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Cult of Personality Passé in Local Government – Now It’s About Shared Ideas, Values
The Memphis News
By now, you may be thinking there’s no real cycle in Memphis politics – that it’s all just one big, loud, brassy parade-like spectacle on an endless loop. You may not always see the marching band and the big guys in the little car, but you can hear them wherever they happen to be.
2009 was supposed to be an off election year. Instead it’s been a watershed period for political change. As the year moves into the holiday doldrums for the considerable number of politicians slated to be on the 2010 and 2011 election ballots, it’s worth remembering that important decisions remain.
Among them is whether there will even be such a thing as a Memphis city government and a Shelby county government a year from now.
The recently passed metro charter commission is scheduled to hold its first meeting this month. The body is charged with drafting a city-county government consolidation proposal. To some, a written proposal involves substantial politics. Most local voters seem to prefer a vote based on ideas to one on personalities.
And after 18 years of a very memorable personality in the mayor’s office, many want to see a lot less of it in any form post-Willie Herenton. Yet proposals and ideas cannot exist in any realistic way without considering the people who will bend and shape those concepts.
Perhaps our most important political struggle in the next year or two isn’t about the concept of consolidation, single-source funding for public schools or sustainability. Perhaps it is in regaining the balance between the power of personality in our politics and the power of commonly held ideas and goals.
Just before the change now finding its way to the ballot began, we underwent a series of public corruption trials in Memphis federal court that shed much light on how far personality can stray from the ideas that prompt some of us to seek elected office.
Politicians took money as the latest digital technology recorded them. Only the technology is new when it comes to getting caught red handed. But the technology also recorded conversations in which these political leaders babbled constantly about what they were going to get and what they had gotten – and none of it was in any form other than money and what money could buy. For themselves. Not the constituents they purported to serve.
More than one of those involved in the corruption said that wasn’t the way they began their political lives. Once it had been about ideas. It wasn’t that the ideas were weak; the people who carried them to elected office were the weak ones.
The lesson is that personality and goals must find a coexistence that does not now exist. It’s a challenge, but we find ourselves with an opportunity to strike that balance.
One election won’t set the scales, either. It will require a series of decisions at the ballot box over the next two years. And whom we pick will be governed by changes that are certain to come in the goals we want to pursue.
If our history is any guide, some of the leaders who now loom so large on the political stage could wind up being transitional figures. Others whom most of us don’t even know yet may be the next true pilots of our destiny.
It is incumbent upon us as voters to remember that we own the boat as well as the river on which we are bound.
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