Tag: David Kustoff

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Politics Politics Feature

Two Takes

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Bob Corker made one thing clear at a town meeting in suburban Arlington on Tuesday — that the venue, Crave Coffee Bar and Bistro, was not yet “the time and the place” for him to express his future plans, rumors about which run from a governor’s race in 2018 to a possible presidential bid two years later.

The Arlington event was set up in much the manner of a meet-and-greet, and other dignitaries present included Mayor Mike Wissman of Arlington, Shelby County Republican chair Lee Mills, and 8th District Congressman David Kustoff.

Jackson Baker

Senator Bob Corker at the Crave Coffee Bar

It was the first step of what the senator’s office billed as a “Travel Across the Volunteer State” and was to be followed by his attendance at a noon event at the Hilton Memphis, where kudos were to be administered to several worthy individuals at the 14th Annual Dunavant Public Servant Award Luncheon.

On the basis of the reception he got from a standing-room-only audience, one that was rather more a contentious town meeting in the current style, you had to wonder how much more of his current job the junior senator from Tennessee would be willing to stand for.

He was asked if he intended to run for a third Senate term in 2018, and he gave the answer cited above. The immediate result was a challenge or two from the crowd as to whether Chattanoogan Corker hadn’t pledged, back in 2006, when he was first elected in a tight race with Democrat Harold Ford Jr., to quit after two terms.

He gave a soft answer, that both he and Ford had said only that they “couldn’t imagine” serving more than two terms, and that seemed to turn away any further potential wrath on that matter.

But Corker had every reason to remain on edge for most of the hour-long encounter in Arlington. The questions he got were rapid-fire, mainly on issues of domestic controversy, and they were evenly mixed between the inquisitive and the downright challenging.

On some of the latter, he seemed to satisfy most of the crowd with his expression of confidence that the pending Senate inquiry into a Trump-Russian connection would go forth to good result. He had less success defending his support for charter-school enthusiast Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.

Corker was also hard-pressed on issues ranging from the prospective defunding of Planned Parentood, the uncertain future of health care, and the shape of tax reform. He did his best to hit a middle distance.

At the end of it all, someone said the obvious, that he, as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, had not been asked about the current crises in Korea and Syria. He shook his head slowly but gave an indulgent smile. “Unbelievable,” he said.

• Mere hours later, a few miles away in Midtown, former mayor Willie Herenton was having an easier time with his audience, the Rotary Club of Memphis.

Jackson Baker

Herenton at Rotary

The luncheon speaker was welcomed as what he was, a public dignitary from the past. That, in his time as mayor from 1991 to 2009, Herenton caught his share of flack was a fact no one mentioned, save the ex-mayor himself.

Herenton’s subject was his current project, which goes by the name of New Path Campus of Restoration. “Campuses,” actually, because Herenton’s original concept of a single dormitory/instructional facility for troubled African-American youth in north Shelby County has grown to include the idea of three campuses — in downtown Memphis, in Frayser, and in Millington.

As Herenton has explained on earlier occasions, these facilities would be alternatives to the severe and geographically remote locations available to house youthful detainees at the moment. The centers would be financed by savings from traditional incarceration and by state funding for the detainees as students.

More about the appearances of Corker and Herenton at memphisflyer.com.

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Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee, Shelby Parties Organizing for 2018

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Retiring Blue Cross-Blue shield exec Calvin Anderson, here at a ceremony naming a street for him, will be a cog in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial campaign.

Last week was a time for members of both local political parties to gather and take stock. The Shelby County Republicans did so with their annual Lincoln Day banquet at the East Memphis Hilton on Saturday night — the highlight of which was an address by former Bush-era U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who, while contending that “we need Donald Trump to be strong,” cautiously but firmly took issue with the president’s immigration policies. (For a full account of Gonzales’ remarks and the evening at large, see “Politics Beat Blog” on the Flyer website.)

The Lincoln Day event drew an extensive field of GOP gubernatorial hopefuls for 2018: U.S. Representative Diane Black (R-6th District); state Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksdale); State Senate majority leader Mark Norris (R-District 32); entrepreneur and former state Economic Development director Randy Boyd; and Nashville-area businessman Bill Lee.

• Even as Shelby County Republicans were gathered at the Hilton to hear Gonzales’ sober-sided hedge to all-out Trumpism, some 150 Democrats were making moves to reassert some vision and presence of their own, celebrating “Obama Day” at the Madison Gallery under the auspices of the Shelby County Young Democrats, with Mayor Kelvin Buck of Holly Springs, Mississippi, as official host and Mayor Megan Barry of Nashville serving as keynoter.

The emphasis there was altogether on moving forward afresh, with a new national party chairman, former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, having been elected in Atlanta earlier Saturday and with visions of stronger candidate efforts for Democrats in the forthcoming off-year election year of 2018.

After months of making appearances up and down the length of Tennessee, former Mayor Karl Dean of Nashville, Barry’s immediate predecessor, issued a formal statement making it official: He’s a candidate for governor in 2018. Dean will apparently have some good local help from newly appointed campaign treasurer Calvin Anderson, a longtime aide to former U.S. Senator Jim Sasser. Anderson has just retired from several years as a Blue Cross Blue Shield executive (with a street newly named for him adjacent to the insurance giant’s Memphis headquarters) and remains well-connected.

And, even though Nashville real estate entrepreneur and mega-donor Bill Freeman, who had been touching the state’s bases in an exploratory bid of his own, decided over the weekend not to run, the state’s Democrats will apparently still have a respectable gubernatorial primary in 2018, just as in their now vanished years of ascendancy.

State Representative Craig Fitzhugh, the well-liked Democratic House leader from Ripley, has been making it clear for months to any and all who have asked (including ourselves) that he intends to run for governor, and he repeated that resolve for the record on Monday. Though General Assembly rules preclude Fitzhugh’s taking formal organizational steps before the current legislative sessions ends in April, he, like Dean, has been out and about, appearing both at the Memphis YD event and a meeting last week of the Tipton County Democrats.

And, yes, Virginia, as previously indicated in this space, soon there will be a new bona fide Shelby County Democratic Party that will try to make good on the local party’s revivalist hopes.

State Democratic chairman Mary Mancini of Nashville, who recently appointed 13 Shelby County Democrats to serve as an ad hoc committee to plan a restructuring of the currently decertified local party, arranged for the group’s first meeting on Tuesday night of this week in the law office of David Cocke, a vintage Democrat and member of the ad hoc group.

The now completed membership of that core group is comprised of: Cocke, Dave Cambron, Corey Strong, Jeanne Johnson, Van Turner, George Monger, Jolie Grace Wareham, Danielle Inez, Deborah Reed, Emma Meskovic, Clarissa Shaw, Cordell Orrin, and Keith Norman.

• As the General Assembly prepares for the likely return of the Draconian de-annexation measure sponsored last year by state Representative Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah) and state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), the voluntary “right-sizing” plan which the Strickland administration hopes to offer as an alternative may be in for trouble on the City Council.

Asked about its prospects following his speech last Wednesday to the downtown Kiwanis Club, current City Council chair Berlin Boyd repeated his determined opposition to the plan, asserting that the city was in no position to give up the $7 million in tax revenues it would lose in the short term. And Boyd said, “There are lots of others on the Council who feel the same way.”

• As Congress takes a brief break, the wave of well-attended and often high-tempered congressional town meetings on health care and other issues is likely to continue, in Tennessee as elsewhere, but U.S. Representative David Kustoff (R-8th) has seemingly adopted a strategy that, to some degree, will sidestep them.

Kustoff explained things in the aftermath of his address to a Chamber breakfast at the Crescent Club last Thursday. Pleading the large “footprint” of his sprawling district, Kustoff said he had opted for relatively limited group sessions in sites like Brownsville, Covington, and Jackson, with a pre-arranged cap on the number of subjects to be discussed.

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Politics Politics Feature

Trumped Expectations

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Consider: As the year began, the idea of Donald Trump‘s becoming the Republican nominee for president was still considered somewhat fanciful — not to mention what seemed the remote prospect of his actually winning the presidency. But that general impression would change — and fairly rapidly.

It may be largely forgotten now, but Trump actually lost the Iowa Republican caucuses, first trial vote of the year, to arch-conservative Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And when I made my quadrennial visit to New Hampshire to check out the candidates, both Democratic and Republican, I had my doubts about The Donald. In my first online report from New Hampshire, on February 8th, here’s part of what I said:

“But for all the polls that still have Trump way ahead of his GOP rivals — by something like 20 points, at last reckoning — I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up suffering another major embarrassment like that which befell him in his second-place finish to Ted Cruz in Iowa last week. 

“So far I’ve only seen him in action in Saturday night’s debate of the remaining Republican contenders in Bedford, and, in all honesty, it was difficult to see Trump as a major figure in that event, or, for that matter, retrospectively over the course of the debates and cattle-call forums to date.”

I began to be disabused of that foolish conclusion (“foolish” because I mistook Trump’s lack of attention to issues in a debate to be a disqualifier) when I traveled through a blizzard to see his magic with crowds — and his fundamental uniqueness — at an indoor mega-rally in the state capital of Manchester the very next night.

That was the night that Trump shattered all verbal precedent by referring to Cruz, at the time his major GOP opponent, as a “pussy.” Granted, he was just channeling what he’d heard a woman supporter call out from the crowd, but still …

My online take: “The battle lines are now clear on an issue, perhaps the defining one, of Trump’s campaign — that of political correctness. Oh, go ahead and heap some other adjectives on: Social correctness. Verbal correctness. Philosophical correctness. What you will. The man is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it. 

“In a campaign based on the most broad-brush attitude imaginable toward political issues, it is Trump’s fundamental iconoclasm that stands out. Be it ethnic groups, war heroes, disabled persons, gender equities, or linguistic norms, Trump is dismissive of all protocols.” 

Trump won New Hampshire, easily, and, from that point on, was basically on a roll. He had the obvious aura of a winner by the time he took his road show to Shelby County on February 28th, appearing before a crowd of thousands gathered at a Millington hangar.

From my report: “The crowd, which was plainly not the usual muster of political junkie-dom (though any number of local GOP regulars could be spotted here and there) was uproariously with him … chanting “Win! Win! Win!” [W]hen, as often happens at one of his rallies, a protester began to chant against him from inside the hangar, he calmly directed the crowd to ‘get him out’ but ‘don’t hurt him.’ And so the crowd did, with its counter-chant morphing from ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ to ‘Win! Win! Win!’ And finally to ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’

“Call it what else you will, but this is a movement.”

And a movement it would remain, all the way through Trump’s primary victories, a turbulent GOP convention in Cleveland, and a rancorous fall campaign against overconfident Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Finally, there was the astonishing moment of truth, agonizing for so many, galvanizing for so many others, that was summed up by the now famous Flyer cover of the November 10th issue, showing a victorious Trump in profile over a capitalized caption: “WTF?”

And those bare letters (understandably controversial at the time, though they merely used a common cyber-motif to express a shocked befuddlement that we suspect was experienced by Trump himself) continue to express our — and the world’s — uncertainty as we await the forthcoming reign of The Donald.

OTHER  ELECTIONS: Most local interest was focused on the hotly contested Republican primary for the 8th Congressional District seat vacated by U.S. Representative Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump. A large field competed, including several local politicians. In the end, former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff would come from behind and edge out runner-up George Flinn, the wealthy businessman/physician who had previously served on the Shelby County Commission. Kustoff easily defeated Democrat Rickey Hobson in November.

STATE POLITICS: The prevailing fact of life in state government in 2016 was the same-old, same-old domination of all affairs by a Republican super-majority in the legislature. The upset victory in November of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus was one of the few circumstances to counter the trend.

An early excitement in Nashville was the deposing of sexual predator Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin), first, from his perch in the GOP leadership, then from his party’s caucus, and, finally, from the General Assembly itself through expulsion.

From Memphis’ point of view, the crowning moment of the legislature had to be the dramatic turnaround of  a stealth de-annexation bill that was on the very brink of detaching from Memphis every territory annexed by the city since 1998. A concerted last-ditch effort by a coalition of city interests turned the tide and diverted the measure to the limbo of summer study.

From my article on that outcome: “‘We really had no idea this was going to happen. But it was the best possible result, obviously. This is really a victory for the entire state,’ said Phil Trenary, the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce head who had been in Nashville last week and this week opposing the bill.”

The issue of de-annexation is not dead, however. It was the subject of serious examination by local governmental task forces, and it will almost certainly return to the legislative calendar in 2017.

CITY AND COUNTY POLITICS: The first day of the year saw the inauguration of a new mayor, former Councilman Strickland, and of six new council members. One sentence of Strickland’s well-received  inaugural address expressed a painful reality: “We are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.” Another acknowledged a problem that still remains: “We will focus on the goal of retaining and recruiting quality police officers and firefighters, knowing public safety is at the forefront of rebuilding our city.”

A new police director, Michael Rallings, was appointed from the department’s ranks, as the city confronted an alarming rise in homicides.
Late in the year, Strickland launched a “Memphis 3.0” initiative to devise a new long-range plan for the city via a series of neighborhood meetings.

The dominant motif of the Shelby County Commission’s year was a back-and-forth power struggle with Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, focused on such matters as control of fiscal policy and the commission’s desire to have its own attorney, distinct from the county attorney’s office. The matter was one of several still hanging fire at the end of the year, though Terry Roland, of Millington, commission chair for much of the year, led the way with Heidi Shafer in getting a referendum passed extending the commission’s advise-and-consent power to the firing as well as the hiring of a county attorney.

Roland made it clear that he intended to run for county mayor himself in 2018, with another likely entry being that of County Trustee David Lenoir. Meanwhile, Linda Phillips became the new county election administrator.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS: The city council approved a measure to liberalize the penalties for marijuana possession. The Shelby County Commission failed to follow suit, and state Attorney General Herb Slatery’s opinion that state policy prohibited such local ordinances doused expectations, but reports were that medical marijuana might have new life in next year’s General Assembly. 

At year’s end, a major argument had erupted between local environmentalists and TVA over the authority’s intent to drill wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer in order to cool a forthcoming new power plant. Watch this space. 

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Fincher Paid to Defeat Flinn in 8th Race, Publication Says

CREDIT: JB

JB

Fincher (l), Flinn

It will be recalled that Memphis physician/businessman George Flinn, a frequent candidate for political office, was edged out in the August Republican primary for 8th District Congress by fellow Memphian David Kustoff, a former U.S. Attorney.

Kustoff’s margin of victory, 2,689 votes, was earned late in the contest, it is generally acknowledged. Both campaigns were aware of polling that showed Flinn, who out-spent all others in the multi-candidate GOP race, was leading in various private polls until the last week of the campaign.

During that last week, a flurry of print and TV ads appeared in the district alleging that Flinn was on record as having supported a Democratic candidate. The Democrat had been Flinn’s son, Shea Flinn, who ran unsuccessfully for a state House seat some years ago, later was appointed to an interim state Senate seat, and still later won and served two terms on the Memphis City Council.

With election day almost on top of him at that point, candidate Flinn, a longstanding Republican, tried to point out the obvious — that he had merely been supporting his own son — but had little time to get that message circulated. Flinn’s people — and some outside observers as well — blame the last-minute anti-Flinn adds for his defeat.

Now, it develops, according to the Tennessee Journal, that those ads were paid for by the outgoing Republican 8th District congressman, Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump in Crockett County. In its October 21 issue, the Journal notes that $100,000 in late contributions by Fincher to Win for American PAC, which technically placed the anti-Flinn advertising, match up directly with the placement-time and amount of the ads.

Flinn had been among several candidates in 2010 who ran for the 8th District seat, won that year by Fincher, and had, as was the custom by all the candidates in the race, run negative ads against his opponents. But Flinn had supported Fincher during the now congressman’s successful reelection runs in 2012 and 2014.

Whatever may have motivated Fincher, Flinn himself seems to have been no stranger to Realpolitik. Though no evidence links him to the expenditures of another group, a 501-C4 organization called Power of Liberty, that group, which was able legally to conceal the identities of its donors, had launched issue-advocacy ads attacking every candidate but Flinn in the recent congressional race.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Politics Wrap Up

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At press time on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) was scheduled to make one more effort, via a unanimous-consent request on the floor of the Senate, to get a vote on the confirmation of Ed Stanton III of Memphis as U.S. District Judge. 

Stanton, now serving as U.S. Attorney for Tennessee’s Western District, was nominated by President Obama in May 2015 to succeed Judge Samuel H. “Hardy” Mays.

Sponsored by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis, a Democrat, and heartily endorsed by Tennessee’s two Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, Stanton was expected to be a shoo-in for Senate confirmation long ago, but the same partisan gridlock that has prevented Senate action on Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland has held up action on Stanton and other judicial nominees.

• The two major political parties have both now established local headquarters for the stretch drive of the presidential race. 

The Republicans went first, opening up a combination HQ for 8th District congressional nominee David Kustoff and the coordinated GOP campaign at 1755 Kirby Parkway on August 31st. The Democrats will open theirs, at 2600 Poplar, with an open house this Saturday. 

At the GOP headquarters opening, Kustoff spoke first, then Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, as West Tennessee chairman for Donald Trump. Next up was Lee Mills, interim Shelby GOP chair (he replaced Mary Wagner, who had been nominated for a judgeship). He began recognizing Republican gentry in the room.

When Mills got to David Lenoir, the Shelby trustee who’s certain to oppose Roland for county mayor in 2018, he fumbled with Lenoir’s job title, then somewhat apologetically said, “David, I always want to call you tax collector.” Roland then shouted out delightedly, “I do, too!”

• Given the overwhelmingly Republican nature of voting in the 8th District in recent years, Kustoff’s chances of prevailing are better than good, but for the record, Rickey Hopson of Somerville is the Democratic nominee. Hopson is making the rounds, having spoken at last month’s meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club, one of several local Democratic clubs taking up the slack for the Shelby County Democratic Party, decertified by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini several weeks ago.

Another Democratic underdog challenging the odds is Dwayne Thompson, the party’s candidate for the state House District 96 seat (Cordova, Germantown) now held by the GOP’s Steve McManus. A fund-raiser is scheduled for Thompson next Wednesday, September 28th, at Coletta’s Restaurant on Highway 64.

Memphis lawyer John Ryder, who currently serves as RNC general counsel and who supervised both parties’ rules changes and the RNC’s redistricting strategy after the census of 2010, has been named Republican Lawyer of the Year by the Republican National Lawyers Association and will be honored at a Washington banquet of the RNLA at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington on Tuesday, September 27th. “Special guests” will include Senator Corker and RNC chairman Reince Priebus.

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Politics Politics Feature

Getting Out the Vote

The tradition of presidential-election years holds that the American electorate really doesn’t begin to pay serious attention to the candidates’ campaigns until Labor Day has come and gone. That holiday happens this weekend, and the local branches of the two major parties got a running start on things with events held last week.

The Republicans brought out some of their leading lights Tuesday night at the annual Master Meal banquet of the East Shelby Republican Club, the county’s largest. First up on the dais at the Great Hall in Germantown was David Kustoff, who recently won the GOP nomination for the 8th District congressional seat and, given the Republican propensities of that district these days, has every expectation of serving in Washington next year.

Kustoff made it clear that he hopes to do so in tandem with a President Donald J. Trump, to whose candidacy he gave unstinting verbal support. Though the brash New York billionaire has had highly publicized trouble gaining traction, even in pockets of his own Republican base, Kustoff said predictions of a Trump defeat by Hillary Clinton were the results, essentially, of myopia on the part of an unsympathetic media, and he called the roll of candidates, ranging from Ronald Reagan to current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who, he said, had won out despite negative forecasts in the press.

Kustoff’s commitment to the cause of Trump was further embodied in the opening on Wednesday night of this week of a “combined election headquarters” at 1755 Kirby Parkway, housing the “Kustoff for Congress” campaign as well as Trump’s Memphis-area efforts and the campaigns of other local GOP candidates.

Also toeing the line for a top-to-bottom Republican effort at the Master Meal were state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, and visiting state GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood, although Luttrell, who had also sought the GOP nomination in the 8th, gallantly focused most of his praise on Kustoff.

Perhaps the most telling commentary Tuesday night came from Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, who earned a Trump-like shoot-from-the-mouth reputation of his own during his rise as a political figure. Against all expectations, Roland, who has already launched a campaign to be elected county mayor in 2018, became something of a conciliator — enough so that, as he neared the formal end of his one-year term as chairman on Monday of this week, he received standing ovations from his commission colleagues at each of the legislative body’s last two public meetings. By way of suggesting that Trump’s own rough edges might smooth out during a term as president, Roland, who is West Tennessee chairman of the Republican nominee’s campaign, said of Trump, “Folks, six years ago, that was me!”

• For their part, a sizeable swath of the county’s Hillary Clinton supporters turned out last Wednesday night at a standing-room-only meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club that required the opening of a partition to combine two separate meeting rooms at Coletta’s Restaurant on Appling Road.

Among those present for the occasion were Tyler Yount of Chattanooga, a statewide organizer for the Clinton campaign, and Rickey Hobson of Somerville, the Democratic nominee in the 8th District congressional race. Although attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia were there to recount their experiences at the convention, the main focus of the meeting was that of organizing a get-out-the-vote effort in Shelby County.

Although the long-troubled Shelby County Democratic Party organization is temporarily defunct after its decertification week before last by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini, and apparently won’t be reconstructed until a local party convention can be held in March, various informal Democratic groups — the Germantown Democrats, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and the county’s Young Democrats among them — seem intent on organizing a significant GOTV effort.

According to Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron, a headquarters to house a coordinated local Democratic campaign will be opened on Poplar soon.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Crap Shoot in the 8th

I’m thinking of moving to Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District so I can vote for Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane. Karen, or “Free” as I like to call her, is an independent candidate, one of 20 people vying to become GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher’s replacement, including four other independents, two Democrats, and 13(!) Republicans.

There are 13 Republicans running because the 8th District has been gerrymandered into a lockdown seat for the GOP. All one of these 13 boys has to do is win, say, 20 percent of the votes and they’re on their way to Washington, D.C. The actual election in November is a foregone conclusion.

And thanks to the GOP gerrymandering of the 8th District that occurred after the 2010 census, I wouldn’t have to move very far to vote for Free — just to the “finger” on the map that juts its way deep into east Memphis, into the heart of what used to be Democratic 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen’s district, including the area where many of the city’s Jewish voters live. Huh, what could they have been thinking?

No problem, they gave Cohen Millington in exchange. Seems fair, right?

Gerrymandering is the source of our congressional gridlock. It’s a system that allows office-holders to literally pick who gets to vote for (and against) them. The majority party in power after the census obtains the right to draw the borders of our districts and other various political bailiwicks. They almost always do so in a way that splits and scatters the opposition party’s voters and solidifies their own. That’s why members of Congress are very seldom defeated, unless it’s by a member of their own party in a primary. Since they don’t have to work across party lines in their home districts, there’s very little inclination to do so once they get to Washington. They just have to keep the homefolks in their own party happy.

And that’s why there is a mad scramble among 13 Republicans to win the GOP nomination in the 8th. Once they’re in, they’re in for as long as they want to be there.

Just eight years ago, things were reversed. Longtime Democratic Congressman John Tanner controlled the 8th District, winning election after election. In 2008, the GOP didn’t even field a candidate. Tanner won the general election with 180,000 votes to his write-in opponent’s 54 — almost literally 100 percent of the electorate!

Then Tanner retired, and in the 2010 “wave” election, Fincher beat Democrat Roy Herron. In the post-census redistricting, the 8th District got gerrymandered to ensure that it would remain Republican, at least until the next census. That was done by moving much of eastern Shelby County, a GOP stronghold, from the 9th District to the 8th.

Which is why the Memphis television and radio airwaves are now filled with ads from Republicans, each trying to outdo the others with their red, white, and blue credentials. David Kustoff is going to end Islamic terrorism; George Flinn is going to abolish Obamacare (with the help of those two white-haired biddies who love him so); and real conservative Brian Kelsey is going to be the most conservative conservative who ever conserved. It’s why we are being visited by the dregs of the recent GOP presidential nomination process — Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and others — who are pitching for one or the other of the Goopsters. It’s why city boys are putting on their best button-down plaid shirts and visiting tractor pulls and county fairs.

There’s been little independent polling, making this race a crapshoot in the most literal and metaphorical sense. The early thinking was that Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had the inside track, which would be fine with me, frankly. He at least tried to push for Governor Haslam’s expansion of Medicare, indicating that he has a brain and actually cares about the area’s uninsured population and Shelby County’s overburdened hospitals. Having another congressman from Memphis couldn’t hurt. It certainly beats having one from Frog Jump, like Fincher.

I mean, as long as Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane is out of the running …

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Settle the Carson Matter!” …

Mr. Kustoff, if you can singlehandedly end Obamacare, stop illegal immigration, and destroy radical Islamists, there’s no reason to wait until Election Day. Please, sir, put on your cape, and fix all our problems immediately. Having done so, you will no doubt win by acclamation. 

Boris

Seeing the party’s inability to audit its own books, we are left to ponder a couple of possible reasons: 1. The party is incapable of performing an audit due to an utter lack of accountability for the funds, not just from the former chairman, but everyone involved (i.e., no one submitted receipts even for legitimate expenses), or 2. The party is unwilling to perform an audit due to general penny-ante corruption, not just of the former chairman, but throughout the organization.

And the actions of the state party chairman, rather than being a harsh reprimand, seem more like the actions of someone desperate to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Jeff

It’s foxes guarding the hen house. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m not optimistic that Bryan Carson will satisfy the entire $6,000 debt.

Regarding David Kustoff’s campaign ads: I’ve noticed that they don’t display any of the arrogance, condescension, and general snarkiness that he exhibits on shows like Informed Sources. Maybe he has turned over a new leaf.

Okay. That was pretty sarcastic.

Jenna

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Politics Politics Feature

First Licks in the Tennessee 8th District

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As introductory campaign events go, the forum for 8th District congressional candidates held Tuesday night last week by the East Shelby Republican Club at Germantown’s Pickering Center was somewhat tentative — as most such debut cattle calls are — but it contained plenty of foreshadowing of the slings and arrows to come.

Four of the main GOP players were there — state Senator Brian Kelsey, radiologist/radio executive George Flinn, Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, and advertising man/consultant Brad Greer of Jackson. Missing among the touted contenders were former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The outlier of the group, both geographically and, to a large extent, philosophically, was Greer, whose chances for prevailing are maybe not quite as good as those of then state Senator Marsha Blackburn when she ran for the 7th congressional seat in 2002 against three Shelby Countians— the aforesaid Kustoff, then Shelby County Commissioner (now state Senator) Mark Norris, and then Memphis City Councilman Brent Taylor. 

Blackburn, whose home base was Brentwood in Williamson County, campaigned well across the 7th District, even in Shelby County. She would win easily, taking advantage of the split vote among Shelby County natives, none of whom exactly ran like a house afire anyway.

But if Greer’s public image is not as well honed as was Blackburn’s, who at the time was one of the preeminent leaders of the anti-income tax movement in Tennessee, he has even more opponents from Shelby County than had Blackburn in 2002, and thus can count on an even more advantageous split.

Jackson Baker

(l to r) Brad Greer, George Flinn, Brian Kelsey, and Tom Leatherwood in Germantown

Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood (to list them in the order of their campaign financial holdings) could very well divide the vote in their home county of Shelby, wherein resides 55 percent of the 8th District electorate. And that could pave the way for an upset victory for Greer, whose Madison County bailiwick is closer to the traditional heartland of the District, which since 2010 has been served by Crockett County resident Stephen Fincher, who is voluntarily relinquishing the seat.

That might especially be the case if the 8th District votes according to the same pattern as in March on Super Tuesday, when the distribution of votes for the hotly contested Republican presidential primary was, according to Greer, 60 percent in the non-Shelby part of the district and only 40 percent in the Shelby County bailiwick of Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood.

To be sure, Greer has some competition of his own among fellow Jacksonians Hunter Baker, David Bault, and George Howell, none of whom, however, have raised much money at this point or figure to run well-supported races. And prominent Madison County kingmaker Jimmy Wallace, a major force behind Fincher, is putting his eggs this time in the basket, not of Greer, but of Kelsey, who also has good support and fund-raising potential in the Memphis area.

For the record, candidate cash on hand, as of the first-quarter reporting period, was: Flinn, $2,930,885; Kelsey, $439,005; Kustoff, $319,682; Luttrell, $144,570; and Greer, $103,713. No one else had amassed $100,000, or anything close to it. (And Flinn’s total should be taken with a grain — or perhaps an airplane hangar — of salt. Like Donald Trump at the presidential level, he is wealthy enough to self-finance, and, unlike The Donald, actually does so to a substantial degree; he does minimal fund-raising as such.)

All of the foregoing is a recap of the basic paper facts. Last week’s forum at the Pickering Center gave a partial foreshadowing of how the race might be run and of some of the intangibles involved. Herewith are some (admittedly sketchy) reviews of how and what the participating candidates did:

First up was Greer, who established the fact that he represented rural Tennesseans and had handled 18 West Tennessee counties in the 2006 U.S. Senatorial race for Republican victor Bob Corker. He distinguished himself from the others when an audience member asked about trade policy, and Greer wasted no time blasting away, Trump-like at the purportedly ruinous effects of various free-trade pacts on ordinary working folk. “I don’t give a good rat’s ass about other countries before my fellow countrymen,” Greer declared, in what may have been the line of the night.

Flinn was next, and right away declared his fealty to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump. He went on to express, as he does in his now-frequently-appearing TV ads, some of the well-worn GOP shibboleths of recent years, fretting that “we’re being killed by entitlements,” and promising to “represent you to D.C., not D.C. to you.” (I can’t help fantasizing about what would happen if the genial and accomplished Flinn dispensed with such pedantic bromides and let fly something defiant about the independence secured by his self-financing, a la “If you like Trump, you’ll love me!”)

Kelsey was third to speak, and in his allotted two-minute introductory spiel, he must have used the self-defining phrase “proven conservative” perhaps 50 times. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but variations on the phrase dominated his brief remarks to an overwhelming degree. In fairness, he did get to elaborate on his record during the Q-and-A portion of the evening, touting his sponsorship of a constitutional amendment to ban a state income tax and his enmity-to-the-death for Medicaid expansion.

Most compellingly, Kelsey signaled his willingness and intent in the future to attack the absent Luttrell, a supporter of Governor Bill Haslam’s ill-fated “Insure Tennessee” proposal: “We have Republicans in this very race who supported extending Obamacare.” And later: “As I mentioned before, we have Republicans who want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.” 

And there was Leatherwood, whose hold on his county register’s job owes much to a neighborly demeanor and a competent, customer-knows-best attitude but who, when running for offices of partisan consequence, prefers to present himself as some kind of avenging Robespierre of the Right. He vies with Kelsey in his contempt for “socialism” and regard for “free enterprise” and, on matters of education policy, gave notice of his wish to purify both state (“Frankly, TNReady is merely Common Core by another name”) and nation, promising to support the abolition of the Department of Education.

In brief, Flinn, Kelsey, and Leatherwood all essentially stuck to well-worn Republican talking points, and Greer evinced at least some disposition, in this year of Trump and Sanders mass assemblies, to go yellow dog.

The next forum for these Republican contenders is scheduled for this Thursday night in Dyersburg.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Poll shows large Luttrell lead over other Shelby Countians in 8th District race.

A po

Luttrell

ll completed by the Remington Research Group of Kansas City shows Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell to have a commanding lead over other Shelby County candidates in the 8th Congressional District Republican primary.

The poll, conducted on February 29 and March 1 involved “686 likely Republican primary voters,” with a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percent, according to Remington director Titus Bond.

Below is the tabulated response to the question, “ If the candidates in the Republican primary election for United States Congress were Brian Kelsey, David Kustoff, Mark Luttrell, George Flinn, Tom Leatherwood and Steve Basar, for whom would you vote?.”

Mark Luttrell: 26%
George Flinn: 11%
Brian Kelsey: 9%
David Kustoff: 8%
Tom Leatherwood: 7%
Steve Basar: 1%
Undecided: 38%

The press release announcing these results said further:

“In addition to his ballot strength, Luttrell possesses the strongest image rating of all the potential Republican candidates. 43% of likely Republican primary voters view him favorably with only 5% viewing him unfavorably. This is by far the strongest image rating of the field by more than double his nearest competitor.
“Luttrell enjoys massive support in the Memphis media market where he receives 33% support. The Memphis media marketanchors the district, comprising more than 71% of Republican primary voters.

“’Mark Luttrell holds a strong advantage in the early stages of this race. In a winner take all primary, other candidates will have to spend significant sums just to match Luttrell’s current ballot position and favorability,’ said Titus Bond, Director of Remington Research Group. ‘Mark Luttrell is the heavy early favorite in this Republican primary.’”

Asked the obvious question about the poll — whether he or his campaign had commissioned it — Luttrell said no.

There was no explanation as to why several declared candidates from outside the Shelby County area were not included in the questionnaire.

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