By now, the much-ballyhooed first of two mayoral forums to be conducted by the Daily Memphian has come and gone. The five billed participants at Monday night’s event at the Halloran Centre were Paul Young, Michelle McKissack, J.W. Gibson, Frank Colvett, and Karen Camper.
The fact is, only one of these participants can be ranked among the leaders at this early pre-petition stage of the mayoral race. That would be Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Young, who is indisputably the most successful fundraiser among all the candidates.
Young reported $432,434.97 on hand in his second-quarter financial disclosure, just outdoing Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who reported $400,139.12. Young is also known to have significant support among the city’s business and civic social elite, who make up a large percentage of the donor class.
At this juncture, the main disadvantage facing Young vis-à-vis rival Bonner is a fairly enormous name-recognition gap favoring the sheriff, who has out-polled every other contestant for whatever position in each of the last two Shelby County elections.
Clearly, the need to narrow this gap is one reason, along with his undoubted public-spiritedness, that impels Young to take part, along with other relatively unknown candidates, in every public forum that comes along.
Keeping their distance from such events so far are Bonner and Willie Herenton, the even better-known former longtime mayor. Almost as hesitant to appear at such affairs has been local NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner, who, like the other two, was absent Monday night, as he had been at a recent mayoral forum at First Congregational Church.
Turner, also, can claim a respectable degree of prior name recognition, and he brought into the mayoral race a fairly well-honed constituency among the city’s center to center-left voters.
The relevance of all this to this week’s forum, and to other such opportunities for exposure that may come along before petitions can be drawn on May 22nd, should be obvious. Those who need to enhance their share of public attention are likely to be attendees; those who feel more secure in their familiarity to the electorate may not be.
To be sure, both Bonner and Turner pleaded the fact of previously scheduled fundraising events as reasons for their absence on Monday night. A reliable rule of thumb in politics is that the existence of “prior commitments” can always be adduced to explain nonparticipation in a particular event.
Still, to win, it is necessary to be an active competitor, and Bonner, Herenton, and Turner, who — not coincidentally — topped the results in the only poll that has been made public so far, can be expected to rev things up in fairly short order. Bonner and Turner have been stalled somewhat by their ongoing litigation against a five-year residency requirement posited by the Election Commission.
That matter may be effectively resolved in Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins’ court at a scheduled May 1st hearing.
Herenton, meanwhile, has habitually stonewalled multi-candidate appearances throughout his long public career — out of apparent pride as much as anything else.
None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that other candidates, including the five involved Monday night, can’t break out of the pack. Politics is notoriously unpredictable.
