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Losing it

Is Jake Ford, the controversial independent candidate for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional seat, losing his cool? That appeared to be the case before, during, and especially after Monday night’s debate, when Ford made a scene that seemed designed specifically to humiliate the Flyer’s political editor Jackson Baker.

Baker, originally the debate’s sole moderator, had agreed to co-moderate with local news anchor Richard Ransom after the Ford campaign complained about the format.

Throughout the debate, Ford was hostile. After it ended, the assembled crowd descended on the bar for hot dogs and wine. Local bloggers discussed Ford’s unfortunate public announcement that “If Cohen was a black woman, he would have been arrested like Kathryn Bowers.” Baker stood nearby, trying to make nice with Ford after he had taken issue with the Flyer‘s reputable political reporting. Like so many in the crowd, Baker was also enjoying a delicious weenie, and as the noted writer spoke, a nearly microscopic bit of hot dog escaped his lips and landed on Ford’s jacket. It was the sort of social faux pas Miss Manners has long suggested we ignore, but manners be damned.

“This man spit on me,” Ford announced loudly, twisting up his face in terrible disgust. “This man spit on me. Does anybody have a napkin?” As Baker politely attempted to defuse the situation, Ford turned on him with a swift battery of questions: “Didn’t anybody ever tell you to chew with your mouth closed? Didn’t your mama ever teach you how to eat?” It was a loud, brattish display that captured the attention of several observers who milled around the two protagonists.

Ford backed away from the crowd calling toward the nearby bloggers and Baker. “Are you going to call me a fucktard?” he asked, referencing a recent article by Baker dispelling nasty, blog-generated rumors about Ford’s campaign. “Because,” he concluded, “I don’t know what that means.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Cutting to the Chase

Mayor Willie Herenton for Harold Ford Jr. Governor Phil Bredesen and Commissioner Sidney Chism for Steve Cohen? Say it ain’t so!

Fact is, it is so. Really.

None of the endorsers mentioned above were exactly jumping through hoops or shouting “Hallelujah!” but they made firm commitments of support, all the same.

Most forthright was Herenton’s endorsement of Ford, made after the mayor’s attendance at last week’s prayer breakfast for Senate candidate Ford at The Peabody.

“At the urging of a group of clergy and business leaders, I agreed to endorse Congressman Harold Ford in his bid for the United States Senate,” said the mayor in an interview with the Flyer. “I can look at the big picture,” maintained the frequent Ford-family foe. Herenton said his decision had been made “in the interests of Democratic Party solidarity,” and “in the context that I have previously endorsed Governor Phil Bredesen for reelection and state senator Steve Cohen for Congress.”

The mayor said he had “deliberated for the last two weeks” on the matter of an endorsement and noted that, while Ford had requested an endorsement “in passing,” there had been “no Memphis conversation” at which the congressman had sought his support.

Herenton contrasted that with the fact that former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, the Republican candidate, had “appropriately and respectfully” requested his support and discussed with the mayor his plans regarding Memphis, if elected. “In that sense, I might have had a greater respect for Mr. Corker had an endorsement of him been possible.”

But, said Herenton, he had made it clear to Corker that no such endorsement would be forthcoming and that for reasons of local unity and party solidarity the choice for him came down to either non-endorsement or endorsing Ford. He said that his endorsement was not a “left-handed” one and that he was at Ford’s disposal for campaign appearances.

Meanwhile, Cohen, the Democratic nominee for the 9th Congressional District, got a stamp of approval from two major politicians with whom his relations have been, to understate the case, something other than sunny.

During a visit to Memphis last week, Governor Phil Bredesen confirmed that he intended to support every statewide Democratic nominee, “and that certainly includes Senator Cohen.”

Also acknowledging his support for Cohen was former interim state senator and current Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, who expressed himself similarly, saying, “I am going to vote for every Democratic nominee, including Senator Cohen.”

Memphis became the center of the state’s political consciousness — and, in the case of one race, the nation’s — last weekend as debates were held here for the contenders in three major races: the United States Senate, the governorship, and the 9th District.

First was a Saturday-night showdown on WREG-TV between Ford and Corker.

In an affair that was widely commented on thereafter in the national media, both contestants in a potentially pivotal race for control of the Senate continued to hew to the same generally centrist (or mildly rightist) themes.

Considering that Corker, by virtue of a clearly overdue staff shakeup, had just stabilized what had been a disastrous decline in the polls (and was lucky to come into this event more or less even), it was surprising that he started out playing the political equivalent of a prevent defense.

Perhaps, as one observer suggested, Corker just wanted to get safely through this first encounter on Memphian Ford’s home turf and save his real game for a later debate elsewhere, where a good performance might put him over the top.

Maybe. But that assumes Corker can keep it close until then, and on the strength of Ford’s energetic performance Saturday night, that can’t be assumed.

Ford was having a fine time exhibiting his performance skills — a little too fine in that once in a while his adrenaline seemed to be getting the best of him. His penchant for flip asides, delivered via casual moves on and off his stool, reminded some viewers of Bill Clinton and others, longer of tooth, of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, back in the summer of 1960 — although Kennedy was a much more controlled, less hyper presence, and Corker was on point and poised enough not to be Nixon.

If Ford seemed somewhat over-active and glib, that may have been merely the boil-over of a very self-assured presence — the same one the state’s viewers have seen over and over in Ford’s TV ads, most of them stressing themes of national security and patriotism — de facto rebuttals of Corker’s disastrous early “Ford’s a liberal” attack ads that have now been shelved in favor of a more personal approach by the GOP candidate’s new campaign manager, political vet Tom Ingram.

Corker warmed up to a little direct action himself midway into Saturday night’s debate, taking a shot at the “Ford political dynasty,” one which Ford rebutted by the kind of “I love my family” response that, artfully and simultaneously, establishes distance between the congressman and his kindred.

Failing receipt of a “recipe” for picking one’s family, the Memphis congressman advised his opponent to “be quiet, and let’s run for the Senate.” But the Corker team afterward left no doubt that further attacks on the Fords as a political clan would be heard from in the last month of campaigning.

The next encounter, televised via WKNO-TV on Sunday afternoon, was a League of Women Voters forum featuring Bredesen and Republican opponent Jim Bryson.

The most remarkable aspect of that one may have been Bryson’s success in getting to the governor’s left on the issue of health care.

Bryson said that the programs Bredesen put in place as partial substitutes for TennCare, notably the “Cover Tennessee” plan of insurance supplementation, were “bare bones” solutions that would not resolve the issue of uninsured and uninsurable patients the governor had cut from the program, many of them, Bryson said, with “terminal” illnesses.

Bredesen countered by suggesting that his disenrollment effort had been aimed primarily at aspects of TennCare most subject to fraud and other abuses and said the program, instituted by former Governor Ned Ray McWherter and continued under former Governor Don Sundquist, had been “over-blown and over-bloated.”

Other points of divergence were: Bredesen’s defense of the jury-trial system of deciding medical-malpractice issues vs. Bryson’s call for caps on punitive damages; and the GOP challenger’s call for using the state surpluses accumulated under Bredesen to pay for elimination of the sales tax on groceries.

Finally, there was a sometimes stormy three-way debate Sunday night on WREG-TV featuring 9th District candidates Cohen, Republican Mark White, and “independent” Democrat Jake Ford.

Ford, first up, characterized himself as a champion of “working-wage Americans.” Next, primary winner Cohen expressed solidarity with his fellow Democrats for conferring the party’s nomination on him and promised he would “never turn … my back” on them, meanwhile chastising Ford for avoiding the party primary. Finally, White argued for a “coming together” of “new people, new blood” to create a different political reality in the traditionally Democratic district.

Thereafter, the genial White became something of a bystander as favored veteran Cohen and newcomer Ford scrapped for bragging rights.

The exchanges between Ford and Cohen became ever brisker, with Ford characterizing Cohen as “too liberal” on the issues of “gambling” (Cohen is the acknowledged father of the state lottery), marijuana (the senator has proposed legalizing medical marijuana), and, most controversially, same-sex marriage (Cohen opposes what he calls “constitutional tampering” to deal with the matter).

At one point, Ford went so far as to say that Cohen’s position on gay marriage was “certainly, I hope, not for personal reasons.”

Meanwhile Cohen made a point of stating for the record that he had never been arrested, “nor has Mr. White,” leaving it to Ford to acknowledge, without specifiying, that he might have had such trouble between 1990 and 1993, when his father, former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., faced federal indictments.

These and other heated exchanges between Cohen and Ford suggest that, as this race continues, there will be further trouble between the two, right here in River City.

Note: complete accounts of the three weekend debates may be found in the “Political Beat” section at MemphisFlyer.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

State of Denial

Not too long after Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Republicans insisted on what would become the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. It was meant to ensure that never again would a president serve more than two terms. Now is the time for yet another amendment. This one would ensure that no child of a president could become president. This would avert another George W. Bush.

The reasons for this amendment can be amply found in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial. If ever a title was apt, this is the one. As if to prove that Woodward had it right, Bush reacted to the book’s revelations about Don Rumsfeld — intransigent, incompetent, and intellectually intolerant — by reaffirming his confidence in him. To Bush — and indeed, to the rest of us as well — Rumsfeld has come to personify the conduct of the Iraq war. His leaving, especially his firing, would be an admission of the obvious: failure.

The Cohen Amendment comes to mind because from time to time Woodward quotes someone on why Bush ran for president in the first place and what determines his executive style: his father. He wanted to best his father but also even the score for him. George W. Bush wanted, in effect, to win the second term that George H.W. Bush had lost (to Bill Clinton), and he wanted also to finish the job his father had started with Saddam Hussein. If there is better explanation for why Bush so fervently wanted war, I cannot come up with it.

This descent of mine into the fog of Freudian politics is, I know, just the sort of thing Washington eschews. Such musings lack position papers or paper trails and rely instead on elastic language sometimes known as psychobabble. Yet those of us who are both fathers and sons know the truth of these matters. There is no more complicated relationship on the face of the earth. It is fraught with competition, suffused both with an edgy rivalry and an immense love that does not quit even with the grave. If I say that George W. Bush was out to both vanquish and redeem his father, many a man will know what I mean.

But I don’t have to say it. Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s close friend and his former national security adviser, says it for me. This is what Woodward writes about Scowcroft: “In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn’t decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster.”

It was not only Scowcroft, though, who thought, or feared, that Bush had approached the challenge of Saddam Hussein the wrong way. There are suggestions in the Woodward book that both of Bush’s parents felt that way. Woodward quotes a conversation Barbara Bush had with former Senator David Boren, an old family friend, in which she says that both she and her husband are “worried” about Iraq — with the former president “losing sleep over it.” Boren asks why the father did not talk to the son.

“He doesn’t think he should unless he’s asked,” Barbara Bush said.

I go on about this matter because in the Woodward book, as with everything else I’ve read about the 43rd president, it’s apparent that Bush had no reason to run for the office other than to satisfy some psychological compulsion — and had no accomplishment to his name that did not stem from primogeniture. Especially in foreign policy, he was an ignoramus who smugly thought that his instincts trumped experience and knowledge. What’s even more appalling is that over and over in Woodward’s book, Bush sticks to his losing hand, refusing to challenge his own assumptions or, it seems, his steadfast belief that his is a divine mission.

The conventional script in Washington for ending the Iraq war is for Bush to approach key Democrats and seek bipartisan cover for a methodical American withdrawal. Maybe that will happen or maybe it will be Republicans such as James Baker, Bush senior’s secretary of state, who will do the approaching. But given the nature of the problem, maybe it would be best if the father shed his reluctance and offered his son some sharp advice. After all, it is now clear that the finest service one president can provide another — not to mention his country — is to assert a parental role. The kid’s in way over his head.

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Editorial Opinion

Serving Two Masters

The current Tennessee Senate campaign presents journalists with a conundrum. While Congressman Harold Ford Jr. is the Democratic nominee for the seat being vacated by Bill Frist, his day job requires that he continue serving the best interests of the citizens of the Ninth Tennessee District in the House of Representatives. As a result, we cannot ignore his performance in that capacity, even while we devote much more ink to coverage of his campaign for higher office.

Last week Congressman Ford cast votes in the House of Representatives on two controversial national-security bills. The first involved the president’s detainee legislation. It eliminates the right of habeas corpus for those brought before military tribunals. And it allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone and everyone he thinks is an “unlawful combatant.”

Ford’s good friend, Senator Barack Obama, described himself as “ashamed” by the contents of this Military Commissions Act, pushed comfortably through both houses of the Republican-controlled Congress last Wednesday. Evidently, Congressman Ford has a higher shame threshold; he was one of just 34 House Democrats voting to restore to President Bush the sweeping executive powers that had been stripped from him by Supreme Court rulings earlier this year.

Later in the week, the House considered passage of the bizarrely titled Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act, a heinous piece of legislation also designed to subvert recent Supreme Court decisions, in this case those requiring the president to get special-court approval before wiretapping American civilians. This time, only 18 out of 201 Democrats broke ranks with the party leadership. But Harold Ford Jr. again was among the dissidents.

Congressman Ford’s votes on these two measures should be a matter of concern for all his Ninth District constituents. We would suggest that any poll of public opinion in this heavily Democratic district would record overwhelming opposition to these bald extensions of presidential power by the Bush administration. So why did Mr. Ford vote the way he did?

Of course, one would had to have spent the last six months living on Mars to ask that question without first planting one’s tongue firmly in cheek. In the last month of a bitter Senate campaign, our congressman obviously is appealing to a broader audience than the one he currently represents, an audience more sympathetic, perhaps, to the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prescriptions.

But until January, Harold Ford Jr. still represents his Ninth District constituents, citizens who deserve the courtesy of an explanation of his actions on the House floor. We are troubled by the fact that nowhere on his two political Web sites (his official House site and his Senate campaign site) does the congressman provide such an explanation. Even more troubling is the fact that his Web sites make no reference whatsoever to the fact that these events actually happened and that he returned to Washington last week to vote with the Bush administration, not against it, on both of these national-security measures.

We would welcome the congressman’s explanation of these two votes and would be happy to provide space in this newspaper for him to do so. No doubt he has much bigger fish to fry these days and may find explaining these votes to the people whose own votes sent him to Congress for five consecutive terms something of a distraction. Nevertheless, inquiring minds want to know.

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Politics Politics Feature

Tightening Up

The difference between GOP senatorial nominee Bob Corker and his Republican primary opponents, Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary, was in the quality and frequency of his advertising vis-à-vis theirs. For a solid month, Corker, a self-made multi-millionaire with healthy backing from his party’s establishment, was able to introduce himself to the state’s TV viewers as an accomplished mayor, an adroit businessman, and a friendly, somewhat countrified fellow with an extra-nice mom.

Poor Bryant and Hilleary, both running unimaginative and negative campaigns, might not have been able to compete even with equivalent financing, but the fact is, they didn’t have enough campaign money to counter the television onslaught, and they fell steadily behind. Ironically, their last chance came in the last two weeks of the campaign when, for reasons yet to be explained, Corker (who was well ahead in the polls at the time) took to attacking his opponents with advertising that was not only negative but demonstrably misleading.

Bryant and Hilleary counter-attacked, pointing out that neutral observers expressly belied the content of Corker’s attacks and considered them unfair. They lost anyhow, but with another month and another million apiece, the two hapless ex-congressmen might have been able to make up some ground.

The experience is relevant to what has happened to Corker in his current campaign against Democrat Harold Ford Jr.

For several weeks, as the general-election effort against Ford got under way, the former Chattanooga mayor ran TV commercials virtually nonstop — but not the sort he had used to establish himself as a likable, trustworthy figure in the primary. Rather, he filled the airwaves with negative attack ads, like his last ones against Bryant and Hillary.

It was almost as though he had established a groove — a rut, rather — and couldn’t get out of it. Worse, Corker himself didn’t figure in any of them except as a late-appearing figure whose voice-over, in accordance with Federal Election Commission regulations, “approved” the ads. Worse yet, the ads were as misleading as those against Bryant and Hilleary had been. Worst of all, his new opponent, Ford, had the money to compete with him on the airwaves.

Ford was in the attack mode, too, and his own ads were no model of fairness or accuracy, either. But he was in them, an undeniably telegenic and persuasive presence, and that set him apart from his opponent. Corker’s early lead evaporated, and Ford caught up and began to race ahead.

But wait! In the last week or two, there was Corker with his doting cutie-pie mom again, and here comes another commercial featuring the Bobster himself, talking regular-folks-common-sense talk about those blowhards in government and how a straight-arrow businessman like himself could straighten out all the stuff they’ve got wrong.

This reversion to best-foot-forward politics is the apparent result of a shakeup in the Corker campaign. Tom Ingram, a veteran operative who has been serving as Senator Lamar Alexander‘s chief of staff, is the new campaign manager, taking over from Ben Mitchell, and the new ad strategy is first fruit of that change.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the bleeding in the Corker campaign seems to have been stanched, and now he and Ford are now trading leads in this or that poll.

Undeniably, Ford has momentum — the result of his star quality and campaigning skills as well as what could turn out to be a national buyers’ remorse reaction to the Bush administration.

But, though the fact seems to have escaped most observers in the national media, Ford has critics within his own party — most of them on the left, to be sure, and not nearly as numerous as his detractors imagine but, arguably, influential beyond their numbers and, inarguably, out of love with their party’s nominal standard-bearer.

The reason? What they see as Ford’s apostasy from Democratic Party precepts. This includes his votes with the Republicans on such thematic/social issues as the flag-burning and marriage amendments and Congress’ mandated medical review in the Terri Schiavo case, economic issues like the bankruptcy bill and extension of the Bush tax cuts, and a plethora of national-policy concerns, such as Ford’s continuing support of the Iraq war effort and his go-along votes on a number of national-security issues.

Two of the latter occurred within the last week, as the Memphis congressman cast yea votes on two administration-backed bills — one extending broad authority to the president to define torture as it applies to captured enemy aliens, the other granting the chief executive the power, in effect, to decree warrantless surveillance. On the former bill, Ford was one of 34 House Democrats to vote as he did, on the latter one of 18.

Especially given apparent popular disenchantment with the Iraq war and with President Bush’s conduct of both it and the war on terror generally, Ford’s actions reignited the always-simmering discontent among his hard-core Democratic critics, who consider Republican attack ads on Ford as too “liberal” to be somewhere between an unintentional irony and a bad joke.

Not to talk too far out of school, but several indisputably Republican and/or conservative sources acknowledge privately the possibility that Ford’s increasingly conservative rhetoric may be more than election-year posturing.

Said one GOP loyalist and erstwhile Bryant supporter: “Harold Ford Jr. may be as conservative as it is possible for an African-American Democrat to be.”

Tellingly, Ford’s campaign paraphernalia does not feature the word “Democrat,” and, in a campaign that has focused unusual attention on the longtime Republican preserve of East Tennessee, seems almost to have proscribed use of the word on the stump. Even in hometown Memphis, he told a headquarters crowd back in April, “I’m not a Democrat running up to Washington yelling ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.'”

Another issue — mainly of concern to local Democrats but important enough to have attracted attention on the editorial page of the Nashville Tennessean — concerns the current 9th District congressional trifecta, in which Democratic nominee Steve Cohen is opposed both by Republican nominee Mark White and by “independent” Jake Ford, the congressman’s brother who says that, if elected, he would caucus with House Democrats.

But in a recent radio interview Jake Ford echoed his brother’s political ecumenism somewhat. Noting that he was “running without a party affiliation,” the younger Ford characterized his race as being “about people politics, not party politics,” and he added, “All too often people want you to get wound up in the issues Democrats want you to hear about or Republicans want you to hear about. I just want to represent the people.”

Representative Ford himself continues to maintain a neutral posture vis-à-vis Cohen and brother Jake. The congressman’s hesitancy has permitted the flourishing of persistent rumors that the Ford brothers are operating their campaigns in concert. Other than the common support of both by proud papa Harold Ford Sr., there would seem to be little evidence for such an assumption.

An equally persistent rumor — also unconfirmed and unlikely — has it that Jake Ford’s continued pursuit of the congressional seat might be, from the Ford clan’s point of view, conditional and subject to negotiation.

In any case, Ford’s Democratic critics cite Representative Ford’s ambiguous attitude toward the three-way congressional race as yet another impediment to their acceptance of his own candidacy. A refrain has begun to recur in the posting of a hard corps of anti-Ford bloggers — most of them in Shelby County but some also posting out of Nashville and elsewhere.

Why, Democratic skeptics in the blogosphere say, should we put aside our doubts and support Harold Ford Jr. as the party nominee when he won’t do the same for Cohen?

Ford defenders among longtime Democratic partisans are increasingly advancing another question: What’s the big deal on Ford’s credentials? they ask. Worst-case scenario: that a Senator Harold Ford Jr. would be an old-fashioned Southern Democratic conservative of the sort people in these parts once took for granted. So?

Meanwhile, Republican White, apparently deciding to take a step away from GOP orthodoxy, chided the president for not responding to White’s suggestion of a joint tour of inner-city Memphis during President Bush’s fund-raising stopover here for Corker last week. “Why he will not follow me there is beyond me,” said White, who is making a point of pitching for traditionally Democratic African-American votes.

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Opinion Viewpoint

How Did America Come to This?

Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

I’d like to thank Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham — a former military lawyer — and John Warner of Virginia. I will always think fondly of John Warner for this one reason: Forty years ago, this country was involved in an unprovoked and unnecessary war. It ended so badly the vets finally had to hold their own homecoming parade, years after they came home. The only member of Congress who attended was John Warner.

A debate on torture. I don’t know — what do you think? I guess we have to define it first. The White House has already specified “water boarding” — making the prisoner think he’s drowning for long periods — as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.

I don’t think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don’t like being identified with the Gestapo. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, “Are we insane?”)

The safe position is, “Torture doesn’t work.”

Well, actually, it works to this extent: Anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the victim started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, “professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the “professionals” can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end “the program” completely if he doesn’t get what he wants. (The same small voice is shrieking, “Professional torturers trained with my tax money?”)

Bush’s problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo and, via CIA rendition, in prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.

Since only seven of the several hundred prisoners at Gitmo have ever been charged with anything, we face the unhappy prospect that the rest of them are innocent. And will sue. That’s going to be quite an expensive settlement. The Canadian upon whom we practiced rendition, sending him to Syria for 10 months of torture, will doubtlessly be first on the legal docket. I wonder how high up the chain of command a civil suit can go. Any old war criminals wandering around?

I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as … well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.

Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that’s having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now. Right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything. Phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate. Go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity.

How will you feel if you didn’t do something and torture becomes the official policy of your country? (“Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks.”)

As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.'”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Brother Act

Say this about Harold Ford Sr.: The former 9th District congressman hasn’t lost his appetite for political combat. He made that clear last week when he accepted co-billing with his son Harold Ford Jr. at a Friday-morning rally at the Park Place headquarters of the current congressman, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

A “reception” for the two Harold Fords, it was called, and it drew a goodly crowd. With some time to kill, the senior Ford shared some thinking about his son’s campaign as he awaited the arrival of Representative Ford’s campaign bus. (Yes, if earlier that morning you were watching hometown idol Justin Timberlake on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, that was the selfsame bus that just happened to have pulled up behind the stage, flashing its Ford For Senate logo before the eyes of the nation.)

Nor has the old warrior lost his sense of strategy. It was clearly a mistake, the former congressman said, for his son’s Senate rival, Republican nominee Bob Corker, to have invited President Bush to Memphis for a fund-raiser next week — the second such occasion in Tennessee, following a public embrace between the two the week before last in Nashville.

“That’s the trouble with those millionaires. They don’t want to spend any money, especially none of their own,” Ford Sr. — a seven-figure type himself these days as a well-paid Florida-based consultant — said of the former Chattanooga mayor, an entrepreneur whose considerable fortune has derived from low-income housing projects.

As the elder Ford explained it, Corker’s misplaced frugality was making him over-dependent on a president with sagging polls and presumably frayed coattails. As a piece of analysis, it made sense. It was certainly true that his son’s campaign seemed to be spending more money than his rival’s just now — mainly on a recurring and well-crafted series of TV ads that made the most of the younger Ford’s mediagenic looks and reassuring stage presence.

Those commercials — the most recent one made in a church! — featured the same right-of-center rap (pro-Patriot Act, pro-curbs on immigration, etc.) that has driven the left wing of the congressman’s party bananas. One effect of this approach has seemingly been to prevent Corker, fearful of being out-flanked on his right, from coming to the political center as newly minted party nominees usually do.

The audience for Representative Ford’s typically rousing and generalized remarks at the Friday-morning rally included a generous collection of Democrats — senior citizens, business types, Midtown Democrats, suburban types, etc.

Subsequent to the event, the impression got out in some quarters that it had been an affair for College Democrats (it wasn’t — though they, like other Democrats, had been invited and responded) in which, according to a widely circulated e-mail from a University of Memphis student: “Apparently, after Junior was done speaking, his fucktard brother got a chance to speak to the volunteer base that we acquired for Junior.”

Hearsay of this sort begat further hearsay, and soon an honest blogger or two had picked up on a gathering outrage among supporters of 9th District Democratic nominee Steve Cohen that the “fucktard brother” (i.e., independent congressional candidate Jake Ford) had benefited from what had now, in some tellings, become a “handoff” at the rally from Representative Ford.

Actually, nothing of the sort occurred. Jake Ford had been no more than one member of the large and milling crowd. He had no role in the proceedings, which ended after his congressman brother left to go join the Rev. Ben Hooks for the dedication of a Whitehaven Job Corps center in Hooks’ honor.

If Jake Ford “worked the crowd” afterward (as a revised version of the ever-shifting story had it), then so did anybody else who had been in the throng. It was just a case of a large gathering breaking off into isolated conversational clumps as people made their way out the door.

That so much was later made of a non-event merely served to underscore the existence of a very real schism in local Democratic ranks — one that was bound to be exacerbated by Jake Ford’s own claim in a radio interview this week.

Asked by a caller on a show hosted by Jennings Bernard why Representative Ford had not publicly endorsed him, Jake Ford maintained that his brother had in fact done so and, to further that contention, availed himself of the same rumors that were already in play concerning last week’s Friday-morning rally.

“Quite simply, he [Representative Ford] endorses me every day,” said Jake Ford. “I endorse him every day.” As for why his brother hadn’t “officially come out,” Ford said, “I think most people should realize he does endorse me. I was just with him on Friday at his campaign headquarters for a rally. Make no mistake about it, he’s my brother, and I love the guy. It’s just two different races. He’s running for the Senate and I’m running for Congress.”

The bottom line was that now people were prepared to believe what they wanted to believe. When Jake Ford’s radio remarks are carefully parsed, they don’t authenticate the fact of an “endorsement” that, ultimately, could only come from Representative Ford himself. But they certainly put Ford Jr. in the position of having to speak to the issue himself, something he ultimately will be under great — perhaps unavoidable — pressure to do.

Understandably, proponents of state senator Cohen are vexed at Representative Ford for the statements of neutrality he has made so far concerning the race to succeed him. They, too, tend to regard the congressman’s posture as indicative of de facto support for brother Jake.

In the long run, some believe, that feeling could grow in Democratic circles, even at the statewide level, and cost Representative Ford enough votes at the margin to threaten his chances in the Senate race. Right now, with Corker running like a dry creek and losing momentum in all the polls to Ford, it may not seem so to the congressman.

And his ex-congressman father has made no secret of his intention to pull out all the stops for both of his sons.

Meanwhile, Cohen continues to be regarded as the front-runner. He, after all, is his party’s nominee, made what has to be regarded as a substantial primary showing in black precincts (17 percent overall), is regarded by many Democrats, especially liberal ones, as a longtime champion of their causes, and even has boosters in Republican circles.

That last fact, based on some isolated conservative positions (e.g., on gun control and the death penalty) as well as a general admiration for his legislative service and tenacity, is cause for some concern in the camp of Republican nominee Mark White, who has devoted much attention in his own campaign to social issues like abortion and gay marriage. It is areas like those where he perceives Cohen to have possible weaknesses.

In an address to the College Democrats at the University of Memphis Monday night, Cohen maintained that “both of my opponents” hoped to undermine him in such areas. He defended his opposition to constitutional amendments against gay marriage — jesting, however, that he was firmly opposed to “intergalactic” marriage.

Cohen told the College Democrats that Jake Ford in his radio appearance had implied Cohen was a homosexual, a racist, and “a crook.” In all fairness, the first two allegations derived more from innuendoes and more from callers than from anything Ford said. But candidate Ford did seem to be doing his best to nudge home the last charge.

“I think he’s stepped over the line a couple of times, and we still cannot get the attorney general to be responsive to some of the allegations that we have become aware of pertaining to some dealings that he has had himself,” Ford said on Bernard’s show without elaborating further.

The very fact that he said something like that was taken by many Cohen supporters as ample confirmation that Jake Ford was intimately bound up with the appearance of a new Web site called CrookedCohen.org, which makes the very unspecified allegations alluded to by Ford. Blogger Derek Haire (rivercitymud.com) painstakingly traced that site and Jake Ford’s own campaign site back to the same IP address.

No sign, by the way, of Ophelia Ford, unseen on the campaign trail during this entire season but still, for demographic and party reasons, the favorite in the District 29 state Senate race over the relentlessly campaigning Republican Terry Roland.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

GOP Troubles

The Democrats are determined to make the election of 2006 a referendum on Bush and the war in Iraq. And, as of now, that is how history will likely record it. But beneath the surface of the national election, a different plebiscite is being held within the conservative movement on the ideology George Bush imposed on Ronald Reagan’s party.

What are the elements of Bushite neoconservatism?

First, an interventionist foreign policy, using U.S. power to impose democracy and “end tyranny on this earth.” Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon are the laboratories and proving grounds.

Second, “big-government conservatism,” as seen in the deficits, the dearth of vetoes, soaring social spending in wartime, the bulking up of the Department of Education and “faith-based initiatives.”

Third, an immigration policy featuring amnesty and a “path to citizenship” for 12 million illegal aliens, pardons for all businesses that hired illegals, and outsourcing of immigration policy to corporate America to go abroad and hire workers for jobs here.

Fourth, a trade policy rooted in the belief that it does not matter where goods are produced or whether Americans produce them. What matters is unimpeded global commerce, where the consumer is king and gets all the goods he wants at the cheapest possible price.

On these four mega-questions, Republicans are as divided as they were in the days of Rockefeller and Goldwater. Wherever “conservatives” stand — whether Old Right or neocon, supply-sider or deficit hawk, “America first” or global democrat, big government or small government — the returns of Bush’s policies are largely in and the outcome is unlikely to change. And this is why Bush and the GOP are in trouble, and neoconservatism is in the dock.

The altarpiece of the Bush foreign policy is Iraq. American dead are at 2,600, the wounded at 18,000. Three hundred billion dollars has been plunged into the war. Yet, Iraq is a bloodier, more dangerous place now than it has been since the fall of Baghdad. IED attacks on U.S. troops are at record levels — three-and-a-half years after Baghdad fell.

The Bush democracy campaign has brought stunning electoral gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. Our ally in Afghanistan Hamid Kharzai is today little more than mayor of Kabul, as the Taliban roam the southeast and coalition casualties reach the highest levels since liberation five years ago. North Korea and Iran remain defiant on their nuclear programs. Vladimir Putin is befriending every regime at odds with Bush, from Tehran to Damascus to Caracas.

Unless we grade foreign policy on the nobility of the intent, it is not credible to call Bush’s foreign policy a sucess. The Lebanon debacle, once U.S. complicity is exposed, is unlikely to win anyone a Nobel.

Bush’s trade policy has left us with annual deficits of $800 billion with the world and $200 billion with Beijing. Once the greatest creditor nation in history, we are now the greatest debtor. U.S. manufacturing has been hollowed out with thousands of plants closed and 3 million industrial jobs vanishing since Bush took office.

As for Bush immigration policy, the nation is in virtual rebellion. Six million aliens have been caught at the Mexican border since he took office. One in 12 had a criminal record. In April and May, millions of Hispanics marched through U.S. cities demanding amnesty and all rights of citizenship for aliens who are breaking the law by even being here. Bush and the Senate are in paralysis, appeasing the lawbreakers by offering amnesties and by opposing House demands that the president seal the border.

While the economy has been running well since 2003, the real wages of working Americans have not kept pace with the portfolios of the clients of Lawrence Kudlow. Industrial states, like Ohio, could be killing fields of the GOP in November.

To the neocon guru Irving Kristol, “The historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be … to convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”

With some of us, the tutoring never took, but the neocons surely did convert George W.

How’s your boy doing, Irving?

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jaking It

Ninth District congressional nominee Steve Cohen, who has grappled with a variety of health and family issues since his victory in the August 3rd Democratic primary, has some political ones as well.

Cohen happened to bump into his party’s U.S. Senate nominee, Harold Ford Jr., at a Midtown hostelry last week. And, oh yes, during the three minutes or so that the two men of the hour had for a brief but cordial (or, in diplomatic parlance, “correct”) conversation, the question of the hour came up.

The longtime state senator from Midtown had the opportunity to ask the outgoing 9th District congressman directly: Will you endorse me?

Ford’s answer: “I can support you, but I won’t endorse you.” (If that sounds ever so much like John Kerry‘s famous equivocation about an Iraq spending measure, “I voted for it before I voted against it,” you have to remember that Ford was an early supporter — a national co-chairman, in fact — of the Massachusetts senator’s late presidential campaign.)

The congressman then went on to explain what Cohen and everybody else already knew: He had a brother in the race, whom he apparently wouldn’t be endorsing either.

Days before, during his post-primary statewide bus tour, the barnstorming Ford had been quoted in the Nashville Tennessean as saying he was a Democrat who supported Democrats — and, as Ford explained, both Cohen and Jake Ford, the congressman’s brother, who is in the congressional race as an independent, were Democrats.

That was that, and to Cohen, as to the Tennessean earlier, Ford coupled his reservation about the congressional race with a profession of loyalty — or “love,” as Ford put it to Cohen — for Connecticut U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, who, having lost his primary race to party insurgent Ned Lamont, is now running as an independent as he continues to seek reelection.

In statewide political circles, Representative Ford’s position on the two races has generally been regarded as a dilemma. It is, of course, equally possible to construe each of those races as providing the congressman cover for dealing (or not dealing) with the other.

Meanwhile, speculation as to the import of all this has become a cottage industry among political observers. Some emphasize the value of the congressman’s coattails to his brother Jake. Others suggest that continued irresolution on Representative Ford’s part could snag his coattails in such a way as to damage Democratic unity and the prospects for his own victory.

As of now, the congressman is running well — with his campaign trumpeting a new poll showing him with a two-point lead over Republican senatorial nominee Bob Corker.

• The aforesaid Jake Ford, whose congressional campaign remained merely conceptual until the Democratic primary was finished, now looks more and more like the real thing. He was seen last week loading a pickup truck with yard signs. The signs — accented in black, white, and blue and featuring the candidate’s name along with an image of the U.S. Capitol — shortly began sprouting in South and Southeast Memphis.

There is also now a “Jake Ford for Congress” Web site — bare bones for now but featuring several category heads that will presumably be filled in later.

The last week has also seen the first stirrings of an organized effort on Jake Ford’s behalf among a few traditional Democrats in the African-American community.

One such is William Larsha, a sometime local columnist and veteran member of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee, who this week published two brief essays on the blog of Thaddeus Matthews arguing that Jake Ford should be supported by blacks in order to preserve an African-American congressional seat for Tennessee.

The influence within the party of Larsha, approaching 80 and with no particular affiliation with any of the Democrats’ local factions, is marginal. But in the absence so far of major black defections to independent Ford, he becomes the equivalent of the proverbial flag that’s run up a pole to see who might salute it.

And what of Republican congressional candidate Mark White? Some see him as profiting from a prospective Cohen-Ford split; others foresee defections from his camp to that of Cohen.

Trying Times: Wearing a gray pin-striped suit, a businesslike striped tie, and — ultimately — a look of anguish, Michael Hooks Sr.,

Michael Hooks Sr.

whose resignation as Shelby County commissioner had taken effect at 12:01 a.m., formally pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to accepting $24,000 in bribes during the course of the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting.

“An error in judgment affects a lifetime,” a visibly contrite Hooks said to reporters afterward. “I have nobody to blame but me. I don’t blame the sting operation, I don’t blame the set-up, I blame Commissioner Hooks. And for that, I will pay for it the rest of my life.”

Hours later, state senator Kathryn Bowers, another Tennessee Waltz indictee, postponed her own day of reckoning by seeking and receiving a delay until September 5th for a “final report” in which she will state her plea. Her attorney, William Massey, later suggested, somewhat meaningfully, that a trial might not be necessary.

Presiding in the cases of both Hooks and Bowers is U.S. district judge John D. Breen, who earlier had approved a plea agreement between Hooks and the U.S. Attorney’s Office and set December 6th as a sentencing date.

In his brief statement to reporters, Hooks went on to say that he took “sole responsibility” for actions, committed in 2004 and 2005, that resulted in his taking a total of $24,000 in FBI cash from individuals working under cover and posing as representatives of a fictitious computer-disposal firm known as E-Cycle Management. “I knew better and should have done better,” Hooks said. He said his family had been affected by the scandal, and he was ready to accept “any judgment that’s handed down.”

Announcing the terms of Hooks’ plea agreement in court, assistant U.S. attorney Tim DiScenza briefly recounted the series of incidents, all documented by audio- and videotaped evidence, in which Hooks had asked for and accepted cash to help repair a personal “deficit” of $38,000. Asked by Judge Breen if DiScenza’s narration had been accurate, Hooks replied, “Basically.”

Attorney Steve Farese appeared on Hooks’ behalf, along with lawyer Marc Garber from Atlanta. Farese told reporters later that the government’s allegations, followed by an indictment of Hooks as part of the Tennessee Waltz sting, had “killed [Hooks’] soul.” He said that he and Garber had carefully screened the evidence and later reviewed it with Hooks. “I sat down for three straight days with Michael, and after I let him see transcripts and let him see recordings, he knew at that time that a trial was simply out of the question,” Farese said.

Neither Hooks nor his two lawyers gave any indication as to whether Hooks might become a principal in subsequent trials of others indicted in the Tennessee Waltz. One of these is his son, Michael Hooks Jr., charged with similar actions while a member of the Memphis school board.

In the afternoon hearing for Bowers, attorney Massey successfully sought a continuance for his client on grounds that, with the completion of discovery (the final receipt of relevant evidence, including audio- and videotapes from the government), Bowers’ team needed time to digest everything.

Asked by reporters if Bowers might consider a plea other than Not Guilty, Massey said, “We’re always reevaluating our position, in light of everyone else, in light of the discovery we’ve had.”

Though she seemed chipper, especially in comparison with the clearly depressed Hooks, Bowers acknowledged to reporters that “this overall ordeal has really taken a serious toll on my health.”

Question: If Bowers — on the basis of the kind of well-documented evidence that convicted former state senator Roscoe Dixon — also ends up having to cop a plea, can former state senator John Ford, considered the biggest fish snared in the FBI’s net, possibly avoid doing the same?

Categories
Opinion

The Next Storm

“That was the trouble with corruption. The bigger the players who went down, the bigger the headlines got and the worse the city looked. So it was always the little ones — the ones mixed up in things they didn’t necessarily ask for, the ones who wouldn’t be missed — who were sacrificed. And the big fish eased back under their rocks to let the storm blow over.”

That passage is from T. Jefferson Parker’s new novel, The Fallen. The setting is San Diego, and the sordid backdrop — that city’s public pension-fund scandal — could be taken right off the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Where will the next storm in Memphis come from? Pension plans? Tennessee Waltz? The Memphis City Schools? Election problems? Mayor Herenton’s reelection? The Memphis Charter Commission? In the spirit of the college football polls, here are six candidates for you, the readers, to rank.

The next chapter of Tennessee Waltz. Now that Michael Hooks Sr. has pleaded guilty and Roscoe Dixon has been convicted at trial, what will John Ford and Ward Crutchfield do? Ford and Crutchfield were the longest-serving and most powerful politicians indicted in Tennessee Waltz, and both have so far indicated that they will go to trial. But Dixon’s trial was brutal and will probably get him a longer sentence than Hooks. If Dixon, Hooks, Ford, or Crutchfield decide to unburden their conscience, or maybe even if they don’t, there will be more indictments.

PSPB stands for public-sector pension burden. Get used to seeing it. Pension problems threaten to bring down General Motors and Ford and reached scandal status in San Diego, a city much richer than Memphis. Memphis appears to have its pension plan adequately funded, but there are warnings — pension concerns were the original impetus for the Memphis Charter Commission, and the city’s bond rating was lowered last year.

Without a whistleblower like the insider who exposed the problems in San Diego, PSPB problems stay under the radar. They’re not media-friendly, and the feds can’t “get a wrench around it,” as former federal prosecutor Hickman Ewing Jr. used to say. But the basic problem of funding retirement benefits with taxpayer money is nationwide.

Election problems. Remember when elections consisted of 60 percent turnouts, decisive victories, and gracious concession speeches? The norm in Memphis these days, it seems, is a turnout of 25 percent or less, a victory margin of less than 1 percent or a “winner” with one-third of the vote, and a post-election challenge by the loser. And three weeks after the election, the Shelby County Election Commission is still going over the votes and hasn’t come out with a Voter Turnout Report.

The Memphis Charter Commission. Direct democracy has come to Memphis. Will the seven commissioners play it safe, or will they present voters with one or more blockbuster referendums in the October 4th, 2007, city election? Activist agendas around the country include term limits, no tax increases without voter approval, and, in Arizona, a $1 million lottery award to encourage voting.

The Memphis City Schools. Another one of those big-picture stories that is hard to get a wrench around. Memphis is pulling for Superintendent Carol Johnson, but the top assistant she brought with her from Minneapolis suddenly left last month, and recent headlines included classrooms without schedules or textbooks, a principal resisting arrest on Beale Street, and a fight between a parent and student and a police officer.

A fifth term for Willie Herenton? Harold Ford Jr. will get the headlines until November, but after that, attention will shift to Herenton, who runs in October 2007. Steve Cohen’s victory with 31 percent in the 9th District Democratic congressional primary gives hope to others with limited but loyal followings in a multi-candidate field.

Herenton is well entrenched with operatives, including spokeswoman Gale Jones Carson on the state Democratic Party executive committee, all-purpose special assistant Pete Aviotti, newly elected Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism, MLGW president Joseph Lee, and city attorney Sara Hall. He remains the heavy favorite.

Correction: I mistakenly reported last week that Pat Kerr Tigrett’s Waterford Plaza penthouse is for sale. Another Waterford Plaza penthouse is for sale. I regret the error.