Charles ‘Chooch’ Pickard

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (second from right) at Saturday fish fry event for Super District 9, Position 2 Council candidate Paul Shaffer (second from left). Others are Jeff Sullivan and Carol Risher.

Candidates trying to get into public office no doubt envy those who are already there. But being an office-holder has its special quandaries.

Take 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, for example. He’s been in public life for so long and in so many different guises — County Commissioner, state Senator, and even, briefly, General Sessions Judge — that he’s accumulated an expectedly large number of friends and political allies. And he, like everybody else, has his ideological preferences.

At election time, understandably, several of the aforementioned friends and allies crave special attention from the Congressman.

Specifically, they’d like his endorsement — a commodity that, both in theory and in proven practice, is a help in getting elected.

The problem is that often there are several friends and allies all seeking the same position, and that puts the Congressman — and other officials in a similar situation (think Wharton, Luttrell, Haslam, etc., etc.) — in a bit of a bind.

The bottom line: Reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Cohen has not endorsed anybody for anything yet in the Memphis city election, as he made clear on Saturday, when he stopped by a fish fry at the IBEW building on Madison, in honor of his longtime friend and ally, Paul Shaffer, a candidate for the City Council, District 9, Position 2 seat.

“I may do something close to the [July 16] filing deadline,” Cohen said, “but I’m not endorsing as of yet.”

Shaffer is certainly a prime candidate for a Cohen endorsement; so are several candidates in other races.

Take Council District 5, for example: At least three candidates in the multi-candidate field are close to Cohen, either personally or politically of both. They are John Marek, Mary Wilder, and Charles “Chooch” Pickard. (One or two others in that field he finds potentially attractive, as well.)

Cohen posted some flattering remarks on his Facebook page this past week about Marek (his former campaign manager in two recent reelection efforts), and he’s certainly very fond of Marek and very impressed by him and encouraging of Marek’s political ambitions.

“But I have other friends in that race, too,” he clarified Saturday, indicating that he could speak highly of them, as well.

At least one published report stated flatly, though, that Marek had Cohen’s “endorsement,” and, to repeat, the Congressman insists that is not literally the case, as the word “endorsement” is commonly understood in the case of a political race.

All of this will work out in the wash, and it may well be — but it’s not guaranteed — that Marek will get a formal endorsement at some point. Meanwhile, friends of Wilder and Pickard — are perhaps those candidates as well — are bending Cohen’s ear.

As indicated, he is likely to confer an endorsement either just before or just after the filing deadline — if for no other reason than he is aware that three candidates vying for the same essential constituency (call it “progressive” or Democratically-inclined or what-have-you) could split the district vote in such a way as to leave them all outside the frame of a runoff election.

It is known, in fact, that Cohen counseled with at least one candidate, and perhaps more, about that prospect some weeks ago, before the field expanded.

Anyhow, if nothing else, the current confusion has made Cohen’s ultimate decision — about District 5 and other races — something of a suspense factor in a city election season getting ready to dispense with training wheels and pick up speed.

The District 5 City Council seat, which has been occupied for two terms by Jim Strickland, who is vacating it to make a mayoral run, is a crucial one for several reasons, including the fact that the Midtown/East Memphis district contains both substantial commercial and residential turf and several different hotbeds of politically active citizens.

It bears repeating that it will be a solid month before April 17th, the first date on which candidate petitions can even be drawn, and that any list of candidates is, of necessity, only a preliminary one. But there are several individuals who are campaigning already and have to be taken seriously.

There is Mary Wilder, for example, a veteran political and civic activist and longtime presence in the Evergreen Vollintine neighborhood, who has political credibility and name recognition from a previous race or two and from having served as an interim state Representative in state House District 89.

Wilder was the beneficiary last Thursday of a well-attended fund-raiser at Annesdale Mansion, hosted by former state Senator Beverly Marrero (whose vacated House seat Wilder assumed temporarily in 2007), and longtime progressive activist Happy Jones, who noted that Annesdale was an ancestral home. Between the two of them, Marrero and Jones symbolized the broad appeal Wilder hopes to demonstrate along the Poplar Corridor.

In brief remarks, Wilder cited her 11 years as United Methodist services director and her work on behalf of preservation initiatives and environmental causes. She also served as facilities director at MIFA.

A candidate with similar appeal and who, like Wilder, was an early entry is Charles “Chooch” Pickard, an architect who also has evinced a strong interest in preservationist issues and strategies for dealing with blight. Pickard has served as executive director of the Memphis Regional Design Center and currently serves on the MATA board. He has signed on some seasoned campaign pros to help his race.

In her introduction of Wilder last week, Marrero challenged Wilder’s supporters to work hard because, as she said, “there’s a lot of money on the other side.”

There are several candidates that remark could describe, but one of them is certainly Worth Morgan, a member of a well-known brokerage family, if at this point still something of an unknown quantity. Morgan is an executive at SunStar Insurance of Memphis, and word is that his campaign will be well-endowed financially.

In that sense, with his themes unspoken to so far, his campaign could resemble the one successfully run in 2007 by current Councilman Reid Hedgepeth, whose race was in a sense under the radar but who had similar sources of support.

Another candidate who can count on significant financial backing and whose political profile is somewhat more developed, is Dan Springer, who has served as an aide to both Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and U.S. Senator Bob Corker.

Springer, who currently serves as communications director for Evolve Bank and Trust, has begun making the rounds of local civic and political clubs to introduce himself.

Coming from a totally different political corner is Paul Shaffer, business manager for IBEW Local 474 and a long-established presence in local Democratic Party politics. The well-liked Shaffer can count on serious backing from organized labor, but his support does not end there. In past races for a council super-district, he has enjoyed good across-the-board support from Democratic political figures of note, and he could well get a lion’s share of them this time, too.

As other political observers have noted, the District 5 picture could be complicated by the recently much-rumored prospect of a retirement from the Council by Super District 9 member Shea Flinn, to assume executive duties with the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce. If that should come to pass, several of the names mentioned here, along with various others, could well end up on the ballot as potential successors to Flinn.

In any case, the District 5 field indicated here is likely to experience both pluses and minuses, and several other potential candidates have floated preliminary trial balloons. (Candidates omitted in this list should fear not; as indicated, we’ve got time, and they shall get their due.)

One of those who talked about making a District 5 race early on but who has been dormant of late is Mike Ritz, the former two-term county commissioner from Germantown who, as commission chairman, played a major role in important stages of the school merger/de-merger controversy.

On the eve of a move into Memphis last year, Ritz, a sometime businessman-banker with a long-term pedigree in both city and county governmental affairs, discussed his desire to seek the District 5 seat in the event that Strickland, as expected, chose to vacate it for a mayoral run.

Ritz has, however, decided against a council race. The reason? “I couldn’t find much interest out there — not only for my race but for anybody’s race.”

On the supposition that all of you reading this are sitting down, I can announce that, er, somewhat to my surprise, I was informed this week that yet another contestant — and an unexpected one, at that — is waiting in the wings with a definite hankering to enter the already crowded District 5 City Council race.

Joe Cooper.

Wow, that was noisy — all those chairs falling! Well, pick yourselves up, and I’ll say it again. Joe Cooper.

“I don’t want anybody thinking this is a joke” said Cooper, on the telephone. And I can assure you, Cooper is no joke.

Yes, Cooper has taken some hits — more than his share, maybe. He has two felony convictions, and there’s no hiding that. The first one, back in the 1970s, when he was a ubiquitous and influential member of the county court, is regarded in some quarters as having been payback for breaking ranks with a local Republican Party that was just beginning to feel its oats as a political force.

The offense was technically a species of mail fraud, in which Cooper, clearly hard up for cash, arranged some personal loans for himself in the name of friends, many of them influential government players. Irregular, to be sure, and he (but not they) got nailed for it by an unsympathetic D.A.’s office.

Cooper did some time, and for several years afterward divided his time between attempts at reestablishing a political career and several business start-ups, none of which endured for very long. He remained knowledgeable about government, however, and served in other people’s campaigns and offices and as a man-to-see about working the system and as an all-purposes resource — “the world’s greatest concierge” — as he called himself.

Do you need an autographed picture of President Chester A. Arthur by 2 p.m. tomorrow? Cooper is your best bet to get it. And much else.

In 2008, he got nailed again for selling Cadillacs to drug dealers, who paid cash for contracts that bore other people’s names — money laundering. While Cooper ended up doing more time, his punishment was mitigated by his subsequent assistance to the FBI in making bribery cases against local officials, and his cooperation netted him a sentence of only six months on the money laundering charges.

Besides treading these dangerous legal waters, Cooper has survived some significant physical ailments in recent years, and he, unquestionably and in a very unique sense, bears the aura of a survivor. For all his derogators — and they are many — he has his defenders, also numerous, although many of them, perhaps most, may be loath about boasting the fact publicly.

Cooper is what he is. He can make the case that he’s learned the hard way about staying on the beaten path, and it’s a path that he knows something about. He isn’t likely to win, but, in the crowded field that the District 5 race is becoming, who knows? He can at least hope to make a runoff (permitted in district races, though not for at-large positions).