Several plots, real or alleged, are afoot in the politics
of Shelby County just now. To take some of these, in no particular order:
1) Ford vs. Ford vs. Whomever: Last week’s filing
deadline for statewide and federal races ended with lawyer Joe Ford Jr.,
son of the county commissioner, as one of several candidates for the Democratic
primary for the 9th District congressional seat being vacated by his
first cousin, current U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr.
Simultaneously, another first cousin, the current
congressman’s brother Jake Ford, filed as an independent.
For the record, Joe Ford Jr. sounded genuinely annoyed at
Jake Ford’s filing, disclaimed any family-wide knowledge of, or participation in
his decision to run, and scoffed at both Jake Ford’s qualifications and his
chances of polling many votes as an independent. . ” I don’t care what his name
is, who his brother is, or who his Dad is,” said Joe Ford, who predicted a
victory in the general election for the winner of the crowded Democratic
primary.
There were others, however, who saw the double-Ford entry
as a ploy to insure that a Ford family member would still be on hand to contest
the issue among black Democratic voters if state Senator Steve Cohen, the
only major white candidate, should emerge as the Democratic nominee.
In the ensuing three-way race, which would presumably
include a white Republican, Cohen’s vote total would be squeezed, allowing a
Jake Ford victory. Or so goes the theory. Meanwhile, various Democrats were
supposedly exhorting Jake Ford – probably in vain — to pull out by this
Thursday’s withdrawal deadline.
2)La Simba Gray et al. vs. Cohen: There was
no doubting that an effort was underway to undermine Cohen’s chances from
another direction. The Rev. LaSimba Gray, a principal organizer of a
multi-candidate forum held on Sunday night at First Baptist Church on Broad St.,
made no bones about it in his introduction of the aspirants:
The forum was “to make some sense of the confusion that is
taking place,” Rev. Gray said. “All that we have fought for all of these
years…we could end up losing it this year.” He went on: “Tonight’s forum is to
see we can come to some sense of for whom we should vote….It may well be that,
for the first time in 32 years, African Americans will be without representation
in the U.S. Congress from West Tennessee.”
That was fairly direct corroboration of Cohen’s something
anxious paraphrase, before the event, of a well-known Cary Simon lyric. “I’ll
bet this song is about me,” the senator said.
In the event, Cohen sang effectively from his own songsheet,
pointing out a series of his votes and legislative proposals over the years that
expressly benefited African Americans, as well as several instances of his
having supported black candidates against white ones in local elections.
“I’ve always represented African Americans,” Cohen said in
a passionate opening statement, which concluded thusly: “I ask you to vote for
the content of my character, and not the color of my skin, and you’ll never ever
regret it!” In answer to several questions and in his closing remarks, Cohen
made similar statements, to general applause.
After the event, several of the other candidates expressed
regrets, both to Cohen and to this reporter, that the racial issue had been
brought up. In defending his approach, Gray acknowledged that Cohen had fairly
represented blacks in the state Senate, but insisted that his preference for an
African-American candidate would be paralleled by Cohen in an election featuring
a Jewish candidate: “If Steve Cohen voted, he’d vote for the Jew.”
Apprised of this, Cohen, who is Jewish, expressed
disappointment at Gray’s interjection of a religious element and pointed out
that he had supported John Kerry, a Catholic, over Joe Lieberman,
a Jew, in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries.
For the record, a poll of attendees at the forum favored
candidates Ed Stanton, Ron Redwing, and Marvell Mitchell.
3)Bailey and Bailey vs. Whomever: Though the
Shelby County Democratic Party was unable, for deadline reasons, to decertify
former longtime Republican activist J.W. Gibson, as a county commission
candidate for District 2, Position 1 on its May 2nd primary ballot,
the party’s steering committee did formally deny Gibson’s status as a “bona
fide” Democrat after a vigorous debate of the party’s executive committee last
week.
A plot within the plot, as it were: Various partisans of
outgoing term-limited commissioner Walter Bailey – notably the
incumbent’s lawyer son Jay Bailey, who spoke vigorously against Gibson at
last week’s meeting – are pushing for a “victory” for Walter Bailey, whose name
remains on the ballot. The theory: if the incumbent finishes ahead, the party
committee will then be able to substitute its own choice, presumably the younger
Bailey.
Offsetting this prospect was a growing support in party of
ranks for a third candidate, Darrick Harris, who acquitted himself well
in a forum for Democratic commission candidates last week. Jested Harris about
the party loyalty issue: “My voting record looks sort of like my fourth-grade
report card: It’s got D’s all over it.”
Mayor Sammons? One of the visitors to the
Election Commission on filing-deadline day last week was city council member
Jack Sammons, who engaged in animated and friendly conversation with another
interloper, local Republican eminence John Ryder. It was Ryder who – on
behalf of former county mayor Jim Rout and the GOP establishment –
recruited John Bobango for a successful 1995 run against then incumbent
Sammons, who had opposed Rout in 1994.
Sammons, Ryder, and Bobango were all best buds by 1999 when
Bobango stepped aside, and Sammons, who later became finance chair for the local
Republican Party, regained his seat.
Now Sammons is eying a further political step. He
acknowledged that he was seriously considering a run for Memphis mayor in 2007 –
thereby becoming the first of several rumored mayoral candidates to make such an
overt declaration.
Another year, another path?: Members of New Path, a
predominantly African-American group which describes itself as “a
non-partisan political action organization dedicated to encouraging young
leaders in Shelby County,” held a press conference at the Tom Lee Memorial on
Riverside Drive Monday to introduce three of the group’s endorsees in this
year’s elections. They were: Mike Rude, a Republican primary candidate
for the Shelby County Commission’s District 1, Position 1 seat; Melvin
Burgess Jr., Democratic primary candidate for the commission’s District 2,
Position 2 seat; and Kevin Gallagher, Democratic primary candidate for Criminal
Court Clerk.
New Path is largely credited for having helped one of its members, Tomeka
Hart, to an upset in her race for the Memphis school board in 2004.
The
Single-Resource Theory: Four members of the ‘Fellows’ program of The
Leadership Academy (formerly; Goals for Memphis) have decided to help Shelby
County voters cut to the chase when confronted with the record number of
candidates running in a gargantuan number of races (pushing 200, depending on
where the voter lives) on the county’s various election ballots this year.
Lesley Beasley, Nicole Hernandez, Jenny Koltnow, and Kerr
Tigrett, hoping to provide a “single source” point of reference have
compiled a ‘Guide to Memphis and Shelby Counted Elected Offices” (www.shelbycountyelectionguide.com
<http://www.shelbycountyelectionguide.com)
with “specific information about city,
county, state, and federal elected offices [including] a job description, length
of term, salary, minimum qualifications, name of current seat holder, election
information, and a related website. ”
Any further questions will have to be answered by the candidates themselves, if
they’ll talk turkey. But this is a start.
Preview of Possible, er, Coming Attraction
“That’s Western
technology, sir. A eugenicist like yourself should be on top of that!” That
was me, talking to James Hart, would-be Republican candidate for
Congress in the 8th District (though the Republican Party itself
has taken steps to strip him of the party label on the ballot).
Having arrived
at the Coletta’s restaurant in Cordova, site of Hart’s “debate” last week with
John Farmer, another Republican primary candidate, I discovered to my
chagrin that my trusty Olympus recorder had slipped out of my jacket pocket
during an impromptu afternoon nap at home. And, though I scribbled notes
furiously during the Hart-Farmer encounter, I make every effort to insure the
verbatim accuracy of all quotes and therefore asked Hart, who had his own
pocket recorder and had further furnished a compliant audience member with a
video-cam, if he would mind downloading a recording from either and sending it
to me from his Paris, Tennessee, address.
That was when
Hart, who claims racial supremacy for Europeans and their descendants and
campaigns on the issue, confessed he had just bought both contraptions and
didn’t know from downloading or anything else technical. And that was when I
made my crack.
“That’s like
when that fellow said ‘Sieg Heil!'” admonished Hart – his reference being to
Farmer’s disgusted retort to one of his more perfervid denunciations of
“inferior” races.
(Two interested
observers, General Sessions Judge Betty Thomas Moore and her husband
Alvin Moore, both African Americans, had discreetly – and
understandably — left the restaurant in the middle of Hart’s impassioned
declaration that blacks possessed “lower I.Q.’s and smaller brains.”)
In any case,
Hart was kind enough to make a tape recording while playing the video and sent
me a copy. The result is pretty muddy, and I’m making my way through it. I’ll
be happy to write a fuller account of proceedings later on if that seems
needful. Or maybe this is ’nuff said.
Meanwhile,
Farmer’s reaction is not unique. I can attest to the fact that virtually every
self-professed conservative I know, conventional or otherwise, has made a
point of communicating to me a disgust with Hart’s out-and-out racist views,
which include his advocacy of “eugenic abortion.”
Indeed, with
Hart in the race, the term “centrist” may need to be re-defined. – J.B.
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