Tag: Bill Freeman

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Key Political Moves Underway in Memphis and Nashville (UPDATED)

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A statement made by state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) in Nashville last week all but put the Senate Majority Leader in the running for the governorship in 2018.

Norris, who for years has made no secret of his gubernatorial ambitions, told reporters that he was “more than mulling” about a race and was actively making plans, though he emphasized that he still had a job to attend to in the legislature. He later told the Flyer that he had discussed organizational plans with a local campaign consultant but had not yet finalized a deal.

Norris, as a sitting state legislator, is prohibited from active fund-raising for the duration of the current session of the General Assembly, just convened. So are two potential rivals for the Republican nomination, state Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksville), who has declared his intentions of running, and Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), speaker of the state House of Representatives, who held a recent pre-session fund-raiser at $2,500 a head.

Other Republicans known to be considering a race are Nashville industrialist Bill Lee and Randy Boyd, who just announced that on February 1st he would take leave of his current position as state commissioner of Community and Economic Development. 

Though most attention has so far been focused on the possible GOP candidates, there are no fewer than four Democrats who are considered possible entrants in the governor’s race, as well.

One is wealthy real estate tycoon Bill Freeman of Nashville, who has served as the state Democratic Party’s treasurer and for years has been a major donor to numerous Democratic campaigns and causes. Freeman, who ran unsuccessfully for Nashville mayor in 2015, made a trip to Memphis last year on behalf of Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign that doubled as a fund-raiser for state Senator Lee Harris (D-Memphis) and functioned also as a scouting expedition for a governor’s race.

Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has traveled widely in the state after leaving office and is thought to be serious about a governor’s race. 

Two other Democrats frequently mentioned as possibilities are state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), a highly regarded party figure who would also have to vacate his legislative seat to make the race, and Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, a former state senator who is now running for reelection.

• Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who has taken the lead in trying to create a seat for suburban Shelby County on the MLGW board, has switched tracks on that initiative. Confronted by city of Memphis resistance and stymied by a split between city and county members from including the matter in the county commission’s official legislative request package, Roland wants to put the matter before the Tennessee Regulatory Authority.

Meanwhile, state senators Norris and Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) are studying the option of taking the matter up legislatively.

Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a supporter of Roland’s initiative, said the matter wasn’t dead but was sure to surface again, “when the weather for it is right.” (See Editorial, p. 10.)

Even if the issue of county participation on the MLGW board ended up not being a part of the official county wish list approved by the county commission for its legislative package, other once controversial matters have apparently made the package.

Foremost among them is a call for a limited but profound change in the status of marijuana. In the language of the final commission resolution: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly, Governor Bill Haslam, and the federal government to authorize medical marijuana in Tennessee.” There are at least two bills to that effect already introduced in the General Assembly, both from mainstream members of the Republican super-majority.

A concomitant resolution by the commission reads: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly and Governor Bill Haslam to implement or expand a second-chance program for individuals using less than half an ounce of marijuana.”

These are first steps, to be sure, but meaningful ones that could not have been anticipated even a few short years ago.

[UPDATE: The words “have apparently made the package”in the paragraphs about the Commission’s attitude toward medical marijuana and second-chance legislation were, as it turms out, premature. In committee action on Wednesday, sponsor Terry Roland successfully moved for a deferral on voting for those parts of the legislative package.]

 

• Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen joined civil rights icon John Lewis (D-GA) and what may be a substantial number of other political figures in announcing Monday that he will not attend the Friday inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

Cohen, who has represented the 9th District since 2006, made the announcement Monday morning at Mason Temple of God in Christ during a commemorative celebration on MLK Day.

Telling the Flyer that a series of insulting tweets from Trump about Lewis became “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Cohen praised the Georgia congressman as someone who had “risked his life” for human rights, adding that Trump’s attacks on Lewis were particularly egregious coming on the eve of the Martin Luther King weekend. Cohen cited “an accumulation of distressing remarks, actions, and appointments” on Trump’s part, including “his questioning President Obama’s birth, the racist, misogynistic statements he made during the campaign, his inability to tell the truth, and his mocking of a disabled person,” as well as the President-elect’s attacks on Senator John McCain and actress Meryl Streep.

“This is a president who does not act presidential.” Cohen said. Cohen said further he had attended confidential briefings about Trump’s compromised behavior and circumstances and said that “there’s more to it than Russia.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Dems on the Rebound

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A group of 75 to 80 people showed up at the Steamfitters Union Hall Monday night for a session which was billed in advance as a “debriefing” with state Democratic Party chairman Mary Mancini — the first of several such affairs which Mancini intends to hold all across the state of Tennessee.

As the westernmost part of the state, Shelby County was as logical a starting point for such a mission as any. There were good reasons other than the strictly geographic for Mancini to start off her tour in Memphis, however. 

One reason is that Shelby County is one of three counties — Davidson (Nashville) and Haywood (Brownsville) were the other two — carried by the party’s presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election. For the record, those three counties, plus Hardeman (Bolivar), were the only counties in 2012 that went for President Obama, the party’s standard-bearer that year. 

Shelby County — on the strength, essentially, of its large African-American vote — is something of a bedrock constant for Democratic presidential candidates, though not necessarily anymore for statewide candidates. Or, for that matter, for countywide candidates, given that Republicans have been accustomed, for the last several countywide elections, to get electoral sweeps, or near-sweeps.

A second reason is the fact that in January the state Democratic executive committee will meet in Nashville and elect a chair for the next two years, and it makes sense for Mancini, who intends to run for reelection, to touch base with Democrats in Shelby County, which is still the state’s largest county, population-wise.

This is especially the case inasmuch as wealthy businessman Bill Freeman, Mancini’s fellow Nashvillian and Tennessee’s most active donor to Democratic candidates and causes, made a conspicuous pre-election foray into Memphis in early November, during which he let it be known that he intended to run for governor in 2018. In the wake of the statewide election results, in which the Democrats lost one seat overall in the state House of Representatives and failed to gain in the state Senate, Freeman said point-blank that the party needed a new chair.

At this point, it remains to be seen whether there will be a Freeman-backed candidate for the chairmanship as such, but, given his gubernatorial ambitions and his known history as a generous source of party funds, Mancini is in no position to take Freeman lightly. That’s especially the case, since, as she acknowledged Monday night, the party had not possessed the $5 million or so this year that she estimated would have been necessary to provide full backing for all the candidates who ran in Tennessee under the party label. 

And a third reason why Memphis was a logical starting place for Mancini’s debriefing tour is the embarrassing one that there is at the moment no formal Shelby County Democratic Party, as such, the party organization here having been decertified by Mancini herself back in August, in the aftermath of a lengthy dispute between herself and an SCDP majority over the issue of whether and how to settle an ongoing financial scandal in the local party.

Jackson Baker

Allison Berger at Mancini debriefing

The local party had also, as Mancini pointed out at the time, endured “many years of dysfunction,” involving internecine warfare of various kinds, and there were any number of local party members who were more than ready to throw in the towel. 

In any case, there is a clear and present need for local Democrats to have an umbrella organization serving the entirety of Shelby County, and Monday night’s turnout was surely hearty enough to offer them some encouragement — especially since a goodly portion of the attendees seemed to be new faces, and several of those were willing to offer their own thoughts about how to develop a strong Democratic base in Shelby County.

Typical of these was Sean MacInnes, who introduced himself as a Christian Brothers University employee and suggested that there were numerous potential members of the Democratic base who were not being tapped and should be invited into active participation. 

Referring to statistics showing that 45 percent of the state’s electorate had not become involved in this year’s election, MacInnes said, “Those are the voters we should be reaching out to. We should be saying, ‘Why are you not involved in the political process? What is it that the Democratic Party should be should be doing for you and [to] represent you?'” He suggested more concerted party effort to reach potential party cadres on the internet.

And there was Alison Berger, an activist in efforts to curb gun violence, who said she discovered in her outreach efforts that it was the Democratic Party which seemed most to concur with her point of view and her goals. As a result, she said, she had become involved with “Pantsuit Nation” and other party-oriented organizations and causes. “Now, I’m a staunch Democrat,” she said, recommending that the party expand by seeking out alliances with single-issue groups like her own. On one key question, when the Shelby County Democratic Party might be able to reconstitute itself, Mancini pinpointed March as the normal time for local party reorganizations and the likely date for Shelby County as well.

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Winds of Change Roil Shelby County’s Post-election Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race will likely open up career opportunities for fellow Republicans — including some in the Memphis area.

One possible beneficiary is lawyer John Ryder, a longtime eminence in GOP affairs. Ryder has served as local Republican chairman, as a member of the Republican National Committee from Tennessee, and, currently, as general counsel to the RNC. After the census of 2010, Ryder headed up the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts nationwide, and the map he helped create has strongly reinforced the GOP’s hold on districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A partner at the Harris Shelton law firm of Memphis, Ryder was named Republican Lawyer of the Year in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. That follows a year in which he served as a Trump delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland and was a key member of that conventions’ rules committee.

Considering that Ryder, as general counsel, has essentially been the right-hand man of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, and that Priebus has just been designated by Trump to be the new president’s chief of staff, the question arises: Is Ryder a prospect to succeed Priebus as head of the RNC?

“That would be a decision reached by the president-elect,” Ryder said Monday in a telephone conversation that took place as he drove to Nashville, where he teaches a course at Vanderbilt. “We’re going to see what happens. A lot of different paths are going to open up in the next few weeks, and I’m looking to where I can best be of service to the republic.”

Ryder emphasized that “nothing’s been discussed so far.” As for the possibility of his being offered other positions in the official GOP network that stands to be expanded in the new administration, Ryder said, “I’m not particularly looking for anything. I’m not particularly expecting anything.”

Elsewhere locally, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who served as Trump’s West Tennessee chairman, said he expected to have a say in whatever patronage positions might be available in his bailiwick.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Democrats may be looking to change direction in the wake of yet another election in which they failed to advance. Except for one upset win, that of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus in state House District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), Democratic candidates lost all the legislative races in which they challenged Republicans. The net result was a loss of one seat in the House, which means that there will be 25 Democrats and 74 Republicans in the House come January; the state Senate remains at its current level: five Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Republican legislative super-majority holds tight.

And that’s not a satisfactory set of affairs for Bill Freeman, the wealthy Nashville businessman who is the chief Democratic donor in Tennessee and, as he made clear in a visit to Memphis earlier this month, has ambitions of running for governor in 2018.

Likening the party’s electoral showing to a dismal season in the NFL, Freeman told the Nashville Tennessean that, “we’ve got to look at every option, including a new chair.”

The current chair, Mary Mancini of Nashville, has no intention of giving up the job, however, and has said she will run for another two-year term. 

One of Freemen’s closest associates is former state party chairman Chip Forrester, who has served several chairmanship terms in different decades, who served Freeman as campaign manager in his unsuccessful race for Nashville mayor last year, and will probably head up a Freeman gubernatorial campaign in 2018 if there is one.

But there is no indication so far that Forrester is looking at another run at the party chairmanship, and Freeman is talking up Holly McCall, who early in the year declared for House District 65, then held by bad-boy Republican incumbent Jeremy Durham, an accused sexual predator. She eventually lost her bid for the seat to Sam Whitson, the Republican who ousted Durham in the GOP primary.

In a letter to members of the state Democratic executive committee emailed on Monday, Freeman put the kernel of his argument this way: 

“First and foremost, for all the effort that we focused on in Tennessee, we gained absolutely no ground in the state senate and had a net loss of one seat in the state house. Instead of moving the needle forward, we went backward. This is unacceptable. … We should have done better and done it more robustly. I believe we need new leadership to do so.”

Of Mancini, Freeman said, “She is a fine person and clearly committed to serving our party, but we have failed to grow as we all had hoped for during these past two years. … The poor results we have seen this past Tuesday show clearly that we need a change.”

Pointedly, Freeman made reference to “a critical statewide race for the United States Senate in 2018,” and said, “We must rebuild our party to have the infrastructure in place so that our Democrat nominees for governor and U.S. senator have the party machinery in place to succeed.”

Tennessee Democrats — and Mancini — did, however, have one legislative victory in the recent election that nobody saw coming except the participants in the winning campaign. As indicated, this was the upset win of Thompson, a genial human resources administrator and longtime Democratic activist, over state Representative McManus, a GOP legislative mainstay, in District 96.

Under the circumstances of the 2016 election cycle, which not only strengthened the GOP super-majority in Tennessee but put Donald Trump into the presidency and gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House, it is astonishing that Thompson should have won election to the state House from a suburban Shelby County district. It is doubly astonishing that he unseated an incumbent Republican to do so.

Not only was Thompson the only Democrat in Tennessee to unseat a Republican, he believes himself to be the only Democrat in the South to have done so.

Thompson’s victory over McManus, who had been serving as chairman of the state House banking and insurance committee, was by the total of 351 votes out of almost 28,000 cast, and that ultra-thin margin can be attributed to old-fashioned work ethic on the winner’s side and what has to be reckoned as complacency and over-confidence on the loser’s.         

McManus’ campaign war-chest totaled  $155,754.59 as of the third-quarter financial-disclosure deadline, dwarfing Thompson’s $5,088.20. Thompson later received an infusion of financial aid from the Tennessee Democratic Party: $1,500 in a direct outlay on top of a $13,100 in-kind contribution in the form of a “polling survey.”

In October, Thompson’s total expenditures of $13,817 were almost equal to McManus’, and the Democratic challenger targeted his campaign money well, spending some of it on some modest internet advertising that pointed out, among other things, the fact that he had a military record.

McManus’ confidence may also have stemmed from the fact that he had easily dispatched Thompson in their first match-up, in 2014, with 62 percent of the vote to Thompson’s 38 percent.

Thompson was determined to prove that District 96 was a swing district, composed of a working-class/middle-class mix that was susceptible to a Democratic appeal. He boasts that he and his campaign team knocked on a total of 12,000 doors in the course of the campaign, focusing on issues ranging from Cordova’s traffic problems to skepticism about charter schools and the need for reviving Governor Bill Haslam‘s dormant Insure Tennessee program for Medicaid expansion, which, he emphasized to voters, had been blocked in McManus’ committee in the special legislative session of 2015.

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Suburban Showdowns in Germantown and District 96

Dwayne Thompson on the stump. Photo: Jackson Baker

Even if, as is currently being assumed by observers in both major political parties, Democrat Hillary Clinton should win the presidency over Republican nominee Donald Trump, and win in a landslide, how might that affect down-ballot races in Tennessee, where the GOP, almost everywhere, remains in the ascendant?

One test case might be the race in District 96 of the state House of Representatives between incumbent Republican Steve McManus and Democratic challenger Dwayne Thompson. The district, a suburban one incorporating parts of Cordova and Germantown, is considered safely Republican by most observers.

Thompson, a self-described “human resources professional,” disputes that, citing what he says are significant turnouts for Democrats in past statewide and presidential races in the district, as well as  a mix of upscale, middle-class, and working-class populations that he thinks is ready for change.

Among other things, Thompson hopes for a backlash against legislative Republicans for their opposition to Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal for Medicaid expansion. At a recent forum sponsored by the Tennessee Nurses Association, Thompson accused opponent McManus, an investment counselor and chairman of the House Insurance and Banking Committee, of having “bottled up” consideration of Insure Tennessee in the special legislative session of 2015.

McManus’ committee, which did hold an abbreviated hearing on Insure Tennessee in which McManus’ skeptical views on the proposal were obvious, did not administer the proposal’s coup de gras, however; that came from the Senate Health Committee, which had been specially expanded for the purpose by GOP Speaker Ron Ramsey.

McManus subsequently was named by Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell to a special task force on health-care which met several times this year and emerged with a scaled-down health insurance proposal, called the “3-Star Health Insurance Pilot,” that would expand TennCare for uninsured veterans and mental health patients as a prelude to possible general expansion in the future.

Thompson dismisses that plan as too little, too late, and says he will, if elected, continue to push for Insure Tennessee or some close variant.

McManus has more financial resources at his command, by far — $155,7543.59 in campaign cash as of the third-quarter filing, compared to a mere $5,088.20 for Thompson. But Thompson, whose ads — stressing that he is both a veteran and a cancer survivor — have begun to appear here and there, especially online, with a frequency unusual for a Democrat running in the Memphis suburbs.

And, in fact, Thompson’s campaign expenditures for the third quarter of 2016 come close to matching McManus’, with outlays of $9,524.83, compared to $11,871.61 for the incumbent. He is also working hard at outreach to independent voters, like members of the nonpartisan Asian-Americans for Tennessee, who showed up en masse last week at a meet-and-greet for Thompson sponsored by state Representative Raumesh Akbari (D-District 91) at her family’s hair research facilities in East Memphis.

JB

Dwayne Thompson on the stump

Thompson is giving McManus  a run for his money, but the GOP incumbent, no slouch himself at campaigning and possessed of those aforesaid financial advantages as well as help from the Shelby County Republican Party’s vaunted Get-Out-the-Vote network, is sure to be heard from in the campaign’s home stretch.

• Apropos that home stretch: As of Tuesday morning, turnout in Shelby County had been higher than usual for early voting, which began last Wednesday and will end on Thursday, November 3rd. Much of the increase was due to the fact of the ongoing presidential election, of course, but, even allowing for that fact, voter interest seems to be unusually high.

Totals for Wednesday were 16,655; for Thursday, 14,892; for Friday, 15,249; and for Saturday, 9,819. In all cases, the turnout outstripped previous early-voting records, set in 2008, the year of President Barack Obama’s first election.

• Several of the Shelby County suburbs are having spirited local campaigns. In Germantown, there are races for the city’s board of aldermen as well as its school board, which, in both cases, come down to pitched battles between organized slates of incumbents and challengers — the Ins versus the Outs, as it were.

Three alderman seats are up in Germantown. Incumbents Dave Klevan (Position 3) and Rocky Janda (Position 5) are opposed by Dean Massey and David Nischwitz, respectively, while incumbent Forrest Owens has a free ride in Position 4.

Three of the seven school board seats are also on the ballot. Incumbents Linda Fisher (Position 1) and Natalie Williams (Position 3) are opposed by Laura Meanwell and Suzanne Jones, respectively, while Amy Eoff and Mindy Fischer are vying for the Position 5 seat vacated by outgoing member Ken Hoover.

All five incumbents, as well as Fischer, are being supported by current Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo, who spoke on their behalf at a meet-and-greet affair on Sunday at the home of Naser and Shila Fazlullah.

• For the first time since the Democratic gubernatorial field melted down in 2010 to a single serious candidate, Mike McWherter of Dresden, the state’s Democrats seem able and determined to up the ante and make a valid run for governor in 2018 against the now-dominant Tennessee Republican Party.  

• Bill Freeman, well-known Nashville businessman, former mayoral candidate, and prominent donor and activist in Democratic circles, will be the special guest and principal speaker at what is being billed as a “Reception for Senator Lee Harris & Rally for Our West Tennessee Candidates,” to be held in Memphis at the home of Democrat Linda Sowell on November 3rd.

The current co-chair of Hillary for Tennessee and a member of Democratic presidential candidate Clinton’s national finance committee, Freeman is scouting support for a possible race for governor in 2018. Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has also been criss-crossing the state as a prelude to a governor’s race.