Tag: Bill Lee

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Last Call! Voters’ Final Chance to Set a New Course

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Glitches as Usual

To the victor belong the spoils, goes the saying, and in electoral terms in Tennessee, that means that, in contested partisan races, the name of the “governing party’s” candidate goes first on the ballot. Inasmuch as the governing state party these days is indisputably the Republicans, that means that the first name listed on the gubernatorial portion of the November 6th ballot is GOP nominee Bill Lee.

The second name on the ballot is supposed to be the candidate of the minority party. In the case of the gubernatorial race, that would be Democrat Karl Dean — followed by a list of independent candidates.

That being the case, there were probably very few people going to one of Shelby County’s 27 early voting locations who expected to find Dean’s name bumped to the second page of the ballot, at the other end of a lengthy sandwich made up of the names of 26 independent candidates. But that was exactly the case for those voters who chose to “enlarge type” on the voting machines.

While state law may have ordained that Lee, as the representative of the majority party, should be listed first, there was apparently no reason for jamming the names of independent candidates between his name and Dean’s other than the whim of state Election Coordinator Mark Goins, the Republican appointee who is the ultimate authority on how ballots should be arranged for Tennessee elections.

Election officials claimed that the unusual placement of Dean’s name via “enlarge type” magnification was due to built-in insufficiencies of the machinery in use — an explanation that is of little consequence to local activists who have campaigned for years for the elimination of the election machines used in local elections and their replacement by newer machines equipped with the capacity to make simultaneous paper records to facilitate accuracy in vote-checking.

Jackson Baker

Election officials facing off with the media.

Whether by caprice or conspiracy or simple coincidence, the election ending on the official election day of November 6th will have been marked by several other instances of presumably avoidable confusion. 

Examples abound: Three referenda of some importance to the future of Memphis (whose registered voters are the only ones entitled to vote on them) are worded like something translated loosely from oral sources in Uzbekistan. And in this case, suspicion is strong that the confusion is intentional.

One is a referendum on City Ordinance #5676, which would prohibit someone from election as mayor or council member “if any such person has served at any time more than three (3) consecutive four-year terms, except that service by persons elected or appointed to fill an unexpired four-year term shall not be counted as full four-year term.” All clear?

The language would seem to be imposing a three-terms limit requirement. And it does, except that it conveniently omits that a two-term-limits requirement has already been passed by voters.

To be clear to voters, the ordinance should have specified that what it does is extend the current limitation by another four-year term. Hmmm. Anyone care to guess why the incumbent council members voted unanimously in favor of such misleading language?

Moreover, another problem with the referendum as worded in the ballot was pointed out by the most lengthily-tenured of all Memphis chief executives, Willie Herenton, who served from 1991 until his retirement in 2009 and was elected five times. 

At a press conference last week, Herenton and his attorney Robert Spence pointed out that the referendum language, as approved by the council, applied to electoral service  “at any time after December 31, 2011” — an exemption that would allow Herenton to pursue an announced mayoral race in 2019, whereas the language on the ballot seemingly would not.

In response, Council Chair Berlin Boyd summoned up all his formidable dudgeon to pronounce allegations by Herenton of fraud and conspiracy to be “fictitious” and dismissed the ballot language as due to a “drafting error” by council attorney Allan Wade. While he and Wade spoke vaguely of there being a possible “remedy” in Herenton’s case, the ballot will continue to read as it reads.

Another referendum, to establish City Ordinance #5669, repeals an amendment approved by the voters in a 2008 referendum that allowed “instant runoff voting,” a process involving the redistribution of runner-up ballots so as to declare majority winners without runoff elections, and would “restore the election procedure existing prior to the 2008 Amendment for all City offices,” while “expressly retaining the 1991 federal ruling for persons elected to the Memphis City Council single districts.”

IRV, also known as “Ranked Choice Voting,” is slated to be employed for the first time, unless repealed, in the 2019 city election. Though county Election Administrator Linda Phillips has pronounced the method eminently viable, incumbent council members and council attorney Allan Wade have possibly gone beyond their official wherewithal to oppose it.

During the 2018 legislative session, Wade dispatched city lobbyists to Nashville to lobby for a bill that would ban IRV statewide. More recently, Boyd used his chairman’s recap email to publicly argue for passage of the anti-IRV referendum and the other two.

The 2008 referendum enabling IRV, also known as “Ranked Choice Voting,” is scheduled, unless repealed, to be employed for the 2019 city election. In 2008, the ordinance bore a required “fiscal note” estimating savings for the city of $250,000, to be gained from making costly runoff elections unnecessary.

Presumably, Ordinance #5669 should also carry a fiscal note, in this case specifying a cost to the city for restoring runoffs of at least $250,000, amended for inflation. But no sum is specified, the city finance director having claimed an inability to estimate one. 

Should Ordinance #5669 pass, its clause calling for the restoration of runoff elections would clash directly with the language of the third referendum on the ballot, for Ordinance #5677, which would eliminate runoff elections altogether. Passage of both referenda would occasion legal confusion.

Some measure of confusion also could result from the fact that the ballot language asks citizens to cast their votes “for” or “against” the three referenda, whereas the language originally approved by the council and incorporated in the Election Commission’s official sample ballot seeks “yes” or “no” votes. This change, like the order of listing of candidates’ names, was apparently mandated by state Election Coordinator Goins.

All of the above by itself is sufficient to rattle the equilibrium of voters. But there’s more. Even before voting got under way, the Election Commission had to call a press conference to announce that not all of the voters’ registration applications that were completed by the official deadline had been processed and that some voters, once validated by registration records, would have to have their information channeled into the voting machines when they arrived to vote. 

Some early voters reported that they were given paper ballots instead, but election officials stoutly denied that — except in the case of isolated voters arriving at the polls without verifiable credentials. These voters were given “provisional ballots” to be checked against records at the end of the vote-counting process. These ballots are paper, but identifiable by a specific color code.

On top of a mounting propaganda campaign against early voting and what many see as the vote-discouraging effects of a state photo-ID law that requires working-class voters and impoverished citizens to furnish these badges of middle-class identity at the polls, this pattern of miscues suggests that the democratic process has become something of an obstacle course.

(left to right) Phil Bredesen, Democrat; Marsha Blackburn, Republican; Karl Dean, Democrat; Bill Lee, Republican

On the Cusp of Decision

As noted above, the seeds of mystery, doubt, and confusion have been sown a-plenty in the runup to the November election, the last of several electoral showdowns this year. Not to mention enough boilerplate and talking points and attack ads to exhaust the patience and menace the stability of the voting public.

Yet there is still a sense that this concluding election of 2018 could mark a real difference, perhaps even a decisive shift, in the direction not only of local events but in the developing destinies of the state of Tennessee and of the nation at large. This is evident both in the tenor of the two major statewide races on the ballot — for governor and for U.S. senator — but also in the incidentals of local races and of the three key referenda confronting Memphis voters.

In comparison to the issues on the Memphis ballot, the contests for governor and U.S. senator would seem to be relatively simple matters. The race for governor, between Franklin businessman Bill Lee, the Republican, and former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, the Democrat, has actually hewed fairly closely to the democratic concepts the forefathers may have had in mind. In their public statements, including those made in the course of two debates televised statewide, Lee and Dean have behaved with commendable courtesy and apparent respect toward each other, outlining their views without rancor or mystification.

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee (above) and Karl Dean (below) behave with “commendable courtesy.”

Karl Dean

Lee emphasizes his faith and allows for faith-based approaches, while, in keeping with his professed conservatism, espousing a preference for marketplace solutions. Dean, who stresses his track record as a mayor, has a greater affinity for governmental activism. The chief disagreement between the two is over the efficacy of Medicaid expansion, which Dean strongly favors, arguing that the state has been forfeiting $1 billion and a half annually in federal funds under the Affordable Care Act, money that could keep Tennessee’s struggling rural hospitals afloat. Lee counters that participation in the ACA bounty would amount to pouring such funding into a “fundamentally flawed system.”

It is generally acknowledged that Lee, a political newcomer, won his nomination by keeping free of the animosities and name-calling that early GOP gubernatorial frontrunners Diane Black and Randy Boyd hurled at each other. In like manner, Dean and his primary opponent, Democratic House Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, kept the peace with each other for the most part.

But the general election showdown for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the GOP’s Bob Corker has been a slugfest in which former Governor Phil Bredesen, the Democrat, and 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn, the Republican, have thrown nonstop haymakers at each other, and in this case there is no sweet-natured Marlboro Man for grossed-out voters to turn to as an alternative. One of them — either Bredesen or Blackburn — will win in what started out as a neck-and-neck race but has shifted ever so gradually, if the polls can be trusted, in Blackburn’s direction.

Jackson Baker

Marsh Blackburn

Jackson Baker

Congressman Marsha Blackburn (above); former Governor Phil Bredesen (below)

Bredesen started out well enough, running on the common-sense notion that he should represent the people of his entire constituency, working across the aisle in Congress as, demonstrably, he did as governor. It may well be that he is a Democrat because in Nashville, perhaps the last remaining outpost of the onetime solid Democratic South, conditions still favor white Democrats running for office.

A case in point that illustrates the real Bredesen: In 2001, the year before Bredesen’s election as governor, then state Senator Marsha Blackburn advocated a Draconian eight percent spending cut across the entire state budget; Bredesen came to power, instituted a nine percent cut and began to radically downsize TennCare, the state health-care program that his well-intentioned Republican predecessor Don Sundquist had tried valiantly to maintain. Even the arch-conservative Blackburn praised him at the time.

So much for the GOP’s current campaign fiction that Bredesen, a former Nashville mayor who came into politics after making a fortune as a health-care entrepreneur, would be the tool of radical tax-and-spend Democratic taskmasters in Congress. His rhetorical throwing of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer under the bus or his pubic praise of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have looked like craven cave-ins to Blackburn at the time, but those actions probably were true representations of Bredesen’s mind. 

Such criticism as Bredesen makes of the Trump administration, and it is minimal, is directed mainly at presidential gambles that might ultimately jeopardize the business climate, like Trump’s tariff wars.

Even so, the Bredesen-Blackburn race is one of crucial importance to the political balance of power, nationally. If Bredesen’s political stance is only modestly Democratic, Blackburn’s Republicanism is Trumpian brinkmanship to the max. Largely indifferent to social safety-net measures, she is a zealous advocate of the corporate tax-cut measures favored by congressional Republicans, wants to see Trump’s Great Wall built on the nation’s southern border, and is so much a champion of the profit motive that she, perhaps unwittingly, became the sponsor of a laissez-faire initiative that 60 Minutes highlighted as having opened the door to unregulated proliferation of opioid medications.

As a synecdoche, the Bredesen-Blackburn Senate race could well be the decisive one in determining whether the Democratic blue wave that flowed so vigorously for most of the year remains strong enough to accomplish the party’s return to power in Congress and its regeneration as a national force. It is no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the nation are upon us. (Local political races are dealt with in “Politics.”)

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Politics Politics Feature

Nonpartisan Event Stirs Partisans

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In politics, as in everything else (maybe more so in politics!), no good deed goes unpunished. When state Representative Mark White (R-Memphis) and Senator John Stephens (R-Huntington), co-chairs of the Tennessee legislature’s West Tennessee Economic Development Caucus (WTEDC), decided to schedule four nonpartisan events in the weeks prior to the November 6th election, they seem not to have anticipated negative feedback.

But they got some. Big-time.

When White aide Paul Marsh, on behalf of the two co-chairs, recently sent out a letter to a network of civic and governmental leaders announcing a series of four regional meetings of the WTEDC with the candidates for governor and U.S. senator, he conscientiously specified that all four — gubernatorial candidates Karl Dean (Democrat) and Bill Lee (Republican) would take part, sequentially. Ditto with the two candidates for Senate — Phil Bredesen (Democrat) and Marsha Blackburn (Republican).

Jackson Baker

GOP’s White and Democrat Craig Fitzhugh at WTEDC event

As planned, the schedule called for Dean on Monday of this week in Jackson; Bredesen on October 18th, also in Jackson; Lee on October 22nd in Martin; and Blackburn, back in Jackson on October 23rd. Monday’s meeting with Dean, the former mayor of Nashville, took place as scheduled at the offices of the Southwest Tennessee Economic District, which will be the site for the other Jackson meetings as well.

Members of both political parties and presumably some independents as well were on hand Monday, as, with White presiding, Dean and others discussed the status of the West Tennessee Megasite in Haywood County and other ongoing or potential development projects in the region. The group conversation was collegial, focused, and nonpartisan, a veritable object lesson in civic responsibiliity.

It remains to be seen, however, if that kind of comity holds up for the next go-round — the meeting with Bredesen. Upon receipt of Marsh’s original letter, at least two recipients — both Republicans — responded with curt and identical refusals: “No, thank you” regarding the Bredesen meeting. And it became clear that both decliners, Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald and state Representative Jim Coley, represented the tip of an iceberg. Several other Republicans found ways of conveying their displeasure, apparently seeing the planned occasion as some sort of partisan disloyalty.

Undiscouraged, White took pains to reassure his party brethren that no such treason was afoot, that the series of meetings with contenders for statewide office were part of no political agenda but were merely intended to be disinterested occasions for sharing ideas and information.

On Wednesday of last week, however, The Tennessean of Nashville carried a report of a hostile reaction to the scheduled Bredesen appearance from the famously partisan and unbashful state Representative Andy Holt (R-Dresden), a legislator famous (or infamous) for such capers as an anti-whistleblower bill that Governor Bill Haslam vetoed as unconstitutional and for dumping hog waste into fresh-water streams, an offense that earned him a fine from the EPA.

Holt vaunts his position on the rightward fringe of the Republican Party, too, and was quoted by the Tennessean as denouncing the WTEDC’s plans to meet with Bredesen.

Said Holt: “I’m a member of this Caucus, but I want it to be VERY CLEAR, that I am not, and have no intention of EVER hosting Phil Bredesen at any event with which I’m associated!” Holt wondered, “Who’s [sic] idea was this?” He called the Bredesen scheduling and the public invitation to it  “egregious political miscalculations” and threatened to resign from the caucus. 

Several of the Republicans present at Monday’s WTEDC meeting with Dean expressed dismay at Holt’s attitude. State Representative Jimmy Eldridge, currently a candidate for mayor of Jackson, was particularly vexed. “Can you believe that? We’re trying to have a meeting of minds here. This is completely nonpartisan!” And Eldridge was seconded by several others.

Count it as a healthy omen, even a sign of potential redemption for state government, that such was the prevailing reaction toward a nonpartisan event in a highly charged political year among the Democrats and Republicans gathered in Jackson, all of whom practiced the most elaborate courtesies toward each other.

• As it happens, Bredesen has been the focus of attention in numerous other ways of late. The former governor, whose innate centrism and willingness to reach out across the political aisle had previously been serving him well, took a good deal of flack last week from his fellow Democrats, who judged him to be overdoing it.

Many Democrats expressed displeasure that Bredesen had reacted to taunts from GOP opponent Blackburn by publicly disowning Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York during the two Senate candidates’ recent televised debate. But that reaction was nothing compared to the outrage that greeted Bredesen’s statement endorsing President Donald Trump‘s designation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court after an abbreviated FBI investigation of Kavanaugh for alleged sexual misconduct and before the final party-line vote in his favor in the Senate.

Meanwhile, whatever the reason for it, the polls, which had been showing Bredesen with a significant single-digit lead reversed course, and Blackburn began to top such samplings as were made public.

No doubt compounding the Democratic candidate’s discomfort was a series of hard-hitting TV attack ads from the Blackburn camp. Some of these were patently misleading — notably one which attempted to connect the former governor with the current opioid-addiction problem (apparently based on the fact that, among other things, his stock portfolio includes some shares of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical group). That approach is a blatant attempt to do a turn-around on the fact that Blackburn was the author of Pharma-friendly legislation that 60 Minutes identified as a major factor in inhibiting the DEA’s ability to control the proliferation of opioids.

• The campaign of Democrat Gabby Salinas for the District 31 state Senate seat is calling foul on a mailer sent out by her opponent, Republican incumbent Brian Kelsey. Headed by a picture of Kelsey and his wife, Amanda, with a family dog and replete with other domestic themes and references, the mailer states, “Brian Kelsey’s Family Has Called Shelby County Home for Seven Generations. He’s From Here. He’s One of Us.”

Salinas is a cancer survivor whose family emigrated here from Colombia during her childhood to pursue treatment for her at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. A spokesman for her campaign maintains that the “nasty” mailer, a “not-so-subtle dog whistle” is “attempting to raise the question of Gabby’s heritage and background as an immigrant and naturalized citizen.”

Kelsey’s response (via Kelsey’s campaign manager, Jackson Darr): “It’s very simple. It means that Brian lives in Shelby County. Senator Kelsey has deep roots here. … Brian participates daily in Shelby County life. That’s what it means to be one of us.”

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A Look at Bill Lee’s Uber-Conservative Home Church

Franklin millionaire businessman Bill Lee won a surprise upset during the GOP gubernatorial primary basically because he came across as a nice guy. He didn’t run attack ads, and he travelled across the state in an RV twice, setting up highly scripted town halls in all 95 counties. He talks a lot about his faith and how his love for Jesus got him through the worst time in his life, when his wife died in a tragic horse-riding accident. But other than admitting he doesn’t believe in gay marriage, Lee hasn’t talked a lot about what that faith really looks like, and the press corps has yet to press him on it. For some reason, Lee has become seen as a “moderate,” not unlike Governor Bill Haslam. He’s not.

Some of this came to light Tuesday, after The Tennessean revealed a state trooper had been canned from Democrat Karl Dean’s security detail after leaking info to Lee’s campaign about a “Muslim event.” Said event was actually a meet and greet at Yassin’s Falafel House in Knoxville, a restaurant operated by a Syrian refugee with a truly inspiring story, but Lee apparently thought it was in a mosque, and that a picture of Dean in a mosque would be damning.

But to attendees of Grace Chapel, the Williamson County evangelical church of which Lee is a longtime member, association with Islam is quite literally damning. One guest pastor, Michael Brown, gave a sermon on March 1, 2015, on “Understanding Radical Islam,” which he says he was specifically asked to give by Grace Chapel’s pastor Steve Berger. Brown started his sermon admitting that maybe not all Muslims support violence or are trying to take over the country with Shariah law, but as he went on, the implications are clear: Christians in government are only trying to do “what’s right,” whereas in Islam, “there’s no separation of church and state,” and if Muslims take over we could all be beheaded.

Islamophobia isn’t new to Tennessee politics, and it’s especially not new to evangelicals in Tennessee politics, but when one is running for governor of a state that has the largest population of Kurdish immigrants in the country, it’s worth wondering why no one is asking Lee about this. It’s also worth asking about Lee’s views on women and the LGBT community, above and beyond gay marriage.

During the primary, there were rumors that Lee had told supporters at a small fund-raiser that U.S. Representative Diane Black “didn’t look like governor material” and that he didn’t understand why she didn’t just want to stay home with her grandchildren. Lee and his campaign denied it, just like they denied asking the trooper to get a picture of Dean in a mosque. But it’s clear Lee isn’t a proponent of women in leadership, given the makeup of his own company. Out of 13 people in leadership roles, including Lee himself, only one is a woman, and all are white. At Grace Chapel there are no female pastors, and no woman serves on the board.

Given Pastor Steve Berger’s views, however, it’s unclear why any woman would want to serve in church leadership. On September 30th, Berger gave a sermon on Brett Kavanaugh, entitled “Biblical Qualifications for Bringing an Accusation Against Someone.” In it he cites verses from Deuteronomy, Matthew, and 1 Timothy that say not one but two or three witnesses (at least) are needed to bring an accusation of sin against someone. “This is a moral law here,” Berger says.

“I’m telling you, I’ve been victimized. I’ve been abused by false accusations,” Berger says, later in his sermon. What accusations those might have been, Berger does not detail. But he states that since his accusers did not provide multiple “witnesses” (which can, he says, include fingerprints or DNA evidence), then it was the accusers themselves acting unbiblically. “For this reason alone, and listen to me, for this reason of two or three witnesses alone, Dr. Ford’s testimony, as it relates to this Judge Kavanaugh issue, doesn’t meet the biblical requirements to bring forth a valid accusation.”

Berger went on to say that even if Kavanaugh did rape someone, he’s still qualified for the Supreme Court, because “Moses was a murderer before he was the world’s greatest lawgiver,” and “King David was an adulterer and murderer as a King,” and “Saul of Tarsus was a murderer before he became Paul the Apostle, the greatest Apostle in the history of the church.” (Notably, Moses and David and Paul all actually sought forgiveness, something Kavanaugh has not done.)

This is far from the only offensive sermon Berger has given. In a June 28, 2015, sermon entitled, “It’s Evening in Sodom,” Berger laments the SCOTUS ruling legalizing gay marriage. He preaches that his followers should not be hateful towards their gay friends, but they should “beg them to stop their wickedness before it’s too late for them” — i.e., before Judgment Day — and says that holding back “truth” in the name of “love” is the true “hate.” Needless to say, the church also does not believe transgender people are truly transgender either.

Berger is an active proponent of gay conversion therapy, i.e., the discredited belief that one can “pray the gay away.” Tennessee is unfortunately not one of the 15 states and territories that has banned the practice, despite opposition by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Health Organization. But Berger not only preaches about the practice, he’s on the board of the Reformed Hope Network, which describes itself as “a coalition of ministries serving those who desire to overcome sinful relational and sexual issues in their lives and those impacted by such behavior, particularly homosexuality.”

Berger is one of the members of Lee’s “Community and Faith-Based Advisory Council,” along with musicians Michael W. Smith and Ricky Skaggs, NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip, and retired hockey player (and Mr. Carrie Underwood) Mike Fisher. Lee has talked much about creating a new state office of faith-based and community initiatives if elected, which, at this point, seems almost inevitable given the polling and Dean’s unwillingness to go on the attack. Whether the office comes to exist remains to be seen, but during an interview in early July, I asked him about the plan. 

Bill Lee

Lee downplayed the faith aspect of the office and told me that he wants to “reach out to nonprofits that are doing the work that government cannot and should not do, whether they’re faith-based or not.” At the time, a post on the Breitbart-esque Tennessee Star had expressed “concerns” as to whether the office would have to work with Islamic nonprofits, and I asked Lee about it. He said he hadn’t read the article. I then asked if he was attuned to the needs of Muslims in the state, especially given the Kurdish community in Nashville.

“My wife has worked in a ministry that serves Kurdish refugees, I’ve been to Kurdistan and served with refugees from ISIS in refugee camps,” Lee replied. “I believe that the work of nonprofits is powerful and important, and that’s what this is about. And I am a Christian, so my experiences and my work with non-profits that are doing effective work has been Christian organizations, so that’s what I talk about, because I talk about my experience, and I will support works that are doing, meeting some of the greatest challenges in our community that I believe government shouldn’t meet, it’s not the role of government to do that. But it is the role of the nonprofit community and I would encourage that kind of work, for sure.”

When asked for comment on the various issues Wednesday, Lee’s campaign communications advisor Chris Walker got a bit testy. “A cherry-picked sermon does not equal Bill Lee agrees with this,” Walker said of the Kavanaugh sermon. I said that I wasn’t just looking at one sermon, that I wanted to know if Lee agreed with Berger about the “usefulness” of gay conversion therapy. “If this is a Steve Berger story, you need to talk to Steve Berger,” Walker replied. When pressed on whether Lee agreed with Berger’s standards for “biblically reporting” sexual assault, Walker questioned whether I had gone through all of the sermons given at Dean’s church.

Dean is a Catholic who (when not campaigning) regularly attends the Cathedral of the Incarnation, the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nashville. The church has mass three times daily (only twice on Friday and once on Saturday), so even if all the services were archived online like Grace Chapel’s (they aren’t), it’d be a lot to go through. But, like many other Catholics, Dean has publicly broken with the church on numerous issues. He does think abortion should be legal, he supported legalized gay marriage years before SCOTUS did, and he’s okay with women in the pulpit. And unlike Lee, Dean is not running ads touting his relationship with Jesus.

Cari Wade Gervin is a freelance political journalist currently bouncing between a couple of cities in Tennessee.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

It’s Raining Politics II: High Visibility and Hard Choices

CREDIT: JB

This was the Week of Coin Flips for serious followers of politics locally. On Tuesday evening, one night after Donald Trump had held one of his patented rallies in Johnson City, some 500 miles away, the President came all the way to suburban Southaven for a sequel. But simultaneously, the two major-party candidates for Governor — Democrat Karl Dean and Republican Bill Lee — were holding their one and only West Tennessee debate at the University of Memphis.

It was a dilemma: Which event to go to?

For the deep-of-pocket types, especially those whose political sympathies can run in more than one direction, there was an even more challenging choice on Wednesday, the next night. Of the four candidates running in the top statewide races, three (count ‘em, 3) held big-ticket fundraisers in Memphis.  JB

Dean at Railgarten

The aforesaid Dean was feted by a group of lawyers at the Crescent Club, Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen was the beneficiary of an event at the home of Ron Belz, and GOP Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn had a fundraiser not three blocks away at what her invitation referred to as “the historic home of Dr. George Nichopoulos” on Cottingham Place.

Dr. George Nichopoulos, it will be remembered, was the personal physician of the iconic late singer Elvis Presley. Deceased himself since 2016, “Dr. Nick” was at the center of serious controversy, stemming from his role in prescribing uppers and downers to the King, and ultimately was stripped of his medical credentials. That fact made the location of Wednesday night’s fundraiser the subject of gibes from Bredesen supporters who note that legislation sponsored by Blackburn may have contributed to the over-supply of opioids in society at large during the last few years.

Dean vs Lee

Of the two Tuesday night events, the more sedate by far was gubernatorial debate at the UM, sponsored by The Commercial Appeal, WMC-TV, and the League of Women Voters, among others. Both Dean and Lee were in good form, and the choice of a winner for most observers probably hewed fairly closely to their partisan loyalties.

Rhodes College political science professor Michael Nelson had a take on the debate that reasonably well described the difference between the two contenders. It was a case of Agenda (Dean) vs. Personality (Lee), said Nelson, who maintains (correctly) that, inasmuch as ultimately you vote for a person, the two factors tend to balance out in any fair metric.

Unsurprisingly, the go-to guy for issues per se was former Nashville Mayor Dean, whose answer to the first question of the night, about Medicaid expansion, was a resolute call for the state’s acceptance of the annual $1.5 billion offered by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act and an unequivocal statement that the Republican-controlled state government has committed a major mistake in blocking Tennessee’s participation in the Act so far.

Failure to accept the proffered aid, 
JB

Lee with reporters

 said Dean, had left 300 thousand Tennesseans needlessly uninsured, had turned away by now some $4 billion in funding due Tennessee without saving the state’s taxpayers a penny and had resulted in financial hard times and instances of closing for the state’s hospitals.

Lee has an undoubted ability to suggest a solid character through both word and deed. That fact, plus an agreeable square-jawed look and a reassuring manner, was a key to his come-from-behind victory over more highly touted candidates in the Republican primary, and it came through again both on stage and to a watching television audience. He demurred on the value of Medicaid expansion, contending on the basis of his own experience as the owner of a construction and equipment company employing some 1200 people that the state’s existing medical-insurance system was “fundamentally flawed,” and said he would “execute a different plan.”

Though he would provide a bit more reasoning during a Q-and-A with reporters after the debate, Lee has never quite articulated a definitive remedy of his own for the shortcomings of medical coverage for the masses of Tennesseans. In this respect, as in most others, he seems content to offer his own evident sincerity and good intentions as alternatives to sketched-out specifics.

Aside from the issue of Medicaid Expansion, there were few dramatic differences between the two candidates,though Dean posited the lack of Medicaid expansion as a major factor retarding progress in several other spheres — including industrial recruitment and educational achievement — and implicated it as a problem exacerbating the state’s unresolved transit issues.

The two candidates agreed that TNReady in its present form was failing , that there should be more emphasis on
JB

Blackbun at Owen Brennan’s on Wednesday

vocational education, and that alternatives to the state’s ASD handling of “priority” (i.e., failing) schools like Shelby County Schools’ home-grown IZone schools are promising.

There was one moment of exuberant reaction from the audience following the two candidates’ discussion of MeToo and gender issues in general. Lee worried about the prospect of divisiveness, but Dean went full tilt for equalizing incentives and opportunities for women and for making Tennessee the friendliest and best state for women.”

Although Dean followed up his good showing with the previously mentioned fundraiser on Wednesday, followed by a meet-and-greet at Railgarten, he is regarded at this point as sill behind in the polls to Lee, who has the Red-State factor in his favor.

Trump at Southaven

Although, as usual, the President’s Tuesday night rally at the Landers Center in Southaven, ostensibly to lobby for Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-White’s reelection, was a parade of his Greatest Hits talking points, one moment in particular would strike the entire nation’s attention.

That was Trump’s employment of verbal mockery to question the bona fides of Dr.Christine Blasey Ford, whose accusations of sexual assault against Trump Supreme Court designate Brett Kavanaugh would throw that nomination into doubt.

Riffing on the weak points of Ford’s memory of the 36-year-old incident, Trump reeked with sarasm, doing his obvious best to make Ford appear to be not only an unreliable but a dishonest accuser. He characterized the Senate Democrats contesting Kavanaugh’s nomination as practicing a strategy of “resist, demolish, destroy, and delay.”

The capacity crowd at Landers responded with cries of “Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh!” and “We Want Kavanaugh!”

Those were not the only chants to be heard from the assembly at Southaven. There were such blasts from the past as “Lock Her Up!” in relation to Trump’s erstwhile Democratic presidential opponent. And there were numerous refrains of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “Build That Wall!” (the latter a reference to the President’s dogged insistence on erecting a 2000-mile barrier on the nation’s southern border.

It was a typical Trump performance — not so much a speech as a performance in which he aroused and stroked the emotions of his base. Along the way he boasted a litany of claimed achievements — including tax cuts, a booming economy,rising employment, his new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, his opening to North Korea, and the opening of an American embassy in Jerusalem. He blasted such adversaries as the aforementioned Hillary Clinton, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the lawyer Michael Avenatti, and Democrats in general.

The President went so far as to suggest that the Democratic Party (or “Democrat Party,” as he says it) is a threat to the future of Medicare, although Democrats by and large seem committed to the expansion of Medicare, the creation of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. And Trump tried to link Republicans as a whole to the continuation of insurance coverage for people with previous medical conditions, though there is serious sentiment among GOP opponents of Obamacare to forgo that aspect of the Affordable Care Act.
As usual in the case of a Trump rally, truth was not the essential agreement. Rather, it was raw emotion, stoked by preambles of patriotic music and fueled by multiple helpings of impassioned rhetoric from the President.
Hifh
There was no doubting, however, that Trump can wow a crowd like few others. He concluded, as usual, with a promise that, under his policies, America would be “wealthy again…strong again…safe again…great again.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Blackburn, Dean, Lee, and Donald Trump All in Memphis Area

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The semi-lull in politics that had lasted from the mid-summer election of August 2nd until Labor Day is now unmistakably over, as the present week’s events well indicate.

On Monday night, Tennessee was favored with the presence of one Donald J. Trump, who turned up for one of his patented political rallies in Johnson City, in the far corner of northeastern Tennessee. Trump was on hand to bolster his own permanent campaign as well as the hopes of 8th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by incumbent Republican Bob Corker. On Tuesday night, he appeared at a rally in Southaven. (For a report on the president’s Southaven visit, go to memphisflyer.com.)

Jackson Baker

Trump in Johnson City

On Monday, the president, professing happiness at “being back in the great state of Tennessee with thousands of hard-working American patriots,” also made a point of ladling out grace notes to every other leading Republican in sight. His beneficiaries included Congressmen Phil Roe, John Duncan, Chuck Fleischmann, and Scott Desjarlais (“my favorite name in politics”), Congressional candidates Tim Burchett and Mark Green, Governor Bill Haslam, Lt. Governor Randy McNally, and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee.

Trump took time to brag on a new trade arrangement with Mexico and Canada, designated by the letters USMCA, an anagram that, unlike the predecessor association of NAFTA, cannot be said as a word. Though the new trade pact is considered somewhat more advantageous to American milk producers and automakers than was NAFTA, its primary advantage, as Trump sees it, may be that it’s one more replacement for a now-discarded creation of his Democratic predecessors.

The president also defended his current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and disparaged several Judiciary Committee Democrats who oppose Kavanaugh — notably Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Dianne Feinstein of California.

But Trump reserved most of his criticism for Phil Bredesen, the former Tennessee governor who is Blackburn’s Democratic opponent for the Senate seat. The election of Bredesen, he said, could mean the loss of Tennessee gun-owner’s Second Amendment rights, the escalation of taxes “beyond your wildest imagination, the likelihood of mass unemployment, and the takeover of medical care by the government.”

The Bredesen campaign later issued a point-by-point refutation of these charges, along with the following summary: “From Day 1, Governor Bredesen has been clear — he is not running against Donald Trump. He is running for a Senate seat to represent the people of Tennessee. As he said in Chattanooga this evening — if Tennesseans are looking for someone to continue the D.C. gridlock and shouting, he’s not their candidate. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has gotten very good at this after 16 years in Washington. If what Tennesseans are looking for is someone who will get things done, then Phil Bredesen is applying for the job.”

That statement, consistent with the general run of Bredesen’s TV commercials, which stress his political independence and demonstrated ability to work across the political aisle, both complements and somewhat contrasts with the former governor’s action last week in announcing that, if elected, he would not support current Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York for reelection to the Senate leadership post.    

Bredesen took that position during a debate at Cumberland University in Lebanon, and it came off then as a concession — needless, some Democrats worried — to his Republican opponent’s frequent attempts to tie him to the national Congressional leadership of Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

Jackson Baker

Mike Stewart in Germantown

• Meanwhile, there’s more politics in the offing locally. As I write this, there is to be a Tuesday night debate at the University of Memphis between the aforementioned Lee and his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean. Dean is scheduled to stick around for a meet-and-greet Wednesday night at Railgarten, and Senate candidate Blackburn was advertised for a GOP luncheon at Owen Brennan’s, also on Wednesday.

Local Democrats have been getting help from elsewhere, too. State Representative Mike Stewart was in Shelby County the weekend before last, speaking at a picnic of the Germantown Democratic Club and bringing aid and comfort — some of it rhetorical and devoted to the macro level of politics.

Said Stewart: “We have got to take this country back — neighborhood by neighborhood, councilmanic district by councilmanic district, statehouse district by statehouse district.” 

Stewart scourged “this very radical Congress that would not compromise” and a national Republican regime that, he said, “stymied at every turn” progressive efforts.

He made the case that several local House districts now belonging to Republicans were in range to be captured. “These districts are changing,” he said. “We can turn these districts blue. These suburban districts are where the fight is at.”

On hand for the event was a prime exhibit of Stewart’s thesis: State Representative Dwayne Thompson of House District 96. Thompson upset then incumbent state Representative Steve McManus two years ago in the district, which includes parts of Cordova, southeast Memphis, and Germantown, and which, as Stewart had indicated, had indeed undergone significant demographic change.

Thompson had worked the district with all due diligence back in 2016, knocking on what he estimated to be “thousands of doors,” and his effort certainly was the largest reason for his victory. But another major component was the significant financial aid that the state party shifted his way, by way of targeting the district.

In 2018, the state Democratic Party is once again involved as an active principal in the legislative races of Shelby County, and Stewart’s very presence was a clear symbol of that. This year the state party seems to have identified two more districts capable of turnover — District 97, in the Bartlett-Eads-Lakeland area, now represented by the GOP’s Jim Coley; and District 83, in the East Memphis-Germantown overlap, now represented by Republican Mark White.  

The Democrats running for those seats — Allan Creasy in District 97 and Danielle Schonbaum in district 83 — have reportedly been pinpointed for accelerated financial aid from the state party’s coffers, as has the reelection effort of Thompson, who is opposed by Republican Scott McCormick in District 96.

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Politics Politics Feature

Bredesen and Dean Hoping to Ride the Wave

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

With six weeks to go before the November 6th election, the question on most minds — certainly on the minds of Democrats — is whether the blue wave that was so evident locally on August 2nd exists in enough strength statewide to affect the outcome of the races for governor and senator.

Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and former Governor Phil Bredesen, the Democratic candidates for governor and senator respectively, certainly hope so. And so far their efforts to swell that wave have made them more evident in the Memphis area than their Republican opponents, Franklin businessman Bill Lee, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, and 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn, the party’s candidate for senator.

Jackson Baker

fund-raiser in a Memphis home.

When Blackburn opted out of an invitation for a senatorial debate at Rhodes College last Thursday, Bredesen turned up anyhow, converting the aborted showdown with his opponent into a “‘Memphis Matters’ Ideas Forum” before a nearly full house in Rhodes’ McNeil Concert Hall.

A questioner in the audience suggested that, if 80 percent of succeeding at something consisted of just showing up, the former two-term governor might get 80 percent of the votes from those who turned out. Bredesen upped the ante a bit, suggesting hopefully that he might get as much as 82 percent of the audience vote. Given the strongly partisan cast of the attendees, that didn’t seem terribly far-fetched.

The more objective polls taken to date of the population at large have see-sawed, with Bredesen and Blackburn trading small leads back and forth.

Dean’s situation is a bit more challenging. In his latest Memphis appearance, at a Monday afternoon fund-raiser at the Central Avenue home of Cynthia and Mark Grawemeyer, the Democratic nominee for governor noted the progession from a Fox News poll showing him 20 points behind Lee to a “newer and bigger and more accurate” poll by CNN cutting the gap to a mere nine percentage points.

“Nine points is fantastic!” said Dean, who told his sizeable crowd of well-wishers that he’d expected to come out of the primary-election period something like 12 points down, with the opportunity to chip away at his GOP opponent’s lead on the strength of vigorous campaigning and persuasive issues like the state’s need for Medicaid expansion, which he favors and Lee does not.

Dean described other “clear differences” with Lee: “He’s for arming teachers. I’m for security officers. I’m for the Second Amendment but want some sensible background checks. He’s for permitless carry, not a good thing.”

Decrying the local poverty rate of “46 or 47 percent” as “simply not tolerable,” Dean promised help in what he described as Memphis’ “existential battle” with the neighboring states of Mississippi and Arkansas in the competition for economic growth. “It’s time to win some of those battles,” he said.

There’s no doubting that Memphis will figure large in Dean’s own battle with Lee, who narrowly lost Shelby County to Diane Black in the GOP primary but had made considerable gains here late in that campaign, as he did elsewhere in the state — mainly, it would seem, on the basis of a compelling personality. But Dean professes confidence. “If we vote, we win,” he said Monday, predicting, “There’s going to be a blue wave of some sort.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Fallout From the August Election and Predictions for November

Here we go again. The voting round that concluded on August 2nd with a virtual Democratic sweep is the second local election in a row in which a resurgent Democratic Party has demonstrated quantifiable strength at the polls, just as it did in the May 1st county primary election, when the Democrats totaled 44,768 votes against 30,208 for the Republicans. 
And here again, too, comes some of the skeptical second-guessing that followed that outcome, the tenor of which is that an apt reading of the numbers actually proves the opposite of what the election results seemed to indicate.

My resourceful and distinguished friend John Ryder, the former general counsel of the Republican National Committee and as eminent a Republican as can be found in these parts, assayed forth in The Commercial Appeal last weekend with an analysis of the August 2nd election that mirrored his conclusions about the previous one. 

On the prior occasion, Ryder juggled some numbers from past elections in order to demonstrate that, as he insisted, the voting curve actually favored Republicans and that Democrats would discover on the then-far-off date of August 2nd, that conditions boded ill for their party.

But, just as the Ides of March inexorably came for Caesar, the 2nd of August would come in for Ryder and other GOP optimists — with the aforementioned result, a sweep for Democratic candidates in countywide races and a measurable gain for them in other positions.

Predictably, however, Ryder managed to find solace in the numbers. More Republicans across the state of Tennessee voted for governor in their primary than statewide Democrats did in theirs, he noted, a finding that led him to conclude: “This does not bode well for the Democrats in the November election.” Considering the difficulties incurred by Ryder since his similar prophecies in May, it may just be that his bod-o-meter is out of order and needs to be serviced.

Or he may be right, of course, in implicitly predicting a victory for Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Lee, who certainly emerged from the GOP primary as a likeable new face, and who, perhaps conveniently, lacked any political record and thus was immune to the knife-throwing tactics of his chief Republican opponents, Randy Boyd and Diane Black, who managed to slash each other into irrelevance.

Or maybe the problem was that Boyd and Black were engaged in a desperate contest to see who could more accurately pose as a loyal minion to President Donald Trump. Trump deigned not to confer his official favor on either, for better or for worse.

In any case, the Republicans’ four-way gubernatorial race (which included also state House Speaker Beth Harwell) certainly generated more press attention than did the Democratic race between former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and the woefully underfunded House Democratic Leader Craig Fitzhugh. That could be one explanation for the numbers differential of the two parties’ gubernatorial votes — which Ryder cites as gospel, despite declining to accept the Democrats’ edge in mayoral-primary voting as an indicator back in May.

Whatever the  reasons for his thinking, Ryder seems implicitly to be predicting that 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn, an outspoken Trumpian with The Donald’s full endorsement, will triumph over her Democratic opponent for the U.S. Senate. That would be former Governor Phil Bredesen, a middle-of-the-road veteran whose two gubernatorial terms were won with significant crossover votes from Republicans and independents, and who has been faring well so far in competitive polling against Blackburn.

Trump’s coattails or more blue wave? Which bodes well — and for whom — in the November general election? It remains to be seen.

• If Jesse Jackson has his way, the blue wave will keep on rolling. The iconic civil rights veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate was in Memphis early this week on behalf of his Rainbow PUSH coalition’s effort to encourage more voter participation in this year’s election process.

Jackson spoke Monday 

morning to students at Booker T. Washington High School, urging them to register to vote and to stand against violence in their neighborhoods. Afterward, asked his reaction to the Democratic sweep in the county election here, Jackson said he was pleased to see “blacks and whites voting together” in recognition of their “common interest” in “a very difficult season of our lives as Americans.”

Jackson said it was too early for him to get behind a specific presidential candidate in 2020. “We don’t know who’s running. It’s too early.” But he took the occasion to inveigh against the current electoral-college winner-take-all system of voting by states.

“The last time around, the loser won, and the winner lost,” Jackson said, noting Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 3 million popular vote edge. “We need a one-person, one-vote democracy,” he said. “Let the winner win, and the loser lose, to be fair.” 

As for the Electoral College, “we never could apply to it,” he said in a bit of wordplay. What the country needs is “universal rights, not states’ rights.”  

 

• Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, a former local Democratic Party chairman who keeps a low partisan profile as a nonpartisan political official, was invited to deliver the opening statement Saturday at a “Hot Dogs in the Park” event in Overton Park celebrating recent Democratic election victories.

Strickland complied and launched into a congratulatory message to the sponsoring organization, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and continued with several citations by him of progress on his mayoral watch, which he attributed in part to inspiration by the DWSC.

Commissioner-elect Tami Sawyer, a Democrat, is welcomed by GOP Commissioner Mark Billingsley.

A group of four or five protesters, led by activist Hunter Demster, began heckling the mayor’s brief remarks, yelling things like “Where’s Tami?” (an apparent reference to the absence from the event of County Commissioner-elect Tami Sawyer) and “How many African Americans?” in answer to Strickland’s claims of increased city contracting with firms owned by women or minority members.

In response to the heckling, event organizer Norma Lester called for a police presence, and a few squad cars pulled up, though the officers never entered the pavilion where the event was taking place and stood quietly, as observers on the periphery. After the initial heckling, there was no further interruption, and various newly elected Democratic officials contributed brief statements to the celebration.

• “Changing of the guard” was a largely unspoken theme Monday at what was the next-to-last full meeting of the Shelby County Commission before its newly elected  members are sworn in at the end of the month. Such Commissioners-elect as Democrat Sawyer and Republican Amber Mills sat onstage on the periphery of the meeting, as outgoing members struggled to complete a lengthy agenda of unfinished business. Most got processed, but two key items — one levying a new tax on Airbnb domiciles and another involving a proposed new housing development in Collierville — were kicked back to committee, with but one public meeting left to consider them. 

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Politics Politics Feature

Most Shelby County Election Results Were Predictable

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Republicans were not the only ones dismayed at the results of the August 2nd election. To be sure, the GOP took a licking in races for countywide positions, and they lost a swing district on the Shelby County Commission, giving Democrats a decisive 8-5 majority for the next four years.
But, with the exception of Democrat Michael Whaley‘s win in District 5, a city swing district, Shelby County Republicans held their own in localized one-on-one competition. On a countywide scale, though, the GOP fared less well, even in nonpartisan races. Two judicial candidates bearing Republican endorsements — David Rudolph and Jennifer S. Nichols — went down in defeat, despite having the advantage of being incumbents, albeit as recent interim appointees.

In a general way, the law of averages is what determined the outcomes. Yes, there are in theory more Democrats than Republicans in Shelby County; this year, unlike the case in 2010 and 2014, there was a general consensus in both parties that, quality-wise, Democratic candidates were as good as — if not better than — than their Republican counterparts, and, for a change, adequately funded. Crossover voting in the GOP’s direction, a factor in the previous two elections, was virtually non-existent this year. 

Similarly, there is the related fact that there are more African Americans in Shelby County than whites, and, while post-racial results have been known to occur in local elections (think Steve Cohen or, when he still had a bloom on, A C Wharton), it would seem to be human nature that, all else being equal, people will vote for their racial group-mates. Accordingly, in relatively close races between blacks and whites, the racial factor tilted toward African Americans.

Finally, in local politics as in state and national elections, women have steadily become a more active force, and people, including other women, who in the binary sense are yet another majority, have no compunction in voting for women.

Taking those three factors into account — party, race, and gender — a fairly reliable rule-of-thumb can be stated that, where any two are present, they can be decisive for the candidate on the majority side of the ledger. 

Thus, Democrat John Boatner Jr., a white candidate in the primary for Congress in the 8th Congressional District, was at a disadvantage in his contest with Erika Stotts Pearson, an African American. And, while Boatner had more money and was clearly the more active of the two candidates (omnipresent at campaign events, and with several large yard signs bearing his name on upscale sections of Walnut Grove Road), he was a first-time candidate, and, as a white male contending with an African American female, was on the wrong side of the arithmetic. (In his case, too, the power of the city vote, where Democrats are numerous, out-did the party’s rather scanty presence these days in the West Tennessee counties that comprise the rest of the district.)

A few other upsets reflect various versions of the Democratic/black/female tilt.

Circuit court Judge Rudolph had, by general consent, performed well after his 2017 appointment by Governor Haslam to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Judge Robert L. “Butch” Childers, and his diligence as a candidate, often in the company of his personable wife, Elizabeth, an administrator at the University of Memphis Law School, could not be faulted. The scion of an East Memphis family, educated at MUS and Vanderbilt, he was well-financed, to boot.

But he was felled by Yolanda Kight, an equally impressive and diligent young black woman from a humble background in South Memphis, who had risen very much by her own efforts to attain the lesser judicial rank of magistrate. Aided also by the “upset” factor which can generate sympathy in an electorate, she ended with a narrow win over Rudolph. 

Another such case was the victory in a Democratic state Senate primary race of Gabby Salinas, whose Bolivian family had immigrated to Memphis so that young Gabby could be treated for childhood cancer at St. Jude. On the threshold of being a scientist in her own right, she survived three different bouts with the disease, and, though she was faced with a better-financed opponent, the able and equally appealing Le Bonheur chaplain David Weatherspoon, her backstory may have made the difference. Her next challenge will be, as an advocate of Medicaid expansion, against Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey.

There were other unexpected outcomes. The victories of Joyce Dorse-Coleman and Michelle McKissack over Shelby County Schools Board incumbents Mike Kernell and Chris Caldwell conformed to the above-mentioned formula, though McKissack’s in particular also owed much to her support from charter-school advocates. Though hardly a novice in politics, the oft-controversial city Councilwoman Janis Fullilove, victorious as a Democrat over Republican Bobby Simmons for Juvenile Court Clerk, was expected to be shut out of the white vote entirely. Further analysis will determine whether she wasn’t or whether she was but was able to prevail anyhow.

Most outcomes on August 2nd conformed to the form sheet. It was a Democratic year, not so much because of a better-than-usual turnout but because their candidates were measurably better than in previous years, staving off the customary flow of crossover Democratic voters to Republican candidates that had marked prior elections. 

In the marquee local races, State Senator Lee Harris for county mayor was clearly an able political figure, as was Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner for sheriff, both of them sufficiently so to attract crossovers of their own to augment what was already their majority standing.  

The Democratic blue wave was no surprise. In the vernacular, this was how it was ‘sposed to be.

Ford Canale‘s win for a a vacant city council position was due to his maintaining establishment support against a field of several candidates breaking up the dissident vote. In the statewide contests, Republican Bill Lee won his gubernatorial primary by being himself; Democrat Karl Dean won his through superior resources and fidelity to a centrist party message. The U.S. Senate primary wins of Democrat Phil Bredesen and Republican Marsha Blackburn were no-brainers.

The final win of the mid-summer election season occurred Monday night at Shelby County Republican headquarters, where a small caucus of steering committee members from the state House District 99 of late state Representative Ron Lollar elected onetime state Senator Tom Leatherwood, outgoing as register and a loser in his race for Circuit Court Clerk, as a compromise choice to run against Democratic nominee Dave Cambron in November.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bill Lee Closes Fast in GOP Primary

CREDIT: JB

JB

Gubernatorial candidate Lee works the room at Arlington’s Legacy Grill.

Is Bill Lee the new frontrunner among Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial candidates? A recent poll says that he is, and the Williamson County businessman is now promoting that assumption on a last, pre-primary tour of the state at “100 town halls” (two of them in Shelby County on Thursday, a week before final voting on August 2nd).

Given the lingering consensus that, Democratic blue wave or no blue wave, Republicans are still the majority party in Tennessee, does the prospect that — with less than a week to go — Lee has taken over the GOP lead from the duo long at the top, Diane Black and Randy Boyd, mean that he is the state’s likely new governor?

“Maybe” is the right answer to all those questions. The poll reflecting a sudden come-from-behind lunge from Lee is by JMC Analytics and Polling, a Louisiana firm that is new to the headlines in Tennessee. So, make allowance for a degree of skepticism. It is certainly true, however, from an aggregate of various other polls over the last several months, that Lee had been maintaining a reasonably close third-place position behind Black and Boyd and was theoretically within striking distance of the Black and Boyd, should either or both of them falter.

And it is widely believed that both Black and Boyd, whose campaigns had largely become mere mechanisms for attacking each other, had indeed faltered, especially since their attacks had become progressively meaner-spirited and less connected to reality — accusing each other of being swamp creatures secretly disloyal to President Trump, as well as mad taxers intent upon robbing Tennesseans blind while gaming the financial system to enrich themselves. At no time has there been a reasoned dialogue between the two contrasting Black’s hard-shell Trump-style conservatism with the progressive governmental ideas of Boyd, an entrepreneur and former idea man for current Governor Bill Haslam who prefers now to be called “Conservative Randy Boyd,” as if that were the name on his birth certificate.

Meanwhile, Lee — a multi-millionaire like his two main rivals — has been steadily touring the state in the supportive company of his wife, Maria, stressing his religious faith and his rebound from previous family tragedies that included the death of his first wife from a horseback fall. Looking like a casually composed latter-day Marlboro Man, Lee has eschewed desperate attacks upon his opponents in favor of promises to help build a ‘better life” for all Tennesseans. Steering clear of ideology as such, and lacking a political record of any sort, he styles himself as a “conservative” and an outsider.

His current pre-election tour of Tennessee, in the same 14-year-old RV he has been using for the past year or so, made two stops in Shelby County on Thursday — one at noon at the Kooky Canuck eatery downtown, another at mid-afternoon at The Legacy Grill in Arlington, he greeted supporters, schmoozed with diners, and in general acted like a low-key Man of the Hour.

The restaurant at Arlington was filled with people, who were first treated to a stock campaign video, which recapped moments from the life and times of Lee, who was seen describing his first wife’s fatal horse-riding accident in a subdued but straightforward voice.

“Over time, we healed, we grew, we started laughing again,” Lee said on the video, explaining that he had made it his mission to “ work to change others, to make life better for other people,” not just the “1,200 hard-working pipe-fitters, electricians, plumbers of the Lee Company,” but others, including the inner-city child he mentored and the “guy from prison” he helped make a transition back to society at large.

“I started to think, What if I could do that for everyone in Tennessee? I believe I can. I’m sure going to try.

A local pastor then introduced the flesh-and-blood Lee to the crowd as “a man’s man, “farmer, husband, father, grandfather … not a career politician — in fact, he’s never run for office before — a passionate lover and follower of Jesus Christ.”

Lee came up to the front, dressed in casual shirt and chinos, suggesting that people were looking for a “conservative man of faith” and offering that as a description of himself. Hailing some Memphis-area cousins that were in the crowd, Lee cited the “transformational” nature of his family tragedy and in short order was joined at the front of the room by Maria, “God’s gift to me.”

He promised to take better care of the state’s teachers. “We test too much, and we may be testing for the wrong things.” He spoke of his wish to reform criminal justice and reduce “the revolving door” of recidivism, lamented that 15 Tennessee counties, all rural, were officially designated as in poverty, and got an extended round of applause when he rounded on the “dishonest, deceptive attack ads” that, he implied, his major GOP opponents were committed to.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics,” he said. “There’s a lot more truth you can find in the person behind those ads than in the person in those ads.”

There was more in that vein, and a nod to his independence and the fact that he was “not beholden to anybody,” donors, lobbyists, or legislators. He likened his “outsider” status to that of President Trump. “That’s why he’s been so effective.”

After his remarks, he and his wife greeted an impressive number of well-wishers who approached them.

He was asked if really had taken the lead. “We certainly know there’s a surge, and the momentum is there. I don’t rely on polls, but I do rely on the momentum and the electricity I see. In today’s world, people want a conservative and an outsider, and that’s me.”

Asked to define what he meant by the term “conservative,” he said it denotes a “playbook for the fundamental approach to governing, that limited government and small government is better, that fiscal governmency includes not allowing government to grow beyond what it should, and understanding there are conservative social values like being 100 percent pro-life.”

Some might think of all that as boilerplate, but Lee makes such statements with a seeming frankness and a confident if modest attitude. He is not one for hard and fast policy points, but in a contest where image counts for much, he certainly looks the part, and, after several months of trailing frontrunners Black and Boyd for first-place honors in the Republican gubernatorial primary, he may indeed be peaking at the right time.

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Cover Feature News

Democratic Blue Wave or GOP Firewall?

In truth, there are several elections on the August 2nd ballot in Shelby County. 

One is a county general election, featuring contests for Shelby County mayor, sheriff, and various other county official positions, as well as for members of the Shelby County Schools board and Shelby County Commission, special elections for three judgeships, as well as a referendum on pay raises for county officials. And, for roughly half the voters of Memphis, a contest for an open at-large position on the City Council. 

Another election, involving primaries for major statewide and federal offices, includes races for governor, U.S. senator, the U.S. House of Representatives, and legislative positions in the Tennessee General Assembly. 

The outcomes of the county general election and the state/federal primaries will not only be consequential in themselves but will have significant barometric relevance to ongoing political currents — local, statewide, and even national. In particular, the most closely watched races will indicate the extent to which the current century’s ramparts of Republican dominance in Tennessee and Shelby County are still at full strength or whether, conversely, the much-rumored “blue wave” of 2018 will signal a Democratic revival.

Certainly, a Democrat — Lee Harris — is regarded as having a fair chance to prevail as Shelby County mayor, the first to do so since two easy victories in 2002 and 2006 by former county and city Mayor A C Wharton. Harris is a former Memphis city councilman and, more recently, the elected leader of the Democrats’ five-member remnant in the state Senate. He is opposed by David Lenoir, a two-term county trustee, who won a three-cornered Republican primary over County Commissioner Terry Roland and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos in May. 

GOP: Bill Lee, Diane Black, Randy Boyd, and Beth Harwell

The root fact is that the August 2nd county ballot will be the first real test this year of Democrats against Republicans, and might provide a measure of the respective prospects for either party in the months and even years to come.

As it happens, of course, balloting in the county general election, as well as in the state/federal primaries, is already underway, in an official early voting period that began last Friday, July 13th, and will continue through Saturday, July 28th. 

And, because of a controversy over the Shelby County Election Commission’s choice of voting sites that flared up in the couple of weeks before the process started [see Editorial, p. 8], public attention to the process of early voting was whetted to an unprecedented degree.

By the time the controversy was resolved in the courtroom of Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, Democrats and Republicans had seen early voting sites added in pockets of the county dominated by their constituents. The final number of sites was 27, fairly evenly distributed, and five of those sites — also apportioned equably party-wise — were enabled to operate for an extra three days each.

When the Shelby County Democrats for Change PAC held a reception and rally for party candidates in the Serenity Events Center in East Memphis on Sunday, the organizers proudly claimed a 68 percent to 32 percent voting ratio in favor of the Democratic state/federal primary versus the Republican one for Friday’s first day of early voting. If that kind of differential should continue and be reflected in the voting results of the county general election, chances for the putative blue wave would be looking good.

DEM: Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh

The two mayoral contestants will have had several public one-on-one matchups by the time final voting ceases on Election Day. In the first one, held last month at a meeting of the Downtown Kiwanis Club, Republican Lenoir seemed to gain some traction by selectively using Democrat Harris’ legislative record to make a “soft-on-crime” attack.

In the candidates’ second major encounter, held last week by the NAACP and the ad hoc Voting is Power 901 activist group at the National Civil Rights Museum, Harris made pointed efforts to rebut Lenoir’s charge and clearly found the environment more hospitable to his own message of progressive social change. Score it one-to-one as the opponents prepared to square off again this week before the Downtown Rotary Club.

Though this potentially nip-and-tuck mayoral contest will have exposed the two parties’ contrasting attitudes, the real battle was taking place in the political center. 

Lenoir’s pitch, based essentially on his claim of demonstrated competence, was centrist enough, his supporters hoped, to give him the same shot at independents and Democratic crossovers that current GOP Mayor Mark Luttrell enjoyed in two elections. Similarly, Harris’ professional gloss as a Yale Law graduate and his record in office of simultaneously working across the political aisle, and pursuing cutting-edge Democratic goals gave him a good chance to activate his base, demographically presumed to be a majority, while discouraging crossovers the other way.

Even the race for sheriff, not normally one characterized by political extremes, has a discernibly ideological edge this year, as was demonstrated by another NAACP/VIP901 debate last week, this one between Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner, the Democrat, and county homeland security director Dale Lane, the Republican.

Phil Bredesen and Marsha Blackburn

Among other issues, Bonner’s declared disinclination to cooperate with the Trump administration’s roundups of undocumented immigrants, locally, contrasted with Lane’s professed willingness to assist the operatives of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials as “fellow law officers.” (See Politics, p. 7,  for more.) 

Consistent with the blue wave theme, the August 2nd election ballot shows three Democrats running for the office of governor, and only one of them — political unknown Mezianne Vale Payne — has the look of a ringer. The other two Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and outgoing Democratic state House Leader Craig Fitzhugh — are major league, all the way.

Most analysts see Dean as the clear favorite, on the basis of his financial edge and backing from traditionalists in the party network, though Fitzhugh has the declared support of party legislators, educators, state employees, and various other rank-and-file groups.

There are three Democrats vying in the party primary for the U.S. Senate, too, and one of them is former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen. His party rivals, for the record, are named Gary Davis and John Wolfe, but there is no mystery about who the Democratic nominee will be. Bredesen not only has wall-to-wall support from rank-and-file Democrats in Tennessee, he is counted on by national Democrats of all persuasions to contribute mightily to the party revival that Democratic optimists (and numerous media analysts) have been forecasting.

And, just as there is no mystery about Bredesen’s looming victory in the Democratic primary, the identity of his Republican adversary in November, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional district, is also a given, though one Aaron L. Pettigrew also has his name on the primary ballot. Blackburn, who occupies a position on the hard right of the Republican Party, was a Trumpian before there was a Trump, and her all-too-obvious intent to move on to the Senate was probably a major factor last year in convincing incumbent Senator Bob Corker, a Trump critic, that it was time to bow out.

There is something of a coin-toss situation among Republican gubernatorial candidates.. Considering the fact that three of the six GOP aspirants — entrepreneur and former state economic development Commissioner Randy Boyd, 6th District U.S. Representative Diane Black, and Williamson County businessman Bill Lee — are multi-millionaires, that metaphor is almost literal. The fourth serious candidate in the GOP primary, state House Speaker Beth Harwell, has been hampered by her relative lack of financial resources.

Though only Black has a political profile arguably close to Trump’s (she’s an advocate for building “the wall” on the nation’s southern border, and she veers hard right on most other issues), all of the Republicans call themselves “conservatives” and are at pains not to put too much public distance between themselves and the president.

Boyd, in particular, seems determined in that respect, running ads that seem designed to depict him as more rigidly conservative than Black, though in person he is soft-spoken and thoughtful, a near clone in his thinking to current Governor, Bill Haslam, for whom Boyd designed such arguably forward-looking programs as Drive to 55 and Tennessee Promise. 

Lee, a genial man who campaigns heavily on his Christian faith and his rebound from family tragedies, is clearly a generic conservative, though one with few hard and fast positions. By general consensus (and such reliable polling data as exists), he has been running third and hoping for a stumble by one or both of the acknowledged GOP front-runners, Boyd and Black.

There are those who see Lee’s real purpose as building a profile for some future race. Harwell’s is more a case of sink-or-swim in a possible last hurrah, though she is well-liked enough to be called upon for further public duty, possibly by someone’s appointment.

In any case, Bredesen vs. Blackburn and the eventual gubernatorial matchup in November will measure the contrary tides of political sentiment in Tennessee. Apropos prospects for a blue wave, a look at the legislative races on the ballot, with Democrats vying for every available position and there being numerous races for which no Republican is contending, would almost suggest that Shelby County has returned to the circumstances of the old Solid Democratic South of the pre-civil rights era, in which the GOP was an outlier party.

That, to say the least, would be misleading. What the dearth of Republican candidacies, almost entirely in predominantly black areas, does represent, however, is a continuing lack of indigenous support in the inner city of Memphis, as well as a serious downturn in the party’s outreach results, whether through lack of serious effort or simple failure. In theory at least, the party is still trying, as would be indicated by the presence on the GOP ballot once again of Charlotte Bergmann, an African-American activist and a perennial candidate, once again seeking the 9th District Congressional seat.

The omnipresence of Democratic legislative candidates, meanwhile, signals a rekindled zeal among rank-and-file Democrats as well as in the leadership of a local party which was reorganized in 2017, after internal disunion and chaos resulted in the state party’s lifting its charter in 2016. 

Longtime observers of local and state politics recall a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the Republican Party, then a definite minority organization in both Shelby County and Tennessee at large, began fielding candidates in established Democratic fiefdoms. Largely unsuccessful at first, the GOP efforts eventually bore fruit, and, when social changes (most of them national in origin) began to weaken ancestral voting habits, today’s wall-to-wall GOP state government emerged.

Locally, though, the situation is far from being static. It should be remembered that the Republican sweeps and near-sweeps in the county elections of the 21st century are counter-demographic, in that they have occurred at a time when Shelby County’s emergent non-white majority has been ever enlarging. If the new flood of Democratic candidates in the suburbs can stimulate a dormant activism there and meanwhile activate the party’s urban base, generally somnolent in non-presidential election years, the political power ratio could transform quickly.

Or, as Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills put it, in a cautionary message to his party-mates back in February: “Since 2010, we’ve been lucky in Shelby County. Thanks to the leadership we’ve had, we’ve had good organization and we’ve had good candidates. The Democrats, on the other hand, have had just the opposite. They haven’t had good candidates and they haven’t had good organization. But for the first time in a long time, they have both of those things. They have a good organization. They have a good leader. And they have decent candidates at the top that’ll drive all the way down to the bottom. So we have got to turn our voters out.”

There are three state Senate seats at risk in the primary, and there are interesting contests in all of them:

In State Senate District 29, Tom Stephens is a token Republican entry. The real race is in the Democratic primary, between outgoing County Commissioner Justin Ford, a member of urban Memphis’ best-known political clan, and current state Representative Raumesh Akbari, a rising legislative star who won her House seat in a 2013 special election over Ford’s cousin, Kemba Ford.

Three Democrats are on the ballot in Senate District 31, where David Weatherspoon, a chaplain at Le Bonheur Hospital, seeks the party nod over Gabby Salinas, a cancer survivor and scientific researcher. A third Democrat is M. Rodanial Ray Ransom.

Salinas’ history of personal triumph over difficult odds makes for a compelling backstory, but Weatherspoon has a serious financial edge and support across party lines. Both Weatherspoon and Salinas are committed to supporting Medicaid expansion, which Republican incumbent Brian Kelsey, unopposed in his primary, has stoutly resisted.

No Republican is running in Senate District 31, perhaps because Democratic incumbent Reginald Tate is well-known for his close cooperation with the GOP leadership in the legislature. That fact has also generated a stout challenge to Tate in the Democratic primary from nursing entrepreneur Katrina Robinson, who is supported by several name Democrats, including current state Senators Sara Kyle and Lee Harris.

Of Shelby County’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives, only five have races on the ballot, and all these races are between rival Democrats. In House District 85, there is a four-way contest involving Jesse Chism, Ricky Dixon, Brett N. Williams, and Lynette P. Williams. In House District 86, long-term Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper has two primary opponents: Amber Huett-Garcia and Jesse Jeff. In House District 90, things begin to get truly interesting. Here incumbent John DeBerry — who, like the aforementioned Reginald Tate, is considered by many of his party-mates to be too cozy with Republicans — is challenged by Torrey Harris, a small-business owner. 

House District 91, vacated by Akbari, is being fought over by Democrats Doris DeBerry Bradshaw, Juliette Eskridge, and London P. Lamar, while House District 93 incumbent Democrat G.A. Hardaway has a contender in the Democratic primary, Eddie Neal. In House District 99, Antonio “Two-Shay” Parkinson,  is being challenged by fellow Democrat Johnnie Hatten.

House District 99 has a special distinction as a result of the recent untimely death of Republican incumbent Ron Lollar. It was too late to change the ballot; so Lollar’s name remains. Before the November election, the Shelby County Republican Party will be entitled to name a replacement. Some of the Republican names in play: county commission Chair Heidi Shafer, Shelby County GOP Chair Mills, Bartlett Alderman David Parsons, and County Commissioner David Reaves.

And David Cambron, the Democratic mainstay and ace recruiter who is as responsible as anyone for the stepped-up party showing, has a shot at winning a seat himself. He’s unopposed to be the Democratic nominee in House Disrict 99.See ‘Politics,’ , for more election preview.