Reason to Believe In a few brief remarks, Ford Jr. may have set the stage for a Senate race in 2000. by Jackson Baker NASHVILLE -- The chief speaker at Friday night's annual state Jackson Day dinner for Tennessee Democrats was James Carville, and the pugnacious partisan polemicist did his usual credible job -- among other things, keeping in circulation that old saw about how he looked to someone as though he had been sired out of the love scene in Deliverance. When Carville and his wife and ideological opposite Mary Matalin appeared in Memphis three years ago, she told it as her own observation. Carville attributed it Friday night to Milos Forman, who directed him in The People vs. Larry Flynt. In both cases it worked as a nice venture in self-deprecation. Statewide, the Democrats have had much to deprecate themselves about in recent years -- having lost the governorship and both U.S. Senate seats to the Republicans in 1994 and having failed to mount a serious challenge to regain any of these positions since. That may all change next year if U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis makes the Senate race against incumbent Republican Bill Frist, which so many Democrats, notably including state party chairman Doug Horne, are urging upon him. (Memphis' other aspirant for the Senate, businessman John Lowery, let it be known late last week that, faced with the task of expanding the operations of his church-based economic cooperative onto the Internet and preparing to go public, he would not seek the Senate seat in 2000). Expectations for Ford were such that his brief speech was more closely attended than was Carville's. Kept short, it was essentially an exhortatory series of remarks on the theme of "It's our time, Democrats!" and it made believers of many present. Beforehand, one venerable legislative lion (nameless here because he spoke confidentially) suggested that the congressman had best stay away from an encounter with Frist on the ground that "he ought not fall." And former party chairman Will Cheek of Nashville wondered if what he cryptically called "the Memphis experience" would actually transport well to other parts of the state. "Even back in 1986, when I wanted [then Shelby County Mayor Bill] Morris to run, I was worried about that," said Cheek. (Morris, who would run afoul of some Nashville Democrats who did their best to sabotage his campaign, did run for governor later in 1994.) In the event, Ford's brief and energetic remarks were well-received, especially when he took on Frist directly for his efforts against the Clinton administration's version of a patients' bill of rights. "A hell of a speech," Horne said proudly, as the crowd rose in a standing O. Afterward, most commentary in the Opryland ballroom was to the effect that Ford should indeed run against Frist. One such testifier was Charlie Dyer, a former Ford aide who has moved to Nashville to oversee his own consulting business. "He doesn't need to be in that corral that long, anyhow," said Dyer of Ford's tenure in the House of Representatives. "He's the kind that can go as high as he wants to, but he needs to follow his own instincts. And I think he has a window of opportunity." As Dyer noted, young Ford's quick rise to statewide and national prominence was of the sort one normally identifies with show-business figures, not with politicians of the time-serving sort. Someone noted to Ford after his remarks that almost all current office-holders -- ranging from President Bill Clinton to Senators Fred Thompson and Frist himself -- had been considered long-odds underdogs before making their races. Maybe, it was suggested, one has to be a gambler to serve in major office. "I agree," said the congressman, and perhaps that's a clue of sorts. He had, in any case, given the Democratic crowd at the Opryland hotel Friday some reason to believe. * As Thursday's withdrawal deadline for mayoral and other municipal candidates neared this week, Shep Wilbun and his longtime political associates in their North Memphis-based political organization had a decision to make. Two decisions, really: One was whether current Shelby County Commission chairman Wilbun, who more or less entered the mayor's race week before last on his own, without the group's formal sanction, would remain in it. The other decision was the matter of which mayoral candidate would be supported by the group -- which consists of state Representatives Larry Miller, Ulysses Jones, and Joe Towns and Memphis city councilmen Rickey Peete and Joe Brown. "Whatever we do, we hope to do as a unit," said Miller after a meeting of the group at the office of Brown's janitorial business Monday night. He promised word by the end of the week, hopefully by Thursday. Surprisingly enough, since some -- perhaps most -- members of the group have historically kept their distance from the Ford political organization (to which they consider themselves an alternative of sorts), mayoral candidate Joe Ford has not been eliminated as a possible endorsee. The other two in the running for the group's endorsement are Wilbun, of course, and incumbent Mayor Willie Herenton. At Monday night's meeting, Wilbun presented the results of a home-grown poll that showed his candidacy to be viable, but this remains to be evaluated by the group, as do various other polls by other candidates. Clearly, the burden of proof seemed to rest on Wilbun, Miller indicated. And, if he ends up jumping or being pushed out of the race, the beneficiary still most likely will be Herenton. A Small Moment, Remembered The photograph above chronicles a moment in July 1988 that struck me as a watershed even then -- certainly a personal one, since what the snapshot shows is me in the act of encountering John F. Kennedy Jr. at a gathering of the Hollywood "brat pack" on the penthouse floor of an Atlanta hotel. But the moment had a larger significance, too, going way beyond any ego trip of mine. JFK Jr. had, after all, just made his maiden speech before a nationwide audience, extolling his late father, President Kennedy, before the Democratic convention audience at Atlanta's now-demolished Omni auditorium. And when later on I met the younger Kennedy, then 28, at this after-hours party attended by the likes of Rob Lowe, Justine Bateman, Judd Nelson, and Rebecca DeMornay, all my previous conceptions of who he was had to be revised. As was (and is) the case with so many others, my previous conception of JFK Jr. was of the little round-headed blondish towhead who had broken everybody's heart by pausing to salute the passing casket of his slain father on a gray and grim day in November 1963. One got news of "John-John," as the nation, perhaps incorrectly, insisted on calling him, sporadically over the intervening years, but it had always seemed somehow that his mother, the protective Jackie, had kept him (and his sister Caroline) in virtual seclusion from the wicked, treacherous world. It was for this very purpose, we would read here and there, that she had married the ungainly but supremely wealthy Aristotle Onassis -- so that she and her children could withdraw to the safety of the shipping magnate's remote and self-sufficient Greek island. What I expected from John F. Kennedy Jr., mingling with those jet-set movie stars on that Atlanta disco floor in 1988, was a remote, mysterious, withdrawn figure. What I got was an outgoing, engaging, utterly uncomplicated, thoughtful, and even somewhat chatty person. He was in T-shirt and blue jeans, the kind of garb most of the surrounding brat-packers were assuming that evening. (It should be said that I was at the party thanks to an advance tip from Memphis Democrat Charles Burson, shortly to become Tennessee attorney general and, after that, chief legal adviser to Vice President Al Gore.) Gore, then a U.S. Senator who had run an unsuccessful presidential race that year, had been tipped by Burson, too, and he was there with his wife Tipper. They, like me, were somewhat overdressed. With the exception of one or two of the party-goers who distrusted the senator's politics as being potentially too conservative (surprising as that might be to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, circa 1999), the Gores were treated warmly. I had no complaint, either. After an hour's worth of conversation with DeMornay, I ended up with her phone number -- a circumstance that gave me great satisfaction for years until I finally realized that the conditions under which I might actually use it were remote or nonexistent. (I mean, I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid. Or vice versa.) There was no question that for me the dominant figure at the affair was JFK Jr. -- carefree, relaxed, clearly his own man, and utterly unselfconscious and unaffected. What he and I talked about (briefly, I must admit) I have long since forgotten. It was the small-talk equivalent of the kind of grazing food -- substantial without being heavy -- which the party's buffet tables were littered with. He was definitely not, in the familiar idiom of today, stiff. He was, in short, a somewhat junior version of the figure which the whole nation finally got to know, especially when he reached that stage of his career in recent years when he created George magazine and flowered as a personable figure on the Manhattan scene, as a publisher, and -- it would seem -- as a husband and potential father. He was not a "Kennedy." He was John. For all the speculation that he would follow his father and various uncles and cousins into electoral politics, he seemed perfectly content to be just who he was -- one of those rare types who aren't always straining hard to become something or someone else. That I was able to get this whiff of so natural and elegant -- but democratic -- a personality at the very moment he chose to come out in public is something for which I am grateful. It is also one of the reasons why, like almost everybody else, I am grieving this week. -- J.B.