Tag: Willie Herenton

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Opinion

Marriage of Necessity?

Motivational speaker Cavett Roberts once told me that one of the secrets of his trade was “Don’t change the speech, change the audience.”

Mayor Willie Herenton made his latest pitch for consolidation this week to a Memphis City Council that includes nine freshman members and a Shelby County Commission whose five most senior members were forced out in 2006 by term limits.

“I am not on an ego trip,” he said. “Consolidation of the governments is more important than any of our political aspirations.”

Herenton said he isn’t basing his pitch strictly on savings but believes “in the long term it is a more efficient government and will cost the taxpayers less.”

The fifth-term mayor has made the pitch several times, and he has the newspaper clippings to prove it. In 1993, two years after he was elected, he gave an interview to New York Times reporter Ronald Smothers in which he proposed that Memphis merge with Shelby County by surrendering its charter. He presented a different path to consolidation in 2002, suggesting that a vote could be held in 2004. Six years and two city elections later, Herenton again plugged consolidation in his speech to the Memphis Rotary Club in January. This time, consolidation was one of several New Year’s proposals, including a new convention center.

Most recently, in a Flyer interview in September, the mayor said he and business leaders will work for consolidation in 2009 with an eye toward creating a referendum in 2010 and a metro mayoral election — thereby bumping his own retirement ahead by one year, since he would not seek the job.

In this scenario, the presumptive metro mayor would be the current county mayor, A C Wharton. He is restricted by term limits from running again for that office. He could, however, run for city or metro mayor, and he recently formed a fund-raising committee.

Wharton is as popular as Herenton is unpopular. He was in Nashville Tuesday when Herenton spoke to the council and commission, but he has spoken in favor of consolidation at other public meetings. Popular he may be, but if he can’t persuade the County Commission to give up the Pyramid for $5 million, then how will anyone get them to give up their jobs?

Candidate Wharton would have opponents such as Carol Chumney, who got 35 percent of the vote in the city mayor’s race in 2007, and probably others running as anti-consolidation candidates. A referendum on consolidation would bring them out in droves.

Herenton has always predicted that consolidation would occur when there was a financial crisis in local government. Now we have a crisis on the horizon, and at least one longtime Herenton critic agrees with him.

“He can’t sell it, but it will get done,” said suburban developer Jackie Welch. “We’d be better off if we had one mayor and one council. If they freeze the school system boundaries, then I think everything else would work out.”

Walter Bailey, who was a county commissioner for three decades, disagrees.

“The anti-consolidation forces are locked in their position,” he said. “Their justification doesn’t hinge so much on the economy as wanting to keep themselves separate from the city.”

A case can be made that a crisis would divide voters rather than unite them — witness the tenor of the presidential campaign and the rough passage of the bailout bill.

A consolidation plan might well look sort of like a bailout bill in reverse. The bailout bill was loaded up with pork-barrel inclusions to satisfy reluctant congressmen. A consolidation proposal would be loaded up with exclusions for schools, unions, and law enforcement. Savings and efficiencies, if any, would be years in the future, while the crisis festered.

Government and real estate are right up there with FedEx as engines of the local economy. Real estate is broken, and the tax base is threatened. Welch says builders can’t even get people to come to open houses, much less buy a new house. Government jobs are patronage plums and safe harbors in this economy. In 17 years as mayor, Herenton has not proposed cutting a significant number of them.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton After Hours

CREDIT: by Jackson Baker

Mayor Willie Herenton, known for his big plans and numerous controversies during the almost 13 years he has served as Memphis mayor, is famous within journalistic ranks for his candor. Though he can be as reticent as any other public figure in formal settings, even defiantly so on particularly sensitive subjects, the mayor can dish with the best of them when he wants to.

Herenton was in such a mood last Thursday night when, after arriving late at a fund-raiser at downtown’s Joysmith Studio for his friend, Shelby County commissioner Deidre Malone, he let himself go a little with a handful of attendees. Asked about the unfounded rumor that went around, and kept going around, two weekends ago, concerning what was supposedly his imminent indictment on federal charges, the mayor made no secret of his exasperation at the willingness of people, especially the media, to believe anything and everything about him.

“It’s unbelievable what they say!” Herenton exclaimed. He recalled another widespread rumor several years ago. “They said I was at Betty Ford and claimed they couldn’t find me. Well, all they had to do was look. I was in my office working!”

At the time, E.C. Jones, then a councilman from District 1, which cuts a swath across the city’s northernmost precincts from Frayser to Cordova, went public with his concerns that Herenton was nowhere to be found.

“Couldn’t find me!” the mayor expostulated. “Well, he could have found me if he wasn’t … .” Here came one or two unflattering epithets. The mayor went on. “He could have found me if he’d had enough sense to ride the elevator up two floors, from five to seven, and just look around.”

Herenton was dismissive about current suspicions that he was behind the surprise firing by new superintendent Kriner Cash of the Memphis school system’s former longtime athletic director, Wayne Weedon, and his replacement by David Gaines, who was once a basketball teammate of Herenton’s at LeMoyne-Owen College. “Is ‘Smokey’ Gaines an old friend of mine? Yes. Was he a treasured teammate of mine? Yes. Did I have anything to do with getting him hired? No. I never said a word about the matter. That was Kriner Cash all the way.”

(For the record, Cash has since complained that a recent, highly positive performance review had been missing from Weedon’s file when he reviewed it and indicated he thought the matter deserved to be investigated. Weedon is meanwhile on “special assignment.”)

The mayor offered an opinion on another issue, the sponsorship of potential referendum proposals to require City Council approval of city contracts and second-level mayoral appointments by Barbara Swearengen Wade, long presumed an unswerving Herenton loyalist. He saw it as a matter of payback. “I think she was perturbed by my support of changing police residency requirements,” said Herenton, who has favored a variety of proposals to expand the geographical areas from which police recruits can be drawn.

The mayor shrugged. “She feels very strongly that all city employees should reside in the city. I respect that, but I just need — the city needs — police officers, and we have to do what we have to do to attract them.”

Though Herenton was ostensibly in a lighthearted, jesting mood, the concerns of office dominated his conversation at the fund-raiser. Reminded of his teasing suggestion on two recent public occasions that he might choose to seek a sixth term, the mayor let his wide grin settle into a wan smile, then disappear altogether. “No,” he said. “No, it’s just too much … ” Momentarily he searched for the right word, then said it, softly and almost inaudibly, “… stress.”

Weighing Shelby’s Vote

• Though few people not in their dotage or approaching it can recall it, there once was a time when the phrase “Solid South” was used to describe the voting habits of the sprawling area coinciding more or less with the limits of the old Confederacy. The era of Democratic supremacy dated more or less from a decade or two before the Civil War through the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960, when the majority of voters in every Southern state were so reliably Democratic that the phrase “tantamount to election” was used to describe the results of party primaries.

Now, of course, the voting habits of the South have largely flipped, and Republicans dominate the region’s vote — at least in presidential and major statewide elections. The one remaining place on the face of the earth that, in golf terms, has continued to be such a “gimme” for the Democrats, in local, statewide, and national voting, is Nashville/Davidson County.

That and the fact that Nashville is the state capital account for the predominance of the Middle Tennessee area in party fund-raising and in the incidence of Democratic nominees for statewide offices. Case in point for the former was the fact that 9th District congressman — and, not incidentally, former state senator — Steve Cohen had some of his major fund-raising events this year in Nashville. Case in point for the latter is the fact that two of the three major Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. Senate this year — Bob Tuke and Kenneth Eaton — hail from Nashville (the third, Mike Padgett, is from Knoxville).

What is unusual about the Senate primary that ends this week is that Tuke, regarded by most observers (and by his own polls) as the leader in that race, chose to make Shelby County the focus of his primary efforts — to the point of scheduling his election-night celebration for the Cadre Building in downtown Memphis. “We think this is where the decision will lie,” said an aide to the former Democratic Party chairman on an all-day swing through Shelby County on Saturday.

The thrust of his remark was that what is true for this week’s primary will hold true again for the November general election, when the Democratic Senate nominee will be up against it in a contest with the formidable Republican incumbent, Lamar Alexander.

Interestingly enough, Shelby County has figured large in another well-watched race — the Republican primary for Congress in the 7th District, a jurisdiction that snakes from Memphis’ eastern suburbs all the way into the western suburbs of Nashville.

Still regarded as a long shot, challenger Tom Leatherwood entered the last week of the primary hoping that home-county Shelby, where his yard signs have been plentiful of late, would give him a chance of overtaking the heavily favored incumbent, Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County.

• As Election Day approached, the voting patterns of Shelby County, as evinced during the two-week early-voting period, were subject to a variety of interpretations.

Bill Giannini, the Republican candidate for assessor against Democrat Cheyenne Johnson, saw the early stats as ominous, e-mailing a “Campaign Update” to his supporters that warned “Democrat turnout is at record levels in some Memphis precincts” and urged remedial action via a 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation.

The overall statistics on which Giannini based his conclusions went this way: Of the slightly more than 22,000 total ballots cast during early voting, 14,277 were by persons classifying themselves as black, 4,019 by self-identified whites, and 3,900 by persons choosing the description “other.” It is the hard-to-define demographics of that last category that could tell the tale in several close races.

A fair number of the “other” voters are presumed to be Asians and Hispanics, but many, too, are local residents who simply bridle at the idea of racial classification and choose not to identify themselves by race. Depending on how the “other” category breaks down, it could alter — minutely or substantially — the results that can be extrapolated from the ratio of self-identified black and white voters.

Clearly, Giannini is correct in that early voting, with its heavy concentration of African-American voters, favored Democratic candidates in head-on contests with Republicans. The effect of the ratio on other races is more uncertain, especially in regard to the 9th District contest between Cohen and primary opponent Nikki Tinker.

Democrat Cohen, it should be noted, has traditionally drawn Republican crossover votes, despite having a voting profile that is distinctly liberal, and several of his late ads and other pitches to voters have been thinly veiled appeals to GOP voters to come his way once again. In that sense, he and Leatherwood are involved in something of a competition.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton Defends “Damaged” Lee, Slams Feds and Media, and Hints He May Run Again

CREDIT: jb

In a free-wheeling press conference Thursday that began
with an impassioned defense of “unfairly damaged” former
MLGW head Joseph Lee, newly released from the threat of federal prosecution,
Mayor Willie Herenton covered the waterfront of his grievances – against the
media (both black and white), against alleged conspirators in the business
community, and against a system of justice that he considers “plantation”-based.

In the process, Herenton decried both the media and the FBI
for focusing their attention on blacks in general and himself in particular and
pointed them in the direction of former Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, whose
eyebrow-raising stock arrangements with the now-defunct Delta Capital
Management Company got attention from the press and the feds which,
the mayor implied, was too brief and was prematurely dropped for reasons both racial and
political.

Condemning recent Commercial Appeal articles
suggesting that he was under federal investigation for possible improper
involvement in city contracts extended two African-American associates, Elvin
Moon and Cliff Dates, Herenton denied that he had been directly questioned in
the matter, contended he had more white friends and business associates than
black ones and said, “The perception is that if you’re African American and do
business, you’re corrupt.”

Continuing in a recent pattern of ex post facto
revisionism, Herenton appeared to deny that he had ever directly sought the
superintendency of Memphis City Schools and characterized his now-famous
“resignation” letter of mid-March to city CAO Keith McGhee as having been based
on “conditions” for improving the schools – though it was pointed out to him
that the letter was a terse announcement that he intended resigning as of July
31 and mentioned neither the word “conditions” nor anything about MCS.

Asked directly if he had intended to resign back in March
and if he still intended to resign now, the mayor insisted that he would
continue to serve and jokingly suggested that he might reconsider his previous
statements that his current mayoral term would be his last. “I was
thinking of retiring, but maybe I’m doing something right,” said Herenton, who
had previously contended that current allegations of illegality against him,
like an alleged blackmail plot against him last year, stemmed from the fact that
“they can’t beat me in an election.”

(More details to come.)

Categories
News The Fly-By

Book Club

CREDIT: Valentin Bartolomeu | dreamstime.com

As a girl, Leslie Holland was a voracious reader, often putting a towel under her door at night so that her mother wouldn’t know she was staying awake to read.

Now librarian at the Memphis College of Art, Holland is a member of the newly formed Librarians for Memphis Public Library.

“I feel like the city is taking the library in a bad direction,” Holland says. “It feels like they’re working against the community instead of for it.”

At the annual meeting of the Tennessee Library Association last month, a group of librarians, mostly from area colleges, realized they needed to do something. They were concerned about the proposed closures of five library branches, the deterioration of the library board of trustees, and the controversial appointment of a longtime city employee who is not a librarian to head the library system after Judith Drescher’s departure last December.

“It’s really an 11th-hour thing. If we don’t do something now, we really are going to lose these libraries,” Holland says. “If they close Highland and the Poplar-White Station branches, we’re not going to have any libraries in the middle of the city except for the main one.”

Earlier this year, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton proposed closing those branches, as well as Cossitt, Gaston, and Levi, to save $1.5 million to $2 million for the upcoming fiscal year. The proposal came on the heels of Herenton appointing former public services and neighborhoods director Keenon McCloy to head the library system, and some people suspect the personnel change was tied to Herenton’s proposal.

“There are clear education and experience guidelines for someone running one of the state’s largest library systems,” says Chris Matz, director of the Christian Brothers University library. “The appointment the mayor made doesn’t meet those in any way.”

Herenton and CAO Keith McGee have defended the appointment, saying the library system needs a proven manager, not someone with a master’s of library science.

“As people who went to graduate school and who sometimes have decades on the job, when we hear about someone who has never gone to graduate school and getting a plum position, that’s an issue,” Matz says. “It’s a job that would attract very qualified people if we did a national search.”

During a recent budget presentation, Herenton revisited the controversy, pointing out that the city of New York doesn’t have a professional librarian at the head of its library system.

Benjamin Head, instruction librarian at CBU and another member of the group, has researched the head librarians in other municipalities.

“New York has a former college president who was over a major college library and who has a number of advanced degrees in education,” Head says. “That’s quite different in my view.”

The group thinks the mayor’s appointments — and the proposed branch closures — might have met more scrutiny if the library’s board of trustees was still a working group. Moreover, it’s unclear when or how the board was dismantled.

Even the state has taken notice.

“A portion of their funding is dependent on [having a library board of trustees],” says Jeanne Sugg, state librarian and archivist. “They have promised me they are working on that. … The more quickly that happens, the better.”

By state law, the library system must have a board of trustees before the state can disburse $45,000 in funding. Each of Tennessee’s major metropolitan areas is awarded the same amount, but for the Memphis system to get its share, it must have a board in place by the end of the month.

McCloy did not respond to a call for information about the board of trustees.

The librarians have an online presence (l4mpl.blogspot.com) and are working with both the Tennessee Library Association and the Memphis Area Library Council, as well as local neighborhood groups, to save the branch libraries.

“I think it took everybody by surprise that they were going to close these branches, especially on such a short timetable,” Matz says. “One of the long-term goals of the group is that we don’t believe the library director should be subject to mayoral appointment. It’s not a spoils job. It deserves a full-blown search process.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Sham Meetings

On Monday night, the League of Women Voters held a public meeting in Cordova to allow the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County and the suburbs to discuss consolidation and other issues.

The meeting was a flop, a non-event, and a trap. The mayors on the panel included Sharon Goldsworthy of Germantown, Linda Kerley of Collierville, Keith McDonald of Bartlett, and A C Wharton of Shelby County. Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, according to his spokeswoman and the League of Women Voters, was originally scheduled to attend but declined late Monday afternoon. Several suburban mayors also were absent.

The audience consisted of about 30 people, at least half of whom were public officials (Memphis Police director Larry Godwin, Sheriff Mark Luttrell, Judge John Fowlkes, county commissioner Sidney Chism, and others) or reporters. Many of them left when it became clear that Herenton wasn’t coming and the suburban mayors were going to recite their familiar bromides against consolidation, city schools, property taxes, and crime while calling their own communities tidy citadels where people “live, work, and play.”

The implication, of course, is that Memphis is Shelby County’s problem child. The outmanned Wharton demurred that the suburbs don’t have to run and support school systems, that Herenton’s personality is not the issue, that consolidation can exclude schools and preserve suburban sovereignty.

“It is not fair for municipalities to say, ‘Oh, we manage so neatly,'” he said to no avail, as the suburban mayors said just that.

In other words, it was a reprise of a scene that Wharton, Herenton, and other elected officials have heard many times. Herenton was smart not to attend what would have been a piling-on party with him at the bottom.

Last month, the consultants hired to recruit and screen candidates for superintendent of Memphis City Schools held a series of public meetings to get “citizen input.” The meetings were a charade, attended by four or five people and held during the middle of spring break. Too bad, said the consultants, who are apparently more interested in fulfilling the letter rather than the spirit of their charge.

Some people at the Memphis Board of Education, The Commercial Appeal, and the civic groups they favor are perpetuating the myth that these meetings represent progress and doing things by the book. Never mind that almost nobody cares and nobody moves one inch off their entrenched positions.

The problems of Memphis and Shelby County demand action and hard choices. The issues have been vetted. Public meetings on consolidation and choosing a city schools superintendent have become a recipe for stalemate and the status quo.

The impatience and exasperation of mayors Herenton and Wharton is understandable.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

It’s Herenton for Four More Years

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach

Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton won his fifth term tonight with 42 percent of the vote.

City Councilwoman Carol Chumney placed second with 35 percent, followed by former MLGW CEO Herman Morris with 21 percent.

The numbers were:

Herenton, 70, 177
Chumney, 57, 180
Morris, 35, 158

There were 11 also-rans, the best known of whom was former Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham, who had 1, 118 votes, or .68 percent.

Following a gracious concession speech from Morris and a rather ungracious concession speech from Chumney, it was time for Herenton’s “victory” speech. And an odd one it was.

After thanking his supporters, Herenton began reciting a litany of grievances against various “haters” and “mean people,” including a FedExForum crowd that booed him — a crowd that was, in Herenton’s words, “90 percent white.”

Herenton went on to say he now knew “who was for him and who was against him.”

For a man who’d just garnered 42 percent of the total vote, there is still ample evidence that there may more of the latter than the former.
— Bruce VanWyngarden

from the victory stand:

The song “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” blared over the public
address system in a Memphis Cook Convention Center ballroom Thursday as
supporters of Willie W. Herenton pushed toward the stage where the mayor
delivered his victory speech.

The emcee barked “He shook the haters off,” into the
microphone, as the jubilant crowd roared its approval.

Campaign manager Charles Carpenter set, or at least
reinforced, the celebration’s defiant tone in his introduction to Herenton’s
comments. “Reporters ask me, ‘What’s the difference between this race and 2003?’
In 2003 the mayor who had been doing an excellent job at that time, had business
community support and white community support. But this election, he had little
of either,” he said.

Herenton took the microphone on a stage crowded with
familiar faces, including former Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division head
Joseph Lee, former Herenton hater Thaddeus Matthews, attorney Robert Spence,
Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin, and Tajuan Stout Mitchell.

“I’m in a very serious mood,” he told the crowd, before
thanking God for His favor. “It is out of this favor, that we received this
victory tonight. I now know who is for me and… who is against me. I thank God
for discerning.”

Herenton thanked the friends whom he said had supported him
unconditionally. “I appreciate loyalty,” he said. “This election was hard for
me. There were people [who] I thought were with me, and I found out, they
weren’t.”

“I’m going to be nice tonight,” Herenton continued, “but
there are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis. These are the haters. I
know how to shake them off,” he said, his last words lost in the applause.

“Memphis has some major decisions to make. Memphis has to
decide whether or not we want to be one city, or… a divided city,” he said.

He mocked the “haters,” anticipating their criticisms of
him. “He didn’t get many white votes.”

The mayor recalled two incidents in which he perceived
racism. He said that a “90 percent white” crowd at a University of Memphis basketball
game booed his honoring DeAngelo Williams with a key to the city. “I know the
haters are going to say I need to pull the races together — I didn’t separate
us.”

He then told of his television appearance with Justin
Timberlake, remembering the audience “95% young white kids that booed me on
national television. The white citizens of Memphis were not in outrage. Nobody
wrote letters and said that was shameful.”

Herenton did single out his “few white brothers who have
stuck with me,” including developer Rusty Hyneman and used-car salesman Mark
Goodfellow.

Returning to whites other than those few, Herenton warned,
“If you’re not careful, they’ll work a game on you. They have psychology.” — Preston Lauterbach.

Chez Chumney

At ten o’clock Thursday night, Carol Chumney ended her campaign for city
mayor in the same aggressive spirit that distinguished her term on the Memphis
City Council. Promising to “work with mayor Herenton any way I can” in her
concession, she nevertheless took the opportunity to launch a final volley at
the city leadership, saying, “we have sent a message that Memphis deserves
better.”

The parting shot at Mayor Herenton rallied the crowd of more than a hundred
close supporters and volunteers gathered in the Peabody Continental Ballroom,
most of whom hadn’t seen their candidate in person since the election results
were announced on television. For many, it was clearly a cathartic end to a
long and exhausting day.

Earlier, as the first few precinct reports trickled in by word of mouth, the
mood at Carol Chumney’s election night party was bouyant, if slightly tense,
and continued to remain so even as the early returns showed Mayor Herenton
with a significant lead. But by the end of the night, with the outcome all but
certain, any trace of that early hope had given way to sore discontent.

“I’m disappointed in the people of Memphis,” said longtime Chumney supporter
Zenia Revitz. “I can’t believe that they didn’t open their eyes and see what’s
going on in this community.” Her reaction may have best captured the mixed
emotions felt by those present, as she quickly qualified her remark by adding,
“So far, that is. We’re only at fifty percent,” referring to the number of
precincts still uncounted. No one at the event was willing to fully give up
the chance of a turnaround until it became unmistakably clear that none would
come.

Another strong supporter, Joan Solomon, summarized what many at the party saw
as a flawed election process, stating simply, “Everyone that voted for Morris
was voting for Herenton.” A Rassmussen poll commissioned by WHBQ Fox 13 taken
just days before the election showed that in a two-way race against Herenton,
either Chumney or Morris would have won with a comfortable majority. Together,
the two candidates provided the embattled mayor with the chance to win a fifth
term with a 42 percent plurality of the vote.

The message of the Chumney campaign was strongly populist, and as such, their
election strategy was centered around volunteer support. Noting in her
concession speech that she was “outspent probably about 2 to 1,” the
councilwoman credited “hundreds of volunteers” with the large measure of her
success. Campaign manager Charles Blumenthal was also quick to praise the
campaign’s unpaid workers, calling the campaign operation “a well-oiled
machine,” adding that out of fourteen full-time staff, only four were paid.

Indeed, it was a different kind of campaign from what one usually sees in
Memphis. In spite of the high-priced venue, the campaign began with small
funds and very little financial support from the business community, not
building fund-raising momentum until the final month of the race. Chumney’s
largest donations came from labor unions and trade associations, with most of
the city’s old money going to Herman Morris.

Also remarkable was the fact that compared with the two other major
candidates, few current or former elected officials endorsed Chumney or participated
in her bid for city mayor, with only two notables present at the
election night event. State Representative Mike Kernell was there, long an
ally and friend of Chumney’s, along with freshman Shelby County Commissioner
Steve Mulroy, who appeared with her onstage. Otherwise, the rest of her
support appeared to come from family, friends, activists, and more than a few
political neophytes.

While there were more whites than blacks at Chumney’s final campaign stop, the
racially mixed crowd represented a fairly adequate cross-section of the
citizenship of Memphis. Chumney was pleased by the support she received from
predominately black neighborhoods. “There were some [African-American]
precincts where I was running at 30 percent, it made me feel good.”

After the loss, Chumney was upbeat, but expressed disappointment in the low
turnout. “The people who didn’t vote should be kicking themselves because this
was their chance to make a change.”

This is Chumney’s second bid for an executive seat, first running against
Shelby County Mayor A.C. Wharton in 2002 and garnering only 17 percent of the vote.
Ineligible to run for mayor and city council at the same time, she leaves her
seat on the Council to Jim Strickland, who handily won the seat with 73 percent over
Bob Schreiber. After finishing the remainder of her city council term, she
said she plans to return to her private law practice, but she was otherwise
undecided on any future political plans.

“Who knows?” she said, “we’ll see what the future holds.”

—Derek Haire

Herman Morris’ Last Dance

At 7:45 at the Holiday Inn-University of Memphis Thursday night, things were quiet. A few folks were meandering in, riding the escalator to the mezzanine in twos and threes. Kevin Paige and his band were singing “Crazy” in the ballroom.

The crowd, such as it was, was racially mixed and age-diverse. The big-screen television at the back of the room flashed photographs of candidate Herman Morris and his family. Herman as a young track star, a young lawyer, a family man, etc.

Downstairs in the lobby, the South Carolina-Kentucky game was on a television in the corner. The game was close and exciting, but the numbers crawling across the bottom of the screen gave early indication that the race for mayor was going to be neither.

The early voting and absentee totals — almost half the predicted vote — showed incumbent Willie Herenton with 43 percent, Carol Chumney at 34 percent, and Morris a distant third, with 24 percent. Those percentages wouldn’t vary significantly all night.

Kevin Paige is singing “Killing Me Softly.”

The food lines and bar lines are growing quickly as the ballroom fills. There is little optimism. There are lots of hugs and wry smiles.

At 8:30, with a little more than 20 percent of precincts reporting, the percentages haven’t changed: Herenton 43, Chumney 32, Morris 25. It’s over.
With perfect ironic, and no doubt unintentional timing, Paige’s band breaks into “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.”

Ooops.

Republican maverick Tom Guleff wanders about with five-year-old son Logan in tow. Adman Dan Conoway, sips a beer and chats up latecomers. Campaign cochairman and longtime judge and civil rights activist Russell Sugarmon, quietly works the door. Memphis schoolboard member Jeff Warren leans over a laptop, checking the discouraging numbers. Sadly, for this campaign, the only number getting bigger is the number of folks in the ballroom, which is near capacity. But their man Morris appears doomed to finish a distant third.

With 50 percent of precincts counted, the percentages remain markedly consistent: 42, 33, 24. As the numbers flash on the television screen someone shouts, “Time for a drink.”

Warren shakes his head ruefully and says, “I’m very disappointed. I think Herman is the one man who could bring this city together.”

There is a clattering of applause in the outer room. The candidate, surrounded by his wife, mother, and children enters the ballroom. The outpouring of affection seems genuine and somehow poignant.

Morris steps to the microphone and says, “It’s a great day for Memphis.” But nobody in the room believes him.

Morris continues, thanking his campaign committee and supporters, and thanking his wife Brenda for 27 years. It is, in fact, the couple’s wedding anniversary. Morris presents a large bouquet of red roses to his wife and says, “Happy anniversary.”

The rest of Morris’ speech sounds suspiciously like a hurriedly edited “victory” speech. He repeats the “great day in Memphis” line, and thanks the crowd for playing a part in “bringing the city together.” He implores the crowd to work with the apparent victor, Willie Herenton, and even asks for a round of applause for the mayor. When the crowd responds weakly, he exhorts them: “We can do better than that!” They do, barely.
“

“And now,” he says, “let’s have one heck of an anniversary party!”

The band strikes up the old Etta James song, “At Last,” and Herman Morris and his wife dance, staring into each other’s eyes, encircled by photographers and television cameras.

It could have been a helluva party.

As the crowd files out, the television in the corner of the lobby is showing happy women doing “The Electric Slide” at Herenton headquarters.

But here at the Holiday Inn nobody feels much like dancing.

— Bruce VanWyngarden

Notes on the runners-up:

Opinions on the responses to their defeats by mayoral runner-up Carol Chumney and third-place finisher Herman Morris vary significantly.

Everybody seems to have regarded Morris’ Election Night statement to have been a “gracious” – if somewhat pro forma and dull-normal – concession. (In other words, the staid Morris bowed out the same way he came in.) Particularly appreciated was the former MLGW head’s suggestion to his supporters that they give the victorious Mayor Herenton a round of applause. (Some, however, thought he was smirking at the resultant Sound of One Hand Clapping.)

I remember Morris breaking through his cocoon of dignified restraint a few times during the campaign. Once in particular, when, at a fundraiser before some of his well-heeled supporters at the Galloway House, he waxed passionate and eloquent with an analogy between the desperate emotions of the Memphians of the Yellow Fever era and those of today’s city-dwellers hoping to ride out the crime menace.

When I moderated a Rotary Club debate between Morris, Chumney, and John Willingham, I gave each of them a chance to re-enact one of the glory moments I had glimpsed them in during the campaign. In Morris’ case it was that speech at The Galloway House.

What he ended up doing was some wonky recitation of his published crime plan. Nothing even close to what I’d asked for. When I saw him elsewhere, a day or two later, I said, “Hey, Herman, what happened? I was trying to set you up.”

He shrugged and said, “Well, that sort of thing isn’t on call.”

And my thought was: It’s a good thing for the Yankees that Roger Clemens’ fast ball is on call.

In contrast to Morris’s speech on Election Night, Chumney’s swan song was more of a trumpet blast – some might say, a tooting of her own horn for some further campaign yet to be waged. Not until the end of a fairly extended address to her still enthusiastic troops did a note of conciliation creep in. And that, to mix a metaphor, was a rather left-handed note: “I had worthy opponents. I will work with them any way I can…”

Given her limited success in bonding with her soon-to-be-former councilmates and with the man who had just defeated her for mayor, that wouldn’t seem to be an extraordinary number of ways. And she would probably be wasting her time if she sat by a telephone waiting on a phone call from one of the indicated worthies.

Also striking was her dismissal of the only one of the three late polls – the one conducted by Steve Ethridge for The Commercial Appeal – that hadn’t shown her neck-and-neck with Herenton. A “disservice to the public,” she called it. Gotcha, Carol. That’s how I feel about the folks who don’t show me proper appreciation, too.

Still, there was something gallant, even impressive (if arguably myopic), about Chumney’s bulldog attitude, her persistence, and her refusal to stop finding fault with the Herenton administration in her concession speech, even at a time when protocol called upon her to make nice. (No observer of protocol she, for better or for worse, and actually for both.)

If she had somehow managed to win, she would have become an instant cynosure for the national media. Governing? Well, who knows…..

Morris vs. Chumney for county mayor in 2010? Not impossible. — Jackson Baker

Stay tuned to Memphisflyer.com for updates.

Categories
Opinion

Ten Inconvenient Truths

1) There is a very good chance that the winner of the mayor’s race will be rejected by half the voters and a good chance that the winner will be rejected by six out of 10 voters.

2) Things could be worse, and maybe they have been. In 1971, 1975, and 1979, a charismatic mayoral candidate given to fits of ego, arrogance, candor, and foibles in his bachelor lifestyle rallied his political base while writing off the “other” racial group and won a narrow victory. His name was Wyeth Chandler, and he was mayor from 1972 to 1982. The Peabody was closed. Downtown was emptying out. The Martin Luther King Jr. assassination was a recent memory, not a chapter in the history books. Firemen went on strike as buildings burned. Chandler got almost all the white vote and almost none of the black vote.

3) Willie Herenton increasingly refers to himself in the third person. This is not a good thing in Memphis or any other city.

4) Herenton has seemingly written off many of his former supporters, although his special assistant, Pete Aviotti, thinks he will get 65 percent of the vote. When Chandler hunkered down with his white base in 1975 and 1979, black Memphians, who were then slightly in the minority, said it was tragic. If Herenton gets almost none of the white vote after serving 16 years, it will be no less tragic today.

5) Herman Morris is Republican retro, from his supporters, who include John Ryder, Minerva Johnican, and Lewis Donelson, to his big house in Midtown, which was lit up like Christmas while his neighbors were still in the dark after Hurricane Elvis (luck of the grid, it was said) to his membership on corporate boards that pay more for meetings than most people earn.

6) It is well and good that Morris, who grew up in Binghamton, went to Rhodes and Vanderbilt Law School and has a very nice family. But it is telling that, until he was a candidate for mayor, he did not often attend neighborhood meetings in either his current or former neighborhoods of Evergreen and Vollintine-Evergreen.

7) If there was a public institution less open to scrutiny than MLGW under Morris (and Herenton, who appointed the board), it would be hard to name it. The place was a fortress. Its board made a mockery of open meetings by going into executive session in the morning and a perfunctory public session after lunch. Sure, the notorious Morris VIP list included Mom and some corporate chiefs. But it also included Morris pals at The Commercial Appeal, which conveniently low-balled the details of the retirement package Morris sought and Herenton rejected back in 2003.

8) Carol Chumney will speak truth to power, but what if she had the power? As a candidate, her favorite word often seems to be I, as in “what I did.” Being mayor is about “we.” An election is partly a popularity contest. In other circumstances, Chumney’s distance from her council colleagues would be understandable, even admirable, given that two of them were indicted. As a mayoral candidate, it’s a legitimate concern.

9) What about me? asks John Willingham. True, candidates have run on flimsier credentials, and Willingham is a former elected county commissioner with the endorsement of the local Republican Party steering committee. But when he had a one-on-one shot at an already weakened Herenton in 2003, he got about 30 percent of the vote. Only in college football do you expect a rematch after losing 70-30.

10) Chumney and Morris have a better chance than Willingham, but he won’t support either of them. Enough said.

Categories
News News Feature

Herenton’s Stadium Proposal: A Brief History

CREDIT: Nashville Scene

On January 1st, Mayor Willie Herenton surprised those attending his traditional New Year’s Day prayer breakfast by proposing that Memphians consider tearing down Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium and replacing it with a new stadium at the Fairgrounds.

On Tuesday, the Memphis City Council received a consultant’s report on the feasibility of a new stadium and promptly voted to delay further discussion of it until December.
Here is a “progress report” on the stadium proposal for the last nine months.

January 1, 2007

Theme: “On the Wall,” the title of the mayor’s breakfast speech.

Venue: Press conference after breakfast at Memphis Cook Convention Center.

Handout. Six stapled-together pages of color pictures of pro and college football stadiums in Charlotte, Detroit, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Louisville.

Cost estimate: $63 million (Louisville) to $300 million (Detroit)

Research/Professionalism: College student hoping for a C grade.

Supporting cast: UM’s R. C. Johnson and CVB’s Kevin Kane.

Big idea: Replace rather than refurbish the Liberty Bowl.

Reaction: Say what?

February 20, 2007

Theme: “Project Nexus: Fairgrounds master plan and new stadium proposal.”

Venue: Lobby of City Hall

Handout: Four-page press release and 40-page plastic-covered report.

Cost estimate: $150 million to $185 million.

Research/Professionalism: Five-figure consulting job, Power-Point style.

Supporting cast: Various directors and mayoral staff.

Big idea: Economic development with fiscal restraint. No property taxes.

Reaction: Harold Byrd and other UM boosters push for on-campus stadium.

September 18, 2007

Theme: “Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium Development Options.”

Venue: City Council committee room.

Handout: 136-page report.

Cost estimate: $21 million for renovation to $217 million for new stadium.

Research/Professionalism: Six-figure consulting job, with footnotes.

Supporting cast: Chief Financial Officer Robert Lipscomb.

Big idea: Report covers all the bases, but was “edited” before release.

Reaction: Put it away until December, two months after election.

Meanwhile, the University of Memphis Tigers defeated Jacksonville State Saturday before an estimated 28,000 fans at the 62,000-seat stadium.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Black on Black Politics: Herenton on South 3rd

by CHRIS DAVIS.

A Thursday press conference at his South 3rd
St. headquarters found Mayor Willie Herenton surrounded by supportive members of
the city’s black clergy. After enduring a handful of heartfelt testimonials, and
a few over the top comparisons to Christ, the mayor took center stage and railed
against various enemies including, but not limited to, the media, house Negroes,
and more nebulous anti-Herenton forces, which were repeatedly identified as
simply “they,” and “them.”

The mayor listed numerous accomplishments: the rebirth of
Downtown; the upgrading of various housing projects; the demolition of others.
But the bulk of his speech was devoted to unsubtle broadsides aimed at those who
have dared to run against him.

“This city was founded in 1826, but people of color didn’t
achieve the position I hold until 1991,” Herenton said, receiving animated vocal
support from the assembled clergymen. “And some people have the audacity to say
I have been here too long.”

Herenton’s rhetoric ignored inconvenient verities and
turned almost entirely on the notion that, although there were other candidates
“of color,” he was the only black in the race.

Some African Americans have “joined in on this nonsense,”
he said, alluding to but never mentioning by name mayoral candidate and former
MLGW President Herman Morris.

“But divide and conquer ain’t gonna work,” the mayor
declared before decisively pitting black against black.

“Back in Slavery some [blacks] worked in the field, and
some worked in the house,” Herenton noted. “And after emancipation was achieved,
some didn’t want to be free.”

The mayor could
not have assembled a better Amen corner. Throughout his speech the ministers
showed their support with shouts of “Yes,” and “That’s right.”

Later Thursday Herenton turned up at a forum of the Cordova Neighborhood Association at the Homebuilders site, where he omitted most of this rhetoric and emphasized his achieverments in office. He left the stage before his three main opponents – Carol Chumney, Morris, and John Willingham – made their own remarks.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Mayoral Shuffling

Memphis mayoral candidates continued to campaign, as is their wont, over the weekend:

Incumbent mayor Willie Herenton, who is eschewing formal debates with his opponents, spoke briefly to a rally at a Frayser mall Saturday but mainly spent his time there autographing campaign T-shirts and demonstrating his prowess at the “Cupid Shuffle” as a sound system blared out some music.

Opponent Carol Chumney held a well-attended opening at her Poplar Avenue headquarters on Sunday, once again chiding Herenton for being willing to spar with Joe Frazier while ducking debate, but she seemed to broaden her attack to include rival Herman Morris as well as Herenton: “My opponents love to walk you through their humble beginnings, but their actions both in political office and as executives demonstrate that they have long forgotten where they came from.”

Morris held at least one major fund-raiser over the weekend, while John Willingham presided over a headquarters open house that spread over Sunday and Monday.

Present at Mt. Olive C.M.E. Church for an all-candidates forum Sunday were Chumney, Morris, and Willingham, but not Herenton. A wide representation of other mayoral candidates also attended, including Laura Davis Aaron — who cited as two reasons for running the fact that “Mayor Herenton reads my mail” and that she needs a job — and Dewayne A. Jones Sr., who shouted so loudly as to temporarily short out his microphone.

• With Congress in recess, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen is much in evidence locally. Among other things, Cohen presided (along with Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander) over a ceremony formally changing the name of the Federal Building to the Clifford Davis/Odell Horton Federal Building, in honor of the late U.S. district judge Odell Horton.

Cohen also proposed to President Bush that he appoint former deputy attorney general James Comey to succeed the disgraced and now resigned Alberto Gonzales as U.S. attorney general. (Comey, along with the bedridden John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, had resisted as unconstitutional a Bush wiretapping plan aggressively pushed by Gonzales, then White House counsel.)

Cohen addressed a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored banquet as the first of its Frontline Politics speakers this year and took part in a panel on crime sponsored by the Public Issues Forum. The congressman’s remarks at the Frontline dinner at the Ridgeway Center Hilton struck a new note, in that Cohen, a longtime critic of the Iraq war, acknowledged for the first time that residual U.S. troops might need to remain in the war-torn country for some time to come.

Cohen also scheduled a meeting, tentatively set for Tuesday of this week, with members of the Memphis Black Ministerial Association, one of whose leaders, the Rev. LaSimba Gray, has led an assault on Cohen’s support for a congressional Hate Crimes Bill.

There are several anomalies associated with the ministers’ protest — among them, that Cohen’s predecessor, former congressman Harold Ford Jr., had consistently supported such legislation without drawing criticism from the association.

Pointing out further inconsistencies this week was an association member, the Rev. Ralph White, who originally expressed solidarity with the protest but later satisfied himself it was based on misconceptions. Said White: “I’ve read the bill, and I’m satisfied that it does not restrain a minister from expressing opposition to homosexual conduct or anything else that might be offensive to his conscience or Christian doctrine. The language of the bill specifically guarantees such freedom of speech.”

Turning the attack back on its maker, White said, “What LaSimba Gray has to answer to is whether he is consciously trying to aid the congressional campaign of Nikki Tinker. Nobody seems to be wondering what her attitude toward the Hate Crimes Bill is.”

Actually, many people have so wondered, but a Washington, D.C., spokesman for the elusive Tinker, a 2006 Cohen opponent who has already filed to run a reprise of last year’s congressional race, has publicly said she will, at least temporarily, distance herself from discussion of such issues — as she did at an equivalent period of last year’s race. White, who also sought the 9th District seat last year, is holding open his options for another run of his own.

• Senator Alexander, just back from an extended fact-finding trip to Iraq in tandem with Tennessee Senate colleague Bob Corker, seems, like Cohen, to have moderated his stand on Iraq somewhat. Alexander continues to push for a bipartisan resolution, co-authorized with Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar, based on the findings of the Iraq Study Group and calling for an end to U.S. combat operations.

But the senator indicated in Memphis last week that he had been impressed by progress made by the ongoing U.S. troop “surge” in Anbar Province and other points and, pending a scheduled report to Congress next month by General David Petraeus, was keeping an open mind on continued troop commitments in Iraq.

• A casualty of County Commission voting Monday was Susan Adler Thorp, a former Commercial Appeal columnist and consultant who had been serving as public relations adviser to Juvenile Court judge Curtis Person but whose position ended up being unfunded. Somewhat later, a commission majority would authorize equivalent sums for a new “outreach” position, yet to be filled.

• The 2007 recipient of the Tigrett Award, funded by FedEx founder Fred Smith in honor of the late John Tigrett, will be former U.S. senator Howard Baker, it was announced last week. The award will be presented by the West Tennessee Healthcare Foundation at a gala later this year.

• Next week: a systematic look at this year’s City Council races.

Him Again

Richard Fields was back on the attack, battling his foes by means of publicly circulated letters.

To be sure, one of the epistles was written not by Fields but by Lambert McDaniel, an imprisoned ex-club owner, to Gwen Smith, the point person in Mayor Willie Herenton‘s accusations concerning a lurid blackmail plot against him orchestrated by lawyer Fields and other alleged “snakes.” In the letter, McDaniel, who was incarcerated on a drug charge, refers to Smith by pet names and advises her to stay in touch with “the Mexicans” — presumably drug connections.
What relevance the letter has to Herenton’s charges against Fields — who, according to the mayor, urged Smith to seduce and entrap the mayor — is uncertain. Clearly, it does milady’s reputation, already sullied, no good. But, by association, it wouldn’t seem to entitle Fields — or Nick Clark, his acknowledged confederate in the purported topless-club investigation — to any merit badges, either.

Fields is a textbook illustration of the adjective “unabashed,” however. Confirming reports that the lawyer’s own poison pen had been unsheathed for yet another epistolary crusade, Shelby County commissioner Sidney Chism denounced Fields in the commission’s public session Monday, during a debate on whether to assign Head Start children to the non-profit Porter-Leath Children’s Center.

In one of Fields’ widely circulated broadsides, Chism, a child-care provider himself, was taken to task for his initial opposition to the Porter-Leath arrangement and was told, among other things, he should be “ashamed” of himself.

Chism’s response was scornful. Citing a variety of allegations against Fields that have been insistently put forth by blogger Thaddeus Matthews, Chism challenged Fields’ bona fides, saying that, if all that was said about Fields was true, “he shouldn’t be anywhere around children, anyhow.”

Whatever the accuracy of the charges and counter-charges swirling about Fields, there was little doubt about one thing: With an election happening, the odds were better than even that there will be, in some guise or another, a Richard Fields ballot this year, as there was in each of the last two local election cycles. If so, would this be good or bad for Fields’ endorsees? This, too, remains to be seen.