Tag: Bredesen

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Politics Politics Feature

Last Stop, Memphis!

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

To say it plainly, Monday night of this week was a challenge — for  candidates who wanted one last opportunity to see and be seen; for party operatives determined, by hook or by crook, to expand the next day’s turnout for their charges; for  those undecided voters who realized that their one last fleeting chance to experience specific candidates directly was at hand; for reporters whose wish was to cover the last moves of major candidates before Judgment Day on Tuesday, November 6th, and at the same time, as circumstances allowed, to check out the much-ballyhooed “Transition Report” of County Mayor Lee Harris at the FedEx Event Center (one had to wonder about the Election Eve scheduling for the event, given the competition for attention).

And complicating it all was the monsoon, a huge series of rain showers that lasted through the evening, creating flash floods and traffic jams and direly complicating all those imperative hopes and ambitions mentioned above.

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee (top) and Karl Dean with Memphis supporters on Election Eve

Still and all, it was a major night for Shelby County. It had to mean something that former Governor Phil Bredesen sandwiched in a last visit to Shelby County, at Jim Neely’s Interstate BBQ on South Third, between events in Jackson and his home town of Nashville, site of his onetime mayoralty and his two terms as Tennessee governor.

Unfortunately for those Democrats who wanted to embrace all their heroes at once, their gubernatorial nominee, Karl Dean, who succeeded Bredesen as Nashville mayor, was holding forth under the roof of Hoskins Road Spiritual Kingdom Church, many miles away, accompanied by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen. An advance ad for the event had indicated that Bredesen would be there, too — a physical impossibility and not just because of the torrential downpour.

Not only was Memphis the last stop on Dean’s long and winding trail, he was scheduled also to do a poll visit or two here on Tuesday morning. Clearly, he was a believer in the enduring nature of the Democratic blue wave, which crested here unmistakably in the runup to August 2nd, when Democratic candidates performed a clean sweep in the county general election.

And the deluge of new voter applications since, right up to the registration deadline of October 9th, had given Shelby County Election Commission officials all they could process, and then some. Moreover, even though the great Kavanaugh/Supreme Court flap had allegedly been a spur to Republican enthusiasm as well, there was no doubt that most of the new-voter gain was going to the Democrats’ side of the voter rolls.

Consequently, Dean, abetted by the ever-intensive Cohen and other attendant party stars, managed a plausible optimism in his remarks to the well-wishers who had braved the storm.

Even as Dean intended to spend the night in Memphis, his opponent, Republican nominee Bill Lee, was finishing up a last statewide dash with an address to supporters at Another Broken Egg Cafe at Park Place in East Memphis. Looking around the interior of the place, Lee described it as “packed,” and he wasn’t wrong. He proceeded to deliver a valedictory on his surprisingly successful outlier campaign that sounded simultaneously like a proclamation of victory.

And, given the apparent message of such polls and other samplings that have been taken in the general election campaign, the Franklin businessman may well have been entitled to look and sound as confident about the outcome as he did, and he elaborated once more on his running theme that redoubled efforts to expand the economy and infrastructure of Shelby County would be high on his intended agenda in office and necessary ones for the state itself to prosper.

In any case, there was no doubt that, with both Dean and Lee choosing to end their gubernatorial campaigns here, Memphis bore a prominence in this election and an influence on its results that seemed almost to hearken back to an earlier time, the Crump era, when the city was the undisputed pivot of the state’s political direction.

And, no doubt about it, the next governor of Tennessee was here on Election Eve.

It remained to be seen whether such a statement could be made about the U.S. Senate race. Bredesen certainly made an effort to show his flag, appearing here with some frequency, even before his braving of the deluge Monday night. For whatever reason, Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn, the Congresswoman whose 7th District at one point, before the last redistricting, took in a sizeable hunk of eastern Shelby County, was not so much in evidence locally.

But, during the course of things, she had had two marquee appearances with her party leader, President Donald Trump. One was at a Trump rally in Southaven last month; another was in Chattanooga, in east Tennessee, this past weekend.

• For all the bad weather and the other claims on people’s attention, a generous crowd turned out at the FedEx Event Center at Shelby Farms Monday night for a formal presentation of a report from the transition team of Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris.

The team, which numbered some 40 people, was chaired by former Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins and Paul Morris, president of Jack Morris Auto Glass. Danielle Inez was its executive director.

The transition report covered such areas as education, transportation and community development, criminal justice, health care, economic development, and government structure and metrics.

Coincident with the transition report, Harris and Shelby County Commission Chairman Van Turner recently announced the resolution of a matter that had bitterly divided the previous commission and former Mayor Mark Luttrell. That was the commission’s desire for its own staff attorney to represent its interests vis-à-vis the administration. Harris and Turner agreed on a resolution allowing Turner, as commission chair, to select an assistant county to serve the commission in that regard. That attorney will be Marcy Ingram, a longtime favorite of commission members.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The American Health-Care Nightmare

Last month I got a curious envelope from the health insurance company Humana.
My wife and I are both self-employed freelancers. With no employer group plan to join, we must buy our health insurance on the individual market. 

Every year for the last decade, I have spent hours researching our options, trying to find the best coverage for the best price. Before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare), we were paying ruinously high premiums and receiving only the barest of benefits. Pre-ACA, a single emergency room visit that turned out to be a false alarm ended up costing us more than $5,000. When the ACA took effect in 2014, we were among the first wave of customers to find coverage on the Health Care Marketplace. It was a dramatic improvement over the former, so-called “free market” for health insurance. Our premiums immediately dropped by more than 50 percent, and our coverage improved dramatically. A recent emergency room visit that was not a false alarm cost a little over $800.

But last year, as the Trump regime came into power, our choices on the Health Insurance Marketplace dwindled to one company. Now we were in the same boat with the hundreds of millions of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer: health insurance “choice” in name only. The real decisions are being made by unaccountable bureaucrats your workplace and the monolithic, uncaring health care companies that can endanger a company with a single price quote, and bankrupt families at their whim.
That’s why the envelope from Humana was so curious. Humana had been our health insurance company for two years, but not in 2018. When they announced their pullout from the individual health insurance market in 2017, they claimed they were losing money because by were taking on too many sick people and not enough healthy people to balance out their risk pool.

So, when I opened the envelope, I was shocked to see a check from Humana, along with a letter explaining that it was a rebate required under the ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio provision. That section of the ACA mandates that health insurance companies selling policies on the individual marketplace must spend at least 80 percent of the money that comes in as premiums on actual medical care. The other 20 percent can be used for overhead, paying salaries, and taking profits. The ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio for employer-provided health insurance is only 15 percent, meaning the individual market is, by law, the most profitable segment of health insurance industry.

The letter, which was signed by Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana Insurance Company, informed me that, “In 2017, Humana spent only 78.1 percent of a total of $372,479,024 in premium dollars on health care and activities to improve health care quality.” That means that, after rebating $7,077,191, Humana took home $74,495,804 from Tennessee premium payers in 2017. I don’t have an MBA, but that doesn’t sound like losing money to me. And yet it was not enough to keep Humana in Tennessee. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Broussard personally took home $19 million in salary, bonuses, and stock options in 2016, so you’d think Humana would need that $74 million to keep him in the manner to which he is accustomed. My attempts to get Humana to comment for this piece by calling the number they provided in their letter went comically awry.

In retrospect, Humana’s decision to leave $74 million on the table by withdrawing from a profitable individual health insurance marketplace looks less like a business decision and more like a political decision. When the company announced the decision in February 2017, it had just been denied permission by the Justice Department to merge with Aetna, and the Republican drive to repeal the ACA was in full swing. Humana’s announcement was trumpeted by Trump on Twitter as proof that “Obamacare continues to fail.” Did Broussard decide to see if he could curry favor with the president and get a favorable ruling on future mergers? We’re about to find out: Wal-Mart, which runs thousands of pharmacies across America, is currently in talks to buy Humana, which is valued at $37 billion. If that happens, people like Broussard, who own thousands of shares of Humana stock, will profit handsomely.

Lying and bad faith by a major health insurance corporation is not an aberration. As anyone who has received a baffling “benefit statement” from their insurer already knows, it’s the norm. The deeper lesson here is that health insurance companies simply cannot be trusted. Barack Obama won the presidency with a promise to fix America’s broken health-care industry. The Affordable Care Act was not a socialist government takeover of health care. It is a market-based solution designed by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, and first implemented in Massachusetts under Republican governor (and Obama’s opponent) Mitt Romney.

It was a typically Obama-esque attempt to carve out a compromise with the Republicans, and those same Republicans have spent the last four years throwing that compromise back in our faces. First, they sued to allow states to opt out of the law’s Medicare expansion, which is why tens of thousands of poor Tennesseans find themselves without health care today, and rural hospitals in the state are closing. Then, when they gained control of Congress, they voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare. Once Trump was elected, even though their repeal attempts were thwarted by massive public outcry, they have still attempted to sabotage the ACA by any means means necessary. As I write this, Newsweek has reported that the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate will increase health insurance premiums by 16 percent next year.

It’s clear from their actions that the Republicans and their corporate paymasters will never accept a deal on health care, even one like Obamacare that guarantees them tens of millions of dollars in profits. Nor do they intend to honor any agreements with Democrats. The time for compromise and half measures has long passed. With support for single payer health care currently polling at 52 percent nationally, it’s time for Medicare For All. For-profit, employer-based health insurance is the reason it’s so hard to find a full time job even at a time of low unemployment. It has produced the only nation in the developed world where health care costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy. The United States not only has the highest health care costs in the developed world, but also the worst health outcomes. We’re paying too much for too little.

When you go to the polls next week, remember that Democrats like Congressman Steve Cohen want to fix the system, and gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean has vowed to make expanding Medicare in Tennessee a top priority, while Republicans like Marsha Blackburn only want to see you stay sick, broke, and indentured to your health insurance company. Medicare For All is an idea whose time has come. For the sake of your health and wealth, vote on November 6th.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Hold Your Nose and Vote for Mr. Excitement

Remember that time a blockbuster investigative report showed that the president of the United States had engaged in multi-million-dollar tax frauds throughout his business career? Probably not. It happened last week, while we were all watching the Senate’s Kavanaugh Kabuki Theater production unfold.

For some reason, The New York Times decided it would be the perfect time to publish an exhaustive, 40-page investigative report detailing the Trump family’s finances. The story revealed that Donald Trump (and his siblings) became millionaires as children, thanks to patriarch Fred Trump’s tax-evasion maneuvers. By age 3, the president was earning $200,000 a year. He was a millionaire by age 8. In all, Fred Trump transferred more than $1 billion to his children — and, according to the Times, the family paid around five percent in taxes on that money, thanks to shell companies and other financial machinations.

Phil Bredesen

The Times story completely debunked Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he is a self-made millionaire who took a measly $1 million loan from his father and turned it into a vast real estate empire. (Trump lied. Shocker, I know.) It also laid out a rock-solid case that committing tax fraud was a routine part of the Trump family’s business plan.

At any other time in American history, this story would have created a tidal wave of outrage. It would have consumed the media and our public discourse and put the president in political jeopardy. In 2018, the story barely caused a ripple.

Instead, the media focused on the GOP’s victory in getting Kavanaugh installed on the Supreme Court. Not content to merely celebrate their triumph, Republicans and their media minions took the occasion to lament that, as a result of all those nasty, aggressive women coming forward to recount horror stories of harrassment and sexual assault, it is actually men who are in danger in our society.

“The women are fine,” the president said, as he shot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

We shall see how fine they are in about 30 days, when the November 6th mid-terms occur. Hopefully, voters will let the president and the GOP know how they feel about the absurd “investigation” into allegations about Kavanaugh’s past behavior.

A fact that often gets overlooked is that Republicans aren’t really the “majority” in this country, even though they have managed to take control of all three branches of government. A majority of the country, for example — by a 45 percent to 32 percent margin — believed Christine Blasey Ford over Kavanaugh. The 48 Democratic senators who opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination represent 56 percent of the population, a clear majority. The 50 GOP senators who supported Kavanaugh represent 44 percent.

That’s why the only real change has to come at the ballot box. The system is skewed, both by the ridiculous gerrymandering of House districts nationwide, and by the fact that states like Wyoming — which has a population that’s about half that of Shelby County — have the same number of senators as California, with 40 million residents. The Senate does not accurately represent the electorate. Which is why every Senate race is so important.

Speaking of … in Tennessee, Democratic Senatorial candidate Phil Bredesen enraged many of his supporters last week by stating that he supported Kavanaugh’s nomination. It was a dumb move. The initial polling after Bredesen’s statement showed his opponent, Marsha Blackburn, surging into the lead, as many Democrats renounced their support for their nominee. A common refrain: “I’m not voting for the lesser of two evils.” But that’s exactly what you should do in this case.

There’s a saying that “Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.” I don’t know any Democrats who are in love with Bredesen, a centrist who’s probably to the right of John Kasich. But this is the choice we have: Phil Bredesen versus Marsha Blackburn — a Trump boot-licker and a pawn of Big Pharma, the NRA, and other corporate lobbies. She’s anti-choice and would support Alex Jones for SCOTUS if Trump nominated him.

So, if you’re a progressive, tell me again how not voting in this election because you’re miffed at Bredesen is a smart decision. Progressives don’t have the luxury of sitting this one out because the Democratic candidate is less than perfect. There’s no Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or any other feel-good “make a statement” candidate in the race. The decision is binary, and it’s simple: You can hold your nose and vote for Bredesen, or you can cut it off to spite your face — for six years.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Attack Ads Insult Voters’ Intelligence

One of the object lessons of the late political-primary season was the realization that you can dumb down political messages to the point that even the dimmest of voters is too smart to be hoodwinked.

The perfect example was the GOP gubernatorial primary, when two multi-millionaires, Diane Black and Randy Boyd, decided to blow their own money and that of their deep-pocketed donors on a negative-ad battle in which Black essentially tried to convince the Tennessee electorate that all the state needed was to trust in such national issues as she and Donald Trump favored — you know, like a wall on the Southern U.S. border and tax breaks for the wealthy — and that Boyd was a stinker because he wasn’t properly zealous about such things.

Boyd — who, on his record as a cabinet member in the Haslam adminstration, was actually a moderate, thoughtful social engineer of sorts — countered with ads suggesting that he was as far to the right as Black was and that he worried himself sick about welfare chiselers and sneaky immigrants. And he did, too, favor the wall and had actually gone to the border to pose for pictures there. He insisted that he loved Trump as much as Black did. Back and forth, they went, tearing each other down.

Meanwhile, Bill Lee, an almost overlooked third-place candidate for much of the way, kept gaining, mainly on the basis of a pleasant personality and a reluctance to play the dozens with the other two. He won the primary.

Tennessee is now getting a partial rerun of the embarrassing Black-Boyd antics in the race for the U.S. Senate between Republican Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Phil Bredesen. The mischief here has been pretty much one-sided. Blackburn and the National Republican Senate committee — and whoever else has been thinking this stuff up — have been laboring hard to make Bredesen — a middle-of-the-roader who was so conservative as governor that he made his GOP predecessor Don Sundquist look like a Democrat — appear to be a crazed tax-and-spend liberal.

One Blackburn ad has Trump himself saying such things about Bredesen, who has promised, reasonably enough, to support such actions by the president as might seem good for Tennessee. Another ad states that Bredesen wildly hiked up state taxes (actually, no, he really didn’t) and, worse, enjoyed himself at taxpayers’ expense by gussying up the governor’s mansion, which, as Bredesen notes correctly, he never even lived in as governor.

If Bredesen has wisely chosen, for the most part, not to reciprocate, the Democratic National Committee seems to have fallen into the trap of responding to Blackburn’s bait with its own ad claiming that she’s the one who’s really been fleecing the taxpayers by excessive globe-trotting and constantly gadding about on the public dime.

Stop it, everybody. You’re trivializing the democratic process, turning it into a preposterous flame war. Stick to the issues, please. There are real ones, after all, and, honestly, we can tell the difference between the stuff some of you are doing and shinola.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Tennessee Politics: Restless Bedfellows

Anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to Tennessee state government in recent years has surely noticed that we have what amounts to one-party government. Republicans run the roost, and Democrats are a rump group with minimal numbers and no power.

This state of affairs has existed for less than 10 years. Going into 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s election as president, Tennessee still had a nominally Democratic governor in Phil Bredesen, control of the state House of Representatives, and near-parity in the state Senate, where Republicans had the narrowest possible majority.

The turnover of a handful of seats in 2008 gave the GOP a majority of one in the House. 

It was only in the presidential off-year election of 2010 that the Republicans essentially swept the Democrats in legislative races and took firm control of both houses. That year, the gubernatorial race was basically a three-way affair involving Republicans Bill Haslam, Zach Wamp, and Ron Ramsey, with the general election contest between primary winner Haslam and Democrat Mike McWherter being a no-contest walkover for the GOP.

President Obama was reelected in 2012 with no help from Tennessee, an erstwhile bellwether state which at that point had firmly realigned with the Deep South politically. In the off-year election of 2014, the Republicans won their present super-majority. End of story?

Nope. What has gone on since has been the slow, but now obvious, development of a fissure in state Republican ranks. As it turns out, nature not only abhors a vacuum; failing an iron-handed dictator, it pretty much rejects a monolith, too, and, under easy-going Republican Governor Haslam, the natural yin and yang of things has begun to reassert itself.

Among state Republicans, this fragmentation first became noticeable in several of the legislative fights over gun bills — particularly those imposing official toleration of concealed weapons on or around business property. Those battles pitted Republican legislators loyal to (or indebted to) established corporate interests against Tea Party insurgents who were susceptible to the blandishments (or threats) of the faux-populist NRA.

The estimable journalistic-workhorse-turned-occasional-columnist Tom Humphrey did an insightful take this past weekend about a legislative Republican split over two matters — one, the so-called “bathroom bill” that would force transgendered persons to use only the public lavatory facilities of their birth gender; the other, a bill enshrining the Holy Bible as the official state book. Leaving aside the very real civil-liberties and First Amendment aspects inherent in both bills, the aforementioned corporate interests opposed them both because they were, in simplest terms, bad for business.

The Republican Party’s right-wing populists, on the other hand, favored the two bills as emblematic of their “values” issues, in defense of which they had drifted away from what they saw as an over-secularized, over-diverse Democratic Party.

This time, there was no powerful lobby like the NRA intervening, and business (aided by the Democratic minority) won, forcing the eventual scuttling of both bills. But there will be other such battles on the state front — each corresponding in rough (if inexact) ways to the current national schism between Trump supporters and the GOP establishment.

If all this bodes ill for the future unity of the Republican Party, the Democrats have their own fissures to worry about. The presidential-primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has outlined an ongoing struggle within the Democratic Party as well — one similar in some ways to that afflicting the Republicans.

Sanders is clearly on to something with his unflagging emphasis on the core issue of economic inequality. He’s the one attracting the multitudes, building out from that central issue, while Clinton’s political base is more a matter of putting together a collection of special interests, patchwork-style, working from the outside in.  

Many of these she shares with Sanders — blacks, gays, women, civil libertarians, low-income voters, et al. — but one of them is hers alone: big money. She is still the likely primary winner, but her ties to the financial establishment leave her dependent on the amorphous appeal of “diversity” instead of the central one of reform.

If not this year, down the line, the Democrats in Tennessee as elsewhere will have to have their own internal reckoning.

Senior editor Jackson Baker is the Flyer‘s political columnist.

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Opinion

Leaving Memphis Before Easter? Not So Fast

Elvis_Dolores_Hart2012x.jpg

I’m leaving Memphis tomorrow for a vacation before Easter, but I won’t really be leaving all things Memphis and Tennessee.

For starters, how about this exchange:

“I’d go to Memphis for the ribs.”
“Now you talkin’. Best bar-b-cue in the world’s at the Germantown rib joint.”
“The Germantown Commissary. Corky’s is good.”
“I love Corky’s. They serve that pulled pork shoulder. Best anyplace.”

A feature in Bon Appetit? Two visitors at the Tennessee Welcome Center? Actually, it’s a slice of dialogue from my road read, Elmore Leonard’s new novel “Raylan,” set in Harlan County, Kentucky.

On Saturday I should get to the beach just in time to catch the sunset and the second game of the Final Four between Kentucky and Louisville, aka Coach Cal vs. Rick Pitino.

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How many times will they mention Memphis-Kansas 2008? I put the over and under at four counting the pregame.

On Thursday night I can catch HBO’s offering, “God is the Bigger Elvis,” about Dolores Hart, a former actress in Elvis flicks who became a nun. God must be proud, but what does it say about a guy who drove a pretty young actress to join a convent for the next 50 years?

Finally, the Republican Party 2012 Presidential Campaign Quote of the Day, if not the Quote of the Season, comes from former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. An op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal Friday coauthored by former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, highlights Bredesen’s comment that President Obama’s health care plan, now universally described as ObamaCare, is “the mother of all unfunded mandates.”

As the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported, it was 2009 and Bredesen was speaking of Medicaid and he supported universal health care. But “the mother of all (fill in the blank)” is the mother of all cliches, and who better to pry undecided Democrats away from Obama than a Democrat, so this one will be recycled by every politician, columnist and commentator in America who worships at the altar of the Wall Street Journal.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Time for a School Takeover

People can talk about crime being the number-one issue. It’s not. Education is. If we can educate our kids, crime goes down, but the present educational system has failed us all. It’s time for a radical change.

The departure of Memphis’ latest school superintendent, Carol Johnson, provides an opportunity to revolutionize Memphis City Schools (MCS). In its present state, it’s nothing but a system that is failing to educate, is fiscally irresponsible, and is a major drag on the general welfare of this community. And the only solution we ever hear from our educators is: Give us more money.

But just consider: The city school budget is already almost twice the budget of the city of Memphis. The operating budget for the 675,000 residents of Memphis is $539 million. This encompasses fire and police protection, roads, garbage collection, parks, sewers, city courts, and much more. By contrast, the operating budget for the Memphis public school system — for 119,000 students seven hours a day, nine months a year — stands at $918 million. The two budgets were roughly equal in the 1990s, but in recent years, the school budget has escalated dramatically — with rapidly diminishing results. Increased funding is not the answer; better management is.

More than a decade ago, we saw Superintendent Gerry House come and go with rave early reviews, only to realize later that her tenure was, to say the least, unsuccessful. Johnson has come and is now going with the same tepid results. Yes, she can extrapolate from the reams of data at her disposal and point to some slight test-score improvement here and some minor success there, but that’s more show than substance. We forget that running the school system is a billion-dollar-a-year business for which a doctorate of education offers little training.

The results of overlooking business credentials can be seen in school projects such as the Mitchell High School auditorium, which escalated from a $1 million auditorium renovation to a $5 million performing-arts center, with no one accountable to explain how it happened. There is a new $20 million child nutritional center that no one knows how to run, whose need is questionable, and which is operating at 20 percent capacity with no positive results for students. Tens of millions have been spent for consulting contracts with no demonstrable purpose other than to provide cover for the lack of business acumen on the part of the superintendent and the school board. I could go on.

It is now the time for all to come to the realization that the Memphis City Schools system is broken and not fixable by means of the present school board/superintendent structure. If MCS were a company, it would be a prime candidate for Chapter 11 reorganization.

As it happens, there is a means at hand to accomplish the reorganization of a school system. Before we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to employ “hiring consultants” to bring in another superintendent with more of the same credentials, it may be time for Governor Phil Bredesen to exert his authority under the No Child Left Behind Act and take over the school system, as he has recently threatened to do.

He needs to do what Mayor Herenton wanted to do, and that’s to fire the school board, which has been riddled with incompetence, conflicts, turf protection, and emotional outbursts, and bring in a new head with a new team to shake this system to its very core, rebuilding it from the ground up — a new school “czar,” to use an overworked term.

This new head could operate outside of the political arena and make those hard decisions that need to be made unfettered by school boards and prior contractual constraints.

We can delude ourselves into thinking that success is just around the corner, but it’s not. Another search team looking for another superintendent with the same old resume for the same old system won’t work. We’ve been down that road before.

It’s time for a radical change, and I believe Governor Bredesen has the guts and ability — and the legal and political wherewithal — to change the system.

Now is the time to act. Memphis restaurateur John Vergos is a former city councilman.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Cutting to the Chase

Mayor Willie Herenton for Harold Ford Jr. Governor Phil Bredesen and Commissioner Sidney Chism for Steve Cohen? Say it ain’t so!

Fact is, it is so. Really.

None of the endorsers mentioned above were exactly jumping through hoops or shouting “Hallelujah!” but they made firm commitments of support, all the same.

Most forthright was Herenton’s endorsement of Ford, made after the mayor’s attendance at last week’s prayer breakfast for Senate candidate Ford at The Peabody.

“At the urging of a group of clergy and business leaders, I agreed to endorse Congressman Harold Ford in his bid for the United States Senate,” said the mayor in an interview with the Flyer. “I can look at the big picture,” maintained the frequent Ford-family foe. Herenton said his decision had been made “in the interests of Democratic Party solidarity,” and “in the context that I have previously endorsed Governor Phil Bredesen for reelection and state senator Steve Cohen for Congress.”

The mayor said he had “deliberated for the last two weeks” on the matter of an endorsement and noted that, while Ford had requested an endorsement “in passing,” there had been “no Memphis conversation” at which the congressman had sought his support.

Herenton contrasted that with the fact that former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, the Republican candidate, had “appropriately and respectfully” requested his support and discussed with the mayor his plans regarding Memphis, if elected. “In that sense, I might have had a greater respect for Mr. Corker had an endorsement of him been possible.”

But, said Herenton, he had made it clear to Corker that no such endorsement would be forthcoming and that for reasons of local unity and party solidarity the choice for him came down to either non-endorsement or endorsing Ford. He said that his endorsement was not a “left-handed” one and that he was at Ford’s disposal for campaign appearances.

Meanwhile, Cohen, the Democratic nominee for the 9th Congressional District, got a stamp of approval from two major politicians with whom his relations have been, to understate the case, something other than sunny.

During a visit to Memphis last week, Governor Phil Bredesen confirmed that he intended to support every statewide Democratic nominee, “and that certainly includes Senator Cohen.”

Also acknowledging his support for Cohen was former interim state senator and current Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, who expressed himself similarly, saying, “I am going to vote for every Democratic nominee, including Senator Cohen.”

Memphis became the center of the state’s political consciousness — and, in the case of one race, the nation’s — last weekend as debates were held here for the contenders in three major races: the United States Senate, the governorship, and the 9th District.

First was a Saturday-night showdown on WREG-TV between Ford and Corker.

In an affair that was widely commented on thereafter in the national media, both contestants in a potentially pivotal race for control of the Senate continued to hew to the same generally centrist (or mildly rightist) themes.

Considering that Corker, by virtue of a clearly overdue staff shakeup, had just stabilized what had been a disastrous decline in the polls (and was lucky to come into this event more or less even), it was surprising that he started out playing the political equivalent of a prevent defense.

Perhaps, as one observer suggested, Corker just wanted to get safely through this first encounter on Memphian Ford’s home turf and save his real game for a later debate elsewhere, where a good performance might put him over the top.

Maybe. But that assumes Corker can keep it close until then, and on the strength of Ford’s energetic performance Saturday night, that can’t be assumed.

Ford was having a fine time exhibiting his performance skills — a little too fine in that once in a while his adrenaline seemed to be getting the best of him. His penchant for flip asides, delivered via casual moves on and off his stool, reminded some viewers of Bill Clinton and others, longer of tooth, of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, back in the summer of 1960 — although Kennedy was a much more controlled, less hyper presence, and Corker was on point and poised enough not to be Nixon.

If Ford seemed somewhat over-active and glib, that may have been merely the boil-over of a very self-assured presence — the same one the state’s viewers have seen over and over in Ford’s TV ads, most of them stressing themes of national security and patriotism — de facto rebuttals of Corker’s disastrous early “Ford’s a liberal” attack ads that have now been shelved in favor of a more personal approach by the GOP candidate’s new campaign manager, political vet Tom Ingram.

Corker warmed up to a little direct action himself midway into Saturday night’s debate, taking a shot at the “Ford political dynasty,” one which Ford rebutted by the kind of “I love my family” response that, artfully and simultaneously, establishes distance between the congressman and his kindred.

Failing receipt of a “recipe” for picking one’s family, the Memphis congressman advised his opponent to “be quiet, and let’s run for the Senate.” But the Corker team afterward left no doubt that further attacks on the Fords as a political clan would be heard from in the last month of campaigning.

The next encounter, televised via WKNO-TV on Sunday afternoon, was a League of Women Voters forum featuring Bredesen and Republican opponent Jim Bryson.

The most remarkable aspect of that one may have been Bryson’s success in getting to the governor’s left on the issue of health care.

Bryson said that the programs Bredesen put in place as partial substitutes for TennCare, notably the “Cover Tennessee” plan of insurance supplementation, were “bare bones” solutions that would not resolve the issue of uninsured and uninsurable patients the governor had cut from the program, many of them, Bryson said, with “terminal” illnesses.

Bredesen countered by suggesting that his disenrollment effort had been aimed primarily at aspects of TennCare most subject to fraud and other abuses and said the program, instituted by former Governor Ned Ray McWherter and continued under former Governor Don Sundquist, had been “over-blown and over-bloated.”

Other points of divergence were: Bredesen’s defense of the jury-trial system of deciding medical-malpractice issues vs. Bryson’s call for caps on punitive damages; and the GOP challenger’s call for using the state surpluses accumulated under Bredesen to pay for elimination of the sales tax on groceries.

Finally, there was a sometimes stormy three-way debate Sunday night on WREG-TV featuring 9th District candidates Cohen, Republican Mark White, and “independent” Democrat Jake Ford.

Ford, first up, characterized himself as a champion of “working-wage Americans.” Next, primary winner Cohen expressed solidarity with his fellow Democrats for conferring the party’s nomination on him and promised he would “never turn … my back” on them, meanwhile chastising Ford for avoiding the party primary. Finally, White argued for a “coming together” of “new people, new blood” to create a different political reality in the traditionally Democratic district.

Thereafter, the genial White became something of a bystander as favored veteran Cohen and newcomer Ford scrapped for bragging rights.

The exchanges between Ford and Cohen became ever brisker, with Ford characterizing Cohen as “too liberal” on the issues of “gambling” (Cohen is the acknowledged father of the state lottery), marijuana (the senator has proposed legalizing medical marijuana), and, most controversially, same-sex marriage (Cohen opposes what he calls “constitutional tampering” to deal with the matter).

At one point, Ford went so far as to say that Cohen’s position on gay marriage was “certainly, I hope, not for personal reasons.”

Meanwhile Cohen made a point of stating for the record that he had never been arrested, “nor has Mr. White,” leaving it to Ford to acknowledge, without specifiying, that he might have had such trouble between 1990 and 1993, when his father, former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., faced federal indictments.

These and other heated exchanges between Cohen and Ford suggest that, as this race continues, there will be further trouble between the two, right here in River City.

Note: complete accounts of the three weekend debates may be found in the “Political Beat” section at MemphisFlyer.com.