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TAKEN AT THE FLOOD: SHELBY COUNTY’S NEW WAVE

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, “ said Shakespeare (and surely we can update the Bard by including within his scope today’s Shelby County politicians, regardless of gender), “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…”

Well, there was certainly some right smart surf-riding in Tuesday’s primaries for county wide offices. In fact, if the two remaining election days in Shelby County in August and November measure up to the year’s first one, which saw Democrat A C Wharton and Republican George Flinn nominated for county mayor, the record books may have to be rewritten.

A number of precedents were established Tuesday.

Among them:

  • the closest County Commission race ever run, in which veteran pol Joe Cooper defeated fellow Democrat Guthrie Castle by one vote (count ‘em, er, it, 1). Cooper, who defeated Castle by 1313 to 1312, will square off in the August general election against Republican Bruce Thompson, who defeated GOP mainstay John Ryder, by a shocking two-to-one margin.

    Whichever party wins the pivotal 5th District (East Memphis) seat will control the commission, also by one vote;

  • the most expensive countywide primary race to date, one in which radiologist/broadcast mogul Flinn spent nearly half a million dollars of his own money to overpower State Rep. Larry Scroggs.

    Flinn will try his tested air-war tactics in August against Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton, who kept runnerup State Rep. Carol Chumney under 20 percentage points;

  • the greatest wipeout of incumbents in the history of the Commission, one in which chairman Morris Fair and long-serving member Clair VanderSchaaf both went down — to insurgent Republicans John Willingham and Joyce Avery, respectively — and two other incumbents, Republicans Linda Rendtorff and Tom Moss, survived without much to spare.

    At issue in all four races was the incumbents’ support for public funding of the proposed NBA arena downtown, a final vote on which was scheduled for early Wednesday, in the wake of the election. Another outcome of consequence:

  • Republican Mark Luttrell and Democrat Randy Wade easily won their parties’ nomination for Sheriff to succeed the outgoing A C Gilless. Ranking officer Wade’s three-to-one win was exepcted over the well-credentialed (ex-Marine, Secret Service) if almost apolitical Henry Hooper, but Luttrell coasted much more easily than was generally anticipated against Chief Deputy Don Wright and Commander Bobby Simmons.

    In retropect, the outcome of the Republican sheriff’s primary should have been obvious –though observers of the race fell into the habit of regarding it as a three-way contest and kept up the habit right until the end. Some of the other races — Flinn vs. Scroggs; Thompson vs. Ryder (and third candidate Jerry Cobb); the two commission races in which incumbents were dumped — evolved from their original assumptions in the same way.

    Many of the primary races had a fool-the-eye aspect to them in which the main threads didn’t get tied (or untied) until late. Other scenarios, of course, were obvious from the word Go.

    Cases in Point:

    MAYOR’S RACE (DEMOCRATIC):It’s hard to see how Chumney could have run Wharton close, but the problem was not that she didn’t handle her issues well. She had several, which she was able to express succinctly and sometimes used to keep Wharton off balance during their frequent encounters at candidate forums. She stressed her foursquare support of city-county consolidation versus Wharton’s ambivalent (if erudite) discussions of the issue; her utter spurning of developer support and developer money; a promise to seek a moratrium on property tax increases; and her personal history as a legislative reformer of the daycare industry.

    None of it seemed to matter, least of all to the women whom Chumney counted on as a major source of her support. Though it will be a while before proper soundings can be made about gender voting in Tuesday’s election, it would seem from the results, which saw Chumney come in at only 17 percent of the total, that women probably were as inclined as men were to give their trust to the affable and competent presence known far and wide as A C. (Wharton’s use of his initials in his campaign paraperhanlia was no accident.)

    Chumney repeatedly underscored the fact that Wharton’s political identity, though nominally Democratic, was ambiguous at best. Voters seemed to see his apolitical patina as a plus, not a minus (and may continue to through the general election campaign — a concern, surely, to Flinn as he tries to rally Republican cadres in the wake of a primary battle that, from time to time, took on bitter overtones).

    One reason why Chumney’s focus on perfectly legitimate issues failed to net palpable results was the often overlooked fact that voters tend to choose candidates as much by the cut of their jib as by the heft and purity of their position papers.

    Despite the now fashionable criticism of “horse race coverage” of political races, voters use some such standard themselves in deciding whom to vote for. They know instintctively that the “issues” of a campaign may turn out to have little if any relation to the actual problems of governing and they focus most of their own attention on how the horse bears up under the stress and drama of a race and much less to whatever kind of ideological saddle is along for the ride.

    MAYOR’S RACE (REPUBLICAN): The other side of that coin turned up in the Republican race, however. Flinn’s huge differential in financial resources (one, it should be said, that, in its five-to-one ratio, reflected the disproportion existing between Wharton and Chumney, as well); allowed him to highlight in mailouts and TV commercials a bareboned image of himself as a fiscal conservative interested in education, economic development and public safety while representing Scroggs, generally known as a cautious, even parsimonious legislator, as some kind of Mad Taxer.

    Flinn’s approach even involved the ruse, late in the game, of suggesting that a $1,000 personal contribution to Scrogg’s campaign by Governor Don Sundquist, a longtime friend, meant ipso facto that Scroggs was a co-conspirator with the governor in backing a state income tax that Scroggs has, in fact, made a point of opposing.

    A striking thing about Flinn’s victory is that it was achieved almost entirely by means of paid broadcast media — most of the nearly half million dollars of his own money that went to his election effort was earmarked for that sort of “air war,” and he did almost no public campaigning beyond a headquarters opening and a couple of forums.

    Scroggs, on the other hand, was forced to fight a relentless ground war, pressing the flesh as he could between obligatory trips to Nashville for legislative service and trying to get as much free media as possible to counter Flinn’s charges.

    Though Flinn in post-election interviews characterized his Democratic opponent, Whartion, as “a friend,” and predicted they would campaign against each other in sweet harmony, it would surprise no one if he did not continue with the same kind of air war as before, dropping high-megaton bombs at frequent intervals. Wharton will have much more of a wherewithal to respond, of course, but not even he can match what could turn out to be a personal warchest of two or three million dollars.

    “We weren’t able to counter Flinn’s charges,” was the post-election lament of Scroggs’ media adviser Harlan Judkins, echoing a lament made often during the race by Scroggs himself. Judkins predicted that the decidedly middle-of-the-road Wharton might attract a number of disaffected Republicans in the general election, but this, of course, presumes that the Public Defender’s moderate, unthreatening image withstands the bombardment of the general election campaign and emerges intact.

    Outlook for August: The same demographics which favored Wharton, an African-American with proven crossover potential, would suggest an easy victory, but we have learned too much about the effects of unrestrained big-bucks campaigning in recent years to write off Flinn — who will have the HOP’d statewide-primary bonus vote working for him but who must somehow find a way to reconcile the estranged segment of his would-be constituency.

    COMMISSION RACES (REPUBLICAN): The election results would seem to indicate that there is an aroused electorate in the suburbs, one deeply suspicious of incumbents and of what is imagined to be their free and unilateral use of the taxing power for questionable public purposes. This belief, expressed in some unexpectedly well-produced mailouts by restaurateur Willingham, who in previous losing races, had not used such sophisticated materials, resulted in bad news for District 1, Position 3’s mild-mannered Fair, who campaigned minimally and was a known supporter of the NBA arena and the use of public bonds to finance it. (Both Fair and the other commission casualty, VanderSchaaf, routed in District 4, Positon 1, by the dedicated Avery as much for his freewheeling personal past and for collaborations with the commission’s Democrats as for his arena decisions,voted with the majority to approve the issuance of revenue bonds in a surprisingly anti-climactic morning-after commission meeting, thus completing the final step necessary to begin actual construction of the arena.)

    Willingham’s daughter, Karla Templeton, came close to upsetting commission incumbent Linda Rendtorff, in Distict 1, Position 2, and Tom Moss in District 4, Positon 2 escaped the purge largely through the good fortune that his chief opponent, ex-Lakeland Mayor Jim Bomprezzi, had to deal with a vendetta of his own in the race, from estranged home-town alderman Mark Hartz. Although winner Thompson, a financial planner with good support from key Memphis business executives, had enough pure presence and natural political instinct to win on his own recognizance, so to speak, his victory over Ryder and Cobb owed something, too, to the voter discontent over a burgeoning county debt which Thompson, in his mailouts and TV spots, was able to link, fairly or not, with Ryder, a longtime force in county politics and a veteran assistant county attorney. (Ryder could console himself with a cast of well-wishers at his election-night venue, the home of Jesse and Annabel Woodall, that arguably contained the cream of Shelby County Republican society.)

    The other winner in District 5, Democrat Cooper, was the most atypical of all candidates. While Castle’s campaign availed himself of some astute mailouts and some active phone banks, all targeting key Democratic voters, Cooper almost single-handedly hauled his simple red-lettered yard signs (left over from previous campaigns) all over Shelby county and even on the approaches in from Tunica, Mississippi. As always, Cooper’s signs read, “It’s Time– Now.” Maybe it is time, but, as the redoubtable Ryder found out, Thompson is no slouch. One way or another, however, the 5th District commissioner of the future will probably line up with both Democrats and Republicans, depending on the nature of the vote.

    So will winner David Lillard, who beat David Shirley, Stuart Acree, and Mundy Quinn in Distrixct 4, Positon 3.

    Other winners Tuesday, especially in the predominantly African-American Democratic districts, were decided not so much by policy considerations or by voter reactions to this or that recent development. All the Democratic incumbents were returned, and, in open seats, Joe Ford beat sister Opehlia Ford, as expected, in District 3, Position 3.while Deidre Malone won handily in District 2, Positon 3.

    Outlook for August: Regardless of what happens in the 5th district or of which party numerically controls the commission, it will almost certainly prove harder to get spending measures and bond issues through the body than has proved the case over the last few years.

    SHERIFF’S RACE (REPUBLICAN): Luttrell had sole possession of what might have been the winning issue all by itself — his expertise in incarceration, as director of the county’s Corrections Institute, at a time when both the media and the public imagination had been repeatedly snagged by the county jail, its cost overruns, and the seemingly endless record of court judgments against it .

    On top of that, Luttrell was supported by members of the Republican establishment, notably outgoing Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, and assisted by capable handlers (his say-it-all slogan, “Change for the Better,” was recognizably out of seasoned consultant John Bakke’s bag of tricks). By the end of the race, Luttrell, whose fundraising had trailed the others’ early on, surpassed that of Simmons and was approaching the level of Wright’s, which was up around the $200 thousand level.

    In an election year that, as often as not, treated experience in office as a character flaw instead of as a credential, career Sheriff’s Department employees Wright and Simmons came off as stereotypical Good Ole Boys, while the tall, rawboned Luttrell was not only a new face, he looked more like someone who had walked off a movie lot and not out of one of the Department’s back rooms.

    His media availed itself of that same no-nonsense look-’em-in-the-eye image, while Wright presented himself in a montage of bland family–style tableaus and Simmons tried for an older-fashioned use of actual news clips and vintage photographs to chronicle his own career and, later, the presumed failings of his opponents. One of his latter ads may have done him in — and simultaneously boosted Luttrell. It savaged Wright for purportedly cutting County Commissioner Michael Hooks (who was handily reelected Tuesday) too much slack in the course of the commissioner’s arrest for crack possession two years ago.

    Even some of those closest to Simmons thought the ad made him look like a slasher, especially to those who saw the repentant Hooks as a poster person for rehabilitation. (Ironically, Simmons, wearing a blue blazer and looking relaxed, came off very well in a non-political ad which, appearing in the week before the election, did not present him as a lawman but as a pitchman for Lucky Motor Sports.)

    SHERIFF’S RACE (DEMOCRATIC): Wade’s victory over Hooper, even more lopsided than Luttrell’s over the Republican field, was, on the other hand, a case whereby virtual incumbency (a lifetime’s work in the Department), good political connections (with, for example, the “North Memphis Mafia,” an established group of political figures whose ad hoc leader is Memphis city councilman Rickey Peete) overpowered an opponent almost without real connections or professional backup to match his undeniably impressive resume. Hooper, whose admirable military and law-enforcement background could be learned about only in some homemade-looking leaflets which the candidate generally passed out himself, didn’t have the money to get his message out even if he’d known how. His slogan, “The Candidate of Change,” came off as nondescript — a contrast in every way to the somewhat similar one of Luttrell.

    Outlook for August: Luttrell should be able to profit from the boost given Repuiblican candidates by the simultaneous GOP Senate and 7th District primaries, both hotly contested. He will continue to stress jail improvements and cost control, while Wade will also campaign as a reformer — for streamlined booking procedures and humane treatment of the mentallY ill, among other issues.

    ON THE CLERKS’ FRONT: The Republican incumbents, Trustee Bob Patterson, Circuit Court Clerk Jimmy Moore, Criminal Court Clerk Bill Key, Probate Court Clerk Chris Thomas, County Clerk Jayne Creson, and Register Tom Leatherwood all won easily over minimal or non-existent opposition, as did Juvenile Court Clerk Shep Wilbun, a Democrat.

    Challengers in August will be Democrats E.C.Jones, for Patterson; Del Gill, for Moore; Ralph White, for Key; Steve Stamson, for Wilbun, Sondra Becton, for Thomas; Janis Fullilove, for Creson; and Otis Jackson for Leatherwood.

    Outlook for August: Here at least, there will be little change in the conduct of affairs, and probably little change in the composition of office-holders. It is otherwise ot the commission, where some new and potentially turbulent waters will shortly start to swell and which the new mayor, whoever he be, will be forced to heed and learn to navigate. Meanwhile, the Grizzlies — Jerry west, Pau Gasol, et al. — have safely made the cut. Some key issues of the past are now moot.

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    LAMAR’S TEAM CLAIMS SHELBY LEAD

    The following is the text of a memo from the consultant/polling firm representing senatorial candidate Lamar Alexander, showing the former governor’s purported strength in Shelby County.

    From: Whit Ayres, President

    Ayres, McHenry and Associates, Inc.

    Date: May 8, 2002

    Subject: Highlights of Shelby County Republican Primary Poll for U.S. Senate

    As part of our survey of likely Republican primary voters throughout Tennessee, we over-sampled Republican primary voters in Shelby County to assess support for the candidates for U.S. Senate just in that county. Highlights of the Shelby County survey, with a total of 253 likely Republican primary voters and a margin of error of plus or minus 6.29 percent, are:

  • Even though Shelby County produced almost half of Ed Bryant’s votes in his last congressional election, Governor Alexander leads Bryant in Shelby County on the Senate primary ballot test. Alexander leads Bryant by 45 to 40 percent among likely Shelby County Republican primary voters, with the remainder undecided.

    Alexander’s advantage includes leads among those who say they are absolutely certain to vote and those who consider themselves strong Republicans. Alexander leads Bryant by 44 to 40 percent among likely primary voters who say they are “absolutely certain” to vote, and by 50 to 36 percent among strong Republicans.

  • Alexander has both a higher favorable rating and better name recognition in Shelby County than does Bryant. Alexander’s favorable to unfavorable rating among these Shelby County Republican primary voters is 74 to 15 percent, with 96 percent name recognition. Bryant’s favorable to unfavorable rating is 69 to 4 percent, with 88 percent name recognition.

    Lamar Alexander shows remarkable strength in Ed Bryant’s political base, and he is well positioned to defeat Bryant in Shelby County. Should he do so, it will be very difficult for Bryant to win statewide.

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    LAMAR’S TEAM CLAIMS SHELBY LEAD

    The following is the text of a memo from the consultant/polling firm representing senatorial candidate Lamar Alexander, showing the former governor’s purported strength in Shelby County.

    From: Whit Ayres, President

    Ayres, McHenry and Associates, Inc.

    Date: May 8, 2002

    Subject: Highlights of Shelby County Republican Primary Poll for U.S. Senate

    As part of our survey of likely Republican primary voters throughout Tennessee, we over-sampled Republican primary voters in Shelby County to assess support for the candidates for U.S. Senate just in that county. Highlights of the Shelby County survey, with a total of 253 likely Republican primary voters and a margin of error of plus or minus 6.29 percent, are:

  • Even though Shelby County produced almost half of Ed Bryant’s votes in his last congressional election, Governor Alexander leads Bryant in Shelby County on the Senate primary ballot test. Alexander leads Bryant by 45 to 40 percent among likely Shelby County Republican primary voters, with the remainder undecided.

    Alexander’s advantage includes leads among those who say they are absolutely certain to vote and those who consider themselves strong Republicans. Alexander leads Bryant by 44 to 40 percent among likely primary voters who say they are “absolutely certain” to vote, and by 50 to 36 percent among strong Republicans.

  • Alexander has both a higher favorable rating and better name recognition in Shelby County than does Bryant. Alexander’s favorable to unfavorable rating among these Shelby County Republican primary voters is 74 to 15 percent, with 96 percent name recognition. Bryant’s favorable to unfavorable rating is 69 to 4 percent, with 88 percent name recognition.

    Lamar Alexander shows remarkable strength in Ed Bryant’s political base, and he is well positioned to defeat Bryant in Shelby County. Should he do so, it will be very difficult for Bryant to win statewide.

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    WHARTON, FLINN HEAD TICKETS AFTER TUESDAY’S VOTE

    If the two remaining election days in Shelby County in August and November measure up to the year’s first one, — Tuesday’s party primaries for countywide offices, which saw Democrat A C Wharton and Republican George Flinn nominated for county mayor — the record books may have to be rewritten.

    A number of precedents were established Tuesday. Among them:

  • the closest County Commission race ever run, in which veteran pol Joe Cooper defeated fellow Democrat Guthrie Castle by one vote (count ‘em, er, it, 1). Cooper, who defeated Castle by 1313 to 1312, will square off in the August general election against Republican Bruce Thompson, who defeated GOP mainstay John Ryder, by a shocking two-to-one margin. Whichever party wins the pivotal 5th District (East Memphis) seat will control the commission, also by one vote;

  • the most expensive countywide primary race to date, one in which radiologist/broadcast mogul Flinn spent nearly half a million dollars of his own money to overpower State Rep. Larry Scroggs. Flinn will try his tested air-war tactics in August against Shelby County Public Defender Wharton, who kept runnerup State Rep. Carol Chumney under 20 percentage points;

  • the greatest wipeout of incumbents in the history of the Commission, one in which chairman Morris Fair and longest-serving member Clair VanderSchaaf both went down — to insurgent Republicans John Willingham and Joyce Avery, respectively — and two other incumbents, Republicans Linda Rendtorff and Tom Moss, survived without much to spare. At issue in all four races was the incumbents’ support for public funding of the proposed NBA arena downtown, a final vote on which was scheduled for early Wednesday, in the wake of the election.

    Another outcome of consequence:

  • Republican Mark Luttrell and Democrat Randy Wade easily won their parties’ nomination for Sheriff to succeed the outgoing A C Gilless. Ranking officer Wade’s three-to-one win was exepcted over the well-credentialed (ex-Marine, Secret Service) if almost apolitical Henry Hooper, but Luttrell coasted much more easily than expected against Chief Deputy Don Wright and Commander Bobby Simmons.

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    ELECTION 2002: WHO’S ON FIRST?

    Note: This is an expanded version of the Election Preview in the current print issue of the Flyer. It will be updated, both grapically and textually, up until Election Day.

    The sheriff’s race is unique in that somebody gives every candidate in both major parties a chance to win. Republican Bobby Simmons is counting on allies like city councilmen Jack Sammons and Tom Marshall.

    SHELBY COUNTY MAYOR’S RACE: No getting around it. The favorite, both in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and in the ultimate August showdown, is Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton., a personable, respected longtime public figure who has served in positions of authority on boards and commissions dealing with mental health, education, and criminal justice.

    He is, moreover, an African American at a time when demographics arguably favor blacks in Shelby County voting, but one who is uncommonly unthreatening to whites. Add the fact that he has substantial support, financial and otherwise, across party as well as racial lines.

    Skeptics criticize Wharton’s reticence in this campaign to take specific positions, but his reluctance to spell out a credo or a program goes beyond any penchant for waffling.

    The fact is, he has always maintained a sturdy independence from causes, even when fully saddled up to them in an institutional way

    A case in point was his service as Shelby County chairman of former 4th District congressman Jim Cooper‘s 1994 race for the U.S. Senate. As the race between Cooper, the Democratic nominee and early leader, and Republican nominee Fred Thompson, heated up, Wharton was asked about his candidate on the then widely watched WKNO-TV talk show, Informed Sources.

    With the wry grin that he assumes when he is telling a home truth, Wharton said about his mild-mannered candidate, “He’s not the most exciting fellow.” Observing Cooper in action, he said, was “ kind of like watching a man eat a mashed-potato sandwich.” His fellow panelists guffawed in astonishment. How many votes could that have been worth for good ole Jim? Yet the remark merely articulated what many friends of the relatively bashful Cooper had long believed.

    And there was his summing-up, on another installment of the same program, of the reason for Senator Jim Sasser‘s defeat by Nashville doctor Bill Frist in the 1994 election. “I didn’t see him much in recent years,” Wharton said drily of the influential Sasser, who had been promised the position of Majority Leader if the Democrats held on in the Senate (they — and he — did not). “Oh, I would see his name in the New York Times and read about him in Time, but I never [brief , almost imperceptible pause for effect] got to touch the hem of his garment.”

    Among the qualifications boasted in the Shelby County Public Defender’s campaign literature was his chairmanship of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). True enough, but it omitted reference to a bizarre occasion from several years back when Wharton’s fellow commission members had first elected him chairman, only to see Wharton, who had not been at the meeting, publicly repudiate his election and decline to serve. Not enough available time, he explained plausibly, but it was the independence, even brashness, of his gesture that stood out.

    Wharton has certain things in common with another consensus Democratic favorite, ex-Nashville mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen, whose desertion of a key element of his partymates’ credo — notably, their conviction that a state income tax is called for by the present fiscal crisis — has frustrated many of them and enraged others.

    The main party shibboleth being spurned by Wharton is the belief in city-county consolidation which is taken for granted by many — perhaps most — local Democrats. It is certainly a major article of belief for Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, the man whose reelection campaigns Wharton has served twice as campaign chairman.

    The reality is that the joint “task force” on consolidation which Herenton created and which has just issued its first report — on “single-source” funding for city and county schools — is a procedural cover for the mayor’s unrelenting support of consolidation, a support he has urged unremittingly since his first election as the city’s mayor in 1991.

    For Wharton, however, the task force has been cover of another sort — the excuse, some would maintain, for avoiding having to take a position on the controversial issue. When asked about consolidation, the Public Defender always carefully explains that he “supports,” not it, but the task force study of it. And he goes on to explain that there are several different models of consolidation and enough complexities associated with all of them to merit a good deal of study indeed.

    A C Wharton is a patient and cautious man, one who is not about to be moved until he sees that a goal is attainable and knows precisely how to advance to it.

    In 1995, word was getting out that longtime Memphis congressman/power broker Harold Ford Sr. (the patronymic suffix is something we have learned to add in retrospect) intended to vacate his seat, and to bequeath it, more or less, to his oldest son and namesake, long since celebrated but then an untried 25-year-old law school graduate

    Whether being prescient of just being careful, Wharton declined some persistent entreaties to become an establishment-supported alternative.

    A number of Old School Memphians saw their opportunity to put an end to the Ford dominion, and, at Mayor Herenton’s annual Christmas part at The Peabody, one of them, National Bank of Commerce executive Gus Denton relentlessly hotboxed Wharton to run as a rival candidate Through it all, Wharton kept smiling, but you could almost see the common-sense mantra of No Way running through the mind behind those mild but calculating eyes of his.

    Contrast that with his reaction in July of last year when Bobby Lanier, the right-hand man of county mayor Jim Rout (as of Mayor Bill Morris before him), confided to Wharton that Rout would not be running again. Though for propriety’s sake Wharton let a little time pass before announcing his intentions, he in effect had already made his mind up: He would run.

    It made sense, especially since Wharton’s first round would be fought in the Democratic primary, where two-thirds of the electorate would be black, and where race-consciousness would not be a decisive factor among the rest of the population.

    It was hard to see how Wharton could lose, and the well-credentialed Harold Byrd — former legislator, Bartlett banker, and civic booster nonpareil — found out as much from his pollster in early March, and, after more than a year of intensive preparation and fundraising, had to –painfully, reluctantly, but realistically — fold his hand.

    A C (the unpunctuated initials which were his entire given name and which, instead of his last name, he would run by) had other primary opponents — the black contractor C.J. Cochran, who wore a cowboy hat to forums and proposed some intriguing (if impractical) ideas, like a countywide light rail system; and C.C. Buchanan, an African-American minister who spoke for “the people” and who deprecated both himself (lightly) and (with suspicious regularity) Wharton, whom he denounced as a tool of Republicans and special interests.

    A C’S LAST REMAINING SERIOUS OPPONENT IN DEMOCRATIC RANKS, State Representative Carol Chumney, took up these latter themes systematically and with surprising effectiveness. Especially at candidate forums, where she could sometimes do a virtual one-on-one with Wharton (with an assist from Buchanan), Chumney pumped for her major themes — consolidation, a curb on reckless development, and a two-year freeze on the property tax — and scourged Wharton for his Republican support (generally from moderates like County Commissioner Buck Wellford), for being too partial to the developers, for refusing to commit himself on consolidation, and even for the clients he had taken on in his private law practice, notably the Madisons, proprietors of one of the more troubled day-care operations.

    Chumney does a lunch, campaign-style

    Chumney had made a name for herself as the author of legislation that attempted to reform the day care operations (many of the fly-by-night variety) which had proliferated in the wake of TennCare and state and federal welfare reform measures. It was characteristic of a career which had seen her alternate between poles of outsider and insider She had also served as chairperson of the legislature’s joint special committee on children and, for a spell, had been a ranking member of the state House Democratic leadership.

    She was voted out of her leadership post a couple of sessions back, and the consensus was that she was ultimately not the species of team player that was called for in that role, that — for better or for worse — she had more than her share of personal independence.

    Once she had set her sight on a goal, Chumney seemed driven and highly focused, as even apparently trivial incidents from her career would indicate. A former University of Memphis student body president, who was also editor of the law review at the university’s Law School, Chumney faced down a raft of opponents in 1990 (including then Mayor Dick Hackett‘s main man, Paul Gurley) and won election with relative ease.

    A day or so after her victory, she rewarded herself with an ice cream cone and was concentrating on enjoying it when she took an awkward step off a curb, taking a pratfall and breaking an arm. Her main thought going down — one which contributed to her misfortune — was,I must not drop this cone.

    The same single-mindedness has showed up throughout her subsequent career. In 1994 Chumney lost a devoted ally, Memphis feminist Paula Casey, when she attempted to wrest control from Casey (who had supplied the idea and much of the organizing energy) of a newly created state Suffragist Commission. In the ensuing fight, which ended with a compromise — Casey and an ad hoc legislative ally of Chumney’s, Nashville state Senator Thelma Harper, sharing power — Chumney would alienate her erstwhile friend Casey, who believes to this day she was slandered and who this year emailed her network of allies in the women’s movement messages detailing her determined opposition to Chumney’s candidacy.

    Not that Chumney is an iron-willed curmudgeon. While her determination to stay on message has vexed many an interviewer (especially TV reporters looking for something beyond a canned sound bite), she also owns an infectious giggle and some pop-culture enthusiasms which give her, like Wharton, a rounded personality.

    And, in the judgment of a growing number of observers, the case she has made against Wharton as a codependent of special interests, notably developers, has gathered some resonance.

    WHATEVER THE JUSTICE OF HER CHARGE AGAINST Wharton — who, in this instance, as in others, would prefer to appear the thoughtful surveyor of multiple options — Chumney makes a plausible case that pell-mell development has forced Shelby County government to hasten after it and create the widely dispersed new schools and utility infrastructure that are major factors in the county’s current $1.4 billion-dollar debt.

    An especially complicating factor is the state-mandated formula, based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA), which distributes capital construction funds to city and county in a 3 to 1 ratio which is a hot-button issue for all candidates running this year for commission posts outside the city and which was a target for eradication by Mayor Herenton’s special task force on school funding. (Ironically enough, the ADA formula has, because of the very disproportion which so alarms its critics, resulted in finally getting even some of the more dilapidated city schools air-conditioned and otherwise up to snuff.)

    Opponents of the impact fee on developers which Chumney says she favors (and which Wharton, typically, is reserving judgment on) point out that some 60 percent of new development is outside Shelby County and that such fees might increasingly drive developers into adjoining counties

    Representatives of the very suburbs which were created by developers working overtime during the last couple of decades have now developed their own aversions to more-of-the same. They particularly fear the kind of “cookie-cutter” projects which locate relatively low-income houses in the vicinity of newly established mid- to upper-scale residences

    There are two bottom lines to the suburbanites’ reaction: — anxiety about declining property values, and, in the case of those motivated by “white-flight” considerations, a sense that the troubling diversities of Memphis might be catching up with them.

    Mayoral candidate Larry Scroggs emerged late last year as a consensus candidate for a Republican Party whose better-known public figures (including outgoing incumbent Mayor Jim Rout himself) seemed to doubt the party’s chances in the new demographics of Shelby County.

    District Attorney General Bill Gibbons (who seems legitimately to have not wanted the job) said No, then respected former city councilman John Bobango, then businessman/sports figure Allie Prescott. Along the way, County Trustee Bob Patterson, Probate court clerk Chris Thomas, and various others also demurred.

    A bid for party support had been made by radiologist/radio mogul George Flinn, politically inexperienced but personally ambitious and, after significant success in two widely divergent fields, confident of his ability to handle the job of running Shelby County. But party luminaries kept looking for someone already versed in the arcana of politics and government (or, as Dr. Flinn and various GOP dissidents saw it, someone from the party’s established Good Ole Boy network, who — among other real and imagined sins — had been hand-in-hand with the more rapacious of the developers).

    Though no particular friend of the development community, Scroggs, who had already deliberated on possible races for Congress and the governorship, otherwise fit the bill. Polite, studious, and disciplined, he was a fiscal conservative and reliable party man who could also work amicably with Democrats. (Ironically, Scroggs had seemed most inconvenienced in recent years by a long-term association with Governor Don Sundquist, who had helped him in two bitter primary struggles with Democratic-turned-Republican David Shirley and who for years employed Scroggs’ wife Pat as his field representative in Memphis.)

    Eventually, late last year, Scroggs got the party regulars’ nod, and Flinn was left on the outside, but not for long. After simmering for a while, first filing for the mayor’s race as a Republican, then withdrawing to consider running as an independent, Flinn eventually took the leap and filed a second time in the GOP primary, this time for keeps.

    The two men are more contrasting even than the two main Democrats — the chief difference being that Scroggs is an insider, Flinn an outsider, in both cases for better and for worse. Scroggs knows the ropes; sometimes his display of knowledge is impressive, at other times, he treads on the edge of pedantry. For his part, Flinn often seems confused and uncertain about some of the issues of the mayoral debate, but he makes a plausible case that his background equips him to bring innovative thinking into the task of resolving them.

    While Scroggs more or less has a monopoly on support from other key Republicans (he was unanimously endorsed by his fellow Republicans in the legislature, and he also got the backing of suburban Shelby County’s mayors), Flinn — made wealthy by his ultrasound patents and business success — has a huge advantage in financial resources.

    Former GOP chair Phil Langsdon gave newcomer Flinn a boost as campaign chairman.

    Consequently, the two men have waged the war their means have equipped them for — Flinn spending prodigiously on radio and TV spots (so far focusing on his own positive attributes) and on mailouts (at least one of which nails Scroggs for his purported — and, in some cases, clearly exaggerated –support of various tax measures). Scroggs, hoping to husband his comparatively meager resources for a summer campaign, has responded with press conferences in a frank bid for free media.

    Scroggs counters charges in a Flinn mailout

    At bottom, though, there is not much ideological difference between the two GOP candidates. Both are opposed to consolidation and express doubt that it would actually offer either savings or efficiency to taxpayers. Both are for fiscally strict policies that would assign highest priority to education spending. And both stress the pre-eminent importance of job development.

    Whichever one of them wins the Republican primary may not be the doomed loser that appeared, some months ago, to be the inevitable fate of the GOP standard-bearer. Since then, the likelihood of a disproportionately high Republican turnout for the August general election has been raised by hard-fought contests for the U.S. Senate and the 7th District congressional seat. Democrats have no such races to drive their vote.

    Speaking of turnout, most observers reckon that next week’s will be moderately light — somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 percent of eligible voters. Early voting has gone slightly higher than in the county-primary season of four years ago, according to sources at the Election Commission.

    Beyond the mayoral level, this may be what Democratic activist David Upton calls a “mailout election,” one in which the voting precincts can be carefully targeted. And, indeed, mailboxes are beginning to fill up with flyers.

    AMONG THE STANDOUT RACES:

    County Commission, District 1, Position 2 (Republican): Incumbent Linda Rendtorff faces a challenge from winsome but untested newcomer Karla Templeton, who stresses the tax issue and that of public funding for the proposed NBA arena. (The commission has voted — most recently in a special meeting last week– to hold off final voting on bonds for the arena project until May 8th, the morning after the election). Verdict: Rendtorff should be safe.

    County Commission, District 1, Position 3 (Republican): Current commission chairman Morris Fair faces the same sort of challenge as does Rendtorff, and from Templeton’s father, restaurateur John Willingham, a lynchpin of the internal GOP opposition. Verdict: Fair has better-than-fair prospects.

    County Commission, District 2, Position 3 (Democratic): One of the more deserving political activists around is youngish veteran Deidre Malone, an established public relations adept and activist who bridges several of the local Democratic Party factions. She already looked strong when when appointed incumbent Bridget Chisholm was stillin the field but became the prohibitive favorite when Chisholm dropped out. Opponent Reginal Fentress is fighting a stout and somewhat impressive campaign of his own, but he may end up, like Malone before him, going through several different enactments before his own show gets to center stage. Renita R. Scott-Pickens is also in the race. Verdict: Malone.

    County Commission, District 3 Position 3 (Democratic): In a race which, like the independent candidacy of Isaac Ford for mayor, signifies that the political Fords no longer constitute a monolith, two siblings, former city councilman Joe Ford, the interim appointee, and his sister Ophelia Ford vie for the seat their late brother, Dr. James Ford. formerly held] Verdict: It’s so, Joe.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 1 (Republican): Longterm incumbent Clair VanderSchaaf, pilloried for purported sins that include collaboration with Democrats and wrong votes on taxes and the arena, faces a stout challenge from conservative activist Joyce Avery. Verdict: Who knows?

    County Commission, District 4, Position 2 (Republican): Appointed incumbent Tom Moss, who calls himself a homebuilders and is called a developer by challenger Jim Bomprezzi, is under the same kind of attack as VanderSchaaf, especially as he was the beneficiary of some of the intraparty collaboration, but he has the advantage that former Lakeland mayor Bomprezzi has a nemesis n the field, erstwhile Lakeland alderman Mark Hartz. Newcomer Deandre Forney is impressive, but much too young (and African American) to have a realistic chance. (An ironic feature of Moss’ race: he is guided by the same consultant, Lane Provine, who is also steering the fortunes of nsurgent candidate Avery.) Verdict: Moss may get lucky.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 3 (Republican): David Lillard, the lawyer and election commissioner who was aced out by the aforesaid collaboration, tries again for a seat vacated by Tommy Hart. He faces maverick David Shirley and newcomer Mundy Quinn. Verdict: Lillard’s long party background wins for him.

    County Commission, District 5 (Republican): Lawyer and veteran party activist John Ryder carries into this contest for the seat vacated by Buck Wellford prestige, political IOUs, and recognized ability. He is being given a run, however, by Bruce Thompson, a well-financed, impressive young financial manager. The GOP’s Grand Old Maverick, contractor Jerry Cobb Jerry, is also in the race. Verdict: Ryder, but by not as much as he’d like.

    County Commission, District 5 (Democratic): Zelda Hill is the cipher in this showdown between party regular Guthrie Castle, a two-time loser for Congress, and veteran political figure Joe Cooper, who has lost more often than that but who used to be a County Squire. Verdict: a tossup.

    NON-COMMISSION RACES:

    Probate Court Clerk (Democratic): Vying for the right to challenge GOP incumbent Chris Thomas are Sondra Becton, Boris Combest, Jim Brown, and Cheyenne Johnson. Verdict: hard to figure, but former School Board member Brown may have a slight edge.

    County Clerk: After Republican Jayne Creson‘s job are Janis Fullilove, Jennings Bernard, and Michael Williamson. Verdict: Former media personality Fullilove should win on name-recognition.

    Register (Democratic): A grudge match between 2000 nominee John Freeman and Otis Jackson, whose independent candidacy foiled Freeman’s bid against the GOP’s Tom Leatherwood two years ago. Verdict: Jackson, as an African American, may have a demographic edge over former Ford lieutenant Freeman, who, however, has all the endorsements that count.

    SHERIFF’S RACE:

    (Democratic): Insurance man Henry Hooper, a former Secret Service agent and ex-Marine, has an impressive background but an unimpressive prior record as a candidate. Departmental deputy administrator Randy Wade has better and more long-term connections overall. Verdict: Wade, but things could hinge on who has the best last-minute mailouts.

    (Republican). County corrections commissioner Mark Luttrell has waged an impressive outsider’s race with insiders’ support against Chief deputy Don Wright, who is well-financed and supported but has to carry the baggage of a troubled current administration. The sleeper here is Field Commander Bobby Simmons, whose money and careful cultivation of voters give him a chance to split the difference. Verdict: a three-way, too close to call.

    Democratic sheriff’s candidate Randy Wade (center) chats it up with supporters and fellow candidate Ralph White, second from right, a Criminal Court clerk hopeful.

    Categories
    Politics Politics Beat Blog

    ELECTION 2002: WHO’S ON FIRST?

    Note: This is an expanded version of the Election Preview in the current print issue of the Flyer. It will be updated, both grapically and textually, up until Election Day.

    SHELBY COUNTY MAYOR’S RACE: No getting around it. The favorite, both in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and in the ultimate August showdown, is Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton., a personable, respected longtime public figure who has served in positions of authority on boards and commissions dealing with mental health, education, and criminal justice.

    He is, moreover, an African American at a time when demographics arguably favor blacks in Shelby County voting, but one who is uncommonly unthreatening to whites. Add the fact that he has substantial support, financial and otherwise, across party as well as racial lines.

    Skeptics criticize Wharton’s reticence in this campaign to take specific positions, but his reluctance to spell out a credo or a program goes beyond any penchant for waffling.

    The fact is, he has always maintained a sturdy independence from causes, even when fully saddled up to them in an institutional way

    A case in point was his service as Shelby County chairman of former 4th District congressman Jim Cooper‘s 1994 race for the U.S. Senate. As the race between Cooper, the Democratic nominee and early leader, and Republican nominee Fred Thompson, heated up, Wharton was asked about his candidate on the then widely watched WKNO-TV talk show, Informed Sources.

    With the wry grin that he assumes when he is telling a home truth, Wharton said about his mild-mannered candidate, “He’s not the most exciting fellow.” Observing Cooper in action, he said, was “ kind of like watching a man eat a mashed-potato sandwich.” His fellow panelists guffawed in astonishment. How many votes could that have been worth for good ole Jim? Yet the remark merely articulated what many friends of the relatively bashful Cooper had long believed.

    And there was his summing-up, on another installment of the same program, of the reason for Senator Jim Sasser‘s defeat by Nashville doctor Bill Frist in the 1994 election. “I didn’t see him much in recent years,” Wharton said drily of the influential Sasser, who had been promised the position of Majority Leader if the Democrats held on in the Senate (they — and he — did not). “Oh, I would see his name in the New York Times and read about him in Time, but I never [brief , almost imperceptible pause for effect] got to touch the hem of his garment.”

    Among the qualifications boasted in the Shelby County Public Defender’s campaign literature was his chairmanship of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). True enough, but it omitted reference to a bizarre occasion from several years back when Wharton’s fellow commission members had first elected him chairman, only to see Wharton, who had not been at the meeting, publicly repudiate his election and decline to serve. Not enough available time, he explained plausibly, but it was the independence, even brashness, of his gesture that stood out.

    Wharton has certain things in common with another consensus Democratic favorite, ex-Nashville mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen, whose desertion of a key element of his partymates’ credo — notably, their conviction that a state income tax is called for by the present fiscal crisis — has frustrated many of them and enraged others.

    The main party shibboleth being spurned by Wharton is the belief in city-county consolidation which is taken for granted by many — perhaps most — local Democrats. It is certainly a major article of belief for Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, the man whose reelection campaigns Wharton has served twice as campaign chairman.

    The reality is that the joint “task force” on consolidation which Herenton created and which has just issued its first report — on “single-source” funding for city and county schools — is a procedural cover for the mayor’s unrelenting support of consolidation, a support he has urged unremittingly since his first election as the city’s mayor in 1991.

    For Wharton, however, the task force has been cover of another sort — the excuse, some would maintain, for avoiding having to take a position on the controversial issue. When asked about consolidation, the Public Defender always carefully explains that he “supports,” not it, but the task force study of it. And he goes on to explain that there are several different models of consolidation and enough complexities associated with all of them to merit a good deal of study indeed.

    A C Wharton is a patient and cautious man, one who is not about to be moved until he sees that a goal is attainable and knows precisely how to advance to it.

    In 1995, word was getting out that longtime Memphis congressman/power broker Harold Ford Sr. (the patronymic suffix is something we have learned to add in retrospect) intended to vacate his seat, and to bequeath it, more or less, to his oldest son and namesake, long since celebrated but then an untried 25-year-old law school graduate

    Whether being prescient of just being careful, Wharton declined some persistent entreaties to become an establishment-supported alternative.

    A number of Old School Memphians saw their opportunity to put an end to the Ford dominion, and, at Mayor Herenton’s annual Christmas part at The Peabody, one of them, National Bank of Commerce executive Gus Denton relentlessly hotboxed Wharton to run as a rival candidate Through it all, Wharton kept smiling, but you could almost see the common-sense mantra of No Way running through the mind behind those mild but calculating eyes of his.

    Contrast that with his reaction in July of last year when Bobby Lanier, the right-hand man of county mayor Jim Rout (as of Mayor Bill Morris before him), confided to Wharton that Rout would not be running again. Though for propriety’s sake Wharton let a little time pass before announcing his intentions, he in effect had already made his mind up: He would run.

    It made sense, especially since Wharton’s first round would be fought in the Democratic primary, where two-thirds of the electorate would be black, and where race-consciousness would not be a decisive factor among the rest of the population.

    It was hard to see how Wharton could lose, and the well-credentialed Harold Byrd — former legislator, Bartlett banker, and civic booster nonpareil — found out as much from his pollster in early March, and, after more than a year of intensive preparation and fundraising, had to –painfully, reluctantly, but realistically — fold his hand.

    A C (the unpunctuated initials which were his entire given name and which, instead of his last name, he would run by) had other primary opponents — the black contractor C.J. Cochran, who wore a cowboy hat to forums and proposed some intriguing (if impractical) ideas, like a countywide light rail system; and C.C. Buchanan, an African-American minister who spoke for “the people” and who deprecated both himself (lightly) and (with suspicious regularity) Wharton, whom he denounced as a tool of Republicans and special interests.

    A C’S LAST REMAINING SERIOUS OPPONENT IN DEMOCRATIC RANKS, State Representative Carol Chumney, took up these latter themes systematically and with surprising effectiveness. Especially at candidate forums, where she could sometimes do a virtual one-on-one with Wharton (with an assist from Buchanan), Chumney pumped for her major themes — consolidation, a curb on reckless development, and a two-year freeze on the property tax — and scourged Wharton for his Republican support (generally from moderates like County Commissioner Buck Wellford), for being too partial to the developers, for refusing to commit himself on consolidation, and even for the clients he had taken on in his private law practice, notably the Madisons, proprietors of one of the more troubled day-care operations.

    Chumney does a lunch, campaign-style

    Chumney had made a name for herself as the author of legislation that attempted to reform the day care operations (many of the fly-by-night variety) which had proliferated in the wake of TennCare and state and federal welfare reform measures. It was characteristic of a career which had seen her alternate between poles of outsider and insider She had also served as chairperson of the legislature’s joint special committee on children and, for a spell, had been a ranking member of the state House Democratic leadership.

    She was voted out of her leadership post a couple of sessions back, and the consensus was that she was ultimately not the species of team player that was called for in that role, that — for better or for worse — she had more than her share of personal independence.

    Once she had set her sight on a goal, Chumney seemed driven and highly focused, as even apparently trivial incidents from her career would indicate. A former University of Memphis student body president, who was also editor of the law review at the university’s Law School, Chumney faced down a raft of opponents in 1990 (including then Mayor Dick Hackett‘s main man, Paul Gurley) and won election with relative ease.

    A day or so after her victory, she rewarded herself with an ice cream cone and was concentrating on enjoying it when she took an awkward step off a curb, taking a pratfall and breaking an arm. Her main thought going down — one which contributed to her misfortune — was,I must not drop this cone.

    The same single-mindedness has showed up throughout her subsequent career. In 1994 Chumney lost a devoted ally, Memphis feminist Paula Casey, when she attempted to wrest control from Casey (who had supplied the idea and much of the organizing energy) of a newly created state Suffragist Commission. In the ensuing fight, which ended with a compromise — Casey and an ad hoc legislative ally of Chumney’s, Nashville state Senator Thelma Harper, sharing power — Chumney would alienate her erstwhile friend Casey, who believes to this day she was slandered and who this year emailed her network of allies in the women’s movement messages detailing her determined opposition to Chumney’s candidacy.

    Not that Chumney is an iron-willed curmudgeon. While her determination to stay on message has vexed many an interviewer (especially TV reporters looking for something beyond a canned sound bite), she also owns an infectious giggle and some pop-culture enthusiasms which give her, like Wharton, a rounded personality.

    And, in the judgment of a growing number of observers, the case she has made against Wharton as a codependent of special interests, notably developers, has gathered some resonance.

    WHATEVER THE JUSTICE OF HER CHARGE AGAINST Wharton — who, in this instance, as in others, would prefer to appear the thoughtful surveyor of multiple options — Chumney makes a plausible case that pell-mell development has forced Shelby County government to hasten after it and create the widely dispersed new schools and utility infrastructure that are major factors in the county’s current $1.4 billion-dollar debt.

    An especially complicating factor is the state-mandated formula, based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA), which distributes capital construction funds to city and county in a 3 to 1 ratio which is a hot-button issue for all candidates running this year for commission posts outside the city and which was a target for eradication by Mayor Herenton’s special task force on school funding. (Ironically enough, the ADA formula has, because of the very disproportion which so alarms its critics, resulted in finally getting even some of the more dilapidated city schools air-conditioned and otherwise up to snuff.)

    Opponents of the impact fee on developers which Chumney says she favors (and which Wharton, typically, is reserving judgment on) point out that some 60 percent of new development is outside Shelby County and that such fees might increasingly drive developers into adjoining counties

    Representatives of the very suburbs which were created by developers working overtime during the last couple of decades have now developed their own aversions to more-of-the same. They particularly fear the kind of “cookie-cutter” projects which locate relatively low-income houses in the vicinity of newly established mid- to upper-scale residences

    There are two bottom lines to the suburbanites’ reaction: — anxiety about declining property values, and, in the case of those motivated by “white-flight” considerations, a sense that the troubling diversities of Memphis might be catching up with them.

    Mayoral candidate Larry Scroggs emerged late last year as a consensus candidate for a Republican Party whose better-known public figures (including outgoing incumbent Mayor Jim Rout himself) seemed to doubt the party’s chances in the new demographics of Shelby County.

    District Attorney General Bill Gibbons (who seems legitimately to have not wanted the job) said No, then respected former city councilman John Bobango, then businessman/sports figure Allie Prescott. Along the way, County Trustee Bob Patterson, Probate court clerk Chris Thomas, and various others also demurred.

    A bid for party support had been made by radiologist/radio mogul George Flinn, politically inexperienced but personally ambitious and, after significant success in two widely divergent fields, confident of his ability to handle the job of running Shelby County. But party luminaries kept looking for someone already versed in the arcana of politics and government (or, as Dr. Flinn and various GOP dissidents saw it, someone from the party’s established Good Ole Boy network, who — among other real and imagined sins — had been hand-in-hand with the more rapacious of the developers).

    Though no particular friend of the development community, Scroggs, who had already deliberated on possible races for Congress and the governorship, otherwise fit the bill. Polite, studious, and disciplined, he was a fiscal conservative and reliable party man who could also work amicably with Democrats. (Ironically, Scroggs had seemed most inconvenienced in recent years by a long-term association with Governor Don Sundquist, who had helped him in two bitter primary struggles with Democratic-turned-Republican David Shirley and who for years employed Scroggs’ wife Pat as his field representative in Memphis.)

    Eventually, late last year, Scroggs got the party regulars’ nod, and Flinn was left on the outside, but not for long. After simmering for a while, first filing for the mayor’s race as a Republican, then withdrawing to consider running as an independent, Flinn eventually took the leap and filed a second time in the GOP primary, this time for keeps.

    The two men are more contrasting even than the two main Democrats — the chief difference being that Scroggs is an insider, Flinn an outsider, in both cases for better and for worse. Scroggs knows the ropes; sometimes his display of knowledge is impressive, at other times, he treads on the edge of pedantry. For his part, Flinn often seems confused and uncertain about some of the issues of the mayoral debate, but he makes a plausible case that his background equips him to bring innovative thinking into the task of resolving them.

    While Scroggs more or less has a monopoly on support from other key Republicans (he was unanimously endorsed by his fellow Republicans in the legislature, and he also got the backing of suburban Shelby County’s mayors), Flinn — made wealthy by his ultrasound patents and business success — has a huge advantage in financial resources.

    Consequently, the two men have waged the war their means have equipped them for — Flinn spending prodigiously on radio and TV spots (so far focusing on his own positive attributes) and on mailouts (at least one of which nails Scroggs for his purported — and, in some cases, clearly exaggerated –support of various tax measures). Scroggs, hoping to husband his comparatively meager resources for a summer campaign, has responded with press conferences in a frank bid for free media.

    Scroggs counters charges in a Flinn mailout

    At bottom, though, there is not much ideological difference between the two GOP candidates. Both are opposed to consolidation and express doubt that it would actually offer either savings or efficiency to taxpayers. Both are for fiscally strict policies that would assign highest priority to education spending. And both stress the pre-eminent importance of job development.

    Whichever one of them wins the Republican primary may not be the doomed loser that appeared, some months ago, to be the inevitable fate of the GOP standard-bearer. Since then, the likelihood of a disproportionately high Republican turnout for the August general election has been raised by hard-fought contests for the U.S. Senate and the 7th District congressional seat. Democrats have no such races to drive their vote.

    Speaking of turnout, most observers reckon that next week’s will be moderately light — somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 percent of eligible voters. Early voting has gone slightly higher than in the county-primary season of four years ago, according to sources at the Election Commission.

    Beyond the mayoral level, this may be what Democratic activist David Upton calls a “mailout election,” one in which the voting precincts can be carefully targeted. And, indeed, mailboxes are beginning to fill up with flyers.

    AMONG THE STANDOUT RACES:

    County Commission, District 1, Position 2 (Republican): Incumbent Linda Rendtorff faces a challenge from winsome but untested newcomer Karla Templeton, who stresses the tax issue and that of public funding for the proposed NBA arena. (The commission has voted — most recently in a special meeting last week– to hold off final voting on bonds for the arena project until May 8th, the morning after the election). Verdict: Rendtorff should be safe.

    County Commission, District 1, Position 3 (Republican): Current commission chairman Morris Fair faces the same sort of challenge as does Rendtorff, and from Templeton’s father, restaurateur John Willingham, a lynchpin of the internal GOP opposition. Verdict: Fair has better-than-fair prospects.

    County Commission, District 2, Position 3 (Democratic): One of the more deserving political activists around is youngish veteran Deidre Malone, an established public relations adept and activist who bridges several of the local Democratic Party factions. She already looked strong when when appointed incumbent Bridget Chisholm was stillin the field but became the prohibitive favorite when Chisholm dropped out. Opponent Reginal Fentress is fighting a stout and somewhat impressive campaign of his own, but he may end up, like Malone before him, going through several different enactments before his own show gets to center stage. Renita R. Scott-Pickens is also in the race. Verdict: Malone.

    County Commission, District 3 Position 3 (Democratic): In a race which, like the independent candidacy of Isaac Ford for mayor, signifies that the political Fords no longer constitute a monolith, two siblings, former city councilman Joe Ford, the interim appointee, and his sister Ophelia Ford vie for the seat their late brother, Dr. James Ford. formerly held] Verdict: It’s so, Joe.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 1 (Republican): Longterm incumbent Clair VanderSchaaf, pilloried for purported sins that include collaboration with Democrats and wrong votes on taxes and the arena, faces a stout challenge from conservative activist Joyce Avery. Verdict: Who knows?

    County Commission, District 4, Position 2 (Republican): Appointed incumbent Tom Moss, who calls himself a homebuilders and is called a developer by challenger Jim Bomprezzi, is under the same kind of attack as VanderSchaaf, especially as he was the beneficiary of some of the intraparty collaboration, but he has the advantage that former Lakeland mayor Bomprezzi has a nemesis n the field, erstwhile Lakeland alderman Mark Hartz. Newcomer Deandre Forney is impressive, but much too young (and African American) to have a realistic chance. (An ironic feature of Moss’ race: he is guided by the same consultant, Lane Provine, who is also steering the fortunes of nsurgent candidate Avery.) Verdict: Moss may get lucky.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 3 (Republican): David Lillard, the lawyer and election commissioner who was aced out by the aforesaid collaboration, tries again for a seat vacated by Tommy Hart. He faces maverick David Shirley and newcomer Mundy Quinn. Verdict: Lillard’s long party background wins for him.

    County Commission, District 5 (Republican): Lawyer and veteran party activist John Ryder carries into this contest for the seat vacated by Buck Wellford prestige, political IOUs, and recognized ability. He is being given a run, however, by Bruce Thompson, a well-financed, impressive young financial manager. The GOP’s Grand Old Maverick, contractor Jerry Cobb Jerry, is also in the race. Verdict: Ryder, but by not as much as he’d like.

    County Commission, District 5 (Democratic): Zelda Hill is the cipher in this showdown between party regular Guthrie Castle, a two-time loser for Congress, and veteran political figure Joe Cooper, who has lost more often than that but who used to be a County Squire. Verdict: a tossup.

    NON-COMMISSION RACES:

    Probate Court Clerk (Democratic): Vying for the right to challenge GOP incumbent Chris Thomas are Sondra Becton, Boris Combest, Jim Brown, and Cheyenne Johnson. Verdict: hard to figure, but former School Board member Brown may have a slight edge.

    County Clerk: After Republican Jayne Creson‘s job are Janis Fullilove, Jennings Bernard, and Michael Williamson. Verdict: Former media personality Fullilove should win on name-recognition.

    Register (Democratic): A grudge match between 2000 nominee John Freeman and Otis Jackson, whose independent candidacy foiled Freeman’s bid against the GOP’s Tom Leatherwood two years ago. Verdict: Jackson, as an African American, may have a demographic edge over former Ford lieutenant Freeman, who, however, has all the endorsements that count.

    SHERIFF’S RACE:

    (Democratic): Insurance man Henry Hooper, a former Secret Service agent and ex-Marine, has an impressive background but an unimpressive prior record as a candidate. Departmental deputy administrator Randy Wade has better and more long-term connections overall. Verdict: Wade, but things could hinge on who has the best last-minute mailouts.

    (Republican). County corrections commissioner Mark Luttrell has waged an impressive outsider’s race with insiders’ support against Chief deputy Don Wright, who is well-financed and supported but has to carry the baggage of a troubled current administration. The sleeper here is Field Commander Bobby Simmons, whose money and careful cultivation of voters give him a chance to split the difference. Verdict: a three-way, too close to call.

    Democratic sheriff’s candidate Randy Wade (center) chats it up with supporters and fellow candidate Ralph White, second from right, a Criminal Court clerk hopeful.

    Categories
    Politics Politics Beat Blog

    ELECTION 2002: WHO’S ON FIRST?

    Note: This is an expanded version of the Election Preview in the current print issue of the Flyer. It will be updated, both grapically and textually, up until Election Day.

    SHELBY COUNTY MAYORÕS RACE: No getting around it. The favorite, both in TuesdayÕs Democratic primary and in the ultimate August showdown, is Shelby County Public Defender A C Wharton., a personable, respected longtime public figure who has served in positions of authority on boards and commissions dealing with mental health, education, and criminal justice.

    He is, moreover, an African American at a time when demographics arguably favor blacks in Shelby County voting, but one who is uncommonly unthreatening to whites. Add the fact that he has substantial support, financial and otherwise, across party as well as racial lines.

    Skeptics criticize WhartonÕs reticence in this campaign to take specific positions, but his reluctance to spell out a credo or a program goes beyond any penchant for waffling.

    The fact is, he has always maintained a sturdy independence from causes, even when fully saddled up to them in an institutional way

    A case in point was his service as Shelby County chairman of former 4th District congressman Jim CooperÕs 1994 race for the U.S. Senate. As the race between Cooper, the Democratic nominee and early leader, and Republican nominee Fred Thompson, heated up, Wharton was asked about his candidate on the then widely watched WKNO-TV talk show, Informed Sources.

    With the wry grin that he assumes when he is telling a home truth, Wharton said about his mild-mannered candidate, ÒHeÕs not the most exciting fellow.Ó Observing Cooper in action, he said, was Ò kind of like watching a man eat a mashed-potato sandwich.Ó His fellow panelists guffawed in astonishment. How many votes could that have been worth for good ole Jim? Yet the remark merely articulated what many friends of the relatively bashful Cooper had long believed.

    And there was his summing-up, on another installment of the same program, of the reason for Senator Jim SasserÕs defeat by Nashville doctor Bill Frist in the 1994 election. ÒI didnÕt see him much in recent years,Ó Wharton said drily of the influential Sasser, who had been promised the position of Majority Leader if the Democrats held on in the Senate (they Ð and he Ð did not). ÒOh, I would see his name in the New York Times and read about him in Time, but I never [brief , almost imperceptible pause for effect] got to touch the hem of his garment.Ó

    Among the qualifications boasted in the Shelby County Public DefenderÕs campaign literature was his chairmanship of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). True enough, but it omitted reference to a bizarre occasion from several years back when WhartonÕs fellow commission members had first elected him chairman, only to see Wharton, who had not been at the meeting, publicly repudiate his election and decline to serve. Not enough available time, he explained plausibly, but it was the independence, even brashness, of his gesture that stood out.

    Wharton has certain things in common with another consensus Democratic favorite, ex-Nashville mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen, whose desertion of a key element of his partymatesÕ credo -Ð notably, their conviction that a state income tax is called for by the present fiscal crisis -Ð has frustrated many of them and enraged others.

    The main party shibboleth being spurned by Wharton is the belief in city-county consolidation which is taken for granted by many Ð perhaps most -Ð local Democrats. It is certainly a major article of belief for Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, the man whose reelection campaigns Wharton has served twice as campaign chairman.

    The reality is that the joint Òtask forceÓ on consolidation which Herenton created and which has just issued its first report Ð on “single-source” funding for city and county schools Ð is a procedural cover for the mayorÕs unrelenting support of consolidation, a support he has urged unremittingly since his first election as the cityÕs mayor in 1991.

    For Wharton, however, the task force has been cover of another sort Ð the excuse, some would maintain, for avoiding having to take a position on the controversial issue. When asked about consolidation, the Public Defender always carefully explains that he Òsupports,Ó not it, but the task force study of it. And he goes on to explain that there are several different models of consolidation and enough complexities associated with all of them to merit a good deal of study indeed.

    A C Wharton is a patient and cautious man, one who is not about to be moved until he sees that a goal is attainable and knows precisely how to advance to it.

    In 1995, word was getting out that longtime Memphis congressman/power broker Harold Ford Sr. (the patronymic suffix is something we have learned to add in retrospect) intended to vacate his seat, and to bequeath it, more or less, to his oldest son and namesake, long since celebrated but then an untried 25-year-old law school graduate

    Whether being prescient of just being careful, Wharton declined some persistent entreaties to become an establishment-supported alternative.

    A number of Old School Memphians saw their opportunity to put an end to the Ford dominion, and, at Mayor HerentonÕs annual Christmas part at The Peabody, one of them, National Bank of Commerce executive Gus Denton relentlessly hotboxed Wharton to run as a rival candidate Through it all, Wharton kept smiling, but you could almost see the common-sense mantra of No Way running through the mind behind those mild but calculating eyes of his.

    Contrast that with his reaction in July of last year when Bobby Lanier, the right-hand man of county mayor Jim Rout (as of Mayor Bill Morris before him), confided to Wharton that Rout would not be running again. Though for proprietyÕs sake Wharton let a little time pass before announcing his intentions, he in effect had already made his mind up: He would run.

    It made sense, especially since WhartonÕs first round would be fought in the Democratic primary, where two-thirds of the electorate would be black, and where race-consciousness would not be a decisive factor among the rest of the population.

    It was hard to see how Wharton could lose, and the well-credentialed Harold Byrd Ð former legislator, Bartlett banker, and civic booster nonpareil Ð found out as much from his pollster in early March, and, after more than a year of intensive preparation and fundraising, had to Ðpainfully, reluctantly, but realistically Ð fold his hand.

    A C (the unpunctuated initials which were his entire given name and which, instead of his last name, he would run by) had other primary opponents Ð the black contractor C.J. Cochran, who wore a cowboy hat to forums and proposed some intriguing (if impractical) ideas, like a countywide light rail system; and C.C. Buchanan, an African-American minister who spoke for Òthe peopleÓ and who deprecated both himself (lightly) and (with suspicious regularity) Wharton, whom he denounced as a tool of Republicans and special interests.

    A C’S LAST REMAINING SERIOUS OPPONENT IN DEMOCRATIC RANKS, State Representative Carol Chumney, took up these latter themes systematically and with surprising effectiveness. Especially at candidate forums, where she could sometimes do a virtual one-on-one with Wharton (with an assist from Buchanan), Chumney pumped for her major themes Ð consolidation, a curb on reckless development, and a two-year freeze on the property tax Ð and scourged Wharton for his Republican support (generally from moderates like County Commissioner Buck Wellford), for being too partial to the developers, for refusing to commit himself on consolidation, and even for the clients he had taken on in his private law practice, notably the Madisons, proprietors of one of the more troubled day-care operations.

    Chumney had made a name for herself as the author of legislation that attempted to reform the day care operations (many of the fly-by-night variety) which had proliferated in the wake of TennCare and state and federal welfare reform measures. It was characteristic of a career which had seen her alternate between poles of outsider and insider She had also served as chairperson of the legislatureÕs joint special committee on children and, for a spell, had been a ranking member of the state House Democratic leadership.

    She was voted out of her leadership post a couple of sessions back, and the consensus was that she was ultimately not the species of team player that was called for in that role, that Ð for better or for worse Ð she had more than her share of personal independence.

    Once she had set her sight on a goal, Chumney seemed driven and highly focused, as even apparently trivial incidents from her career would indicate. A former University of Memphis student body president, who was also editor of the law review at the universityÕs Law School, Chumney faced down a raft of opponents in 1990 (including then Mayor Dick HackettÕs main man, Paul Gurley) and won election with relative ease.

    A day or so after her victory, she rewarded herself with an ice cream cone and was concentrating on enjoying it when she took an awkward step off a curb, taking a pratfall and breaking an arm. Her main thought going down Ð one which contributed to her misfortune Ð was,I must not drop this cone.

    The same single-mindedness has showed up throughout her subsequent career. In 1994 Chumney lost a devoted ally, Memphis feminist Paula Casey, when she attempted to wrest control from Casey (who had supplied the idea and much of the organizing energy) of a newly created state Suffragist Commission. In the ensuing fight, which ended with a compromise Ð Casey and an ad hoc legislative ally of ChumneyÕs, Nashville state Senator Thelma Harper, sharing power Ð Chumney would alienate her erstwhile friend Casey, who believes to this day she was slandered and who this year emailed her network of allies in the womenÕs movement messages detailing her determined opposition to ChumneyÕs candidacy.

    Not that Chumney is an iron-willed curmudgeon. While her determination to stay on message has vexed many an interviewer (especially TV reporters looking for something beyond a canned sound bite), she also owns an infectious giggle and some pop-culture enthusiasms which give her, like Wharton, a rounded personality.

    And, in the judgment of a growing number of observers, the case she has made against Wharton as a codependent of special interests, notably developers, has gathered some resonance.

    WHATEVER THE JUSTICE OF HER CHARGE AGAINST Wharton Ð who, in this instance, as in others, would prefer to appear the thoughtful surveyor of multiple options Ð Chumney makes a plausible case that pell-mell development has forced Shelby County government to hasten after it and create the widely dispersed new schools and utility infrastructure that are major factors in the countyÕs current $1.4 billion-dollar debt.

    An especially complicating factor is the state-mandated formula, based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA), which distributes capital construction funds to city and county in a 3 to 1 ratio which is a hot-button issue for all candidates running this year for commission posts outside the city and which was a target for eradication by Mayor HerentonÕs special task force on school funding. (Ironically enough, the ADA formula has, because of the very disproportion which so alarms its critics, resulted in finally getting even some of the more dilapidated city schools air-conditioned and otherwise up to snuff.)

    Opponents of the impact fee on developers which Chumney says she favors (and which Wharton, typically, is reserving judgment on) point out that some 60 percent of new development is outside Shelby County and that such fees might increasingly drive developers into adjoining counties

    Representatives of the very suburbs which were created by developers working overtime during the last couple of decades have now developed their own aversions to more-of-the same. They particularly fear the kind of Òcookie-cutterÓ projects which locate relatively low-income houses in the vicinity of newly established mid- to upper-scale residences

    There are two bottom lines to the suburbanites’ reaction: Ð anxiety about declining property values, and, in the case of those motivated by Òwhite-flightÓ considerations, a sense that the troubling diversities of Memphis might be catching up with them.

    Mayoral candidate Larry Scroggs emerged late last year as a consensus candidate for a Republican Party whose better-known public figures (including outgoing incumbent Mayor Jim Rout himself) seemed to doubt the partyÕs chances in the new demographics of Shelby County.

    District Attorney General Bill Gibbons (who seems legitimately to have not wanted the job) said No, then respected former city councilman John Bobango, then businessman/sports figure Allie Prescott. Along the way, County Trustee Bob Patterson, Probate court clerk Chris Thomas, and various others also demurred.

    A bid for party support had been made by radiologist/radio mogul George Flinn, politically inexperienced but personally ambitious and, after significant success in two widely divergent fields, confident of his ability to handle the job of running Shelby County. But party luminaries kept looking for someone already versed in the arcana of politics and government (or, as Dr. Flinn and various GOP dissidents saw it, someone from the partyÕs established Good Ole Boy network, who Ð among other real and imagined sins Ð had been hand-in-hand with the more rapacious of the developers).

    Though no particular friend of the development community, Scroggs, who had already deliberated on possible races for Congress and the governorship, otherwise fit the bill. Polite, studious, and disciplined, he was a fiscal conservative and reliable party man who could also work amicably with Democrats. (Ironically, Scroggs had seemed most inconvenienced in recent years by a long-term association with Governor Don Sundquist, who had helped him in two bitter primary struggles with Democratic-turned-Republican David Shirley and who for years employed ScroggsÕ wife Pat as his field representative in Memphis.)

    Eventually, late last year, Scroggs got the party regularsÕ nod, and Flinn was left on the outside, but not for long. After simmering for a while, first filing for the mayorÕs race as a Republican, then withdrawing to consider running as an independent, Flinn eventually took the leap and filed a second time in the GOP primary, this time for keeps.

    The two men are more contrasting even than the two main Democrats — the chief difference being that Scroggs is an insider, Flinn an outsider, in both cases for better and for worse. Scroggs knows the ropes; sometimes his display of knowledge is impressive, at other times, he treads on the edge of pedantry. For his part, Flinn often seems confused and uncertain about some of the issues of the mayoral debate, but he makes a plausible case that his background equips him to bring innovative thinking into the task of resolving them.

    While Scroggs more or less has a monopoly on support from other key Republicans (he was unanimously endorsed by his fellow Republicans in the legislature, and he also got the backing of suburban Shelby CountyÕs mayors), Flinn Ð made wealthy by his ultrasound patents and business success Ð has a huge advantage in financial resources.

    Consequently, the two men have waged the war their means have equipped them for Ð Flinn spending prodigiously on radio and TV spots (so far focusing on his own positive attributes) and on mailouts (at least one of which nails Scroggs for his purported Ð and, in some cases, clearly exaggerated Ðsupport of various tax measures). Scroggs, hoping to husband his comparatively meager resources for a summer campaign, has responded with press conferences in a frank bid for free media.

    At bottom, though, there is not much ideological difference between the two GOP candidates. Both are opposed to consolidation and express doubt that it would actually offer either savings or efficiency to taxpayers. Both are for fiscally strict policies that would assign highest priority to education spending. And both stress the pre-eminent importance of job development.

    Whichever one of them wins the Republican primary may not be the doomed loser that appeared, some months ago, to be the inevitable fate of the GOP standard-bearer. Since then, the likelihood of a disproportionately high Republican turnout for the August general election has been raised by hard-fought contests for the U.S. Senate and the 7th District congressional seat. Democrats have no such races to drive their vote.

    Speaking of turnout, most observers reckon that next weekÕs will be moderately light Ð somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 percent of eligible voters. Early voting has gone slightly higher than in the county-primary season of four years ago, according to sources at the Election Commission.

    Beyond the mayoral level, this may be what Democratic activist David Upton calls a Òmailout election,Ó one in which the voting precincts can be carefully targeted. And, indeed, mailboxes are beginning to fill up with flyers.

    AMONG THE STANDOUT RACES:

    County Commission, District 1, Position 2 (Republican): Incumbent Linda Rendtorff faces a challenge from winsome but untested newcomer Karla Templeton, who stresses the tax issue and that of public funding for the proposed NBA arena. (The commission has voted Ð most recently in a special meeting last weekÐ to hold off final voting on bonds for the arena project until May 8th, the morning after the election). Verdict: Rendtorff should be safe.

    County Commission, District 1, Position 3 (Republican): Current commission chairman Morris Fair faces the same sort of challenge as does Rendtorff, and from TempletonÕs father, restaurateur John Willingham, a lynchpin of the internal GOP opposition. Verdict: Fair has better-than-fair prospects.

    County Commission, District 2, Position 3 (Democratic): One of the more deserving political activists around is youngish veteran Deidre Malone, an established public relations adept and activist who bridges several of the local Democratic Party factions. She already looked strong when when appointed incumbent Bridget Chisholm was stillin the field but became the prohibitive favorite when Chisholm dropped out. Opponent Reginal Fentress is fighting a stout and somewhat impressive campaign of his own, but he may end up, like Malone before him, going through several different enactments before his own show gets to center stage. Renita R. Scott-Pickens is also in the race. Verdict: Malone.

    County Commission, District 3 Position 3 (Democratic): In a race which, like the independent candidacy of Isaac Ford for mayor, signifies that the political Fords no longer constitute a monolith, two siblings, former city councilman Joe Ford, the interim appointee, and his sister Ophelia Ford vie for the seat their late brother, Dr. James Ford. formerly held] Verdict: ItÕs so, Joe.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 1 (Republican): Longterm incumbent Clair VanderSchaaf, pilloried for purported sins that include collaboration with Democrats and wrong votes on taxes and the arena, faces a stout challenge from conservative activist Joyce Avery. Verdict: Who knows?

    County Commission, District 4, Position 2 (Republican): Appointed incumbent Tom Moss, who calls himself a homebuilders and is called a developer by challenger Jim Bomprezzi, is under the same kind of attack as VanderSchaaf, especially as he was the beneficiary of some of the intraparty collaboration, but he has the advantage that former Lakeland mayor Bomprezzi has a nemesis n the field, erstwhile Lakeland alderman Mark Hartz. Newcomer Deandre Forney is impressive, but much too young (and African American) to have a realistic chance. (An ironic feature of Moss’ race: he is guided by the same consultant, Lane Provine, who is also steering the fortunes of nsurgent candidate Avery.) Verdict: Moss may get lucky.

    County Commission, District 4, Position 3 (Republican): David Lillard, the lawyer and election commissioner who was aced out by the aforesaid collaboration, tries again for a seat vacated by Tommy Hart. He faces maverick David Shirley and newcomer Mundy Quinn. Verdict: LillardÕs long party background wins for him.

    County Commission, District 5 (Republican): Lawyer and veteran party activist John Ryder carries into this contest for the seat vacated by Buck Wellford prestige, political IOUs, and recognized ability. He is being given a run, however, by Bruce Thompson, a well-financed, impressive young financial manager. The GOPÕs Grand Old Maverick, contractor Jerry Cobb Jerry, is also in the race. Verdict: Ryder, but by not as much as heÕd like.

    County Commission, District 5 (Democratic): Zelda Hill is the cipher in this showdown between party regular Guthrie Castle, a two-time loser for Congress, and veteran political figure Joe Cooper, who has lost more often than that but who used to be a County Squire. Verdict: a tossup.

    NON-COMMISSION RACES:

    Probate Court Clerk (Democratic): Vying for the right to challenge GOP incumbent Chris Thomas are Sondra Becton, Boris Combest, Jim Brown, and Cheyenne Johnson. Verdict: hard to figure, but former School Board member Brown may have a slight edge.

    County Clerk: After Republican Jayne CresonÕs job are Janis Fullilove, Jennings Bernard, and Michael Williamson. Verdict: Former media personality Fullilove should win on name-recognition.

    Register (Democratic): A grudge match between 2000 nominee John Freeman and Otis Jackson, whose independent candidacy foiled FreemanÕs bid against the GOPÕs Tom Leatherwood two years ago. Verdict: Jackson, as an African American, may have a demographic edge over former Ford lieutenant Freeman, who, however, has all the endorsements that count.

    SHERIFFÕS RACE:

    (Democratic): Insurance man Henry Hooper, a former Secret Service agent and ex-Marine, has an impressive background but an unimpressive prior record as a candidate. Departmental deputy administrator Randy Wade has better and more long-term connections overall. Verdict: Wade, but things could hinge on who has the best last-minute mailouts.

    (Republican). County corrections commissioner Mark Luttrell has waged an impressive outsiderÕs race with insidersÕ support against Chief deputy Don Wright, who is well-financed and supported but has to carry the baggage of a troubled current administration. The sleeper here is Field Commander Bobby Simmons, whose money and careful cultivation of voters give him a chance to split the difference. Verdict: a three-way, too close to call.

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    Politics Politics Beat Blog

    ‘RISE ABOVE IT,’ BREDESEN SAYS OF ‘REPEAL’ REMARK

    Campaigning Tuesday in Memphis, a frequent stop during his current gubernatorial campaign, former Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen (at left, receiving Ben Hooks‘ endorsement here two weeks ago) gave the city on the Mississippi higher marks for vigor than his own and challenged income-tax adherents in the legislature to “rise above” any resentment they had over his promise last week to try to “repeal” such a tax if enacted.

    Acknowledging after a talk to supporters at Beale Street’s Rum Boogie Café that some such resentment might exist on the part of House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh and other legislative proponents of an income-tax solution, Bredesen said, “They should just rise above it. They’re 132 strong, and I’m just one of 17 — Van Hilleary and I are just two of 17 — candidates for governor. It should just make them more determined to try harder. They should know that candidates are going to say what they’re going to say, and that’s all there is to it.”

    Bredesen, who announced more than a year ago, when he first began campaigning for governor, that he did not advocate a state income tax, has become progressively firmer in his stand against it — as has potential Republican opponent Hilleary. Both said last week that they would seek to repeal such a tax if one got passed into law during the current session. Bredesen made his statement in response to an earlier one by Hilleary.

    Making an effort to account for his ever-hardening position, Bredesen said in Memphis, “I am just determined that Van Hilleary is not going to make the income tax an issue — or the issue — in this campaign.. When prodded, Bredresen reaffirmed his stance in favor of repeal, though he had made no further mention of it since last week. “To tell you the truth, outside of a few people who’ve made their opinions known publicly, no one has asked me about it.”

    During his public remarks earlier at the indoor Beale Street venue (selected as a fallback when a rainout was threatened at nearby W.C. Handy Park), Bredesen had basked in the endorsement of 1994 primary foe Bill Morris and Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who seemed to be apologizing for having supported Republican Don Sundquist, then a Memphian, during Bredesen’s first try for the governorship eight years ago.

    Bredesen had responded with praise for his hosts and for Memphis by saying, “This is a more vigorous city than any other city in the state of Tennessee.”

    During an earlier trip to Memphis, two weekends ago, Bredesen picked up other endorsements, including that of Dr. Ben Hooks, a civil rights pathfinder and former jurist who now serves as president of the National Civil Rights Museum.

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    Politics Politics Beat Blog

    The Air War

    Forrest Shoaf, a Nashville lawyer who is seeking the Republican nomination for Congress in the 7th District (the one Ed Bryant is vacating to run for the U.S. Senate), was in Memphis last week reconnoitering possible support for his race — which pits him against three Shelby Countians (lawyer David Kustoff, state Senator Mark Norris, and Memphis city councilman Brent Taylor) as well as state Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County in his own Middle Tennessee neighborhood.

    Virtually all his opponents are better known than Shoaf, who was serving as GOP gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary‘s legal counsel when he discovered that congressional reapportionment had put him in the 7th District. “When I go out in the morning to get the paper, I’m in the 7th District,” Shoaf noted while here last week. “When I lean over the curb to pick it up, I’m in the 5th.”

    Shoaf and many of his suburban neighbors are Republicans who were dumped into the 7th District on the say-so of 5th District incumbent Bob Clement, with the concurrence of his colleagues in the Tennessee delegation. Clement presumably breathed easier with a greater proportion of Democrats in his already safe Democratic district; for Clement at least, the point is now moot, since the same act which led Bryant to run for the Senate — incumbent Republican Fred Thompson‘s surprise withdrawal from the race two months ago — induced Clement to become a Senate candidate as well.

    Although he is — literally — just within the district line, Shoaf thinks he can win his party’s nomination through what he calls, unabashedly, “the air war.” Shoaf, a West Point graduate and Army veteran, thinks that all his competitors will come down fairly uniformly for the Republican concepts of limited, less costly government. “What will distinguish us is my military background and pro-military outlook,” says the man whose full name is Nathan Bedford Forrest Shoaf III, a family name whose passage from generation to generation signifies the fact that a male ancestor actually rode with the Confederate cavalry leader whose motto was “be the fustest with the mostest.”

    The way in which Shoaf intends to follow Forrest’s motto is to do lots and lots of media advertising. In contemporary political parlance, that is “the air war,” and it is a methodology that has increasingly been relied upon by modern candidates. “Now Marsha will be running mainly a ground war,” said Shoaf of his chief regional competitor. “And so will Brent. Norris and Kustoff will be doing some of both.”

    “Ground war” connotes an intensive form of meet-and-greet politics done at the local voter level, and, while all candidates for office (Shoaf included) must avail themselves of it, the larger the field of action, the less important it is proportionately. Forrest Shoaf’s belief is that an elongated district which stretches from metropolitan Memphis to metropolitan Nashville — two areas intensively served by the electronic media — is made-to-order for air-war candidacies.

    He also thinks that it’s the best way to play catch-up and to acquaint himself with voters who may already know something about other candidates who’ve been in the field longer (as, in fact, all of Shoaf’s GOP rivals have).

    * What is somewhat surprising — but perhaps understandable under the circumstances — is the emergence of a largely air-war candidacy for Shelby County mayor — that of Memphis physician/businessman George Flinn, whose spots began running on the county’s major radio and TV outlets two weeks ago.

    Flinn’s reliance on media is surprising, in that Shelby County is a small-enough area to permit a more variegated election strategy, including door-to-door campaigning, appearances at forums and neighborhood clubs, and phone banks and other GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote) tactics. The radiologist and broadcast magnate has done some of all this as well, of course, but the ratio of his effort leans much more heavily to direct media appeals than most.

    What is understandable and unsurprising about the Flinn air-war strategy is that: 1) as a highly successful practitioner of both his main prior callings, he can afford to splurge on his maiden political effort; and 2), as is the case with Forrest Shoaf, it may be the quickest, most direct way to acquaint himself with the voters of his would-be constituency.

    Flinn’s first spots concentrated on his general biography and local roots (“I went to the same school, Central High, that my father did. … I remember when Walnut Grove ended at East High School”); a second series focused on a highly generalized approach to issues (stressing the candidate’s three themes of public safety, education, and job-creation), and others in the series may branch out further, campaign sources say.

    Meanwhile, Flinn’s main Republican rival, state Representative Larry Scroggs, has been turning up at every available local Republican club and mayoral forum, whenever his legislative service in Nashville has permitted. Assuming a certain degree of name-familiarity, at least with the Republican regulars he assumes will make up the brunt of May 7th primary voters, Scroggs stresses themes relating to his long-term party activity and legislative record — “performance-based budgeting,” a proposal to sunset government programs that cannot pass the muster of periodic review, being typical of the latter.

    For most of the campaign, Scroggs was able to attend more local meetings as such than Flinn, a circumstance which emboldened him to introduce himself at this week’s Memphis Rotary Club forum as “the Republican candidate for mayor,” even though Flinn, who has of late also begun to budget such appearances in his itinerary, sat down the dais from him.

    An unusual feature of Scroggs’ campaign, however, has been the fact that, uniquely among major local candidates for office, he has done without a campaign headquarters as such. (Shelby County mayor Jim Rout was heard to wonder out loud about this circumstance on Monday.) Scroggs explains that as a necessary consequence of husbanding his funds.

    Although legislation was passed this spring allowing members of the General Assembly to raise money locally for local races (a fact which benefits Democratic candidate Carol Chumney as well), Scroggs acknowledges that he operates at a competitive disadvantage against the well-heeled Flinn — the major reason why the legislator called a press conference two weeks ago, on the eve of his opponent’s media blitz, to denounce a practice he described as “trying to buy” an office.

    * Mary Taylor-Shelby, an African-American activist and perennial candidate who has run for many offices and is in the field again this year, as a Republican candidate for mayor, is not considered a realistic prospect to achieve the office. But she achieved a career peak of sorts this past week at a forum sponsored by the women’s group Hadassah at the Jewish Community Center.

    Taylor-Shelby, who in two forums in recent years concluded her appearances with sobbing episodes, conducted herself not only with poise at the JCC forum, she more than held her own rhetorically, and she had the best line of the evening when, in discussing the strain of multiple demands on a severely straitened county budget, she averred, “We can’t afford cake and ice cream, too” — a variation on an old cliché that not only was unexpected but had the virtue of being so simple and evocative that one could only wonder why the phrase was not already a political commonplace.

    * The verbal war between Democratic mayoral candidates AC Wharton and chief challenger Carol Chumney continues unabated — with Wharton, advised almost uniformly by his advisers not to respond, not only replying in kind to Chumney’s barbs but adding some hard thrusts of his own.

    At the Hadassah-sponsored forum, Wharton contrasted his experience with that of what he termed the “boutique” candidate. Since he was the last speaker of the evening, his thrust went, at least temporarily, unanswered. But Chumney was able to avenge herself somewhat the next night, when, at a reception at the Botanic Garden, she acknowledged the “boutique” reference with a smile and used the term “conflict of interest” to describe what she said was Wharton’s over-involvement with developers and (in his role as an attorney) with daycare brokers.

    (She also responded to a Commercial Appeal editorial characterization of her as a “purist” by saying, “Thanks for the compliment.”

    * Shelby County commissioner Marilyn Loeffel, who chairs the commission’s education committee, single-handedly put a temporary roadblock Monday in what was expected to be the commission’s approval of a reapportionment plan for the Shelby County school board.

    Acting on a request by school board member Wyatt Bunker, who, like Loeffel, represents the Cordova area, Loeffel took note of the fact that Bunker had withdrawn his approval of a proposal approved earlier by the entire board and observed that “responsibility for approving” reapportionment rested with the commission, not with the school board, “especially when there is no consensus.” She would define this latter term as meaning unanimity.

    At issue was Bunker’s discovery that the newly drawn lines, approved without demurrer by his six colleagues on the seven-member board, located a fellow social conservative, Leeann McNinch, within the same district as himself, rather than in the adjoining district of board member Joe Clayton, who is thought to be considering retirement. McNinch is the current president of FLARE, a conservative organization formerly headed by Loeffel.

    Both Loeffel and Bunker acknowledged, when asked, that their hopes of giving McNinch an opportunity to join the board played a prominent role in the positions they took at Monday’s commission meeting. Board president David Pickler and member Ron Lollar were on hand, pointing out that the lines of the plan under consideration had been drawn so as to assign each member a major high school and the “feeder” schools for that high school.

    “That’s all right if you can get it,” Bunker said with a shrug about the fact that redrawing the lines to accommodate McNinch might make it impossible to apply the principle. “But it’s not the only thing you need to think about.” Bunker and Loeffel both defended the propriety of redrawing lines to accommodate particular candidates’ future ambitions.

    “They did it for me, and they’ve done it for lots of others,” observed Bunker, who was elected to the board two years ago to succeed his father, long-term member Homer Bunker.

    The commission scheduled a Thursday morning meeting to ascertain whether the school board’s 6-1 approval of the plan proposed Monday could be made a 7-0 vote for a newly configured plan.

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    Politics Politics Beat Blog

    MAYORS BOOST SCROGGS, DUBIOUS ON TASK FORCE

    Lakeland mayor Scott Carmichael, county mayoral candidate LarryScroggs, Bartlett mayor Ken Fulmar, Scroggs aide Eliot Cohen, and Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy met Wednesday morning at Bartlett City Hall.

    The mayors of Shelby County’s municipalities agree on a few matters, it seems. One is the candidacy for Shelby County mayor of Germantown state Representative Larry Scroggs,who is running in the Republican primary.

    Another is that they have increasing doubts about the task-force proposal on single-source funding for city and county schools which was released last week..

    Their views about the latter issue are for the most part shared by Scroggs, who was formally endorsed by five of the mayors at a Wednesday morning press conference at Bartlett City Hall. Endorsements came from Bartlett mayor Ken Fulmar, Lakeland mayor Scott Carmichael, and Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy, all of whom were on hand, as well as from Arlington mayor George HortonLinda Kerley, who were absent.

    (Millington mayor George Harvell,whose wife is a prospective county school-board candidate, is not endorsing a candidate for mayor.)

    What the mayors and Scroggs agreed on Thursday was that initial enthusiasm in the outer county for the task-force proposal should be subjected to serious second thoughts. The mayors on hand had doubts about such matters as a provision in the task-force proposal giving the county commission authority over school bonds. “That in a sense makes the decision unrepresentative of the county school population, since only three commissioners directly represent the area,” Goldsworthy said. She and the others also expressed concern that they were not consulted directly in the formulation of the proposals and that the task-force proposal might shift too much of the schools’ tax burden from business and industry to suburban homeowners.

    The mayors’ endorsement of Scroggs followed by two days an endorsement of the legislator’s mayoral candidacy by the Republican members of the General Assembly.