Shelby County Young Democrats

So it’s come to this: There is, as pointed out this week by state Young Democrat president London Lamar, only one “chartered Democratic organization in this county,” and it isn’t the Shelby County Democratic Party, a body which was officially “decertified” last Friday by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini. It is, in fact, the Shelby County Young Democrats, led by Lamar’s colleague Alvin Crook.

Surprisingly, given the fact that the SCDP was a hotbed of internal dispute, there was very little remorse at its passing. It would seem that Mancini’s action was widely regarded by all sides as something of a mercy killing.

Meanwhile, Lamar and Crook promise that the Shelby County YDs will pursue “initiatives” and, in effect, act in the stead of the now defunct “state SCDP,” pending its reconstitution.

That reconstitution will take some doing, in that the party organization, as such, has been so locked into pointless disputation for some time as to have been of little consequence in influencing political results in Shelby County — at least to any positive end.

In elections for local countywide office, only two Democrats — Assessor Cheyenne Johnson and General Sessions Clerk Ed Stanton Jr. — have been able to gain office and be re-elected in recent years. To rescue an often-abused phrase, their cases are the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule. Both Johnson and Stanton are county-government veterans with demonstrable records of competence and with support across partisan lines. Their success at the polls would seem to clearly debunk the claim made by losing Democratic nominees in every county election in this century that the defeats of party candidates must be due to some infamy or illegality perpetrated by the county’s Republican Party or by the admittedly error-prone Election Commission, with its current preponderance of three Republican members to two Democratic ones.

For whatever reason, in a county which, by the usual demographic and economic measures, should possess an overwhelming majority prone to voting Democratic, Republicans rule the roost instead. It is high time that local Democrats cease looking for the blame elsewhere and begin a long overdue reexamination of their own premises.

Under the circumstances, the plucky resolve of the county’s Young Democrats is a welcome first step.

Ann Morris

Speaking of pluck, the huge turnout this week at the visitation and funeral rites for Ann Ward Norton Morris, across various kinds of lines, political and otherwise, was in large part a testament to that quality in her life — as well as to the virtues of courage and perseverance, which Morris continued to demonstrate, even after a severely disabling stroke suffered in 1997 deprived her of most of the faculties which the rest of us take for granted. Remarkable also was the heroic care-giving service rendered unstintingly over that nearly 20-year period by her husband, former Sheriff and County Mayor Bill Morris, who regards that service, and not any office he gained, as the summit of his own life’s work.

For what it’s worth — and that is a very open question — the Shelby County Democratic Party has ceased to exist, having been formally decertified last Friday by state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini of Nashville.

Mancini’s letter of decertification, dispatched to the latest person to chair the SCDP, Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant Michael Pope, cited as the basis for her action “Article III Section 2(f) and Article VII Section 1(a)(3) of the Tennessee Democratic Party Bylaws,” which, she said, made it “the responsibility of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee to establish ‘the procedures and rules for organizing and functioning of County Democratic Executive Committees and maintaining close relationships with such committees’ and to develop and monitor a minimum set of requirements that must be observed by a state sanctioned certified County Democratic Party.”

That description left unaddressed two important components of the matter: 1) whether and to what extent the state committee took part in her decision; and 2) specific reasons for her action.

Those are arguably related issues, in that one of the known factors in forcing Mancini’s hand, and likely the precipitating one, has been the Shelby County party’s months-long impasse over what to do about the case of former local party chair Bryan Carson, who resigned last year after an audit turned up evidence of unexplained shortages in the party treasury.

Ever since, through the brief tenure of one successor to Carson as chair, Randa Spears, who also resigned, pleading a need to give full attention to her administrative job at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and into the election of Pope as her successor, the local party organization has been riven into two factions.

One faction was willing to accept a compromise proposal, letting Carson effect partial repayment of the unaccounted-for funds at the level of $6,000, through monthly installment payments of $100. The other, contending that a second audit showed Carson’s liability to be at $25,000 or higher, sought prosecution of some sort and prevailed in a vote of the committee at its June meeting.

Nothing came of that vote, however. Meanwhile Mancini, expressing displeasure that the imbroglio was getting in the way of the party’s ability to focus on electing the party’s candidates this year, prevailed upon Pope to execute an agreement with Carson on behalf of the $6,000 compromise.

That led to a vote at the SCDP committee’s July meeting at which a tie vote failed to ratify the agreement, and to a vote at the committee’s August meeting, two weeks ago, renouncing Carson’s bona fides as a Democrat.

Carson continues to be a member of the state Democratic executive committee, however, a fact that his critics, and Mancini’s as well, find questionable under the circumstances.

In any case, Mancini could with some justice cite as additional reasons for her decertification what she termed (in something of an understatement) the SCDP’s “many years of dysfunction,” typified by nonstop personal feuds, many of them involving self-appointed party gadfly Del Gill, and the fact that, in both Carson’s tenure and Spears’, the SCDP failed to meet deadlines for financial disclosures to the state Election Registry, thereby incurring fines rivaling in size the amounts alleged to have gone missing under Carson.

In the meantime, Alvin Crook, president of the Shelby County Young Democrats, and London Lamar, president of the state YD organization, held a press conference on Monday, at which the YD officers promised, in Lamar’s words, to continue to “represent the views of the Democratic Party,” as the only remaining “chartered Democratic organization in this county.”