed of Bryant’s first broadside on the subject, the former governor was clearly taken aback. He had made the statement near the end of a long interview at the close of a long day’s worth of campaigning, he said, and had just let his guard down.
In subsequent interviews, Alexander would amend his response, suggesting that he had been indulging in some kind of levity. (That seems to be the favored approach these days of political figures confronted with potentially embarrassing quotations.) There is no reason why the statement should not be taken at face value, however, and no particular reason why any odium should attach to it. By definition, anybody who has tried for the presidency – as Alexander did in the 1996 and 2000 cycles – and failed is settling for less by seeking another public office later on.
A ‘Moderate’’s Re-emergence
What has intrigued some in the current race is the obvious ease with which Alexander has worn his Senate candidate’s mantle – contrasted with the relatively awkward and unconvincing manner of his two presidential races, in which, having compiled a moderate record as the successful two-term governor of Tennessee, he chose to run as a conservative’s conservative – even to the point, in 1996, of advocating the abolition of the Department of Education which he once headed and, in 1999, of denouncing then rival George W. Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” as a case of “weasel words.”
In his primary campaign this year against Bryant, Alexander was compelled once again to stress his conservative credentials, but since then has re-emerged as a reassuringly middle-of-the-road figure – capable, for example, of stretching hands across partisan boundaries to form a “coalition” with Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, a nominal Democrat and former city schools superintendent who professes admiration for Alexander’s educational reforms as governor during the ‘80s.
Meanwhile, those red-meat Republicans who always distrusted Alexander for the very moderation which he practiced as governor, when he had to make common cause with Democrats to get his programs enacted, have apparently been mollified by his stated allegiance in this campaign year to the programs of the Bush administration.
The difference between administrative and legislative functions being what it is, there is relatively little likelihood that a Senator Alexander would run afoul of his party’s conservatives, though he – like Clement – has shown signs of wanting to brake the administration’s headlong rush toward confrontation with Iraq. (While giving lip service to the president’s pronouncements, Alexander has advocated a greater role for Congress and America’s allies in the shaping of a military policy, and he makes a point of saying that his own interest is in domestic policy and in “winning the peace.”)
ClemeNt has proved a doughty campaigner, and his wife, Mary Clement, has won numerous admirers for her strength and sagacity on the campaign trail (though she, like her counterpart Honey Alexander, has been under-employed as a campaign surrogate). He has legitimate policy differences with Alexander – notably on providing prescription-drug insurance for seniors through Medicare and imposing a form of price controls on drugs – but his own history as a sometime fellow traveler with the Bush administration (on the initial Bush tax cuts, for example) makes it difficult for him to draw graphic contrasts.
With a month to go, it would seem to be the mellifluous-voiced Alexander’s race to lose, but the undecideds in an electorate that has seen Republican Van Hilleary close the gap with Democrat Phil Bredesen, the long-term leader in that race, may reserve judgment for a few more weeks yet between candidates Alexander and Clement, both of whom are doggedly working the middle of the road.
The first of five planned debates between the two major-party U.S. Senate candidates is now in the can. After a televised encounter Monday night in Chattanooga, it is clear that Democratic candidate Bob Clement, currently the congressman representing Nashville, has his work cut out for him in hoping to overtake his Republican opponent, former Governor Lamar Alexander.
One of the ironies of Clement’s situation was highlighted by polls taken during the past few weeks and showing his political future ebbing and flowing on wildly fluctuating findings. One day’s survey would show him almost 20 points behind Alexander, another only eight, and the Clement camp’s chief lobbying point was that, as the candidate himself urged on a recent evening in Memphis, “when our name-recognition is the same with a group of voters, we come out even.”
What is astounding about this is that Clement has run for — and held — statewide office before, has been the capital city’s man in Washington for more than a decade, and is the son of one of Tennessee’s most legendary governors in modern times, Frank Clement, a magnetic orator whose keynote speech at the 1956 Democratic Convention mesmerized the nation’s listeners.
The senior Clement was still serving as governor during the late ’60s when an automobile accident terminated his life and career simultaneously. Indeed, it was almost entirely on the basis of the family name that son Bob was able to launch his own political career in the years following his father’s death, winning election as a Public Service Commissioner and mounting a credible challenge for governor.
As the Democratic nominee for the 7th District congressional seat in 1982, he was upset by a Republican who later became governor, Don Sundquist, but his race that year, followed by his subsequent service in the Nashville-based 5th District, should have guaranteed wide name recognition in the state’s two most populous areas.
The fact is that Clement, though arguably in possession of a quite lustrous vita (he also served terms as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as president of Cumberland University), has a persona problem that stems not from any dearth of ability (his gifts are generally recognized) or even from his diminutive stature (he stands at considerably less than six feet) but from the fact that he seems low-profile by nature, almost bashful — an introvert in an extrovert’s profession.
One difference between Clement and Alexander was dramatized during the televised debate Monday night in the periodic cutaway shots of either candidate reacting to what the other was saying. Alexander appeared to have the actor’s gift of knowing when he was on camera; he seemed polite, attentive, shrewd, and skeptical as needed. When he smiled, it was in good-natured acknowledgment of the developing plot line.
Clement, on the other hand, seemed to pout and glower whenever his adversary was making a point that he deemed off the mark or unfair in what it suggested and to purse his lips when he was just listening. At several points, the camera caught him rolling his tongue in the hollow of his right cheek — a maneuver that in close-up looked huge and almost volcanic.
In short, Alexander at all times had his public face on, while Clement’s private self kept wandering into the proceedings like a lost child. It was a situation that could be interpreted to either man’s credit or to either’s blame, but in any age when appearances count for as much as issues, the cosmetic edge clearly belonged to the former governor.
Even the logistics of the TV studio in Chattanooga worked to Clement’s disadvantage: Those who have seen them both in the flesh are aware that Clement is as ruddy of complexion as Alexander is, but the side of the set on which the congressman sat seemed to be bathed in an antiseptically yellow light, while the former governor had the benefit of pinker and more natural-looking hues, a state of affairs that somewhat equaled out on those rare occasions when Clement was able to stand center stage and field a question from a guest in the studio audience.
From time to time, Clement has picked up and hurled at Alexander one of the barbs thrown at the Republican nominee by his erstwhile antagonist in the GOP Senate primary, U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant.
The kiss-and-make-up etiquette of partisan politics requires that intra-party rivals support each other even after the most bitter of primaries, and that between Alexander and Bryant was one such. Speaking at a recent luncheon meeting, the outgoing 7th District congressman dutifully endorsed — and sported the stickers of — both Alexander, whom he so recently was chastising on an almost daily basis, and congressional colleague Van Hilleary, the GOP gubernatorial nominee with whom Bryant played Alphonse-and-Gaston a few seasons back, when both men, equally ambitious, were eyeing both a Senate and a governor’s race for 2002.
Though Bryant was no doubt sincere, the exercise had a bit of a pro forma feel to it, and Clement, perhaps overoptimistically, has frequently made appeals on the stump to the erstwhile Bryant voters, professing to represent their populist interests against the putatively more elitist and establishmentarian Alexander.
In any case, Clement has, as indicated, appropriated some of Bryant’s weaponry, repeating the 7th District congressman’s charges that Alexander was out of step with the Senate, which passed by a 97-0 vote on a corporate-reform measure that Alexander disapproved of, and strongly suggesting, as did Bryant, that the former governor had amassed his fortune by means of sweetheart deals that may have leveraged his governmental connections.
In Monday night’s debate, as previously, Clement made much of a recently renewed $102 million contract between the state and Education Networks of America (ENA), a company on whose board Alexander sits for an annual salary of $60,000. Alexander should give the money back, Clement suggested, “but it hasn’t happened.”
For the record, Alexander has denied anything improper and has noted, as in the televised debate, that Clement, like himself, is a “multimillionaire.” He made an attempt to turn the tables by recalling what he said was Clement’s membership on the board of directors of a bank owned by the Butcher brothers, Jake and C.H., once-prominent Tennessee Democrats whose banks later failed, leading to federal fraud convictions for both men.
An apparently surprised Clement denied any such membership, but the Alexander campaign later e-mailed reporters copies of a photograph from the 1973 annual report of the City and County Bank of Knox County, showing a youthful Bob Clement as one of several “directors.”
Though Clement quibbled about the meaning of the picture — and the nature of his relationship to the bank and to the Butchers, whom he ended up on the wrong side of, politically, losing to Jake Butcher in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1978 — and Alexander has pooh-poohed the nature of his ENA involvement, the fact is that both men have profited from private-sector opportunities their public prominence made easier for them.
There is no great surprise in this — it is one of the unspoken perks of public life, conspicuously so in the careers of most recent American presidents, for example — and there is nothing necessarily improper about it. In any case, the fallout from Monday night may make it more difficult henceforth for Clement to link Alexander with “Enron capitalism” — though the former governor seems to have been measurably more active in the corporate sector than the congressman.
Clement may have more luck with another stratagem inherited from Bryant. In the primary, the GOP congressman made much of a remark made by Alexander early in the year to Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Tom Humphrey, who quoted the two-time presidential aspirant as saying, “I wanted to be president. The Senate will have to do.”
Bryant interpreted the remark as demonstrating the arrogance of a lordly Alexander deigning to go slumming for what he regarded as a consolation prize. This is how Clement would prefer it be seen, as well.
As it happens, Alexander first learned of the possible repercussions of his statement while on a visit to the Flyer office during the primary. Informed of Bryant’s first broadside on the subject, the former governor was clearly taken aback. He had made the statement near the end of a long interview at the close of a long day’s worth of campaigning, he said, and had just let his guard down.
In subsequent interviews, Alexander would amend his response, suggesting that he had been indulging in some kind of levity. (That seems to be the favored approach these days of political figures confronted with potentially embarrassing quotations.) There is no reason why the statement should not be taken at face value, however, and no particular reason why any odium should attach to it. By definition, anybody who has tried for the presidency — as Alexander did in the 1996 and 2000 cycles — and failed is settling for less by seeking another public office later on.
What has intrigued some in the current race is the obvious ease with which Alexander has worn his Senate candidate’s mantle — contrasted with the relatively awkward and unconvincing manner of his two presidential races, in which, having compiled a moderate record as the successful two-term governor of Tennessee, he chose to run as a conservative’s conservative — even to the point, in 1996, of advocating the abolition of the Department of Education he once headed and, in 1999, of denouncing then rival George W. Bush‘s phrase “compassionate conservatism” as a case of “weasel words.”
In his primary campaign this year against Bryant, Alexander was compelled once again to stress his conservative credentials but, since then, has reemerged as a reassuringly middle-of-the-road figure — capable, for example, of stretching hands across partisan boundaries to form a “coalition” with Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, a nominal Democrat and former city schools superintendent who professes admiration for Alexander’s educational reforms as governor during the ’80s. Herenton’s son Rodney, as well as his longtime aide Reginald French, briefly chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Coordinating Committee this year, are members of a newly formed “Shelby County Citizens Coalition” for Alexander.
Meanwhile, those red-meat Republicans who always distrusted Alexander for the very moderation he practiced as governor, when he had to make common cause with Democrats to get his programs enacted, have apparently been mollified by his stated allegiance in this campaign year to the programs of the Bush administration.
The difference between administrative and legislative functions being what it is, there is relatively little likelihood that a Senator Alexander would run afoul of his party’s conservatives, though he — like Clement — has shown signs of wanting to brake the administration’s headlong rush toward confrontation with Iraq. (While giving lip service to the president’s pronouncements, Alexander has advocated a greater role for Congress and America’s allies in the shaping of a military policy, and he makes a point of saying that his own interest is in domestic policy and in “winning the peace.”)
Clement has proved a doughty campaigner, and his wife, Mary Clement, has won numerous admirers for her strength and sagacity on the campaign trail (though she, like her counterpart Honey Alexander, has been underemployed as a campaign surrogate). He has legitimate policy differences with Alexander — notably on providing prescription-drug insurance for seniors through Medicare and imposing a form of price controls on drugs — but his own history as a sometime fellow traveler with the Bush administration (on the initial Bush tax cuts, for example) makes it difficult for him to draw graphic contrasts.
With a month to go, it would seem to be the mellifluous-voiced Alexander’s race to lose, but the undecideds in an electorate that has seen Republican Hilleary close the gap with Democrat Phil Bredesen, the long-term leader in that race, may reserve judgment for a few more weeks yet between candidates Alexander and Clement, both of whom are doggedly working the middle of the road.
CENTER RING
The first of five planned debates between the two major-party U.S. Senate candidates is now in the can, after a televised encounter Monday night in Chattanooga, and it is clear that Democratic candidate Bob Clement, currently the congressman representing Nashville, has his work cut out for him in hoping to overtake his Republican opponent, former governor Lamar Alexander.
One of the ironies of Clement’s situation was highlighted by polls taken during the past few weeks, showing his political future ebbing and flowing on wildly fluctuating findings. One day’s survey would show him almost 20 points behind Alexander, another only eight, and the Clement camp’s chief lobbying point was that, as the candidate himself urged on a recent evening in Memphis, “when our name-recognition is the same with a group of voters, we come out even.”
What is astounding about this is that Clement has run for — and held — statewide office before, has been the capital city’s man in Washington for more than a decade, and is the son of one of Tennessee’s most legendary governors in modern times, Frank Clement, a magnetic orator whose keynote speech at the 1956 Democratic Convention mesmerized the nation’s listeners.
The senior Clement was still serving as governor during the late ‘60s when an automobile accident terminated his life and career simultaneously. Indeed, it was almost entirely on the basis of the family name that son Bob was able to launch his own political career in the years following his father’s death, winning election as a Public Service Commissioner and mounting a credible challenge for governor.
As the Democratic nominee for the 7th District congressional seat in 1982, he was upset by a Republican who later became governor, Don Sundquist, but his race that year, followed by his subsequent service in the Nashville-based 5th District, should have guaranteed wide name recognition in the state’s two most populous areas.
The fact is that Clement, though arguably in possession of a quite lustrous vita (he also served terms as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as president of Cumberland University), has a persona problem that stems not from any dearth of ability (his gifts are generally recognized) nor even from his diminutive stature (he stands at considerably less than six feet) but from the fact that he seems low-profile by nature, almost bashful — an introvert in an extrovert’s profession.
One difference between himself and Alexander was dramatized during the televised debate Monday night in the periodic cutaway shots of either candidate reacting to what the other was saying. Alexander appeared to have the actor’s gift of knowing when he was on camera; he seemed polite, attentive, shrewd, and skeptical as needed. When he smiled, it was in good-natured acknowledgement of the developing plotline.
Clement, on the other hand, seemed to pout and glower whenever his adversary was making a point that he deemed off the mark or unfair in what it suggested, and to purse his lips when he was just listening. At several points the camera caught him rolling his tongue in the hollow of his right cheek — a maneuver that in closeup looked huge and almost volcanic.
In short, Alexander at all times had his public face on, while Clement’s private self kept wandering into the proceedings like a lost child. It was a situation that could be interpreted to either man’s credit or to either’s blame, but in any age when appearances count for as much as issues, the cosmetic edge clearly belonged to the former governor.
Even the logistics of the TV studio in Chattanooga worked to Clement’s disadvantage: Those who have seen them both in the flesh are aware that Clement is as ruddy of complexion as Alexander is, but the side of the set on which the congressman sat seemed to be bathed in an antiseptically yellow light, while the former governor had the benefit of pinker and more natural-looking hues, a state of affairs that somewhat equaled out on those rare occasions when Clement was able to stand center stage and field a question from a guest in the studio audience.
Echoes of the Primary
From time to time, Clement has picked up and hurled at Alexander one of the barbs thrown at the Republican nominee by his erstwhile antagonist in the GOP Senate primary, U.S. Rep. Ed Bryant.
The kiss-and-make-up etiquette of partisan politics requires that intra-party rivals support each other even after the most bitter of primaries, and that between Alexander and Bryant was one such. Speaking at a recent luncheon meeting, the outgoing 7th District congressman dutifully endorsed — and sported the stickers of– both Alexander, whom he so recently was chastising on an almost daily basis, and congressional colleague Van Hilleary, the GOP gubernatorial nominee with whom Bryant played Alphonse-and-Gaston a few seasons back, when both men, equally ambitious, were eyeing both a Senate and a governor’s race for 2002.
Though Bryant was no doubt sincere, the exercise had a bit of a pro forma feel to it, and Clement, perhaps over-optimistically, has frequently made appeals on the stump to the erstwhile Bryant voters, professing to represent their populist interests against the putatively more elitist and establishmentarian Alexander.
In any case, Clement has, as indicated, appropriated some of Bryant’s weaponry, repeating the 7th District congressman’s charges that Alexander was out of step with the Senate, which passed by a 97-0 vote a corporate reform measure that Alexander disapproved of, and strongly suggesting, as did Bryant, that the former governor had amassed his fortune by means of sweetheart deals that may have leveraged his governmental connections.
In Monday night’s debate, as previously, Clement made much of a recently renewed $102 million contract between the state and Education Networks of America (ENA), a company on whose board Alexander sits for an annual salary of $60,000. Alexander should give the money back, Clement suggested, “but it hasn’t happened.”
For the record, Alexander has denied anything improper and has noted, as in the televised debate, that Clement, like himself, is a “multi-millionaire.” He made an attempt to turn the tables by recalling what he said was Clement’s membership in the ‘70s on the board of directors of a bank owned by the Butcher brothers, Jake and C.H., once prominent Tennessee Democrats whose banks later failed, leading to federal fraud convictions for both men.
An apparently surprised Clement denied any such membership, but the Alexander campaign later emailed to reporters copies of a photograph from the 1973 annual report of the City and County Bank of Knox County, showing a youthful Bob Clement as one of several “directors.”
Though Clement quibbled about the meaning of the picture — and the nature of his relationship to the bank and to the Butchers, whom he ended up on the wrong side of, politically, losing to Jake Butcher in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1978 — and Alexander has pooh-poohed the nature of his ENA involvement, the fact is that both men have profited from private-sector opportunities that their public prominence made easier for them.
There is no great surprise in this — it is one of the unspoken perks of public life, conspicuously so in the careers of most recent American presidents, for example — and there is nothing necessarily improper about it. In any case, the fallout from Monday night may make it more difficult henceforth for Clement to link Alexander with “Enron capitalism” — though the former governor seems to have been measurably more active in the corporate sector than the congressman.
Clement may have more luck with another stratagem inherited from Bryant. In the primary the GOP congressman made much of a remark made by Alexander early in the year to Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Tom Humphrey, who quoted the two-time presidential aspirant as saying, “I wanted to be president. The Senate will have to do.”
Bryant interpreted the remark as demonstrating the arrogance of a lordly Alexander deigning to go slumming for what he regarded as a consolation price. This is how Clement would prefer it be seen, as well.
As it happens, Alexander first learned of the possible repercussions of his statement while on a visit to the Flyer office during the primary. Informed of Bryant’s first broadside on the subject, the former governor was clearly taken aback. He had made the statement near the end of a long interview at the close of a long day’s worth of campaigning, he said, and had just let his guard down.
In subsequent interviews, Alexander would amend his response, suggesting that he had been indulging in some kind of levity. (That seems to be the favored approach these days of political figures confronted with potentially embarrassing quotations.) There is no reason why the statement should not be taken at face value, however, and no particular reason why any odium should attach to it. By definition, anybody who has tried for the presidency — as Alexander did in the 1996 and 2000 cycles — and failed is settling for less by seeking another public office later on.
A ÔModerate’’s Re-emergence
What has intrigued some in the current race is the obvious ease with which Alexander has worn his Senate candidate’s mantle — contrasted with the relatively awkward and unconvincing manner of his two presidential races, in which, having compiled a moderate record as the successful two-term governor of Tennessee, he chose to run as a conservative’s conservative — even to the point, in 1996, of advocating the abolition of the Department of Education which he once headed and, in 1999, of denouncing then rival George W. Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” as a case of “weasel words.”
In his primary campaign this year against Bryant, Alexander was compelled once again to stress his conservative credentials, but since then has re-emerged as a reassuringly middle-of-the-road figure — capable, for example, of stretching hands across partisan boundaries to form a “coalition” with Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, a nominal Democrat and former city schools superintendent who professes admiration for Alexander’s educational reforms as governor during the ‘80s.
Meanwhile, those red-meat Republicans who always distrusted Alexander for the very moderation which he practiced as governor, when he had to make common cause with Democrats to get his programs enacted, have apparently been mollified by his stated allegiance in this campaign year to the programs of the Bush administration.
The difference between administrative and legislative functions being what it is, there is relatively little likelihood that a Senator Alexander would run afoul of his party’s conservatives, though he — like Clement — has shown signs of wanting to brake the administration’s headlong rush toward confrontation with Iraq. (While giving lip service to the president’s pronouncements, Alexander has advocated a greater role for Congress and America’s allies in the shaping of a military policy, and he makes a point of saying that his own interest is in domestic policy and in “winning the peace.”)
Clement has proved a doughty campaigner, and his wife, Mary Clement, has won numerous admirers for her strength and sagacity on the campaign trail (though she, like her counterpart Honey Alexander, has been under-employed as a campaign surrogate). He has legitimate policy differences with Alexander — notably on providing prescription-drug insurance for seniors through Medicare and imposing a form of price controls on drugs — but his own history as a sometime fellow traveler with the Bush administration (on the initial Bush tax cuts, for example) makes it difficult for him to draw graphic contrasts.
With a month to go, it would seem to be the mellifluous-voiced Alexander’s race to lose, but the undecideds in an electorate that has seen Republican Van Hilleary close the gap with Democrat Phil Bredesen, the long-term leader in that race, may reserve judgment for a few more weeks yet between candidates Alexander and Clement, both of whom are doggedly working the middle of the road.
ALPHABET SOUP
The alphabet agencies are about to catch a little flak from the City Council.
The spark that set off the council’s fire was the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau’s (CVB) hiring of former Shelby County mayoral aide Tom Jones less than a month after Jones was suspended for using a county credit card for personal items. When Jones was not reappointed by new county mayor A C Wharton, the CVB and its president, Kevin Kane, snapped him up.
Jones will be doing a job in community development that did not previously exist at the CVB. The Commercial Appeal reported that his salary will be approximately $100,000, but Kane said last week it is not that much.
Kane attended Tuesday’s council committee meeting where the issue of “quasi-governmental agencies” was pressed most forcibly by council members TaJuan Stout Mitchell and John Vergos. Kane noted that the CVB wasn’t created by the city or county and gets “not one penny from the general tax fund in 20 years.” It does, however, get a dedicated revenue stream from the so-called bed tax on hotel rooms.
The council committee unanimously approved a resolution requiring the “quasis” to regularly provide information about budgets and expenses. The list of agencies is yet to be compiled but members indicated it will include the CVB, Center City Commission (CCC), Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC), Memphis in May, the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce, and the Orpheum.
Mitchell said she wasn’t singling out the CVB or Jones, but felt the job should have been posted because “there are a lot of folks looking for jobs and people need to know where the opportunities are.” She said she didn’t care if “Donald Trump or Donald Duck” gets the job.
“This is just a request for information,” she said. “It does not imply that someone will lose funds.”
Vergos said some of the agencies are “creating kingdoms” run by a handful of well-connected board members who are hostile to requests for sensitive information but quick to run to the council in time of need.
“They want to all act as if they are independent private corporations,” he said, noting that his father, Rendezvous founder Charlie Vergos, was instrumental in setting up both the CVB and the Memphis Development Foundation which runs the Orpheum.
Turf and jealousy may be factors with the council as well. The alphabet agencies have been grabbing a lot of headlines, and the pay and perks are usually better than they are in government. The City Council gets the heat, a modest salary, some of the bills, and a supporting role. Top executives at the quasis tend to be consumate government insiders or, like Jones, former top-level government employees. In recent years, three city and county division directors have moved over to alphabet agencies Ñ Benny Lendermon and John Conroy at the RDC and Dexter Muller at the chamber of commerce.
Neither Kane nor council members were particularly happy with the term “quasi-governmental agencies.” In addition to being a mouthful, it lumps together agencies like the RDC and CCC that were created by elected public officials and organizations like the CVB and chamber of commerce that get most of their operating support from their members.
The resolution adds to the confusion by making it seem that divisions of city government are the target. It says “each division of the City of Memphis that is either dependent on city funds or the approval of same shall provide the Memphis City Council and the chief administrative officer of the city of Memphis copies of their enabling legislation, annual report, 10K form, and personnel policies and procedures” each year.
A handier and more accurate catch-all phrase is nonprofits, although that has a “food baskets to the needy” connotation that is outdated. All of the groups the council is interested in are nonprofits, and they are already required by the IRS to file and make readily available to the public an annual Form 990 listing their public purpose, top salaries and benefits, budget, income and expenses.
Nonprofit organizations, specially created authorities, and quasi-governmental agencies have virtually taken over much of downtown, including the public parks on the riverfront, AutoZone Park, the new NBA arena, the Orpheum, Memphis in May, and dozens of office buildings and apartments to which the Center City Commission’s Revenue Finance Corporation holds title so they can get tax freezes.
Councilman Jack Sammons pointed out that many nonprofit board members serve for altruistic reasons, bring special skills and fresh ideas to the table, and “would be glad to provide us this information.”
This is not the first time the accountability issue has surfaced. During the NBA arena debate, State Sen. John Ford, a member of the Public Building Authority, argued that the authority and by extension the arena could not exist without the enabling legislation and support of the state legislature. Elected officials have made similar comments about the Center City Commission, with the result that several of them now serve on the board.
Vergos said having a city council representative or other elected official on the board of the quasi-government agencies doesn’t solve the accountability problem if the board is “stagnant” and run by a handful of insiders.
One of local politics’ most eligible (and idiosyncratic) bachelors is single no more. Two weeks ago David Kustoff— he of the 3:30 a.m. early risings and the one-meal-a-day regimen– eloped to Gatlinsburg with the former Roberta Nevil, a lawyer like himself.
After a brief honeymoon in the East Tennessee resort town, Kustoff (the male version) went right back to work as campaign manager for the U.S. Senate campaign of Lamar Alexander (due for a Memphis fundraiser Thursday, with Vice President Dick Cheney as the guest of honor).
A former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party and director of the succeessful Bush presidential effort in Tennessee in 2000, David Kustoff finished second behind Nashville’s Marsha Blackburn in the just-concluded six-candidate Republican primary for Congress in the 7th District.
For some time, the gubernatorial campaign of Republican nominee Van Hilleary was presumed to be on life support. In a way, it still is, but the support is coming from high places now, as the Bush administration itself, buoyed by new polls showing the 4th District congressman within striking distance of Phil Bredesen, is palpably lending its influence.
On Tuesday last week, the president made a visit to Nashville for a big-ticket fund-raiser in GOP senatorial candidate Lamar Alexander‘s honor (followed by a photo-op visit to a Nashville school that literally everybody — Alexander, Hilleary, and Democratic senatorial candidate Bob Clement — got in on).
Clement worked overtime to lobby the media, statewide and national, into reporting that he traveled back to Washington later Tuesday with Bush aboard Air Force One. Even Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bredesen connected to the event in absentia, noting in a press release that the school in question was one of those built on his watch as Nashville’s mayor during most of the ’90s.
But the point of the presidential visit was, of course, to boost the GOP’s statewide candidates, and Hilleary got some special stroking the very next day in Memphis, where a Wednesday-morning fund-raising breakfast brought to the downtown Plaza Club no less an eminence than former President George H.W. Bush, who called himself “41” to distinguish himself from his son and successor by one remove, “43.”
An amiable, ingratiating presence as ever, the senior Bush joked about planning another — and final — parachute jump for his 80th birthday (less than two years off) and charmed the crowd with details of his domestic life — though he inadvertently echoed an embarrassing lapse of 1992, when, during his unsuccessful presidential-reelection campaign, he demonstrated unfamiliarity with a grocery store scanner. In Memphis, he boasted of overseeing the Bush-family TV set but couldn’t remember what to call a remote control, referring to it as “that thing you change the channels with — the push-button.”
Even so, Hilleary was glad for the boost. And the lofty stature of the occasion was lost on neither him nor his wife Meredith Hilleary, a schoolteacher, who had her own moment to remember when, during the automobile ride taking the former president from the airport to the Plaza Club, Bush turned to her and explained that his tie was askew, and, since “Bar” was not around to fix it, would she mind doing the honors? The surprised Meredith complied, adding later, “I couldn’t keep my hand from shaking.”
On Monday of this week, White House political director Ken Mehlman came to Nashville with other administration biggies to oversee a fund-raising dinner for both Hilleary and Alexander. And on Tuesday, Mehlman met with the Capitol Hill press corps at Vanderbilt-Loew’s Plaza and hooked up with various other Tennessee scribes via conference phone. His message: Hilleary’s campaign is a key one on the GOP’s national radar.
As Mehlman spelled that out, the urgency of a Hilleary victory — which everyone acknowledges would have to be of the come-from-behind variety — had to do with support of the president’s program. Hilleary, said Mehlman, was one of the 13 conferees who wrote the president’s vaunted “No Child Left Behind” education bill. The congressman was touted also for his work on welfare and fiscal issues.
Hilleary has “a very impressive record as a reformer,” said Mehlman, who insisted, “This isn’t about the presidential election. It’s not about us. It’s about education reform, about the president having a partner at the state level.”
No one, of course, was totally taken in by that. For a president whose disputed election in 2000 depended on his capture of Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes, being able to rely on the personnel and machinery of a friendly state government here in 2004 is, to say the least, a desideratum — especially since it looks more and more as though President Bush’s Democratic challenger may be his neck-and-neck opponent of two years ago, former Vice President Al Gore.
Gore, who was one of the rare Democratic senators in 1991 to give the senior President Bush full support for his then-pending war on Iraq, surprised many observers on Monday when, instead of offering the current President Bush his unqualified support, essentially called for severe restraints upon the president’s intended actions against Saddam Hussein.
Simultaneously with his aggressive stance toward Bush, Gore has been continuing the “fence-mending” effort in Tennessee he promised after the embarrassing — and crucial — loss in his native state in 2000. Not only have he and wife Tipper Gore purchased a new home in the Nashville area, he continues to teach part-time at Fisk University, and he has made conspicuous and regular appearances elsewhere in Tennessee — including two highly visible ones so far in Memphis during the current campaign year.
From President Bush’s point of view, it has become important that Hilleary hold his end up. Mehlman dismissed out of hand a somewhat obsolete question Tuesday from a Nashville reporter who wondered if the administration had “written off” the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate; Mehlman’s very presence in Nashville belied the premise, of course, as had former President Bush’s journey to Memphis last week.
How well is Hilleary holding up his end? Astonishingly well, considering that, for most of the two years he has in effect been running, he has faced both widespread media ridicule as a lightweight and less than abundant enthusiasm from his own party’s establishment. The 4th District congressman’s estrangement from Governor Don Sundquist is notorious, and though rumors abounded last year that Hilleary had visited the governor in vain search of an endorsement, the congressman has denied them, and he certainly seems to be doing all right without the lame-duck governor’s support.
Indeed, when, during the Republican primary season, Sundquist, burdened among his partymates by his dogged and futile support of a state income tax, let it be known that he favored Hilleary’s opponent, former state Representative Jim Henry, it was Hilleary’s campaign that trumpeted the headline “SUNDQUIST SEEKS THIRD TERM!” in one of its press releases.
And, in talking off the cuff last week about the second of two debates he has had so far with Bredesen, Hilleary made an interesting Freudian slip. “Sundquist didn’t waste any time! He came right out of his corner slugging!” said the GOP hopeful before correcting himself: “Oh, I meant Bredesen did.”
Conventional wisdom has it that Hilleary has held his own in the two debates so far, and there has now arisen between the two gubernatorial campaigns a debate over debates — Bredesen insisting that the two men keep to a schedule proposed quite early, which would include high-profile debates in the state’s major urban centers, and Hilleary countering with a proposal for a multitude of “flatbed” debates out in the state’s more rural locales.
Hilleary, who can adopt a shucksy manner more readily than Bredesen, has won repeated elections in the formerly Democratic-dominated 4th District, which snakes through Tennessee’s boondocks from east to west without encountering a major media market along the way. And the Republican’s TV commercials differ from the more didactic Bredesen’s in stressing his military past (as a Gulf War pilot) and using NASCAR-like images to suggest he would get Tennessee’s slumping economy fired up again.
For whatever reason, a race that conventional wisdom once virtually conceded to Bredesen has become ultra-competitive. A Mason-Dixon poll last week showed Bredesen with only a two-point lead, 44-42, with 14 undecided or leaning to fringe candidates. That wasn’t radically different from Hilleary’s own poll, which has the numbers 39-39, with 23 percent undecided or leaning to independent challengers Ed Sanders and John Jay Hooker (yes, that John Jay Hooker, who, as the Democratic nominee in 1998, ran a single-issue race based on campaign-finance reform and lost badly to Sundquist).
Hilleary is handicapped as a campaigner in that his basic Republican theme of financial retrenchment doesn’t necessarily jibe well with his emphasis on being an “education governor,” but in recent appearances before friendly audiences (like last month’s luncheon of the Shelby County Republican Women), he has summoned a good deal of passionate and sincere-sounding outrage about the low status of Tennessee education.
For all the closeness of the polls just now, Bredesen is still favored. He has put away the curiously on-again, off-again emotional manner of his losing 1994 campaign against Sundquist and has become a dependably benign and attentive figure on the stump. Moreover, his achievements as mayor of Nashville — the Titans, the Predators, a new library, new schools and parks — reinforce his image as a dependable executive who can, in his phrase, “manage” Tennessee back into solvency.
But Hilleary, having shown himself to be something other than a doofus, is a clear winner in the expectations game. And, though Bredesen matched him point-for-point as an income-tax opponent when that issue was before the legislature, Hilleary has cast doubt on his opponent’s long-term attitude on taxes and may have gained some traction.
* Hilleary isn’t, by the way, the only gainer against the odds board. Democratic senatorial candidate Clement, made to look hopelessly out of it by a recent poll showing him 18 percent behind Alexander, has now climbed to a perch of only eight points back, according to the latest Zogby poll.
The Clement camp cites a poll of its own, which shows that when both senatorial candidates have the same degree of name recognition, they run even. The irony of this one is that the name “Clement,” back in the ’50s/’60s heyday of the Nashville congressman’s father, the late Governor Frank Clement, had no peer as far as name recognition went.
Clement remains optimistic, though his best chances of winning lie in making charges of corporate hanky-panky stick against the amiable and (as of the end of the GOP primary) moderate-seeming Alexander, whose former business arrangements have often been under attack but never so much as to weaken his electoral efforts.
* Former Shelby County Democratic chairman Sidney Chism believes he was mischaracterized by state Representative Kathryn Bowers, who in this space recently charged that Chism has handpicked and backed primary candidates against herself and other Democratic legislators. Bowers sought to expand the county Democratic coordinating committee on the grounds that its membership is remote from voters’ concerns. Chism notes that he received 22,389 votes as a candidate for the state Democratic committee this year, more than the 4,071 votes Bowers got in her successful legislative-district primary race.