Tag: Democrats

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Congressman Steve Cohen Grills McNulty

Political uber-blog “Talking Points Memo” ran a clip today of 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen grilling Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty.

The set-up: “In April, a group of anonymous Justice Department employees wrote to the House and Senate judiciary committees and accused Paul McNulty’s chief of staff Michael Elston, of leading an effort to eliminate applicants to the Justice Department who were Democrats.

“And what did McNulty have to say when asked whether his right-hand man was working to politicize the hiring process at the Department? He doesn’t know.

“Faint comfort.”

Check out Cohen’s performance here.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Done Deal

Chancellor Kenny Armstrong’s ruling last Friday permitting the Shelby County Commission to proceed on the establishment of a second Juvenile Court judgeship was a no-brainer. Whatever one thought of the politics of the commission’s near-party-line vote in the wake of last year’s election or of the often needlessly confrontational tactics of the majority Democrats, it seemed obvious that the right to establish the

judgeship was accounted for explicitly by legislative act years ago.

Indeed, the General Assembly, as Armstrong correctly observed, had already created the additional court in embryo. It merely remained for the commission to exercise its discretion in completing the establishment of the court. It has now, somewhat belatedly, chosen to do so, and though Judge Curtis Person insists he will appeal, it is hard to see how the explicit language of the enabling legislation can be gotten around.

The commission almost let the opportunity pass to take a further decisive step at its regular monthly meeting, but Commissioner Steve Mulroy raised the issue of following up on Armstrong’s ruling. And it fell to a Republican commissioner, David Lillard, to actually make the motion for the commission to set a date — Wednesday, May 30th — as a time to begin what will probably be a quick two-step process (interviews of candidates, followed by an interim appointment of a second judge). In 2008, it would seem, the new judgeship will come before the voters in the regular countywide election.

What we have here is a done deal, and the virtual absence of further impassioned debate, coupled with the near-unanimity of the vote for Lillard’s motion, amounts to a demonstration that the commission has accepted a reality that we presume Person will ultimately have to accommodate himself to as well.

Telling It

The presidential-candidate debates have barely gotten under way, and already the pundits have taken it upon themselves to tell us who should presume to take part in them and who should not.

It was just barely tenable that they should have turned thumbs down on the entertaining if politically over-the-hill Democrat Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator from Alaska who hasn’t held office in a quarter-century. Eccentric he may be, but his proposal for a universal national heath-care plan based on vouchers was intriguing, and his warnings about the perils of nuclear poker-playing and his fellow Democrats’ ostrich-like attitude toward the Iraq fiasco were on point. “These people scare me!” he said about his party’s frontrunners. Us, too, Mike.

But the real travesty was the Beltway gang’s decision to pile on against Republican congressman Ron Paul, who, whatever the oddities of his sincere and systematic libertarianism, has made the most intelligent and complete case against the Iraq venture of anybody anywhere this year, actually daring to point out that the 9/11 attacks were in significant measure “blowback,” a response to our own blunderbuss military interventions in the Middle East.

Dissed by journalists Howard Kurtz and Gloria Borger, who demanded his exclusion from future debates, Paul made more sense in his two TV appearances than either of them has in their lifetimes.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Democrats Need to Find Courage

“In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday.” — AP

Dear Congressional Democrats,

What is wrong with you people? Have you not read the polls that say more than 70 percent of Americans think we’re screwing up in Iraq? Have you not noticed that the president’s approval rating is hovering somewhere between horrific and really, really crappy? Do you just lack cojones (that loosely translates as “courage,” for those of you who don’t like anything Hispanic), or are you suffering from some sort of collective battered-wife syndrome?

Assuming it’s the latter, let this serve as a sort of editorial intervention: Your “man” is no good. He lies to you about everything, including this war you continue to allow him to wage on our behalf.

He spies on you and doesn’t tell you about it. He’s even tried to make the Justice Department a wing of the Republican Party. When you pass legislation, he signs it, then adds a cute little “signing statement” that says he’ll ignore whatever part of the law he feels like ignoring.

All your friends around the world see what he’s doing to you and to our reputation as a country. Our soldiers (our figurative children) are dying daily, and you’re doing nothing. You have become enablers in the greatest foreign-policy mistake in American history.

Oh sure, I know he says he’ll keep you “safe” and that he’s keeping the terrorists at bay by fighting them overseas so they won’t “follow us home.” And maybe you’re afraid that the American people still believe that fairy tale. Some do, but most of us have figured out that the terrorists are already here, rejoicing in the fact that our troops and our money are tied up in a civil war thousands of miles away.

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you the truth, but it’s for your own good. Your man is a cheat and liar. Dump him.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Bump in the Road

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A few weeks ago, Keith Norman, matched against rival candidate Jay Bailey, seemed a good bet to become the next chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party.

His public boosters included both Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, the former Teamster leader and ex-party chairman who leads one of the major party factions, and Desi Franklin, a leader of the Mid-South Democrats in Action, a reformist group that came on the local political scene in the wake of the 2004 presidential campaign.

The combination of Chism’s supporters and the MSDIA group (abetted by members of Democracy in Memphis, an outgrowth of the erstwhile Howard Dean movement) was enough to put Matt Kuhn over as party chairman in 2005. At the time, Kuhn, a youthful political operative and veteran of numerous campaigns, was regarded as a compromise “third-force” choice — a break from the back-and-forth pendulum swings between the party’s “Ford faction” and Chism’s group, loyal, more or less, to Mayor Willie Herenton.

Jackson Baker

Keith Norman

To be sure, local Democrats are disputatious (maybe we should say “free-minded”) enough to do justice to 20th-century humorist Will Rogers’ line, “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” Their loyalties are not so hard and fast as to be confined permanently to one bloc or another.

Lawyer Bailey, son of former longtime county commissioner Walter Bailey, had a span of his own, ranging from members of the old Ford faction to party loyalists grateful for his legal representation of several defeated Democratic candidates who challenged the results of last year’s countywide elections.

Even so, depending on how the delegate-selection process from the party’s March 3rd caucus actually sorted out, the Chism-Franklin arithmetic was regarded in many quarters as good enough to give Norman, a Baptist minister, the advantage in the forthcoming local Democratic convention, to be held on Saturday, March 31st.

This impression was bolstered by Norman’s speaking appearance late last month at a meeting of the MSDIA — one that was attended by curious party members from various factions.

At that event, Norman spoke eloquently and persuasively (as befits someone long used to dealing with a large congregation, in his case, the First Baptist Church on Broad Street). He proclaimed a “big tent” philosophy in which a variety of viewpoints would be welcomed within the party, talked turkey on matters of fund-raising, Get-Out-the-Vote efforts, and managed to skirt potentially divisive issues like abortion and gay rights.

Though Bailey is a trial lawyer with ample rhetorical skills of his own, it seemed obvious to attendees at the MSDIA meeting that Norman, a towering but good-natured presence, would be a hard man to match up to, one-on-one. It seemed clear, too — both from Norman’s presentation and from testimonials paid him by various Democratic luminaries and activists — that his appeal could be wide enough to transcend factional differences.

Jackson Baker

Richard Fields

Ninth District congressman Steve Cohen passed along his compliments, and even David Upton, a longtime Bailey associate and backer, had good things to say about Norman.

Some of his professed supporters, however, may have done him more harm than good.

The Fields Case (Continued)

There was the strange case of attorney Richard Fields, who in recent election years has comported himself in the manner of a would-be kingmaker. In fairness, Fields probably sees himself as some kind of public ombudsman, overseeing the political process in the interests of the people.

In any event, Fields made a big splash during the 2006 countywide election process, composing open letters about the attributes, positive and negative, of various candidates. His widely distributed observations on judicial candidates in particular were regarded as having had palpable effect in the election results.

Fields, however, was not universally accepted as an unbiased observer. Some African-American observers — notably blogger Thaddeus Matthews — argued that Fields was bolstering mainly white, establishment-supported candidates and selectively bashing independent-minded blacks.

The very charge, true or not, was ironic, given Fields’ background as a civil rights attorney, his marriages to black women, and the biracial nature of his several children.

In truth, Fields supported both whites and blacks and Democrats as well as Republicans, though Matthews and others, notably attorney Robert Spence, saw him as having hedged his endorsements, even changing several, in order to create a false appearance of objectivity.

As chronicled in a previous column (“The Fields Case,” February 1st issue), two white candidates for General Sessions judgeships — Janet Shipman and Regina Morrison Newman — saw their promised endorsements belatedly withdrawn by Fields in favor of equally qualified black candidates, Lee Coffee and Deborah Henderson, respectively.

Coffee and Henderson, who, among their other important endorsements, had that of the Shelby County Republican Party, both won, and Shipman and
Newman each later agreed with Spence’s assessment that they had fallen victim to Fields’ need to do some old-fashioned ticket-balancing.

Spence himself had serious arguments with erstwhile supporter Fields during his service some years ago as city attorney and later made unspecified charges that Fields had tried to extort unwarranted favors from him.

Jackson Baker

Legislative Leaders: West Tennessee may have lost some clout in the Tennessee General Assembly, but not Shelby County, which boasts both party leaders in the Senate. Here Mark Norris (left), Republican majority leader, and Jim Kyle, Democratic leader, mull over a compromise on medical tort reform.

When Spence became a candidate in the special Democratic primary to fill a state Senate vacancy early this year, Fields materialized yet again as a public scold, sending out an advisory letter warning voters of what he saw as Spence’s derelictions as city attorney. Spence lost to fellow Democrat Beverly Marrero, who also won the general election last week to succeed Cohen (and interim fill-in senator Shea Flinn) as state senator from District 30.

In any case, Fields’ ad hoc career as commentator on elections and would-be arbiter of candidacies was already well-launched when he rose during the last several minutes of Norman’s meeting with MSDIA members to make a point of revealing his own support of the minister, announcing, in fact, that he had “vetted” Norman’s candidacy beforehand.

That statement, together with Norman’s own wry revelation that Fields had made several telephone calls to him that day to make sure he would be in attendance at the MSDIA event, created an impression, right or wrong, that Fields was a prime mover in the Norman candidacy.

Confusion in the Ranks

Reaction to Fields’ intervention was virtually immediate. This was, after all, no judicial election for which Fields, as a longtime practicing attorney, could be thought of as supplying a pure, even-handed evaluation of credentials. This was the most partisan of all possible partisan matters — the selection of a party leader — and Fields was not exactly the ideal endorser.

He had, after all, been forced to resign last year as a member of the very Democratic committee that will have to decide on a new chairman. His offense? Pooling his legal efforts with those of the state Republican Party to overturn the 2005 special election victory of Democrat Ophelia Ford for reasons of possible election fraud committed on her behalf.

No one on the committee quarreled with Fields’ right to seek that legal end — just not as a member of the Democratic committee. (Ford’s election was, in fact, ultimately voided by the state Senate, though she won election to the seat overwhelmingly in last year’s regular election.)

Several rank-and-file Democrats expressed open displeasure concerning Fields’ involvement in the chairmanship race, and blogger Matthews would later report that Norman, when asked about it, “denounced” Fields as a potential supporter. Asked about that this week, Norman declined comment. He also would neither confirm nor deny that he had distanced himself, as reported by Matthews, from Chism’s support.

For obvious reasons, all of this fuss caused some rethinking about Norman’s inevitability as a chairman. The pastor himself would say only that he preferred to speak of “principles” rather than personalities, that he wanted to avoid immersion in factional disputes, that he had no wish to be judgmental, and that he had resolved to keep his own efforts “on higher ground.”

Last week saw the resolution of two political mini-dramas with the special-election victories of Democrats Marrero and G.A. Hardaway for state Senate and state House positions, respectively. (New District 92 representative Hardaway, a longtime campaigner for father’s-rights legislation in child-custody cases, will presumably bring with him his continued dedication to that cause.)

One other piece of news from the week (actually late last week): Shelby County Election Commission chairman Greg Duckett was named to the state Election Commission — which means that a new member will shortly be named to the county Election Commission.

Whoops! Here comes another political drama — maybe not so mini. The fact is, the local commission is facing not a single routine replacement but something resembling a total makeover — at least of its three-member Democratic Party contingent.

The commission as a whole has come under frequent challenge during the past year for alleged derelictions in supervising elections, and, while the commission’s two Republicans, Rich Holden and Nancye Hines, appear to have escaped their partymates’ wrath and seem assured of a safe return, the remaining Democrats are at risk.

As Senate Democratic leader Jim Kyle, a member of the Shelby County legislative delegation that will resolve the issue, put it on Thursday: “I wouldn’t be surprised if either Maura [Sullivan] or O.C. [Pleasant] went off, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they both did.”

A total swap-out for the Election Commission’s Democrats? Other legislators from Shelby County — like delegation chairman Joe Towns, who personally took no position on the prospect of a complete makeover — said they’d heard similar conjectures.

The list of Democratic applicants for one, two, or three positions include the two party holdovers, Sullivan and Pleasant, and several other well-known local Democrats, including former commissioner Myra Stiles’ recent countywide candidates Coleman Thompson, Shep Wilbun, and Sondra Becton and local AFSCME leader Dorothy Crook.

Some measure of Democrats’ discontent with the status quo on the commission can be gleaned from the fact that Suzanne Darnell, representing the local Democratic executive committee’s task force on the election process, has requested a meeting with Election Commission members and staff to discuss 14 separate points of misgiving concerning the way elections went last year.

The points ranged from doubts concerning election hardware and software to questions concerning the commission’s oversight and the fact that the post of deputy commission director continues to go unfilled. The late Barbara Lawing, a longtime Democratic activist and proponent of civil rights and feminist issues, will be the only posthumous recipient of the seven Women of Achievement awards that will be given Sunday at 4 p.m., at the University of Memphis-area Holiday Inn as part of National Women’s History Month. Other recipients will be the Rev. Rebekah Jordan, Donna Fortson, Nancy Lawhead, Gertrude Purdue, Modeane Thompson, and Sheila White.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

On Democratic Purity

As the eagerly attentive denizens of the planet’s seven continents surely know by now, the Shelby County Democrats were able Monday night to enforce a ban against Republican officeholders at their annual Kennedy Day Dinner. There were, both literally and figuratively, no elephants in the room.

There were, however, some conspicuous elephants outside the room, and Governor Phil Bredesen, titular head of Tennessee Democrats,

alluded to them in an aside to his keynote address. These were the disabled Tennesseans and their sympathizers who picketed the event from positions on the Central Avenue sidewalk outside the Holiday Inn where the dinner took place. In his speech, Bredesen gave these protesters against his TennCare cuts backhanded praise for exercising their constitutionally protected freedom of speech, just as — or so he informed his Democratic audience — he had given them a few minutes of his time before entering the hotel.

The governor’s solicitude for the demonstrators was given appropriate applause. But Bredesen might have merited greater praise had he dealt with the TennCare issue in some other way than by repeating his well-worn mantra that, to maintain the state’s solvency, he had no other choice than to make the draconian series of cuts that left many of the seriously disabled protesters uninsurable.

We seem to recall that state senators Steve Cohen and Rosalind Kurita, both Democrats, had proposed increasing the state cigarette tax so that the resulting revenue might have seriously mitigated the scope of the TennCare reductions. The governor, up for reelection this year and an economy-minded administrator under any circumstances, chose not to support such a measure. More crucially, perhaps, Bredesen took an adamant stand against new taxes of any kind — especially that bugaboo of the state’s recent past, an income tax — and boasted of Tennessee as a “low-tax state.”

It’s true that Tennessee’s rate of per-capita taxation is phenomenally low compared to the national average and to that of the great majority of states. The corollary is that Tennessee is a low-services state as well, and that’s nothing much to brag about.

It should be noted that Bredesen spent much of his speech insisting that his fellow state Democrats marshal their energies this year toward the goal of electing 9th Distict congressman Harold Ford Jr. to the U.S. Senate — the same Harold Ford Jr. who just voted, against the Democratic majority in Congress and along with House Republicans, to make permanent President Bush’s giveaway tax cuts for the wealthy.

It is all well and good for the Democratic Party to safeguard the sanctity of its guest list on formal party occasions. We just wish the party — and its spokespersons — would be just as resolute in upholding Democratic traditions and policies that, once upon a time, benefited the most needy and deserving in our midst.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Litmus Test

Except for a generous number of judges and judicial candidates one also sees at Republican events these days, and for the several MOR Democrats (like businessman Karl Schledwitz) active in the campaigns of district attorney general Bill Gibbons and Sheriff Mark Luttrell, there was no taint of Republicanism at the Kennedy Day Dinner held Monday night by a newly cleansed Democratic Party.

Even so, there was still a large enough crowd to nearly fill the third-floor ballroom of the University of Memphis-area Holiday Inn to hear Governor Phil Bredesen‘s keynote address. Ironically, the famously centrist governor would proselytize for a commitment to the U.S. Senate campaign of Congressman Harold Ford Jr., not exactly a stickler for Democratic orthodoxy himself.

As another irony, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton — whose loyalty to party causes and candidates has been, to put it mildly, uneven — was also on hand, at least at the beginning. But Gibbons and Luttrell were kept away, and that certainly represented a victory for the Democratic Party nominees — every countywide candidate save Mayor A C Wharton and the mysteriously invisible Circuit Court clerk nominee Roderic Ford — who had protested the possibility of the two Republican officeholders’ showing up as paying guests.

The group of nominees held two press conferences over the weekend to prevent that indignity and had gone so far as to issue an ultimatum to Shelby County Democratic chairman Matt Kuhn demanding that he disinvite Gibbons and Luttrell. That the letter bearing this demand was hand-delivered to Kuhn’s address after its 5 p.m. Saturday deadline had already expired was an unfortunate piece of bad timing.

Perhaps understandably, the normally laid-back Kuhn was perturbed by that circumstance, as well as by a statement made Sunday by Gibbons’ general-election opponent, Gail Mathes, the Democratic nominee for district attorney general. Mathes, who was serving as spokesperson for the group of nominees, said of Kuhn, “He did not return calls until the very last minute, when he may have called Mr. Gibbons — only Mr. Gibbons, and not necessarily the other incumbents, and he may have talked Mr. Gibbons into not coming.”

Kuhn would later characterize the implication that he ignored calls from Democratic nominees as a “boldfaced lie.” He said the only calls he had not returned were from Democratic activist David Upton, who played a major role in organizing the nominees’ protest, and that he had specifically and immediately returned a telephone call from Shep Wilbun, the party’s nominee for Juvenile Court clerk.

Kuhn said he had twice last week discussed with fellow Democrats the issue of a Republican presence at the dinner. This was after rumblings had started among Democrats in the blogosphere. The matter came up on Wednesday night at a planning session for the dinner and again on Thursday night at a meeting of the party’s steering committee. By then, Kuhn had evolved a policy, which the committee gave its unanimous backing to.

In essence, the party would not obstruct the attendance at the event of Gibbons and Luttrell, who had purchased tickets online and not by anybody’s invitation.

Kuhn and the committee members agreed that the two GOP officials would not be recognized from the dais or be allowed to do any electioneering. Kuhn called Luttrell and Gibbons on Friday, briefing them on the ground rules. Neither objected.

But the party nominees did, and the brouhahas of the weekend ensued. Luttrell bowed out, and an intermediary prevailed on Gibbons to do the same. (Gibbons issued a formal statement to that effect on Monday, pointedly appending to it a lengthy list of his Democratic supporters.)

When it came time for Kuhn to address Monday night’s gathering, he conveyed a tone of battle fatigue — understandable for one who, in scarcely 10 months at the helm, has had to deal with continued factionalism and case after case relating to the issue of party fidelity vs. inclusiveness.

“Are you a Republican?” he began brazenly. “If you are, as a last resort, we may ask our sergeant-at-arms … to come around … to ask about a litmus test and see if you’re a bona fide Democrat, to give you the secret handshake and hear the password.”

As the crowd began to stir with nervous energy — some of it delighted, some of it clearly not — Kuhn delivered the clincher: “That secret password is ‘minority.'” A brief and, as they say, pregnant pause ensued, punctuated with an audible gasp or two. Kuhn proceeded to detail the fact of a current Republican majority on the County Commission and segued into a castigation of the local GOP for having led the way into partisan and “divisive” local elections more than a decade ago.

The young chairman then launched into a conventional call to arms on behalf of the party’s candidates this year, and the rest of the evening proceeded along more or less traditional lines, culminating with Bredesen’s speech. But, just as Kuhn’s critics within the party had made their point, so, finally, had he made his.

The GOP “Homecoming”

The Shelby County Republicans had just put on a formal dinner of their own only two nights earlier at the Al Chymia Shrine Temple on Shelby Oaks Drive, where Republican chairman Bill Giannini had an easier time of it.

The Saturday-night event, called “A Tennessee Homecoming,” featured patriotic songs by former Miss America Kellye Cash, a skit from impressionist Paul Shanklin, remarks from former county mayor Jim Rout and former governor Winfield Dunn, and — the pièce de résistance — an appearance by actress Dixie Carter. Carter entertained the crowd with a speech that focused on Republican “values” and detailed her lifelong loyalty to the Republican Party.

State senator Jim Bryson of Franklin, the state GOP’s favored candidate for governor this year, also dropped in. A home truth was spoken, perhaps inadvertently, when Dunn spoke of his, and the party’s, gratitude to Bryson — who forfeited his chance for reelection to the state Senate — for making the governor’s race.

Said Dunn: “Surely, we’re not going to let that guy in Nashville, in the Capitol building, who’s a pretty nice guy, as everyone would acknowledge, have a free ride into the governorship for four more years. And we looked hard for a candidate.” That was an oblique way, perhaps, of saying “sacrificial lamb.”

Also on hand were the three Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate — former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker and former congressmen Van Hilleary and Ed Bryant. The latter two, who huddled together before the event, may have been appearing in the same place for the first time since they recently agreed to avoid attacks on each other and to make common cause against the perceived “moderate” Corker.

“I’m flattered,” said Corker Saturday night.

To no one’s surprise, a straw poll at the dinner went overwhelmingly in favor of Bryant, who, as a longtime congressman from the 7th District, is something of a favorite son in Shelby County.

Last Thursday night a crowd of some 300 at the University of Memphis Law School auditorium saw the largest turnout yet of declared Democratic candidates for the open 9th District congressional seat — 12 candidates and a surrogate — at a forum sponsored by the Shelby County Democratic Party and participating Democratic clubs.

A review of that event, which generated some sparks and may have shaken up the perceived pecking order somewhat, will appear online at MemphisFlyer.com and in next week’s Flyer, along with a retrospective on the congressional campaign to date.