by Jackson Baker
To echo an old joke: Aside
from that, Senator Ford, how'd you enjoy your weekend? Ironically enough,
the workplace will be serving this week as something of a refuge for State
Senator John Ford, whose apparent gun-wielding behavior at his East
Memphis residence on Saturday may finally have torn the envelope, landing
him in the most difficult -- and troubling -- controversy of a controversial
career.
Ford, who is chairman of the Senate General Welfare, Health, and Human Services committee, will be conducting hearings this week on the Department of Human Services component of Governor Don Sundquist's newly released austerity budget. And, despite the local outcry about Saturday's incident, the beleaguered Ford, a defender of public health expenditures, does not lack for defenders.
Two legislative colleagues, State Rep. Kathryn Bowers and House of Representatives Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry, professed solidarity with Ford at a press conference Monday in which they appeared with health-care activists concerned about the Sundquist administration's relegation of various potential TennCare recipients into managed-care organizations (MCOs). Essentially, they called for fairness and an open mind while the facts involving Ford are investigated.
And the health-care activists -- Mary Scott, Sheila Barton, and Georgia King -- all chorused their support for Ford. "He's among the most effective legislators in Nashville. We absolutely depend on him to defend the public interest," said King. "He's among the very best up there," said Barton.
The state capitol at Nashville would indeed seem to be the one place on Earth where Ford -- who in his 20-odd years of public life has been involved in a series of often-bizarre confrontations with the law -- both enjoys the most respect and is known to work hardest. And it is there that he retreated for a dose of relative normalcy after his weekend arrest on a complaint from MLGW workers that he threatened them with a loaded shotgun while they worked outside his house, creating an obstruction which seems to have angered the senator.
(After Ford was released on his own recognizance, his attorney, Walter L. Bailey Jr., received a court date of March 12th, at which the charges will be heard by General Sessions Criminal Court Judge Anthony Johnson. An irony that will not go unremarked is that Ford, before his defeat by Chris Turner last year, was General Sessions clerk.)
At the press conference, DeBerry did add a relatively sobering note. "We don't have all the details. If it ever got to the point that it [the incident] seriously got in the way of representing his people's interests, John Ford would surely resign," she said. But DeBerry added that she didn't think that point would be reached.
She confided, however, that a group of Ford's legislative colleagues from Shelby County and elsewhere would probably undertake to meet with the senator in Nashville this week to counsel him about his behavior. Such a meeting has never heretofore taken place, DeBerry noted.
Even some of Ford's most serious detractors in Nashville acknowledge his capability as a legislator. "The thing about him is -- he's so often right!" said a Legislative Plaza lobbyist last month on the heels of regaling a press-corps contingent with unflattering stories about Ford's penchant for embarrassing himself.
It was during a recent meeting of the Shelby County delegation in Nashville that Ford, having heatedly interrogated an administration official on the TennCare issue, got involved in an argument with GOP State Rep. Joe Kent, threatening at one point to "whip" Kent. (At last weekend's Lincoln Day dinner of the Shelby County Republican Party, where all the buzz was about news of Ford's arrest on the weapons-wielding charge, Kent, a former Memphis policeman, would say, "He'll need a gun if he wants to try to whip me.")
However things turn out for Ford at next month's hearing in Judge Johnson's court, and however many defenders might rally around him, even some of his staunchest local supporters conceded that the senator may have gone too far this time.
"He's turned erratic behavior into an art form," said one such, Shelby County Democratic Party vice chairman David Cocke, and that had the sound of a fairly sizeable understatement.
n At Saturday night's Lincoln Day dinner at the Adam's Mark, Gov. Sundquist had a somewhat defensive reaction to a variety of recent criticisms. About critics of his TennCare revisions, Sundquist said, "They did the same thing to Gov. [Ned Ray] McWherter when he created TennCare. It's tough the first year." And he noted that 95 percent of the state's citizens would soon be covered by health insurance, "putting Tennessee first in the nation."
Of Nashville State Rep. Gary Odom's recent charges that Sundquist had overused state aircraft, the governor wondered aloud why Odom, "who wakes up in Nashville and goes to work in Nashville," needed to draw a per diem from the state. And he countered criticism from another Nashville-area state representative, Mike Williams of Franklin, that he had cut funding for state prisons by saying, "All I cut was some of the teachers that were being provided prisoners. They had a better student-teacher ratio than most of our public schools!"
Responding in general to criticism from legislative Democrats, the governor allowed, "It's like Winston Churchill said: There's no greater satisfaction in life than being shot at without results."
There was an unmistakeable effort to mount a bipartisan, majoritarian appeal at the Lincoln Day affair, from the keynote remarks of U.S. Senator Bill Frist on down. Frist noted the current Republican majorities in Congress and among the nation's governors and said, "It wasn't true before, but it is now. We are the majority party."
And Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, who includes several prominent Democrats among the potential supporters of his expected 1998 reelection bid, began his remarks by saying, "I'm proud to be speaking to a thousand Republicans, right-thinking Democrats, and independents." (Sundquist would follow that up by saying of Rout, "He'll be reelected by Republicans and Democrats and independents.")
The dinner drew a large turnout of Shelby County judges, mindful that they will be facing reelection in 1998, in which year they will be under pressure to declare party affiliation. Among those attending jurists still juggling their independent status were Criminal Court Judge Carolyn Blackett and Circuit Court Judges Tim Dwyer, Robert L. (Butch) Childers, and General Sessions Judge Louis Montesi.