Maybe George Flinn was better off staying away from Saturday’s Dutch Treat Luncheon to concentrate, as he said, on the last day of early voting in his city council runoff contest with Carol Chumney.
And maybe, if he’d been at the luncheon, Flinn could have provided some obstacle to Chumney’s bonding with the attendees — the kind of political conservatives who would normally be counted in the Republican physician/businessman’s camp.
On point Number Two, we’ll never know. On point Number One, we’ll presumably find out next Thursday, when voters in the city’s 5th District will decide the issue between Flinn and State Representative Chumney.
In any case, Chumney had the mike to herself — though both candidates had been invited for what had originally been intended as a debate — and she acquitted herself very well indeed, as two details of her reception would indicate.
First, Stan Pepperhorst, president of the Southeast Shelby Republican Club, a hotbed of Flinn support, made a point of congratulating Chumney after she had spoken and fielded a lengthy list of questions. She had, he said to much concurring applause, succeeded admirably in distinguishing for the audience the separate fields of responsibility for officials of federal, city, county, and state government.
Then Emily Joe Greer, former president of the now-defunct social-conservative lobby, FLAIR, and now a representative of the Religious Roundtagble, introduced herself to Chumney and gave her a friendly hug. If nothing else, that was an acknowledgement of the Democratic state representative’s convincingly agile performance before her largely Republican auditors at The Picadilly Restaurant on Mt. Moriah.
Not that there weren’t attempts to third-degree her on social issues. The first question she got concerned her attitude toward same-sex marriage, and Chumney handled that one by noting that she had voted in Nashville in favor of the legal exclusivity of heterosexual unions. And a late question challenged her on abortion, which the pro-choice state representative deflected by stating that the issue would never come up for a council vote — which it probably won’t, at least in the pure sense — and that she had taken legislative positions which she said were meant to support adoption as an alternative to abortion.
The one question which might have caused some Chumney some grief — one which Flinn could have pinned her down on, had he been there — concerned the timing of her recent resignation from her District 89 seat in the state House of Representatives. She had waited to resign until after making the runoff with Flinn (as the leader in athe original field of five) — late enough to require a special election to fill her seat — but before next Thursday’s runoff election. Had she waited until then, the Republican-dominated Shelby County commission could have named a successor. (As it happens, four Democrats and no Republican ended up filing for her legislative seat)
The issue of Chumney’s resignation came up, but she wasn’t pressed on it and dispensed with it relatively easily, stressing that her action had allowed “the people” to make the ultimate decision about her successor.
In her introductory remarks, Chumney had wasted no time in chastising Flinn for “ducking” Saturday’s and several other proposed recent formats that might have provided one-on-one opportunities for the candidates. She kept her speech brief (something of a departure for her), then asked for questions. She got them. In her responses, Chumney:
A READER’S RESPONSE:
…Let me assure you that Saturday was the turning point in the Flinn campaign and that our candidate spent his time in a much more productive way than did Carol Chumney….
We had the polls to ourselves Saturday. In a runoff election, it is much more important for candidates to be one-on-one with the voters than one-on-one with one another. There were plenty of debates in October.
And, we do not need voters to come to us – we go to them.
I feel very confident that we got 7 out of 10 votes at Berclair, and we changed a few minds right there in the parking lot.
We also called hundreds of people that morning and knocked on their doors and then had the pleasure of greeting them when they drove up to the polling place to vote. Now you tell me whose time was better spent!
A more appropriate title would be “Chumney has crowd to herself while Flinn has voters to himself.” I would choose the latter any day.
R. Kemp Conrad
Shelby County Republican Chairman
