Tag: Carol Chumney

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Forum Fever

Forums are all the rage these days as Labor Day approaches — after which the crowded 2007 pre-election calendar starts to overflow big-time.

Among the events to watch are two forthcoming candidate debates co-sponsored by the Flyer and the Memphis Rotary Club. On September 4th, candidates for the hotly contested District 9, Position 2 seat will square off, and one week later the major mayoral candidates will have at it. Both events are at noon at the Cook Convention Center.

Having thus done my duty by our own events, I must next tip the hat to the Coalition for a Better Memphis, which actually succeeded in getting all four major mayoral hopefuls — including the debate-leery Mayor Willie Herenton — on the same stage, though only one after the other, answering the same series of across-the-board questions.

The event last Thursday, at the Bridge Builders site downtown, wasn’t therefore a debate — as moderators Roby Williams and Bobbi Gillis stressed — but it may have been the next best thing.

Standing in front of a climbing wall in a cavernous, well-filled room, the four hopefuls appeared in sequence before the same audience and answered the same questions from Williams and Gillis, while members of the coalition set about grading the answers according to a four-level scale.

Based on what the candidates said, how they said it, and what others said about it later on, these are some broad conclusions:

John Willingham, who was first up, clearly meant to demonstrate that he was no crank but a serious man with serious proposals. The former Shelby County commissioner was a beneficiary, as he always is from time-restrictive formats, of the two-minute-per-answer limits on the nine questions asked.

Kept thereby from waxing prolix, Willingham was still able to offer a host of specific proposals. Some of them, e.g., drastically curtailing a mayor’s contractual authority and the number of his patronage positions, seemed good fits for the current debate on charter changes. Others, like his concept of turning the Fairgrounds into an Olympic training village that could generate 2,000 jobs and $2 billion in annual revenues, were of the sort that Willingham fans would consider visionary and non-fans might regard as fanciful.

Even under the time and format constraints, Willingham put forth too many proposals and statistics to be easily summarized. All that was consistent with the suggestion that the mayor’s job was to be both an executive and an idea man. Conversation among attendees afterward indicated that those who tend to see him as a crank will continue to do so; those who regard him as farsighted and misunderstood, likewise. A point of general agreement concerned his limited base and the small likelihood of his being elected.

Herman Morris was the second candidate to appear. He spoke briskly and without hesitation, letting general statements substitute for extended elaboration.

Contrasting his up-from-poverty background with his quality education (Rhodes College, Vanderbilt law school), Morris characterized himself as an able executive with a proven track record, especially at MLGW, which he headed for seven years. He also noted such involvements as his former chairmanship of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, experience on industry-seeking missions, and 20 years’ membership on a state lawyers’ ethics panel, two years as chairman.

In answer to a question about achieving diversity in government, Morris, an African American who emphasizes his potential appeal to both races, gave an answer that might resonate better with whites than with blacks.

The standard for city employment, he said, should be “not just diversity, but … merit, experience, talent, skills, history, track record of success,” as it was at MLGW under his administration, he said. That was a head-scratcher, unless, as a Republican well-wisher opined, it was one means of distancing himself from recent publicity regarding his well-received remarks at gay/lesbian forums.

Verdict: Morris, markedly less stiff than when he first announced, held his place in line. He’s viable if he can somehow generate better across-the-board traction than he’s managed so far. Among other things, he repeated his challenge for other candidates to follow his lead in taking a drug test. For all the trying, that one has not yet so much as blipped on the public radar screen.

He may have a way to go before convincing a majority that he is something “new and different and better.”

Willie Herenton was the third candidate to appear. Unsurprisingly, the mayor wanted to talk specifics — or at least those stats and achievements that suggested his first four terms had been a success.

Herenton eschewed the “hating on me” rhetoric of an earlier speech to the Whitehaven Kiwanis Club. Appearing stately and dignified, he warned against “novices,” boasted of his “40 years in public service,” recapped his career as a school principal, school superintendent, and mayor, and repeated his series of rhetorical challenges to the Chamber of Commerce concerning which mayor had presided over the city’s best economic growth, per capital income, etc. “Of course, I already know the answer to that,” he said.

Herenton declared, “We have virtually eliminated decayed public housing as we have known it in the past.” He also boasted a blameless personal record on ethics matters and claimed to have achieved the most diverse city workforce in Memphis history. Other professed achievements were more familiar — like downtown redevelopment in general and, in particular, the FedExForum and the NBA franchise that came with it.

So far, so good, except that such accomplishments are no longer regarded as unalloyed benefits and are the subject these days of a critical second sight.

All in all, the mayor may not have provided a fresh prospectus or a convincing rebuttal to his opponents’ insistence that it’s “time for a change.”

Carol Chumney was the final speaker, and her reception was every bit as revealing as anything explicit she said at the event. Council member Chumney’s persona as a persistent scold of the administration and of government and politics as usual continues to serve as both medium and message.

Unlike the other candidates, the former state legislator made few concrete proposals, couching her statements almost solely in terms of the shortcomings she perceives in the current city administration or in terms of general goals. Her very first sentence said it: “I’m running to bring about safe streets, safe schools, and safe neighborhoods and to clean this city up once and for all.”

Though her Web site contains specific proposals, Chumney on the stump rarely deals in such specific terms. Her remedies at the forum were more broadly stated: e.g., “more accountability … a mayor more capable of inspiring the city … stronger on children and youth … neighborhood watch programs … stronger code enforcement … partnerships with all kinds of people,” and so forth.

As during the nearly four years of her service on the council, Chumney proved most compelling when she presented herself as the avenger, as the dedicated scourge of everything that is wrong with city government. “You know, we have a lot of moonlighting going on at City Hall. People don’t talk about that,” she said at one point. And ears perked up.

Overall, to judge by word-of-mouth afterward, Willingham’s presentation was discounted more than it might have been if his prospects were deemed brighter; Morris held his own; Herenton came off well (if somewhat out of answers on the freshness front); and Chumney, questions about her financial wherewithal notwithstanding, is still getting the benefit of the doubt.

• Among the several other groups sponsoring candidate forums are Mid-South Democrats in Action (MSDIA) and One Hundred Black Men, who collaborated in an event last week at the University of Memphis Law School featuring candidates for the three council positions in Super-District 8.

Turnout by the candidates was good — as, in the opinion of most observers, was the content of candidate responses. The major absentees for the forum were Position 1 incumbent Joe Brown and Position 2 challenger Janis Fullilove (who was apparently conducting a simultaneous campaign event).

• Two District 9 races are attracting much attention. That for Position 2 is widely regarded as a showdown between lawyer/broadcast executive Shea Flinn and businessman Kemp Conrad — a Democrat and a Republican, respectively, though both have support across partisan lines. Newcomer Frank Langston also has good support. “Memphis Watchdog” blogger Joe Saino will have an impact, as may Joseph Baier.

Contenders for Position 3 include another well-connected newcomer, Reid Hedgepeth, businessman Lester Lit, lawyer/activist Desi Franklin, neighborhood activist and former interim legislator Mary Wilder, and Democratic activist Boris Combest. The first three named have most of the sign action so far.

A detailed version of these items is available in “Political Beat” at www.memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Four More Years?

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

We have seen the field. That is the hard, inescapable fact of last week’s filing deadline. The next mayor of Memphis will almost certainly be one of three contenders — two of whom are familiar properties: the proud (some say reckless, some say haughty) incumbent Willie Herenton, and the determinedly independent (some say foolishly stubborn) City Council member Carol Chumney. A third candidate, former NAACP official and MLGW head Herman Morris, has yet to make his profile clear, and that is perhaps his major problem.

Oh, there is yet a fourth candidate, former Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham, who is well enough known. Respected, even beloved, by some for his densely detailed plans to fix virtually everything and regarded as an eccentric by a perhaps greater number, Willingham constitutes a relatively distant second tier all by himself.

And after him, among the 12 other candidates who qualified by the July 19th filing deadline, there is naught but anonymity, lacking as of now even Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, the barefoot denizen of the Planet Zambodia and the numbing punchline to an old joke which, for some time now, has been told only by himself to himself.

A perennial, Mongo filed his papers correctly but was disqualified for one more run because of unpaid fines relating to state election requirements. The now officially irrelevant Mongo did have one moment of historical importance, shaking loose a few hundred frivolous protest votes that likely would otherwise have gone to then-incumbent mayor Dick Hackett in 1991 and thereby making possible the victory, by a margin of 142 votes, of former Memphis City Schools schools superintendent Herenton as the city’s first elected black mayor.

If not for that, Mongo would have been no more consequential than a candidate who remains on the ballot — Bill (formerly Willie) Jacox, the perennial’s perennial, who disappeared from Shelby County ballots for a decade, as did his crude self-advertising handbills that used to litter telephone poles throughout the city, but who is back this year. Two other candidates — bus driver Carlos Boyland and businessman Randy Cagle — were so obscure that, when they tried to launch early candidacies at the Election Commission’s downtown office in 1996, they were erroneously given petitions to run for county mayor that year.

Cagle made something of a fuss at a recent neighborhood forum in southeast Memphis when he accused the media of downplaying his prospects and keeping him, and others like him, out of the charmed ranks of acknowledged contenders.

It doesn’t work like that, of course. Though here and there over the years an effort has been made to logroll somebody into or out of prominence, the media don’t make or break anybody. They — we — are still merely chroniclers of moods and momentums that stir of themselves, or, as in the case of Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, the reluctant warrior who last week finally and firmly squelched insistent draft efforts by a multitude of well-known and unknown courtiers desperate for a change at the city’s helm, are put into motion by specific forces in the community itself.

Now, as always before and (one hopes) forever, ours is a representative system. That, for better and for worse, is the root fact.

Who, then, do the major players represent? Here is a capsule of sorts:

Mayor Willie Herenton: By his own testimony, the incumbent mayor is still the man who, as he told an almost hysterically happy, cheering crowd of mainly African-American citizens at The Peabody on an October night in 1991, was “willed” by them into power and prominence as the culmination of historical justice and inevitability, whose accession to power was attended, at the last rally and at the first post-victory celebration, by no less a figure than Jesse Jackson, the civil rights avatar who had been on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968 with the slain martyr Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the ironies of this mayor’s career is that he could not have represented outcasts from power and passions so long denied had he not, just prior to his ascension, been suddenly cast into disrepute with a civic establishment that had once embraced him and appointed him to its major power boards. Forced from his perch as head of the Memphis schools system by a sexual scandal (the late 1980s were post-Gary Hart and pre-Clinton times) and by alleged administrative irregularities, Herenton became a martyr for that moment of change.

Justin Fox Burks

The mayor, an able and commanding figure and (as he never tired of reminding people) a once-undefeated Golden Gloves champion, won three subsequent elections on the strength of his personal dominance and visible successes — mainly in civic (read: downtown) reconstruction and a record of (apparent) fiscal solvency. But his fourth term, which began with a thunderous denunciation of his City Council and a heady claim of divine sponsorship, proceeded into financial difficulties, an era of resurgent crime, and all-too-mortal wrangles with disbelievers, who included both council members and those members of a disaffected population who were challenged by Herenton to “leave” if they didn’t like how he did things in his dominion.

As it happens, the number so aggrieved has risen to the point, among blacks as well as among whites, that the mayor actually ran second (to Chumney) in the first set of polls conducted in this electoral season. Hence his reaching again for the martyr’s mantle and African-American solidarity, as in the now famous press conference of mid-June when he accused various disloyal “snakes,” in concert with a vengeful power establishment, of scheming to overthrow him with — shades of those late 1980s — a sexual-blackmail plot.

But as the Rev. Bill Adkins, a major ally in Herenton’s campaign of 1991 and co-founder of the ill-fated “Draft A C” movement, observed last week, “He really hasn’t done what he promised to do for black people. The truth is, on matters like minority contracting, he’s not even been as good as Dick Hackett was!”

Outlook: Though favored at the moment by prognosticators looking down track, Herenton fared no better than even with Chumney in the last major Wharton-less poll, taken the week before last for The Commercial Appeal by Ethridge and Associates. The mayor still has much to prove, even to his presumed hard-core base in the black community.

Carol Chumney: A maverick’s maverick, first-termer Chumney is, hands down, the most unpopular City Council member among her colleagues in city government, both on and off the council. More than once, she has put on the table a motion for an action or cause with more than plausible rationale, only to look in vain for a second. The most recent and telling case of this came back in April, when Chumney proposed a resolution asking Mayor Herenton to reverse course and accept the proferred resignation — initially rejected by the mayor — of the then beleaguered MLGW president Joseph Lee.

As so often before, Chumney’s motion failed for lack of a second. Accused by colleague Joe Brown of trying to advance her political chances and by member Brent Taylor of procedural irregularity, Chumney responded indignantly, “If I’m out of order, so be it!” A subsequent resolution by councilman Jack Sammons asking Lee to resign encountered racial-bloc voting and failed of approval by a single vote – Chumney’s. She had declined to vote for it on the technically correct ground that Lee had already tried to resign — or at least gone through the motions of doing so.

When Lee’s dormant resignation finally was accepted, on the heels of his misguided (and apparently misinformed) blackmail threat against an MLGW board member, the suddenly ubiquitous Nick Clark, Chumney claimed vindication. But the consensus among many neutral observers was that she had lost face — not just by virtue of her colleagues’ rejection but because she had appeared too unyielding and unwilling to consider compromise, that mother’s milk of consensus politics.

It is, of course, her very intransigence that has accounted for Chumney’s surprisingly high standing in the polls and for the fact that the former Democratic state representative from Midtown draws cheers when she appears before government-bashing conservative groups anywhere in the city.

If Herenton has cast himself as the symbol of a long-suffering race, Chumney has succeeded in becoming the Joan of Arc of the disaffected. Moreover, she has genuine reformer’s credentials, having played a leading role in exposing and correcting child-care abuses while a member of the state House and, as a council member, taking damn-the-torpedoes positions against questionable, if long-accepted, practices in city government. A case in point was the now-vanished arrangement whereby only 12 years of city service entitled one to a comfortable lifetime pension.

Chumney can also take credit for go-it-alone probes that in the last year or two turned up evidence of the city’s fluctuating credit rating and its tenuous budgetary predicament.

Jackson Baker

Mayoral candidate Carol Chumney: Joan of Arc of the disaffected?

Outlook: Though boosted by a grass-roots network of sorts and by recent trends that arguably favor female candidates, all other factors being equal, Chumney seems doomed to run a cash-poor campaign, and though her unquestioned ability to garner free media will help her in that regard, her long-range prospects among black voters remain a mystery, while at the same time she has real competition for the city’s white vote.

Herman Morris: Once a star scholar and athlete and, in his adult years, a man of considerable professional attainment, this up-from-humble-origins success story has found himself cast all too often as a contemporary member of what used to be called “the black bourgeoisie.” This is despite a long early history of legal and political activism on behalf of civil rights causes and candidates.

Morris’ reputation in the public mind is largely fixed from his seven years’ service as president of MLGW, an important (and, these days, crucial) administrative venue that depends disproportionately on behind-the-scenes activity, even more so than other appointed positions of less obvious public urgency. Even in moments of crisis — like the “Hurricane Elvis” windstorm of 2003 — it is elected officials, notably the mayor, who bear the brunt of public attention.

Until this year, when he followed through on a long-nursed ambition to run for mayor — at least partly, many think, to atone for what he regarded as ill treatment by Herenton — Morris was mainly known for the falling-out with Herenton that led to his ouster from MLGW in late 2003 or for the supposed “golden parachute” that, perhaps unfairly, he was considered to have left with or perhaps even for his championing of utility investments, including the now-controversial Memphis Networx, a public/private fiber-optic venture that is popularly believed to have been a financial bust and is on the verge of being abandoned, at a fire-sale price, to a private financial concern.

Morris is the kind of public figure who requires careful scrutiny to properly “get” him, and the same is apparently true of Networx, which, in February of this year, long before the taxpayer-funded investment became an issue, newly announced mayoral candidate Morris made a point of publicly touting. Indeed, in an age in which Memphis is encumbered by a “connectedness” gap (see Editorial, p. 16), Networx might, as the Flyer‘s Chris Davis has suggested in a series of articles, have been the foundation of a viable public utility in its own right.

If Morris is to succeed in the politics of this year, however, he has to stake out some basis for popular appeal. He is funded well. This month’s disclosures showed him well into the six figures — though still considerably below the half-million dollars and up that Herenton has in cash on hand. Morris’ voter support, too, has so far depended largely on affluent sectors of the community and on Republican sources as much as on Democratic ones.

With that need in mind, we may be treated to further quirky moves like Morris’ recent demand that other candidates join him in having drug tests — a patent play to so far wholly unsubstantiated rumors concerning the incumbent mayor.

Outlook: With his mixture of black and white support, based disproportionately in the middle class, Morris may well turn out to be the default anti-Herenton candidate, but his long-term prospects depend on further progress in what has been a slow evolution from his naturally reserved private persona into the kind of glad-handing bonhomie type that a mayoral race requires.

John Willingham: What can we say that we have not said many times already about this gallant and largely misunderstood public figure, to whose gadfly-like prodding of the governmental structure the public owes much — not only in the realm of exposing abuse (à la the now-notorious FedExForum deal, private garage and all) but in the determined venting of alternate public courses, like Willingham’s various proposals for serious tax overhaul?

Willingham has a reputation in too many quarters as a crank, though he overcame it big-time with his upset victory in 2002 over an establishment pillar, the late Morris Fair, to become a member of the Shelby County Commission. That triumph was owing to Willingham’s becoming a channel for massive discontent over the way public funds were used, sans public consent, to bait the Grizzlies into relocating to Memphis.

Forced into an ill-advised race against Shelby County mayor Wharton in 2006 by his correct perception that too many forces, financial and otherwise, were committed to defeating his bid for reelection to the commission, Willingham is once more a private citizen, and, unfortunately for his electoral prospects, even many of his veteran well-wishers have written off his chances, casting their lot with other candidates. His devoted but long-suffering wife Marge has made no secret of her wish that her husband would cease and desist from his flirtations with public office, especially now that his chances seem so slim.

But he is still there, for one more Revere-like ride, it would seem, passing out pamphlets showing he still has an ambitious eye for redesigning the public sphere (most recently to convert the much-pondered-over Fairgrounds into an Olympic Village).

Outlook: The ex-Nixon administration aide, multi-patented inventor and engineer, and well-known barbecue maven is the longest of long shots, eminently more qualified than, say, the unlamented Mongo, but in most quarters given no greater potential for success than the Zambodian would have had. Indeed, some longtime friends wonder if Willingham isn’t taking votes away from the other potentially viable challengers.

Whoever is destined to be mayor of Memphis after October 4th is guaranteed to be dealing with a City Council with a majority of newly elected members. That outcome was foreshadowed by accelerated attrition and by the wave of indictments for public corruption that swept aside two veterans, and it was made certain when council mainstays Tom Marshall and Jack Sammons, both of whom apparently considered mayoral runs themselves, opted out of reelection races just before filing deadline.

That means that such front-burner issues as what to do with the Fairgrounds (a legislatively vetted proposal from developer Henry Turley awaits possible implementation), whether or not to seek functional merger of the city police with the Sheriff’s Department, and how finally to dispose of the ghost facility known as the Pyramid (tomb of a previous governmental generation’s civic imagining) will all come under the purview of fresh eyes and — we are entitled to hope — fresh perspectives.

This new council and the newly elected (or reelected) mayor will also have the advantage and the challenge of dealing with recommendations for change by the Charter Commission that was elected last year and has dutifully and quietly gone about what could turn out to be momentous labors.

In any case, a new team will be taking the field, and the game of Memphis city government will almost surely take new and unexpected turns, no matter who the manager of record turns out to be.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Coming to Shove

As was noted here last week, momentum for a mayoral candidacy by Shelby County mayor A C Wharton — and pressure on that famously reluctant (or coy) official — has seriously intensified as the clock keeps on ticking toward next week’s filing deadline.

Things were patently coming to a head with the public emergence of a “Draft A C” movement led by, among others, the Revs. La Simba Gray and Bill Adkins. Despite Mayor Willie Herenton‘s attempted dismissal of the effort, and of the two African-American ministers as relatively unimportant figures motivated by “personal” or even mercenary reasons, the fact is that both had once been key members of Herenton’s political team.

Adkins especially was a major force in the epochal first race by Herenton in 1991, relentlessly proselyting for the then “consensus” black candidate on his daily radio show.

These days, neither Adkins nor Gray is regarded as necessarily “first tier” among African-American leaders, though Gray made a serious effort to become so last year in his sponsorship of forums designed to produce a single black candidate around whom other blacks might cohere.
No such figure materialized in a race ultimately won by then state senator Steve Cohen. But if Wharton, who agreed to meet with his newly energized suitors, ended up saying yes to their entreaties, there would be no need to look further to find consensus, and the resultant combination of African-American forces with a business community already avid for A C to run was bound to be a first-tier effort.

In famous lines by T.S. Eliot, the poet’s probable stand-in, J. Alfred Prufrock, opined, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Well, A C was meant to be. And it has to be remembered that in the play Eliot was referencing, Hamlet does finally act.

Meanwhile, other mayoral candidates were increasingly making themselves available. Several hopefuls were scheduled to appear at a Tuesday night meeting of the Southeast Memphis Betterment Association at Asbury Methodist Church, including newcomer Randy Cagle and, er, oldcomer Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges.

Among the promised attendees generally acknowledged to be “serious” challengers were council member Carol Chumney, former MLGW head Herman Morris, and former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham.

Scheduled to make what would seem to be his first public appearance as a candidate for mayor was former FedEx executive Jim Perkins, who is the unknown quantity of the mayoral race so far. Perkins reportedly has a million dollars of his own money to spend on the race, and that fact alone has been enough to encourage speculation that he might figure significantly in the outcome.

Coincidentally, Tuesday happened also to be the deadline for candidates’ filing disclosures for the second quarter of the year, just ended. Preliminary indications have been that candidate Morris will show cash on hand in the six figures, with Chumney lagging behind, and Willingham pulling up the rear.

Meanwhile, Willingham is doing what he can to engender what, in our time, is rather quaintly called “free media” (i.e., news coverage).

At a recent meeting of the Southeast Shelby Republican Club at the Pickering Center in Germantown he used the club’s traditional “introduce-yourself” round asked of all guests by delivering what amounted to a campaign address that was standard Willingham.

Contained within it was a litany of the maverick former commissioner’s sworn foes — including old ones like establishment Republicans David Kustoff, Kemp Conrad, John Ryder, Maida Pearson, and Alan Crone, all former party chairmen who announced their support of his then potential 2006 commission opponent, Mike Carpenter, early enough to help persuade Willingham out of a reelection race and into one for county mayor.

But there were some new names, too — prominent among them Bruce Saltsman, former governor Don Sundquist‘s transportation commissioner, whom Willingham, without further explanation, held liable for the “shenanigans” of the now suspect FedExForum deal. And the former commissioner intimated he knew of dark deeds committed by some well-known developers.
But all of this would definitely play second or even third feature to the potential restaging, right here in River City, of Shakespeare’s most famous play.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

One Mayor’s In

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Willie Herenton made it official Tuesday. At the stroke of noon — surrounded by a medley of supporters, reporters, and the curious throngs that only a longtime officeholder of his stature (and none of his opponents so far) can command, a smiling mayor showed up at the Election Commission, wrote out his check, turned in his reelection petition, acknowledged his supporters, and named his adversaries.

In no particular order, they were the media, the power establishment, assorted plotters and schemers, and almost as an afterthought, his declared ballot opponents. Herenton was asked if he thought that any “major” opponents were yet to declare. (That was code for his longtime friend and governmental counterpart, Shelby County mayor A C Wharton.) “It doesn’t matter,” he boomed out, as a surrounding crowd cheered his confident declaration.

And it may not matter. But there is a general feeling now, with two weeks to go before the July 19th filing deadline, that the best bet — some think the only bet — to turn the mayor back from gaining a fifth four-year term is Wharton and that the county mayor is running out of temporizing time.

It seems clear that he must in very short order either declare his candidacy, risking an old friendship with the man whose campaigns he has more than once been the titular manager of, or make an unambiguous statement renouncing any possible shadow of ambition to move his mayoral chair across the downtown government mall to City Hall.

What is known is that Wharton has been tempted to run, but that, besides his native reluctance and his loyalty to Herenton, he fears a bitter campaign in which he ends up being mauled by his old friend, a former pugilist who has never been prone to pull any punches — in the ring or out.

It is further known that Wharton — or someone acting on his behalf — has researched various questions of governmental protocol, including the key one of whether he could run for one mayorship while occupying the other or even hold both offices at once.

Meanwhile, the rest of the field went on doing its collective thing:

Earlier in the week, former MLGW head Herman Morris perceptibly stepped up his schedule, appearing at a meet-and-greet on Wednesday, followed by a fund-raiser before an audience of lawyers on Thursday.

At the latter event, held at the University of Memphis-area Holiday Inn on Central, Morris pointedly condemned political appeals to “racial divisiveness,” an apparent reference to what many observers saw as a central element of Herenton’s now famous “blackmail plot” press conference.

It is now clear that Morris and his supporters are staking their hopes on his prospects of appealing to both black and white voters and thereby becoming the legitimate default candidate for those seeking an alternative to a continuation of Herenton’s tenure.

Jackson Baker

Mayor Herenton

As the leader in early mayoral polling, City Council member Carol Chumney, of course, wasn’t conceding anything. She too accelerated her campaigning over the last week, following up a Monday-night appearance before the Germantown Democrats with some extended shmoozing at Thursday night’s weekly “Drinking Liberally” event, held at the Cooper-Young bistro Dish.

Finally, on Saturday night, Chumney invited supporters to the Memphis Showboat for what she called a “kickoff” of her campaign. (For once, given the venue, the term “launch” might have been more appropriate.)

Chumney read a lengthy statement in which she noted the panoply of reformist positions and independent stances that have gained her a substantial following. Especially prominent in her audience Saturday night were a group of environmental activists.

Nor was former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham inactive. Appearing at Tuesday night’s meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club at the Pickering Center in Germantown, Willingham made the most of a brief cameo appearance before the main address by state representative Brian Kelsey, espousing a disdain for the city’s “power elite” that may have transcended even Herenton’s in its intensity.

Of James Perkins, the retired FedEx executive who is reputed to have a million dollars to load into a campaign, not much is yet known. His campaign so far remains invisible, and, to the electorate at large, so does he.

The fact remains: In the field as constituted so far, only Willie Herenton is a creature of genuine sturm und drang. Only he has demonstrated the dramatic potency that, beyond all issues and for better or for worse, can motivate a mass electorate.

What happens if Wharton does get in? Chumney insists that she will remain in the race and eschew a return to the District 5 City Council position, which three candidates — Jim Strickland, Dee Parkinson, and Bob Schreiber — now seek. Morris insists that he raised enough money and support to go the distance, and no one doubts that Willingham will stay the course.

What the other candidates — or their representatives — all say is that they have displayed a resourcefulness that the county mayor has not. “It’s easy enough for him to just say no. Why doesn’t he?” is a common refrain. The answer to that, of course, is that he may yet give the alternative answer.

• A new physical principle has been discovered about the known universe, or at least about that corner of it occupied by the Shelby County Democratic Party. It is this: That the likes of Richard Fields can be gotten rid of — perhaps permanently — but longtime gadfly Del Gill is irrepressible and will return again and again — perhaps till the end of time.

Fields, accused by Mayor Herenton of being ringleader of a “blackmail plot” aimed at deposing the mayor, was the subject of two votes at last Thursday night’s monthly meeting of the local Democrats’ executive committee. First, his resignation from the committee — tendered in a letter to party chairman Keith Norman in which Fields blamed his departure on complications arising from “my present investigation of problems in Memphis” — was accepted by a 36-0 vote.

That vote, however, came only after Gill — yes, Gill — tried to move for Fields’ expulsion and was talked by Norman into tacking that motion on to the acceptance motion as a second stage. The reason: As Norman explained it, only the state party could rule on an expulsion; hence, Fields’ resignation had to be accepted first, lest some discovered technicality bind him forever to the committee, and to the party.

And that, Norman explained, was what nobody wanted. The chairman opined that “we should never have elected him back on in the first place” after Fields was forced off an earlier version of the committee in 2006 for working with Republican lawyers to overturn the election of Democrat Ophelia Ford to the state Senate.

Norman allowed himself some additional rhetoric to the effect that Fields was best gone forever — a point that Gill and others thought had been incorporated into the resolution of expulsion, which passed 27-6. Both Norman and party secretary David Holt said afterward, however, that the word “permanently” — heard frequently in discussion on Gill’s motion — was not involved in the final vote. The point may be moot; it is hard to imagine a third coming for Fields.

The real miracle was the return to the committee of Gill, who has his own detractors. That resurrection occurred when Gill, a perennial member who was not, however, elected at this year’s party convention, got nominated by the newly formed Memphis Democratic Club as its representative on the executive committee.

The Memphis Democratic Club is chaired by Jay Bailey, the lawyer who was defeated by Norman for the party chairmanship, and numbers other dissidents among its members.

Also returned to the committee was another longtime maverick, Bill Larsha, who was accepted as the representative of yet another newly formed dissident club.

• Even as all parties to the County Commission’s Juvenile Court controversy await the state Supreme Court’s verdict on whether it will adjudge the legality of the commission’s vote for a second judgeship, the commission itself has established an oversight committee for the court. Its chair? First-term member Henri Brooks.

Categories
Opinion

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Two things are troubling about the selection of Henry Hooper to replace Rickey Peete on the Memphis City Council:

First, the IRS assessed nearly $400,000 in tax liens against Hooper between 2000 and 2005. Second, Hooper didn’t volunteer this information and explain it to the council, and members didn’t ask him about it.

Hooper, agent/owner of State Farm Insurance and Finance Agency and a former United States Secret Service agent, was chosen to replace Peete for the remainder of the term that expires at the end of this year. It’s not clear yet whether Hooper will be a candidate in the October election.

Peete resigned shortly before pleading guilty in federal court last week to bribery charges. It is the second time Peete has been convicted of bribery in the performance of his public duties. He was indicted in December along with Councilman Edmund Ford. Ford has pleaded not guilty and is still on the council. Ford’s unpaid MLGW bills have drawn federal scrutiny and taken up hours of council time.

If there was ever a time for full disclosure of potentially embarrassing money matters, this is it. With Memphis at the center of the Tennessee Waltz, Main Street Sweeper, and MLGW investigations, this is no time for don’t ask/don’t tell. Hooper, who ran for sheriff in 2002 and the Shelby County Commission in 1994, is no virgin. The City Council, which is rewriting its ethics code, well …

The IRS assessed Hooper for $109,958 in taxes, interest, and penalties for 1998, $99,755 for 1999, $73,138 for 2000, and $113,112 for 2001. The assessments were in 2004 and 2005. The notice of a federal tax lien reads as follows:

“We have made a demand for payment of this liability, but it remains unpaid. Therefore, there is a lien in favor of the United States on all property and rights to property belonging to this taxpayer for the amount of these taxes.”

In an interview Tuesday, Hooper said the civil dispute involves a business trust and deductions which the IRS did not allow. He said he has hired an attorney and taken the case to tax court in Cincinnati. He said the investigation began when the IRS looked into an illegal offshore trust in which he was not involved, but the same people who set up that trust also set up his trust. He is hopeful of a settlement.

“Our trust was not illegal, but they were not going to let us deduct everything we wanted to,” he said.

He said he wasn’t trying to hide anything from the City Council.

“I was not under any legal obligation to go into a personal tax matter,” he said. “There has never been any question of my integrity at any time in my life. Now it becomes a question because somebody is trying to discredit me.”

He said the tax lien is “totally different from” Ford’s overdue utility bills because his tax issue is in court and there are no charges of favoritism.

On the resume Hooper submitted to the council, he lists his federal employment including the Secret Service for 24 years, six years with the Green Berets, and 22 years as an insurance agent and businessman. That was enough for council members. Jack Sammons said he learned of the tax lien after Hooper was chosen, but “it wouldn’t have bothered me” because it is not unusual for businesses to have IRS disputes that drag on for several years. “It’s sort of refreshing to be dealing with someone who has enough business to have a tax challenge,” he said.

Councilman Carol Chumney, however, said the tax lien should have been disclosed and “would have influenced my vote.”

The Secret Service, until 2003, was, like the IRS, a division of the U.S. Treasury. Hooper said he worked with IRS agents during his career.

Memphis politics is a forgiving business. Once you’re in the club, it’s a new day. It wasn’t only the voters in his district and his colleagues who embraced and forgave Peete. He was chairman of the board of the Center City Commission for five years and also served on the board of the Riverfront Development Corporation.

After pleading guilty last week, Peete stopped to shake hands and make a brief statement in front of the news cameras. Then he grinned and waved and climbed into an SUV. If you weren’t listening, it was hard to tell if he won or lost.

That was Rickey Peete. Henry Hooper is no Rickey Peete. He should take pains to make that clear.