Tag: Reince Priebus

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Politics Politics Feature

Winds of Change Roil Shelby County’s Post-election Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race will likely open up career opportunities for fellow Republicans — including some in the Memphis area.

One possible beneficiary is lawyer John Ryder, a longtime eminence in GOP affairs. Ryder has served as local Republican chairman, as a member of the Republican National Committee from Tennessee, and, currently, as general counsel to the RNC. After the census of 2010, Ryder headed up the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts nationwide, and the map he helped create has strongly reinforced the GOP’s hold on districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A partner at the Harris Shelton law firm of Memphis, Ryder was named Republican Lawyer of the Year in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. That follows a year in which he served as a Trump delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland and was a key member of that conventions’ rules committee.

Considering that Ryder, as general counsel, has essentially been the right-hand man of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, and that Priebus has just been designated by Trump to be the new president’s chief of staff, the question arises: Is Ryder a prospect to succeed Priebus as head of the RNC?

“That would be a decision reached by the president-elect,” Ryder said Monday in a telephone conversation that took place as he drove to Nashville, where he teaches a course at Vanderbilt. “We’re going to see what happens. A lot of different paths are going to open up in the next few weeks, and I’m looking to where I can best be of service to the republic.”

Ryder emphasized that “nothing’s been discussed so far.” As for the possibility of his being offered other positions in the official GOP network that stands to be expanded in the new administration, Ryder said, “I’m not particularly looking for anything. I’m not particularly expecting anything.”

Elsewhere locally, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who served as Trump’s West Tennessee chairman, said he expected to have a say in whatever patronage positions might be available in his bailiwick.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Democrats may be looking to change direction in the wake of yet another election in which they failed to advance. Except for one upset win, that of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus in state House District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), Democratic candidates lost all the legislative races in which they challenged Republicans. The net result was a loss of one seat in the House, which means that there will be 25 Democrats and 74 Republicans in the House come January; the state Senate remains at its current level: five Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Republican legislative super-majority holds tight.

And that’s not a satisfactory set of affairs for Bill Freeman, the wealthy Nashville businessman who is the chief Democratic donor in Tennessee and, as he made clear in a visit to Memphis earlier this month, has ambitions of running for governor in 2018.

Likening the party’s electoral showing to a dismal season in the NFL, Freeman told the Nashville Tennessean that, “we’ve got to look at every option, including a new chair.”

The current chair, Mary Mancini of Nashville, has no intention of giving up the job, however, and has said she will run for another two-year term. 

One of Freemen’s closest associates is former state party chairman Chip Forrester, who has served several chairmanship terms in different decades, who served Freeman as campaign manager in his unsuccessful race for Nashville mayor last year, and will probably head up a Freeman gubernatorial campaign in 2018 if there is one.

But there is no indication so far that Forrester is looking at another run at the party chairmanship, and Freeman is talking up Holly McCall, who early in the year declared for House District 65, then held by bad-boy Republican incumbent Jeremy Durham, an accused sexual predator. She eventually lost her bid for the seat to Sam Whitson, the Republican who ousted Durham in the GOP primary.

In a letter to members of the state Democratic executive committee emailed on Monday, Freeman put the kernel of his argument this way: 

“First and foremost, for all the effort that we focused on in Tennessee, we gained absolutely no ground in the state senate and had a net loss of one seat in the state house. Instead of moving the needle forward, we went backward. This is unacceptable. … We should have done better and done it more robustly. I believe we need new leadership to do so.”

Of Mancini, Freeman said, “She is a fine person and clearly committed to serving our party, but we have failed to grow as we all had hoped for during these past two years. … The poor results we have seen this past Tuesday show clearly that we need a change.”

Pointedly, Freeman made reference to “a critical statewide race for the United States Senate in 2018,” and said, “We must rebuild our party to have the infrastructure in place so that our Democrat nominees for governor and U.S. senator have the party machinery in place to succeed.”

Tennessee Democrats — and Mancini — did, however, have one legislative victory in the recent election that nobody saw coming except the participants in the winning campaign. As indicated, this was the upset win of Thompson, a genial human resources administrator and longtime Democratic activist, over state Representative McManus, a GOP legislative mainstay, in District 96.

Under the circumstances of the 2016 election cycle, which not only strengthened the GOP super-majority in Tennessee but put Donald Trump into the presidency and gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House, it is astonishing that Thompson should have won election to the state House from a suburban Shelby County district. It is doubly astonishing that he unseated an incumbent Republican to do so.

Not only was Thompson the only Democrat in Tennessee to unseat a Republican, he believes himself to be the only Democrat in the South to have done so.

Thompson’s victory over McManus, who had been serving as chairman of the state House banking and insurance committee, was by the total of 351 votes out of almost 28,000 cast, and that ultra-thin margin can be attributed to old-fashioned work ethic on the winner’s side and what has to be reckoned as complacency and over-confidence on the loser’s.         

McManus’ campaign war-chest totaled  $155,754.59 as of the third-quarter financial-disclosure deadline, dwarfing Thompson’s $5,088.20. Thompson later received an infusion of financial aid from the Tennessee Democratic Party: $1,500 in a direct outlay on top of a $13,100 in-kind contribution in the form of a “polling survey.”

In October, Thompson’s total expenditures of $13,817 were almost equal to McManus’, and the Democratic challenger targeted his campaign money well, spending some of it on some modest internet advertising that pointed out, among other things, the fact that he had a military record.

McManus’ confidence may also have stemmed from the fact that he had easily dispatched Thompson in their first match-up, in 2014, with 62 percent of the vote to Thompson’s 38 percent.

Thompson was determined to prove that District 96 was a swing district, composed of a working-class/middle-class mix that was susceptible to a Democratic appeal. He boasts that he and his campaign team knocked on a total of 12,000 doors in the course of the campaign, focusing on issues ranging from Cordova’s traffic problems to skepticism about charter schools and the need for reviving Governor Bill Haslam‘s dormant Insure Tennessee program for Medicaid expansion, which, he emphasized to voters, had been blocked in McManus’ committee in the special legislative session of 2015.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Reince and Repeat.

In August, Donald Trump was touting all the major polls, many of which at that time had him closing the gap on Hillary Clinton and even leading her in some instances. In September, as his numbers began to spiral downward, Trump changed his tune and began claiming the polls were tilted in favor of his opponent. Now, in late October, he has gone full-conspiracy-theorist, claiming that not only are the polls merely liberal propaganda, the very election itself is rigged against him. 

In fact, almost all credible national polls — FiveThirtyEight, New York Times, ABC, Real Clear Politics, even Fox News — are indicating, with two weeks to go, that this election will be an electoral blowout. Several states that haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades are now either leaning blue or rated as toss-ups, including Georgia, Arizona, and even Texas.

The early voting results are just as daunting for Trump, with the Democrats crushing the GOP early turnout in North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, and other traditional “tossup” states. In addition, GOP early voting numbers are running far behind those of Mitt Romney in 2012.

The venerable Cook Report said this week that even if Trump wins all remaining toss-up states, including Ohio and Florida, he’ll still fall 10 votes short in the Electoral College.

As Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes narrows to near impossibility, the campaign is beginning to look like an episode of The Walking Dead. Campaign surrogates go on television and say one thing, and before you can change the channel, their candidate has stepped on that message or, more likely, said just the opposite.

The saddest of these Trumpettes is GOP National Committee Chairman Reince (“i before e, except after capital R”) Priebus, who is caught between outraged GOP donors who’ve abandoned the party’s presidential candidate and the candidate himself, who’s disparaging party leaders and seemingly doing all he can to discourage votes for down-ballot Republican candidates.

When challenged on a Sunday morning talk show to defend Trump’s stated unwillingness to accept the results of the election, Priebus sputtered a magnificent piece of pretzel prose: Trump, he said, is “not willing to not concede if he loses and there’s no fraud.” What?

Meanwhile, Trump’s Washington, D.C., “policy office” shut down, as staffers resigned because they hadn’t been paid in months. And new allegations, this time, about cocaine and models parties in the 1980s, popped up. On the campaign trail, Trump continued to throw out one reason after another the system was conspiring to deprive him of his rightful place in the White House.

The more I read about these huge early voting totals, these state polls moving relentlessly blue, the more I’m convinced that there are a whole lot of people who want to see Trump go down like the Hindenberg. They’re voting so they can watch the spectacular humiliation of the man whose narcissistic charade of a campaign destroyed an election cycle — and maybe a major American political party — and lured America’s ugly racist underbelly out of the shadows. Schadenfreude is probably an underreported poll motivation.

It’s a fitting end, though, to the 15-month reality show that Trump created and the GOP failed to stop. If you enumerated all the outrageous things that have happened and have been said in this campaign and tried to pass it as fiction, no one would believe it. Trump’s probable dysfunctional meltdown after getting his ass kicked on November 8th is really just the ultimate season finale. Must-see TV.

Of course, it’s still theoretically possible that all this blue polling and all these early voting stats are wrong. If so, they would be masking what would be the greatest turnaround in the history of American politics: a Donald Trump victory.

But I’m not not willing to not believe that.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

RNC Adopts John Ryder’s Debate Proposal

CREDIT: JB

There was a lot of politics in Memphis this last week or so. Last Tuesday, the voters of Shelby County went to the polls and chose nominees in Democratic and Republican primaries for county offices.

The most notable win was that of former County Commissioner Deidre Malone in a three-way race for County Mayor with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. and County Commissioner Steve Mulroy. She will oppose incumbent Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell on August 7th.

Both local parties subsequently held post-primary unity rallies in preparation for the county general election in August, which will coincide with judicial races and primaries for federal and state offices.

Then on Wednesday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) began a four-day spring meeting at the Peabody here, resulting most notably in a dramatic change in the way GOP presidential candidates will debate in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In the long run, the consequences of the RNC meeting are likely to overshadow not only the local election results but a good deal of what is currently passing for momentous circumstance in national politics.

The major event of the RNC conclave was the passing of a motion by John Ryder, the Memphis lawyer who is both a national committeeman from Tennessee and the RNC’s general counsel, and who, further, was the impetus for the RNC holding its meeting in Memphis.

What the Ryder motion did was establish a machinery for the Republican presidential primary debates in 2016 that will exclude the national TV networks from any semblance of control over how the debates are conducted.

The motion — technically an amendment to “10H,” the RNC’s rule governing participation by candidates in presidential debates — was first presented by Ryder in a meeting of the RNC Rules Committee on Thursday.

Contending that only 7 percent of media members were Republicans, Ryder drew a portrait of a party whose prospective leaders in 2011 and 2012 had been hamstrung and misrepresented in televised national debates.

There had been 23 debates between Republican candidates, all totaled, too many and all of them too much under the sway of a media that was 93 percent hostile, said Ryder, who contended the result had been harmful — perhaps fatal — to the GOP’s hopes of gaining the White House.

Ryder’s amendment would create a 13-member committee to sanction a list of approved presidential-candidate debates. Eight members would be elected from the RNC membership — two each from the committee’s four regions — and five more would be appointed by the RNC chairman.

Once a committee so appointed determined an officially sanctioned list of debates, any presidential candidate participating in an unsanctioned debate would be prohibited from taking part in any further sanctioned debates. All details of the sanctioned debates would be overseen by the 13-member RNC committee — the rules, the questions, the choice of moderators, the length of answer time permitted to the candidate … everything and anything, in short.

“We would be in control,” Ryder said. Not “the Great Mentioner” (presumably meaning the media as a collective entity).

There were objectors to his proposal — notably Ada Fisher, a delegate from North Carolina, and Diana Orrock of Nevada, both of whom questioned its dampening effect on free speech, and from Morton Blackwell of Virginia, who concurred with them and expressed a further concern that the proposed RNC commission would be over-loaded with appointees by the chairman, who would have too much authority over the primary process and might be able to cherry-pick the presidential contenders.

But Ryder insisted that all these concerns were irrelevant to the need for the GOP to get out from under the control of a “hostile media.”

Ryder’s contention was further boosted by Randy Evans of Georgia, who rose to acknowledge to the rules committee that his 2012 candidate for president, home-stater Newt Gingrich, had profited from the free-ranging nature of that year’s debates.

But the issue was very simple, he said. “This is about control … the networks versus the party. No more is the mainstream media going to control what we do.” As he had put it earlier, in what was probably the defining line of the debate, a showstopper, “Somebody has to have the power to say ‘no’ to [CNN’s] Candy Crowley!”

In the end, the objectors to the Ryder amendment turned out to be only a handful, limited essentially to those few who had spoken against it. A Blackwell amendment to alter the way members were picked for the proposed commission went down hard, and then Ryder’s amendment sailed through the Rules Committee, 46 to 3, with one abstention, needing only the approval of the full RNC contingent at Friday’s General Session.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus began that session with a speech containing the following admonition: “We have an important mission …. When something gets in the way of that mission, we have to act. We all know that that roadblock so often is in the media. … In the past, Republicans would complain about it but didn’t act. That was the old way. By acting smartly in the most important cases, we’re getting results with the media.”

Priebus recapped his successes in pressuring NBC and CNN into halting plans last year for televised “tributes” to Hillary Clinton and in forcing an apology from Ebony magazine for an article he deemed unfriendly and unfair to Republicans. The next step, he said, prefiguring the debate on the Ryder proposal, was to “take ownership over control of our debates. The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat.”

When the time came to present his proposal to the full body, Ryder continued in that vein, citing once again “an academic study … which revealed that exactly 7 percent of journalists in America are Republican.”

That meant, he said, that “93 percent are not our friends,” and “so we have engaged in a process over several presidential cycles where the people who plan and organize and orchestrate the debates are composed of that 93 percent who wish us no good.”

The same objectors as before had their say, but the result was proportionally similar to that of the day before: 152 to 7 in favor of excluding the media from all control over Republican primary debates. The networks would be faced with a take-it-or-leave-it choice on televising the debates.

Now that it’s a done deal, what are the actual facts of the “academic study” mentioned by Ryder — the one allegedly demonstrating the existence of a media composed of “93 percent who wish us no good”? The study, by Indiana University professors Lars Willnat and David Weaver, shows something else entirely. True, it indicates that only 7 percent of responding journalists called themselves Republicans. But it notes that only 28.1 percent call themselves Democrats — meaning that the balance — 64.8 percent — proclaim themselves either Independent or something other than either Republican or Democratic.

Nothing in these figures suggests that this preponderant journalistic majority “wishes no good” to either Republicans or Democrats, both of whom, as declared party adherents, constitute small minorities of all practicing journalists.

The specter raised by Ryder and Priebus of a “hostile media” could, in other words, be raised almost as readily by Democrats as by Republicans, but the more obvious interpretation is surely that the majority of journalists prefer to consider themselves objective observers, not partisans of either side politically and certainly not enemies of either side.

In fact, the chief victims of the new RNC debate policy are likely to be neither Democrats nor the putatively offending networks but those candidates — long shots like Gingrich who got a new birth as a candidate in 2012 by upbraiding CNN’s John King for a question about his private life or political outliers like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, whose heterodox mix of libertarianism and conservatism may not accord with the wishes of the GOP establishment and the RNC hierarchy.

Ironically, Paul was the principal speaker at Friday’s RNC luncheon and was already drawing flak from remarks made to some Memphis ministers expressing doubt about the value of requiring photo IDs for voting. Now that would be a topic well worth debating — if someone could be found to ask about it.