by Jackson Baker
ell: Give them credit. The Shelby County Republican Party gives
good show.
Foiled in their earlier efforts to hold a judicial primary this year, the party laid claim to its legal pounds of flesh the old-fashioned way on Saturday – via endorsements. In making its cuts, the GOP superficially seemed to risk some blood-letting in party ranks. But a closer look reveals the carnage to be mainly a matter of greasepaint and ketchup.
Meeting at the Pickering Community Center in old Germantown – as good a symbolic center of Shelby County Republicanism as any – the party’s steering committee considered the prior work of two subcommittees, one concerned with candidate recruitment, the other with judicial selection per se. In each of several disputed instances, the latter committee’s choices were ratified.
There were 38 anointments made in all (one Circuit Court position went unspoken for – the District 4 seat held by Judge James Swearengen, who, unlike most other presumed Democrats, deigned not to seek the GOP nod).
Some decisions – like picking assistant D.A. Terry Harris over the exotic Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown – were no-brainers; others – like the choice of incumbent Criminal Court Judge Tony Johnson over challenger Tim Beacham – reflected the Shelby GOP’s inner contradictions.
Harris is a member of the inner circle of District Attorney General Bill Gibbons, long a fair-haired boy in local GOP circles. Brown has been a burr in the D.A.’s saddle, so outspoken a partisan for conspiracy theories in the affair of the late James Earl Ray that the State Court of Criminal Appeals felt obliged to remove that case from Brown’s jurisdiction.
By contrast, Beacham – another local prosecutor and an acknowledged Republican – is a former hero cop, confined to a wheelchair after being gunned down by a perp years ago; the affable Johnson has been politically neutral, his main appeal to the steering committee being that he, along with a generous number of other black incumbents, were on an advance “safety” list – tacitly agreed upon by ranking Republicans – that had been suggested by County Commission administrative assistant Calvin Williams, one of the GOP’s few black steering committee members. (Other black incumbents had been favored by subtle nods of support from Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout.)
The GOP long ago became the party of choice for white Shelby Countians, but Republican officials – undoubtedly sensitive to the bare numerical majority of whites in the county – have long professed a desire to reach out to African Americans.
Hence the highly public even-handedness of Saturday’s choices. Even some black aspirants who didn’t make that list may qualify for consolation prizes of another kind. One such is Otis Higgs, the former Criminal Court Judge, interim sheriff, and frequent mayoral candidate (both city and county versions) who lost out for a GOP endorsement to yet another prosecutor, Eddie Peterson.
Higgs has in the past been a high-profile Democrat, and that hurt him. But word is that prominent Republicans are among those quietly pushing him as a good bet to succeed the late Joe Jones on the State Court of Criminal Appeals. (The state Judicial Nominating Commission is accepting applications for the position until June 10th and will forward three names for Governor Sundquist’s consideration by June 29th.)
In a curious sense, the party’s inability to hold its intended primary – the result of a 1997 General Assembly act, subsequently upheld by the courts, which empowered the County Commission to nullify judicial primaries in Shelby County – may have worked to the GOP’s advantage.
A primary – dependent on the unfiltered voting instincts of the county’s Republican rank and file – might well have yielded an all-white slate of judicial candidates. The endorsement process allows the party to at least seem diversity-minded, although it’s a fairly safe bet that color will be at least an unconscious determinant for Republican voters in the August general election. (It clearly was in the party’s 1994 primary, when Williams – though endorsed by virtually all Republican movers and shakers – finished far behind Democratic convert Jimmy Moore in the race for Circuit Court Clerk.)
Racial and other exigencies accounted for some hurt – and hard – feelings at Saturday’s endorsement meeting, but there was a method to the madness. Party chairman David Kustoff and his judicial selection chief, Alan Crone, long ago hit upon the expedient of issuing the party’s endorsements five days before the actual deadline for judicial filing this Thursday.
In practice, this means that the losers on Saturday have almost a week to decide whether they want to shift their bid to another division, maybe even another court – where the lack of an official party endorsement won’t hurt them as much.
What could happen is that a few of Saturday’s runner-ups might end up opposing – or even beating – some of Saturday’s nominal winners.
Despite convincing protestations of good faith from GOP chairman Kustoff and others, a cynical observers might even consider Saturday’s endorsement ritual a sleight-of-hand that preserves appearances while it allows the old political/racial verities to work in an altogether opposite direction. In point of fact, the August balloting, pumped up on the GOP side by elections for a county school board, could mean trouble for one or two black incumbents.
But – for the record, anyhow – the Republican hierarchy can show clean hands. If anybody gets publicly bloodied, it’s likely to be the Democrats, who have deigned not to endorse judicial candidates as such and who, as a consequence, have witnessed some key party members attaching themselves to nominally Republican candidates.
In particular, the presence in Harris’ camp of John Farris, a former county Democratic chairman, has drawn an angry rebuke from the local Teamsters, predominantly both black and Democratic. Farris has pointed out that, for judicial candidates, the August elections are officially nonpartisan, but in practice that technical reality could still turn out to be little more than a limb for him and other Democrats to get stranded on.
General Sessions Judge Charles Gallagher, in Division 11, has
to be regarded as an endangered species. He faces Mischelle Alexander-Best,
who will have much black and Democratic support, while another
opponent, Jim Robinson, got the GOP endorsement.
The Mayor Meets and Greets
At first, it seemed like Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton appeared to be looking to improve his access to the media. His spokeswoman, Carey Hoffman, originally compared a proposed reception for members of the local Fourth Estate to how Bill Clinton would regularly meet the press when he was governor of Arkansas.
But last week’s reception (Hoffman’s original idea) at the River Terrace Yacht Club did not signal a new era of better access to Herenton, nor did it signal a new relationship between the media and city government. Herenton basically spoke about how great Memphis city government is and about how important it is to have a good relationship with the media.
Then he had all his division directors introduce themselves, who then praised their boss and made a brief comment about their relationship with the media.
“It appears when y’all can’t find anything else y’all come over to the police department,” Police Director Walter Winfrey joked. Chief Administrative Officer Rick Masson lightly admonished the local media for not always portraying Herenton fairly.
The reception apparently didn’t have the immediate impact the
Herenton administration had hoped, because Hoffman is now saying
she doesn’t think there will be a repeat event anytime soon. “Right
now, I’m thinking every other year,” she says.
PHOTO BY JACKSON BAKER
Outgoing General Sessions Judge Sam Thompson (left) discuses old
times with Barksdale Restaurant owner Jerry Stamson, who holds
a picture of Thompson with his former employer, Elvis Presley.
– Phil Campbell
Heading Off Into the Sunset
One of the most intensely contested races on the judicial ballot, come August 6th, will be the race for the open seat in General Sessions Civil Divison 6. Until recently no newcomers need have bothered to apply, but incumbent Sam Thompson – first elected eight years ago and considered a shoo-in for reelection – began passing the word some weeks ago that he’d had enough.
Ironically, the catalyst for that decision was a conversation Thompson had with this writer backaways, at a mammoth fund-raiser put on for another General Sessions incumbent, Tim Dwyer. Impressed by Dwyer’s turnout, Thompson began to muse about his own potential first fund-raising event.
What he talked out loud about doing was importing for the hypothetical affair some of the show-business talent that he, a former bodyguard for the late Elvis Presley, and his sister Linda Thompson, the singer’s former girlfriend, might be able to draw upon.
“The more I thought about it, though, and the more I talked it over with my brother-in-law [entertainment figure David Foster], the more I got into the idea of show business for its own sake. After all, I knew a lot of people in the business.”
The upshot was that Thompson – a former sheriff’s deputy who rejoined the department after Elvis’ death and worked his way through law school, going part-time – picked up an offer from Atlantic Records/Time-Warner to serve as legal adviser to the mother corporation’s new record label, called 143. And, abruptly, he decided to change his venue.
So, when the current judicial session ends on August 31st, Thompson
will head off westward into the sunset – to Los Angeles’ legendary
Sunset Boulevard, in fact, where, ironically enough, his office
will be across the street from that of Elvis’ ex-wife, Priscilla
Beaulieu Presley, currently the primary executor for the late
entertainer’s estate. – J.B.