by Jackson BakerFord Jr. Makes His Mark
Yates' selection as new party chairman underscores the congressman's dominance.
or somewhat
more than a year, FedEx editor Gale Jones Carson had been campaigning
hard for the chairmanship of the Shelby County Democratic Party -- appearing
here and there and doing this or that kind of highly visible yeoman work.
She organized conferences, she became state Democratic Party secretary,
she served as a vice chair of the local party.
Carson's support was mainly black, but she had a smattering of white endorsements, too.
Until
last Saturday, the day of the local Democrats' biennial convention, Carson
was in fact the only declared candidate for chairman.
She lost.
The bottom line -- as most objective observers were well aware all along -- was that Carson lacked support where it counted, among the party regulars clustered around the clan of outgoing chairman Bill Farris and, even more significantly, around the persons of former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford and the party's rapidly rising star, current U.S. Rep Harold Ford Jr. Carson had conspicuously failed to support the younger Ford's congressional candidacy in 1996.
The Democrats' new chairman, elected at Saturday's convention at East High School, is none other than Mark Yates, the first-term congressman's local chief of staff. The voting wasn't even close. Yates -- whose candidacy was decided on in the middle of last week and was communicated by a letter from Rep. Ford to the 294 convention delegates, won by a two-to-one majority of the new 56-member executive committee, which was also elected Saturday.
Although Yates immediately issued a call for party unity (ironically echoing Carson's own campaign theme), the defeated candidate and many of her chief supporters professed themselves unreconciled.
"You've basically got somebody who hasn't been involved in party affairs, who comes in here at the last minute and expects to take over. I can't accept that," said Carson, and sentiments like that were also expressed by aides Deidre Malone and Jerry Hall, among others. Some Carson supporters alleged that Rep. Ford had violated the law -- or, at least, political propriety -- by sending out his endorsement letter on stationery specifying his congressional status. ("It was his personal stationery, it wasn't franked [i.e., taxpayer-funded], and we checked it out first with the House Ethics Committee," Yates responded.)
For their part, opponents of Carson had accused her -- or some of her supporters, at least -- of having played the race card against such potential Ford-backed opponents as lawyer David Cocke. In any case, the Ford organization had started looking for African-American alternatives like Yates.
Although he has kept a low political profile in recent years, the 31-year-old Yates, a former First Tennessee Bank executive, was an all-everything type at Central High School in the early '80s, active in student government and captain of the CHS football team. He is remembered as having been a bridge between white and black Centralites -- politically astute enough, for example, to have worked hard one summer to darken his tan during a period of African-American militancy at the school.
Yates' easy victory Saturday was further confirmation of the rising influence of Rep. Ford, a potential future Senate candidate who is beginning to eclipse his proud papa, the former congressman, locally and is also achieving a degree of national prominence -- having appeared recently at a Florida political forum that otherwise included only Democratic presidential aspirants.
The first-term congressman also turned up on Friday's installment of Politically Incorrect on ABC-TV, debating such issues as the separation of church and state.
* Speaking of which, conservative religious activist Marilyn Loeffel, who was the center of a legislative firefight as Governor Don Sundquist's unsuccessful nominee for the state Board of Education last spring, confesses that she's glad now that she got turned down by the General Assembly.
Currently a candidate for the County Commission seat being vacated by the GOP's Pete Sisson, Loeffel said at a fund-raiser at Colonial Country Club last week that she would probably have been ineffective as a conservative on what she saw as a liberal-dominated education board.
But the prolonged controversy aroused by her candidacy, which incurred determined opposition from the Tennessee Education Association and a variety of other groups, had the side effect of giving Loeffel an enduring name recognition that helps significantly in her current race, she now acknowledges.
Other Republicans now running in the GOP-dominated mixed urban-suburban district are marketing executive Paul Stanley and businessman Scott McCormick.
* 4th District U.S. Rep. Van Hilleary (R-Spring City), one of the congressional Republicans who attempted a dramatic -- but ultimately unsuccessful -- coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich last year, sounded like an unreconstructed rebel when he came to Memphis Saturday.
In town to boost the Shelby County Young Republicans at a fund-raiser at Kirby Farms, Hilleary made it clear he was still unreconciled to Gingrich's leadership style. "If you've had trouble figuring out what the Republican congressional agenda has been, I don't know what it's been, either," the two-term Middle Tennessee congressman said, arguing that President Clinton and the congressional Democrats had, time after time, been able to steal away Republican issues such as welfare reform and a balanced budget.
"The president has outmaneuvered us. But the leadership went into a fetal position. It's hard to lead from a fetal position," said Hilleary, who cited as the newest presidential turnabout Clinton's decision to concur in restrictions on the Internal Revenue Service.
The growing consensus for an IRS shakeup concerned Hilleary for a tactical reason as well. "I'd just as soon stretch out the tax debate until next year as resolve everything now," he said, clearly hoping that tax reform might serve the Republicans as an issue in the 1998 elections.
Looking ahead to the year 2000, Hilleary lamented the decline of the so-called Contract with America agenda of 1994 and called for a "new contract" to unify the ideological efforts of the GOP's congressional candidates and its next presidential standard-bearer.
* State Sen. Steve Cohen is not only the sole Democrat remaining to have discussed a gubernatorial race, he also is thinking of a bid for Shelby County mayor.
After Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton and Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout had headed the first meeting of a joint city/county negotiating panel at the Convention Center Monday, county attorney Donnie Wilson privately unveiled the mechanism of a consolidation proposal to be presented to the County Commission meeting next Monday.
Acting at the request of Commissioner Pete Sisson, Wilson had reviewed state laws for two different consolidation options, one allowing for metropolitan government, another permitting a "unified government" of separate municipalities. Wilson indicated the latter option was the more viable.
It provides for the creation of a charter commission either by proclamation of the county mayor or resolution by the county commission, which must offer majority approval in either case. Mayors Herenton and Rout would have eight appointees each to the charter commission, and the mayor of each additional Shelby County city could appoint a member. The recommendations of the charter commission would at some point be submitted to the county's governmental components for voter approval.
Mayor Rout indicated Monday that such a process -- if approved at each stage and expedited -- might take as long as a year.
Even as former Memphis police director Melvin Burgess geared up his candidacy for Shelby County Sheriff with a well-attended fund-raiser at the Crescent Club last week, his chances were about to take a possible downward drip.
Memphis city councilman E.C. Jones, who for some time had been meditating on a sheriff's race himself -- probably as an independent -- has decided instead to run for county register as a Republican and will announce that fact this week.
That gave well-funded incumbent Sheriff A.C. Gilless a likely one-on-one next year against Burgess, with the demographics likely to favor Gilless, a white who intends to run as a Republican, against Burgess, an African American who'll seek the Democratic nod.
Had Jones -- who has a stout working-class constituency in the Frayser-Raleigh area -- stayed in as an independent candidate, he would very likely have cut into Gilless' countywide white vote, greatly enhancing Burgess' chances of wedging through to victory.
Reportedly, Jones -- who had long been courted by both Democrats and Republicans to make various races -- has been promised good support from within the local GOP establishment for his register's bid. Incumbent Guy Bates, who won the Republican nomination in 1994, has not yet declared his intentions, but two other Republicans -- Lane Provine, an aide to County Trustee Bob Patterson, and firefighter Tom Watson -- are considered candidates for the register's job.