Tag: Harold Ford Jr.

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Politics Politics Feature

Harold Ford Jr. Returning to the Airwaves for Fox News

Harold Ford Jr. (by Jackson Baker)

Former Memphis Congressman Harold Ford Jr. may or may not be out of politics (that remains to be seen), but Ford, who has logged considerable time in the past as an on-air commentator, will soon be back before the camera, on behalf of Fox News.

Fox CEO Suzanne Scott made the announcement this week that Ford, who some years back was a part-time commentator on her network, will be appearing “on all Fox News platforms” during both daytime and primetime programming.

After his first stint with Fox, Ford hooked up with MSNBC as a commentator and was a frequent guest on various NBC programs and on the syndicated show Imus in the Morning. 

The son of former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., Ford succeeded his father in Congress as representative of Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District (Memphis), serving from 1997 to 2007. Running as the Democratic nominee, Ford narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race to Republican Bob Corker in 2006.

He later moved to New York, where he worked for some years on Wall Street and briefly flirted with the idea of running for the Senate in that state. Most recently, he has worked as chairman of RxSaver, a healthcare company.

Ford has maintained connections with Memphis and has visited here with relative frequency over the years. In 2019 he was the featured speaker of the Rotary Halloran Speaker Series, cosponsored by the Rotary Club of Memphis and former Orpheum president Pat Halloran.

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Politics Politics Feature

City Election’s Final Races Head Into the Stretch

Thursday, November 14th, two weeks from now, will see the final voting for the 2019 Memphis city election. The remaining races to be decided, via runoff, are the Memphis City Council seats in District 1 (Frayser, Raleigh), where incumbent Sherman Greer hopes to do a turnaround on the tally of October 3rd, when challenger Rhonda Logan missed an outright majority win by a hair’s-breadth, and in District 7, where Michalyn Easter-Thomas, runner-up to incumbent Berlin Boyd, is attempting to consolidate a potential anti-Boyd majority with the support of several other former candidates in that race.

Early voting for the runoff elections began on Friday, October 25th, and will end on Saturday, November 9th.

Ordinarily, challengers Logan and Easter-Thomas would seem to own the momentum, in light of the failure of Greer and Boyd to exploit the presumed natural advantage of their incumbency on the first go-around. But no one is making any firm and fast predictions. The notorious reality about runoffs — and one of the compelling arguments in favor of substituting Ranked Choice Voting as an alternative to dependence on them — is the precipitate fallout in general voter turnout that accompanies them.

Photographs by Jackson Baker

Michalyn Easter-Thomas with supporters

Victory in a runoff often depends on which side is more successful in getting their people out to the polls. And one seasoned consultant, asked about prospects for the runoff election, conjectured that the total vote in each of the runoff districts could easily run to no more than 1,600 voters each.

That fact co-exists with another reality, that the incumbents have a second chance to activate the donor sources that, as office-holders, they have presumably been able to develop a working relationship with. But the financial factor may not be weighted as much for the runoff cycle as it was for the general election.

In any case, all four candidates seem to be trying hard — each according to their fashion. 

Councilman Sherman Greer campaigning in district coin-op laundry

Logan is busy on social media and working with her political allies in the district. Greer is pressing the flesh in locations like the coin-op on Highway 64, in the Countrywood sector of his district. Boyd is being touted by at least one large billboard on a major thoroughfare. And Easter-Thomas is networking big-time with organization Democrats and fellow District 7 candidates from the first round.

Further points: Boyd’s wheeler-dealer image is both a help and a hindrance. He may enjoy some credit for his efforts, say, in landing a dog park on Mud Island and arranging a FedEx presence in the vacated Gibson’s building Downtown, but he incurred conflict-of-interest allegations for his previously undisclosed contractual relationship with FedEx.

Easter-Thomas’ opportunity is the high-water mark for the 2019 version of the People’s Convention, and it was buttressed by her well-attended support rally last week from former District 7 candidates, political veterans (like the Rev. Bill Adkins), activists (e.g., AFL-CIO representative Jeffrey Lichtenstein), along with a huge turnout from the media on a rainy day.

Though Greer finished well behind Logan in the regular general election, his previous service with Congressmen Harold Ford Jr. and Steve Cohen makes for both a helpful and a practical association, and he has crossover support from the likes of GOP icon John Ryder.

Logan, president of the Raleigh Community Development Corporation, is a bona fide grassroots product, heavily boosted now as before by influential indigenous political figures, notably state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Departure of Jones and Tate; The Return of Harold Ford Jr.

On the whole, it was a bad week — or at least a sad one — for the political community of Memphis. The city lost two veterans of legislative service — via the deaths of former state Representative Rufus Jones and former state Senator Reginald Tate.

There was one redeeming high note — the return to town, for a much-appreciated visit, anyhow, of another former public official. That was former Memphis Congressman Harold Ford Jr., now a resident of New York and serving as chairman of RxSaver, a health-care company.

Ford, who represented the city’s 9th congressional district from 1996 to 2006, addressed a luncheon crowd on Tuesday at the Westin Hotel as part of the Rotary Halloran Speaker Series, a joint effort of the Rotary Club of Memphis and former Orpheum president Pat Halloran.

Jackson Baker

Harold Ford Jr. at Halloran Rotary Lunch

The essence of Ford’s speech was a catch-up on his (and his family’s) personal circumstances for the attendees, but he was willing to address political matters as well. He began with a courtesy nod to the Trump supporters in the audience, saying that if the president’s much-encumbered name happened not to be attached to many of his policy initiatives, some of them would appear to be, relatively speaking, “decent.”

But, asked about the current Syrian fiasco, caused by the president’s unexpected and abrupt withdrawal of an American tripwire force there, Ford opined that Trump’s action triggered a view of him in the world at large as “unpredictable” in a way that communicated an ominous sense of weakness.

• Even as members of Shelby County’s political community, Democrats and Republicans alike, were mourning the death on Sunday of Jones, a member of  the state House of Representatives from 1980 to 1996, they found themselves having to deal as well with the loss on Monday of former state Senator Tate, whose tenure in the state Senate ran from 2006 to 2018.

Both Jones and Tate served as Democrats — Jones during a period in which his party commanded a comfortable majority in his chamber and in the legislature at large, Tate during an era of Republican control of both the Senate and the General Assembly. Both Jones and Tate had business backgrounds, Jones as a member of a South Memphis family with grocery interests, Tate as president/CEO of an architectural firm.

Each of them was personally popular on both sides of the aisle, and each served during periods of political controversy that tested their commitment to pure partisanship. Jones’ case was less demanding in that regard. Along with a majority of other legislative Democrats, he found himself working in harmony with Republican Governor Don Sundquist in an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to pass a state income tax.

Representative G.A. Hardaway, chair of the Legislative Black Caucus and often a Democratic spokesman at large, sized things up this way: “Rufus E. Jones served as a ready and willing source of reliable and sound advice for myself and other legislators. Our families were close, and that allowed me to personally witness and learn from an excellent exemplar of personal conduct, professional success, and civic leadership.”

Tate’s situation was different. Lacking any party background as such, he had the support of his neighbor Sidney Chism, an influential Democrat and sometime party chairman, when the county Democratic Committee had to find a substitute nominee in 2006 for the Senate seat vacated by incumbent Kathryn Bowers, who would be tried as a suspect in the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz corruption sting.

Tate was nominated and won. He entered the Senate during a time when control of that body was swinging from Democrats to Republicans, and he seems to have perceived his duty, both to himself and to his district, as that of maintaining good relations with the soon-to-be dominant GOP. Legislative Republicans, for their part, made sure to get him aboard key committees. Increasingly, he was seen by fellow Democrats to be overstepping political boundaries — even to the point of becoming a board member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing mill for ultra-conservative state legislation.

Matters came to a head in 2018, when Tate was up for re-election to a fourth four-year term. Not only had he aroused the ire of his party mates with his ever-increasing number of conservative votes, he was overheard on a hot microphone apparently uttering profane criticism of his fellow Democrats. It was less a judgment on his part than a sign of frustration as he saw one after another member of his party caucus side openly with his Democratic primary opponent in 2018, Katrina Robinson, an accomplished newcomer and proprietor of a nursing school.

It cost him; Tate would go down to defeat by a 2 to 1 margin, Robinson polling 14,140 votes to his 6,464, and she would go on to serve effectively as a member of the Senate Democratic minority.

Still, there was little rejoicing in party ranks at Tate’s defeat. Even those who were opposed to his politics remained personally fond of the man whose people skills were of the highest order. Karen Camper, the Democrats’ House Leader, was a particular friend, as was Democratic caucus chair Raumesh Akbari, who said, “No matter what the legislative issue was, he found a way to work with folks from both sides of the aisle and always thought of Memphis first. Senator Tate had a way of always making you smile, and I know he’s smiling down on all of us today.”

Shelby delegation chair Antonio Parkinson noted, “Senator Tate left an indelible mark on the state of Tennessee and its citizens through legislation that he sponsored and cosponsored over his many years at the Tennessee Legislature.”

Senator Sara Kyle, who had been an explicit critic of Tate, said, “Senator Tate did many good things for the citizens of Shelby County during his time in the General Assembly, and I was shocked and saddened to learn of his passing. We will all miss his smile and good sense of humor.” And Robinson, his electoral conqueror, also weighed in: “This is a sad day for Shelby County and our entire state. Thanks for 12 years of service to District 33.”

Funeral arrangements had not been announced at press time.

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Politics Politics Feature

New Names on the Marquee

A longtime intimate of Harold Ford Jr. was asked the other day if the former Memphis congressman — who, as the Democratic nominee in 2006, lost a U.S. Senate race to Republican Bob Corker by a hair’s breadth — would trade the wealth and standing he has since acquired on Wall Street for the alternate biography that would have followed from a win over Corker.

The answer was quick and unequivocal: “In a minute.” He might have said, but didn’t, “In a New York minute,” since the Empire State has, for some years now, been Ford’s abode. The man, who had worked in close harness with Ford for the duration of his political career in Tennessee, went on to say, “He wanted to be president.”

Should “wanted” be “wants”? Whether it is a matter of his own uncooked seeds or just that various political talk shows want access to his expertise and/or residual star quality, Ford is a staple these days on cable TV — a frequent guest, for example, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, where he offers informed centrist commentary when queried on topical issues and affairs of state by the show’s host. Joe Scarborough is often peremptory with his guests but usually deferential with Ford, whom he refers to familiarly as Harold.

Upon the close of a recent colloquy with Ford, Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida during the Tennessee Democrat’s own time there but an independent now and a member-in-good-standing of the resistance to Trump, smiled fondly and declared that Ford just might be the man to close the gap between right and left factions in the opposition.

The same note was also struck recently on an installment of Real Time With Bill Maher, when the eponymous host ended a group discussion that included Ford with a statement to the effect that he and the audience could be looking at the Democrat who could mount a successful challenge to Trump.

It must be said that in neither case did Ford respond with either a mock protest to the idea or a concurrence with it. With a certain modesty, he just allowed the sentiment to be expressed, while there were detectable murmurs of assent from others onstage or in the studio audience.

But how? Ford, no longer an office-holder, lacks the usual political perch from which a bid for national office could be mounted. Just after his loss in 2006, in a race that saw him featured on the cover of Time as a possible avatar of something new in national politics, Ford taught politics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and became titular head of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a center-to-right party organization that had been the launching pad for Bill Clinton‘s own ascent to the presidency.

As Democratic politics shifted leftward during those years of a George W. Bush Republican administration, the DLC ceased to be much of a force and eventually ceased to be, period. Meanwhile, too, a new and ambitious young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had seized the limelight and, along with it, first dibs on a quest to become the first black president (an honor Ford’s supporters had long assumed to be his).

Ford’s views on fiscal matters had always tilted surprisingly rightward for a Democrat, and an African-American in particular. Indeed, that fact had been a sticking point with self-styled progressive Democrats in Tennessee and something of a brake on their ardor in Ford’s contest with Corker. But those views were consistent with Ford’s next move, which was to New York and Wall Street, where, a married man now with a family, he works as a rainmaker and managing director for the Morgan Stanley brokerage firm.

Early on in his New York residence, Ford took a flyer at a possible run for the Senate seat held there by fellow Democrat Kirsten Gillebrand, but the conservative social views he had expressed as a candidate in Tennessee worked against him in New York despite his efforts to update them in conformity with his new milieu, and he was forced to abandon his trial run.

So whither now? Lack of an office in government did not hinder Trump’s political ambitions, but Ford, for all his ubiquity on cable, is not on the same plane as a national celebrity. 

Ironically, were native son and periodic Memphis visitor Harold Ford still an official Tennessean, he might be the subject of renewed blandishments from Democrats anxious to field a candidate for the Senate seat which Ford’s former opponent Corker is abandoning. That may be happening, anyhow.

 

• Meanwhile, there is continued action in Tennessee on the Senate front and another possible blast from the past for Democrats, with no residential barrier to running.

Phil Bredesen, the state’s last Democratic governor (and last Democratic winner of any statewide office) made no bones of his wish to remain in government following his term-limited exit from office in 2010, but the hoped-for invitation from the Obama administration never came. (Bredesen had been rumored for secretary of Health and Human Services.)

Now, prodded by some of the aforesaid desperate Democrats — and notably by party moneyman Bill Freeman of Nashville — Bredesen announced Monday that, despite an earlier rejection of the idea, he is thinking seriously about a Senate run. Watch that space!

Last week,  prior to Bredesen’s statement, James Mackler, the Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet who is already a declared Democratic candidate, was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the East Memphis home of Brice Timmons, where he demonstrated significant gifts as a speechmaker, articulating a lively point-by-point case against both putative GOP nominee Marsha Blackburn and President Trump. 

Mackler’s affair drew a fair number of longtime Democratic activists and donors.

On the Republican side, the former 8th District Republican congressman Stephen Fincher is serious enough about a possible Senate run — despite the presence in the race already of a like-minded conservative, 7th District U.S. Rep. Blackburn —  to have embarked on a statewide “listening tour” which took him to Memphis this week. More about that anon.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (November 20, 2014)…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter from the Editor on urban vs. rural voters and fear …

You’re seriously comparing racism to a fear of… cows?

Count Dracula

“Aren’t you worried about those cows coming after us?” That’s the funniest line I’ve read in a long time.

Nobody

One of my favorite movies is Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, and Rip Torn. In a nutshell, Brooks’ character dies and finds out the afterlife is a review of one’s life, and it’s to determine if you have to return to earth and try it again or get to move on to the “next destination.” The determining factor is fear. If you let fear rule your life, then you will return to earth and try again in a new life.

Rip Torn’s character explains it with this quote: “Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything — real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can’t get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you’re in for the ride of your life.”

Charley Eppes

About Harold Ford Jr.’s Viewpoint column, “A New Day in Washington” …

Yikes, a lot of that made sense. How did that slip into this week’s Flyer? It’s not sour grapes like every other piece.

Not a Midtown Liberal

Why should the president take advice from a perennial loser? Yes, this election is a wonderful opportunity for soulless, bottom-feeding Democrats to suck up to Republicans and sell out your party and your people for an invitation to a Washington cocktail party.

Thanks ever so much for bringing up our old friend, the Keystone Pipeline. This Canadian boondoggle that promises to bring thousands of well-paying, short-term jobs (not including strippers, I suppose) in exchange for a leaky pipeline delivering, as Charles Pierce says, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel across an aquifer that waters America’s breadbasket — and then to the world’s, but not America’s, gas tanks. It’s such a sweet deal, the Canadians themselves didn’t want it crossing their land, so they looked south for a sucker and found one named Harold Ford Jr.

Jeff

Was he out of the country during the 2010 and 2014 elections? Blue Dogism is dead, so are the careers of Lieberman, John Barrow, and all the others. On Election Day we settled all family business, and we are drifting rightward as a party no more.

LeftWingCracker

About Clay Skipper’s cover story, “Drake’s Dad” …

How nice that you featured Dennis Graham. Excellent approach to journalism. Terrance and I have met him at DKDC for one of Marcella’s shows, and he rocks! Very cool man — down to earth, warm, and friendly.

Cynthia Simien

This was a very good article. People rarely write articles like this, these days. It was like a novel.

Odera Okoye

About Toby Sells’ post, “Big River Crossing Construction Begins on Harahan Bridge” …

This is one of the biggest boondoggles ever concocted. Total waste of money. The proponents must have never been to West Memphis. It ranks as the mother of all armpit jewels in the U.S. Can’t this colossal waste be stopped? I sure hope so.

xtraxtra

Talk about a bridge to nowhere. What a waste of money.

Wicketr

It’s not a bridge to nowhere. It will connect with the Mississippi River Trail and, once across, you will be able to ride the levee to New Orleans and eventually north to the river’s source in Minnesota. From what I have seen, projects like this boost a city’s draw, making people want to live inside the city limits. Having people stay or move into the city will be a long-term benefit to the tax base. Think of it as an investment.

Mark Hendren

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Opinion Viewpoint

A New Day in Washington

With the stock market at an all-time high, with almost 50 consecutive months of positive job growth, with the nation’s annual deficit at a six-year low, and with America now the leading producer of oil and gas products in the world, why are a majority of Americans so dispirited and disappointed with President Obama and the Democrats? 

And, separately, with a divided government in Washington now, is there hope for progress on key issues in Washington over the next two years?

Let’s answer in reverse order. 

Yes, there is hope for progress, but it depends on two things. First, which wing of the Republican Party will lead and negotiate matters of legislative seriousness in Washington. If Republicans follow the “sore winners” wing of their party — symbolized by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who declared election night that the Republican sweep ends an era of “Obama lawlessness” — it’s unlikely anything meaningful gets done. The paralysis and foolishness of Washington will only persist. 

But if Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rob Portman of Ohio and, yes, Mitch McConnell — the GOP Senate majority leader from Kentucky who on election night called for cooperation and change — are the dominant faces of Republican leadership, there’s a chance for a new day to emerge. 

Can important compromises be reached between the president and Congress on trade, taxes, immigration, and energy policy? 

Very likely, especially if Republicans agree to the creation of a public-private bank to jumpstart critical U.S. building initiatives — including new airports, broadband networks, roads, schools, pipelines, and subway lines. In addition, the Republicans need to accept that an outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka “Obamacare”) isn’t going to happen. They should aim instead to repeal the medical device tax portion of the ACA, a policy change I support, as do many Republicans and Democrats. 

But, first, the Republicans should give the president the trade promotion authority he has sought but been denied by the Senate’s Democratic leadership over the past years. What a White House visual that would be in the next few weeks: the president, surrounded by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, signing a piece of legislation! 

Obama and the Democrats have to be willing to do their part. The president’s first reaction to the election last Wednesday was a seeming effort to dodge any accountability for our party’s losses. Fortunately, on Sunday, Obama pushed the reset button by acknowledging that the buck stops with him.   

If I were advising the president, I’d recommend three things:

First, he should sign the Keystone Pipeline legislation and then agree not to change immigration laws unilaterally right now. And, in exchange, the Republicans should agree to raise the minimum wage and not repeal the ACA. This deal is achievable if the president leads on it.  

Independent analysis of the environmental impact of building the Keystone Pipeline substantiates a negligible carbon impact, and, in addition, a large number of Congressional Democrats want it as well. The long-term job-creation impact of the pipeline’s construction is in dispute. But what is not is that the pipeline’s construction would immediately produce thousands of well-paying jobs.    

Second, to deal with immigration, the president should appoint a bipartisan, Baker-Hamilton 9/11-like commission to offer recommendations by June to the president and Congress. He should ask majority leaders John Boehner and McConnell to agree to a vote on all or some of the recommendations before Congress adjourns for the year in the fall. If the Republicans don’t act in good faith, then the president can act by executive action at the end of the year. 

Next, raise the carried-interest rate to 25 percent, and lower the corporate tax rate to 20 percent to make it more competitive globally, while granting a 90-day, 12.5 percent tax holiday for repatriation. Proceeds from the tax holiday could fund a public-private bank to begin rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. 

And last, Obama should be more social with Congress, spending regular time with congressional leaders from both parties who have complained that they don’t see the president enough. If for no other reason, better answers to the avalanche of foreign policy challenges the country faces are likely to be attained if there’s increased dialogue and trust between Congress and the president. 

Some will argue that these recommendations aren’t big enough. But it’s surely preferable for the political argument in this country to be about how to do more things in Washington and not just about how to get something — anything — done.

And we the people should do our part. Let us be as diligent in educating ourselves on the issues as we are in hurling invective at our political opponents. Let us not attack others’ political ideas unless we have alternatives to fix problems we know exist. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

How to Fail in Politics 101

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Toward the end of his just-concluded campaign for U.S. Senate, Democratic candidate Gordon Ball, son of a moonshiner (that was one of his never-fail best self-descriptions), a self-made multi-millionaire Knoxville lawyer who made his money and his name suing polluters and greedy corporations, altered his presentation in a perplexing way.

To back up: Ball had always been determined, as he put it, to take a broom against the feckless Washington, D.C., power community that he saw, in the original and negative sense of the term, as so much rascal flats. He would fulminate against the major inhabitants of this gone-wrong Potemkin Village, particularly Republican opponent Senator Lamar Alexander, whom he castigated for what was made to sound like an ill-gotten $22 million net worth, including $620,000 reaped from a $1 investment in the now-defunct Knoxville Journal. “A finder’s fee,” Ball scornfully quoted Alexander.

“If you want to change things in Washington, you’ve got to change the people,” Ball said. And he would name names of those who had to go — Mitch McConnell, the would-be Senate majority leader from Kentucky who was drenched with oil and gas and Koch money and would do nothing but obstruct any modest agenda put forth by Democrats, and Alexander, who opposed minimum wage and women’s rights and veterans’ rights and so much else, and needed to go home and tend to his garden of greenbacks.

So far, so good, I thought, as I heard all this at a morning stop last week at the IBEW headquarters on Madison. He’s coming on as a populist and demonizing the opposition and pitching to his base. But afterward, when we reporters had a chance for some private words with Ball, something he’d said on the road that I’d read in somebody else’s coverage kind of chafed at me, not in an ideological sense but in purely practical terms. So I had to ask.

Had Ball actually included on this list of desirable purgees the name of Harry Reid, the bespectacled ex-pugilist from Searchlight, Nevada, who’d risen to become Senate Democratic Majority Leader and who was constantly at battle with Senate Republicans determined to filibuster every proposal brought by the Obama administration?

Instead of reading my question as a rhetorical one, maybe even an implied rebuke (What’s to gain from attacking your own party leadership?), Ball took what I’d said as a prod. He’d overlooked Reid, whom, in various articles along the trail, he’d said he wouldn’t be able to vote for as leader. He apologized for having omitted Reid’s name at the IBEW rally and added it back in. “Yes, let’s include Harry Reid in there, too. We need to get rid of Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander and Harry Reid!”

It scanned wrong with my sensors, mainly because it diluted Ball’s respectably populist message, already nudged a little bit toward that shadowy, ill-defined reform constituency — the Tea Party — that had repudiated Common Core, as had any number of classroom teachers, who disliked the standardized tests and career-binding teacher scores that came with it as heartily as the Tea Party folks hated what they saw as governmental over-reach.

These were the folks who contained so much of the undecided vote that Ball needed in order to make up the gap shown in the final Middle Tennessee State University poll — reputedly showing Alexander (the same Alexander who netted only 49 percent of the Republican primary vote in August) with 42 percent, Ball with 26, and the rest, 32 percent, undecided. “I’ve got to get almost all that undecided,” Ball would tell me on election eve.

We can all do the math and see how much of it would have had to break Ball’s way — and, since this is being read after the election, we can now see for ourselves how much of it did break toward the challenger.

Something tells me that the Knoxville Democrat’s rhetorical throwing of his current party leader, Reid, on the same trash heap as Alexander and McConnell was worth very little to his hopes and, indeed, was likely counter-productive.

I am sure there are extant studies on the efficacy of this kind of acrobatic tactic, in which a candidate separates from his party, or from what he perceives as the unpopular national version of it, in hopes of ultimately gaining both re-entry into his party’s good graces and –more importantly — immunity from its adversaries.

Maybe even their toleration. Heck, maybe even their votes!

If there aren’t such studies, there should be, and, meanwhile, with a conviction based entirely on my intuitive sense, coupled with case after case of actual results. I say this sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing maneuver is a loser, always.

First, there is no reason to believe, literally no reason, that a disparagement of some symbolic party colleague whom one’s political adversary has made an arch villain will gain a single vote for oneself. Those who would agree with the disparagement are already on the other side, for that and any number of other assorted reasons.

It’s just a guess, but I believe a candidate would do equally well with the opposition voter by heaping rhapsodic praise on the party colleague whom the other guys have demonized. A wash, is my guess.

On the other hand, he would certainly get better results with his own party base and ideological constituency with the latter course, which might have the salvific effect of rousing them to solidarity and sincere effort on one’s behalf.

Another case in point — speaking of McConnell — is that of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky who, for much of the past year, had been running neck-and-neck with the venerable GOP Senate leader.

Here of late, however, McConnell seemed to be pulling away a bit, and either as partial cause or maybe just as an objective correlative to that fact, Grimes has apparently tried to join McConnell on the anti-Obama bandwagon, refusing four times in a brief televised performance to say she had voted for Obama for president.

As Memphis Leftwing Cracker blogger Steve Steffens noted with some dismay, along with fellow Democratic blogger Rick Maynard, Grimes had demonstrably been a convention delegate of Obama’s — something requiring a positive embrace and avowal of a candidate on a relatively public scale. And now she was denying him? Thinking … what?

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Steffens and Maynard both concluded.

I am one who thinks current Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Roy Herron is doing good work, and I always thought he was a conscientious, effective state Senator, but, while I recognized the head of steam Republican Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump had going in the 8th District congressional race of 2010, I thought Herron, a longtime fixture in the area,  was competitive until he began pandering to what he perceived as his home folks’ animus against national Democrats, and ended up repudiating the then-Democratic House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whom he vowed to vote against.

Same arithmetic as with all other such cases: No gain from the opposition camp, while there is a palpable unease in one’s own party ranks, resulting in resentment, resignation, and fatalism that probably cost votes.

And need we mention the 2006 U.S. Senate race, in which the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Harold Ford Jr., made a concerted effort to dissociate himself not only from national party luminaries but from established party talking points on issues such as gay rights, a Draconian bankruptcy bill, opposition to the war in Iraq, and even from the party label itself.

At his headquarters opening in Memphis in 2006, he declaimed at one point, “I’m not a Democrat running up to Washington yelling ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat!”

And sure enough, Ford, who in other ways was running what may have been the last truly competitive statewide Democratic race against a Republican, lost to Republican Bob Corker and never got a chance to go up thataway yelling “Democrat, Democrat, Democrat” or “Blue Dog, Blue Dog, Blue Dog” or whatever other mutated and minimized form of party identity he was willing to own up to. 

Maybe “Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street”? That’s where he works today, having thus far failed to rekindle popular excitement for another political candidacy, here, there, or anywhere.

Radical thought: Maybe it actually pays to embrace one’s political party, its principles, and its personnel. Maybe that’s how you get elected.

Categories
Cover Feature News

25 Who Shaped Memphis: 1989-2014

Picking 25 people who had a major impact on the life and times of Memphis over the past 25 years is easy. In fact, you can easily pick 50. Narrowing the list down to 25 is the hard part. We made our final choices keeping in mind several areas of influence: politics, government, entertainment, sports, etc. We tried to pick folks whose contributions have stood the test of time or were responsible for a major shifts in attitude or direction.

It is by no means a perfect list, as these things are by necessity subjective. But it’s our list — and it’s a good one. — BV

Laura Adams

Laura Adams

Adams lives and breathes Shelby Farms Park. She was appointed as the conservancy head in 2010, but long before that, Adams advocated for increased use of the city’s largest urban park through Friends of Shelby Farms Park. Since she’s been in the lead role of the nonprofit conservancy, Adams has overseen the addition of the seven-mile Shelby Farms Greenline, a new foot bridge over the Wolf River, the state-of-the-art Woodland Discovery Playground, and new festivals and attractions, and soon, work will begin on expanding Patriot Lake.

Craig Brewer

Over the past 25 years, Hollywood has come to Memphis to shoot several high-profile movies, including The Firm, 21 Grams, and Walk the Line. But there’s only one local filmmaker who took Memphis to Hollywood: Craig Brewer.

On the strength of his first film, 2000’s The Poor & Hungry, Brewer got Hollywood backing for the movie that put Memphis Indie filmmaking on the map: 2005’s Hustle & Flow. The flick won Sundance, got a major theatrical release, and was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning one for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” by Three 6 Mafia and Frayser Boy.

Brewer followed it up with another Memphis-made film, Black Snake Moan, and then his biggest yet, a remake of Footloose. Nowadays, Brewer divides his time between Memphis and L.A., but make no mistake: There is no bigger or more powerful advocate for the Bluff City film community.

John Calipari

John Calipari

Let’s get one thing straight: Before John Calipari, there was great Memphis Tigers basketball. He did not make the program — but he did make it relevant again when college basketball was no longer essential for players to make it in the NBA. Calipari arrived in Memphis in 2000, licking his wounds after a failed stint in the professional league. He was greeted by some here as a savior (U of M basketball was on the ropes following the Tic Price scandal) and by some as a slick operator (Calipari’s previous college employer, UMass, had to vacate a Final Four because of NCAA violations while he was in charge). But when Calipari’s teams began winning big here, the coach went from someone Memphians hated to love to someone we loved to love. And, when he left for a job at the University of Kentucky — taking some big-time recruits with him — he turned instant villain, someone we loved to hate. Even now, five years after he’s gone, not many a day goes by where his name isn’t uttered on local sports talk.

Karen Carrier

Karen Carrier

Anybody with taste buds in this town should be grateful that Karen Carrier is the restless type. In 1991, she opened Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club on Second Street across from the Peabody. When not a lot was happening in that area, this restaurant’s cool décor and innovative fare inspired by “sun-drenched” locales offered a chic downtown oasis. In 1996, Carrier proved pioneer again when she converted her own home in Victorian Village to pretty, white-tableclothed Cielo. Later, she dumped that concept and made the space into the fashionable Mollie Fontaine Lounge, and then there’s the Beauty Shop, Do, and Bar DKDC. Basically, Carrier is the pied piper of happening restaurants and one of Memphis’ true culinary pioneers.

Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen

The congressman from Memphis’ 9th Congressional District since his first election in 2006, Cohen is still goin,’ running for a fifth term in 2014. Though his first win was via a plurality against a dozen-plus opponents in the predominantly African-American district, Cohen has since won one-on-one contests against name primary challengers with margins ranging from 4-to-1 to 8-to-1.

Cohen’s political durability, first evinced during a 26-year run as a Tennessee state senator, owes much to hard work and tenacity, both in office and on the campaign trail. His most important legacy as a state legislator was his sponsorship of a state lottery and the Hope Scholarship program, which it funds. He’s a vigorous supporter of women’s rights and programs benefiting health care and the arts. Among his contributions in Congress, where he serves on the House Judiciary Committee, are his successful sponsorship of a resolution formally apologizing for the country’s history of slavery.

Margaret Craddock

Margaret Craddock

When Margaret Craddock took the helm of the Metropolitan Inner-Faith Association (MIFA), she not only held the organization on course but also led it into new waters.

Craddock began working at MIFA part-time in 1982 and then full-time in 1988. Spurred by her experiences there, she earned degrees in urban anthropology and law from the University of Memphis. Craddock was entrenched at MIFA and continued to rise to prominence there. 

As associate director, she was instrumental in developing one of MIFA’s most noted programs. The agency decided to build five three-bedroom homes for emergency housing in 1989. Now, that program, implemented in MIFA’s Estival Place communities — gives homeless families a place to live for two years while they take life-skills classes. 

In 1997, Craddock became the first woman to hold MIFA’s top job. At one time, she oversaw an $11 million budget, 160 employees, and more than 4,000 volunteers, and she actively worked to forge outside community partnerships.

Craddock focused MIFA’s mission, built on the agency’s inner-faith heritage by including more clergy on its board of directors, developed more community partners, and improved and modernized MIFA’s inner workings. Craddock retired in 2011.

DJ Paul & Juicy J

DJ Paul and Juicy J

DJ Paul and Juicy J collectively helped globalize the Memphis rap scene when they formed the label Hypnotize Minds in the early 1990s. Under the duo’s leadership, local acts, including Three 6 Mafia, Project Pat, and a magnitude of other artists were introduced to the world. Several Gold and Platinum records have been won by the label, and the first Memphis-based rap movie, Choices, was filmed under their auspices.

In 2006, they became the first hip-hop artists to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” and were showcased on the MTV reality sitcom “Adventures In Hollyhood.”

Although they’ve taken a hiatus as a collective, both artists continue to prosper. Juicy J is enjoying the spoils of a fruitful solo career while DJ Paul has reestablished Three 6 Mafia as Da Mafia 6ix.

John Elkington

John Elkington

To understand the impact John Elkington has had on downtown Memphis, consider Beale Street before he began to manage it in 1983: blocks of abandoned and boarded-up buildings, trash littering otherwise empty streets.

As the developer and manager of modern Beale Street, Elkington transformed it into Memphis’ premier entertainment district and one of the top tourist destinations in the U.S.

The relationship between Elkington and city government ended in 2010. Following the announcement, Memphis mayor A C Wharton said, “Pioneers always get bloodied. [Elkington] went in when others did not go in, and this community owes him a debt of gratitude.” 

Despite the public break-up, Elkington will leave one very important fingerprint on the future of the street he helped create. A 2011 study of Beale Street said thanks to Elkington “the district’s uniqueness and special personality have been largely protected and maintained.”

Harold Ford Sr. / Harold Ford Jr.

Harold Ford Sr. /Harold Ford Jr.

This father/son combination held the Memphis congressional district (first designated Tennessee’s 8th, later the 9th) from 1974 until 2006, beginning when Democrat Ford Sr., then a state representative, won in an upset over the Republican incumbent, becoming the state’s first elected black Congress member.

A member of an upwardly mobile black family invested in the funeral home business, Harold Ford Sr. became the patriarch of an extended-family political dynasty, which has consistently held positions in state and local government ever since. Wielder of the “Ford ballot,” an endorsement list of candidates in each successive election, Ford Sr. became influential in Congress as well but was ensnared in a Reagan-era Department of Justice prosecution for alleged bank fraud that, after one mistrial, would end with Ford’s exoneration in a 1993 retrial.

In 1996, the senior Ford stepped aside, backing his son Harold Ford Jr., who won election that year and four more times. Uninterested in the kind of local political organization overseen by his father, and more conservative politically, Ford Jr. directed his ambitions toward national power instead and was widely considered a prospect to become the nation’s first African-American major-party nominee for president. Beaten to the U.S. Senate by Illinois’ Barack Obama in 2004, Democrat Ford made his own try for the Senate in 2006, narrowly losing to Republican Bob Corker. He subsequently married and moved to New York, where he works on Wall Street. He is still considered to be a political prospect, with a rumored Senate run in the Empire State.

Larry Godwin

Larry Godwin

The former Memphis Police Department (MPD) chief spent 37 years tenured with the MPD. Beginning as an undercover narcotics officer in 1973, Godwin later was a homicide investigator and commander of the crime response/bomb unit before being named police director in 2004.

Godwin helped restructure the department’s method of operation, adding new crime prevention programs, such as Blue CRUSH; established a $3.5 million technology hub, Real Time Crime Center; and increased the number of police on the streets. Under his leadership, the percentage of violent crimes dropped significantly, and numerous undercover investigations targeting narcotics sales were successfully executed.

Following his retirement in 2011, Godwin became the deputy commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

Pat Halloran

Pat Halloran

Halloran moved to the city in 1969 and was elected to the Memphis City Council within five years. With the Memphis Development Foundation (MDF), he saved the Orpheum from the wrecking ball. The theater reopened in 1984 and has set records for booking touring Broadway shows. Halloran has earned three Tony Awards, notably for the musical Memphis. In March 2014, the MDF began construction on the The Orpheum Centre for Performing Arts & Education, a 40,000-square-foot facility featuring theater space, classrooms, an audio-visuals arts lab, and event rental space. Without Halloran’s ongoing vision for the Orpheum through the years, Memphis would be an infinitely less interesting city.

Michael Heisley

Michael Heisley

For decades, Memphis had pursued an NFL team, but the city’s hopes were dashed in 1993, when the league opted against awarding Memphis a team. The NFL settled in Nashville, leaving a bitter taste in Memphians’ mouths. It seemed a pro sports team would never move here. That changed in 2001, when Michael Heisley, billionaire owner of the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies, decided to relocate his team to Memphis. It was a shocking move at the time and is still shocking in retrospect. Local power players were crucial in making the city attractive to Heisley, securing financing for FedExForum, but it was Heisley’s call. His decision radically affected downtown Memphis, the entertainment industry, sports business, sports talk, and even the city’s psyche.

The outspoken owner had his ups and downs in the public eye over the years, but he did right by Memphis. He eventually sold the team in 2012 and passed away earlier this year. Never forget: Before there was grit and grind, there was Michael Heisley.

Willie Herenton

Willie Herenton

Herenton was born to a single mother on Memphis’ south side. She lived to see her son become the city’s first African-American school superintendent and later witnessed his five separate inaugurations as Memphis’ mayor, after becoming the first black person ever elected to that position, in 1991.

A Booker T. Washington High School graduate, Herenton was an amateur boxing champion as a youth. Pursuing education as a career, he earned a Ph.D. and worked his way up rapidly in the Memphis City Schools system, becoming its superintendent in 1978. An educational innovator with magnet schools and other new options, he resigned reluctantly in the wake of negative publicity about a sexual liaison with a teacher and a modest administrative scandal.

He landed on his feet, becoming almost instantly a consensus black candidate for mayor in 1991. Considered a strong chief executive, he eventually lost interest in the job and resigned in 2009. He made an unsuccessful challenge to incumbent 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen in 2010 and has spent the time since attempting to develop a chain of local charter schools. He now runs a charter school program.

Benjamin L. Hooks

Rev. Benjamin L. Hooks

A native Memphian, Hooks was largely known as a seminal civil rights activist. A Baptist minister and attorney, he was the first African-American Criminal Court judge in the South since the Reconstruction Era, and the first African-American appointee for the Federal Communications Commission.

During the civil rights movement, Hooks helped orchestrate protests and sit-ins, and promoted the importance of education. He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 15 years.

Hooks was a strong advocate for racial, social, and economic justice. The civil rights icon died in 2010, but his legacy lives on through the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, and the Benjamin L. Hooks Job Corps Center.

Carissa Hussong

Carissa Hussong

That cool Greely Myatt piece you have on your wall, the one that looks like nails…that is art with a capital “A.” It does not match your couch. Other than family and friends, about half-a-million Memphians will never see that piece. But all of us can check out Myatt’s Quiltsurround, a metalwork quilt used to cover up City Hall’s air units. That work and nearly every piece of Memphis’ public art created in the past 17 years — from the murals in Soulsville and Binghampton to the menagerie of art at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library — traces its lineage to the UrbanArt Commission and its founding executive director, Carissa Hussong.

Hussong left the commission to become the executive director of the Metal Museum in 2008. Under her lead, the museum has introduced its “Tributaries” series, featuring the work of emerging metal artists.

J.R. “Pitt” Hyde

Hyde grew up watching his grandfather and father turn Malone & Hyde into one of the country’s largest food wholesalers.

“They took risks that many people considered unwise — and succeeded, despite the odds,” Hyde says. “I believe my exposure to this type of ‘pioneering’ mindset gave me the drive to try new, unproven ventures.”

Those ventures include being the founder of auto parts giant AutoZone, chair of biopharmaceutical startup GTx Inc., co-founder of the private equity firm MB Ventures, the impetus (along with his wife, Barbara) behind the $69 million Hyde Family Foundation, and scion of several other highly placed and deep-pocketed endeavors rooted in Memphis — most notably the National Civil Rights Museum and Ballet Memphis.

Hyde was instrumental in the founding of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation, Memphis Tomorrow, and the National Civil Rights Museum. He is a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies and helped bring the NBA team to Memphis.

Robert Lipscomb

Robert Lipscomb

For years, Lipscomb has been significantly involved in the restructuring of public housing in Memphis, as well as the redevelopment of its downtown and inner city communities. In 2009, he was appointed executive director of the Memphis Housing Authority and director of the city’s Division of Housing and Community Development.

Motivated by the desire to improve the city’s underprivileged living conditions, Lipscomb developed Memphis’ first strategic housing plan. Under his guidance, numerous run-down and crime-plagued housing projects have been replaced with modern developments.

Lipscomb is spearheading the $190 million project to redevelop The Pyramid into a Bass Pro Shops retail center. He’s also involved in the planned redevelopment of the Mid-South Fairgrounds.

A native Memphian, Lipscomb created the Down Payment Assistance Program, the Housing Trust Fund, the Housing Resource Center, and other housing initiatives.

Jackie Nichols

Jackie Nichols

Playhouse on the Square’s founding executive producer doesn’t just make theater. He makes community. And he makes sense. Loeb Properties may have ponied up the money to bring back Overton Square, but it was Jackie Nichols who literally set the stage for the area’s incredible turnaround. Nichols was still a teenage tap dancer when he realized that Memphis needed producers more than it needed performers.

In 1969, he launched Circuit Players. In 1975 he expanded, opening Playhouse on the Square on Madison Avenue. In 2010, Nichols, also instrumental in the founding of TheatreWorks, moved his operations from the old Memphian Theatre into a $12.5 million, custom-built performing arts facility at Cooper and Union. When Overton Square developer Robert Loeb asked Nichols what it would take to make Overton Square work as a theater district, Nichols answered, “More theaters,” paving the way for Ekundayo Bandele’s Hattiloo, which opens to the public in July.

The new Playhouse on the Square has allowed for collaborations with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and created a Midtown home for arts institutions like Ballet Memphis and Opera Memphis. But Nichols’ legacy is best represented by Memphis’ thriving independent theater scene, made possible by the space, equipment, and support he’s created. His greatest contribution to the city may be in showing us that the arts really can be a sound investment.

David Pickler

David Pickler

Once considered the “president-for-life” of the old county-only Shelby County Schools (SCS) board, to which he was first elected in 1998 and led until that version of the board ceased to be with the SCS-Memphis City Schools (MCS) merger of 2011-13, Pickler continued to represent Germantown/Collierville on the first post-merger SCS board, pending the creation of new suburban school districts.

Many blame the surrender of the MCS charter and subsequent forced merger on Pickler’s decades-long vow to seek special-school-district status for the original SCS system, which was publicly renewed when a Republican majority — presumed to be suburb-friendly — took over the legislature in 2010. Pickler contends that then-MCS Board Chairman Martavius Jones, a prime mover in the charter surrender, already harbored merger plans.

In any case, Pickler, a lawyer who also operates Pickler Wealth Advisers, an investment/estate-management firm, continues his involvement with education matters as president of the National School Boards Association and is thought to harbor political ambitions.

Beverly Robertson

Beverly Robertson

Robertson has headed up the Civil Rights Museum since 1997, but perhaps her greatest achievement has been overseeing the museum’s recent $27.5 million renovation. The old Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968, and the adjoining building have been remodeled with interactive touch-screen exhibits, a slave ship where visitors can crawl into the tiny space where slaves were held, and the recreated courtroom from Brown vs. Board of Education. Since Robertson took the helm, the museum has been identified as one of the nation’s top 10 attractions by National Geographic’s Young Explorers and as a “national treasure” by USA Today. Though she’s led the museum for 16 of its 22 years, Robertson has announced that she will retire next month.

Gayle Rose

Gayle S. Rose

We’ll bet that no other University of Northern Iowa (UNI) music student has ever been named by Business Tennessee magazine as one of our state’s “100 Most Powerful People.” But then, Gayle Rose isn’t like most people. After earning degrees in music and business from UNI, the accomplished clarinetist graduated from Harvard with a master’s in public administration. Rose spearheaded self-help guru Deepak Chopra’s international publishing and TV ventures.

She co-founded 10,000 Women for Herenton (later 10,000 Women for Change), co-founded the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis, founded the Rose Family Foundation, and earned the national “Changing the Face of Philanthropy Award.” She also formed Max’s Team, a volunteer organization that honors the memory of her late son.

Rose is the principal owner and CEO of Electronic Vaulting Services (EVS) Corporation, a data protection company, headquartered in Memphis. Prior to joining EVS, Rose served as managing director of Heritage Capital Advisors, LLC, a private equity, corporate advisory, and asset firm with offices in Atlanta and Memphis.

Rose is perhaps best-known for leading the NBA “Pursuit Team,” which eventually attracted the Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis in 2000.

Maxine Smith

Maxine Smith

In 1957, Memphis State University refused to admit Maxine Smith because she was black, and that inspired her to take on the South’s racist attitudes and fight for civil rights. Smith headed up the local NAACP and became one of few women leaders in the male-dominated local civil rights movement. She and her husband, Vasco Smith, protested segregation at the Memphis Zoo and the Memphis Public Library, and she fought to reorganize the city school board to allow black candidates a chance at winning city elections. Smith was elected to one of those school board seats in 1971, and afterward, she became a huge proponent for court-ordered busing, which she saw as a way to overcome city leaders’ attempts at only integrating a few schools for show. Smith sat on the board of the National Civil Rights Museum and received the museum’s National Freedom Award, along with former President Bill Clinton, in 2003.

Pat Kerr Tigrett

Pat Kerr Tigrett

This Memphis-based fashion designer got her start designing Vogue-worthy gowns for her paper dolls when she was just a kid living in Savannah, Tennessee. She later moved to Memphis for college, won Miss Tennessee Universe, and then bought the Tennessee Miss Universe franchise.

As a beauty queen, Kerr Tigrett got a taste of philanthropy with fashion charity shows. She went on to launch the Memphis Charitable Foundation, host of the annual Blues Ball, which, since 1994, has raised loads of money for Porter-Leath Children’s Center, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center, Madonna Learning Center, and other local nonprofits. Kerr Tigrett is the widow of entrepreneur John Tigrett.

Henry Turley

Henry Turley

Some developers leave behind a footprint on their community. Behind Henry Turley will be an entire Memphis landscape. Turley’s brilliance was in recognizing — and acting upon — what now seems obvious: The most valuable real estate in the world is next to water. With downtown Memphis perched alongside the mightiest stream in North America, a breathtaking neighborhood (or more) awaited birth.

With Jack Belz, Turley, developed the upscale Harbor Town residential and commercial center on Mud Island, the low-income and middle-income Uptown residential development north of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and South Bluffs, where he lives.

Stroll through Harbor Town or South Bluffs today, and you’d think the mighty homes and river views have been there a century when, in fact, most are barely 20 years old, the realization of Turley’s vision for making downtown more than a business center.

Turley is a board member of Contemporary Media, the parent company of Memphis magazine and the Memphis Flyer. A native of Memphis and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Turley is known for his plainspoken good humor, creativity, and unfailing belief in downtown and the restoration of public spaces in older neighborhoods.

AC Wharton

A C Wharton

A native of Middle Tennessee who grew up on country music and both graduated from and taught at the Ole Miss Law School, Wharton is the epitome of crossover and conciliation, and either of those “c” words could be his non-existent middle name. (“A” doesn’t stand for a name either.)

Wharton’s major contribution was to restore calm and a sense of unified purpose to the city after the contentious last years of his mayoral predecessor Willie Herenton’s lengthy tenure. Hard-working, eloquent, and good-natured, Wharton was Shelby County’s Public Defender for many years, then easily won two four-year terms as county mayor before winning a special election to succeed Herenton, who had resigned, in 2009. Reelected in 2011, he has had to grapple with dwindling revenue, a never-ending budget crisis, and attendant crises in public services.

Sherman Willmott

Sherman Willmott

The irascible Willmott has worked like a Tahiti-shirted puppet-master, shaping a lot of cool and important Memphis stuff over the past 25 years. In 1988, he and Eric Freidl opened Shangri-La Records on Madison Avenue, which became a center for the burgeoning alt-music scene. Soon they were mixed up in independent record distribution and releasing records by the Grifters that earned national accolades and a big record deal. Willmott kept the Stax flame lit during the dark ages and was instrumental in curating the Stax Museum. His work with master archivist Ron Hall formed the basis for the acclaimed wrestling movie, Memphis Heat, which is a great film and a better document of how hilariously weird Memphis really is.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Ford Disowns Former Aide Who Imputed “Terrorism”

Reaffirming his support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, former
9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr. has fully and decisively
distanced himself from Beecher Frasier, who ran Ford’s 2006 campaign for the
U.S. Senate and who made news over the weekend with apparent concerns about Obama’s
possible “terrorist” ties.

In a statement dispatched to the Nashville Post late Friday, Ford
declared that “Beecher’s past association with me is just that – past,” and
said, “I don’t want a relationship with him, or anyone else who says these
things. His comments offend me as an American and embarrass me as a Tennessean.”

Frasier, along with Fred Hobbs, a Democratic state committeeman, had been
quoted in the Nashville City Paper on Friday as wondering about possible
associations with terrorism on Obama’s part. Writer John Rodgers was exploring
the reasons why 4th District congressman Lincoln Davis, a Democrat,
had so far not made a statement endorsing Obama as his party’s nominee.

Rodgers first elicited this quote from Hobbs, who is considered close to Davis: “I don’t
exactly approve of a lot of the things he [Obama] stands for and I’m not sure we
know enough about him. He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist
connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

The City Paper article continued: “His [Davis’] chief of staff,
Beecher Frasier, said he doesn’t know for sure if Obama is ‘terrorist connected’
but he assumes he’s not.”

The statements by Hobbs and Frasier caused a storm in both state and national
Democratic circles and generated demands that both men resign their public
connections. Both Hobbs and Frasier have since tried to backtrack from their
earlier statements, Hobbs insisting that he intends to vote for Obama and
Frasier saying that “nobody in his right mind” could regard Obama as connected
with terrorists.

One upshot of the controversy is that future political prospects for Davis, who
has been rumored as a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2010, have been
dimmed.

Ford’s statement on the controversy is as follows:

Let me be clear about 2 things

First, Beecher Frasier is dead wrong. Senator Obama is a Christian, American
patriot with a vision to make America safer and stronger. I am going to join
millions of Tennesseans and Americans by working this year this to bring life to
that vision by electing Barack Obama President of the United States.

Second, Beecher’s past association with me is just that – past. I’ve had no
relationship with him since 2006. I don’t want a relationship with him, or
anyone else who says these things. His comments offend me as an American and
embarrass me as a Tennessean.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Bachelor No More

The number of Memphians attending the recent wedding of former 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr. to the former Emily Threlkeld in South Beach, Florida, was relatively modest — though attendees included such well-known personages as Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, lawyer/lobbyist John Farris, Ford confidante Jay Lindy, the Rev. Bill Adkins, lawyer David Cocke, and entrepreneur Billy Orgel — most of these with their spouses, as well.

Conspicuous absentees were the groom’s brothers, Jake and Isaac Ford, both of whom had been present, along with numerous other Memphians, at a pre-nuptial reception at the Brooks Museum in early April. Intervening between that event and the wedding itself, which took place on Saturday, April 26th, was a public disagreement between Harold Ford Jr.’s siblings, on one hand, and their brother and father, former congressman Harold Ford Sr., on the other.

That disagreement concerned remarks made by the two younger Fords on the occasion of Jake Ford’s filing as an independent for his brother’s former congressional seat. Candidate Ford was quoted as making racial and religious references concerning the 9th District’s need for black representation that were repudiated by brother Harold and by his father. Harold Ford Jr. called the remarks “insulting,” and Harold Ford Sr. termed them “not representative of the family.”

• Where the newly married former congressman will ultimately maintain his domicile is something of a mystery. Currently, Ford is dividing his time between the three offices he maintains: in Nashville; in Washington, where the Democratic Leadership Council, which he leads, is headquartered; and in New York, where he is affiliated with the Merrill Lynch brokerage. He also maintains an apartment in Memphis. The new Mrs. Ford, a designer, has worked in both New York and Paris.

Equally uncertain are the former congressman’s political plans. A close runner-up in his 2006 U.S. Senate race against current Republican incumbent Bob Corker, Ford is widely considered a potential candidate for governor in 2010 — though a few close friends doubt that Ford, who remains preoccupied with national and international concerns, will make that race.

A new book, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, by Carol Felsenthal, contains a passage that the former congressman may regard as bittersweet. Felsenthal quotes former president Bill Clinton as saying in 2006 that Illinois senator Barack Obama and then Senate candidate Ford “are the two guys with the juice to go all the way” — presumably, to gain the presidency.

Ford’s defeat by Corker temporarily dropped him out of the running for national laurels, though his celebrity and multiple associations, including his new affiliation with the cable channel MSNBC as a commentator, provide him with a platform for a political revival at some point.

Felsenthal’s book quotes the former president as having said, at the same time he was touting Obama and Ford, that he doubted his wife, New York senator Hillary Clinton, would be a presidential candidate in 2008. “No, because I don’t think she can win,” he is reported to have said.

• The question of who would address the Shelby County Democrats’ annual Kennedy Day Dinner became a campaign issue of sorts for local party chairman Keith Norman, who had to fend off criticism on the matter from one or two executive committee members at the party’s reorganizational meeting several weeks back.

At the time, committee members were being asked to sell tickets to this year’s gala dinner without being able to tout a major speaker — or any speaker at all.

In the long run, however, the party and Norman seem to have landed on their feet. Keynote speaker at the dinner, to be held Friday, May 9th, at the University of Memphis-area Holiday Inn on Central, will be Tennessee’s 5th District congressman, Jim Cooper of Nashville.

Inasmuch as Cooper is the state chairman of Obama’s presidential campaign and the dinner falls right in the middle of Obama’s still-heated campaign with rival Hillary Clinton, the Nashville congressman’s appearance should make for interesting news fodder — especially in that Cooper’s name has figured in campaign coverage of Hillary Clinton’s 1994 problems as White House liaison for the then Clinton administration’s health-care plan.

Some of that coverage has focused on tension between Hillary Clinton and Cooper, who was the author of a voluntary health-care plan that rivaled her own and — perhaps not coincidentally — is similar to one advanced this year by Obama.