Tag: campaign

Categories
Editorial Opinion

End Notes

First, the good news: The Memphis municipal election of 2007 involved some of the more interesting cross-cultural campaigning, in both the racial and the political senses, that we can remember in recent political history. In particular, white candidates made more

overt appeals to black voters than has been customary of late. A high point (if that is the right term) was the extravagant public claim of also-ran candidate John Willingham, a white Republican, that he was the candidate of black Memphians and had no fewer than 13,000 African-American votes locked up early on.

In this case, the very claim — not the reality of it — was the message.

Now, the bad news: The Memphis municipal election of 2007 involved some of the more flagrant appeals to racial divisiveness that we can remember in recent political history. In particular, Mayor Willie Herenton, who knows better, made several calculated appeals to racial solidarity based on the dubious assumption that there are, on the white side of town, any number of ongoing plots against black political power.

In this case too, the claim itself is the message.

Much money has been spent by the various campaigns on TV and print advertising, yard signs, and other appeals to voters. This, too, has a high side and a low side — inasmuch as the truth content of such communications has been ambivalent at best. (Poor Rickey Peete. Besides a bad conscience and the likelihood of prison time, the tarnished councilman has to live with the fact that his name is now proverbial — having been coupled, rightly or wrongly and sometimes with a bare minimum of justification, with this or that candidate in attack ads.)

Then there are the polls — sometimes commissioned in the interests of specific candidates and sometimes not — and under suspicion of being so even when such is patently not the case. The Flyer itself has neither paid for nor commissioned any polls — though we were the first media outlet to release a key poll by Berje Yacoubian late in the mayoral campaign. This fully annotated sampling was promptly doubted by partisans of the major candidate who did less well than his two opponents.

And, sure enough, another poll came along in another news outlet showing a wholly different configuration. For the record, yet a third major poll, commissioned by a TV station, was released this week, and it conformed quite closely in its results to the poll that ran in the Flyer.

Who’s right? Early readers of this space will still be wondering — as are we — though many will be looking at it ex post facto and will already know how things came out.

In any case, we rest easy with the fact that, in several of the City Council races, talented and able candidates were abundant, and we presume that voters had enough information at their disposal to be able to sift the real from the shoddy and to make the proper decisions.

We can only hope that such a presumption is not itself presumptuous.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton Has Most Money; Morris and Chumney Cite Successful Fund-Raising

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Mayor Willie Herenton is still the king of fundraising, but
one challenger , Herman Morris, is coming on strong, while another, Carol
Chumney, says she, too, is having increasing success in raising money.

Morris actually raised more money than Herenton in the most
recent campaign spending reporting period which started July 1st. But
Herenton had more money on hand before July and still has much more than either
Morris or Carol Chumney.

Herenton raised $117,800 and spent $378,675 in the last
three months. He has $242,083 on hand. His largest expenditures include $56,000
to Clear Channel Outdoor for billboards, $47,800 for radio ads, and roughly
$13,000 for t-shirts. Herenton raised almost all of the money locally in the
latest reporting period.

Morris raised $219,222 and spent $249,912. He has $11,096
on hand and has personally loaned his campaign $35,576. His largest expenditures
were to Conaway Brown for advertising. The candidate administered an indirect
slap to rival Chumney at his Thursday press conference, saying that he was
making his gains “while other candidates find that they are dropping and falling
or standing stagnant.”

At a press availability of her own Thursday, Chumney at
first minimized the apparent edge enjoyed by both Herenton and Morris. “We’ve
raised a lot of money, enough to do what we need to do,” she said. Claiming to be
as well known as Herenton and better known than Morris, she said the relevance
of that was “it doesn’t take as much to talk to the voters and tell them what
you want to do “

But she would go on to say, “We’ve raised a lot of money
lately, especially in the last two weeks.”

Chumney, who trails Herenton by only two percentage points
in a recent poll, apparently filed her documents just before the deadline
Thursday, and they had not been received at the Shelby County Election
Commission Friday morning.

Friday’s
Commercial Appeal quoted Charles Blumenthal, Chumney’s campaign manager, as
saying Chumney had raised $165,000 in the period, quadrupling her efforts from
the previous period. Blumenthal had given The Flyer a different number
Thursday, $142,000, and repeated the figure again Friday.

Blumenthal
made a point of noting that Chumney had $18,000 on hand, as against some $11,000
for Morris.

(UPDATE: Chumney’s filing, as received by the Election Commission on Saturday, shows quarterly receipts of $142,127, with $25,258 as cash on hand.)

The election is October 4th, with Saturday being
the last day for early voting. More than 25,000 have voted this week alone,
bringing the total early vote to 55,484, a record. On Thursday, 8181 people
voted.

Last week, Herenton tried to stop early voting because of
alleged problems with voting machines, but voters and poll workers apparently
have overcome the problems or found them to be non-existent.

Chumney was optimistic about her early voting totals.
“We’re winning early voting, with fifty percent of the vote,” she contended on
Thursday — without, however, explainiing the basis for that belief. (Results of early voting cannot be ascertained until all voting is concluded after the polls close on Election Day itself, October 4th.)

Morris made no such claims , but, when asked Thursday about
Herenton’s recent remark concerning the “mathematical impossibility” of his
prevailing in the election,” Morris answered with a reference to Herenton’s
stewardship of the now questionable FedEx Forum deal with the city.

“First of all, we’re not going to take math lessons from
someone who couldn’t count five floors in the FedEx Forum garage,” Morris
quipped. And he repeated that he was rising at the other candidates’ expense and would prevail.
“We’ll be there at the end.”.

Jackson Baker and John Branston

Categories
Opinion

Flashback to 1991

In the immortal words of Mary Winkler after she whacked her husband, our “ugly got out” last week.

The bizarre events involving Mayor Willie Herenton, attorney Richard Fields, and his client-turned-accuser Gwen Smith promise an ugly year of retro politics driven by religion, race, revenge, and fear.

Doubtless there are plenty of snakes of all kinds in Memphis, but the city’s biggest problem are the old bulls who still run the show. The relationship between Herenton and Fields goes back to 1969, when, as principal and teacher, they joined a school boycott called “Black Mondays” to get black representatives on the school board.

Fields supported Herenton and the NAACP when the school board tried to appoint a white superintendent in 1978. When Herenton was elected mayor in 1991 by just 142 votes, Fields was one of only two prominent white citizens to publicly support him. In federal court that year, he helped strike down the runoff provision in mayoral elections, enabling Herenton to win with 49.4 percent of the vote. He represented Herenton in his divorce and in well-publicized lawsuits filed by a teacher and a police officer.

“I know how to keep confidences,” Fields said in a Flyer interview last week.

An activist at heart, he also knows how to take matters into his own hands. He tried to influence county and judicial elections last year by recommending some candidates and criticizing others with information gleaned from public records. He got in the middle of a state Senate election involving attorney Robert Spence earlier this year. And in March, he took a mayoral poll, and when it showed strong signs of Herenton fatigue, he took it to the top floor of City Hall.

“That’s been my role,” Fields said. “I get to disagree with him. That’s the kind of relationship we have.”

Or had, anyway. Fields says they met cordially that afternoon for three-and-a-half hours, talking about old times and the mayor’s legacy as well as the poll and the people surrounding Herenton, particularly Reginald French, an unsuccessful candidate for sheriff last year and head of the beer board. Fields suggested Herenton not run again. “I was trying to help him go out gracefully without any mess,” Fields said.

Herenton gave a much different account. At a news conference, he mocked Fields and said his sincerity and concern for his legacy were bogus. Then he called him a snake.

Fields said he was “distressed” by that, and, moreover, he is tired of activism.

“I would really like to get out of the business of being the person on the front lines,” he said. “I wish some young black lawyers would come forward. But there’s a lot of resentment out there because of the judges’ survey that I did.”

He denied having a sexual relationship with Gwen Smith, who was jailed in Nashville last week for violating probation, or giving her any files or indictments that are not public record. He said businessman and Joseph Lee accuser Nick Clark is “my client,” but he isn’t working for any mayoral candidate, announced or otherwise.

Not that anyone is knocking on his door. Rough-cut, outspoken, and married and divorced four times, Fields is one-of-a-kind. Five years ago, when they were still on good terms, Herenton said, “A lot of my friends don’t understand my friendship with Richard because he irritates the hell out of them.”

The mayoral campaign of 2007 will be the most interesting and bitter one since 1991. On New Year’s Day, Herenton cast himself in biblical terms of being “on the wall” like Nehemiah at Jerusalem. He quoted Scripture at his press conference last week and drew a chorus of “amens” from police officers and supporters in attendance.

Addressing black Memphians specifically, he warned of efforts to divide them and said, “This time, divide-and-conquer ain’t going to work.”

Ominously, he said, “There are those in this community who would like to see me removed by any means,” and, without naming anyone, “They might resort to what happened to Dr. [Martin Luther] King in Memphis.”

A bit stunned by that one, I asked the mayor’s friend and former campaign chairman Charles Carpenter, who was there, if he heard what I heard. At first, he said there had been death threats against the mayor, but when I said I thought that should be reported, he said he wasn’t sure. Standing nearby, police director Larry Godwin said he was unaware of any such threats.

By appealing for racial solidarity, Herenton has little to lose. He already cast black challenger Herman Morris as a “boy” in league with whites from the geriatric set. He has more than $500,000 in his campaign account but has raised only $1,650 this year, and much of what he raised last fall came from supporters in Detroit and Atlanta. In 1999 and 2003, he raised more than $300,000 each year.

And he is right that the polls showing him on the skids are biased and misleading. As the four-term incumbent, he can rally old warriors including attorneys Carpenter and Ricky Wilkins, former MLGW presidents Joseph Lee and Rev. James Netters, and political hands French, Sara Lewis, Deidre Malone (the Shelby County commissioner who orchestrated the Gwen Smith media festival), Sidney Chism, Gale Jones Carson, Stephanie Dowell, Pete Aviotti, Rick Masson, and TaJuan Stout Mitchell. Even some of the now-maligned “wealthy business leaders” may get over it and join Team Herenton once they see how the field shapes up and which way the wind is blowing.

Herenton’s demand for a federal investigation of “an ongoing civil/criminal conspiracy designed to entrap African-American leaders in the city of Memphis” was a politically shrewd reminder that the scorecard so far in Operation Tennessee Waltz and Main Street Sweeper shows six black elected officials in Memphis and no whites. The unpopular Republican attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who is barely hanging on to his job, probably won’t do a thing. And if any federal indictments come out of the investigation of Ralph Lunati’s strip clubs, they can be spun as the work of snakes if they touch anyone close to the mayor.

Divide-and-conquer may not work, but that is assuredly the strategy. The latest one to employ it is Herenton.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Sign Up, Sign Down

With Election Day a seemingly distant memory, the city is beginning to recover some sense of normalcy. Gone are TV ads about family values and the pipe-dream promises of myriad I-approve-this messages.

But on telephone poles, in empty lots, and on curbside greens, the fight is not over.

The recent election season saw over 20 million campaign signs posted on public property nationwide. For campaigns concerned with putting the signs up, the difficult task now becomes tracking them all down. In addition to being an eyesore, signs that overstay their welcome blur the line between “free speech” and “litter.”

Judge Larry Potter of the Shelby County Environmental Court has overseen over 50 lawsuits against offending candidates, including Bob Corker, Harold Ford Jr., and Phil Bredesen. Cases are still pending against a few fringe candidates who posted signs on street medians.

“These signs are a very real problem during political season,” Potter said. “They are a public nuisance.”

Environmental court does not have any jurisdiction over political signage on private property. The Shelby County zoning ordinance provides that “temporary political campaign or referendum signs including their supporting structures are permitted provided they are erected no longer than 90 days prior to an election and are not placed upon utility poles or within public rights-of-way.”

But according to Larry Jenkins, chief zone and sign inspector for Shelby County Code Enforcement, there is no official timeframe for the signs to be taken down.

This can cause campaigns to get lax in cleaning up the mess, particularly those of losing candidates who used all their money and volunteer power during the race itself.

Potter hopes people know that the court takes these matters seriously. Since January 2005, environmental court has fined over 35 different candidates.

“Fines are based on a per-sign basis. I usually do it on a sliding scale,” says Potter. “We have people that put out 300 or 400 signs at once, and we do get quite serious with them. It all depends on the number of signs.”

The court can assess up to $50 plus court costs per sign, though penalties differ depending on the nature of the signs.