Diedre Malone – Memphis Flyer

The year 2014 began with a call for unity from several of the political principals of Memphis and Shelby County — remarkable circumstances given that just ahead was another one of those knock-down, drawn-out election brawls that characterize a big-ballot election year.

Speaking at an annual prayer breakfast on January 1st, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen called for an end to bipartisan bickering in Congress and touted the achievements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (aka Obamacare). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell asked for civility in county government, and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, amid a good deal of wrangling over city pension reform, among other matters, said something similar and declared, “I’m through with whose fault it is!”

Surely no one is surprised that few of these hopes were fully realized in the course of 2014.

Not that some concrete things didn’t get done. The nervy national website Wonkette crowned Tennessee state Representative Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) “S***muffin of the Year,” and, lo and behold, the voters of Knox County would come to a similar conclusion down the line, voting out the incumbent madcap whose most famous bills had come to be known, fairly or otherwise, as “Don’t Say Gay” and “Starve the Children.”

State Senator Brian Kelsey had mixed results, losing again on a renewed effort to force Governor Bill Haslam into a big-time school voucher program and in a quixotic attempt to strip Shelby County of two of its elected judges but getting his props from those — including a majority of Tennessee voters — who supported his constitutional amendment to abolish an income tax in Tennessee for all time.

All four constitutional amendments on the state ballot would pass — including one to strip away what had been some fairly ironclad protections of a woman’s right to an abortion and another to transform the selection and tenure procedures for state appellate judges. Another little-noticed amendment guaranteeing veterans the right to hold charity raffles also passed.

The battle over the key three amendments all reflected a growing concern that Republican-dominated state authority had begun to enlarge its control over local governments and individual citizens alike, not only in the nature of the constitutional amendments but in the legislature’s effort to override local authority in matters including firearms management, public school oversight, public wage policy, and the ability of localities to establish their own ethical mandates.

Shelby County Democrats, who had been swept by the GOP in 2010, had a spirited primary election, with most attention focusing on the mayor’s race between former County Commissioner Deidre Malone, incumbent Commissioner Steve Mulroy, and former school board member and New Olivet Baptist Church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

When votes were counted on May 6th, Malone emerged to become the head of a Democratic ticket that would challenge several well-established Republican incumbents. Democrats’ hopes were high at first, but two of their expected election-day stalwarts began to suffer self-destructive moments at an alarming rate.

The two were lawyer Joe Brown — the “Judge Joe Brown” of nationally syndicated TV fame; and County Commissioner Henri Brooks, a former legislator who had an abrasive way about her but who had recently won laurels as the watchdog on Juvenile Court who had forced the Department of Justice (DOJ) to mandate a series of reforms.

Both District Attorney General candidate Brown, through his celebrity and what was thought to be his ability to bankroll much of the Democratic ticket’s activity, and Juvenile court Clerk candidate Brooks, riding high on her DOJ desserts, were thought to be boons, but they rapidly became busts.

Brown, it turned out, had virtually no money to pass around, even for his own campaign efforts, and he got himself arrested for contempt in Juvenile Court. When, late in the campaign, he launched a series of lurid and seemingly unfounded attacks upon the private life of his opponent, Republican D.A. Amy Weirich, he was dead in the water.

Brooks engaged in successive misfires — browbeating a Hispanic witness before the commission; assaulting a woman she was competing with for a parking spot; and, finally, turning out not to have a legal residence within the commission district she represented.

The bottom line: Shelby County Democrats — underfunded, under-organized, and riven by internal rivalries — were overwhelmed once again on August 7th, with county Mayor Mark Luttrell, Weirich, and Sheriff Bill Oldham leading a Republican ticket that won everything except the office of county assessor, where conscientious Democratic incumbent Cheyenne Johnson held on against a little-known GOP challenger.

All things considered, the judicial races on August 7th went to the known and familiar, with almost all incumbents winning reelection on a lengthy ballot in which virtually every position in every court —General Sessions, Circuit, Criminal, Chancery, and Probate — was under challenge.

Meanwhile, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who had dispatched a series of Democratic Primary and general election challengers since his first election to Congress in 2006, faced what appeared in advance to be his most formidable primary foe yet in lawyer Ricky Wilkins. Cohen won again — though only by a 2-to-1 ratio, unlike the 4-to-1 victories he was used to.

The final elections of the year, including the referenda for the aforementioned package of constitutional amendments, would take place on November 4th.

But for the amendments, there was no suspense to speak of. Two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate — Gordon Ball and Terry Adams, both Knoxville lawyers — had run a spirited and close race in the primary, but winner Ball ran way behind Republican incumbent Senator Lamar Alexander, despite Alexander’s having barely eked out a primary win over unsung Tea Party favorite Joe Carr.

Haslam, the Republican gubernatorial incumbent, easily put away Charlie Brown, an unknown quantity from East Tennessee who had won the Democratic primary mainly on the strength of his comic-strip name.

Throughout the year, there had been persistent wrangles in City Hall between Wharton and members of the city council over dozens of matters — including pension and health-care changes, development proposals, and failures to communicate — with the result that influential councilmen like 2014 council Chairman Jim Stickland and Harold Collins were possible rivals to Wharton in a 2015 mayoral race that might draw in a generous handful of other serious candidates.

Toward year’s end, though, Wharton pulled off a series of coups — announcing new Target and IKEA facilities and appearing to finesse the pension and school-debt matters — that underscored his status as the candidate to beat.

In Nashville, Haslam seemed to have achieved the high ground, finally, with his espousal of a bona fide Medicaid-expansion plan, “Insure Tennessee,” and a determination to defend the Hall income tax and at least some version of educational standards. But battles over these matters and new attacks on legal abortion loomed.

We shall see what we shall see.

Last March the Shelby County Democrats’ executive committee formally censured several party members for consorting with Republicans.

“I wish those Democrats would go ahead and just sign up and be Republicans. Go ahead and join the party because we don’t need you. You don’t support us.” — Bryan Carson, August 8, 2014

Sure, this day-after-election statement about Democratic crossover voters by the youthful Shelby County Democratic chairman — quickly withdrawn and apologized for within a day — reflected the strain and frustration of a losing race. But it also contained evidence of the virus that has infected the local party for years — and that reached the life-threatening stage this year.

The fact is that, over the past generation, many a Democrat has gone ahead and just “signed up” to be a Republican. The throngs that swell the annual functions of the local GOP — the Lincoln Day Dinner, the Master Meal, and the other large-scale affairs that require significant ballroom space — are loaded with former Democrats, many of them office-holders.

The crowds that attend the Kennedy Day Dinner and other gala functions of the Democrats — the same Democrats who used to number most of the county’s movers and shakers — grow smaller year by year, as do the venues rented to put them on.

Four years ago, Shelby County’s Democrats, conscious of demographic population numbers that seemed to guarantee them an electoral majority, girded for a sweep in the August county election and got one; only it was they who were on the losing end of it.

What happened? One explanation, still popular among the party’s strategists, was that Republican turnout was inflated by the intensely competitive race going on that year among Republicans in the 8th Congressional District and, even more so, by a governor’s race featuring three GOP candidates who spent large and seemed to be making Shelby County a second home.

Another explanation, still widely accepted among Democratic activists and on the street, was that fraudulent or incompetent oversight of the election by the GOP-dominated Election Commission had cheated Democrats out of several possible victories.

In the election just concluded on August 7th, neither of these conditions applied: It was the Democrats who had competitive races — for the 9th District congressional seat between victorious incumbent Steve Cohen and challenger Ricky Wilkins and for the U.S. Senate nomination between impressive newcomers Gordon Ball, the winner, and Terry Adams, the near-thing loser.

Thanks to significant pressure from local Democrats and their governmental allies, federal monitors were on hand to prevent any possible hanky panky at the polls.

Yet it was the same old same old when the votes were counted. Republicans had won everything except for the assessor’s race, won by respected Democratic incumbent Cheyenne Johnson, who kept her campaign mostly separate from the “coordinated campaign” run by the Shelby County Democratic Party and who was, in effect, having to reenact her off-year victory of two years earlier, thanks to a change in the state election calendar.

Of course, the outcome could be partly explained by an apparently disproportionate turnout, especially in early voting, by white suburban Republicans and a lesser-than-expected turnout by inner-city black Democrats. But that argument amounts to what logicians call a tautology, which is a rhetorical first cousin to circular reasoning — as in: “The reason for the lower Democratic vote was that fewer Democrats came to the polls.”

And the fact is, there was more to it than that. Of the Democrats who did come to the polls, it is estimated that perhaps 20 percent of them cast their votes not for party mates but for Republican candidates on the ballot.

These are the ones — the difference-makers castigated by Chairman Carson the morning after — who swung the election. His implication was that these voters were disloyal, and demands for absolute loyalty had all too clearly dominated local Democratic proceedings in the lengthy run-up to the August election.

“Disloyalty” by party members had in fact become a third reason cited by disgruntled Democrats for the election debacle of 2010 — and grounds for punitive action.

Last September, the device of censure was trotted out by the party executive committee to stigmatize James Harvey, chairman of the county commission, for allegedly colluding with GOP commissioners on committee assignments.

Then, in January, at what was a reasonably successful Kennedy Day Dinner, Carol Chumney, the former state representative and city councilmember, delivered an impromptu oration against what she called “Republi-Democratic” behavior — specifically the refusal of “one of our congressmen” to support her in a losing special election race in 2012 for district attorney general.

The congressman in question was Cohen, who had stayed out of that 2012 race. Other prominent Democrats — notably City Councilmen Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn — had actively backed Republican Amy Weirich. In any case, the applause for Chumney’s remarks seemed to transcend particular cases.

Then in early March, several prominent Democrats — former Chairman Sidney Chism, state legislators Reginald Tate and Joe Towns, and well-known Whitehaven activist Hazel Moore — were formally censured by the local party’s executive committee for “disloyal” actions.

Chism’s offense was that of being partial to Republican Sheriff Bill Oldham and discouraging a run for sheriff by eventual Democratic nominee Bennie Cobb. The other three were cited for courtesy visits to a fund-raiser for Republican Circuit Court Clerk Jimmy Moore.

Moore, a onetime Democrat noted for his friendships (and campaign donations) across party lines, was a case in point — a nominal Republican who, like other elected county officials, was forced to choose a party label after the advent of local party primaries in the early 1990s.

The Republican Party, which had already swelled its ranks statewide by attracting erstwhile Democrats to the fold, had begun doing the same thing locally — actively soliciting Democrats and pointedly discounting their former votes and political activity.

For whatever reason, Democrats had taken the opposite course, erecting rigid obstacles to potential members and party candidates with even a hint of Republicanism in their past.

When, in the wake of the Tennessee Waltz scandal of 2005, Matt Kuhn was elected local Democratic chairman at the head of a reform slate, he was forced by a vocal minority to rescind invitations to interested Republicans who wanted to attend that year’s Kennedy Day Dinner.

And that attitude has persisted and even hardened in the exclusionary actions of election year 2014 — one manifestation of which was the embarrassingly rowdy session in which the Democratic Executive Committee voted its endorsements for judicial candidates, making choices so exclusively based on hearsay claims of Democratic loyalty that numerous deserving candidates vetted by a party screening committee were summarily rejected.

That most of these endorsees went down to defeat in the election was consistent with the fate of the party’s nominees in other races, which, more often than not, were based on insular thinking and devoid of significant efforts at outreach.

It is no coincidence that the series of self-destructive actions that damned the once-promising election hopes of Juvenile Court Clerk candidate Henri Brooks began with a County Commission session in which Brooks brow-beat an Hispanic witness and seemed to impute Klan membership to a white colleague.

Then there was the promise of “Judge” Joe Brown, the party’s candidate for district attorney general, to teach the the county’s white population, now out-numbered by African Americans, “how to be a good minority.”

That was actually one of the least impolitic of Brown’s presumably well-intentioned off-the-cuff public remarks, but it reflected a reliance on sheer census numbers that seemed to infect the whole Democratic ticket.

Democratic mayoral candidate Deidre Malone, who resisted such thinking, lacked the funding to escape the back-wash of it and lost by a larger margin than need have been to the GOP’s placidly centered Mark Luttrell. Ditto with Juvenile Court judge candidate Tarik Sugarmon in his formally nonpartisan race with Republican Dan Michael.

Other Democratic candidates — Wanda Halbert, Rhonda Banks, William Chism — fell just short.

One highly tempting conclusion is that the 20 percent of Democrats who forsook the ticket included significant numbers of African Americans as well as whites. But that’s another story.

To be continued.