Tag: Steve Mulroy

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Opinion Viewpoint

Getting the Vote Right in Shelby County

Another Shelby County election, another election controversy. This time, it’s the County Commission race between Reginald Milton and Martavius Jones, where a thin 26-vote margin separates unofficial winner Milton from recount-demander Jones.  

The time’s ripe to finally move to “paper trail” voting machines. In fact, this may be our last chance.

Welcome to the credibility gap: Shelby County’s record of election mishaps is too long to recount here. Highlights include thousands of voters being incorrectly turned away on Election Day (2010) to thousands of voters being given the wrong ballots (2012) to an overturned local election (litigation still pending). A state government audit of our county’s election office concluded that it had “an inability to conduct elections without significant inaccuracies.”

Other than that, though, it’s fine.

The public has a similar lack of confidence in the integrity of our elections, and both the County Commission and Memphis City Council recently passed resolutions saying they had no confidence in the election administrator.

This week, candidate Jones told the Democratic Party’s Primary Board that the election machine “tapes” posted at each polling place tell a different story from the electronic voting machine-generated unofficial count, making the Jones-Milton race a literal tie. The Primary Board then demanded the raw election return data from the Election Commission in an attempt to discover whether Milton really won over Jones. And there’s legal uncertainty over the kind of recount — manual or automatic — that Jones can demand, and when. 

None of this would be an issue if we replaced our purely electronic touch-screen Diebold voting machine system with an “optical scan” voting system that creates a voter-verified hard copy “paper trail.” 

The “optiscan” system would be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken the SAT, the ACT, the TCAP, or any other standardized test. Using a No. 2 pencil, voters fill in bubbles on a “scantron” sheet to mark their candidate preference, and insert the sheet into a machine that electronically scans and records the votes while locking the hard copy sheets away for safekeeping. In the event of a Jones/Milton-like squeaker election, a charge of fraud, or a computer glitch, the hard copies can be compared to the electronic record.

Optiscan is the national trend. In 32 states, it’s either used statewide or for a majority of voters. Nationally, only 1 in 4 voters uses a purely paperless touch-screen system like ours. Here in Tennessee, optiscan has been used successfully for more than a decade in Pickett and Hamilton (Chattanooga) counties.

Not only would optiscan machines keep elections honest and accurate, they would cut waiting time at the polls. At your polling place right now, only three voters at a time can vote, on three different touch-screen machines. With optiscan, 10 voters could take their time at 10 privacy carrels filling out their ballots. When they’re ready, they can then feed their ballot into the machine. Think about that this August, as you wait in line for the voters in front of you to slog their way through the “long ballot,” filled with judicial candidates who come up once every 8 years. 

If we buy now, we can get new machines at half price. Our current voting machines are about 10 years old, and will need to be replaced in the next few years anyway. And right now, millions of dollars of federal funds are sitting in a bank account in Nashville, available for us to help pay for the new machines. These “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) funds can only be used for election reform. 

But if we don’t ask for them this year, they could be given away to other Tennessee counties. That’s why the Election Commission recently asked an internal county budget committee for $1.5 million in capital funds for optiscan machines, expecting a state HAVA grant match of $2.7 million or so. The Election Commission later withdrew that request in deference to another capital budget project, but it was right the first time. 

Optiscan will require us to pay ongoing paper costs, which can be expensive. But we’ll likely save money in the long run, because you need about one-third fewer optiscan machines than touch-screen machines, with resulting savings in machine maintenance, storage, and transport. 

We need voting-machine reform now more than ever, and this may be our last chance. Tell the County Commission and Election Commission to budget for optiscan this year. The next time there’s a close election, we’ll all be thanking them for it.

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.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

April Fool(s)!

It is, as anybody with a calendar — or a sense of humor — can tell, the first week of April. We should explain on the front end that we went to press on April 1st, and, though the great majority of entries in this issue of the Flyer are

straight as the gate and, in any case, reliable as news and information, we are not above a jest or two in the spirit of April Fool’s Day.

The problem we have discovered, however, is the same one that the illustrious novelist Philip Roth hit upon way back in the 1960s when he realized that his trade — that of writing fiction, and glorious fiction at that — was in danger of becoming obsolete because the nature of “reality” itself had turned so surreal. So it was that Roth noted the expedient of writing satire and essays for a spell. We are, however, grateful that he finally turned back to writing novels, composing in the process several masterpieces or near-masterpieces to go with the rest of his quite considerable canon.

Still, we too, have noticed that the line between truth and fiction has begun to dissolve, as, indeed, so has the boundary between farce and reality. Several instances of the phenomenon have reminded us of those facts this week, and — surprise! — they come from the world of politics.

Nevermind the email that Steve Mulroy, a candidate for county mayor, sent out to the media on Tuesday, claiming to be quitting his campaign for the opportunity to become “regional director of corporate public relations for the Kellogg’s corporation.” Mulroy, for the record, has been actively involved in supporting the locked-out workers of that very corporation, as anybody who has paid attention knows. That did not stop several local media from taking the “release” seriously and checking it out (in one case, actually posting it online) as legitimate news.

It is easy, in a way, to understand their confusion. After all, only last Thursday night, a county Commission candidate, Taylor Berger, presided over a packed and, to the impartial observer, fully successful fund-raiser, climaxing the event with a rousing and positive address. On Monday of this week, however, came a press release from Berger. He was out; personal reasons.

Then there was veteran Democratic operative Del Gill making bold statements recently to publicly advise the NAACP as to how they should construct forums involving political candidates this year: by “separating” candidates from the two parties, he explained, into two discrete groups. Failing that, Gill advised, Democratic candidates might reconsider their participation in the forum. That the venerable NAACP is entitled to present candidate forums however it pleases and candidates, likewise, can make up their own minds about appearing at such events seemed beside the point.

And, finally, there was Judge Joe Brown, the erstwhile Criminal Court judge and TV star, staging a confrontation in Juvenile Court that ended with his temporary arrest and a cameo jail appearance. That was quickly followed by an impromptu “press conference” at which a Brown campaign staffer posed as a reporter and asked several softball questions of the candidate.

Mr. Roth — who has indeed finally retired from writing novels — didn’t know the half of it.

Categories
News The Fly-By

“The numbers don’t lie. Thousands fewer low-income women are getting the family planning services they need. We need to take a second look at this.”

— Shelby County Commissioner Steve Mulroy on the issue of Christ Community Health Services (CCHS) serving fewer women than Planned Parenthood did when it held the county’s contract for federal Title X funding. Mulroy co-sponsored a resolution to not renew CCHS’ contract that failed in the Shelby County Commission this week. He was one of the commissioners who voted in favor of CCHS getting the Title X contract in 2011, but now he says CCHS hasn’t held up its end of the bargain. County Health Department numbers show that CCHS saw 1,471 patients in all 12 months of its second year of receiving Title X funds whereas Planned Parenthood saw 1,488 patients in the three final months of its funding. Mulroy has vowed to keep fighting.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Flash Points

Two events occurred on Monday of this week that indicate the unpredictability — nay, the volatility — with which the election seasons of 2014 may be expected to proceed.

On Monday afternoon, the Shelby County Commission was in session and considering, among other matters, the question of whether the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell should be urged to rebid the county’s existing 2011 contract with Christ Community Health Services (CCHS) to administer Title X federal funding for women’s health issues.

Commissioner Steve Mulroy had proposed a resolution to that purpose. He had voted with the pro-CCHS majority in 2011 and had done so, he said then and has repeated of late, so as to attach to the contract with CCHS guarantees of high-level service.

His request for a rebid this week was based on statistics he presented casting doubt about the organization’s adequate compliance.Commissioners opposing the resolution suggested, however, that his true motive had to do with propitiating pro-choice advocates of former Title X contractor Planned Parenthood in his current candidacy for county mayor.

For various reasons, many of them ad hoc rather than inevitable, the resolution was defeated. Question: Does the commissioner get credit for fighting the good fight or do his motives remain suspect, or does it even matter?

The same kinds of questions remain in the aftermath of the ruckus kicked up in Juvenile Court by former judge and TV eminence Joe Brown, who was jailed Monday for contempt of court but later released on his own recognizance.

Again, suspend for the time being your thoughts about the merits of the case: Will Brown, a candidate for District Attorney General, get votes — for himself and other Democrats — for taking on the Juvenile Court establishment? Or will he lose them by appearing to be a hothead?

Or, again, does it even matter?

On such questions — the kabuki principle, as it were — electoral outcomes may depend. Just sayin’.         

• And there’s this: Former state senator and convicted felon John Ford, who finally received notification late last week that the legal probation that followed his release from federal prison in August 2012 was at an end, is free to speak freely about what’s on his mind now. And one thing very much on his mind is a belief that he is an innocent man who was “set up” by a predatory justice system determined to target him.

In the course of two lengthy sit-down interviews with Ford — one last October in the living room of his condominium in a gated East Memphis suburb, another at the Ruth’s Chris Steak House in January — along with several telephone conversations, the former kingpin state senator, now meditating on a possible electoral comeback, confided his assorted thoughts and recollections about his fall from grace and his two felony trials of the late 1990s.

A comprehensive article on our conversations, “Waiting for Godot with John Ford,” will appear in the April issue of Memphis Magazine, and another article, “John Ford’s J’ACCUSE!,” focusing on the legal aspects of Ford’s two trials, appeared on memphisflyer.com.

Reprinted here is a seriously abridged portion of the latter, dealing with Ford’s conviction for bribery in Memphis in 2007 and the prison term of four-plus years, largely served in the low-security federal facility at Yazoo City, Mississippi.

“The crime was being committed on their part,” Ford says of the FBI agents who netted Ford, along with six other officials, in the “Tennessee Waltz” sting of May 2005.

“If you tried to bribe me, you would be guilty of trying to bribe me,” Ford says, but he contends that the video used in evidence at his trial, which shows him taking thousands of dollars in bills from an agent posing as a legislative lobbyist, allegedly to secure Ford’s help in passing a bill, was in effect edited to distort the facts.

“All they had was what they recorded on tape. You can make a video show what you want it to show,” says Ford. “Where’s the evidence? They’re the ones making a recording. There’s nothing illegal about that, about somebody counting out money and giving it to you. They give you some money and talk about something else.”

Is Ford saying that the money was passed for something other than the illegal purposes the government said it was for? “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” is Ford’s answer, but he doesn’t specify what. (In a separate interview with WMC-TV reporter Kontji Anthony, Ford says he was serving as a “consultant” to the agent’s pretended music business.) Ford is clearly making a case that he was framed. And what would be the motive?

Ford suggests that “Tennessee Waltz” and other governmental-corruption trials arose from the politics of the Bush-era Justice Department.

“I think for certain they targeted Democrats who had a lot of power — Democrats in particular who were black who had a lot of power.” As for Republicans — and Democrats — who were conservative, “They didn’t bother with them. I know a lot [of people] who should have been targeted who weren’t targeted. They’re still serving. They did things of their own volition, not when somebody set ’em up.”

Pending the end of his probation, Ford had been reticent about going public with his accusations against the legal system.

“That’s why they have probation, to keep your butt quiet for a year or two. Boom! Everybody that goes to prison — federal, county, state, whatever level — are not there because they committed a crime or because they’re criminals. It’s because the system wanted them there!”

And more in that vein about the bind he felt during his probation period: “You have freedom of speech, but you’re limited. You say something against a judge or a prosecutor or something like that, they can get you. They can say ‘boom boom’ and take your freedom away.

“What you say can and will be held against you. What you say may not be pleasing to them, it’ll be derogatory. They’ll cop an attitude so quick. They’ll try to find something. It ain’t gotta be right. If the judge goes along with it, boom!

“I know it. I’ve seen it. You don’t have to do anything that’s wrong to go to prison. A lot of folks who were down there where I was, we talked. They didn’t commit a crime. They hadn’t done any crime. They lost their cases like I did. They couldn’t out-gun the government. But I did in the end, though, didn’t I?”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Cold Comfort

CREDIT: Casada from capitol.tn.gov; Malone by Jackson Baker

By all reports, it was as frosty and weather-worn in Nashville on Monday as it was here in Memphis, but there was enough of a quorum in both the Senate and the House to finish up some pending legislation.

What got the most attention statewide was the final Senate passage of a compromise wine-in-grocery-stores bill, SB 837, which — local referenda permitting — allows wine sales by grocery retailers and whichever convenience stores meet the 1,200-square-foot area requirement, in most cases as early as July 1, 2016. Liquor stores, meanwhile, will be allowed to sell beer and other sundries as early as July 1st of this year.

As Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, a prime mover of the bill, noted, it “allows for the expansion of consumer choice while protecting small businesses that took risks and invested capital under the old system.” In other words, a lot of trade-offs entered into the bill, which now goes to Governor Bill Haslam for signing.

Over in the House on Monday, there was a curious dialogue between state Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) and state Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin) over the meaning of an innocuous bill (HB 394 by Hardaway) that allows community gardens in Memphis to flourish independently of sales-tax levies and control by the state Department of Agriculture.

Casada, a well-known advocate and author of bills imposing state authority over local matters, as in his notorious legislation two years ago striking down local anti-discrimination ordinances, went disingenuous on Hardaway.

“Are we in any way telling local government what they can and cannot do? … Are we in any way dictating actions to local government at our state level?” Casada asked, all innocence.

Realizing he was about to be fenced with semantically, Hardaway responded just as disingenuously: “You and I share that concern, that we not dictate to local government, and I’m proud that you’re joining me on this bill, where we are making it clear that local government has the options to proceed on these community gardening efforts, sir.”

A few back-and-forths later, Casada said, “I just want to be clear. So we are, in a few instances, telling these local governments how they will handle these parcels for their gardening projects. Am I correct?”

Hardaway would have none of it. “Quite the opposite. We are telling state government that we want local government to conduct the business of local gardening instead of the state Department of Agriculture.”

Casada insisted on drawing the moral of the story another way, defining Hardaway’s bill not as the sponsor himself saw it — as a measure freeing local vegetable gardens from state control — but as yet another case in which the state can tell localities “how they will or will not” do things. “From time to time we do dictate to local government … and this is a good bill,” he concluded.

That prompted Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner of Nashville to confer mock praise on Casada for his consistency in wanting to “bring big government to press down on local government.”

In any case, the bill passed with near unanimity, something of a unique instance in which, depending on who’s describing it, a bill is said to be both a defense of local autonomy and the very opposite of that concept, a reinforcement of overriding state control.

That’s Nashville for you.   

   

• When Shelby County Commission Chairman James Harvey dropped out of the race for county mayor at last week’s withdrawal deadline, saving his marbles (and his long-shot candidacy) for a run at city mayor in 2015, he left behind what is going to be a seriously contested three-way Democratic primary for the leadership of county government:

County Commissioner/U of M Law Professor Steve Mulroy, aided by experienced and connected campaign adviser David Upton, will be everywhere at once with a carefully articulated message for rank-and-file Democrats. The Rev. Kenneth Whalum may not be as ubiquitous, but he has a potentially potent fan base developed during years of a highly visible ministry and an outspoken school board presence.

Both will have to make their case against a seasoned candidate who has earned a large and loyal cadre of supporters from her years in public life and from campaigns in years past. This is Deidre Malone, a well-known public relations consultant and former two-term county commissioner who ran hard in the Democratic primary for county mayor four years ago, losing out to Joe Ford, a former commission colleague who had the advantage of running from a position as interim mayor.

Appearing on Wednesday of last week before a packed meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Stage Road, Malone cited a detailed list of mainstream Democratic positions on issues and looked past her Democratic rivals to voice a resounding challenge to incumbent Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell, challenging his bona fides as a crossover politician and as a leader.

Making an effort to debunk the incumbent mayor’s mainstream status, Malone disparaged Luttrell’s claims to have been a regular participant in meetings of the post-school-merger Transition Planning Commission (“Leadership is not sitting in a meeting”) and to have supported pre-K efforts (“When he had an opportunity for the first county pre-K initiative … he came out against it.”).

Leadership, said Malone, means, among other things, having an opinion: “Sometimes it’s comfortable, sometimes it’s not, but leadership is making that opinion known, so people will know where you stand. So I’m going to ask you today, Democrats here in Germantown and across Shelby County, for your vote. … I’m excited about the primary, but more excited about the opportunity to represent the Democratic Party in general, because he [Luttrell] knows that I’m coming, and he knows that I’m going to be nothing nice.”

Before she spoke, her campaign manager, Randa Spears, took a straw vote of the attendees, an exercise Spears repeated after Malone’s speech. The results in both cases showed Malone hovering around the number 20, with her opponents in single digits — the chief difference between the two votes being that significant numbers of votes for Mulroy (whom Malone seemingly regards as her chief opponent) had — according to the tabulation, at least — shifted over to “undecided.”

Granted, Malone’s cadres were out for the event, and those of Mulroy and Whalum, for the most part, were not, and the ad hoc poll could by no means be regarded as scientific. The fact remains that Malone, a well-known African-American public figure going into her second run for county mayor, was able to demonstrate some core support among a group of predominantly white Democrats meeting out east, and that fact should tell some kind of tale to her opponents.

• Another change in the May 6th primary picture for countywide offices was the Shelby County Election Commission’s decision last week to overrule the previous disqualification of Martavius Jones, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the new District 10 county commission seat, because of a disallowed signature on his filing petition.

That creates a legitimate two-way race between Reginald Milton and Jones, with political newcomer Jake Brown likely to function as a spoiler (though Brown may have a rosier outlook, seeing a split between Milton and Jones as giving him a real chance).

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Ready to Rumble

CREDIT: JB

JB

Judge Joe Brown makes his pitch at IBEW.

I’ll say this for Shelby County’s Democrats: If in the county elections of 2014 they should go down to another defeat like that of 2010, when the rival Republicans, representing a minority of the county’s voters, swept all the contested races, it won’t be for any lack of intensity.

There was more than enough of that to go around last Thursday night, when a lengthy list of candidates — declared, undeclared, likely, and unlikely — had a chance to address the local Democratic Party’s executive committee at the IBEW Union Hall on Madison Avenue.

In a way, Thursday night’s decidedly hurly-burly affair was a kind of segue from a previous party event.

Last month, when the Democrats had what appeared to be a successful Kennedy Day fund-raiser at the Bridges building downtown, a once and maybe future party politician rose up to interrupt what had been, up until then, serial recitations of the usual boilerplate and talking points and sounded a late note that was both jarring and curiously rousing.

It was Carol Chumney, a former state representative and Memphis Council member who felt that, in her last race two years ago for district attorney general, she had been deprived of the kind of party solidarity that might have given her a chance to win against incumbent Republican Amy Weirich.

“Let’s stick together!” she demanded of her assembled party mates. But she didn’t restrict herself to mere exhortations. She went so far as to call out one of the party’s main men, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who not only was in attendance but had played a major role at the fund-raising dinner, arranging the appearance of its keynoter, U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, a House colleague of Cohen’s from California.

Cohen had introduced Lee, who responded to his flattering characterization of her with some kind words of her own, citing Cohen for his “tremendous leadership in Congress” and going on to say: “We know that he is a true champion for economic and social justice. And we know, all of us, we know in the House that we can count on Steve to be with us on behalf of what is just and what is fair and what is right and on behalf of his constituents. … I can’t think of a more loyal or stronger or smarter ally than Steve.”

That was not how Chumney saw it. To her, Cohen was most remarkable for “Republi-Democrat” sentiments, by virtue of his having declined to endorse her candidacy against Weirich. “I think that very few people would say I was not qualified to be district attorney, but somehow one of our congressmen seemed to think that. He said he ‘birthed’ me, Congresswoman Lee!”

In deciding two years ago not to endorse her in the race for D.A., Cohen had indeed claimed, in what may have been an awkward attempt at a conciliatory grace note, to have midwifed Chumney’s entry into public office. (Anybody who covered Chumney’s successful 1990 race for state representative can attest to his daily omnipresence on her behalf in a crowded and contentious field.)

Between 1990 and 2012, clearly, the relationship had changed. And, in the immediate aftermath of Chumney’s remarks, another Democrat, state Representative G.A. Hardaway — whose 2012 primary opponent, fellow state Representative Mike Kernell, a longtime Cohen ally, had won the congressman’s endorsement — offered some payback of his own, referring in an email broadside to “treacherous political deeds” by Cohen and imputing to the congressman, routinely regarded as the most liberal Democrat in Tennessee, a previously unsuspected hand-in-glove relationship with Republicans.

Though most of that sound and fury had been, strictly speaking, more personal than political, the theme of party solidarity at all costs and outrage over potential apostasies carried over into last week’s executive committee meeting.

Speaker after speaker trumpeted the theme, and several, like Coleman Thompson, once again a candidate for Shelby County register, an office that eluded him in 2010, stoked the lingering belief that the party’s electoral wipe-out by the Republicans in 2010 had not been an honest result. “We caught them stealing,” he insisted.

Nowhere was this alleged GOP perfidy more prominent than in a lengthy and impassioned philippic against local Republican-dom delivered by Judge Joe Brown, whose title derives both from his former service as a bona fide elected criminal court judge and his long run as a reality show judge adjudicating domestic disputes on television.

It was the latter experience more than the former that had whetted his talent for tough talk, and Brown dished out lots of it, naming names and speaking of “secret accounts,” “differential vote counts,” stolen elections, “extortion,” sneaking privatization of public business, even a conspiracy to undermine traffic safety on the A.W. Willis bridge. Brown’s charges prompted voices in his audience to cry out, “Teach!”

Brown’s bottom line, reinforced by the fact that his TV show has been discontinued: He has “not quite made up [his] mind” about running for D.A., to end what he had characterized as a reign of error and terror.

Chumney, who had widely been rumored to be eyeing another race for D.A. herself, but who had as of yet given no public indication of it, was on hand again, with a retooled version of her Kennedy Day speech, again calling for Democrats to be “united for the team” and this time citing city council members Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn as Democrats who had abandoned her in 2012 and supported her Republican opponent.

Cohen, who had made a point to greet Chumney cordially, was there to address the committee and was all high road, noting that he had become a ranking member (meaning lead Democrat) on the Constitution and Civil Justice subcommittee of the House Judiciary, recounting his efforts on behalf of voting rights and immigration legislation, and making a special appeal to President Obama to ameliorate unfair sentencing procedures for drug offenses.

The congressman was applauded, but so was the next speaker, attorney Ricky Wilkins, his announced opponent in this year’s Democratic primary. Wilkins boasted of his South Memphis background and his 20 years of effort on behalf of improving public housing in Memphis, promising to bring the same degree of “compassion, energy, and fire” to Congress that he’d evinced in his law career, and making a point of pledging his loyalty in advance to this year’s Democratic nominees.

There were other speakers — Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, for example, on the need to oppose anti-abortion legislation in Nashville, and Councilman Lee Harris on putting an end to the lockout of employees at Kellogg. But it was the evidence of intense intra-party rivalries in this year’s primaries, coupled with the near-paradoxical demand for party unity (party chairman Bryan Carson announced that disloyalty would “not be tolerated”), which animated the evening and bespoke the revved-up nature of local Democratic ambitions this year.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the party’s hopes of recapturing the office of Shelby County mayor from Republican incumbent Mark Luttrell.

The Democrats’ committee meeting had begun with statements from four mayoral hopefuls, all with established names and ambitions.

Shelby County Commission Chairman James Harvey offered “leadership at another level” and promised “stability.” Former commissioner and previous mayoral candidate Deidre Malone — making, as she proudly noted, her second try — rejoiced that “we have a Democratic primary.”  

County Commissioner Steve Mulroy touted his “core set of principles” and said, “I’m a real Democrat, and I can win.” And well-known minister and former school board member Kenneth Whalum Jr. brandished some stirring populist oratory, boasted his role in defeating the last sales- tax referendum, and asked the audience to help him decide whether or not to run.

Whatever happens in the May 6th countywide primaries (for which next week’s February 20th filing deadline is imminent) or on August 7th, date of the county general election as well as state and federal primaries, or on November 4th, election day for state and federal offices, last week’s Democratic meeting provided ample energy and abundant foreshadowing.

Discord and harmony, rowdiness and composure, affection and displeasure, logic and libido — all were present in equal and co-existent measure. The only given in the mix was that Shelby County Democrats aren’t likely to sit this one out.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this column had indicated that Deidre Malone had made two previous runs for county mayor. She has only made one to date; her current race is her second effort.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Redistricting Revisited

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As the filing deadline of February 20th for races on this year’s May 6th county primary ballot creeps ever closer, the effects of the Shelby County Commission’s much fought-over reapportionment, post-2010 census, are worth a cursory look.

District 1: One of the nearly forgotten showdowns of the last few years was that between Millington Republican Terry Roland and the rest of the GOP membership of the commission over the issue of redistricting.

Jackson Baker

Terry Roland

Roland’s preference for a limited, preferably Millington-based district in which to seek reelection was stoutly resisted by other Republicans on the commission, who preferred continuation of a large, multi-member district in the suburbs. It culminated in a wild night at a Collierville Republicans Club meeting in January 2012.

Roland, who was being heckled mercilessly by his party colleagues as he advanced his small-district thesis, began to back up a point with an anecdote concerning his father when he thought he heard his filial sentiments being mocked by fellow commissioner, Chris Thomas. “If you say anything, I’ll knock you out of that chair,” Roland responded, as Thomas protested that he was being misconstrued.

The meeting resumed after that flurry, but then-Commissioner Wyatt Bunker reacted to Roland’s threat by calling the police, who showed up just as the meeting was breaking up. No action was taken, especially since tempers had cooled by that time, but this reporter had captured Roland’s threat on video, and, when posted online, it went viral.

That was then. This is now, when the redistricting matter, which would simmer for several months longer, has been resolved in favor of a 13-member single-member system.

Of Roland’s active GOP antagonists back then, Brent Taylor, who was serving an interim term, and Bunker, who left after election as Lakeland’s mayor, are gone. Thomas, while serving out his commission term, is concerned with new duties as Lakeland city manager. Only Heidi Shafer, running for reelection like Roland, is likely to be around for awhile.

Ironically, Roland, who had disliked the notion of having to face a threat to his reelection from any of several rumored opponents from elsewhere in suburbia, got the smaller district he wanted, but finds that he has a primary opponent, anyhow. This is Dennis Daugherty, a Memphis firefighter who resides in Arlington and picked up enough signs of support on the commission during a recent bid for the vacant commission seat later won by Mark Billingsley to suggest he could become the beneficiary of whatever anti-Roland sentiment there might be in District 1.

Meanwhile, Shafer, a dedicated sparring partner of Roland’s during the reapportionment dispute, when she vehemently opposed single districts, has, so far at least, no Republican primary opponent to worry about in her new District 5, though Tanya Bartee, a Democrat, has pulled a petition.

Another incumbent commissioner who was also seriously disinclined to accept a single-member-district format, is Justin Ford, who during the reapportionment debate, tended to side with the commission’s Republicans in defending the principle of large, sprawling multi-member districts.

Indeed, for a while, his “Ford plan” for achieving that result had the support of the GOP majority. But his motive for keeping to the large-district format differed from theirs, which was, rightly or wrongly, attributed by Democratic Commissioner Steve Mulroy, a single-district proponent, to a desire for “incumbency protection” by discouraging newcomers’ election efforts in a sprawling land mass.

As Ford explained it recently, his case was one of wanting the largest possible scope for his local constituency. He is a Ford, after all, and, as such, has ambitions for higher office down the line. (The Ninth District congressional seat currently held by Steve Cohen is something he has his eye on.)

The larger district, the better for springboard purposes. And sharing it with other commissioners, as the large-district format required, was no problem.

But the single-district format prevailed, and, as previously noted in this space, Ford has a fight on his hands in the new Commission District 9 against three Democrats with public names of their own — former school board member Patrice Robinson, current Memphis-Shelby County Education Association President Keith Williams, and veteran educator and frequent candidate James O. Catchings.  

Several of the new single-member districts, however, not only involve new lines encompassing smaller constituencies, but new faces, at least new to the commission grid.

In District 3, for example, centered on the suburb of Bartlett, no fewer than three seemingly credentialed Republicans have pulled petitions to contest what is one of several open seats.

Kelly Price, the African-American proprietor of the Memphis Entrepreneurship Academy, is one petititon puller; two others, Shelby County Schools board member David Reaves, and Sherry Simmons, a longtime local educator and GOP activist, have already filed — a circumstance making for an interesting one-on-one even if Price ultimately stays out of it — especially as Simmons will have the assitance of her husband, Bartlett alderman Bobby Simmons.

More on these and other developing commission races anon.

• A circumstance that has much distressed local Democrats was the 2010 Shelby County election, in which party candidates — though in theory representing a larger constituency — were completely routed by the Republican slate. Many Democrats continue to suspect hanky-panky in that race, though it is more likely that the chief factor driving the GOP margin of victory was a spirited three-way race for governor in the Republican statewide primary, which coincided with the county general election.

Nothing like that will be the case this time, inasmuch as neither Democrats nor Republicans will apparently have a high-stakes primary going on leading up to the statewide primary/county general election date of August 7th.

Though it may not have a perceptible down-ballot effect on other county primary races (or on August 7th voting), the Democrats will apparently have a decent turnout on the May 6th primary date.

That is due to what is shaping up as a lively Democratic primary for county mayor. Filing on Monday was former county Commissioner Deidre Malone, whose two terms on the commission, prominence in local affairs, and previous race for county mayor in the 2010 primary definitely give her viability.

But also on Monday, county Commissioner Steve Mulroy picked up a petition, presenting Malone with the prospect of one able primary opponent, while two more, current commission Chairman James Harvey and former Shelby County Schools board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., had already drawn petitions.