by Jackson Baker
got here promptly
at 5:30. I was ordered to by Harold Ford Jr!"
That was Hardy Mays' opening quip Friday night when, as the official roastee at a fund-raiser for County Clerk Jayne Creson, the chief of staff for Governor Don Sundquist finally took the stage at the Al Chymia Shrine Center on Shelby Oaks.
"Of course, they laughed. They were Republicans!" was the sober response of Rep. Ford this week, when informed of the incident and the knowing chuckle that had spread through the roomful of Creson supporters.
It was a joke, however, that would have resonated virtually everywhere in Shelby County after a week in which the first-term congressman, in office for all of three months, had unexpectedly emerged as the ultimate in peremptory figures -- publicly chastising two chief executives and assigning them deadlines (or ultimata) in the course of demanding local funding to create 2,000 new summer jobs for disadvantaged youth.
Both
Memphis Mayor W.W. Herenton and Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout felt
the sting of Rep. Ford's rhetoric as he challenged them to contribute $1.6
million each from their respective budgets to match what he said was $3.2
million already committed to summer jobs by the federal government.
In that total, said Ford, were 1,500 jobs included by Herenton in a 4,000-job summer program announced by the city mayor last week at a press conference and publicized in a subsequent $15,000 media campaign. Herenton's total included 2,000 jobs attributed to the private sector and another 500 to be furnished by the city.
"But there's still no city money committed yet. Nor county money, either," the congressman maintained, and, after an inconclusive meeting with the two mayors on Friday, followed by more official responses from all three camps, Ford resolved to go over the heads of Herenton and Rout and challenged the city council and county commission to authorize summer job funds on their own. He also suggested that the two mayors' efforts needed federal monitoring.
It was -- figuratively and, in some ways, even literally -- a breathtaking performance, as the new congressman kept pushing the jobs agenda -- and shattering the normal protocols of intergovernmental relations in the process. Only three weeks ago, Ford had earned a standing ovation at a luncheon of the Rotary Club of Memphis after delivering oratory that was widely considered eloquent and statesmanlike by the club's generally conservative membership.
That was then, this is now -- and the comparisons being drawn in political circles are no longer to Pericles but almost exclusively to the congressman's often controversial and outspoken father and predecessor, former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford. Indeed, although the current congressman vehemently denied it, there was much speculation -- some of it emanating from his own political orbit -- that the senior Ford was calling the shots in his son's rapidly escalating showdown with the two mayors.
According to that premise, the congressman's confrontational strategy is really aimed at drawing the battle lines for an expected confrontation in the 1999 mayor's race between his father and Mayor Herenton. If the council should indeed respond to Ford by voting local funding for summer jobs (the commission would almost certainly not do so), Ford would have weakened Herenton politically while simultaneously putting him on the wrong side of a possibly galvanizing issue with the mayor's inner-city constituency.
Ford denies any such motive and insists that he merely wants both mayors, in the public interest, to match federal funding for jobs. He meanwhile keeps suggesting that Herenton's jobs program -- which he may have gotten advance word of and attempted to pre-empt -- employs cooked numbers.
Regardless of who is right on the summer job issue, it seemed likely that one result of the current controversy would be that more of them will somehow come about. But the political fallout will be enormous. Rout figures in the politics of the affair mainly as a foil. Clearly, the chief target of Rep. Ford's assault was Herenton, who may indeed end up in some way as damaged goods.
But the ultimate victim of the fracas may be the young congressman himself -- and the general benefit of the doubt previously accorded him by a public concerned that he could become an even more divisive political figure than his father ever was.
However long-term relationships of that sort develop, and whatever the merits of his present course, Harold Ford Jr.'s honeymoon period is clearly over.
* As a kind of backdrop to the current imbroglio involving Rep. Ford, some of the controversies of the 1996 9th District congressional campaign simmer on.
Former Rep. Ford, participating Friday in a University of Memphis panel on politics and the media, tucked tongue in cheek and uttered a mock chastisement of the media for being too credulous about what he said were "push polls" (i.e, over-optimistic forecasts) on the part of State Senator Steve Cohen, one of Ford Jr.'s Democratic primary antagonists. (Cohen has always defended the accuracy and good faith of his polling.)
The former congressman was reminded by an audience member that the Ford campaign itself had circulated a barrage of what turned out to be misleadingly pessimistic forecasts in the last day or two of the primary campaign. Word leaked out, for example, of a "poll" showing rapid closure of the gap between Ford Jr. and Cohen, and then congressman Ford gave background talks to reporters in which he said gravely, "We're in trouble. It's getting too close to call." As things turned out, the younger Ford won handily, with two-thirds of the vote.
Reminded of the tactic Friday, the senior Ford conceded with a grin that his son's campaign may have been forced to employ a little "misdirection." Actually, various Ford campaigns historically employed the tactic of underestimating their expected vote totals as a device (in the established political vernacular) to "drive the vote" and motivate the faithful.
For his part, Cohen this week had some new criticism of his former opponent. He said he was "shocked" that Rep. Ford had voted, along with the House majority, for a resolution praising Alabama Circuit Court Judge Roy S. Moore, who has been waging a legal defense of his right to post the biblical Ten Commandments in his courtroom.
"Ford Jr. not only voted against the Democratic leadership. He voted the other way from almost all black congressman and all the sitting representatives, including Jesse Jackson Jr. and Patrick Kennedy, who came into the district to campaign for him," said Cohen, who won national plaudits last year for his solitary vigil in the State Senate against a resolution advocating that Tennessee businesses post copies of the Commandments. Eventually, that resolution was shelved in the state House of Representatives after Gov. Don Sundquist also expressed coolness toward it.
"My vote speaks for itself. I'm in favor of the Ten Commandments," responded Ford to the criticism by Cohen, who framed the issue in terms of civil liberties and blurring the Constitutional distinctions between church and state.
* If Cordova's Marilyn Loeffel, nominated by Governor Sundquist to serve on the state Board of Education, does in fact end up on the nine-member panel, she will not have done so without negotiating an exceptional number of hurdles.
To almost everyone's surprise, including her own, Loeffel handily won the endorsement of the State Senate's Education Committee two weeks ago. Instead of the party-line vote expected by many, the former chairman of the conservative religious group FLARE laid claim to two Democrats -- Centerville's Pete Springer and Monterey's Tommy Burks -- to garner a victory in committee by a vote of 6 to 1. (There were two abstentions, Democrats Roscoe Dixon of Memphis and committee chairman Andy Womack of Murfreesboro; both had been heavily lobbied by opponents -- notably by members of the strongly anti-Loeffel Tennessee Education Association).
And this week, in a vote scheduled for Wednesday, she looked to be an easy winner when the whole Senate considers her nomination. Lt. Governor John Wilder of Somerville, the Senate's presiding officer and a key influence across party lines, was widely considered dubious about the nomination at first and expressed grave doubts to colleagues. But, even though he still held back from committing to Loeffel, Wilder was said to have been more impressed by her even-handedness in an appearance before the Education Committee than he expected to be.
So were various other Democrats, as they conceded privately. "She's milder than her issues are," explained one senator who declined to say whether he would vote No, along with most of his Democratic party-mates.
And Loeffel herself, in a local radio interview Monday, was almost cocky. "Go ahead and count me the winner in the Senate," she said. "The House is where I'll need some help."
Indeed she will.
Unlike the Senate -- shepherded by the politically ambidextrous Wilder and controlled only barely by the Democrats (18-15) -- the House is overwhelmingly Democratic (60-39) with a multi-tiered and highly partisan party leadership led by Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington. Moreover, Loeffel must pass through two committee hoops -- those of the new K-through-12 special committee and the Education Committee proper -- before getting a floor vote.
It remains to be seen whether an anti-Loeffel vote last week by Republican members of the Memphis school board affects the outcome. Indications so far (in the Senate anyhow) are that it hasn't.
The board consists of nine members, all serving nine-year staggered terms. Each is a gubernatorial nominee, formally nominated by legislative representatives from the state's nine congressional districts." Loeffel's nominators of record are State Senator Tom Leatherwood and State Representative Ed Haley. Loeffel is considered especially close to Leatherwood, but she herself has acknowledged lobbying Governor Sundquist himself for the nomination.
"It [the nomination] is a master stroke on Sundquist's part," says one Democratic senator. "I frankly don't think he cares whether she gets to serve on the board or not. But it's his way of saying to the Republican hard-right constituency that `I'm with you.' All the controversy helps him, it doesn't hurt him."
In addition to the Memphis school-board members, groups ranging from the local Public Issues Forum to the Tennessee Education Association actively oppose Loeffel's nomination.