Editor’s Note: The political-football season is now hard upon us, as our country and our state approach November elections that will determine Tennessee’s governor, state senators, and representatives, along with a successor for retiring U.S. Senator Bob Corker and all nine of Tennessee’s members of the U.S. House of Representatives. With national politics a 24/7 fixation of all three cable-news outfits, this gave us an opportunity to take time out from all that, and reflect (p. 40) upon the first three years of Jim Strickland’s term as mayor of Memphis. As with most things political in this magazine, the cover story’s author is the inimitable Jackson Baker, longtime contributing editor and the Memphis Flyer’s political editor for the best part of three decades.
Baker has a full plate this election season, but happily he’s put one contest behind us already, the August Shelby County elections that resulted in a virtual sweep for Democrats locally. Here’s Jackson’s take on the main event, the election of Lee Harris as Jim Strickland’s county counterpart:
When all votes were counted on the night of August 2nd (and it took a while, thanks to the glitch-as-usual performance of the Shelby County election apparatus), Democrat Lee Harris had won his election as county mayor going away. That had to be quite a satisfying evolution, both for UofM law professor Harris and for the Democratic Party, whose losing streak in county elections had continued almost from the very advent of county partisan elections in 1992.
October 1995
Harris’ own first election victory, in a 2011 special election for a vacancy on the city council, had required a run-off to resolve a virtual tie with opponent Kemba Ford. Harris’ next win, in 2014, was by a more comfortable margin over another Ford, state Senator Ophelia, whose most noticed act in the state capital in Nashville had been to fall off a bar stool while bonkers. Harris would go on to be elected leader of the Democrats’ tiny five-member rump contingent in the Tennessee Senate by a single vote, something of a booby prize under the circumstances, but still a win. But he made a point there of pushing such party goals as parity for minorities and women, unrestricted voting rights, environmental protection, and sensible gun laws, all the while managing meaningful collaboration with members of the Republican super-majority on such practical matters as criminal justice reform.
County Trustee David Lenoir, the Republican beaten by Harris, was known to have charted a course that would lead from the county mayor’s office to the governor’s chair, and, after that, who knew? He will have to swallow his ambition; not so Harris, who has, rightly or wrongly, achieved a certain fame for floating future electoral goals while still exploring whichever one he had been newly elected to. City mayor? Congress? And after that, who knows? He will need to restrain that impulse for at least a term to retain the faith of independents and those fellow Democrats of both races who reversed what had become a quadrennial habit of crossing over and voting GOP in county elections. Not to mention the need to reassure his open-minded Republican constituents.
Harris proved during this campaign, especially in his head-to-head debates with Lenoir, that he had acquainted himself with the nuts-and-bolts matters of governing Shelby County, which differ in kind and in quality from the big issues that permeate so much political rhetoric, especially the nationalized kind.
Now, having gained, with help from others and through his own effort, the engine of local government, Lee Harris must be its mechanic — not so glorious a role as raising one’s personal flag above the ramparts in a campaign but the only sure way to secure further advances, both for himself and the total community he must now unify and represent. It will be fun to watch him try his hand and satisfying to see him succeed. Cross your fingers.
