McRae's bright red bull's eye self-applied
By By Sid Salter / syndicated columnist
Oct. 30, 2002
At this point in his political life, state Supreme Court Presiding Justice Charles R. "Chuck" McRae has almost become a caricature of the rough-and-tumble persona he seems to have so carefully cultivated. Who is he?
Depends on which television commercial one watches these days and whom one believes.
Is McRae the up-from-the-bootstraps, man-among-men judge who overcame an impoverished childhood with hard work, moxie and perfect attendance at Sunday School?
Or is he the irresponsible hellraiser who pleads no-contest to a drunk driving charge, then gets arrested on a second one on the way to having the venerable Readers Digest name him "one of the 10 worst judges in America?"
Achiever or hellraiser?
Here's a man in his 60s who rides motorcycles in black leather with the Hell's Angels, runs with the bulls at Pamplona in Spain, climbs Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro and scuba dives in the Bahamas. Juvenile thrill-seeking? Maybe. Some detractors say so.
McRae has never apologized for his efforts to squeeze all the juice he can from life much like Hemingway. Thrill-seeking? Probably.
But McRae has publicly said he also pursues such stunts to attract publicity and financial support for "Kid One," a non-profit transportation system for poor children seeking medical treatment.
For many looking at this pivotal judicial race, McRae's well-publicized drunk driving charges by Flowood and Jackson police take center stage.
Those observers believe McRae has by his behavior rewritten Mississippi's driving under the influence laws in such a manner as to make enforcement more difficult and the public less safe. Those observers particularly the state's Mothers Against Drunk Drivers chapter see McRae's antics as creating "the McRae defense" to drunk driving charges.
McRae and his attorneys made it clear that they saw the justice's DUI defense as exercising his legal rights and thereby defending those rights for others.
McRae's detractors can choose from several weapons the DUI questions, the justice's flamboyant lifestyle, the arrests, the now-infamous photograph in motorcyclists' leathers but all of that is political window-dressing to the real issue in the Southern District Supreme Court race.
It's about tort reform
Current state Supreme Court Chief Justice Edwin Pittman has already announced his intention to step down. McRae is the senior presiding justice and will be elevated to the chief justice's post should he win re-election.
As the justice on the state Supreme Court with the worst record in helping "lawyers find new reasons and causes for lawsuits" according to a study conducted by the Business and Industry Political Action Committee McRae is clearly the candidate backed by the state's trial lawyers and opposed by the state's business and professional community and by the state's doctors.
The bright red bull's eye on Chuck McRae's political backside is one that was self-applied. In this campaign, McRae is reaping the political whirlwind of both the tort reform battle to which his judicial rulings have contributed and of his own personal choices as a public figure.
The daredevil stuff? Who cares? More power to him if he can do it. The DUI business? McRae's not the only public figure to face such charges and survive.
But McRae's political patrons are the same ones who have made it their mission to elect legislators and judges who will do the bidding of the state's trial lawyers and protect the system of "jackpot justice" that threatens the state's business climate.
And that's far more threatening to Mississippi's future than a DUI arrest or a penchant for fast motorcycles.
