There was really only one question I wanted to ask Mark Meadows, was obliged to ask him. I put it to him as soon as I met him, during a VIP reception in a back room of the vast space reserved Friday at the Agricenter for the Shelby County GOP’s annual Lincoln Day Banquet.
“Can you say categorically that you never were involved in discussions to obstruct or delay the counting of presidential ballots on January 6, 2021?”
The former Trump White House chief of staff, keynoter at this year’s banquet, gave me the sweetest, most accommodating smile, whereupon — as we both knew would happen — he evaded the question.
He almost made his refusal to answer sound regretful. “I’d love to answer that,” he said, “but, as the legal processes are still going on, I’m not able to … [brief pause] … but I thank you for asking.”
The gist of the aforementioned legal processes is that Meadows had begun cooperating with the House January 6th special committee looking into the unprecedented assault on the U.S. Capitol that took place on that date. And then he stopped cooperating, claiming executive privilege as he was asked about strategy sessions he is alleged to have conducted with Trump on January 6.
The House of Representatives, a body Meadows used to belong to, voted to find the former chief of staff guilty of criminal contempt and has urged the U.S. Justice Department to file criminal charges against him.
Meanwhile, Meadows, as big a name in the news as there is this side of the Ukrainian border, was chosen as the keynoter for the Shelby County Republican Party’s biggest annual event, its major fundraiser. He was selected for his usefulness as a draw, and,sure enough, several thousand Republicans dropped up to several thousand dollars apiece and gathered at the Agricenter on Friday to get a whiff of him.
The VIP reception, which followed another pre-event reception at the home of current state senate hopeful Brent Taylor, proved sufficiently popular to delay the rest of the banquet proceedings for the better part of an hour.
The dinner for attendees was a passable buffet, with options of steak or chicken breasts as the main entree, and conversation at the tables in the Agricenter’s cavernous space proceeded pleasurably enough, with every stripe of known politician — hundreds of them — up and working the room.
And then the event began, and that was when, for the overwhelming majority of attendees packed into that vast floor space, the event ceased to have much meaning. After an introduction and hello from local party chair Cary Vaughn, a prayer from former state representative and current gubernatorial adviser John DeBerry, a pledge of allegiance to the flag, and a singing of The Star Spangled Banner — all of which could barely be discerned as what they were, due to an embarrassingly bad audio system, the party trotted out its heavies — 8th District congressman David Kustoff, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and ultimately, Meadows.
The sound system was so dysfunctional that muffled noise was all that traveled into the near and far spaces alike of the giant arena. There was no doubt that the speakers were all doling out what the crowd probably came to hear — rhetoric extolling Republican values and condemning the presumed misprisions of the Democrats and President Joe Biden, especially.
But, except for the attendees seated at a few tables directly in front of the speaker, sentences went unheard, meanings had to be guessed at, and private conversations resumed at most of the tables throughout the sprawling floor space as the next best thing that could happen.
And, after all, most of what was being said from the dais was boilerplate of the most familiar kind. To the extent that the speakers received applause, they got it for being themselves and being there, not from anything they might have said.
Here and there, snatches of language could be divined, especially from Meadows, who has something of a clear, clarion voice. One sentence that emerged was, “You are making a difference right here in Shelby County!” Some sentences later he was telling an anecdote that contained the phrase “the Secret Service.”
And, several minutes into his speech, he intoned that orator’s classic: “Let me close with this …” After which came another 15 minutes or so of audio buzz. Eventually Meadows stopped speaking, got a round of applause as a reward for his presence, then resumed again with a coda of sorts. More audio buzz. And then he was done.
All the speakers tried hard, but at any given point it might as well have been eccentric perennial candidate Leo Awgowhat up there, trying out a string of his favorite obscenities on this unhearing strait-laced crowd. (I didn’t see him, but Awgowhat may have been at the event; he’s running for office as a Republican this year).
Circumstances being what they were, one looked for sideshows. One was Brandon Toney, the never-say-die candidate for state Senate who has twice been denied bona fides to run by the state Republican Committee. Toney, along with his campaign manager Katrina Garner, were bird-dogging anybody they could talk to and intimating that they were making arrangements to get on the widely watched Fox-TV show of Tucker Carlson to keep pitching Toney’s case.
Various dignitaries from the Republican past were on hand. I was pleased to see Don and Martha Sundquist, the state’s former Governor and First Lady at the event, squired by veteran CPA Bill Watkins, long the local GOP’s mega-finance manager for important campaigns.
Sundquist, now somewhat infirm and perceptibly an elder, has in the last few years made an effort to accommodate himself to the currently shaped GOP, a more vitriolic one than he attempted to represent in Nashville back in the ’90s and early 2000’s, when as governor, in tandem with Democrats, Sundquist made serious efforts to accomplish state tax reform.
Ward Baker, the Nashville fireplug of so many GOP campaign efforts, local, state, and national, was there. We exchanged hellos, and I learned that someone had foolishly asked him at some point if he were my son. (!!!)
State GOP chair Scott Golden of Jackson was there, benignly explaining that the state Republican executive committee had forced his hand on a series of recent candidate removals from approved ballot status. The aforesaid Toney failed to appeal himself back on the ballot; congressional candidate Brown Dudley, and County Commission candidate Jordan Carpenter had better luck.
I must say that the vast majority of Republicans on hand for Lincoln Day were personally benevolent in the extreme. I cribbed some table time from the very affable Steve Cross, the GOP’s candidate for assessor. (He opposes the equally affable Democratic incumbent, Melvin Burgess, on the August county ballot). And I reminded myself that, for all the craziness that occurs in politics, people are people, all trying to do right by the best of their lights.
As I passed through the arena, post-Meadows, another speaker, Republican congressman Mark Green, was at the dais, and, as I walked in front of the stage, on the way out, I actually could hear him, blasting away at Joe Biden.
I saw Bill Dries, the Daily Memphian reporter, standing nearby taking notes and asked him if he’d been able to hear anything intelligible during the evening. He said he had, and I felt a surge of wholly non-competitive elation thinking that I might have the opportunity to learn from his ultimate copy just exactly how some of the event’s spoken boilerplate had gone.
Although I have a pretty good idea.