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Senators Fire Back at Trump TVA Proposal

Tennessee Senators fired back at a proposal Thursday at a Trump Administration proposal to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) electric transmission lines, calling the plan “loony” and “harmful” for the agency.

The move is one of several ideas President Donald Trump floated Thursday in a plan to re-organize parts of the federal government. The 131-page plan called “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations” was made by executive order and outlines a number of ideas to streamline government.

”Americans routinely shop online, use smart phones to order rides, and get electronic money transfer services, and yet are forced to deal with multiple agencies and excessive bureaucracy when they interact with federal agencies,” reads the proposal.
[pdf-1]
The proposal would, among other things, privatize the U.S. Postal Service, spin off federal responsibility for air traffic control to a nonprofit agency, end the federal oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and combine the Departments of Education and Labor into a single agency, called the Department of Education and the Workforce.

But it was Trump’s proposal to sell TVA’s transmission lines that drew criticism of Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander.

“While TVA has not received any taxpayer funding since 1999 and has taken positive steps in recent years to pay down its debt, I do think it’s valuable to evaluate, from time to time, reforms that could cause TVA to function more effectively for Tennessee taxpayers and ratepayers,” said Corker in a statement. “That said, at the end of the day, I continue to believe that selling TVA’s transmission lines would be harmful to the Tennessee Valley and remains a very unlikely outcome.”
[pullquote-1] Alexander did not mince words and said the idea threatens to increase power bills for consumers.

“This loony idea of selling TVA and TVA’s transmission lines seems to keep popping up regardless of who is president, and each of those proposals have all been soundly rejected by Congress,” Alexander said. “When President Obama proposed selling TVA in 2013, all it did was undermine TVA’s credit, raise interest rates on TVA’s debt and threaten to increase electric bills for 9 million ratepayers.

”TVA has among the lowest power rates in the country which, along with its reliability, help bring numerous new businesses to the region.”

According to Trump’s proposal, selling the 50,000 miles of power lines and other assets to a private company would “encourage a more efficient allocation of economic resources and mitigate unnecessary risk to taxpayers.” It would save the government $9.5 billion over 10 years, according to the report. 

The federal government’s role in electricity production and marketing dates largely to the New Deal, proposal says, and has expanded that role since then.

“Today, a strong justification no longer exists for the federal government to own and operate these systems,” reads the proposal. “The private sector already meets the vast majority of the nation’s electricity needs.

“Private ownership of transmission assets could result in more efficient operations and capital improvements while reducing the subsidies (both implicit and explicit) that the federal government now provides to the respective regions’ ratepayers.”

The Trump proposal also notes that Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have all proposed selling the assets.  

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Opinion Viewpoint

Person to Person

During his brief stopover in Memphis last week, in the course of a “Thank You” tour of Tennessee, U.S. senator-elect Bob Corker said everything there was to say about his victory as a Republican in a Democratic tidal-wave year over Harold Ford Jr.

He had been fortunate, he said, in that the campaign between himself and Ford had not turned into “a national referendum, which would not have been good for us” but became “a choice between two people.”

Bingo!

One way of viewing that statement, which cuts to the core of the case, is to credit, as other analysts have done and as Corker himself seems to have meant, the change of pace imposed upon his campaign by veteran pol Tom Ingram.

When Ingram took over management of Corker’s sagging effort with scarcely more than a month to go, he transformed it from a dreary and unconvincing assault on Ford as a “liberal” into one that stressed the personal differences between the two candidates.

Hence the compelling series of image-based commercials, produced by both the Corker campaign itself and the Republican National Committee, including the notorious “Call Me” ad, which is surely destined for a niche in primers about politics — even if the wrong niche, since its point was not who or what race the bimbo was but the fact that, as she averred, “I met Harold at the Playboy party!”

Corker meanwhile was shown as a down-home family man — using the most convincing fodder imaginable: a real-life wife and two cute-as-a-button daughters.

In his own ads, Ford cut a dazzling swathe, delivering homilies about faith or about a few politically uninflected bare-bones issues — gas prices, health care, patriotism, financial solvency. Having vowed from the stump that he wouldn’t run up to Washington yelling “Democrat, Democrat, Democrat,” he distanced himself as much as possible from party affiliation or anything concrete in the way of ideology.

Good as Ford’s performance was in his ads, they all emphasized the very basis of comparison — personality and personality alone — that Ingram was hoping voters would focus on.

And underneath the smooth surface of Ford’s TV pitches was a meta-text that reinforced the unrelentingly negative portrait of him being painted by the GOP. That throwaway line, for example, in the (perhaps) over-praised Ford commercial filmed in a church sanctuary. He had come by attention to religion “the old-fashioned way,” Ford said. “I was forced to.”

Points for candor, maybe — but you didn’t have to know who Freud was to get the sense of repression from it — all the more reason, finally, to trust the GOP’s contrary image of bachelor Ford as a libertine.

And those nods to heaven and finger-pointings upwards, all those public homages to “the big God I serve” — they all savored of sanctimony, however sincere they might have been.

And, however voters might have felt about a candidate’s open acknowledgment of his political heritage, they were surely not keen — not in a time of Ralph Reed pimping for Jack Abramoff and Indian casinos, of Foleygate, and the unfortunate Reverend Ted Haggard — on someone running up to Washington yelling “Pharisee, Pharisee, Pharisee!”

Arresting and original as was Ford’s daring attempt at recovering the faith-based constituency from Republican control, it meant little without a balancing and clear-minded political correlate. It was like a battery possessing only one node — no way for it to hold or generate a charge.

Bob Corker was right: In a national sweep-year for the Democrats, he was able to hold on against his charming, articulate opponent because it was the latter as much as he himself who had steered away from the referendum on political direction that was so long overdue.

And in the person-to-person comparison that was the only thing left, businessman/mayor Corker somehow came off more frontal and direct to the voters of Tennessee than the attractive young politician with the teasing but ambiguous profile.

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

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Politics Politics Feature

Election Aftermath

By one of those wonderful ironies (in the Churchillian sense of the adjective), the very circumstance that so often was a source of pain to 9th District congressman-elect Steve Cohen eventually became a blessing — namely, the necessity to run hard against “independent Democrat” Jake Ford in the general election after undergoing a strenuous Democratic primary against several well-endowed opponents.

Although exact analysis will not become possible until the Election Commission certifies the results next Monday, the unofficial totals make it obvious that Cohen not only won a healthy 60 percent-plus majority of the district-wide vote but clearly won a majority of the black vote as well — against a bona fide member of the Ford family, no less. And he did so in a year in which the remnants of the Ford organization, led by former Congressman Harold Ford Sr. himself, pulled out all the stops on behalf of Harold Ford Jr.‘s U.S. Senate campaign, along with the local, state, and national party organizations.

Cohen’s convincing victory over both Ford and Republican Mark White, who surely drew off a number of Cohen’s potential white votes, seems to give the new congressman an unmistakable mandate to represent both major population blocs in District 9.

What will Harold Ford Jr. do? That subject has fostered much speculation since Ford lost his Senate race to Republican Bob Corker by three percentage points.

Head of the Democratic National Committee to replace Howard Dean? James Carville is pushing that one — as a stalking horse for the Clintons, some say. But A) HFJr. says he’s not into it; and B) Dean and his 50-state strategy command too much loyalty from the rank and file to let that happen.

Talk show on CNN, MSNBC, or whatever? Now we’re talking. 🙂 And supposedly CNN made an offer the day after the election.

CEO of some enterprise yet to be designated? A Ford insider says that’s the ticket.

Run against GOP incumbent Lamar Alexander for the Senate in 2008? High risk — more so than the run against Corker was.

Run against four-term incumbent Willie Herenton for mayor of Memphis? Wow! That’s the perfect storm council member and declared mayoral aspirant Carol Chumney is looking for to divide and conquer! But the consensus is that HFJr. would just as soon be in prison; his focus is national, not local.

Now who gets Cohen’s District 30 state Senate seat? Among Democrats, some of the names being floated are activist David Upton, a longtime Cohen ally; Kevin Gallagher, the congressman-elect’s recent campaign manager; and state representatives John Deberry and Mike Kernell. And businessman Kemp Conrad, the former Shelby County Republican chairman, reportedly has a hankering for the seat.

The victory of Democrat Lowe Finney over Republican convert Don McLeary for the state Senate seat in District 27 (Jackson and environs) means that Lt. Gov. John Wilder, the nominal Democrat and venerable Fayette Countian who has been the Senate’s presiding officer for decades and has survived any number of election scares, power shifts, and attempted purges over the years, may have landed on his octogenarian feet one more time.

The Senate now has a one-vote Republican majority, and since one of the chamber’s Republicans is Micheal Williams of Maynardville, a Wilder loyalist, and since the body’s 16 Democrats will hold firm for the longtime speaker, that could be enough to keep Republican leader Ron Ramsey of Blountville at bay for one more term.

Bob Davis of Nashville, the state Republican chairman these last two years, has wasted no time post-election declaring his candidacy for reelection, but if he meant for that to be preemptive, it hasn’t quite succeeded.

First-term state representative Eric Swafford of Pikeville, sounding a time-for-a-change note, has let it be known that he’ll challenge Davis when the state Republican Committee meets in Nashville on December 2nd.

Correction: Incumbent Carl Johnson did not win election outright in the race for the District 6 seat on the Memphis School Board. Having polled only 48 percent of the vote, he and runner-up Sharon Webb, who polled an impressive 41 percent, will take part in a runoff election on December 12th.

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Cover Feature News

Turn, Turn, Turn …

As the rain clouds that doused West Tennessee on Monday passed eastward on Tuesday — in the direction of Republican Bob Corker’s presumed stronghold of East Tennessee — Democrat Harold Ford Jr. had every reason to hope for a perfect storm that would elevate him to the U.S. Senate.

It would end imperfectly for the Memphis congressman, however, three percentage points and some 40,000 votes behind his more mundane opponent. At The Peabody, where there was a goodly-sized media contingent and a giddy crowd had gathered for a potential celebration, hope dimmed only gradually.

And when, well after midnight, a somber Ford finally reached the podium and looked out over his sea of faithful supporters, some of them still calling out encouragement as if the next day would bring another vote, another shot at glory, the look of blank disappointment on his face said something otherwise.

It attested to the congressman’s realization that his own — and his family’s saga — had reached a turning point. Not only had he lost, but so had brother Jake, a poor second-place finisher (as an “independent”) to Representative Ford’s soon-to-be successor in the 9th Congressional District, Democratic nominee Steve Cohen — who even then was reveling with an exuberant crowd of his own supporters at Palm Court in Midtown.

As Ford spoke his brief subdued remarks of concession to a gathering that included Uncle John Ford, who resigned from the state Senate last year and faces imminent trial for his role in the Tennessee Waltz scandal, it began to dawn on some that the proud political family’s ranking official had suddenly become Ophelia Ford, the modest and muted successor to powerhouse brother John as senator from District 29.

Presumably, her margin of victory over Republican Terry Roland had been substantial enough this time to withstand the charges of vote irregularities that earlier this year caused her Senate colleagues to void her narrow victory in a 2005 special election for the seat.

Jackson Baker

John McCain (center) stumps for Bob Corker in Nashville

Though the national media saw in Tuesday’s outcome only the abrupt (if perhaps temporary) end of the golden-boy saga they had been chasing these last several weeks and months, the local subtext of the election results had to be: What next for Harold Ford Jr.? What next, indeed, for the Fords?

There had been signs, to be sure, that the weather was turning irreversibly against Representative Ford.

As the campaign wound down and the last week’s polls showed GOP adversary Corker with a double-digit lead, it began to seem that the congressman had over-reached himself — that his family history would trip him up, if nothing else.

Some Democrats — local and statewide — took umbrage on election day upon hearing that Harold Ford Sr. — the Florida lobbyist, former congressman, and Ford-clan patriarch — was putting out copies of a “Harold Ford Sr. Approved Democratic Ballot” on which his second-born son, Jake Ford, had the place of honor for the 9th district rather than Cohen, the Democratic nominee.

That smacked too much of the old Ford machine for various Democrats, whose loyalty to Harold Ford Jr.’s curiously new-breed politics — ranging from indistinct to undeniably right-of-center — was tenuous at best. (See “The Third Man”)

Discontent with Ford among hard-core Democrats may have been a marginal affair, but further analysis may show that this election actually hinged on the margins.

Any student of the blogosphere — suddenly swirling with political dervishes in Tennessee as elsewhere — could attest to the passions that were driving partisans at the edges of ideology. And, whereas in the outer, traditional world, ads for the pious, button-downed-collar Ford were making converts — such as Knoxville’s Frank Cagle, a journalist and conservative activist of the old school — he was still being regarded with suspicion online by red-hots both left and right.

Beyond the convenient descriptors of race or party label, there was in fact not much in the way of ideological difference to distinguish between Corker and Ford. Whatever their private convictions, both had progressively moved from their party’s moderate wings to positions that were clearly right of center.

Both candidates, formerly pro-choice on abortion, now described themselves as pro-life. Both opposed gay marriage. Both favored an extension of the Bush tax cuts, opposed immediate troop withdrawals from Iraq, and supported the president on the so-called “torture” bill. Their differences even on issues like tort reform and Social Security were being fudged.

Chris Davis

Steve Cohen at his Palm Court victory party

So it came down to a contest between individuals — Corker, the plain-spoken businessman and former Chattanooga mayor, versus Ford, the dazzling, charismatic wunderkind of 2006.

Right up to the end, Ford was routinely being described by those pundits who were hazarding election forecasts as having run this year’s best campaign. But that surely was a paradox: In the year of a roaring Democratic tide, with personal gifts that were undeniable and with coverage of his race with Corker devoted disproportionately to him, how indeed could Ford have lost?

One clue, perhaps, was the debate that raged amongst progressive bloggers in Memphis. It narrowed down to the following choices: Hold your nose and vote for Ford, whose politics had gone conspicuously rightward; vote for a fringe candidate of the left, such as the Green Party’s Chris Lugo; desist from voting in the Senate race altogether; or, as a fourth alternative that came to be increasingly taken seriously, vote for Corker.

Several developments drove that resolution: There was a factor that loomed much larger in Tennessee than elsewhere, where pundits chose to ignore that old chestnut about all politics being local. This was the fact, familiar to most Tennesseans within reach of a TV set or a morning newspaper, of the Ford family of Memphis, a.k.a. the Ford political “machine.”

The franchise began in 1974, the year of Watergate, when a two-term Democratic state representative named Harold Ford won an upset victory over white Republican Dan Kuykendall. Soon, Ford Sr. (the suffix, of course, derives from latter-day circumstance) was encouraging his siblings — all, like him, the sons and daughters of N.J. and Vera Ford, operators of a successful South Memphis funeral home — into the new world of politics.

Such were the leadership skills of the first Congressman Harold Ford that soon there were Fords everywhere in government — on the City Council, on the County Commission, in both chambers of the Tennessee legislature. Over the years, those family members, like John Ford of the state Senate, became dominant figures — exercising power up to, and sometimes beyond, established governmental lines.

John Ford’s indictment last year and subsequent resignation capped a swaggering, often scandalous career in which the senator’s very real legislative acumen soon became a secondary issue in the minds of Tennesseans. Ironically, the senator’s arrest in May 2005 occurred on the very eve of his nephew’s announcement for Senate.

Harold Ford Jr., raised in Washington, D.C., and schooled in such environs as St. Alban’s Prep School, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan, had every chance to avoid being stereotyped as “one of the Fords.” First of all, he was different — even early on, he was the same smooth article that TV viewers saw this year in Ford’s political ads.

Almost preternaturally self-assured and glib, he moved into the frames of his commercials and hit his marks with a grace and flourish that any professional actor might admire. Indeed, he was so accessible a figure that reigning political shibboleths ceased to be of any use to would-be analysts. It had long been said, for example, that no black could win in Tennessee.

Ford’s U.S. Senate candidacy directly confronted that assumption. It soon became clear that, while he was black enough, at least in concept, to be the overwhelming favorite son of the state’s African-American constituencies — 16 percent of the total population — he also conformed closely enough to middle-class models of success that crowds of young white professionals soon began to crowd his rallies. His professions of piety (he called himself “Jesus-loving” and began to carry a Bible on the stump) proved effective in rural surroundings and even on TV, where his nods and finger-pointing heavenward was reminiscent of famous pro athletes.

One measure of Ford’s possible appeal to social conservatives was that in Shelby County — where, as returns approached completion, he was maintaining a consistent 65 percent of the total vote — the referendum on state Amendment One, which would ban gay marriage, was winning by tidal-wave proportions — 80 percent to 20 percent. At the very least, this meant no sign of the usual anti-Democratic backlash that in recent years has accompanied evangelical voting.

In retrospect, Ford’s strong showing should have surprised no one. Added to his personal panache — virtually without parallel among Tennessee politicians, black or white — were the facts of an undeniable voter discontent with Republican rule and, for that matter, with politics-as-usual.

But the three percent lead that Bob Corker held onto as a margin never disappeared. And as news organizations began to call the race for the Republican, Harold Ford Jr.’s excellent adventure finally expired.

In the end, the same factors that gave him his chance ultimately may have doomed him to defeat: He lacked an important part of his base. Close, but no cigar.

After all the excitement, after all the better-than-expected election results in Shelby, Davidson, and Hamilton counties (all urban centers), Harold Ford did what most Tennesseans thought he would do at the beginning of his race: lose to an established Republican in a taken-for-granted red state.

Maybe it was never possible he would win. At the end of it all, campaign strategist Tom Lee acknowledged to the media that his candidate had reached or achieved most of the campaign’s goals, falling short, perhaps, only in the upper northeast corner of the state, the so-called Tri-Cities of Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City, traditional Republican strongholds all.

Maybe it was what the national media saw as racial content in the infamous line, “Harold, call me,” spoken by a white bimbo in a Republican National Committee ad — though most Tennesseans doubted it. Indeed, Ford seemed to do well among young, white professionals, who flocked to his rallies and sported his bumper stickers on their Volvos and SUVs. Indeed, they were as much a core constituency as African Americans were.

And he seemed to do well in some of the rural counties where a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage also ran up a big vote. At various times, he even appeared capable of doing the impossible — stealing the religious vote from the Republicans. He promised on national TV that he would be a “Jesus-loving, gun-supporting” senator; he began toting a Bible on the stump and seemed about to create a brand-new political type.

But red-state reality insisted on asserting itself.

Even in his concession speech before adoring supporters at The Peabody, Ford clung to that most surprising and unexpected component of his 2006 persona. Quoting passages of scripture, he made one last nudge of head upward, pointed heavenward one last time, and thanked his maker, the celestial one, for the opportunity to do what he had almost done. And then, after having spoken the merest congratulations to his victorious opponent, he moved offstage, slowly, as most disappointed mortals would, the consoling arm of congressional colleague Lincoln Davis, his campaign chairman, draped over his shoulder.

Ultimately, Harold Ford Jr. fell back to earth, having fallen just short of becoming a political archetype. But, like Icarus of legend, he made a good flight of it while it lasted.

Meanwhile, Cohen was flying high, having won the 9th District seat with a solid 60 percent margin that exceeded what most of his backers regarded as possible. At 57, Cohen would not only have the opportunity for national office that he had hankered for since his earlier try for Congress in 1996 — against Harold Ford Jr. — he would be privileged to begin his term of service as a member of the House majority. That was a privilege his predecessor had never enjoyed. Even the new congressman’s unabashedly liberal bias — unlike Ford’s conservatism — seemed perfectly in tune with the new Congress, where Democrats had also strengthened themselves in the Senate.

As vintage rocker Randy Haspel played piper for the packed and racially diversified crowd of young and not-so-young Democrats at Palm Court, the state senator’s recent bête noire, the moody, unpredictable Jake Ford, was nowhere to be found.

Absent from his brother’s event at The Peabody, the erstwhile congressional aspirant was rumored to have been involved in this or that fracas on election night. Soon enough, even the gossip about him died down — nobody seemed to care any longer what the facts were — and his somewhat less than 15 minutes in the limelight had pretty much wound down.

It was otherwise with Republican Mark White, the third-place finisher in the 9th, who would presumably be able to translate his newly enhanced name recognition into another — and better — chance at elective office somewhere down the road.

Other results: Something of that sort might also be the case for Democrat Bill Morrison, the Bartlett schoolteacher who waged a spunky if underfunded race against incumbent Republican Marsha Blackburn, an easy winner in the 7th Congressional District.

In the 8th Congressional District, the loser was Republican John Farmer, who had a good time venting his idiosyncratic brand of conservative populism even while losing badly to Democratic incumbent John Tanner. Farmer also lost a race to Beverly Marrero, the Democratic state representative from District 89.

There were no surprises in the other local legislative races. Republican Paul Stanley beat Democrat Ivon Faulkner for Curtis Person’s old District 31 state Senate seat; Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper won over her perennial GOP challenger, George Edwards, in House District 86; Democrat Mike Kernell continued his personal streak of invincibility against Republican challenger Tim Cook in House District 93; and Republican Ron Lollar beat Democrat Eric P. Jones in House District 99.

Winners in Memphis school board races were: Kenneth Whalum Jr. succeeding the retiring Sara Lewis by a landslide in At Large, Position 2.; Betty Mallott, displacing incumbent Deni Hirsch in District 2; Martavius D. Jones, unopposed in District 4; and Carl Johnson, reelected in District 6.

As indicated, state Amendment One, to ban gay marriage in Tennessee, won lopsidedly, by a 4-to-1 margin, as did Amendment Two, providing property-tax relief for seniors.

Oh, and to no one’s surprise, Governor Phil Bredesen, running against underfunded Republican Jim Bryson, who declared late as the GOP’s sacrificial lamb, won easily in what may have been the most unnoticed major statewide contest in recent Tennessee history — confirmation, if any were needed, that not every contest this year had to be a matter of heavy weather.

 

 

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Cover Feature News

Center Stage

“Can a bright young charismatic African American overcome racial bigotry and his family history to win a pivotal state for the Democrats in November?”

That remark is in quotes because it, or sentiments tantamount to it, underlie the unvarying storyline of virtually every analysis of the U.S. Senate race in Tennessee — of which there have been almost too many to count: Last week’s cover story in Newsweek. A four-page spread in Time before that. Long takes in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today. Daily coverage on the cable news networks. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS. Larry King. Chris Matthews. Anybody. Everybody …

And let me not be bashful: The sentence quoted above is one that I proposed, as far back as two years ago, would be the unchanging be-all and end-all of national media attention to Harold Ford Jr.’s race.

Here was another prediction from back then that also holds up well: “You will never have seen, nobody will ever have seen, a statewide candidate, in this or any other state, ever, get the non-stop bombardment of favorable, idolatrous treatment from the media that Harold Ford Jr. will receive in his race for Senate.”

Those predictions fall short of today’s reality only in that Ford, scion of a venerable African-American political clan in Memphis, seems largely to have escaped being yoked to the nether side of the aforesaid family history, which includes (along with an acknowledged high side of achievement) indictments of various principals, notably Uncle John Ford, the state senator now retired and facing trial for bribery and extortion in the ongoing Tennessee Waltz scandal.

Representative Ford, who inherited his House seat from his father 10 years ago, has escaped such comparisons for a variety of reasons, including his own presumed squeaky-cleanness in matters of legislative probity. But the ultimate reason is the same as that which has made the 36-year-old Memphis congressman such a national cynosure.

His race as the Democratic nominee against Republican Bob Corker, the former mayor of Chattanooga, is important because its outcome, as so many have noted, could determine which party controls the Senate in the next Congress. But a basic, underlying reason why Ford has commanded so much attention is the same as that which resulted in a politically inexperienced Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s election as governor of California.

In a word (two words, actually): star power. Even political enemies concede that Ford has it. Hence the attempts at disparagement in Republican attack ads: “Well, he does look good on TV!”

Ford has proved something of a moving target for Republican potshots, however. His political profile, especially over the two- or three-year run-up to his Senate race, has seen him cast so many right-of-center votes — on Terri Schiavo, on the GOP-inspired bankruptcy bill, on extending the Bush administration’s tax cuts, on authorizing the war in Iraq, on approving the so-called torture bill, etc., etc. — that various organized groups of hard-core Democrats (influential, especially on the blogosphere, but probably marginal numerically) find themselves hard-pressed to give Ford their vote.

And, for all his newly gained celebrity, nobody really knows to what extent Ford’s decisions have been tactical — designed to gain acceptance in “red-state” Tennessee — or matters of conviction.

Whatever the case, even his political profile, such as it is, has proved subordinate to issues of personality. It is no accident that theatrical issues per se have dominated the campaign of late — beginning with Ford’s now-famous “airport ambush” of a Corker press conference (intended to target allegedly questionable ethics on the part of former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., the candidate’s father, now a well-paid health-care lobbyist).

That was followed by an enduring controversy over an ad produced by the Republican National Convention that featured a leering young woman, who happens to be white, inviting the congressman to “call me.” The critical consensus, right or wrong, has inferred “racism” at the core of the ad, and that characterization has, for better or for worse, dominated recent reportage on the campaign.

Give Ford this: When asked last weekend about the bimbo ad on Fox News Sunday, Ford was honest enough to respond, “No, I think it was smut. I don’t think race had anything to do with that ad.”

That did not prevent the legions of national media pundits from conducting endless smug discussions on the theme — increasingly taken for granted — that the ad was racist. It did not even prevent so renowned a political analyst as CNN’s Jeff Greenfield from wrongly attributing to Ford himself the original claim that the commercial was racially based.

AP Photo

Nor, less forgivably, did it deter such wild responses as that from Vanity Fair writer and blogger James Wolcott. “Bob Corker is gay,” Wolcott opined, tongue presumably in cheek. “He may not know it yet, he may never know it, he may go to his sarcophagus wrapped in denial, but his fascination with Ford’s prowess and good looks gives him away, as does his political affiliation.”

Never mind that Corker, married with two daughters, had seen the RNC product before it went into general circulation, promptly disowned it, and insisted it be taken down. Never mind that the ad was clearly in a series with several others that had attempted to attack not the Democrat’s race but his alleged taste for bright lights and fine living.

Never mind, too, that Willie Herenton, Memphis’ first elected black mayor, had mused out loud and enviously only the week before: “Ford’s light enough that he can go in there and be accepted by those folks. I’m realistic enough to know that I wouldn’t have a chance. I’m just too dark.”

Indeed, it is a truism that Ford’s appeal transcends race. To be sure, he can expect an enormous, virtually unanimous vote from the African-American precincts in hometown Memphis and in the state’s other urban centers (even Chattanooga, home base of his GOP adversary). But one need only observe the crowds at racially heterogeneous Ford rallies to see how strongly he affects another vital constituency: young white professionals.

Ford moves as easily in such company as he famously does amongst his partisan opposite numbers in the House of Representatives. For years he has made a point of boasting his personal relationships among hard-core Republican types like Bob Barr, the former congressman from suburban Atlanta who was the first voice demanding impeachment of Bill Clinton back in the late 1990s.

To journalists covering politics in 2006, Pennsylvania’s Republican senator Rick Santorum — he of “man-on-dog sex” fame for a notorious moralistic outburst — is the likely sad-sack victim of this year’s expected Democratic tide. To Ford, however, Santorum is a prized co-sponsor of the Memphis congressman’s bill to provide investment grants to indigent newborns — bragged about at every public opportunity.

If there is nothing new in Ford’s coziness with his counterparts across the ideological aisle, what has many observers buffaloed is the revelation of a hitherto unsuspected religious side to the congressman.

It was signaled indelibly on several occasions during the campaign year — when Ford stepped up to the pulpit and preached a sermon at one inner-city church, when he taped a striking commercial in the sanctuary of another, when in all three televised debates and in countless TV interviews he was seen to bob his head upward and point toward heaven, pro-athlete style, and — most extraordinary of all — in this statement made this past weekend during his interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace.

Wallace, clearly smitten with the purported conservatism and media bling of the candidate, asked what voters might expect from Ford as a senator.

Without blinking, Ford stared into the camera and said, “What Tennesseans will get is a Jesus-loving, gun-supporting believer that family should come first, that taxes should be lowered, and that America should be strong. When Tennesseans send us to the Senate, that’s what they’ll get in my votes, and that’s what they’ll get in the kind of leadership that we have not had in the Senate over the last six years.”

Jesus-loving? However that might play in the boons where, this generation’s clutch of nattering nabobs notwithstanding, Ford was a clear hit — or at worst an attractive novelty — it could hardly bring joy to the previously quite supportive Jewish communities of Tennessee, especially not after a now notorious speech delivered by Ford Sr. last month. Addressing a Saturday afternoon rally for his son’s Senate campaign on Summer Avenue, the former congressman abruptly segued into a denunciation of 9th District Democratic nominee Steve Cohen, against whom another son, Jake Ford, was running as an independent.

“We’re from a Christian city here,” thundered Ford Sr. “He [Jake Ford] doesn’t believe in legalizing marijuana. This man that’s running against Jake wants some sex shops running in downtown Memphis on a Sunday! That’s our religious holiday.”

The week after news of that got out, a prominent Memphis businessman, one of Harold Ford Jr.’s main financial backers, went to participate in early voting. “I couldn’t bring myself to vote in the Senate race,” he later confided. He went a step further, writing and dispatching a letter to a number of other well-known donors and politically interested individuals, advising them of his own action and the reason for it: the introduction into Ford’s race of what sounded to him like a militant and exclusive brand of Christianity.

Other Democrats looked at the phenomenon differently, seeing it as an extraordinary effort to steal the faith issue back from years of proprietary GOP ownership.

The polls in the Senate race — Zogby, Rasmussen, Mason-Dixon et al. — have been little help to the ever-widening audience watching the Ford-Corker contest. They have fluctuated wildly of late but mainly within a five-point margin of error, showing first one and then the other candidate in the lead. And it was often difficult to pinpoint the reasons for a shift. When, sometime in September, all the polls showed Ford to have closed what had been Corker’s double-digit lead after the August 3rd party primaries, that was easy enough to understand.

Corker had blown away GOP opponents Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary, largely through a series of well-done TV commercials that showcased him as a likable family man and successful entrepreneur with a solid record of achievement as mayor of Chattanooga. But a major difference between that race, in which his opponents were financially handicapped, and Corker’s general election encounter with Ford was that the Democrat would be formidably equipped — both from state and national party sources and from Ford’s own undeniable ability to raise big money, much of it from out of state.

Republicans tried to make much of that latter fact, contrasting Ford’s “New York” and “Hollywood” connections with the down-home “Tennessee life” of Bob Corker. At times that approach, in Corker’s later ads and in his stump rhetoric, seemed to resonate with voters. The problem was that he inexplicably forgot about it during a six-week period in August and September.

That was when the Corker campaign appeared to be channeling the RNC’s standardized attack mode, with “cookie cutter” ads that unimaginatively, even drearily, attempted to portray Ford as a “liberal,” as if a mere code word, especially one that had long since ceased to typify Ford, if it ever had, could win the campaign.

Meanwhile, Ford and the Democratic National Committee had launched their own series of ads, equally attack-minded and no doubt as one-sided and unfair as Corker’s were. (Could anyone seriously believe, as several of the Ford/DNC ads alleged, that mega-millionaire Corker, who made his fortune as a pioneer in providing low-income housing, would bother to swindle the taxpayers of Chattanooga out of three measly mayoral pay raises?)

The difference was that Ford inhabited his ads, with a smooth, fluent, and compelling presence that any professional actor might envy. Corker’s advantage soon melted away — precipitating an internal campaign crisis that resulted in the dispatching of youthful campaign manager Ben Mitchell, who was replaced (reportedly at high-level insistence from the state and national GOP) by seasoned vet Tom Ingram.

Mitchell was probably something of a scapegoat. It was widely rumored, in fact, that a cautious and penurious Corker himself had dictated the shape of campaign strategy prior to the Ingram takeover.

In any case, Corker got back on an even keel, with new ads, better produced and more precisely focused. The more effective ones were homey and personal, featuring straight-from-the-shoulder homilies from the candidate himself and cameos by family members.

Other ads were more aggressive, aimed at the suspected seam between Ford’s newly unveiled religiosity and a more glittery private life. (In that vein also was the ill-starred RNC’s “bimbo” ad mentioned before.)

Ford Sr., both a behind-the-scenes adviser in the Senate race and a formidable analyst of it, was probably correct in suggesting that, early on, Corker relied too much on the national Republican apparatus. Two fund-raising visits by President Bush, with declining poll ratings, offered minimal coattails for Corker, at best. And, in an environment of general time-for-a-change disenchantment among voters, the GOP candidate’s parroted invocations of a low-tax, national-security, socially conservative formula seemed to be getting him minimal traction.

What began to come through for Corker was the image of a homegrown product who had schooled in the state, developed a business here, and maintained close connections across Tennessee.

Though the diminutive Corker lacks the sui generis star quality of Ford, he communicates a genuine personal warmth at close range. A case in point: As an attendee at Shelby County trustee Bob Patterson‘s annual Christmas party last year, Corker made a point of sitting in a chair and spending the better part of an hour with an arthritis-afflicted lady, answering all her questions and eschewing during that time the opportunity to work Patterson’s teeming crowd of influential party-goers.

The Chattanoogan does give good one-on-one (as does Ford, for that matter). And his early reluctance concerning more public forms of give-and-take (he famously turned down an opportunity to debate Ford on NBC’s Meet the Press) eventually dissolved as he became more comfortable with the hurly-burly of statewide campaigning.

Addressing a lunchtime throng at Logan’s Bar-B-Q in Humboldt, in mid-October, Corker seemed to surprise even himself with a leather-lunged exhortation of his “Tennessee Life” saga that drew hearty roars from what looked to be a working-class audience.

And Corker seemed to be holding his own against Ford in the three televised statewide debates — strange affairs in one sense, given that the candidates disagreed on very little, both coming off as right-of-center types with fuzzed positions on issues like abortion (who was and who wasn’t pro-life, and to what extent?), Social Security, and medical tort reform.

As momentum switched from side to side, it even remained possible, as the end approached, that a race which had become something of a national spectacle could be inflected by a more local one — the race to succeed Ford in Memphis’ 9th congressional district.



The Battle for the Ninth

If Harold Ford Jr. seemed destined to have become a national figure, so, too, had the winner of the 15-strong Democratic primary to succeed him, state senator Steve Cohen of a largely Midtown Memphis district.

Brash and sometimes even obstreperous, Cohen was nevertheless widely admired for his off-setting wit and for his distinguished 24-year service in the Senate, during which he largely brought into being the state lottery, championed the arts and animal rights, and was the go-to guy for any measure affecting the rights of women. Sometimes overlooked by those who saw him as a pure liberal was his sponsorship of gun-carry measures and strong defense of Second Amendment rights, legacies from his former service as legal adviser to the Memphis Police Department.

Cohen was defeated in a bid for Congress in 1996, losing to Ford Jr. in what was essentially a mismatch due to the district’s majority African-Americans status and the still-effective machinery of the Ford organization.

The circumstances of the 2006 Democratic primary favored him, however. With a significant black following of his own (he polled nearly 20 percent of the African-American vote), Cohen easily out-pointed the other members of the large primary field, most of them black and many of them possessing their own constituencies.

Going into the general election, Cohen had the backing of Memphis mayor Herenton and Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, as well as numerous other influential black public figures. He also had endorsements from most of his erstwhile primary foes. But he did not have the endorsement of Representative Ford himself, who kept a public silence on the race while his brother Jake Ford, running as an independent, made the general election race a three-cornered affair with Cohen and Republican nominee Mark White.

In many ways, Jake Ford, an unknown quantity, was much smoother than most people expected from someone without much of a pedigree other than the admittedly powerful one of his family name. There were times during the several general-election debates and forums when he suggested something of the glibness and mental grasp of his famous older brother and, for that matter, of his father, whose sporadic eloquence was as much a foundation of his power as his adept management of the once-legendary Ford political machine.

But there were disturbing episodes as well — suggesting that there may have been good reasons for his long years of relative anonymity. (Something of the same seemed to apply also to Aunt Ophelia Ford, inexplicably a no-show for most of the campaign season during her return engagement with Republican Terry Roland for the state Senate District 29 seat — one that she lost when apparent vote irregularities caused the Senate to void her 2005 special-election victory.)

At one point, Jake Ford was compelled to call a press conference to acknowledge several arrests during his late youth and early manhood, including one for assaulting his father.

And there was the League of Women Voters debate, at which Jake Ford came up short in his answers to several basic-sounding questions, not even hazarding an answer and pledging instead to be a “good learner” if elected to Congress. There was the Jekyll-Hyde edge to his personality — one that saw him shift, suddenly and unpredictably, from polish and poise, even grace, to a menacing belligerence.

He and his younger brother Isaac and a mystery aide all figured in various reports of real and attempted intimidation. Cousin Joe Ford Jr., one of several former primary opponents who endorsed Cohen, felt compelled to call out the aide, identified only as “Tyrone” on the Remixx World! blog, charging the aide with sinister threats of payback on the “street.”

White, for his part, came off well if somewhat indistinctly, stressing his success as an entrepreneur, his former experience as a teacher, and professing what seemed sincerely to be an interest in the problems of the inner city. He took that concern to the point of chiding President Bush during his touchdown in Memphis on Corker’s behalf, urging the president to accompany him on a tour of the more challenged neighborhoods of Memphis and saying, “I can’t imagine why he [Bush] won’t follow me!”

The Republican’s hopes were twofold — that he could stave off attrition of his Republican base in Cohen’s direction and that he could make inroads into the black community, particularly the religiously devout portion of it, largely on the strength of what he considered shared moral values. That part of his strategy took a less high-minded detour, though, as both he and campaign manager Howie Morgan began intensifying attacks on Cohen through press releases and mailers that suggested the Democrat favored gay marriage and legalizing marijuana.

Cohen had been forced to deny both allegations already by opponent Ford, who also made several statements that seemed to suggest that bachelor Cohen, known far and wide for his involvements with various attractive women over the years, might be gay.

For all that, Cohen seemed to be maintaining his lead — although the various mechanics of that race, including what was expected to be a massive voter turnout for Representative Ford’s Senate bid, made any precise forecast unpredictable.

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Politics Politics Feature

Et YouTube, Brute?

One of the most discussed developments of the current campaign for the open U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee has been last Friday’s encounter between Democrat Harold Ford Jr. and Republican Bob Corker on the parking lot of Wilson Air Services at the Memphis airport.

Video from the affair has gone around the world, literally — not just via network and cable newscasts but, notably, through the medium of cyperspace. The original footage of the event derived mainly from two sources — WMC-TV and WREG-TV, Memphis’ NBC and CBS affiliates, respectively. But various combinations and recombinations — short, long, and edited for effect — have made the rounds of many Web sites proper, most of the political blogs, and assorted e-mail networks. YouTube.com has virtually teemed with different takes.

The bottom line: Anybody whose curiosity had been whetted by news of the event has been able to find several different versions of it. And many, many have. CNN’s version of it was the single most-watched video on that cable network last Saturday.

Well, what did it show exactly? Opinions differ, largely according to the politics of the beholder, but another, equally interesting question is: What was the origin of the event?

It was not a random circumstance or a happenstance encounter: Be assured of that. Word had got out to most of the local news media well in advance that Ford or some surrogate would be on hand when Corker arrived at Wilson Air Services at 11 a.m. on Friday to announce proposals in the area of ethics. It was no secret, either, that these “proposals” coincided with various campaign charges unleashed by candidate Corker against candidate Ford and the candidate’s father, former congressman, now lobbyist, Harold Ford Sr.

Putting it plainly, media representatives who showed up at Wilson Air on Friday morning had every reason to suspect some act of one-upmanship by Ford or somebody representing his campaign. Just what that might be was the only mystery.

After filibustering with the press pack long enough to give his rival time to show up, Ford bounded over to Corker after he had exited his vehicle and voiced a greeting. The actual conversation, posturing and cross-talk condensed, came down to this:

Ford: It’s good to see you. I’d love to debate you on this Iraq thing and the fact that so many Republican senators now are coming around on the partition plan. In Memphis here you said I might be playing God with it, but now it looks like John Warner and even Kay Bailey Hutchinson, she, uh….

Corker: Uh huh. I came to talk about ethics, and I have a press conference, and I think it’s a true sign of desperation that you would pull your bus up while I’m having a press conference.

Ford: No sir, I can never find you when I’m in the state.

Corker: I was in Jackson last night, and I saw your …

Ford: Well, tell me, what do you think about this Iraq thing. I know you’re here to talk about my family. I thought you made a promise right after …

Corker: No, no, no. I’m here to talk about you, and this race, and you and I, and I’m going to do that right now. As a matter of fact, this is my press conference. Not yours. Okay?

And that was it. Corker went into a terminal to do his planned availability, and Ford chatted with the press a few minutes more.

Who won? At the scene, Ford clearly dominated proceedings with his quips, thrusts, and mugging as much as by his statements. It was his surprise attack, and he had the initiative. On TV, however, Corker’s resolute and terse termination of the encounter was the sort of image that may grow larger in the collective memory of the event. He had, besides, protocol on his side, and an air of maturity more in keeping with the public notion of what a senator is.

Indeed, Corker’s campaign team promptly dubbed the affair the “Memphis Meltdown” and claimed victory in as many press releases as they could repackage and turn out in the next 36 hours. That part of the blogosphere sympathetic with Corker (which these days includes several yellow-dog Democrats disgusted with what they see as Ford’s creeping conservatism) concurred, as did a good many bona fide neutrals.

Only … back to that question of what Ford had in mind. Clearly, if Corker had gotten flustered or defensive, Ford stood to reap huge dividends. Didn’t happen. Hence, the Corker camp’s euphoria at what campaign manager Tom Ingram called “a defining moment.”

But wait: Here’s a minority opinion, from one Richard Banks, a former editor of Memphis magazine, now a toiler on behalf of Southern Living in Birmingham:

“I don’t have any inside scoop on Ford’s intentions, but the video was ready-made for the Web. Now that more voters have broadband at home and at work, it’s easier for these videos to spread virally. Ford shows attitude and bravado in the video, which is ironic, considering now that public opinion has turned against the war, that the ‘tude is used to push an agenda that [Ford] has not been supportive of until now. My guess is that bravado appeals to the younger voters — the very audience this video was designed to reach.”

Hmmmm. Maybe. And as good a place as any to make the point that Junior’s base constituency is as much young white professionals as it is urban blacks. Arguably, more so. But for the apparent consensus that Corker kicked butt, Ford had an answer. Did he! On Sunday morning, news got around that Newsweek magazine had him on its cover, illustrating the title “Not Your Daddy’s Democrats.” The blurb continued, “Hungry to take back Congress, moderates like Harold Ford Jr. have the GOP running scared. Would a Democratic majority go wild or govern from the middle?”

As reassuring — even exalting — as that cover and the fulsome story within were to Ford and his partisans, it was a fresh acid bath on the already scalded psyche of liberal Democrats, whose attitude toward Ford has been, at best, on-again, off-again — the “on” phase tenuously linked to the knowledge that his victory in Tennessee could be the one that returns the Senate to Democratic control.

The polls? For now they are still going back and forth. It seems likely that this weekend’s climactic third debate between Ford and Corker in Nashville will go far toward settling things on November 7th.

Meanwhile, Representative Ford, who had maintained a cautious and ostensibly neutral distance from his brother Jake Ford‘s independent congressional race against Democratic nominee Steve Cohen and Republican Mark White, seemed to cross a line with unexpectedly strong criticism of Cohen.

It began when state senator Cohen, on a fund-raising trip to Nashville, checked in with members of the Legislative Plaza press corps and delivered himself of some typically outspoken observations about what he — honestly or conveniently or both — saw as the drag on Ford’s senatorial campaign. Cohen saw Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes” being overshadowed by the candidacy of brother Jake as well as by a speech given by Harold Ford Sr. in which the former congressman not only conflated a Harold Jr. rally with support for second son Jake but attacked Cohen in language that disturbed many who heard or read about it with its religious overtones.

“We’re from a Christian city here,” Ford Sr. had said at one point. “[Jake] doesn’t believe in legalizing marijuana. This man that’s running against Jake wants some sex shops running in downtown Memphis on a Sunday! That’s our religious holiday.”

After remarking on Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes,” Cohen told his audience of Nashville media, “For him to come this far and to have the effort to overreach, I guess, and to have his younger brother run in the 9th District, I think has hurt his campaign.”

Further, in a reference to Ford Sr.’s out-of-town residences: “The Ford machine used to have a lot of foot soldiers. … The top brass has moved away from the foot soldiers. It’s hard to be in touch with your foot soldiers when you’re on Fisher Island [Miami] or in the Hamptons.”

That prompted a press release in Representative Ford’s name, which said in part: “Now, it appears that state senator Steve Cohen and Mayor Bob Corker are singing from the same Ford family attack hymnal. I know that Bob Corker is attacking my family because he has come up short on ideas and answers in this campaign. I didn’t know that … Cohen was suffering from the same problem.”

The congressman’s statement also accused Cohen of support for gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legalization of marijuana, and “a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq.”

For the record, Cohen has denied favoring gay marriage, opposing only what he calls “constitutional tampering” on top of existing statutes outlawing it. He also introduced a bill last year to legalize the use of marijuana for strictly medical purposes.

“I really think that if Harold Ford Jr. had run with me on a ticket, it would have been a ‘dream team,'” Cohen mused last week in Nashville.

So much for that dream. The reality was that, with the advent of early voting last Wednesday, Ford Sr. had personally taken charge of a Get-Out-the-Vote drive on behalf of both of his candidate sons, routing voters to polling sites via a fleet of buses and other vehicles.

Republican White, the third candidate in the congressional race, has meanwhile kept active, conceding nothing and maintaining dreams of his own for a significant share of the vote in the inner city.

Indeed, “Realizing the Dream,” the title of a panel on overcoming poverty that White was scheduled to appear on this week at Olivet Fellowship Baptist Church (along with Martin Luther King III), could serve as the GOP candidate’s campaign slogan as well. White recently cited a poll (from the Silver Star News, a newspaper with an African-American reader base) showing him with a potential 19 percent share of the black vote.

Though White has addressed economic issues (and went so far as to chide President Bush for not touring the inner city with him on the president’s recent fund-raising appearance here for Corker), his basic appeal both to his would-be black constituency and his predominantly white Republican base has been along social and moral lines.

In a recent fund-raising letter, White attacked “leftist” Cohen along the same lines as had Representative Ford, accusing the state senator of having promoted gay marriage and being responsible for a “bill to legalize drugs in Tennessee,” among other things. The letter took opponent Jake Ford to task as well, citing the latter’s GED degree, “no known background of any kind,” and alleged need for “on the job training” if elected.

The equal-opportunity bashing reflects White’s need — acknowledged in Republican circles — for Cohen and Ford to break even while White holds the line against attrition of the GOP vote and gains at least a modicum of the church-based black vote.

See also Viewpoint,“Color and Politics,” .

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tightening Up

The difference between GOP senatorial nominee Bob Corker and his Republican primary opponents, Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary, was in the quality and frequency of his advertising vis-à-vis theirs. For a solid month, Corker, a self-made multi-millionaire with healthy backing from his party’s establishment, was able to introduce himself to the state’s TV viewers as an accomplished mayor, an adroit businessman, and a friendly, somewhat countrified fellow with an extra-nice mom.

Poor Bryant and Hilleary, both running unimaginative and negative campaigns, might not have been able to compete even with equivalent financing, but the fact is, they didn’t have enough campaign money to counter the television onslaught, and they fell steadily behind. Ironically, their last chance came in the last two weeks of the campaign when, for reasons yet to be explained, Corker (who was well ahead in the polls at the time) took to attacking his opponents with advertising that was not only negative but demonstrably misleading.

Bryant and Hilleary counter-attacked, pointing out that neutral observers expressly belied the content of Corker’s attacks and considered them unfair. They lost anyhow, but with another month and another million apiece, the two hapless ex-congressmen might have been able to make up some ground.

The experience is relevant to what has happened to Corker in his current campaign against Democrat Harold Ford Jr.

For several weeks, as the general-election effort against Ford got under way, the former Chattanooga mayor ran TV commercials virtually nonstop — but not the sort he had used to establish himself as a likable, trustworthy figure in the primary. Rather, he filled the airwaves with negative attack ads, like his last ones against Bryant and Hillary.

It was almost as though he had established a groove — a rut, rather — and couldn’t get out of it. Worse, Corker himself didn’t figure in any of them except as a late-appearing figure whose voice-over, in accordance with Federal Election Commission regulations, “approved” the ads. Worse yet, the ads were as misleading as those against Bryant and Hilleary had been. Worst of all, his new opponent, Ford, had the money to compete with him on the airwaves.

Ford was in the attack mode, too, and his own ads were no model of fairness or accuracy, either. But he was in them, an undeniably telegenic and persuasive presence, and that set him apart from his opponent. Corker’s early lead evaporated, and Ford caught up and began to race ahead.

But wait! In the last week or two, there was Corker with his doting cutie-pie mom again, and here comes another commercial featuring the Bobster himself, talking regular-folks-common-sense talk about those blowhards in government and how a straight-arrow businessman like himself could straighten out all the stuff they’ve got wrong.

This reversion to best-foot-forward politics is the apparent result of a shakeup in the Corker campaign. Tom Ingram, a veteran operative who has been serving as Senator Lamar Alexander‘s chief of staff, is the new campaign manager, taking over from Ben Mitchell, and the new ad strategy is first fruit of that change.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the bleeding in the Corker campaign seems to have been stanched, and now he and Ford are now trading leads in this or that poll.

Undeniably, Ford has momentum — the result of his star quality and campaigning skills as well as what could turn out to be a national buyers’ remorse reaction to the Bush administration.

But, though the fact seems to have escaped most observers in the national media, Ford has critics within his own party — most of them on the left, to be sure, and not nearly as numerous as his detractors imagine but, arguably, influential beyond their numbers and, inarguably, out of love with their party’s nominal standard-bearer.

The reason? What they see as Ford’s apostasy from Democratic Party precepts. This includes his votes with the Republicans on such thematic/social issues as the flag-burning and marriage amendments and Congress’ mandated medical review in the Terri Schiavo case, economic issues like the bankruptcy bill and extension of the Bush tax cuts, and a plethora of national-policy concerns, such as Ford’s continuing support of the Iraq war effort and his go-along votes on a number of national-security issues.

Two of the latter occurred within the last week, as the Memphis congressman cast yea votes on two administration-backed bills — one extending broad authority to the president to define torture as it applies to captured enemy aliens, the other granting the chief executive the power, in effect, to decree warrantless surveillance. On the former bill, Ford was one of 34 House Democrats to vote as he did, on the latter one of 18.

Especially given apparent popular disenchantment with the Iraq war and with President Bush’s conduct of both it and the war on terror generally, Ford’s actions reignited the always-simmering discontent among his hard-core Democratic critics, who consider Republican attack ads on Ford as too “liberal” to be somewhere between an unintentional irony and a bad joke.

Not to talk too far out of school, but several indisputably Republican and/or conservative sources acknowledge privately the possibility that Ford’s increasingly conservative rhetoric may be more than election-year posturing.

Said one GOP loyalist and erstwhile Bryant supporter: “Harold Ford Jr. may be as conservative as it is possible for an African-American Democrat to be.”

Tellingly, Ford’s campaign paraphernalia does not feature the word “Democrat,” and, in a campaign that has focused unusual attention on the longtime Republican preserve of East Tennessee, seems almost to have proscribed use of the word on the stump. Even in hometown Memphis, he told a headquarters crowd back in April, “I’m not a Democrat running up to Washington yelling ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.'”

Another issue — mainly of concern to local Democrats but important enough to have attracted attention on the editorial page of the Nashville Tennessean — concerns the current 9th District congressional trifecta, in which Democratic nominee Steve Cohen is opposed both by Republican nominee Mark White and by “independent” Jake Ford, the congressman’s brother who says that, if elected, he would caucus with House Democrats.

But in a recent radio interview Jake Ford echoed his brother’s political ecumenism somewhat. Noting that he was “running without a party affiliation,” the younger Ford characterized his race as being “about people politics, not party politics,” and he added, “All too often people want you to get wound up in the issues Democrats want you to hear about or Republicans want you to hear about. I just want to represent the people.”

Representative Ford himself continues to maintain a neutral posture vis-à-vis Cohen and brother Jake. The congressman’s hesitancy has permitted the flourishing of persistent rumors that the Ford brothers are operating their campaigns in concert. Other than the common support of both by proud papa Harold Ford Sr., there would seem to be little evidence for such an assumption.

An equally persistent rumor — also unconfirmed and unlikely — has it that Jake Ford’s continued pursuit of the congressional seat might be, from the Ford clan’s point of view, conditional and subject to negotiation.

In any case, Ford’s Democratic critics cite Representative Ford’s ambiguous attitude toward the three-way congressional race as yet another impediment to their acceptance of his own candidacy. A refrain has begun to recur in the posting of a hard corps of anti-Ford bloggers — most of them in Shelby County but some also posting out of Nashville and elsewhere.

Why, Democratic skeptics in the blogosphere say, should we put aside our doubts and support Harold Ford Jr. as the party nominee when he won’t do the same for Cohen?

Ford defenders among longtime Democratic partisans are increasingly advancing another question: What’s the big deal on Ford’s credentials? they ask. Worst-case scenario: that a Senator Harold Ford Jr. would be an old-fashioned Southern Democratic conservative of the sort people in these parts once took for granted. So?

Meanwhile, Republican White, apparently deciding to take a step away from GOP orthodoxy, chided the president for not responding to White’s suggestion of a joint tour of inner-city Memphis during President Bush’s fund-raising stopover here for Corker last week. “Why he will not follow me there is beyond me,” said White, who is making a point of pitching for traditionally Democratic African-American votes.

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Politics Politics Feature

Brother Act

Say this about Harold Ford Sr.: The former 9th District congressman hasn’t lost his appetite for political combat. He made that clear last week when he accepted co-billing with his son Harold Ford Jr. at a Friday-morning rally at the Park Place headquarters of the current congressman, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

A “reception” for the two Harold Fords, it was called, and it drew a goodly crowd. With some time to kill, the senior Ford shared some thinking about his son’s campaign as he awaited the arrival of Representative Ford’s campaign bus. (Yes, if earlier that morning you were watching hometown idol Justin Timberlake on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, that was the selfsame bus that just happened to have pulled up behind the stage, flashing its Ford For Senate logo before the eyes of the nation.)

Nor has the old warrior lost his sense of strategy. It was clearly a mistake, the former congressman said, for his son’s Senate rival, Republican nominee Bob Corker, to have invited President Bush to Memphis for a fund-raiser next week — the second such occasion in Tennessee, following a public embrace between the two the week before last in Nashville.

“That’s the trouble with those millionaires. They don’t want to spend any money, especially none of their own,” Ford Sr. — a seven-figure type himself these days as a well-paid Florida-based consultant — said of the former Chattanooga mayor, an entrepreneur whose considerable fortune has derived from low-income housing projects.

As the elder Ford explained it, Corker’s misplaced frugality was making him over-dependent on a president with sagging polls and presumably frayed coattails. As a piece of analysis, it made sense. It was certainly true that his son’s campaign seemed to be spending more money than his rival’s just now — mainly on a recurring and well-crafted series of TV ads that made the most of the younger Ford’s mediagenic looks and reassuring stage presence.

Those commercials — the most recent one made in a church! — featured the same right-of-center rap (pro-Patriot Act, pro-curbs on immigration, etc.) that has driven the left wing of the congressman’s party bananas. One effect of this approach has seemingly been to prevent Corker, fearful of being out-flanked on his right, from coming to the political center as newly minted party nominees usually do.

The audience for Representative Ford’s typically rousing and generalized remarks at the Friday-morning rally included a generous collection of Democrats — senior citizens, business types, Midtown Democrats, suburban types, etc.

Subsequent to the event, the impression got out in some quarters that it had been an affair for College Democrats (it wasn’t — though they, like other Democrats, had been invited and responded) in which, according to a widely circulated e-mail from a University of Memphis student: “Apparently, after Junior was done speaking, his fucktard brother got a chance to speak to the volunteer base that we acquired for Junior.”

Hearsay of this sort begat further hearsay, and soon an honest blogger or two had picked up on a gathering outrage among supporters of 9th District Democratic nominee Steve Cohen that the “fucktard brother” (i.e., independent congressional candidate Jake Ford) had benefited from what had now, in some tellings, become a “handoff” at the rally from Representative Ford.

Actually, nothing of the sort occurred. Jake Ford had been no more than one member of the large and milling crowd. He had no role in the proceedings, which ended after his congressman brother left to go join the Rev. Ben Hooks for the dedication of a Whitehaven Job Corps center in Hooks’ honor.

If Jake Ford “worked the crowd” afterward (as a revised version of the ever-shifting story had it), then so did anybody else who had been in the throng. It was just a case of a large gathering breaking off into isolated conversational clumps as people made their way out the door.

That so much was later made of a non-event merely served to underscore the existence of a very real schism in local Democratic ranks — one that was bound to be exacerbated by Jake Ford’s own claim in a radio interview this week.

Asked by a caller on a show hosted by Jennings Bernard why Representative Ford had not publicly endorsed him, Jake Ford maintained that his brother had in fact done so and, to further that contention, availed himself of the same rumors that were already in play concerning last week’s Friday-morning rally.

“Quite simply, he [Representative Ford] endorses me every day,” said Jake Ford. “I endorse him every day.” As for why his brother hadn’t “officially come out,” Ford said, “I think most people should realize he does endorse me. I was just with him on Friday at his campaign headquarters for a rally. Make no mistake about it, he’s my brother, and I love the guy. It’s just two different races. He’s running for the Senate and I’m running for Congress.”

The bottom line was that now people were prepared to believe what they wanted to believe. When Jake Ford’s radio remarks are carefully parsed, they don’t authenticate the fact of an “endorsement” that, ultimately, could only come from Representative Ford himself. But they certainly put Ford Jr. in the position of having to speak to the issue himself, something he ultimately will be under great — perhaps unavoidable — pressure to do.

Understandably, proponents of state senator Cohen are vexed at Representative Ford for the statements of neutrality he has made so far concerning the race to succeed him. They, too, tend to regard the congressman’s posture as indicative of de facto support for brother Jake.

In the long run, some believe, that feeling could grow in Democratic circles, even at the statewide level, and cost Representative Ford enough votes at the margin to threaten his chances in the Senate race. Right now, with Corker running like a dry creek and losing momentum in all the polls to Ford, it may not seem so to the congressman.

And his ex-congressman father has made no secret of his intention to pull out all the stops for both of his sons.

Meanwhile, Cohen continues to be regarded as the front-runner. He, after all, is his party’s nominee, made what has to be regarded as a substantial primary showing in black precincts (17 percent overall), is regarded by many Democrats, especially liberal ones, as a longtime champion of their causes, and even has boosters in Republican circles.

That last fact, based on some isolated conservative positions (e.g., on gun control and the death penalty) as well as a general admiration for his legislative service and tenacity, is cause for some concern in the camp of Republican nominee Mark White, who has devoted much attention in his own campaign to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. It is areas like those where he perceives Cohen to have possible weaknesses.

In an address to the College Democrats at the University of Memphis Monday night, Cohen maintained that “both of my opponents” hoped to undermine him in such areas. He defended his opposition to constitutional amendments against gay marriage — jesting, however, that he was firmly opposed to “intergalactic” marriage.

Cohen told the College Democrats that Jake Ford in his radio appearance had implied Cohen was a homosexual, a racist, and “a crook.” In all fairness, the first two allegations derived more from innuendoes and more from callers than from anything Ford said. But candidate Ford did seem to be doing his best to nudge home the last charge.

“I think he’s stepped over the line a couple of times, and we still cannot get the attorney general to be responsive to some of the allegations that we have become aware of pertaining to some dealings that he has had himself,” Ford said on Bernard’s show without elaborating further.

The very fact that he said something like that was taken by many Cohen supporters as ample confirmation that Jake Ford was intimately bound up with the appearance of a new Web site called CrookedCohen.org, which makes the very unspecified allegations alluded to by Ford. Blogger Derek Haire (rivercitymud.com) painstakingly traced that site and Jake Ford’s own campaign site back to the same IP address.

No sign, by the way, of Ophelia Ford, unseen on the campaign trail during this entire season but still, for demographic and party reasons, the favorite in the District 29 state Senate race over the relentlessly campaigning Republican Terry Roland.

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The Big One

Early voting for the August 3rd Shelby County election ballot has been brisk, and the news has been good for some candidates — for example, state senator Steve Cohen, whose 9th District congressional candidacy is surely profiting from a disproportionate turnout of white Democrats at Poplar Corridor and East Memphis sites (See also Politics, p. 15). The same figures may not be so comforting to other candidates — like Division 5 General Sessions judge Betty Thomas, a vigorous campaigner who, as a first-time judicial candidate, won her seat on the bench eight years ago in a multi-candidate field. She now finds herself matched one-on-one against newcomer Evan Nahmias, who could well draw heavily from the same precincts.

Many a presumed sure-thing outcome could be imperiled if the demographics of that early-voting trend continue to and through Election Day, which will still be the occasion for most of the voting. Rarely has so much advance fear and trembling attended an election as is the case with the mammoth August 3rd ballot, with its well-over-100 races to decide no matter where one lives in Shelby County. Everybody, it seems, has heard the horror stories about misadventures, delays, and errors connected with the new Diebold machines that are being employed for the first time (see “Vote Early and Often,” p. 25). Such problems, along with long lines at the polls, could well be a disincentive for working-class voters who don’t have the available time to vote at odd hours or endure lengthy delays.

Other factors that could affect the voting include two big races of transcendent interest. One is the 9th District congressional race where presumed leader Cohen faces a field of 14 other Democrats, four or five considered capable of catching up or coming close with a final spurt. The other is the Republican U.S. Senate primary, in which both local longtime favorite Ed Bryant, a former 7th District congressman, and newly ascendant Bob Corker, the deep-pocketed former mayor of Chattanooga, will be working at revving up their strength in Shelby County. (A third candidate, former 4th District congressman Van Hilleary, was largely confining his efforts to Middle and East Tennessee.)

Local Republicans had been at least as grateful as was Democrat Harold Ford Jr. in April for the last-minute withdrawal of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rosalind Kurita, a state senator from Clarksville. The departing 9th District congressman thereby became this party’s de facto nominee and could husband his resources for the fall instead of working overtime to boost primary turnout.

That fact meant that Republicans, who have predominated among local countywide officeholders since the advent of partisan elections in the mid-’90s, had a fighting chance to hold on to their gains against what has been proclaimed for two full decades as an inevitable demographic tide favoring Democrats. To be sure, a steady out-migration of the white (and black) middle class had, at least in theory, diluted the Republican share of the total Shelby County vote. But the GOP has so far managed to prevail, at least in countywide elections, by superior turnout on Election Day.

It won’t be so this year, insists veteran Democratic activist David Upton, who points to a contrary trend that has seen black inner-city turnout rise somewhat disproportionately in city-wide and presidential elections.

Jackson Baker

Happily locked in a Wharton sandwich recently was judicial candidate Janet Lansky Shipman, endorsed by the county mayor and his wife, lawyer Ruby Wharton

“[D]isgraceful and shameful disgraces … ”

Turnout is only one factor to reckon with. A number of races seem unusually responsive to the nature of the coattails that this or that candidate happens to be attached to. This is especially the case with the ostensibly nonpartisan judicial races.

As an example, former prosecutor and current county personnel director Janet Lansky Shipman, one of four unusually qualified candidates in the race for the open Division 7 Criminal Court seat, was boosted by an unusual twofer. Hers was the only radio ad of the political season that could legitimately summon up the spirit of the King, Elvis Presley himself, who had famously purchased his threads at the Lansky family’s Beale St. clothing store. And she also claimed support from the mayor — Shelby County chief executive A C Wharton, who pointedly endorsed her late in the campaign.

Not bad, although rival Lee Coffee, an assistant district attorney, also has a number of high-profile endorsements, and the two other candidates, attorney Larry H. Nance and federal public defender Doris Holt, also are well regarded.

This year’s judicial races were unusually dependent on other people’s say-so, with two bar associations, two political parties, innumerable ad hoc groups, and several private individuals offering up a confusing mélange of slates and endorsement tickets.

In previous years, judicial contests, conducted according to official canons that would have put the Marquis of Queensberry to sleep, had been staid, formal, and not terribly revealing. But this year’s have been characterized by an unprecedented degree of invective, involving not only quarreling blocs of backers but intramural animosities within political organizations and occasional name-calling between the competing candidates. The most glaring instance of the latter came early on when Deep Throat-era prosecutor Larry Parrish decided that his political comeback effort required a full-scale verbal assault on his opponent, Division 8 Circuit Court judge D’Army Bailey, a former Berkeley radical turned establishmentarian.

Parrish contrived to append to a routine legal pleading a direct attack on Bailey, an occasional actor in movies (including The People v. Larry Flynt, a biopic about the publisher of Hustler magazine). “As part of my campaign,” Parrish suggested in a confusing (and perhaps confused) passage of his affidavit, a link was made from Bailey to the pimp/hustler problem manifested in another Memphis-made movie (apparently last year’s Hustle & Flow, which the thespian/judge had in fact not appeared in). Said Parrish: “I will reiterate how disappointed I was in being told that in May 2006 Judge Bailey appeared in public (at a Memphis In May event) wearing a T-shirt on which the word ‘Mafia’ was printed and garbed in flashy jewelry typical of Memphis pimps, giving dignity and legitimacy to two of the more disgraceful and shameful disgraces this city must bear.”

Yes, this really happened. Bailey’s only recorded response at the time was to say, “This guy is going to make the lawyers love me.” And, sure enough, the incumbent, who had always taken his lumps in annual Bar Association ratings, easily outdid Parrish in this year’s published evaluation of candidates by members of the Memphis bar.

But nonfederal judges in Shelby County are elected, and it clearly would take more than approbation by lawyers, official or otherwise, to put a candidate over in this year’s highly politicized atmosphere (For a commentary on judges and politics in the context of the election process, see retired Judge Robert Lanier‘s Viewpoint column, “Judging the Justices,” p. 17). Politics being politics, personal characteristics count for something. One of the most closely watched races is that for Chancellor, Part 2, which matches incumbent Arnold Goldin, well-regarded across partisan lines, against newcomer Carlee McCullough, currently a contract-compliance officer for the city of Memphis. Both contenders possess more than their share of charm, but Goldin is more heavily credentialed.

Gale Jones Carson, head of this year’s Democratic countywide coordinated campaign, discounts the importance of credentials, noting that many of the judges now officiating in Shelby County lacked a lengthy resume but have performed well once on the bench. It’s the ultimate learn-by-doing job, she maintains.

Credentials were certainly not the only issue back in June, when a lawyer-dominated screening committee proposed a slate of judicial endorsees to the Shelby County Democratic Party’s executive committee. That meeting descended into chaos as epithets were exchanged and several of the screening committee’s recommendations were undone.

In many cases, race was suspected as a motive. Committee members and onlookers at the rowdy Democratic endorsement meeting resorted frequently to accusations of that sort — and that debate continued in the public prints, or at least in the blog portion of it, where the debate continues to rage.

Jackson Baker

Judicial-race rivals Deborah Henderson (left) and Regina Morrison Newman (right) flank Charter Commission candidate Sharon Webb.

Blog Warfare, Internal Threats, and a Showdown or Two

An intriguing footnote to that Democratic meeting: One of the interested bystanders was lawyer Richard Fields, who was overheard observing to longstanding party man (and fellow lawyer) David Cocke: “Y’all ought to get rid of Del Gill.” Gill is the professionally obstreperous party gadfly whose sting usually ends up being turned on himself. At that moment, he was interrupting proceedings every 30 seconds with this or that motion or complaint. When Cocke merely shrugged and said, “He keeps getting elected!” Fields persisted. “Y’all ought to kick him off the committee.” What made that exchange both interesting and ironic was that Fields, a maverick in his own right, had been the only committee member kicked off in recent memory — for having been one of Republican Terry Roland‘s litigators in legal actions opposing Democrat Ophelia Ford‘s election last year in a special state Senate race.

In any case, Fields was not through with the matter. He promptly circulated copies of a letter to members of the Memphis bar containing his own judicial endorsements — as well as embarrassing information about the professional and personal affairs of candidates he disapproved of. (This exhibit, too, may be perused atMemphisFlyer.com.) Fields’ letter galvanized blogger Thaddeus Matthews into turning the tables on several of Fields’ picks, outing some of their own previously closeted skeletons. Nor did Fields himself escape retribution, as Matthews’ blog went on to charge the lawyer himself with grievous private misdeeds. (In this Google-happy age, readers interested in the further details of this and related controversies will have no trouble locating them on the Internet.)

Republicans, meanwhile, experienced their own internal frets. One of them concerned the activities of one Angelo Cobrasci (see “Right of Right,” p. 21), who has displaced longtime party maverick Jerry Cobb as the chief irritant to the local GOP establishment. But whereas Cobb has long been considered a nitpicker, Cobrasci was suspected of wanting to turn a blowtorch on the party’s thin-skinned sensibilities. Not only was he a campaign manager for the independent gubernatorial candidacy of Minuteman leader Carl “Two Feathers” Whitaker (whose earlier effort to run as a Republican had been cold-shouldered by the party brass), but Cobrasci, as impresario of the Shelby County Coalition of Conservative Republicans, saw fit to put out his own sample ballot of endorsement choices in competition with the official Republican one.

Although there are big-ticket races for governor, senator, and Congress on the ballot, an unusual amount of attention has been focused on the District 5 race for the Shelby County Commission. That race, for the seat being vacated by Republican Bruce Thompson, features Democrat Steve Mulroy versus Republican Jane Pierotti, and it is regarded as decisive in the matter of which party controls the commission. (Republicans have predominated over Democrats by a 7-6 majority for the last several terms.) A victory for Mulroy would reverse that ratio.

In a year’s time, Mulroy, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has become widely known for his involvement in the cause of voting-machine reform, in local attempts to salvage the Libertyland amusement park, and on behalf of Ophelia Ford in her attempt to hang on to the District 29 state Senate seat. Pierotti has the advantage of a notable last name (hers by virtue of a since-dissolved marriage), and she is known as a successful business consultant. Turnout will clearly loom large in the outcome in a district which voted 63 percent for Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

Jackson Baker

Henri Brooks is wearing more than one candidate hat this year.

One other commission race of interest is that for Position 2, in District 2, between Democrat Henri Brooks and Republican Novella Smith Arnold. This race was reviewed in last week’s Politics column, which (mea culpa) omitted the salient fact that Brooks is simultaneously running for reelection to her District 92 seat in the state House of Representatives (See Editorial, p. 16). Though clearly an underdog, Arnold is well known as a longtime social activist and former broadcaster and has some degree of support among Democrats. Her chances were further boosted over the last week by endorsements ranging from The Commercial Appeal to the Stonewall Democrats, a gay/lesbian activist group.

Other Important Races

Governor In theory, both parties have gubernatorial primaries on the ballot, but for the Democrats that’s really just a figure of speech. And the Republican race, too, is largely pro forma.

The GOP party brass didn’t get down on their knees and plead with first-term state senator Jim Bryson of Franklin to forgo his reelection race and run for governor without making sure he would have such support as can be mustered up. (Lawyer Mark Albertini somehow didn’t grasp this. Chattanoogan Albertini, who was arrested at a Knoxville intersection last weekend for campaigning while intoxicated, has been the most active of six other Republicans who are at least nominal opponents for Bryson.)

Jackson Baker

GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Bryson greets a small band of the faithful

But one had to wonder about Bryson’s establishment support when he came to town on a fly-around a couple of weeks ago and the only press that was at the Wilson Air terminal to greet him was … moi. And the only reason I was there was because someone from the state Democratic Party in Nashville called me up with an advance retort to Bryson. Nobody acting on Bryson’s behalf ever got around to notifying the Memphis media he was going to be here.

Governor Phil Bredesen, on the other hand, is always well advanced and attended to by Democrats when he comes to town, and not just because he’s an incumbent. The last Zogby poll showed him up over Bryson, 58 percent to 22 percent. For the record, the old warhorse John Jay Hooker is one of three nominal primary opponents for the governor.

Estimated financial resources on hand show $4.5 million for Bredesen, $500,000 for Bryson, and zilch for anybody else.

U.S. Senate Hooker has his (somewhat frayed) hat in the Democratic Senate primary, too, along with four others. But only one of those four, Memphis congressman Ford, is really in the race. For all practical purposes, Ford has the nomination in hand.

There are enough Republican candidates to make a foursome at bridge, but the unknown Tate Harrison will just have to be the dummy. Active hands are held by former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker and former congressmen Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary. The well-heeled Corker probably has most of the trumps. (See recent Flyer story, “Senate 2006: It’s Crunch Time!” in “Political Beat” at MemphisFlyer.com.)

Shelby County Mayor — The simple facts of the matter are that Democrat A C Wharton is the closest thing to an invincible candidate in Shelby County government, and though mayoral opponent John Willingham, the Republican nominee, can make a substantial case for mismanagement and duplicity by a generation of “good ole boys,” the simple arithmetic of politics (as well as a charm quotient that is unexcelled by anybody else running locally) weighs heavily in favor of Wharton, who has been dexterous in distancing himself from Willingham’s bill of particulars.

Sheriff — Incumbent Mark Luttrell is a smooth customer and a genius at public relations. The former chief of county corrections, who seems to attend every available political venue, makes a convincing case that he has rendered both the county jail and the corrections center more efficient at less cost and has removed the jail from federal supervision. He is also quick enough on his feet to have disengaged himself from the contentious issue of privatization.

Surprisingly smooth in his own right, Democrat Reginald French makes a plausible criticism that Luttrell is concerned more with “locking them up” than with crime-prevention per se or with intervention programs. It remains a fact that Luttrell has very serious crossover support from influential Democrats and that French has some baggage he hasn’t quite disposed of — notably a tire-slashing incident several years ago. Deputy John Harvey, who has uncovered beaucoup voting abuses, is running as a write-in and could make waves.

District Attorney General — Even more so than Luttrell, incumbent Republican Bill Gibbons has across-the-board support that includes several prominent Democrats. Gail Mathes, the Democratic nominee, is making a spirited challenge, however — one based on what she sees as ineffective law enforcement behind a public-relations facade.

Juvenile Court Clerk — One of the most watched races features a rematch between Republican incumbent Steve Stamson and Democratic challenger Shep Wilbun, a former clerk who was defeated by Stamson four years ago.

Stamson is well liked and respected, and his claims of running an efficient, less costly operation ring true, but Wilbun acquired a martyr’s mantle, especially in the African-American community, after a 2002 election-year prosecution for “official misconduct” was dropped, presumably for lack of evidence. Stamson has to hope that a recent burst of Tennessee Waltz publicity about malfeasance by some of Wilbun’s former employees will curb some of the Democrat’s momentum.

Shelby County Clerk — Republican Debbie Stamson, wife of the aforementioned Steve Stamson and a longtime deputy administrator under outgoing clerk Jayne Creson, has Creson’s blessing and a presumed edge over gracious Democrat Otis Jackson, who has promised, if elected, to consider re-employing Stamson.

Circuit Court ClerkAnother Republican with an apparent leg up is incumbent clerk Jimmy Moore, who has the support of the Democratic Ford clan (county commissioner Joe Ford Sr. is his campaign chairman!) against one Roderic Ford (no relation), who is widely regarded as little more than a stand-in for maverick Democrat Del Gill‘s personal ambitions.

[image-5 ]

Criminal Court Clerk The issue between GOP incumbent Bill Key and Democratic challenger Vernon Johnson Sr. will be resolved by turnout numbers, pure and simple.

Probate Court ClerkTurnout will also be a key factor in this race between longtime antagonists (who have had issues both in the courts and at the ballot box). Republican incumbent Chris Thomas‘ incumbency will be weighed against Sondra Becton‘s lengthy former experience as an assistant in the office.

Register — This nondescript (if, like other clerkships, well-paying) job will most likely come down to turnout, though incumbent Republican Tom Leatherwood, who is opposed by Democrat Coleman Thompson, boasts that he has reduced overhead in an office that is, in any case, run on the basis of fees collected, not out of the county’s general fund.

Juvenile Court Judge — This race has been a dogfight between four of the five candidates. City judge Jayne Chandler has been largely a no-show (though she did pick up the endorsement of TV judge Joe Brown, a former Criminal Court judge). The favorite is outgoing Republican state senator Curtis Person, who has served for some years as a chief aide to retiring Judge Kenneth Turner. Person, whose friendships range across party lines, is backed by Turner and has the local GOP’s endorsement, as well. His chief competition may come from Democratic endorsee Veronica Coleman, the former U.S. attorney who has crossover potential herself, although another city judge, Earnestine Hunt Dorse, aided by the capable campaign efforts of her husband, longtime activist Fred Dorse, has significant support, too — especially in the black community. Not to be overlooked either is lawyer William Winchester, who, along with African-Americans Coleman and Dorse, has levied reasoned complaints about several issues that all these candidates perceive as incompletely addressed by the court, like its recent tendency to remand more and more juvenile cases to one of the county’s criminal courts.

Jackson Baker

Juvenile Court judicial candidate Earnestine Hunt Dorse (left) with friends

(Note: For more complete information on these and other races on the August 3rd ballot — including those for the Charter Commission — consult “Political Beat” at

MemphisFlyer.com, where updates will appear until Election Day.)

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Senate 2006: It’s Crunch Time!

The Contenders in the Stretch

One of the strangest U.S. Senate races in the annals of Tennessee is coming down to the wire on August 3rd, in a three-way Republican primary that will determine who will end up challenging Democrat Harold Ford Jr. Conveniently for the Memphis congressman, Ford’s primary opponent, state senator Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville, dropped out just before the withdrawal deadline in April.

Meanwhile, Memphian Ford, who has represented the 9th Congressional District since 1996, continues to reap campaign contributions and unprecedented national media attention as he watches the Republican stretch drive, one in which former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker seems to be pulling away from two ex-congressmen — Ed Bryant, formerly of Tennessee’s 7th District, and Van Hilleary, who represented the 4th District.

Consistent with their former bailiwicks, Bryant is strongest in West Tennessee, though he also claims strength in Knoxville and in the Tri-Cities area of the state’s northeastern corner, while Hilleary seems to have greater strength in Middle and East Tennessee. Both, however, have watched more or less helplessly as the well-heeled Corker has put on a media blitz that their relatively cash-poor campaigns have not been able to match.

Unlike his GOP opponents, Corker can seemingly afford to manifest himself on the airwaves anytime and anywhere. During one recent week, Bryant, whose campaign featured a restrictive immigration policy early on, tried to capitalize on the then red-hot issue by going to the Texas border and arranging a conference call with the statewide media. Corker, however, had beaten him to it. For a solid week, a well-produced TV commercial played in every Tennessee media market, showing the Chattanoogan articulating his immigration views with a fenced-in section of the Texas-Mexico boundary serving as his backdrop. Bryant, by contrast, was at the mercy of whatever free media might come his way.

But at least Bryant was making the effort. By mid-May, just as Corker’s advertising barrage was getting under way, Hilleary, the onetime leader in the Republican race, had largely stopped campaigning in West Tennessee. In a public “Dear Ed” letter, he extended the olive branch to opponent Bryant and proposed that the two mount a joint stop-Corker movement: “Let’s come together for the good of the cause — running hard on our own merits and ‘focusing our fire’ only on the candidate who does not share our mutual conservative philosophy, Bob Corker.”

Simultaneously, Hilleary’s campaign people were letting it be known that they were counting on Bryant to hold off Corker in West Tennessee, where, they admitted candidly, they were at a serious disadvantage, both financially and organizationally. Some of Bryant’s chief backers acknowledged that their man had similar problems in the eastern part of the state, where they hoped Hilleary could provide something of a buffer.

“All the latest polls show me with a two-to-one advantage,” Corker said during a stopover in Memphis last week. “That’s a big difference from 60 days ago,” he said with a wink, acknowledging that he had been just as far behind the others back then. Tellingly, in a brief rally with his supporters at his East Memphis headquarters, Corker had not deigned even to mention his two GOP rivals.

“We haven‘t reached the pondscum level yet.”

It had been otherwise with Bryant only days before, when he confided his thoughts to the faithful at the opening of his Poplar Avenue headquarters. Corker’s rise in the polls, stemming from a series of TV spots that had been impossible to miss for anyone who watched even a little television, was the launching point for what Bryant said to say:

“We knew that $4 or $5 million could buy a lot of name recognition, which it has. It’s inevitable that he has taken a bump in this race,” he began. And then Bryant offered reassuring words to his troops. Suggesting that opponent Hilleary might be on his last legs: “Our benchmark poll showed that Van’s support was very soft, and, basically, Bob has rented Bob’s support. Our support is hard, and it’s going nowhere.”

Bryant went on: “It’s amazing that Bob has spent that kind of money and doesn’t have this race wrapped up!”

Bryant deviated from the subject of Corker to talk about his own TV commercial, just then about to make its debut. The ad, when it appears, will emphasize Bryant’s past as an instructor at West Point and his years as U.S. attorney in Tennessee’s Western District. Referring to Bryant as “a conservative leader we can trust,” the ad’s anonymous voice-over concludes with an extraordinary claim: “Ed Bryant will secure our borders. And win the war on terror.”

Bryant’s people murmured their approval that he’s actually begun to compete with Corker on TV, and a burst of excited applause ensued.

Then it was back to the subject of Corker, whose sudden burst in the polls may be the immediate pretext for Bryant’s focus. But the fact is, Bryant’s campaign has never deviated from its preoccupation with the ex-Chattanooga mayor who made a fortune by constructing affordable housing for people with modest incomes, then waged and lost a Senate campaign in 1994 before serving as finance commissioner in the first term of former Republican governor Don Sundquist.

Corker’s mayoralty came next, and, though he and various others regard it as having been successful, Bryant and, to a lesser extent, Hilleary have done their best to undermine that view. In Bryant’s case, not a day has gone by for months — literally — without an attack on Corker’s bona fides as a conservative or even as a reputable executive. Many days see several such attacks, but one in particular goes out without fail, day after day after day, to the state media and to Bryant’s network of supporters and prospective voters.

This is the “Daily Fraud Watch” e-mail, which, as of Monday, had been distributed for 145 consecutive days, virtually unchanged since the day when it first circulated — referring to several unnamed individuals who served in Chattanooga’s city government when Corker was mayor and have since been charged with a variety of derelictions, including some indictable offenses, and come under fire from Corker’s mayoral successor. (No evidence has ever been adduced in the e-mails that would link Corker to any of these former employees.)

Bryant, as one observant blogger noted months ago after seeing him for the first time at a forum, looks distinguished and, well, senatorial, especially now that his still-boyish good looks have begun to gray over. His personal integrity is unquestioned, and he is, as all who know him can attest, the very incarnation of the term “nice guy.” (Indeed, as one of the House “managers” of the Clinton impeachment in 1998, he drew the assignment of interrogating Monica Lewinsky and, in the judgment of almost everybody, went so easy on her that she dominated their dialogue.)

Now, as he takes stock of his campaign before this group of diehard supporters in his headquarters, nice guy Bryant seems aware that some accounting of his campaign tactics is called for.

He jokes about his first Senate race, about “that horrible negative campaign we had with Lamar Alexander in ’02, when I attacked him for being plaid and [said] I was solid.” And he reminds his listeners about the famous — or, some would say, notorious — “six-pack race” in the Republican Senate primary of 1994.

That race was ultimately won by Bill Frist, an independently wealthy first-time candidate who rose to become Senate majority leader and is now a potential candidate for president. It is this seat, which Frist is vacating, that this year’s hopefuls are now seeking.

There was real trash in that 1994 Senate race, Bryant noted, recapping some of the more flagrant epithets, concerning “draft dodgers” and “cat killers” and “desperate little men” and “pond scum.”

Bryant paused. “We haven’t reached the pond-scum level yet.” He then went on to raise questions about Corker’s candor regarding personal finances. “We’re going to be talking some more about his failure to give out his tax returns, whether he’s donated to organizations like NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League] … I don’t know.”

And he repeated allegations — previously raised, he said, by Democrat Ford — that one of Corker’s construction companies had illegally employed alien workers for “a taxpayer-funded project” on Mud Island. Other employers may have done something similar, Bryant said, but Corker was “the only one out there who’s running for the United Sates Senate.”

“You seem like a great fellow.”

If Corker’s ears were burning, he didn’t show it when he hit Memphis a few days later for his own headquarters visit with supporters, followed by some carefully orchestrated door-to-door campaigning.

“I’m running a different kind of race from my opponents,” he maintained on the drive to a nearby White Station neighborhood. He had made a point of refraining from invective, Corker insisted — though, in fact, he had hurled several different kinds at Ford, accusing the congressman of frequent and questionable trips paid for by the taxpayers and by private interests.

“To some degree, the negativity of both of the other campaigns has hurt them,” Corker said. “I think it’s been a poor strategy. The way you run a race is the way you serve.”

And yes, for the record, the former mayor was asked about the alleged fraud which occurred, as the Bryant e-mails put it, on his watch. “It’s absurd, ridiculous,” Corker said. “I’m proud of my record as mayor. I was the first to put in a performance audit.”

He boasted of his “highly organized, very disciplined” campaign. “We’ve knocked on 45,000 doors. We have the most broad-based effort in history, with postcards going out to potential supporters throughout the state.” Since January 2005, when the still new-looking SUV he was riding in had been bought, “we’ve put 100,000 miles on it,” Corker said, adding proudly, “It’s only been out of commission once.”

Corker himself would seem to be in good commission. A small man in his 50s, he is an early-morning jogger, doing three to five miles every day. “It’s the only way to stay sane,” he said. It’s also the only way to go door-to-door the way he does, running the distance from wherever he happens to be to the homestead where one of his young aides has preceded him to find somebody at home.

There is nothing random about the way Corker and his team work door-to-door. This neighborhood, for example, a posh one, had been pre-screened as possessing a certain number of households where registered Republicans likely to vote reside. These are the doors Corker comes to, running up the walk or across the yard and materializing on the resident’s stoop. It could be taken as a stunt, unquestionably, but it makes a statement.

Given the advance preparation, the chances are good that the candidate will be greeted cordially. At most doors he will get, at the very least, some friendly conversation, and, quite often, he will be invited to leave one of his yard signs, which he puts in the ground himself.

Meanwhile, his young aides — some running alongside him, others walking behind at a distance, still others keeping up with him by car — are, as Corker explains, “counting the doors,” adding to that 45,000 total. “That number is going to rise geometrically,” he promised. Most, of course, will be knocked on, not by Bob Corker himself, but by one of his volunteers.

“We actually go faster without him,” said one aide. And it’s easy to see why. Since almost everybody who opens the door has been pre-selected as a politically active Republican, it would be strange indeed if they did not avail themselves of the opportunity to log some chatting time with the candidate.

On this day, there are an uncanny number of people who hail from East Tennessee or know people who do and have a connection to someone who knows Bob Corker.

Not that there aren’t unknown factors. At the door of a retired rabbi, Corker chatted at some length concerning his recent trip to Israel, telling the rabbi, a white-bearded kindly-looking man with a yarmulke, how moved he had been in Jerusalem to visit the Wailing Wall.

Corker and the rabbi seemed to mesh gears perfectly as they discussed issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even concurring that the victory of the militant organization Hamas in recent Palestinian elections might turn out to have positive results. “Now they will have to learn to govern,” the rabbi said, and Corker nodded in agreement.

Out of nowhere the rabbi threw Corker a curve. “Now, Bob,” he asked, “what about that Statue of Liberty with a cross?”

Corker was clearly baffled by this reference to the new and controversial statue, which had been erected at the Church of the World Overcomers in southeast Memphis. And even after it was explained to him, he — no doubt wisely — left the talking to the rabbi, who went on to say, “When you have a community that thinks America is one religion, that’s wrong! The Statue of Liberty holds the Star of David and other religions as well.”

Finally, the rabbi pronounced what came across as a benediction. “I’m impressed with you, Bob. You seem like a great fellow.”

After an hour of this, or dashing up to doorways in 90-degree weather and carrying on extended conversation with homeowners, Corker’s shirt was soaked through with sweat.

Corker was asked: What percentage of the people he has met today knew who he was?

“All of them,” he said confidently. His advertising barrage has done its work.

“A candidate trying to be what he is.”

The two other Senate contenders, Hilleary and Ford, have logged somewhat less time in Memphis and Shelby County of late but for opposite reasons. Ford, who is presumably well known locally, is devoting most of his time, when not in Congress, to firming up his identity elsewhere in Tennessee.

As for Hilleary, reality has dictated his relative scarcity of late in these parts: “We can’t afford to run everywhere” had been the candid assessment of one of the former congressman’s top aides back in May. To be sure, Hilleary still does his best to make the usual courtesy stops expected of a statewide Republican contender, showing up here for events like the annual Lincoln Day Dinner in February and the GOP’s “Tennessee Homecoming” event that was held in May.

At the latter event, though, a straw vote poll confirmed what everybody already knew — that, insofar as there was a favorite son among local Republicans, it was Bryant and by a wide majority. That fact, coupled with Corker’s recent upsurge, has caused Hilleary to concentrate on votes east of the Tennessee River, though he can still boast a strong pocket of supporters in Tipton County, just north of Shelby.

All in all, though, Hilleary seemed clearly not to be flying as high as he was as recently as April, when he touched down in Memphis on his formal “kickoff” fly-around. At that stop, he had referred to the Senate race as a “a very important job interview for a very important job,” and he offered a set of credentials that included his service as navigator on 24 transport missions during the first Gulf War in 1991.

“We need fighters here,” he said, “who will fight against tax increases and for taxpayers, who will fight against those in Hollywood who would tend to corrupt our culture. We don’t need a Democrat like Harold Ford, who would cozy up to the Hollywood culture. Nor do we need Republicans who arrogantly raise our taxes and have forgotten that it’s not their money; it’s the public’s money.”

It was the kind of message that Hilleary, a resident of Murfreesboro, was long used to pitching to the small towns and rural communities of the 4th District, unique among the state’s nine congressional districts in that it snakes around all of the major media markets. Hilleary had represented the district for eight years before vacating his seat in 2002 to make a race for governor. It was that race that gave him the statewide name recognition that, as he boasted back in April, had allowed him to enter the Senate race as the acknowledged front-runner. It was also the race, however, that revealed some of his vulnerabilities, as he surrendered just enough traditionally Republican votes to Democrat Phil Bredesen to allow Bredesen the victory.

Hilleary was, perhaps justifiably, jealous of what he regarded as his own hard-earned reputation as a conservative and wary of others’ pretenses. “You see Hillary Clinton trying to run as far to the right as possible. You see Harold Ford trying as hard as he can to get over to the middle. You see Bob Corker trying to get to the Republican right. It’d be nice, just one time, to see a candidate who’s trying to be what he is.”

“I’m not a Democrat … running up to Washington yelling, ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.'”

Meanwhile, Harold Ford was alternating between his congressional duties in Washington and building those bridges in Middle and East Tennessee.

He was also turning up with some regularity as in interviewee or subject in this or that corner of the national media. A box in Newsweek one week, a front-page profile in The New York Times the next, and, virtually on a weekly basis, a sit-down on Don Imus’ morning show on MSNBC, where the host has long since abandoned any pretense of neutrality, calling for the election of Ford to the Senate “if there is a God in Heaven.”

The story line regarding Ford might vary slightly from venue to venue, but what it all comes down to, over and over again, is something like this: Can a bright young African-American congressman overcome racial bias and his family history to win a pivotal border state for the Democrats in November? Whoever ends up as Ford’s Republican opponent would do well to realize the implications of this:

First of all, questions posed in that manner tend to contain an affirmative, self-fulfilling answer within them. Secondly, such a story line means that discussion of the general-election Senate race is likely to focus on Ford and, in a striking sense, to be about Ford in a way that might render his opponent as little more than his foil.

Largely overlooked, both in national coverage and in the attention paid Ford’s candidacy by the Nashville-based state media, has been the animus toward Ford on the part of a corps of hard-core Yellow Dog Democrats throughout the nation at large and plentiful enough in Ford’s own back yard. At more than one meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club over the past year or two, Ford was taken to task for his increasingly conservative rhetoric and for his continued, if somewhat qualified, support of the military mission in Iraq.

And to a network of local liberal bloggers, Ford had long since become something of a bête noire for his votes on Iraq, for his approval of a congressionally ordained review of the Terri Schiavo matter, for legislation against flag-burning, for his vote on behalf of a severely restrictive bankruptcy law, and for his vote this year to make permanent the tax cuts which most of his fellow Democrats regard as sops to the wealthy.

(Ironically, of course, the official and unofficial organs of the Republican Party continue to churn out press releases attacking Ford as a “liberal.”)

Disaffection with Ford’s campaigning style has belatedly begun to seep into the consciousness of some Democrats elsewhere as well, even as most party cadres seem uplifted by his increased viability. Henry Walker, a lawyer and sometime pundit whose views count for something in Nashville, referred to Ford’s nickname for the three Republican contenders when he told The Tennessean this week, “I’m disappointed in the kind of campaign he’s running, when he’s trying to run to the right of the ‘Three Stooges.'”

Ford himself seems not to be bothered by such criticism. Buoyed by demonstrations of his fund-raising prowess, which in the last quarter showed him forging ahead of money-man Corker, and by polls which increasingly show him to be at least competitive in a race with any of the three Republicans, the congressman felt confident enough to proclaim to a crowd of local supporters in April, “I’m not a Democrat … running up to Washington yelling, ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.'”

It was a distance from party orthodoxy that he must have felt he could afford, given that the day before, Ford’s only party rival for the nomination, Kurita, had withdrawn her bid, due to lack of attention and financial support from traditional Democratic sources.

Ford clearly assumes that most Democrats, even the Yellow Dogs, will reach the same conclusion as did lawyer Jeff Bloomfield, a Germantown Democrat who, contemplating a possible Ford-Corker general election showdown, said last week, “The question is, would I rather elect a conservative Democrat who would vote with the Democrats on most issues when Congress is reorganized next year, or would I rather elect a moderate Republican who will vote with his party? I’ll go with Ford.”