Lessons From A "Special" Election

It was in the late Sixties when our dorm walls bore a poster: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.”

In those heady days of political activism, it was hard to imagine that the poster today should say: “Suppose they held an election and nobody came.”

Voter turnout numbers in Memphis have been tumbling for years, and even though special elections traditionally attract lower turnout, it’s hard to synchronize the pent-up call for change with the voter apathy seen in today’s election for Memphis mayor.

The total votes cast today just barely exceeded 100,000, compared to 165,397 votes cast in a turnout hailed as lackluster in the 2007 city mayor’s race.

Too Nice To Criticize

Perhaps, it was the inevitability of the victory by Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton as the new city mayor. In the end, no opponent could ever lay a glove on him, and while criticizing him as too nice to be mayor, the other candidates never came to grips with the reality that voters didn’t want to see such a nice person attacked.

It seemed lost on them that once you set him up as the nice guy in the race, it’s really hard to then jump on him without looking like a heavy. That’s why Carol Chumney’s apparent desperation in the election eve debate merely came off as shrill, just as Charles Carpenter’s earlier shots merely sounded snarky.

Voters simply brushed aside criticisms of an elected official with the highest approval ratings of any politician in the modern political history of Memphis.

Meanwhile, if there’s anybody who gained from the election – and it’s hard to see how any one really did – it’s probably Myron Lowery, who in the next 7 to 10 days will revert back to his post as chairman of a Memphis City Council divided down the middle in their opinions about him.

Down And Out

Despite that, the tone of the Lowery campaign and his determination to make the most of his few months as mayor pro tem gained him a measure of respect (at least among Caucasian voters). Among African-American voters, he could never recover from the damage done as the deciding vote with the white Council members on several controversial issues and the neverending saga of City Attorney Elbert Jefferson that dogged his time in the mayor’s office.

Meanwhile, Mr. Carpenter’s campaign began with high hopes. Some pundits even suggested that although his campaign might be a long-shot, he would prove to be a strong candidate and position himself strongly for next year’s county mayor’s election. Any dreams of future office evaporated with his failure to get into double digits – or more than half way to double digits.

The election also put a period on the political career of Ms. Chumney, former Council member and state legislator. It seemed impossible during the campaign for her to find her stride and her repeated, clumsy attempts to cast herself as a victim of a glass ceiling for women politicians never gained traction with even a significant percentage of women voters. Just two years ago, she received 57,196 votes for city mayor. Today, she got slightly more than 10,000.

School board member Kenneth Whalum was reminded of another sad fact of life about Memphis politics. You can excite the youth vote, but you just can’t get them out to the polls, and as a result, his 2% of the total vote was much less than the 5% he had polled only four days before the election.

Residual Effects

If there should have been anyone as happy as the Wharton family, it should have been Shelby County Board of Commissioners Chair Deidre Malone and former state legislator Harold Byrd, who have announced their intentions to run for county mayor next year.

It was widely thought by some news reporters that this election would presage next year’s county election by positioning several candidates strongly for that race. Not so. If anything, the election doomed any serious attempt by any candidate to claim they have the kind of base on which to build a countywide campaign.

Another thing proven by the election is that the impact of controversial blogger Thaddeus Matthews is far more perception than reality. Despite relentless and careless fictions about anyone connected to Mayor Wharton, the Carpenter candidacy, if anything, sunk beneath the weight of his cheerleading.

It reinforced the lesson that some were slow to learn in last year’s campaign against Congressman Steve Cohen. Voters are slow to mobilize around smear campaigns and reckless slanders. The Carpenter campaign proved this again in conclusive fashion. Meanwhile, we are told that a Federal Communications Commission complaint is being drawn up against Mr. Matthews and his radio home, KWAM.

New Day

All in all, it was a “take no prisoners” display by Mayor Wharton, who proved conclusive that even a nice guy can put together one mean campaign. It may be too soon for such predictions, but it’s hard to argue with the view that Mayor Wharton is now the dominant political force and if he invests his honeymoon period well, he has the power to change the entire political landscape in Memphis, particularly its tone and civility, for the better.

He is the antithesis of Mayor Herenton, whose stated disdain for consensus-building makes him a strange person to send to Congress and its 435 members. There is no issue that Mayor Wharton does not believe that he can find consensus and common ground. That will unquestionably be put to the test in City Hall.

For us, however, what interests us most is that he’s positioned himself as the political powerhouse who can achieve his goal of ushering in a new generation of young political leaders and public servants.

In his last race for Memphis mayor, Willie Herenton said he had no choice but run because he had neglected to mentor a successor. While it’s hard to imagine Mayor Wharton suggesting that he should pick who will be the next city mayor, he is clearly sincere about the need to attract young people into key positions in City Hall.

Changing Expectations

If this election was about anything, it was about change.

While Mayor Wharton may have tallied 61%, 100% of the vote was for something different. With 25 candidates in the race, no one stood four square in support of Mayor Herenton. No one defended his record, his philosophy or his approach to his work.

Perhaps, that’s to be expected after 18 years of the same person as city mayor, but it was also a residual effect of the historic election of Barack Obama as president. Suddenly, all things seemed possible, even the once unthinkable – One Memphis.

Herenton's Latest Is No Laughing Matter

Today, Willie W. Herenton officially became a punch line.

There are no ways left to describe his behavior except clinical ones - early onset dementia, early stage Alzheimer’s, self-destructive narcissism, obsessive-compulsive behavior or behavior disorder.

Maybe he’s just an addict – a prisoner of the spotlight with a need to always be the center of attention, or maybe he’s like genital herpes. You always know he’s going to show up again; you just don’t know when.

Whatever it is, he’s become the political equivalent of the three-car pile-up on the interstate. We’d rather look away but it’s just so hard to ignore it.

When he strolled into the Shelby County Election Commission this morning and picked up a qualifying petition to run for city mayor, it didn’t create shock waves. We all just need to look away and drive on.

Pot To Kettle

In throwing his hat back into the ring for a possible run for his old seat, he essentially labeled Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery as a menace. It’s hard to imagine a bigger boost that could be given to Mr. Lowery’s campaign.

In our last post, we talked about projection, and it was on display in full force in former Mayor Herenton’s statement charging Mayor Pro Tem Lowery with a “reckless style of leadership.” This from a man whose resignation resulted in a $1 million special election to fill his seat, who put former body guards in appointed offices, who said a mayor can’t do anything about crime, who invited people to leave the city, who berated City Council members at his whim, who inspired a culture of disengagement in City Hall and whose presence had become the most divisive force in our city.

For those of us who remember him from the days when he won his historic election way back and was poised to one of Memphis’ great mayors, the overriding feeling is simply one of immense sadness. How did that person come to this? How did he lose all self-perception and self-worth? Where did the inspirational man go who once inspired superintendent job offers from New York and Atlanta?

It’s a Memphis tragedy. There’s the argument about whether great men make history or history makes great men, but in this case, history apparently just overtook him and he ended up being the stereotype of the self-indulgent politician who treats his city as if it’s his to do with as he wishes, no matter how much damage he does along the way.

Arbitrary And Capricious

Just think about it. His sense of entitlement is so extreme that it leads him to feel that he can inflict a $1 million bill on the rest of us for the special election, because he now wants to be his own successor. The disregard and self-indulgence evident in his decision to pull a qualifying petition are troubling enough for those who once cared about him, but they are unforgivable to the public who now have to pay for his latest act of caprice.

The Herenton script has become such a self-parody that it makes a Sasha Baron Cohen movie look like a documentary.

As usual, his latest erratic action sent theorists contemplating justifications for his topsy-turvy political strategy. The Herenton insiders – the faithful few – didn’t know that he had requested the qualifying petition until the news media called them for comment. Most responded in the same way that the rest of Memphis did – they just shook their head.

Conspiracy Theories

Some said the controversy surrounding City Attorney Elbert Jefferson had been engineered by Mr. Herenton to weaken Mayor Pro Tem Lowery, who has never been mistaken about the former mayor’s disdain for him.

Some said that he resigned only to make sure his pension was locked down, so that in the event of a federal grand jury indictment, his retirement check was protected. With that done, he’s now looking to return to his old job.

Others conjecture that he got back into the race to undermine the candidacy of Memphis lawyer and Herenton confidante Charles Carpenter. The former city mayor has told some friends that he considered some of Mr. Carpenter’s campaign statements disloyal.

Regardless, this time, he may have gone one bridge too far. When Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton toyed with the idea of opposing Mayor Herenton in the last city mayor’s election, polls clearly showed that he would win. But the spectacle of the area’s two dominant African-Americans battling it out in a divisive race is said to have been instrumental in Mayor Wharton deciding against a race. Clearly, Mr. Herenton has no such qualms.

Lame Railings

He said that he’s jumped into the race out of his fear that Mayor Pro Tem Lowery is on the verge of becoming the new city mayor. We’re not sure how he thinks his entry into the race will block a Lowery Administration. They have two entirely different political bases, so there’s little he can do to fatally damage Mr. Lowery.

As Mayor Pro Tem Lowery himself acknowledged in his comments, it’s Mayor Wharton who’s the frontrunner, and despite Mr. Herenton’s political prognostications, it’s not an “anybody can win” race. Of course, it was only a few weeks ago that Mayor Wharton also was the target of Herenton criticisms (shortly after calling Congressman Cohen an asshole).

Today, he said he’s planning to run for mayor because of “the current dilemma.” We’re not sure what he’s talking about unless it was the blessed sense of relief and the stirrings of a new sense of optimism following his resignation.

At any rate, the reemergence of the Herenton political specter was, if nothing else, deflating in an environment where for the first time in eight years, we had a sense of possibility for the future.

Changing Direction

We need to hold that thought. Mr. Herenton will not win the special election, and he will limp into the race against Congressman Steve Cohen, where he will be vulnerable and easy pickings. In politics, the perception of power is always greater than the reality of power. If he enters this election, his air of invincibility will be blown to shreds.

That’s why we predict that today was just a day to tweak the noses of all the people who were pleased by his absence from the local scene, and that in the end, he will not run for his old job. He may be many things, but he is not dumb, and he knows that a run for city mayor is not only sybaritic but he will be a laughing stock.

More to the point, his election would be a blow to our city’s future. That’s because that all of the devastating trends that threaten Memphis’ future actually accelerated this decade under the Herenton leadership – three middle income families a day move out of our city, three 25-34 year-olds a day move out of our community, economic segregation is deepening, college attainment is down, to name a few.

We have to do something dramatic to change our trajectory and the chance for new leadership, consensus-building leadership, healing leadership is too important to squander. That’s the ultimate irony of the Herenton sideshow. Today, as he often does, he talked about how he “loves” our city, and we take him at his word. However, his action today was anything but an act of love.

Memphis School Funding Flunks Tax Fairness Test

Memphis Mayor Willie W. Herenton sent a stern note last week to the Memphis City Council that said its members need to restore full funding for Memphis City Schools.

It prompted memories here of the late Jesse Turner Sr., the civil rights leader and former long-time chairman of the budget committee for Shelby County’s legislative body. When presented once with a directive about the budget by a county mayor, he responded calmly: “I appreciate your opinion. That’s what you have – an opinion. What I have is a vote.”

It’s a fact of life that’s always been lost to some extent on the news media, which hang on every word of mayors and their budget recommendations as if it’s the administrative branch that determines public budgets.

The truth is that it’s the 13 members of Memphis City Council who will make the final decision. They have the responsibility, not to mention the authority, to set the final budget and the tax rate.

Dollars And Sense

We respect the mayor’s opinion about school funding. As the former superintendent of Memphis City Schools, Mayor Herenton, according to a political adviser, is too passionate about schools to remain silent on the issue of school funding. They said that it was a personal motivation that led him to chastise the Council in a letter to City Council Myron Lowery.

It seems likely that the Memphis City Council will return the favor, asking the mayor for his administration’s recommendations on how to include the school funding in the city budget – are cuts in other city departmental budgets recommended to offset the increase for schools or is the recommendation for a tax increase to produce money for schools.

More than a couple of City Council members think that the mayor may have been trying to paint them into a corner, but think that he instead shot himself in the foot (to mix metaphors). They said that if he were serious about funding schools, he would have put the money in the proposed budget that he presented to Council last week along with the bombshell that he’s planning to run for Congress.

In the words of one Councilman, “he didn’t present a balanced budget at all if he truly believes that schools should be funded at previous levels.”

Politics And More Politics

From their side, however, key finance officials assumed that if they had included the school funding, City Council would “grandstand and cut it like they were the only ones who know how to cut budgets.” Regardless of the rationale on each side, some people believe that it’s created a game of political chicken.

And yet, it’s just as likely, based on early reports from the Council, that its members may opt to ignore Mayor Herenton’s letter altogether, recognizing that final decisions on the city budget are theirs, not the administration’s. One Council member also pointed out that the mayor had similar opinions last year, but had no real influence on the City Council budget decisions.

As superintendent, Mayor Herenton was a rising star and highly regarded for top school jobs from Atlanta to New York City. So, it’s no wonder he has a strong feeling about the city’s funding of schools. We just happen to disagree with him.

As we’ve said before, tax fairness affects every Memphian, and if any one is harboring the delusion that our city can compete for new jobs, new talent and new business investment as higher and higher taxes are paid by fewer and fewer people, they are ignoring reality.

Cycles

That is exactly what current trends foretell. Unless we are able to bring some sanity to our current tax system – which punishes Memphis tax base, which is losing middle-income families faster and leaving a polarized city to pay for the increasing costs of the vortex of social problems that stem from our high poverty rate.

It’s a vicious cycle. The high rate of poverty begets a high drop-out rate which begets a high level of people out of the job market which begets the high rate of crime which begets the high abandonment of the city which begets higher tax rates which begets higher risk to the entire region.

In that way, a fair tax rate for Memphians isn’t just the city’s concern. It better be all of ours. In the end, all of us are at risk, regardless of where we live and how much we earn and how immune we think we are from the economic repercussions of Memphis’ collapse.

Because of this, Memphis City Council was not only right when it tried to bring some sanity to the local tax burden. They were also courageous.

Council Courage

After all, this community talked 25 years about placing all school funding where it belongs – on Shelby County’s larger tax base. We’ve been talking for way too long about making the Memphis tax burden more rational, and despite all the talk, nothing changed.

No one is suggesting that it’s not in all of our best interests – not to mention our common humanity – to pay for the education of our children. It does in fact take a village and we all need to be villagers in that pursuit. The village is Shelby County, not two villages, one in Memphis and another in Shelby County.

But the village doesn’t only have children. It has elderly people, especially the significant percentage here who live in poverty, it needs an economy that doesn’t play down to our low skill levels but helps to improve them, and it’s about neighborhoods that are connected, walkable and served by high-quality public transit.

It wasn’t too many years ago that City of Memphis provided significantly less funding for schools. Also, there was a widely held opinion – in both city and county mayors’ offices and in both city and county legal departments – that Memphis’ funding was discretionary. It could stop it whenever it liked, and as a result, City of Memphis increased school funding to higher and higher levels, but rather than getting a thank you note from city schools, they instead get served with a lawsuit.

Wanted: Logical Laws

The state law that forbids local government from reducing its previous year’s school funding may sound on the surface like a commitment to kids, but in the end, it’s a prescription that erodes the kind of self-determination that every government deserves. After all, the law would require government to keep the same level of funding even if enrollment collapsed.

Let’s say this one more time to make sure every one gets it. No property tax money from the budgets of City of Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Millington and Arlington go to fund schools. Meanwhile, Memphians not only pay for schools in their county property tax bill, but they pay for it again with their city taxes. No one else in this county does that – or has ever done that – except Memphians.

Meanwhile, those same small cities use their lower tax rates and their schools as lures to pull people out of Memphis, and Memphians are forced to help make it possible.

Job Opening: City Hall Statesman

OK, now that we’ve all vented, what can we do to solve the divisive problem of police recruiting?

Our problem has been that the vote was like many taken in legislative bodies from Memphis to Washington, D.C. It was cast with tunnel vision and without an understanding of its symbolic importance or its actual importance within the context of what is making cities successful.

Another problem is the deep-rooted suspicions about racially-biased hiring of police officers. While Memphis Police Department officials point proudly to the fact that 51% of the force is African-American, it is valid to remember that Memphis is 64% African-American so there is still a 25% disparity gap that the police force has to close to be totally representative of the city that it serves.

Problems Abound

There’s the problem that loosening the requirements is seem as another example of greasing the skids for the people who are abandoning our city, but if that were the ultimate motivation, it would seem that the recruiting limits for policemen shouldn’t even be extended to the Shelby County line (after all, most of the people who left Memphis did stay inside the county). But in the end, the crux of this concern is that most people are incredulous that Memphis cannot find 200 of its own citizens to hire.

The problem for some is racial. There are white people who think that a majority black city is somehow inherently more dangerous, and there are black people who think that whites complaining about property crime in their neighborhoods are whiners since they weren’t concerned for years that African-American neighborhoods are the scene of most violent crime.

The problem for others is that they think the real purpose of broadening the recruiting area is to take in all those lily-white suburban counties, although Fayette County is 36% African American, Hardeman County 41%, Tipton County 20%, Haywood County 51% and DeSoto County 25% (twice the percentage of 2000). However, the underlying sentiment is that people should not be rewarded for moving outside of Memphis, and that if people are going to get a paycheck from Memphis, they should at least live in Shelby County (and in truth, it’s hard to see that as unreasonable).

Wanted: Empathy

The problem for a smaller group is that they fear that non-Memphians will have less personal investment in our city, and as a result, they might be more inclined toward abuse and brutality, but the same could be said for police officers living in Shelby County outside Memphis. However, the reality is that for a large segment of our city, the police are as menacing as crime.

The problem for a growing number of people is that if Memphis isn’t capable of finding 200 people who can quality to be a police officer – even with the dumbed down requirements calling only for a high school diploma – how are we ever expected to compete in today’s economy for jobs that require a more highly trained workforce?

The problem for major employers is that perception is reality, and their employees see Memphis as crime-ridden and dysfunctional, hampering their success in recruiting workers to our city, particularly 25-34 year-old college-educated talent. Whether they are right or not hardly matters; they think they are right and that makes it a problem for all of us.

The Memphis Messiah

In other words, we have good people on all sides of this issue and their positions are rational from their perspective. It’s like the truth: it all depends on personal perspective. What is the truth to you may be anything but true to me, not because of anything other than the fact that we see the truth from substantially different angles.

There are times when it seems like we need a Memphis Messiah if we are to find unity, a unifying vision for the future and a mutual commitment to rolling up our sleeves and making this the best city that we can.

But it’s not a Messiah that we seek right now. It’s simply a statesman.

That should be dramatically easier to find than 200 police officers. We only need one.

Two Prospects

Truth be told, this statesman probably needs to emerge from the African-American City Council members who voted against the recruiting expansion. They have the majority vote, but they also care about living in a city where the division is lessened and divisiveness is eliminated.

There’s Council Chair Myron Lowery, the most experienced member of the city legislative body, and his ability to reach across the racial chasm has been demonstrated before and his ability to find the middle ground has been displayed before. Perhaps he will step forward.

There’s Council member Harold Collins, whose college degree is in criminal justice and who every day deals with the results of crime, particularly violent juvenile crime, in his job with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office. Perhaps he will step forward.

While they are the most likely statesmen to emerge, there could be others. In the words of the old Southern Baptist evangelist, “it just takes one step, but the first step is the hardest, but Lord, oh, Lord, the rewards…”

Stronger Policy, Stronger City

Whoever is willing to step forward is someone who remembers that compromise is the currency of the best legislative decisions. It now takes someone to prove that we have moved beyond the days when we divided into race if we were talking about the weather. The voters in Memphis have placed a great deal of good will and confidence in this Council, and if it could find a way to come together on this issue, it would be a profound signal that our city has entered a new era.

While 7-6 votes can be politically satisfying to the winning side because they are usually the most hard-fought, they are ultimately like one-vote majority decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court. They are in the end hollow victories. They are less satisfying, they ensure opposition by about half the people and they create weaker policy.

We don’t need to tell the winning Council members this. They know it, and we suspect they are weighing these issues right now in hopes of finding common ground that unites a Council that had inspired so much hope for a different tone.
So, what could be done?

Finding The Middle Ground

For one thing, the hiring of police officers should be treated like the hiring of all city employees. It should be conducted and directed by City of Memphis Human Resources Division like all other divisions. To do otherwise and continue to allow MPD to handle its own hiring inspires doubts and suspicions about insider dealing, special agendas and preferential hiring. There’s one sure way to change it, and that’s by changing the way hiring is done.

Then, perhaps, there should be a temporary, limited use of a wider recruiting area to see if it really does produce results. Once upon a time, Shelby County Government had a policy – and it may still – that it could go outside of the county borders if it become obvious that it could not attract qualified applicants for key jobs. While the impetus for the policy was to recruit qualified physicians to work at the Health Department clinics, it would seem to be practical for police officers. For example, if county government were unable to find physicians in Shelby County, it would open the process to people in other counties. It was not a blanket policy (and perhaps in city government, it should be triggered with a resolution by Council). It was limited to the needs at hand. More to the point, there had to be a clear, proven and documented case for expanding the area for recruitment.

At this point, there seems to be a lot more opinions and fewer facts about police recruiting even after the months of discussing it. Skepticism and mistrust run deep, and Council members need better statistics and data that paint an accurate portrait about the seriousness of the problem. Perhaps, it’s time to appoint a special committee on law enforcement to delve into all aspects of this issue, including repeated general accusations about unfair practices and discriminatory hiring.

New Ways

While some may dismiss them as political posturing, the fact remains that these are extremely serious charges and the public deserves to be reassured that there has been a thorough airing of the issue and a equally thorough investigation of the charges. This too is an issue that should transcend the day-to-day politics of City Hall and should be resolved once and for all.

In other words, there is nothing so important right now as to find some safety valve actions that bring everybody back to the table and into the conversation, that strip the discussion down to its facts and that proves that there is a new way of doing business on City Council.

In the end, the most damaging aspect of the 7-6 vote was that it became yet the latest symbol of a city divided against itself. Lincoln was right: a house divided against itself cannot stand. Somehow, we’ve managed to stand divided for decades, but the foundation is finally crumbling.

Without sounding too Pollyannish, perhaps this is the issue that proves that the times have changed. If America can be said to be entering a post-racial era, it would sure be worth the try for Memphis to be part of it.