Tag: officials

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Politics Politics Feature

Talking Turkey

Newly elected members of the Memphis City Council, fresh from a recent get-acquainted luncheon with Mayor Willie Herenton, followed by an informational session with MLGW officials, continued their orientation with an all-day retreat Monday at the Lichterman Nature Center.

There, among other things, they heard from several council veterans as to what to expect. Typical of the good advice they got was the retiring Dedrick Brittenum‘s counsel that they never meet with constituents petitioning their support for a measure without having a council staffer on hand.

Barbara Swearengen Ware, a returning member, pointedly told the novices that the key to their success would be “relationships, relationships, relationships” — a reminder of the snags encountered in the not-so-distant past by one or two famously go-it-alone members.

Council vet Myron Lowery had a similar message, warning the council newbies not to get involved in “stupid stuff” that feeds the media without yielding positive results. “Three members of the council always had a rebuttal,” he said, without naming names. He cited the evolution in style of one departing colleague. When he was brand-new, Brent Taylor would comment on “everything in sight,” Lowery said, but Taylor finally progressed to the point that he “just voted.”

A surprisingly animated and light-hearted presentation came from the outgoing Henry Hooper, who had often seemed stiff and uncomfortable in his losing reelection race this fall. The visibly relaxed Hooper got a laugh Monday when he expressed satisfaction that he would no longer “have to worry about Janis Fullilove,” his victorious opponent, who smiled amiably as Hooper ventured, “If I run for something else, maybe try to go across the street [County Commission?], she’s not going to quit and run against me.”

E.C. Jones tossed off some one-liners, too — as well as one ultra-serious point: “Remember. You work with the mayor. You don’t work for the mayor.”

The logical follow-up to that was delivered in the form of an address by Stephen Wirls, a professor at Rhodes College. His message? The council has more power, potentially, vis-à-vis the mayor than anyone had previously realized. Hmmmmm.

• Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class is one of the basic texts of urban planning these days, was the featured speaker at last week’s Chairman’s Luncheon of the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce at The Peabody, and his appearance was not without irony.

A superb salesman and, some would say, a gifted theorist as well, consultant Florida advocates diversity and tolerance as essential tools for civic progress, and, as he told his overflow blue-chip audience in The Peabody’s Grand Ballroom, a distinct no-no is for a city’s leadership to address a dissident part of its population with the attitude, “If you don’t like it, you can get out.”

Er … Someone forgot to remind Florida that one of his hosts, Mayor Herenton (whom the speaker, who tailors his remarks to his locale, made sure to praise lavishly), is locally famous for occasionally expressing just such sentiments toward critics of his administration.

• Time, as they say, heals wounds. A case in point is the enhanced status among local Republicans of Shelby County commissioner George Flinn, who hosted this year’s annual Christmas gathering of the Shelby County Republican Women Monday at his expansive East Memphis residence.

Flinn presided over the affair with avuncular grace, and, by way of concluding some welcoming remarks, struck a note that clearly resonated with the sizable throng. “And notice that I didn’t say ‘Happy Holidays,’ I said ‘Merry Christmas,'” offered Flinn, who is fluent these days in the lingo and nuances of his party-mates, most of whom no doubt deplore the erosion of the season’s once-traditional greeting.

Five years ago, Flinn, a well-known radiologist and broadcast magnate, had just conducted his maiden political effort, a run for county mayor which involved both a bruising primary win over the popular Larry Scroggs and a difficult general election race in which he was swamped by the even more popular A C Wharton.

Some ill feeling lingered from both efforts, most of it stemming from the combative campaign tactics urged upon Flinn by some out-of-state consultants.

Flinn would have been an unlikely host for a holiday season GOP event back then, but the increasingly sure-of-himself commissioner is now regarded as one of his party’s least contentious presences and a likely candidate for another try at the mayoralty in 2010.

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Politics Politics Feature

POLITICS: New Game, Different Name

When Bruce Thompson, freshly charged with extortion and mail fraud, called a press conference last week to respond, the former county commissioner struck an unusual note of defiance, chastising My Harrison, the FBI’s local agent in charge, for the “same game, different name” remark with which she had characterized his place in the ever-burgeoning series of federal indictments of local officials.

His life was no game, Thompson said, making the issue personal, and since the distinguished defense attorney Leslie Ballin stood at his elbow when he said it, lending his considerable legal imprimatur to the statement, what Thompson said smacked less of pique than of considered strategy. Indeed, it seemed overtly political, the response of one contender to another in a heated public debate.

And make no mistake: Though both Thompson’s legal defenders and the prosecutorial team representing U.S. attorney David Kustoff will presumably offer abundant briefs, proofs, and exhibits in evidence as they join the issue, there is something political about not only this trial but the whole series of recent ones based on operations with catchy code names like Tennessee Waltz, Main Street Sweeper, and suchlike.

There had already been sporadic, mainly sub rosa efforts within the ranks of local Democrats to challenge the series of Justice Department prosecutions as partisan ones aimed at their party’s power structure. The presence of a nominal Republican, former East Tennessee legislator Chris Newton, among the Tennessee Waltz indictees, had done little to dispel the accusation, since Newton’s GOP colleagues had always considered him a fellow traveler with the General Assembly’s Democrats.

The conservative Thompson, a bona fide upscale Gucci-wearing Republican with strong connections in the local business community, would seem to be a different matter. Yet it can be argued, at no prejudice to the legal merits of either case, that both Thompson’s prosecution and that of former MLGW head Joseph Lee, currently under indictment for improper collusion with city councilman Edmund Ford Sr., are inherently political.

Rather than instances of out-and-out bribery, conveniently staged and videotaped by the government itself, these two cases are not stings but the results of real ex nihilo investigations of actions initiated by the principals themselves. What connects them to the prior cases is that they expressly target the freedom-of-action of public officials.

The prosecutions of Thompson and, even more obviously, Lee are aimed at what had previously been a no-man’s-land of politics, the domain where favors are done in return for favors, where one hand washes the other, and where if you scratch my back, I’ll sure as hell scratch yours.

Did MLGW president Lee choose to look the other way at Ford’s thousands of dollars’ worth of unpaid bills because the councilman changed his mind on Lee’s acceptability as the utility’s head, and because, even more crucially, Ford headed Lee’s oversight committee? It might once have been said: That’s just politics. But Harrison and Kustoff have now declared that statement inoperative, as chief prosecutor Tim DiScenza shortly will in court.

Thompson’s case is even more ambivalent. Before he went to work on getting the Memphis school board to approve a school-construction contract for a West Tennessee company (for an ultimate fee of $250,000 for himself), the then commissioner sought — and got — the formal sanction of county attorney Brian Kuhn.

No conflict of interest, said Kuhn, who reaffirmed again Monday his belief that Thompson, distanced by the state’s funding formula both from city-school spending per se and from oversight of specific school construction, was within his rights to act as an advocate for the company.

That was on pure conflict-of-interest grounds, stressed Kuhn, who eschewed any judgment about various potential illegalities associated with other aspects of the case. Asked whether the Thompson and Lee cases could be interpreted as incursions by federal authorities onto turf previously regarded as exclusively and flexibly political, Kuhn allowed — unofficially and informally, you understand — that he understood how somebody could see it that way.

In an interview with the Flyer back in 1994, when he was first running for the Senate, current presidential hopeful Fred Thompson mused on the then ongoing Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton‘s private finances and, at some passionate length, expressed regret at what he saw as the creeping criminalization of politics.

Locally as well as nationally, what Thompson then lamented seems now to be the very name of the game.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

New Game, Different Name

When Bruce Thompson, freshly charged with extortion and mail fraud, called a press conference last week to respond, the former county commissioner struck an unusual note of defiance, chastising My Harrison, the FBI’s local agent in charge, for the “same game, different name” remark with which she had characterized his place in the ever-burgeoning series of federal indictments of local officials.

His life was no game, Thompson said, making the issue personal, and since the distinguished defense attorney Leslie Ballin stood at his elbow when he said it, lending his considerable legal imprimatur to the statement, what Thompson said smacked less of pique than of considered strategy. Indeed, it seemed overtly political, the response of one contender to another in a heated public debate.

And make no mistake: Though both Thompson’s legal defenders and the prosecutorial team representing U.S. attorney David Kustoff will presumably offer abundant briefs, proofs, and exhibits in evidence as they join the issue, there is something political about not only this trial but the whole series of recent ones based on operations with catchy code names like Tennessee Waltz, Main Street Sweeper, and suchlike.

There had already been sporadic, mainly sub rosa efforts within the ranks of local Democrats to challenge the series of Justice Department prosecutions as partisan ones aimed at their party’s power structure. The presence of a nominal Republican, former East Tennessee legislator Chris Newton, among the Tennessee Waltz indictees, had done little to dispel the accusation, since Newton’s GOP colleagues had always considered him a fellow traveler with the General Assembly’s Democrats.

The conservative Thompson, a bona fide upscale Gucci-wearing Republican with strong connections in the local business community, would seem to be a different matter. Yet it can be argued, at no prejudice to the legal merits of either case, that both Thompson’s prosecution and that of former MLGW head Joseph Lee, currently under indictment for improper collusion with city councilman Edmund Ford Sr., are inherently political.

Rather than instances of out-and-out bribery, conveniently staged and videotaped by the government itself, these two cases are not stings but the results of real ex nihilo investigations of actions initiated by the principals themselves. What connects them to the prior cases is that they expressly target the freedom-of-action of public officials.

The prosecutions of Thompson and, even more obviously, Lee are aimed at what had previously been a no-man’s-land of politics, the domain where favors are done in return for favors, where one hand washes the other, and where if you scratch my back, I’ll sure as hell scratch yours.

Did MLGW president Lee choose to look the other way at Ford’s thousands of dollars’ worth of unpaid bills because the councilman changed his mind on Lee’s acceptability as the utility’s head, and because, even more crucially, Ford headed Lee’s oversight committee? It might once have been said: That’s just politics. But Harrison and Kustoff have now declared that statement inoperative, as chief prosecutor Tim DiScenza shortly will in court.

Thompson’s case is even more ambivalent. Before he went to work on getting the Memphis school board to approve a school-construction contract for a West Tennessee company (for an ultimate fee of $250,000 for himself), the then commissioner sought — and got — the formal sanction of county attorney Brian Kuhn.

No conflict of interest, said Kuhn, who reaffirmed again Monday his belief that Thompson, distanced by the state’s funding formula both from city-school spending per se and from oversight of specific school construction, was within his rights to act as an advocate for the company.

That was on pure conflict-of-interest grounds, stressed Kuhn, who eschewed any judgment about various potential illegalities associated with other aspects of the case. Asked whether the Thompson and Lee cases could be interpreted as incursions by federal authorities onto turf previously regarded as exclusively and flexibly political, Kuhn allowed — unofficially and informally, you understand — that he understood how somebody could see it that way.

In an interview with the Flyer back in 1994, when he was first running for the Senate, current presidential hopeful Fred Thompson mused on the then ongoing Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton‘s private finances and, at some passionate length, expressed regret at what he saw as the creeping criminalization of politics.

Locally as well as nationally, what Thompson then lamented seems now to be the very name of the game.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Feeling the Sting

When, as virtually the last matter taken by the prosecution in former state senator John Ford‘s Tennessee Waltz trial, a $50,000 Rolex watch came into evidence, Ford and his support group, which included numerous members of his immediate and extended families, seemed of good cheer.

As was chronicled here last week, Ford felt sunny enough after that day’s testimony to engage in banter with the two FBI agents, Mark Jackson and Brian Burns, who had testified to being the originators of the entire Tennessee Waltz sting — the means whereby Ford and several other state legislators and other public officials had been induced to accept money in return for legislative favors.

If the watch — a gift from developer Rusty Hyneman that prosecutors were attempting to use as “predication” (proof of Ford’s disposition toward corruption) — had an outer-space element (it was partly made of material derived from a meteorite), so had the sting devised by Jackson and Burns and acted out by three other principals, FBI agents “L.C. McNeil” and “Joe Carson” (the names were pseudonyms) and undercover informant Tim Willis.

The premise of the sting was that a computer-recycling firm calling itself E-Cycle (it was an FBI shell company, as things turned out) needed expert assistance from the likes of Ford and was willing to pay for it — in the senator’s case, to the tune of $55,000.

Aided by defense attorney Mike Scholl, Ford felt that he had a strong prospect for nothing worse than a hung jury (indeed, Scholl would base his closing argument on an appeal to each juror to “act as an individual”).

The very fact that he felt like engaging in humorous asides with the professed architects of his then-pending peril was evidence that Ford and his supporters saw the predication case to be weak enough that he might indeed catch a break from one or two jurors.

Evidently Ford was right, but not right enough. When jurors fell to deliberating on Wednesday, following closing arguments, they did deadlock on the charge of extortion — an indication that Scholl’s claim of entrapment had found some sympathetic ears.

Equally tenuous were the three counts of witness intimidation — all ultimately resulting in not-guilty findings, at least partly because the main witness against Ford on that count, Willis, had seemed disingenuous or worse during a hard day of cross-examination by Scholl.

But the charge of bribery was buttressed by what seemed an endless series of videotapes showing Ford being handed money — $55,000 altogether — by McNeil, who had made sure to connect the payoff to specific talk about legislative action by Ford.

Ford’s mood had conspicuously turned gloomy by Thursday afternoon, when jurors and other trial principals were reconvened to hear Judge Daniel Breen‘s ruling on a definition requested by the jury: What precisely was the meaning of the term “under color of official right”?

When the judge ruled that it referred to actions by a public official, the feeling had almost palpably spread to all followers of the trial that some tide had turned against Ford. In fact, the question had to do with the extortion count, but its import was more general, and, as it turned out, there was no disagreement among jurors on the bribery charge.

Whatever sentiment there was that racial or political factors might have influenced the Tennessee Waltz prosecution (and on the latter score there was and is a considerable amount of suspicion; see City Beat, p. 14), the jury of six blacks and six whites did its duty by the evidence confronting their eyes and ears.

Hypothetically, all of this could come undone in the course of some appeal. In any case, John Ford has very little in the way of a breathing spell. Though he remains free on bond, he is up for trial again next week in Nashville, on charges relating to accepting money in return for legislative favors — this time on behalf of a real company.

• Shelby County assessor Rita Clark, the Germantown homemaker and Democratic activist who surprised herself and everybody else by winning her maiden political race in 1996, then went on to win twice more, won’t run again in 2008.

Clark announced her decision to members of the Shelby County Commission during budget hearings on her department Monday morning.

Asked to accept a 5 percent cut for the next fiscal year, Clark declared such a thing “impossible” and then went on to tell the commissioners she would not run for reelection and didn’t want to saddle her successor with a departmental budget that was too small.

Elaborating on that later on, Clark said, “My budget now is the same as it was when I came into office. There’s no way we could continue to provide an appropriate level of service with less.”

Although she had worked in other candidates’ political campaigns, Clark had never made a race of her own until 1996, when the late Democratic eminence Bill Farris prevailed on her to run against incumbent assessor Harold Sterling.

Clark was widely regarded at first as a pro forma candidate — someone to maintain her party’s presence on the ballot. She ultimately proved to be much more — fighting a hard mano-a-mano campaign against Sterling by questioning his hiring of a personal trainer and an out-of-county assistant.

She won in an upset, going away, and in the process her continued success suggested to many Democrats that, all other factors being equal, someone of her race and gender made an ideal countywide candidate.

To date, no other Democrat — except for Mayor A C Wharton — has been able to crack the Republican monopoly on countywide offices.

Commenting Monday on her decision not to seek reelection next year, Clark cracked wryly, “It’s just time. I’m afraid if I ran again, my husband would oppose me. And I couldn’t beat him.”

• Both Democratic candidates for the vacant District 89 state House seat, Kevin Gallagher and Jeannie Richardson, held campaign fund-raiser/receptions last week, as that campaign begins to mount in earnest. Two Republicans are also competing for their party’s nomination: Wayne McGinnis and Dave Wicker Jr.

Responding to at least one Gallagher supporter’s published skepticism concerning her residence (and the identity of her Midtown housemates), Richardson, a former inhabitant of Mud Island, said, “The people who live here with me are my son, my daughter, and my granddaughter, and I do hope they’ll all be active in my campaign.”

Both parties’ special primaries will be held May 31st, with the two winners facing each other in a July 17th general election.

• Still feeling their oats are a group of local Memphis bloggers who have been sought out of late for audiences by political figures like state Senate speaker pro tem Rosalind Kurita (D-Clarksville) and Memphis mayoral candidate Herman Morris.

Now, the group, whose efforts are pooled under the umbrella site memphisliberalblogosphere.blogspot.com, have been asked for another sit-down — this time by teacher Bill Morrison, a Democrat who ran a game but ultimately unsuccessful race for Congress last year against 7th District incumbent Marsha Blackburn, one of the Republican Party’s stars.

Morrison evidently plans to take on another behemoth — this time City Council incumbent Jack Sammons.

Both Sammons and his friend and fellow Super-District 9 council member Tom Marshall are presumed to be candidates for reelection, but each is also rumored to be still considering a race for mayor.

• It is still too early to write “finis” to the mayoral field. As of Tuesday morning, 14 petitions had been pulled from the Election Commission, and only one person — former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham — had actually filed.

Incumbent mayor Willie Herenton, presumably to cover his flank, made a point this week of dispatching a letter to Shelby County mayor Wharton, his erstwhile campaign manager, advising him that “no circumstances” would prevent him from running again and adding significantly, “I trust that your support will be evident.”

Without Wharton, who is still under pressure from potential backers to make a race, the “top tier” of mayoral candidates is generally considered to consist of Herenton, city councilwoman Carol Chumney, former MLGW head Morris, and Willingham. Some regard former FedEx executive Jim Perkins as belonging in that list, and there is talk also of a candidacy by entrepreneur/businessman Darrell Cobbins.

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Editorial Opinion

On Changing Charters

In what was almost certainly the first of many such appearances to come, three elected county officials showed up at the conservative-oriented Dutch Treat Luncheon last Saturday to argue against making their positions and those of two other county officials appointive rather than elective.

The three — Sheriff Mark Luttrell, Trustee Bob Patterson, and Register Tom Leatherwood — noted for the record that the issue will
almost certainly be adjudicated in the courts. That’s because Shelby County is one of two Tennessee counties enjoying home rule, the other being Knox County, subject of a recent state Supreme Court decision allowing for the possible appointment of constitutionally mandated county officials.

The court’s ruling was based on the fact that the Knox County charter did not provide specific establishment of the offices of sheriff, trustee, assessor, county clerk, and register. Since Knox County’s governmental system was modeled precisely on that of Shelby County, the precedent there clearly indicates that our own system is vulnerable to revision by a similar judicial ruling.

Saturday’s meeting was further energized by a claim from the three Shelby County officials that county mayor A C Wharton was sponsoring legislation already before the General Assembly in Nashville that would facilitate a changeover into an appointive system. That generated something of a state of alarm among the listeners, who seemed to concur with Luttrell, Patterson, and Leatherwood that appointed officials are more remote from the population they serve than elected ones, less subject to direct monitoring, and, by definition, immune from a change in their status at the hands of the electorate.

As it turns out, the bill now pending in Nashville failed by a narrow margin to achieve support from the Shelby County Commission at the commission’s Monday meeting — a fact which probably dooms it to defeat in the legislature at large. And the scope of the bill was somewhat less than advertised, as well. As Wharton explained on Tuesday, the bill — the only one on the subject that he has personally approved — would merely have amended current state requirements to the end that referenda on changes in the county charter could be scheduled by the commission for special elections rather than awaiting regularly scheduled countywide general elections. “I just wanted us to be ready earlier, just in case,” Mayor Wharton said, somewhat ambiguously.

Though we are predisposed to the arguments made by the three officials on Saturday, we are open-minded about the issue in general. We urge Shelby Countians, official and otherwise, to avail themselves of ample study and debate on the matter while there’s still time to consider alternatives.

Meanwhile, we congratulate the members of the city Charter Commission, who on Monday announced a series of public meetings on possible changes in that charter.

The schedule: March 21st, 6 p.m., at City Council chambers, 125 N. Main; March 29th, 6 p.m., at Hollywood Community Center, 1560 N. Hollywood; March 31st, 1 p.m., at Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, 3030 Poplar; April 18th, 6 p.m., at Whitehaven Community Center, 4318 Graceland.

Further information is available at www.memphischartercommission.org.