Tag: Rev. Kenneth Whalum

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Round One: The County Primaries

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As the race for the Democratic nomination for Shelby County mayor entered this week, the last full one before next Tuesday’s May 6th primary, the three-way contest for the right to oppose Republican incumbent Mayor Mark Luttrell had largely settled, as expected, into a two-way affair between current County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, who had more cash on hand, and former Commissioner Deidre Malone, who could claim deep roots among the party’s rank and file.

This is not to minimize the third contestant, the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., the controversial former school board member whose rhetorical fire and  populist image are an X factor in the election. It is merely to recognize that Whalum’s financial resources, which are virtually nonexistent, were not such as to grant him the full county-wide attention that his Memphis-centric message requires for maximum effect.

As of March 31st, when financial disclosures for the first quarter were due, Mulroy claimed receipts for the period of $35,021, with $20,000 on hand. Malone’s comparable figures were $36,405, with $17,972 on hand. For the record, Whalum had raised $1,000 and had all of $740 on hand.

Another disclosure was due Tuesday, and it will almost certainly show that considerable new sums were raised by both main contenders since the last disclosure and that a fair amount of money has been spent by each in the interim since March 31st.

More is yet to come. Early voting, which began on the 25th, was due to end on Thursday of this week, May 1st, and Mulroy and Malone were going all out.

From the beginning, an endorsement battle has been underway. Mulroy pulled off an early coup by netting the endorsement of former Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown, who is now the Democrats’ uncontested nominee for district attorney general and whose considerable fame as TV’s “Judge Joe Brown” has earned him major influence in local Democratic affairs.

Mulroy has been boosted as well by endorsements from nine major unions and from such inner-city political figures as former commissioner and interim County Mayor Joe Ford and current Commissioner Justin Ford, along with City Councilmember Janis Fullilove.

For her part, Malone has scored a laundry list of endorsements from other Democratic figures. This past week, in particular, has been good to her in this respect. Although Mayor A C Wharton was not exactly loud and vocal about it (and absent from an impressive ceremony Malone staged last week with other influential endorsers), she did get a statement of support from the mayor that allowed her to include him at the top of her endorsement list.

That was followed up by this week’s endorsement of Malone by The Commercial Appeal, giving her a stout one-two punch and a real boost for the last stage of the primary.

Mulroy’s contention, as he expressed it in a recent debate with Malone and Whalum sponsored by the Shelby County Democratic Party, is that Democrats should not attempt to fuzz the distinctions between themselves and Shelby County Republicans, but rather to present an “aggressive contrast.”

Malone has been a down-the-line exponent of traditional party causes, and her lead role on the County Commission in attempting to broaden the structure of Juvenile Court both complemented, and in some ways, anticipated the militant reform efforts of current Commissioner (and Juvenile Court clerk candidate) Henri Brooks.

Even Whalum (a bold and dedicated soul who will surely object to that “even”) sees the mathematical necessity to build bridges across a county divide that is part political, part racial, and part geographical, and, in a recent speech to a meeting of the Germantown Democrats, he made it a point to court not only the suburban party-mates in his audience but even members of the opposite party.

“It’s a foolish loser who says he doesn’t want Republican votes. I’m not going to limit myself,” Whalum said on that occasion, during which he redefined the thrust of his adamant opposition, as a member of the Memphis City Schools (MCS) board, to the December 2010 surrender by the board of the MCS charter.

“I was the only Memphis official who fought for the suburbs to have their own schools,” Whalum said. “I have a very good working relationship with all the municipal mayors. I stood with them on their school systems.”

Up to this point, a certain comity has been practiced by the competing  Democratic candidates — one which had them describing each other as “nice people” in the course of a party-sponsored mayoral forum in early April.

But of late, Mulroy and Malone have exchanged some serious shots.

Among several charges in a Mulroy mailer this week is an allegation that Malone “contibuted financially JUST LAST MONTH to the campaign of an opponent seeking to defeat Representative Steve Cohen.”

And, indeed, financial disclosure records show that Malone, on March 27th, contributed $250 to the primary campaign of Ricky Wilkins, Cohen’s primary opponent this year.

Clearly, the charge is meant to shake Malone’s support among supporters of a Democratic congressman who has won a progressively greater hold of his party’s voters with each successive election since his first one in 2006.

Cohen, who made it clear last week that he would not endorse anyone in the mayoral primary, pleading that he had “too many friends” in the race, was not moved to alter his technical neutrality by this circumstance — nor by a parallel charge from the Mulroy camp that Malone had supported Tomeka Hart against Cohen in the 2012 primary.

But it did lead him to redefine his definition of “friends” to mean more specifically Mulroy and Whalum, both consistent supporters of Cohen’s election bids, and to describe Malone’s position as “certainly unusual,” one that, “politically … makes no sense.”

For her part, Malone has begun to exploit what she regards as a Mulroy weak point, his vote in 2011 with a commission majority to support Luttrell’s decision to award Christ Community Health Services (CCHS) a county contract to administer federal Title X funds for women’s health services, rather than Planned Parenthood, the traditional grantee and the clear favorite of pro-choice Democrats.

Mulroy has explained that vote as one made in order to barter with what was already a bipartisan majority for CCHS so as to impose strict and measurable compliance standards. And in recent weeks, he charged CCHS with falling short of those standards and made a conspicuous — if ultimately unsuccessful — effort on behalf a rebidding the Title X contract.

Although Malone herself has publicly soft-pedaled the point somewhat, on the occasion of her endorsement ceremony last week, she vigorously seconded allegations by state Representative G.A. Hardaway, a supporter, that Mulroy had made “a back-room deal with Republicans,” which he was now trying to put forth, Hardaway said, as being in the best interest of women’s rights.

After next Tuesday, all this unpleasantness will be forgotten, and each of the three Democrats has pledged to support the one survivor against the formidable Luttrell, who is opposed only by the hapless perennial Ernest Lunati in the GOP primary.

 

Other Contested Races:

County Commission, District 2 (Republican primary): In a battle between two east Shelby County members of the finance industry, newcomer David Bradford, assisted by former Luttrell insider Dan Springer, is running neck-and-neck with George Chism, son of a former longtime county school board member and a familiar figure in Republican circles. Both are well funded.

County Commission, District 3 (Republican primary): It’s a four-way race in the Bartlett area between businessman Naser Fazlullah, consultant and military veteran Kelly Price, school board member David Reaves, and educator and longtime Republican activist Sherry Simmons, wife of Bartlett alderman Bobby Simmons. Reaves and Simmons, both well-financed, are the main contenders, with Price hoping to break through as the GOP’s latest exemplar among African Americans.

County Commission, District 4 (Republican primary): Foundation executive and current Commission incumbent Mark Billingsley is seemingly much too well-financed and supported for retired lawman Ron Fittes, who is, however, running hard.  

County Commission, District 6 (Democratic primary): The contenders are Karl L. Bond, Willie Brooks, Edith Ann Moore, and Kendrick D. Sneed. Former School Board member Brooks would seem to have an edge over former interim County Commissioner Moore. Both have money to run on.

County Commission, District 7 (Democratic primary): Incumbent Commissioner Melvin Burgess, son of a widely admired former Memphis police director, has too much support and name recognition for gallant newcomer Brandon Echols to overcome

County Commission, District 8 (Democratic primary): Longtime Commissioner Walter Bailey is presumably strong enough to fend off a spirited challenge from former interim City Councilman Berlin F. Boyd. David Vinciarelli is also running.

County Commission, District 9 (Democratic primary): Commissioner Justin Ford is hoping his incumbency and family name are enough to hold off former school board member Patrice Robinson, who has money and serious endorsements, and Memphis Education Association head Keith Williams, who also has a network and good funding.

County Commission, District 10 (Democratic primary): The third time’s the charm for community organizer Reginald Milton, who has impressive across-the-board support against former school board eminence Martavius Jones (who’s running a stealth campaign), and newcomer Jake Brown, who does have Joe Brown’s backing.

County Commission, District 11 (Democratic primary): In a five-way race between Curtis Byrd, Donnell Cobbins, Eddie Jones, Hendrell Remus, and Claude Talford, the main contenders would seem to be Cobbins, Jones, and Talford.

County Commisson, District 12 (Democratic primary): Well-financed attorney and former Democratic Party Chairman Van Turner is a slam dunk over the little-known Bryant Boone.

Assessor (Republican primary): Mary Peters Royko may have a slight edge over Keith Alexander.

Assessor (Democratic primary): Incumbent Cheyenne Johnson should prevail easily over challenger Lorie Ingram.

Trustee (Republican primary): Incumbent David Lenoir is an easy win over Jeff Jacobs.

Trustee (Democratic primary): Derrick Bennett is considered to be leading frequent candidate M. LaTroy Williams, who, however, seems to have funding.

Circuit Court Clerk (Republican primary): The ever-popular Jimmy Moore in a walk over GOP newcomer Michael Finney.

Circuit Court Clerk (Democratic primary): Veteran Democrat Del Gill should win over Rhonda Banks.

Criminal Court Clerk (Democratic primary): Hard-running City Councilmember Wanda Halbert, current City Court Clerk Thomas Long, and prosecutor Michael R. McCusker are in a spirited three-way race. Once again, the deserving perennial Ralph White seems out of the running. 

Juvenile Court Clerk (Democratic primary): With her prominence as a Juvenile Court watchdog overriding her reputation for abrasiveness, County Commissioner Henri Brooks should prevail over former City Administrator Kenneth Moody, whose campaign never quite got started.  

Probate Court Clerk (Democratic primary): The seven candidates are Regina Beale, Jennings Bernard, William Chism, Jr., Darnell Gatewood, Sr., Cynthia A. Gentry, Aaron Hall, and Heidi Kuhn. The well-known Bernard, respected probate attorney Hall, and the hard-working Kuhn, wife of prominent consultant and former Democratic chairman, Matt Kuhn, are the best bets.

County Clerk (Democratic primary): Respected longtime Democratic figure John H. Freeman, supported by Mayor A C Wharton, is well positioned against Yolanda Kight and Charlotte B. Draper.

Register (Democratic primary): Coleman Thompson, who has run before, should prevail over the lesser-known Stephen Christian.

Incumbents Bill Oldham (Republican) and Bennie Cobb (Democrat) have no primary opponents in the race for Shelby County Sheriff. Also unopposed in the Republican primary are Richard L. DeSaussure III for Criminal Court clerk and incumbents Joy Touliatos, Paul Boyd, Wayne Mashburn, and Tom Leatherwood for Juvenile Court clerk, Probate Court clerk, Shelby County clerk, and Shelby County register, respectively.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Big Ballot, Single Choice

Every eight years comes a “big ballot” year, with the August county-wide general election containing choices for the full panoply of Shelby County offices, as well as primaries for federal and state offices, the latter including a veritable myriad of state judgeships.

A largely unnoted effect of the move toward partisan county elections in Shelby County — beginning in 1992 with Republicans, and proceeding with both major parties as of 1994 — has been the winnowing down of the big ballot to more or less manageable proportions.

In that sense, next Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primaries for county-wide offices (excluding judicial races, which remain non-partisan) amount to a first stage, or prescreening of ambitious local office-seekers.

Choices that as recently as 1990 were so numerous for each position as to stupefy voters will have been reduced to a de facto either/or — one Democrat and one Republican —for each county office. To be sure, there will be independent candidates on the August general election ballot, but none of these has ever been elected, or even been a factor, since the advent of local primaries.

The reason for that is obvious. Single candidates, however able and pure of purpose, do not win elections. Their networks do — those combinations of supporters who can lick the stamps, make the phone calls, do the door-to-door canvassing, and pay for the campaigns, which have become increasingly more expensive.

The two major political parties, Democratic and Republican, are the networks of choice, in Shelby County as in most other places in America.

In one sense, that fact of political life would seem unfairly restrictive, even polarizing. But in another sense, the bifurcating of political choices, besides achieving the aforementioned ballot simplification, also becomes a means of clarifying the larger electorate’s sense of direction.

In Shelby County, as in the nation at large, general elections are basically won in the political center, and election outcomes that shift control from one party to the other are often the result of extraneous factors of the sort to which political scientist would assign the prefix “macro.”

It is a fact, for example, that the demographics of Shelby County, preponderantly working class and now majority black, should allow for domination of county elections by the Democratic Party.

But it also a fact that the Republican Party’s county-wide slate won every contested countywide position in 2010 — a clean sweep that could partly be explained by local factors but was more likely due to that year’s stoutly contested Republican primary race for governor.

That gubernatorial race — waged by well-heeled candidates Bill Haslam, Zach Wamp, and Ron Ramsey — poured money and resources into Shelby County and generated a sizeable GOP turnout.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had quietly settled, long before an August primary that doubled as the date for the county’s general election, on a consensus candidate, Mike McWherter of Dresden. No fuss, no bother, no turnout.

There is no such godsend for the Republicans this year, although the turnout of both parties in August could well be mobilized by a race or two on the general election ballot — especially that of incumbent Republican District Attorney General Amy Weirich versus a well-known and controversial Democrat — former Criminal Court Clerk Joe Brown, better known to most voters as TV’s “Judge Joe Brown” and, as such, a macro factor in his own presence.

In any case, Democratic core activists are more than usually conscious of the need to field a competitive slate in August, and that means, in practice, one that has at least some crossover potential. That factor will influence a few outcomes in down-ballot Democratic primary races, and it definitely plays a role in the race for county mayor.

Despite earnest efforts by the Democratic mayoral aspirants — Kenneth Whalum, Steve Mulroy, and Deidre Malone — to paint incumbent Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell as a doctrinaire Republican, indifferent to the concerns of working-class voters, the fact is that Luttrell, in his prior races for sheriff and county mayor, has been far more successful than most GOP candidates in presenting himself as above the partisan battle, thereby capturing significant crossover votes.

Which is why, already, well in advance of the August general election, all three Democratic mayoral candidates — Malone, Mulroy, and Whalum — are conspicuously broadening the reach of their rhetoric.

E Pluribus Unum, “One from Many,” is the Latin motto affixed to our coinage. It also has relevance to a political process whereby a multitude of choices end up pointing in a single direction.

Jackson Baker is a senior editor of the Flyer.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Pair of Showdowns

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Just what does the term “minority” mean when applied to equal-opportunity provisions of government hiring and contracting in Shelby County? The issue got a workout at Monday’s Shelby County Commission meeting when Commissioners Henri Brooks and Walter Bailey objected to two seemingly routine constructions items listed on the Consent Agenda for the meeting.

Consent Agenda items, as against items specified as Regular Agenda, are items expected to encounter no opposition. Frequently, however, such items are pulled off the agenda at the request of individual members and subjected to discussion before voting on them.

Brooks, in particular, is a watchdog on items involving federal grant money and has them reassigned to the Regular Agenda to make sure they observe the Title VI equal-employment strictures of the 1964 Civil Rights bill.

A similar issue was at stake when she and Bailey interrogated Shelby County Public Works officials about one item, in particular, calling for roof replacement of a county structure on Mullins Station Road. After asking about the distribution of jobs on the construction project, Brooks was told that 29 “minority” workers would be employed, a clear majority of the work force.

Brooks probed further: How many of those were blacks? None, she was told. They were all Hispanic. In the hurly-burly of discussion that followed, it was explained by Public Works administrators, including director Tom Needham, that Hispanics comprised the brunt of the work force for all three firms that bid for the project.

Commission chair James Harvey, an African American like Brooks and Bailey, spoke to what he regarded as the unfortunate truism that both blacks and whites were less inclined these days to do hard labor “under the sun,” a term — and a point of view — swiftly objected to by Bailey, who opined that the bidding companies actively discriminated against African Americans.

In the end, a commission majority, including Harvey, voted to refer the contract matter back to committee and in the meantime to establish an ad hoc committee to reexamine the county’s hiring and contracting policies so as to make sure that the employment of blacks, who now constitute a majority of Shelby County residents but remain a “minority” in Title VI terms, is actively sought.

• The obvious first question about last Thursday’s first extended debate of Democratic county mayor candidates at the Professional Building on Airways is: Who won? And the answer is clear: The sponsoring Shelby County Democratic Party, which is still trying to regain its health after the electoral wipeout of 2010.

All three Democratic candidates vying in the Democratic primary of May 6th for the right to oppose Republican incumbent Mayor Mark Luttrell in August — Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, former Commissioner Deidre Malone, and former school board member Kenneth Whalum Jr. — gave good accounts of themselves.

They managed to suggest their differences, some in fairly bold shades, but they did so without the kind of unpleasant in-fighting that could foster alienation later on among party factions.

Indeed, there was a moment toward the end of the debate when the three competed to see who could intone variations on the phrase, “We are all nice people,” with the greatest enthusiasm. And all made the obligatory promise that they would support whichever of the three should get the party’s nomination.

But each, as indicated, had their moments of clear self-definition.

Mulroy, who has championed anti-discrimination and living-wage proposals, among numerous other such issues, defined himself, no doubt correctly, as having been the county commission’s “most progressive activist” — able thereby, in a phrase that thrust in both an ethical and an electoral direction, to “heal the racial divide.”

The way for a Democrat to defeat the Republican incumbent county mayor, Mulroy said, was not to parrot the other party’s rhetoric but to “be consistent” and present an “aggressive contrast.” Two cases in point were the commissioner’s advocacy for universal pre-K and for a stepped-up blight-reduction program.

Whalum, pastor of New Olivet Baptist Church in Orange Mound, was equally determined to differentiate himself from the other two, but his way of doing so was to declare himself unabashedly as a partisan of Memphis concerns, rather than as some bridge-building exponent of Shelby County as a whole. He made much of the fact that he, uniquely of the three, had opposed the December 2010 surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter.

Two of his chief issues are basically intramural ones — an insistence that city government make good on its delinquent $57 million maintenance-of-effort debt to Shelby County Schools, soon to be a de facto city system; and that, in order to strengthen city neighborhoods, SCS keep open the nine inner-city schools it has marked for closing.

Malone, a PR executive with a mixed business/governmental résumé, has a longtime record of activism within the Democratic Party, name recognition from two terms as county commissioner and a previous mayoral race, and a history of involvement with a variety of civic causes.

One of the latter is her membership on the EDGE board, the cross-governmental public/private body that establishes local industrial recruitment policy. Opponent Mulroy made an effort to turn that credential into a two-edged sword in Thursday night’s debate by suggesting that the “people who sit on the board right now” had been lax in providing construction opportunities for women and minorities and guilty of promising results “that have just not happened.”

Malone countered that by expressing pride in her membership, noting that the deals struck to attract new Electrolux and Mitsubishi plants, widely suspect as giveaways, had preceded her involvement, and insisting that she had been “adamant” about bringing labor to the table.

Mulroy’s somewhat veiled challenge to Malone on the EDGE issue was one of several thrusts by one candidate against another that might have led to serious controversy but didn’t. In Thursday’s debate these tentative efforts came out of periodic candidate-asking-candidate segments devised by debate host Greg Coy of Fox Channel 13 to conform with the model of the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858.

Malone launched two sallies of that sort that she deigned not to exploit to any real conclusion. She asked Mulroy a direct but vaguely stated question about the Title X credentials offered by Planned Parenthood in 2011 when the commission majority opted instead to shift federal funds for women’s services to Christ Community Health Services.

All that did was give Mulroy — who had joined with the majority back then, as he has said, so as to impose strict monitoring conditions — a springboard for his consistent demand, backed by Planned Parenthood advocates, that the Title X contract be rebid now in light of a weak statistical performance by CCHS.

That was as nothing, however, to Malone’s surprising neglect of Whalum’s potential bombshell answer when she asked if the former school board member, who has made a major campaign issue of the $57 million owned by the city of Memphis to SCS, had not at one point argued that the city should not make such a payment at all.

Whalum, clearly more than a little abashed, admitted that he had, later contending somewhat lamely that at that early point in school board litigation versus the city there had not yet been a court ruling in the board’s favor.

What the candidates basically did was leave small trail markers on paths they might pursue closer to the May 6th primary vote, when the competition will presumably have become more heated.

Future joint appearances by the three candidates may well see them picking up on the aforementioned trail markers and leaving behind some of the comity on display Thursday night.

Early voting for the May 6th primary extends from Thursday of this week through Thursday, May 1st.