Before this issue hits the birdcage, a new mayor of Memphis will be
sworn in, and other matters will find their place on the front burner.
Let’s get ready to play catch-up:
• On the same day that Memphis voters picked their mayor, a
sliver of East Memphians joined voters in Cordova and Germantown in
formally confirming a pair of nominees to run for the now vacant state
Senate District 31 seat.
That’s the seat that used to be held by Republican Paul
Stanley, who seems to have done an advance run-through of a plot
line involving Late Show host David Letterman: Sometime
boyfriend of subject’s paramour, a female subordinate, tries blackmail,
picks up bogus payoff check, and gets stung by law enforcement.
The difference was in the outcome: Stanley was chased off his set,
while Letterman happily remains on his. What’s the difference, you ask?
Well, Letterman wasn’t elected on a family-values platform. And he has
better gag writers.
In any case, Republican Brian Kelsey and Democrat Adrienne
Pakis-Gillon, both of whom were unopposed in their primaries, will
square off in the December 1st general election.
• Earlier this month, Governor Phil Bredesen did the
expected thing, issuing a writ for a special election to fill the seat
of Kelsey, who resigned his District 83 seat so as to facilitate the
election of a like-minded Republican before the advent of a new
legislative session in January.
The Republican and Democratic primaries for the vacated House seat
will be held on December 1st, the same date as the general election for
the District 31 state Senate seat. A general election will follow on
January 12th, one day before the 2010 session of the General Assembly
formally begins.
Filing deadline for the District 83 seat is Thursday, October 22nd,
with the withdrawal deadline to fall a week later, at noon on October
29th. No Democratic candidates have announced firm candidacies, but two
Republicans have — both previously unsuccessful candidates for
public office.
The GOP hopefuls (one of whom must win the primary — and
probably the GOP-leaning seat) are Mark White and John
Pellicciotti.
White, a businessman whose company sells home theater cable and
audio-visual products, was a candidate for the District 83 seat in
2004, the year Kelsey won it. He was also the Republican nominee for
the 9th District congressional seat in 2006.
Pellicciotti, who works in high-tech sales, made two previous
unsuccessful races against incumbent Democrat Mike Kernell in
District 93, an all-Memphis district which adjoins the more suburban
District 83 to the west.
Reportedly there is a move among Democrats to promote Shelby County
commissioner Steve Mulroy as a candidate in District 83, which
spreads across East Memphis and Germantown. Independent John
Andreucetti has filed a petition to run for the seat.
• Ah, and who will be Shelby County mayor after A C Wharton
resigns to become city mayor? In the short run — say, for the 45
days called for in the commission’s freshly (2008) minted charter
— it will be current commission chair Joyce Avery, a
conscientious conservative who has concerns in matters of education and
public health.
After that 45-day period, an interim mayor would need to be
appointed, pending the outcome of the regular 2010 countywide election
cycle. For all her occasional ecumenism, Avery’s GOP status would
likely prevent her from being named interim mayor.
At this point, the main candidates to become interim mayor are both
commission members: J.W. Gibson, who has said that he wants the
job, and Joe Ford, who also wants it but hasn’t said so as
explicitly. Both Gibson and Ford are Democrats.
Two other commissioners — Democrat Mulroy and Republican
George Flinn — are known to be available as possible
compromise choices in the event that neither Gibson nor Ford can garner
the votes of 7 of the 13 commissioners. As is the case with Avery (who,
as acting mayor, will be a nonvoter on the interim position), Flinn’s
Republican status will presumably have a hard time cadging votes out of
a body, which, these days, is lopsidedly Democratic, by a margin of 8
to 5.
Gibson was not one of the four commissioners who nominated
themselves as prospects for the newly named Metro Commission to explore
consolidated government. (The four were Democrats Mulroy and Sidney
Chism and Republicans Mike Ritz and Mike Carpenter.)
But he was the only one of Wharton’s 10 nominees, all approved by the
county commission on Monday, to pick up nay votes, a distinction he
owes entirely to his ambitions to serve as interim mayor.
Only two votes were recorded against Gibson at Monday’s commission
meeting. They came from Chism and Republican Wyatt Bunker.
(Absentee Ritz would have been a third vote against him.) Publicly, the
nay-sayers based their reluctance on the principle that, as they put it
in committee last week, no pubic officeholders should serve on the
Metro Commission.
One concession wrung from Gibson last week was his declaration that,
if selected as interim mayor, he would resign his membership on the
Metro Commission.
The real issue, however, may have involved complicated prior
tradeoffs and commitments whereby Chism, Bunker, and Ritz were all
committed to Ford’s interim-mayor candidacy.
So far the candidate list for the regular countywide election for
county mayor in 2010 seems limited to two Democrats: county
commissioner Deidre Malone and Bartlett banker Harold
Byrd.
• And, lest we forget, there’s a governor’s race on. Jim
Kyle, the Democrats’ state Senate leader, and Bill Gibbons,
district attorney general for Shelby County, are the two Memphians
running.
Kyle’s rivals are state senator Roy Herron of Dresden;
businessman Mike McWherter of Jackson; former state House
majority leader Kim McMillan of Clarksville; and Nashville
industrialist Ward Cammack.
Gibbons’ primary opponents are Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam,
former Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp, and state Senate
Speaker and Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey.
Gibbons, who at this point trails his three GOP rivals in
fund-raising, was scheduled to hold a headquarters opening on
Wednesday.
• For a mayoral campaign whose outcome was reasonably certain
long before the campaign even got started, the race ending this week
contained its share of bitter charges and verbal bomb-throwing. Much of
that was borne by frontrunner Wharton.
Toward the end of things, especially, Wharton’s frustrated opponents
ritually hurled invective at him for what was essentially distilled by
one and all as the county mayor’s “disrespectful” attitude toward
public forums and debates.
To be sure, Wharton restricted his participation in these affairs
and made it clear with the very first one, a televised debate in late
August on WMC-TV that he would prefer to attach conditions. Some of
that was doubtless good-faith objection to what Wharton saw here and
there as an overly free-handed invitation to participants. Some of it,
too, was undoubtedly a frontrunner’s traditional reluctance to give his
challengers too much of an opportunity to play catch-up (or do target
practice on him).
Whatever the case, A C bit the bullet and committed to two crucial
public debates in the campaign’s waning days — one sponsored by
the Memphis Rotary Club at Rhodes College last Tuesday and another held
on election eve by WREG-TV.
An unusual criticism of the frontrunner came late in the game from
candidate Jerry Lawler, who attacked Wharton for the very fact
of announcing his dual endorsement by two different groups of
policemen, the Memphis Police Association and the Afro-American Police
Association.
“Why should we be encouraging separate racial organizations?” the
wrestler and commentator said. “Why do we even need an ‘Afro-American’
organization?”
Asked his reaction to Lawler’s statements after receiving the police
association endorsements at his Eastgate headquarters, Wharton said,
“That’s just politics. It’s a dangerous way to divide us.”
The county mayor further described Lawler’s complaint as “an attempt
to deny reality,” maintaining that the members of the Afro-American
Police Association “had a hands-on feel” for crime in especially
challenged neighborhoods and needed the special recognition that their
organization provided.
Tyrone Currie, president of the Afro-American Police
Association, responded to Lawler’s criticism by saying, “It’s very
disingenuous to make a statement like that.” Currie pointed out that
young blacks in “disenfranchised” neighborhoods benefited from having
role models they could identify with and that his association gave them
a way of identifying with police officers and focusing respect for the
law.
Wharton generally gave as good as he got — hitting opponent
Charles Carpenter during the Rotary debate for association with
“bond daddies” during a disagreement over who was ultimately
responsible for the county’s debt problems.
But signs of reconciliation may be around the corner: Reportedly,
Jack Sammons, the former councilman who has been serving as CAO
for Mayor Pro Tem (and Wharton critic) Myron Lowery is under
consideration to continue in that capacity in a Wharton
administration.