Tag: partisan

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Politics Politics Feature

Closing Out an Era

Steve Mulroy (Photo: Shelby County District Attorney, Steve Mulroy Campaign | Facebook)

The year just passed saw some decisive developments in the politics of Memphis and Shelby County — the continuing effects of which will be reflected in the course of this year’s city elections. As of this writing, despite many advance rumors to the contrary, there has, as yet, been no sign of a viable white presence in the Memphis mayor’s race — much less of a candidate identifiably Republican.

The outgoing incumbent mayor, the term-limited Jim Strickland, is certainly white but is technically a Democrat, having once chaired the Shelby County Democratic Party, though in his two successful mayoral races of 2015 and 2019, Strickland had virtually unanimous support from the local Republican constituency — as well, to be sure, a healthy share of the city’s African-American vote.

The demographics of the local voting population are such that “Republican” normally equates as white and “Democratic” as Black, though there are certainly limits to this fact of fungibility. In the county election of 2022, for example, the most dramatic and widely followed race was that for district attorney general, won by University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, a certifiable white Democrat.

Mulroy’s support base had its bipartisan as well as biracial aspects, and the contest between him and the candidate he dethroned, Republican Amy Weirich, teemed with issues that in theory crossed the frontiers of race and party, but his winning vote totals were remarkably similar to those of County Mayor Lee Harris and the victorious candidate for Juvenile Court Judge, Tarik Sugarmon, two African Americans who defeated prominent whites.

Sugarmon’s victory in the judicial race over incumbent Dan Michael involved no formal party label, but Harris’ mayoral challenger, the well-heeled Worth Morgan, was the official Republican nominee. Mulroy, Sugarmon, and Harris ran more or less as a ticket, and a Venn diagram would show the support for all three to lie substantially within the intersecting bulges of Black votes and Democratic ones.

This year’s Memphis city election is nonpartisan, of course, but the aforementioned absence early on of a white candidate — especially the much-anticipated “white Republican” — owes as much to a decline in the GOP voter base as to any purely demographic factor. Even more revealing than the 2022 outcomes mentioned above is the fact that the Shelby County Republican Party opted not even to offer a candidate for sheriff, instead officially endorsing the popular Democratic incumbent Floyd Bonner.

Bonner, now a candidate for Memphis mayor, may once again have a decent shot at Memphis Republicans’ votes, there being no Caucasian conservative à la Strickland for like-minded white GOP residents of the city to fall back on.

The year 2022 saw the end of a 30-year cycle, which began with an off-year vote in 1992 for two county positions. That was the year after the landmark victory of Willie Herenton, an African American, in the Memphis mayor’s race, and the Shelby County Republican Party, no doubt seeing an opportunity to consolidate what was still a white majority in the county at large, petitioned to conduct the first party primary in the county’s history. Their candidates won, and when the county’s Democrats eventually followed suit, the era of partisan local elections was begun.

Last year’s election transformed the landscape, and, despite remaining challenges and obstacles, the way seemed clear for whatever reforms the victors — especially the triad of Harris, Mulroy, and Sugarmon — might have in mind. Partisanship of a sort will persist, but not in the same way as before. That era is closed.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I suppose the one saving grace of the human race is that virtually all of our problems are self-inflicted. Theoretically at least, if we are the cause of the problems, we should be able to provide the cure or correction.

Hopefully, the Democratic Party will learn from this experience that it is not a good idea to award delegates on a proportional basis. If the primaries had been winner-take-all, the party would have had its nominee long ago and could be chopping on the Republican tree.

Instead, it is stuck with an exceedingly close race that apparently can only be settled by the so-called super delegates, who are appointed and not elected (another bad idea). This means that inevitably they will be seen as stealing the nomination from one of the two candidates. This will undoubtedly cause a rift in the party.

I used to make money betting that no matter how unlikely the Republican candidate was, the Democrats would scour the country to find somebody who could lose the race. It worked with Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore. In the interim, of course, the Republicans picked up the Democrat habit and nominated Bush the First for a second term and then dragged out the old relic, Bob Dole, so both could be mowed down by Bill Clinton.

Now the Republicans have found another old relic, John McCain, to go up against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. What a great choice in the minds of many: an African American, a woman, or a geezer. Though they won’t tell it to the pollsters or say it on television, there are still blocs of Americans who will not vote for an African American or a woman. Racist and sexist? Of course. Who told you the American people had become civilized, urbane, and educated?

This was supposed to be a shoo-in year for the Democrats. The Republican president has disapproval ratings of historic proportions, has screwed up the economy, and has gotten us stuck in two wars. It should have been no contest, but the Democratic Party has managed, with its nutty rules, to make it a level playing field.

This means the geezer has a chance, provided he doesn’t topple over during the campaign. He doesn’t seem to be very much in touch with reality, but that will merely carry on the tradition of George W. Bush, who, as the Buddhists say, seems destined to have been born drunk and to die dreaming. They will just have to hire somebody to stay close and whisper in McCain’s ear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. He seems confused.

Well, the world can’t blame us. We are only 300 million souls, which is a small field to choose from. Nor can we help it that reasonably honest people with reasonably good skills can make more money in the private sector than in public service, so that we are stuck largely with crooks, lazy people, and incompetents.

Another self-inflicted problem is that our whole society, like some wooden house in a swamp, is riddled with lawyers who most resemble termites. There is a truthful old saying that if a town has one lawyer, he will be poor, but if there are two, they will both prosper. That’s because lawyers are hired arguers, and it takes two to have a dispute. Lawyers have almost replaced car salesmen in local television advertising.

There is a lot of talk about the rising costs of health care, but I think that lags far behind the rising cost of legal services. Legal fees seem to run into the millions of dollars in the blink of an eye these days and not because there has been a burst of legal talent. They have their own monopoly and usually charge what the traffic will bear and then some.

But, as I said, most of our problems are self-inflicted. Let’s just hope we can avoid self-destruction.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Federal Case

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Senator Lamar Alexander made two things clear during a stop in Memphis last Thursday: 1) that he’s running for reelection to the U.S. Senate seat he won back in 2002; 2) that he’s determined to do so from the political center, with minimal concessions to the orthodoxies of the Bush administration.

Both in remarks made to a sizable crowd of well-wishers at the Oaksedge Center in East Memphis and in the course of an interview afterward, Republican Alexander issued what sounded at times like a virtual declaration of political independence.

On Iraq, for example: “We need to get out of the combat business and into the support business,” the first-term senator and former governor said. Alexander said, “We’ve got to get the Iraq Study Group report off the shelf and use it for something other than a bookend.” The report, by a blue-chip bipartisan panel, advocated staged withdrawal from active combat operations in Iraq.

Of the current flap over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: “The administration is guilty of excessive partisanship. And the Democrats are guilty of excessive partisanship in response.”

On Bush’s recess appointment of Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium, bypassing Senate confirmation: “The president has the right to do that sort of thing, but it’s inadvisable. Maybe if they [the executive branch] want to take some of our powers, we should take some of theirs.”

In his remarks to the crowd, Alexander pointedly reminded them of his experience as governor of Tennessee, when, he said, bipartisanship was the rule — beginning in 1978 when Democratic governor Ned McWherter helped get a newly elected Alexander sworn in early. That was to forestall potentially illegal pardons of state prisoners by his Democratic predecessor, Ray Blanton.

“I want to be one of the grownups who can work across party lines in the Senate to get things accomplished for people’s benefit,” said Alexander, noting that he and Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman have been presiding this year over a weekly bipartisan breakfast in Washington.

“We need to spend more time like this, working together on what really counts, and less time on petty, kindergarten games,” Alexander said. “I believe the most recent election was as much about the conduct of business in Washington as it was about the conduct of the war in Iraq.”

Recalling McWherter’s 1978 statement, “We are Tennesseans first,” Alexander said. “I’d like to hear a few more people in Washington say ‘We are Americans first.'”

Asked about the presidential prospects of his former Senate colleague from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, Alexander smiled and said, “The less he does, the more the buzz.” Thompson, who now stars in TV’s Law & Order, has acknowledged an interest in running but has so far taken no steps to do so. As Alexander, himself a two-time presidential candidate, noted, a significant draft effort is now under way, however. “I heard from my former Iowa campaign director who was interested in Fred.”

• Memphis’ 9th District congressman, Democrat Steve Cohen, availed himself of the current congressional recess to make a round of appearances in his home district.

At one such stop, last week’s Martin Luther King memorial awards dinner at the Convention Center, a Cohen invitee, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) extolled her Memphis colleague as “a real congressman … a real progressive” and made a point of calling him “brother” from the dais of the event. For a white man serving a predominantly black district, the remark by Waters, a highly respected African-American member, can only be helpful at reelection time next year.

Cohen was back at the Convention Center on Tuesday of this week as the featured speaker of the downtown Rotary Club. Like Alexander, Cohen, who voted with the congressional majority for a bill establishing a timeline for American withdrawal, viewed with alarm the prospect of continuing combat in Iraq. “We won the war. We’re in an occupation. We can’t win an occupation. We’re not on the scoreboard,” he told the Rotarians.

The congressman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, also took note of the continuing local furor concerning what appears to many to have been much too light a sentence for Dale V. Mardis, who pleaded guilty in Criminal Court last week to the murder of code-enforcement officer Mickey Wright. (See Editorial, p. 18). In a plea-bargain arrangement, Mardis got 15 years for a crime that included dismembering Wright’s body, burning it with diesel fuel, and disposing of it across the state line in Mississippi.

“Mr. Mardis deserves more time,” said Cohen, who expressed the hope that federal prosecutors would initiate their own look at the crime to find other grounds, perhaps denial of Wright’s civil rights, on which to try Mardis. He said he had already begun working on federal legislation of his own that would criminalize the act of transporting a body across state lines to dispose of it.

• Longtime civic activist Mary Wilder was elected unanimously by the Shelby County Commission Monday as interim state representative from House District 89.

Wilder, 57, manager of a home-repair program for MIFA and a longtime member of the Vollintine-Evergreen Community Association, has been frequently mentioned over the years as a potential candidate for public office. Most recently, she was a candidate for the city Charter Commission last year. Though she will evidently serve for the duration of the current legislation session, Wilder will not seek the permanent seat, which was vacated recently when District 89 representative Beverly Marrero was elected to the state Senate.

Democratic and Republican primaries for District 89 will be held on Thursday, May 31st, with the general election following on Tuesday, July 17th. Kevin Gallagher and Jeannie Richardson are known Democratic candidates; so far, no Republican candidate has announced.

Filing deadline for that election will be Thursday, April 19th; withdrawal deadline with be Monday, April 23rd.

• Five veterans of the political world are apparently the finalists for the Shelby County Democratic delegation to choose from as new county election commissioners.

Shep Wilbun, former Juvenile Court clerk and a veteran of the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission, is one of the five names to emerge from a meeting of the delegation in Memphis last week.

Others are current election commissioner O.C. Pleasant, who served several years as chairman of the body; Myra Stiles, a former longtime commissioner; Joe Young, a political veteran who, among other things, was for some years a field rep for former state Democratic chairman Jane Eskind; and Norma Lester, who is the current secretary of the Shelby County Democratic Party. The group of five was winnowed down from some 15 original applicants for the three positions available for Democrats.

One dissenting member of the delegation, however, said the list was not of finalists per se, contending, “It’s vaguer than that. It’s had to say exactly what the list represents.”

The original deadline for the Democrats to select the party’s three commissioners was April 1st; there was no word on when a final selection will occur. Republicans will return their two current members, Nancye Hines and Rich Holden.

• So what else is new? As reported last week, the Shelby County Democrats have a new chairman, for one thing. And last Thursday night chairman Keith Norman presided over his first formal meeting of the new party committee.

That’s when déjà vu set in: Committee member Jennings Bernard offered a resolution to expel newly elected lawyer Richard Fields from the committee on several grounds, including Fields’ public intervention in last year’s general election on behalf of Republican candidates for various offices. Fields was pressured into resigning from the committee in early 2006 for his legal work on behalf of Republican Terry Roland‘s challenge of the legitimacy of Democrat Ophelia Ford’s election to the state Senate. Norman set next month’s committee meeting as an occasion for voting on the resolution.