Tag: Joy Touliatos

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Call Them by Name

The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name. — Sylvia Browne

It was quite a week in Nashville. The biggest news out of the capital city was the horrific mass shooting that took place in a local Waffle House and resulted in the tragic deaths of four young people: Taurean C. Sanderlin, 29; Joe R. Perez, 20; DeEbony Groves, 21; and Akilah Dasilva, 23. All four were people of color; most of them were in college.

The shooter, whose name will not be mentioned here, was a fan of white supremacist “philosophy” and right-wing politics and did the killing with — what else? — an AR-15 assault rifle.

Same story, new town. God bless America. God shed his grace on thee.

The most compelling part of this terrible incident was the bravery displayed by James Shaw Jr., the young man who jumped the assailant while he was reloading and wrestled his weapon away from him. In this case, a good man who was unarmed stopped a bad man with a gun.

President Trump and the NRA quickly issued statements praising Shaw and his courageous actions.

No, they didn’t. Trump didn’t mention the incident, probably because it involved black victims, a black hero, and didn’t fit a narrative that appeals to his base. Or maybe he was distracted by his legal troubles or maybe because it wasn’t on Fox and Friends. Hard to tell.

The NRA’s response was the usual: If others in the Waffle House had had guns, they could have stopped the shooter, because the more guns we have, the safer we all are. They failed to acknowledge the fact that if the shooter had had a larger magazine, which the NRA favors, he wouldn’t have had to reload and could have kept killing until he felt like stopping.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee legislature was wrapping up its annual session this week. It was the usual GOP ideological shenanigans, leavened with a couple of sensible moves. They passed a motion to build a monument to “unborn children” on the state capitol grounds. This, of course, in the wake of last week’s measure to strip $250,000 from funds that were to be allocated to Memphis for its bicentennial celebration. It was a vindictive move, meant to punish the city for removing two Confederate statues from city parks, because small government means the state controls everything. Especially statues.

On the plus side, the legislature voted to honor Shaw for his brave actions at the Waffle House with a resolution filled with the usual “whereas” clauses. It was a nice gesture, even if it was boiler-plate. The legislators avoided actually doing anything meaningful by refusing to allow out of committee a proposed bill to close the loophole exploited by the Waffle House murderer’s father in giving his son weapons back that had been confiscated from him in another state.

The legislators also passed a motion that will allow Tennesseeans to vote in 2022 to remove slavery as a possible punishment for criminal activity. Yes, you read that right: Using slavery as a punishment is still legal in Tennessee. Not likely, admittedly, but legal.

Speaking of slavery and the Confederacy, I hope everyone read Jackson Baker’s report on the Flyer website about the debate last weekend between the GOP candidates for the office of Shelby County mayor. All three candidates expressed support for the state legislature’s move to strip $250,000 from the city of Memphis for taking down its confederate statues. That’s right. They liked the idea of the state controlling statues in Memphis-owned parks. And they all want to be your county mayor, so you should remember their names: Terry Roland, Joy Touliatos, and David Lenoir.

And you should remember whose side they’re really on when you enter the voting booth. I mean, as long we’re naming names.

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Politics Politics Feature

Forums Forth

A definitive public exposure of candidates for office in 2018 still remains to be accomplished. But several preliminary efforts in that direction took place during the past week or so — a Thursday morning showcase of Democratic women candidates at the City & State coffee house on Broad; a Thursday night forum that attracted a decent-sized crowd and two Republican mayoral opponents at Mt. Moriah East Baptist Church; and a massive turnout on Saturday at the University of Memphis for candidates for virtually every position on the ballot.

At the Thursday night forum, WMC-TV anchor Kontji Anthony moderated a guarded discussion of issues by the two candidates for Shelby County Mayor — Terry Roland and Joy Touliatos — who answered an invitation to debate from Diversity Memphis. And on Saturday those two candidates and scores of others — most of those running for election this year — joined a throng of campaign supporters and attendees at large in the ballroom auditorium of the University of Memphis for a meet-and-greet affair co-sponsored by the Tennessee Nurses Association and the League of Women Voters.

Touliatos and Roland at forum

The latter affair was basically a schmooze-fest that culminated in a parade of candidates across the UM stage as their names were called by moderator Greg Hurst of WREG-TV. Nobody got to speak to the entire assembly, but there was ample conversational opportunity out on the jam-packed floor. And the mere fact of showing up and being seen surely paid dividends — pointedly so for GOP gubernatorial candidate Diane Black, who arrived somewhat late but, to all appearances, unflustered, after her car was involved in a collision caused by an errant vehicle operated by the Tennessee Department of Transportation at mile marker 24 of I-40.

At the Thursday night forum, Roland, currently a Shelby County commissioner, and Touliatos, who serves as Juvenile Court clerk, are both candidates for the Republican nomination for county mayor, and while neither of them broke any new ground or made any waves in their remarks, they had the opportunity to present coherent profiles of themselves as they fielded questions put by Anthony and audience members.

Touliatos stressed what she said would be her ability to “build relationships” within county government and with other governmental entities, while Roland emphasized his experience as a “full-time commissioner with part-time pay” for the last eight years.

Both boasted of their roots with ordinary citizens, and both expressed a determination to buttress education and industrial expansion. Touliatos stressed a need to lay a strong foundation in pre-K education. Roland made his usual case for tax increment financing (TIFs) as an alternative to payments-in-lieu-of taxes (PILOTs). He got the most animated response from the crowd when he attacked what he called “a culture of corruption” in Shelby County, in which “the same 10 people have been getting all the sweet milk.”

Anthony asked, “Why do Black Lives Matter?” And both candidates responded with variations on the statement that “all lives matter” — a generalized response that drew a buzz of disapproval from the predominantly African-American crowd and a precursor to a possible issue in the general election, when either Lee Harris or Sidney Chism, both African Americans, will be the Democratic opposition to the Republican nominee.

Further forums and debates are to be expected in the next few weeks, especially for countywide candidates, whose moment of reckoning with the voters will culminate in the May 1st party primaries, less than two months away.

(See also memphisflyer.com for slideshow of TNA-LWV forum.)

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Politics Politics Feature

Two Approaches to Political Advertising

Anybody who’s been raised since the advent of television (which is everybody now alive) knows the importance of TV ads in political races. The advertising phase of several campaigns is just now coming into prominence. In the case of Shelby County political races, there are but two months to go before the May 1st election day in the Republican and Democratic primaries. Statewide races, which culminate in August, have a bit more lead time.  

Two new ads that are just now getting to be seen by the public indicate wholly different strategies. One is on behalf of Shelby County Trustee and GOP county mayor candidate David Lenoir. The other is for gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd of Knoxville, the former state Commissioner of Economic Development.

Though Lenoir is well known in local government circles, he is not exactly a household name. Accordingly, his new 30-second TV spot attempts to fill a name-ID gap between himself and primary opponent Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, a firebrand who is adept at gathering free media coverage for himself.

Lenoir’s spot begins with an image of a football helmet, which fades into a shot of the candidate as a young man, wearing the crimson uniform of the University of Alabama, and clearly game-ready. A voice-over then explains, “When an injury ended his dreams to play in the NFL, David Lenoir refused to stand on the sidelines.”

In fact, Lenoir, whose athletic career ended prematurely due to injury, was once a highly touted defensive end for the fearsome Crimson Tide. The duration of the ad shows images of Lenoir at work and on the campaign stump, looking both accessible and able, while the voice-over speaks of his “reduc[ing] county debt and saving taxpayers millions.” The ad promises that Lanier will “fight to protect our neighborhoods and strengthen our schools” and contends that Shelby Countians “need a mayor with drive and determination.” 

Lenoir has ample funding and will be able to play that ad, and subsequent ones, abundantly in the face of Roland’s newsmaking skills and hot-button pushing, and his other GOP opponent, Joy Touliatos, whose pleasant countenance is displayed on several well-placed billboards on county roadways. No doubt each of them has a TV campaign in mind as well.

Meanwhile, Boyd, a pleasant, mild-mannered man who was a highly successful businessman (Invisible Fences) before his service in state government, where he was known as a moderate, is up against a primary opponent in U.S. Rep. Diane Black who is as well-funded as he is and has a strong hold on her party’s ultra-right constituency.

So Boyd, who has run a couple of TV ads already, stressing his business success, his grit as a distance runner, and his ambitions on behalf of economic development and education, has belatedly decided to contest Black (one of whose ads boasts her readiness to “stand up to the weak-kneed people in my own party”) on her own ground.

Accordingly, while the images in Boyd’s new ad are similar to those in his previous ones, a voice-over intones that the candidate “believes that the right to life comes from God, not the government,” and that people “who can work should work and not permanently live on welfare,” while a subscript on the screen blasts the notion of sanctuary cities. The ad concludes, “What really matters is faith, families, and a good-paying job. A conservative businessman, not a politician.”

Asked about the ad over the weekend in Memphis, where he attended the GOP’s Lincoln Day banquet, Boyd said, “If I’m asking Republicans for their votes, I need to assure them that I share their values.”

The ad, an effort to co-opt an opponent’s issues, is clearly a gamble, and it remains to be seen whether it serves the candidate’s purposes or, alternatively, could backfire with GOP voters looking for a moderate candidate.

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Politics Politics Feature

Waiting for Shoes to Drop

Though competitive races for governor and senator in both major parties will dominate public attention in 2018, the other marquee race on the local ballot for 2018 remains that for Shelby County mayor.

As of now, it’s a three-way on the Republican side, with the contenders being Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, County Trustee David Lenoir, and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos. Democrats running include state Senate Majority Leader Lee Harris and former County Commissioner Sidney Chism.

But, conspicuously, not all the shoes have dropped. Two major figures are on the cusp of decision: former City councilman and current Chamber of Commerce vice president Shea Flinn, and Harold Byrd, president of the Bank of Bartlett and a well-known former public official.

If Flinn runs — and that’s still a serious prospect — it will not be as a Democrat, though he served a brief interim term as a Democrat in the Tennessee state Senate, where, among other things, he broke away from orthodoxy by introducing the first serious measure to legalize marijuana.

He would run as an independent because he believes that partisanship is ruining American politics, that a combination of gerrymandering and low turnouts has ensured that a politics built upon genuine debate and constructive compromise is increasingly impossible, and that the two-party system itself has become unfeasible.

If Flinn runs, it will be a way of asking, as he has expressed it, “Have moderates had enough?” His thinking is that party nominees these days, in local elections as well as statewide and national ones, are determined by the most militant and committed members of both the Democratic and Republican parties, and that, consequently, winning candidates are beholden to relatively extreme views that are bound to be resisted by militant elements in the opposition party, and that governmental gridlock is the inevitable consequence.

His views on these matters are no secret; he has expressed them in radio interviews, and he holds them intensely enough to be on the verge of making an independent run for county mayor as an act of defiance against the intrinsic negativity of  partisan politics.

There have been previous quasi-independent or third-party electoral efforts at the national level — Ross Perot‘s 1992 candidacy for president against Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George H.W. Bush being a case in point — but these have ultimately come to naught, Flinn believes, because, as he sees it, these have been trickle-down movements lacking real grass-roots involvement. He thinks that reformation of the current two-party system can only begin to happen at the most basic, local level.

In other words, Flinn as a candidate would see himself as someone pursuing a reformist mission against a two-party politics that is endangering the country, but he also believes that he could win — particularly if the two major local parties nominate candidates from their militant wings.

To put that in concrete terms: a race in which the Republican nominee would be, say, Roland, the self-styled populist from Millington, versus Democrat Harris, a legislator from his party’s progressive wing.

But Flinn, who is confident of having significant financial backing, would see his independent mission still being relevant, and viable, if the party nominees turn out otherwise — that is, if the GOP nominee ends up being either Trustee Lenoir or Juvenile Court Clerk Touliatos, both regarded as mainstream Republicans, and if the Democratic nominee should become either Chism, a well-known political broker who has been a declared candidate longer than anyone else, or Byrd, whose intentions are still a matter of speculation.

At the moment, Byrd’s intentions remain, along with Flinn’s, the most significant unknown element in the developing mayoral picture.

As mentioned before in this space, Byrd has uncooked seeds remaining from his prior political experience. He was a longtime state Representative who thought long and hard about running for Congress and finally took the plunge in 1994, winning the Democratic primary for the 7th District seat fairly easily but coming up short against Republican Ed Bryant, the victor in a year which saw a Republican sweep and a GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Thereafter, Byrd’s home bailiwick of Bartlett became progressively more Republican, though he and other members of his family remained pillars both of the Bartlett community, through their ownership of the Bank of Bartlett and prominence in numerous civic endeavors, and in the Democratic Party, where brother Dan Byrd had continued to represent Bartlett well into the 1990s.

Harold Byrd first prepared to mount a serious race for county mayor prior to the race of 2002, organizing a coalition that included basic elements of the urban Democratic constituency along with suburban supporters in a campaign that would draw on significant IOUs, both political and financial, owed Byrd from decades of his involvement in public life. In a sense, that 2002 campaign, though Byrd would have been run as a Democrat, was aimed at being the kind of omnium gatherum of political opposites that Flinn may be contemplating for the campaign year of 2018. But it was forced to a halt mid-way by the unexpected entrance of then Public Defender A C Wharton, who was also able to draw on similar bipartisan sources of political and financial support.

For a variety of reasons that seemed practical to Byrd at the time, he withdrew, if reluctantly, and Wharton went on to win and serve one term and the better part of another before ascending to the mayorship of Memphis via a special election in 2009.

By general consent, the county mayor’s job might have been Byrd’s for the asking in the election of 2010, when the other major likely claimant, then Sheriff Mark Luttrell, a Republican, let it be known that he would defer and not run if Democrat Byrd chose to. But by then Byrd, a well-known fitness advocate, was recovering from a bout with cancer, and the bank he administered was having to deal with the aftershock of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

Both factors kept Byrd from being a candidate that year, and Luttrell went on to run and defeat Democratic nominee Joe Ford.

But here it is, late 2017, and Byrd is once again looking seriously at running for county mayor. He has formed a Political Action Committee (Friends of Harold Byrd) for the purpose, and he has been steadily reaching out for assurances of support from well-known Democrats, both urban and suburban, who are either in office now or likely candidates for various positions next year.  

Moreover, Byrd believes he still has, uniquely for a Democrat, significant support in areas of Shelby County where Republicans are used to dominating. And he is confident that he, more than any other Democrat, can raise the money necessary to run a fully empowered mayoral campaign.

The question remains: Will either Shea Flinn or Harold Byrd actually run for county mayor? Though nothing is absolutely certain, the likelihood is that both will — Byrd as a Democrat and Flinn as an independent.

Flinn had come very close to making an announcement this week, the Flyer has learned, and the odds — once rated by him as 70-30 in favor — still tilt toward his making the race. For his part, Byrd has set the end of the year as a personal deadline for decision, with the likelihood, he says, that one will come even sooner.

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Politics Politics Feature

Filling in the Blanks

If Rip Van Winkle happened to be not a fictional character from a previous century but  a current resident of Shelby County, Tennessee, he would not have had to nod off for a full score of years to wake up to a drastically changed landscape.
If he’d just blinked his eyes about midway through last week, he might have missed significant doings in the race for Shelby County mayor and that for United States senator.

State Senator Lee Harris

The first major change in the projected 2018 political lineup occurred on Wednesday with the carefully stage-managed entry into the county mayor’s race of Lee Harris, a Democratic state senator and former Memphis City Council member whose ambitions to keep on moving up in the political hierarchy were clearly signaled back in 2016 when he flirted with the idea of challenging 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen in that year’s Democratic primary but thought better of it.

As the senator confided in a recent conversation, “I can serve anywhere” — the choice of a particular political office being something of a pure variable.
Harris’ interests in running for county mayor had been obvious for most of the current year but were screened somewhat by an elaborate Alphonse-Gaston scenario in which he appeared to be deliberating along with close friend and University of Memphis law faculty colleague Steve Mulroy, a former county commissioner and a mayoral candidate in 2014, as to which of them would actually make the 2018 race.

The veil was dropped abruptly on Wednesday via an interview in The Commercial Appeal, a venue choice made after scouting out the possible advantages of announcing in other media.

Harris has a reputation as a progressive but one adept at working across the aisle, a fact indicated by his partnership with Republican lawmakers on criminal justice issues and with GOP state Senator Brian Kelsey in seeking to safeguard the Memphis Sand aquifer.
As of now, Harris would appear to be the likely Democratic nominee against the winner of the three-way Republican mayoral primary between County Commissioner Terry Roland, County Trustee David Lenoir, and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos.

But two other eminences with credentials both with Shelby County Democrats and with the civic and social universe at large are still meditating on a possible mayoral entry. Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd holds numerous political IOUs as a political donor and broker, a holdover following from his past as a Democratic state representative and two previous near-runs for mayor, and ample access to financial support.

Equally well-positioned is Shea Flinn, currently an influential Memphis Chamber of Commerce vice president and a former progressive spark-plug on the city council. Flinn’s access to funding, too, would be considerable, and, in a political environment not over-stocked with charisma, he has more than his share.
Either one of these figures, running in the Democratic primary or even as an independent, would have a dramatic effect on the outcome.
The other major development last week was in the race for the seat being vacated by Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, whose decision not to seek reelection did not prevent him from continuing to make political waves. (See Editorial, p. 8) To no one’s surprise, 7th District U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn, an arch-conservative, quickly announced as a GOP candidate, though she withheld her announcement until Governor Bill Haslam, a favorite of moderate Republicans, publicly opted out.

Another conservative GOP prospect is former 8th District Congressman Stephen Fincher. And the party’s centrist wing still hopes to convince Memphis philanthropist and longtime party eminence Brad Martin to make the race.

The state’s Democrats may end up fielding a serious candidate, as well. Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke is seriously contemplating a Senate race, while Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler is already in the field.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

David Lenoir Makes It Official: He’s a Candidate for County Mayor

CREDIT: JB

JB

Trustee Lanier, announcing for Shelby County Mayor on Thursday

County Trustee David Lenoir, wearing a dark business suit, cap-toed shoes, and a composed, no-nonsense mien to match, strode to the lectern set up in the lobby of Crye-Leike Realtors on Poplar, acknowledged the generous introduction of him by host Dick Leike, nodded appreciatively to a heartily applauding gathering of supporters, many of them prominent members of the business community or the local Republican rank and file, and proceeded to present the case for his election as Shelby County Mayor.

He began by characterizing himself as “the county’s banker” and as a “bottom-line kind of guy.” He spoke of boyhood experiences cutting grass and helping his parents with a start-up business, of going to the University of Alabama on a football scholarship and getting an accounting degree, and later operating three small businesses of his own, while his wife Shannon, who had been his sweetheart both in high school and at ‘Bama, would end up as a small-business owner herself.

A little bit of Horatio Alger that, updated to the 21st Century standards of the nuclear family (the Lenoirs have sons, “our two young men).

Lenoir said three objectives — or “issues,” as he referred to them — should predominate in the mayoral campaign: “great schools, great jobs, and a mayor who understands how to run an efficient operation and can reduce the tax burden.”

If the last part of that triad was meant to indicate either of his two GOP primary opponents — Millington County Commissioner Terry Roland or Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos — it did so very obliquely.

In fact, Lenoir seems to be proceeding on the assumption that his record of low-keyed professional competence in his two terms as Trustee (involving a progressive shrinkage of the county debt from $1,800 per capita to $1,000) and his status as a mainstream, vaguely middle-of-the-road Republican should speak for themselves. And, in particular, he apparently intends to ignore the ad hominem provocations of opponent Roland.

Two facts in evidence of that: 1) It was clear to all observers during the County Commission’s climactic budget sessions in early summer that Roland meant to indict Lenoir’s performance with his highly public proposal to re-designate for other purposes money earmarked for lawyer Lang Wiseman, an employee of the Trustee’s office. “He don’t show up for work!” Roland claimed via his characteristic vernacular. (He also challenged the line items of Juvenile Court clerk Touliatos.)

For his part, Lenoir ignored the obvious political context and professed an ignorance of Roland’s charges when he turned up at a later commission budget session and simply made a detailed, mathematically based explanation of his employees’ salaries and workloads, including Wiseman’s. He kept all his budgeted money.

More recently: 2) Roland suggested at a recent fundraiser that Lenoir was the candidate of the county’s political/financial establishment and made it all sound like the machinations of a cabal. Alluding to the banker character in “The Beverly Hillbillies” TV sitcom, the Commissioner affected a shucksy mode and said, “I didn’t know I was going to be running against Mr. Drysdale, but I guess I am.”

Asked about that after his announcement on Thursday, Lenoir maintained a poker face and said, “I don’t know his comment. I’m proud of my background… I worked in the business community for 20 years. As far as his comments, I’m not familiar with them.”

Maybe so, maybe no. But it seems clear that Lenoir in any case has no intention of responding to Roland on the commissioner’s own terms. And, in fact, the basic line of Lenoir’s campaign staff, as expressed by one of its prominent members on Thursday, is: “We see our main opponent to be Touliatos.”

Again: maybe so, maybe no — though another of Lenoir’s statements Thursday, that the next mayor should be someone “tested in various arenas and cool under pressure,” would seem to be directed elsewhere.

As did Lenoir’s skepticism, during a Q-and-A with reporters, that the tax-rate reduction achieved this year by the County Commission (a point regularly touted by Roland) did not necessarily equate to an actual reduction of the tax load.

In any case Lenoir’s long-awaited declaration of mayoral candidacy is now official, he will definitely have significant financial and GOP-network support, and his major task now, one shared with Touliatos, is that of profile-raising. Roland long ago succeeded, for better or for worse, in getting people to know who he was.

It’s up to both Lenoir and Touliatos to achieve a wider degree of public awareness ,too. There’s little doubting that David Lenoir will have the means and the opportunity to do that.

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Politics Politics Feature

On the “Mr. Drysdale Effect” and Other Political Doings

In the same way that subtle changes in the color of leaves signal the onset of a new physical season, the increased number of fund-raisers in Shelby County — several each week and sometimes overlapping — are a reliable harbinger of the approaching 2018 election season.

A case in point was the fact that Shelby County Republican rank-and-filers had to choose Thursday of the week before last between paying homage to county sheriff candidate Dale Lane, beneficiary of a fund-raiser in Whitehaven, and rendering an ear (plus coin of the realm) to mayoral candidate Terry Roland at Southwind Country Club.

To be sure, neither candidate is yet assured of being the Republican nominee next year, although the chances of Lane, who has no name GOP opponent on the horizon yet, are better in that respect than those of Roland, who knows he has a serious race for county mayor, with fellow Republicans David Lenoir and Joy Touliatos as primary opponents, and very likely a name Democrat if he gets to the general.

But there are some card-carrying Republicans who want to support both Lane and Roland, and, unless they could clone themselves on Thursday, there was no way they could do both — not in person, anyhow. Both are looking not just for an audience and a vote, but for the fund-raising dollar.

As Roland said in his pitch to the crowd at Southwind: “I need the money, the money to get our message out. The people I’m running against are some very wealthy people.”

And, lest that appeal come off as too abject, Roland rephrased it with a cultural allusion: “I didn’t know I was going to be running against Mr. Drysdale, but I guess I am.”  

The “Mr. Drysdale” in question would be the wealthy banker/bankroller played by actor Raymond Bailey in the vintage ’60s TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. That many members of Roland’s fund-raiser crowd guffawed in appreciation is some indication perhaps of one of the demographics he is counting on for support.

County Trustee Lenoir was being cast by Roland as someone in league with the county’s political/financial establishment. Nor did the commissioner overlook his other GOP opponent, Juvenile Court Clerk Touliatos, about whom he said this, clearly tailoring his remarks to a suburban constituency:

“The other one that I’m running against, if you look at the people that’s supporting her, it’s the people you’re fighting right now; it’s the pro-consolidation people, okay? And Jim Strickland is one of her lead dogs. Let me tell you this: If she gets to be the mayor, then you might as well say that Jim Strickland will have free run of the whole county.”

This attempt at drawing a connection between city Mayor Strickland and a candidate running for county mayor foreshadows what could become a serious leitmotif in the politics of 2018. On Monday of this week, Roland, in his guise as county commissioner, had no difficulty persuading fellow commissioners to hold off on approving an interlocal agreement with the city on financing a new sports arena.

Right now, as it happens, the city and county are at loggerheads on several issues — that of de-annexation, for one (a co-speaker at the Roland fund-raiser was Patty Possel, an activist in that movement and a forthcoming GOP candidate for the District 96 state House seat now held by Democrat Dwayne Thompson). Another is the recent decision announced by Strickland shutting off any new taps on the city sewer line by county developments.

• Across town, on the same day that week, in Whitehaven, a former county commissioner, James Harvey, was hosting an event for Lane, the county director of homeland security, who is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for sheriff next year.

At least half the crowd was African American, a good sign for a Republican candidate, especially one likely to be facing a credentialed black candidate, Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner, as the Democratic nominee for sheriff. And Bonner, let us remember, drew an appreciable number of white folks to his recent kickoff at the Racquet Club, among them current Sheriff Bill Oldham, who was elected eight years ago as a Republican and who made a point of endorsing Bonner.

While clearly we are not yet in a post-racial political environment — and may never be — both candidates will be pitching in all directions. A good thing, that.

Incidentally, Harvey, who was elected to two terms as a commissioner as a Democrat, spoke at some length in his introduction of Lane, making the point that he himself had crossed the party line and was now a Republican. Make of that what you will.

In his remarks, Lane, as usual, stressed his intention to focus on combatting youth violence.

 

• Another recent fund-raiser was the one held last week at the Donati law office on Union for County Commissioner Van Turner, who is unlikely to attract any serious opponents of his reelection next year but is taking no chances.

A goodly crowd showed up for that one, and, as is fairly often the case, much of the drama lay in who was there to see and be seen. In the case of the Turner event, it was Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd, a former state representative and Democratic congressional candidate who, as was noted recently by the Flyer, has signaled an interest in re-entering active political life as a candidate for county mayor.

More show-and-tell is due this week, with Germantown Democrats awaiting an appearance at their monthly meeting on Wednesday night by state Senator Lee Harris, who is also floating a possible mayoral bid (actually co-floating one with his University Memphis law school colleague and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy; don’t ask).

And, apropos that aforementioned city/county dichotomy, two potential cross-overs are in play: City Councilman Ed Ford has a fund-raiser Wednesday night for his bid for county commission District 9 (now held by the term-limited Justin Ford). And conjecture continues about a possible Democratic primary race for county mayor by former council stalwart, now Chamber of Commerce veep Shea Flinn.

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Politics Politics Feature

Byrd and Flinn Looking to County Mayor’s Race?

UPDATED to correct the order of finish in the 2014 Democratic primary for Shelby County Mayor.

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Last week, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, speaking at a fund-raiser in his honor at Southwind Country Club, let loose with typically strenuous blasts against his two major Republican opponents in the forthcoming 2018 race for Shelby County mayor — characterizing County Trustee David Lenoir as basically a tool of the political/financial establishment and questioning Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos‘ bona fides on de-annexation matters.

The Republican three-way battle royal is an open and settled proposition. It is on the Democratic side that intrigue (in every sense of that word) and potential surprise are major factors behind the scenes. 

Sidney Chism, the ex-Teamster leader, former local party chairman, two-time county commission chairman, interim state senator, and political broker nonpareil, has long advertised his availability for the office, but, though Chism continues to preside over a well-attended annual political picnic, it is an open question whether and to what degree the major clout he once enjoyed in Democratic circles has been diminished. 

Now employed by Sheriff Bill Oldham, Chism has had to weather criticism from party purists for his past electoral support of Oldham, who ran for office as Republican, and though he was eventually cleared by an ethics panel, had to withstand formal conflict-of-interest charges from then commission colleague Roland for having voted on appropriations measures that contained wraparound benefits for his day-care operation.

Meanwhile, other Democrats continue to ponder the idea of running. Two possibilities are University of Memphis law professors Steve Mulroy and Lee Harris, who have long been supportive of each other’s political careers. 

A liberal’s liberal in the manner of Memphis congressman Steve Cohen, Mulroy served two terms on the county commission and was a candidate for county mayor in the 2014 Democratic primary, finishing third a three-way race involving eventual nominee Deidre Malone and the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. , who finished second despite being out of the country during the latter part of the race).

Until the surprise election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump last year drastically altered his prospects, at least for the immediate future, Mulroy’s chief ambitions concerned the possibility of an appointment to the federal judiciary. Now Mulroy’s options have once again become more expressly political.

Harris has always leaned in the direction of political office. As a political unknown in 2006, Harris was one of the also-rans in the 9th District congressional primary of that year, won eventually by Cohen. By 2011, he had enough name recognition to run for, and narrowly win, a Memphis City Council race against Kemba Ford.

Harold Byrd and Shea Flinn

Nor did Harris’ ambitions end there. He was active in pursuit of cutting-edge issues and was the chief sponsor of an ordinance prohibiting job discrimination against members of the LGBTQ commmunity. In 2014, he ran in the Democratic primary against another member of the Ford political clan, state Senator Ophelia Ford, and was able to unseat her.

Harris got himself elected leader of the shrunken five-member Democratic corps in the state Senate and made the most of his position, becoming an active spokesman for the party’s issues, and meanwhile working across the aisle with Republicans like state Senator Brian Kelsey on nonpartisan matters.

Ever on the move, Harris meditated seriously on another race for Congress against incumbent Cohen but thought better of it, publicly dropping the idea in early 2016. His latest initiative, the Tennessee Voter Project, serves the dual purpose of revving up Democratic energy in general and keeping his name before the public.

And now opportunity beckons once more with the county mayor’s race. It seems almost inevitable that either he or Mulroy, still functioning as a mutually supportive duo, will make the race, and that coin flip will likely happen fairly soon.

Nor does the guessing game end there. The latest rumors in Democratic Party circles concern the possible mayoral candidacies of two other big names — Harold Byrd and Shea Flinn. 

A core member of the politically active Byrd family, Byrd is president of the Bank of Bartlett, essentially a family enterprise. A longtime state Representative and a political broker in his own right, Byrd was the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 7th District in 1994, losing that year to Republican Ed Bryant.

He prepared a race for county mayor in 2002 but reluctantly withdrew when then Public Defender A C Wharton became a candidate for the nomination, transforming that year’s Democratic primary into a three-way affair that also included then state Representative Carol Chumney.

By 2010, Byrd’s reputation and popularity, both in Democratic circles and across the party line, were such as to make him an odds-on favorite to be elected county mayor that year. Pointedly, Mark Luttrell, the ultimate winner as a Republican nominee, had let it be known that he would eschew the mayoral race and seek reelection as sheriff if Byrd ran for mayor. But a combination of a personal illness and a post-recession duty to see to the needs of the family banking business kept Byrd from running that year.

Now, the word is that Byrd, with both his own and the bank’s health in seemingly good order, is looking at one last chance at gaining the office.

Then there is the chance of a candidacy for the office by Shea Flinn, yet another former political figure with a high profile, both in Democratic Party ranks and in bipartisan circles. A prominent member of the city council after his election in 2007, Flinn resigned his seat in 2015 to become senior vice president for the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce.

That Flinn was considering a re-entry into political ranks was first signaled recently when his name was prominently featured in a telephone robo-poll of potential candidates for county mayor. That was amid rampant speculation that Flinn had a hand in the sponsorship of the poll.

If Flinn should become a candidate he is sure to have the full support of his father, wealthy radiologist/broadcast executive George Flinn, whose resources are such as to have paid for numerous political races by the senior Flinn himself, a one-time member of the County Commission but a so-far unsuccessful aspirant for a variety of other offices.

That George Flinn is a conservative Republican and Shea Flinn is known as a progressive Democrat is an anomaly of the James Carville-Mary Matalin sort that troubles neither father nor son.

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Touliatos Announces for Shelby County Mayor

CREDIT: JB

JB

Joy Touliatos announces for County Mayor as prominent backers John Bobango and Brent Taylor look on.

As of Thursday, there’s a race on for the Republican nomination for Shelby County Mayor. With conspicuous backing from some GOP luminaries of the past and present, two-term Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos, stressing the issues of public safety, taxes, and education,  announced for Mayor at a press conference at Waterford Plaza.

Among the family and well-wishers looking on were former Memphis City councilman and Shelby County Commissioner Brent Taylor and former Councilman John Bobango, both of whom will have major roles in the Touliatos campaign (as treasurer and co-chair, respectively), her political consultant Steven Reid, and Shelby County Clerk Wayne Washburn.

In her announcement statement, Touliatos had this to say about her major  campaign priorities: “First and foremost crime and public safety will be the most important priority of my administration. Second, we need to lower property taxes by making Shelby County Government smaller and more efficient. Third, we must attract new business and create new jobs. And that requires an education system that prepares our kids for college but also recognizes the need to prepare young adults for the workforce. “

Acknowledging the head start, campaign-wise, of Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who announced for mayor more than a year ago and maintains a high public profile, Touliatos expressed confidence in her ability to bridge the name-recognition gap.

It has long been assumed that County Trustee David Lenoir will also be a candidate for County Mayor, though Lenoir has not yet announced and is rumored also to be looking at the state Senate seat currently held by Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, who has been nominated for a federal judgeship by President Trump.

It is probably not coincidental that, during the course of budget negotiations on the County Commission this year, Roland found occasion to fault the spending priorities of both the Trustee’s office and the Juvenile Court Clerk’s office.

In a three-way contest with Roland and Lenoir, both high-powered political figures with presumed support in influential Republican Party circles, Touliatos, who can make claims of her own on GOP loyalists, would conceivably have an advantage with female Republican voters.

Meanwhile, as the blanks are being filled in on the Republican side, the picture among potential Democratic aspirants is more opaque, Former County Commissioner and erstwhile political broker Sidney Chism has advertised his likely candidacy, and outgoing Commission chairman Melvin Burgess has also expressed an interest in running.

Two other possible Democratic candidates, University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy and state Senator Lee Harris, are apparently both deliberating on an entry into th e mayoral race. Whichever one makes the plunge can count on the support of the other.

And there could be a Democratic wild card — former City Councilman and current Chamber of Commerce vice president Shea Flinn, whose name was prominent among those of candidates being asked about in a recently run telephone robo-poll.