Tag: Bob Corker

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Politics Politics Feature

Looking for Lamar Alexander

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Gordon Ball, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator, was in Memphis last week, and he sat down for a lengthy interview on his campaign and his hopes for an upset victory over incumbent Republican Senator Lamar Alexander.

As Ball noted, Alexander had eked out his renomination on August 7th, polling slightly less than 50 percent of the total vote in a Republican primary in which he was opposed by state Representative Joe Carr, a Tea Party supported Middle Tennessean, and George Flinn, the multi-millionaire Memphis physician/businessman.

Carr, who finished strong with 40 percent of the total vote, had gone unmentioned for most of the primary campaign, Ball noted, but toward the end of the race, Alexander had begun making formal attacks on his main challenger by name. “When he started mentioning Joe Carr, it was a sign that things were getting tight for Lamar,” Ball said.

Ball has challenged Alexander to a debate but doesn’t expect that to happen. “Lamar’s going by the incumbent’s playbook. He’s not going to debate me. He will never mention me, unless it gets close.”

From that standpoint, the Democratic nominee can take heart from a response to his candidacy this week by the state Republican Party, which has not only mentioned him but has incorporated his name in a brand-new website entitled ObamaBallAgenda.com.

According to the site, Tennessee faces a veritable liberal onslaught this fall in the form of various nationally sanctioned candidates and causes. And, “at the top of the ticket, will be a man who would be one more vote for Barack Obama’s harmful agenda — Gordon Ball. Mr. Ball, a liberal personal injury lawyer from Knoxville, will only serve to empower Obama and strengthen Washington’s stranglehold on our economy.”

Ball sees the relationship between himself and the national Democratic Party quite differently. Noting the disinclination of the Obama presidential campaign to pump much in the way of resources into Tennessee during the 2008 and 2012 races, the Knoxvillian said, “I think the national Democratic Party has written Tennessee off. That’s not good for the state.” But he shrugged and said, “That’s all right with me. We’ll run without them.”

A corollary to what Ball sees as a lack of interest in Tennessee from national party sources is the fact that the Tennessee Democratic Party itself is not exactly in the pink of political health. Rather famously, the party has, within the past decade, lost control of the governorship and the General Assembly, becoming little more than a token minority in both the state House and the state Senate. 

And, for the second time in the past two statewide elections, Tennessee Democrats have failed to mount a serious challenge in a major statewide race. In 2012, the party suffered the embarrassment of seeing Mark Clayton, an off-brand candidate with alleged membership in an anti-gay hate group, become its nominee against GOP Senator Bob Corker in an almost unnoticed Democratic primary.

And in 2014, via yet another back-burner primary, the Democratic candidate who emerged as the party’s nominee for governor, to oppose well-heeled incumbent Republican Bill Haslam, is one Charlie Brown, a retired construction worker from Oakdale, Tennessee, whose victory in a large but largely anonymous primary field owed much to his name, redolent of a well-known comic-strip character and alphabetically first on the Democratic primary ballot. 

With the wry grin that seems an innate part of his persona, Ball commented, “I wish I had his name recognition.”

But the fact is, Ball represents what both Democrats and Republicans recognize as a serious political possibility. He and fellow Knoxville attorney Terry Adams conducted a primary race that, in the quality of its rhetoric and intensity, was something of a throwback to the now vanished time when Democrats ruled the state. Their race went down to the wire, with Ball, considered the centrist in the race, prevailing on August 7th with 36.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, against 35.6 percent for Adams, an unabashed liberal.

The two Democrats had actually agreed on most issues — including a need for an increase in the minimum wage, support for parity pay for women and the pro-choice position on abortion, provision of equal opportunity for the gay community, and full-throated backing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee, where, Ball says, some 160,000 people can’t get medical care and 28 hospitals are in danger of closing for lack of the ACA-provided Medicaid-expansion funds.

He and Adams had differed most notably on Ball’s espousal of a flat tax, which Adams considered regressive and counter to the needs of working people and a possible barrier to his post-primary support of Ball. Again, the Ball shrug — indicating, in this case, flexibility on the issue. “We need tax reform. I don’t think anybody disagrees. I just want to be in middle of that debate. And I’m for whatever helps the middle class remain strong and viable and that can raise money to pay off our $17 trillion debt.”

In any case, Adams wasted little time climbing aboard the Ball bandwagon and now serves as his former opponent’s East Tennessee co-chair.

One edge that helped Ball in his primary campaign was the wealth amassed during a long and successful legal career. To a certain degree, he can self-finance, as he did during the primary, shelling out some $400,000 for TV ads. He knows, however, that Alexander himself is flush and suspects that Governor Bill Haslam, scion of his family’s Pilot truck-stop fortune and beneficiary of a hugely successful GOP fund-raising campaign, will help the GOP out-spend him.

The point gnaws at Ball. “I’m going to make a strong statement,” he said: “This state is controlled by the Haslam family. Think about it. They own Bob Corker. They own Lamar Alexander. And they have the governor’s seat. Now what else do they want? … It’s just not right that one group of people controls this state. If you don’t think that’s happening, you’re living on another planet.”

Citing polls by Rasmussen and The New York Times that show something like a 47 percent to 32 percent edge for Alexander, Ball predicts the kind of shrinking in the incumbent’s margin that occurred late in the Republican primary, and partly for the same reason — distrust for the incumbent among Tea Party Tennesseans.

“We don’t agree on every issue, obviously, but they see Lamar as being for Common Core [in education] and amnesty [on the immigration issue]. They’re against Common Core and amnesty, and so am I.”

Ball is buoyed by hopes of making inroads among such disaffected Republicans and by what he sees as a largely united Democratic Party (though certain well-known Democrats like former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell and former Congressman John Tanner — “lobbyists now,” Ball says dismissively — are backing Alexander.)

He has worked up a good case of scorn for Alexander, whom he once supported and whom he now sees as having fallen ito irrelevance from what had been a valuable public career. “How do you go from a job that pays $150,000 to being worth $40 million?” he asks rhetorically. “He just needs to take his money and go home.”

Ball gibes at the incumbent Senator, who back in 1978, dressed in a plaid shirt, had based his campaign for Governor on a walk across the state.”  Things — and Alexander — have changed, Ball maintains.

“He said in the primary that citizens of the state of Tennessee could ask him questions if they saw him walking down the street. Well, I’ve been in Tennessee for 65 years, and I’ve never seen him walking down the street. If I ever do see him, I’ve got some questions for him.”

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Editorial Opinion

Deal’s a Deal

But who really came out ahead on this one? It will be remembered that, from last fall through the spring, certain high-ranking Tennessee officials tangled in dead earnest with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union about the prospect of the UAW becoming recognized as a bargaining agent for workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. With some justice, it would seem, the UAW accused Senator Bob Corker, Governor Bill Haslam, and various members of the state legislature of unfair labor practices in the wake of a narrow loss for the UAW in a representational vote held in February of this year.

In the run-up to that election, Senator Corker said publicly, in the face of denials from VW officials, that Volkswagen would manufacture a mid-sized SUV at the Chattanooga plant — so long as the UAW bid was rejected. Bo Watson, speaker pro tem of the state Senate, threatened legislation to withdraw state financial concessions from VW if the union won the vote. And Haslam piled on by saying he thought suppliers would think twice about serving a unionized plant. You wouldn’t want to call that interference or arm-twisting, now, would you? And the state used carrots as well as sticks, reportedly offering Volkswagen an additional $300 million in cash and tax credits, contingent, as The Detroit News put it, on “‘works council discussions between the State of Tennessee and VW being concluded to the satisfaction’ of the state.”

The reference to “works councils” is to the unvarying policy at Volkswagen plants worldwide for workers to be organized as an official part of plant management. Company officials not only had not sided with the naysaying, union-fearing Tennessee officials, they had pointedly welcomed the UAW’s overtures and said publicly that a union at the Chattanooga plant would facilitate the implementation of the aforesaid works councils.

After its defeat in the Chattanooga vote, UAW, armed with the evidence of interference from state officials, initially appealed the election results to the National Labor Relations Board, but, suddenly and surprisingly, withdrew the appeal in April.

Silence, until last week, when several things happened in rapid sequence. First, VW and the UAW announced jointly that the union would establish a local at the plant on the understanding that it would become an official bargaining agent when enough workers signed up for it. As an apparent corollary, the chief UAW bargaining agent was added to the plant’s advisory board. Then, mere days later, VW announced that it would indeed begin building a new SUV line in Chattanooga.

So what’s the deal? Corker et al. used the SUV announcement to claim vindication for their prior position. But, given what some observers say is a better than even chance that the UAW will reach its quota for official representation within a year, the union might equally well claim to have triumphed, however delayed the full fruition of it turns out to be.

It looks to us like one of those deals in which, as the proverb has it, “all have won and all must have prizes.” And that’s okay.

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Politics Politics Feature

Alexander vs. the NLRB?

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander was in Memphis on Monday for a variety of purposes — one of which, perhaps coincidentally, was to see and be seeen on a day when his chief Republican primary opponent this year, state Representative Joe Carr, was the beneficiary of a Germantown fund-raiser.

Among other things, the senator made a pitch at a noon-time press conference at the University of Memphis area Holiday Inn for his bill to simplify student-aid applications and subsequently helped preside over the presentation of the Dunavant Public Service Awards (to Criminal Court Judge Chris Craft and Collierville town administrator James Lewellen).

In between those events, Alexander was asked about the news that broke Monday morning about the United Auto Workers (UAW) decision to withdraw its appeal to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of a representation vote that went against the union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant earlier this year.

Earlier in the day, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, at a press conference of his own, had expressed astonishment at the UAW action, on the grounds, as the congressman said, that the union had what he thought was a good case.

So did Democratic members of Congress, who had only last week laid the basis for a possible hearing on the Volkswagen/Chattanooga matter in Washington focusing on a UAW contention that Tennessee state officials — notably Governor Bill Haslam and Alexander’s Senate counterpart Bob Corker, along with members of the Tennessee legislature — had interfered with a fair and honest vote through their public statements and implied threats to withhold further state aid from Volkswagen if the union gained representation.

(Volkswagen itself, as Alexander acknowledged, had taken a neutral position — one which many believed favored the union cause.)

The reasons for the surprise UAW decision remained obscure, though rumors flew in some circles that it was all part of a maneuver to put the Haslam administration on the spot if Volkswagen chooses not to proceed with plans to build a new SUV line in Tennessee.

Whatever the case, Alexander professed himself pleased. “The UAW lost the election. Now it’s time to get back to buildng cars,” he said. He declined to comment directly on the union accusations against Corker and Haslam, other than to say he admired both officials and that they had “a perfect right to speak out on behalf of the people of Tennessee.”

Warming to his point, Alexander went on to declare that the UAW’s now-withdrawn appeal had been part of a “political sideshow,” and he professed himself critical about the NLRB itself, which, he said, had been tilting more and more toward the interests of organized labor instead of focusing on its intended purpose as an objective body.

Accordingly, said the senator, he and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Senate leader, were preparing a bill to “restructure” the NLRB. He did not elaborate further.

In other words, the Fat Lady may not have sung the terminal note on this issue.

• For the third election cycle in a row, Congressman Steve Cohen has been endorsed in the course of a contested Democratic primary by President Barack Obama.

Cohen, who is opposed in the primary by lawyer Ricky Wilkins, announced the presidential endorsement — an echo of previous primary-season endorsements in 2010 and 2012 — at a press conference at his Midtown home. Obama’s statement, released later via email, reads as follows:

“Congressman Steve Cohen has been a leader on justice and civil rights issues and has worked tirelessly on behalf of his constituents. His focus on bringing good jobs, affordable health care, and world class education to Tennessee is why I am proud to once again support his re-election.”

The formal response of Cohen, who was an early endorser of Obama’s presidential hopes in 2008, went this way:

“It has been my privilege to work with President Obama to make America more fair and just. Whenever I meet with him, we talk about Memphis and the needs of its citizens. I am always impressed with his compassion, dedication, and determination on our behalf. I appreciate the president’s faith in me. Together, we will continue to work every day to ensure that America is a country where if you work hard and play by the rules you get a fair shot.”

• If there is one thing that suburban candidates for the Shelby County Commission tend to agree on, it is that tax increases are off the table, in regard to both existing problems and to governmental innovations going forward.

That much was made clear Monday night when the four Republican candidates for the new District 3 County Commission seat met at the Bartlett Community Center for a forum conducted by the Northeast Shelby Republican Club’s Frank Colvett.

Early on, all four hopefuls — Sherry Simmons, David Reaves, Kelly Price, and Naser Fazlullah — took the no-new-tax pledge, and when moderator Colvett later turned the screw, asking the candidates how they would decide if faced with a choice of cutting county fire and police services by 5 percent or raising taxes, they all held the line — though with various degrees of unease.

With a regretful look, Reaves said services would have to be cut; Price said essentially the same but promised to work with administrators to make the cuts as harmless as possible; and Fazlullah and Simmons both suggested that more fine-tuning of the budget might allow the choice to be averted.

All except Reaves, who noted that the county tax rate had been increased last year and wanted further cuts, were willing to endorse county Mayor Mark Luttrell’s proposed $1.16 billion budget, however conditionally. Reaves suggested reductions could be obtained by eliminating out-sourcing of food services for county prisoners and instead using existing school nutrition sources and by consolidating IT services, a one-time Luttrell proposal that had proved to be a bugaboo with various turf-conscious department heads.

Another given in Republican circles is skepticism about governmental controls, a fact that elicited outright disapproval from three of the candidates of the currently controversial Common Core proposal for educational standards. Simmons, whose 35 years of teaching experience in Shelby County schools made her the only educator in the group, gave a grudging approval of the concept of uniform standards, provided that students were given time to adapt to Common Core’s testing procedures.

Summing up what seemed to be a group disapproval of subservience to “national models,” Reaves, an exponent of more vo-tech to counter poverty, complained that local school systems “should quit sucking money out of Bill Gates and the rest of his buddies.”

The other three candidates had some one-liners, too. Simmons, agreeing with the others about swearing off free sports tickets and other perks, made a tongue-in-cheek exception for national championship games featuring the University of Alabama. Price, suggesting that recent public-school changes had been mainly cosmetic and not for the better, said that if he changed his name to “Dr. J,” he still wouldn’t be able to play basketball.

For his part, Fazlullah, who proposed creation of a “fund” to assist small business, said that local government in the past had been subject to the Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold have made the rules.”

The candidates were split on some issues, like PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-tax provisions) to attract industry, with Reaves and Simmons approving PILOTs as necessary and Price and Fazlullah expressing doubt about their efficacy.

All in all, however, the quartet stuck fairly close to the traditional GOP talking points of low taxes, less government, and greater efficiencies.

Colvett had cautioned the candidates to avoid “personal” disagreements, and, in fact, the event was devoid of any significant disharmony, though Simmons and Reaves — or, more exactly, their supporters — have hit some sharply competitive notes in social media.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Sickening

Last fall, in our November 21st issue, we surveyed the then-brewing struggle between pro- and anti-union forces relative to the pending worker election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. “Who’s the Laughingstock?” We asked in our headline for that editorial — the reference being to what we had hoped was an off-the-cuff remark by U.S. Senator Bob Corker, regarding the fact that the Volkswagen management, both German and American, declined to be alarmed over the prospect of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union gaining representation at the plant.

VW would become a “laughingstock” if something that dire were to happen, Corker suggested, whereas we saw such a label being more appropriate if affixed to official buttinskies like himself. After all, Volkwagen executives had made it unmistakably clear that a UAW presence at their plant would more likely be beneficial than not — especially since it would make the Volkwagen’s traditional reliance on “workers’ councils,” easier to achieve. “Volkswagen considers its corporate culture of works councils a competitive advantage,” VW spokesperson Bernard Osterloh said at the time, adding, “Volkswagen is led by its board and not by politicians.”

Never mind that the UAW was already an established presence at the General Motors plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Of course, Corker had already distinguished himself (or something) by leading the resistance in 2009 to President Obama’s highly successful plan to resuscitate the then-ailing automobile industry in Detroit, headquarters of GM. But we thought that, having vented his union-baiting opinions and saluted the flag of Tennessee’s sacrosanct right-to-work law, he would settle down and allow the worker election in Chattanooga to be held in peace.

He did not. Instead, Corker placed himself at the head of a quasi-official coalition to stop the potential unionization of the VW plant, by any means necessary. Even as VW’s management was graciously allowing union organizers to address workers inside the plant, Corker et al. launched an execrable threat campaign to intimidate Volkswagen and scare the plant’s workers.

Abetted by such unsavory rightwing outsiders as Grover Norquist and the infamous Koch brothers, the Corker coalition went to its union-busting task. Corker said publicly that VW would manufacture a mid-sized SUV in Chattanooga if the workers rejected the union. (In other words: reject the union, boys, and there’ll be more work for you. Plant manager Frank Fischer promptly disputed the senator’s assertion, and Corker blithely called him a liar. Then Bo Watson (R-Hixson), speaker pro tem of the state Senate, went Corker one better, threatening legislation to revoke the existing state financial concessions granted to VW by the state if the UAW should win the vote. (In other words, “we’ll take away the work you already have if you vote yes.”) And, oh yes, surprise: Our go-along governor said he thought suppliers would think twice about serving a unionized plant.

The bottom line: After all this pressure from officialdom, the UAW bid was narrowly defeated, and Senator Corker actually boasted in a press release that the whole Volkswagen-in-Chattanooga project was hatched around his kitchen table. Fair’s fair: Wouldn’t want to give Boss Bob indigestion, would you?

We, however, are inclined to retch.

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Politics Politics Feature

A Wall — and a Bridge

Back in the 1950s there was a spate of science-fiction movies highlighting this or that group of stealth invaders — or sometimes a single, abominably oversized monster — from somewhere else. As often as not, the peril was the result of mutation caused by atomic radiation.

The newish science of semiotics would tell us the obvious — that all these creatures from the Black Lagoon or the ones that came from outer space were a mish-mash of the real-world specters that haunted the public imagination: nuclear warfare and invasion by foreign powers. The “iron curtain” of Cold War lore was an additional veil of secrecy that magnified the threat posed by these ersatz aliens.

All that has passed — or, rather, mutated into a new array of threats, in the van of which are the cinema world’s currently unending supply of vampires and zombies. As before, these beings represent the challenge to normalcy presented by certifiably different Others. Of the two, vampires come off with distinctly better P.R. No longer do the blood-suckers represent an unmitigated repellent evil.

There is, for example, Robert Pattinson, the hemo-goblin as hunk, who exists among a whole and various world of diversity in which his kind have as much chance of being good guys as not. Today’s vampires seem to represent the ambiguities of a society that is still sorting out  just who represents what among the new human types, some still in disguise, that a greater degree of tolerance has fostered among us.

Not so with zombies, those grotesquely unappealing and undeniably “different” invaders who used to shuffle menacingly toward us with malicious intent but now are doing so in spades, romping en masse over all the ramparts and impediments we can place in their way, destroying and consuming everything, including ourselves, that we consider sacred. In a time of immigration paranoia, do we really need to ask what all this is about?

Not quite two decades ago, the right-wing columnist and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan began demanding that we build a fence — a wall, really — covering the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, so as to prevent all them troublesome furriners from pouring in.

At least Buchanan, a self-proclaimed champion of what he calls “Western civilization,” was relatively candid about the caucasoid bunker he had in mind to build.

Others cite purely economic threats — as right here in Tennessee, where each new legislative session sees the introduction of bills to identify, segment off, and expunge these supposed predators on the jobs of indigenous American workers and alleged leeches on the welfare and Social Security systems.

In reality, the case can be made that most of the migrant workers who came here from Mexico almost a generation ago A) were enticed here by the home-building industry as sources of cheap labor; B) performed jobs that the native population wouldn’t do; C) largely stopped coming after the boom ended; and D) have contributed more in consumption and Social Security taxes (based on bogus IDs faked in many cases by their employers) than they took away.

In any case, Buchanan’s concept of a border fence is now accepted doctrine and, in the form of an amendment, is incorporated into the currently pending immigration bill sponsored in the U.S. Senate by a nonpartisan “gang of eight.” For the record, the gang is composed of Michael Bennet (D-CO); Richard Durbin (D-IL); Jeff Flake (R-AZ); Lindsey Graham (R-SC); John McCain (R-AZ); Bob Menendez (D-NJ); Marco Rubio (R-FL); and Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

The amendment is by Senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Hoeven (R-ND) and is clearly intended to bridge the gap between supporters of moderate immigration reform and those in Congress who are adamantly opposed to any concessions to illegal immigrants or to what supporters call a “pathway” to legal citizenship.

In a nutshell, the Hoeven-Corker amendment would increase border surveillance, both in technology and manpower, and commit to 700 new miles of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, while creating strict standards for permanent residence, enforced by the Department of Homeland Security.

In theory, the amendment creates a compromise measure that can transcend the consistent partisan gridlock that plagues the Senate and these days strands almost every controversial bill somewhere between filibuster and cloture.

The other Tennessee senator, Lamar Alexander, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hoeven-Corker, contending that it “takes big and important steps on the immigration issue that matters most: border security,” though he maintained his options on the bill itself: “As this legislation reaches its final form, I will be examining it closely to determine whether it creates an effective immigration system that respects the rule of law. My goals will remain securing our border, ending de facto amnesty, and creating a legal immigration system.”

Among the opponents of the bill is (wait for it) Sarah Palin, these days a scold-without-portfolio, who opines: “Just like they did with Obamacare, some in Congress intend to ‘Pelosi’ the amnesty bill. They’ll pass it in order to find out what’s in it. And just like the unpopular, unaffordable Obamacare disaster, this pandering, rewarding-the-rule-breakers, still-no-border-security, special-interests-ridden, 24-pound disaster of a bill is not supported by informed Americans.”

Not to be outdone was talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who opined: “[I]t’s not even the gang of eight. … It’s the gang of nine, with Obama as part of it, or it’s the gang of one, and it’s all Obama. … [T]his Hoeven-Corker amendment is really the Obama amendment. It was Obama’s idea, possibly, and they found a couple guys to put their names on it.” 

That one of those “couple guys” is Corker, increasingly regarded as a bridge between the two sides of the aisle, and that his home-state colleague Alexander is a chief supporter are facts consistent with the traditional conciliatory role of Tennessee senators, in and out of historical mood swings.

Though they vote the GOP party line more often than not — and can be as stiff-necked as any of their party mates at filibuster time — the two Tennesseans are still to be numbered among those who, speaking of walls, can find pathways through and around the ideological ones that so often confound the prospect of getting anything done in Congress.

• Not to throw any cold water on that assessment, but both Corker and Alexander can go big-time partisan, too. Simultaneous with Alexander’s statement of conditional support for the pending immigration bill was one exulting over the Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments on the constitutionality of President Obama’s January 2012 appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

Said the senator: “It is good news for American workers and employers that the Supreme Court will rule on whether the Senate or the president decides when the Senate is in session. In the meantime, the Senate should pass my bill to stop the National Labor Relations Board from issuing more decisions and creating more workplace uncertainty until the Supreme Court has reached a decision.”

That bill, co-sponsored by U.S. representative Phil Roe (R-TN), “would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from taking any action that requires a quorum until the board members constituting the quorum have been confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court issues a decision on the constitutionality of the appointments to the board made in January 2012, or the first session of the 113th Congress is adjourned.”

The bill is targeted at recess appointments, which all presidents have resorted to when decisions on their nominees to federal offices, often lesser ones, have been blocked by recalcitrant Congresses.

• State senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) has been reelected for a third two-year term as chairman of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The commission was tasked in the 2013 legislative session with conducting a comprehensive study on urban annexation and with making recommendations on the subject to the General Assembly in January.

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Politics Politics Feature

Bob Corker and the McCain Effect:

“It’s not an urban myth. It’s just a fact.” That’s how Bob Corker describes the volcanic temper of U.S. Senate colleague John McCain — a fact of life that Corker says he had to deal with “very early on” in his own Senate career. So far Tennessee’s junior senator has held on to his own mild-mannered ways, but an appearance in Memphis this week revealed some other traits and beliefs Corker has come to share with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

See Jackson Baker’s take here.

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Politics Politics Feature

Corker Says Constituents and “Common Sense” Come Before Political Loyalties

CREDIT: jb

In a visit to Shelby County Wednesday, Bob Corker, the
Republican who was elected to the U.S. Senate last year over Democrat Harold
Ford Jr. in a tight race that drew ample national attention, made it clear that
partisan issues are the least of his concerns.

Both in a luncheon address to Rotarians at the Germantown
Country Club and in remarks to reporters afterward, former Chattanooga mayor
Corker emphasized a “common sense” approach in which “I strive to make sure that
everybody in the state is proud of the way I conduct myself…to understand issues
as they really are, devoid of some of the rhetoric that surrounds these
issues…[and] the political whims of the day.”

Take his response when asked whether embattled GOP senator
Larry Craig, busted in the infamous “wide stance” airport-restroom case, should
resign for the good of the Republican Party:

Corker said Craig’s predicament was a matter for the
“people of Idaho” and the Senate Ethics Committee. “I don’t try to get into all
the political ramifications of this or that. The way to get a whole lot more
done is to focus on issues.” Somewhat disdainfully, he added, “There are all
these messaging amendments that we do, all about making one side look bad and
the other side look good. Democrats do it, and Republicans do it. It’s a total
waste of time.”

Helping The Med

As to how that even-handed outlook affected his stand on
issues, Corker was explicit. He talked of applying pressure on the
Administration, especially on recent health-care issues he considered urgent for
his constituents. “I know for a fact that I played a huge role in this [latest]
TennCare waiver thing. I have to say I had to put a hold on the Bush
nominations to make it happen. I thought it was important for our state.”

And there was his vote and enthusiastic support recently to expand SChip (the
federal State Children’s Health
Insurance Program) so as to increase funding for Tennessee by $30
million and to permit Medicaid payments for patients at The Med from Arkansas
and Mississippi. Both Corker and Tennessee GOP colleague Lamar Alexander
strongly supported the bill, which passed but was vetoed last week by President
Bush.

“I was glad to have worked out these issues
that have plagued the Med for so long. It’s ridiculous that people from Arkansas
and Mississippi have used the facility for so long and don’t pay for it. What’s
the logic in that?” Corker said, vowing to try to get the Med-friendly
provisions re-established in a veto-proof compromise measure yet to be
fashioned.

Corker made a pitch for the Every American Insured Health Act,
a bill he has sponsored that, he said, would modify the tax code so as to
guarantee universal access to private health insurance “but would not add a
penny to the national deficit.”

Contending that “what I’m trying to do is to add to
the equation a real debate, a real solution,” the senator said his proposal had been
“slammed” on the same day by both a conservative columnist and a liberal
columnist, leading him to conclude, “I’m pretty sure we got it just about
right.”

Corker said that executives of key national corporations,
saddled with large health-care costs for their employees, were “waling the halls
of Congress trying to get us to move to a government-run system so they can
alleviate. that expense which makes them non-competitive.” Without some
alternative form of universal access, he said, such a government-run system was
inevitable.

With 800,000 Tennesseans and 47 million Americans lacking
health-care coverage, there was also a “moral obligation” to make coverage universal,
Corker stressed.

Relations with Iran and Syria

As a member of both the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee
and the body’s Armed Services committee, Corker says he is focusing hard on
issues relating to war-torn Iraq, a country he has visited twice, and
neighboring Iran, subject of much speculation these days concerning possible
future hostilities between that country and the U.S.

Here again, the senator stressed his determination to
maintain independence of judgment. “I’ve had some very tense moments with this
administration – in the first two months I was up there [in Washington]
especially. There were some underwhelming meetings.”

Corker is dubious about the current political leadership of
Iraq {“things cannot go on as they are”) but supportive for the time being of
the current military strategy of General David Petraeus, with whom he stays in
contact.

On Iran, Corker said there was “some concern in the
Senate that the president might take action” and emphasized that “he [Bush]would have
to have Senate authority to do that.” Corker reminded reporters that after his
election he had said on CBS’ Face the Nation that diplomatic negotiations
with both Syria and Iran were necessary.

“We don’t want to overplay our hand in Iran,” he said.
“There’s a group of people there who want to be our friends. If we move into
Iran unilaterally others [in the region] will step back from being our friends.”

Corker, who was a construction executive before entering
politics, related the current diplomatic situation to his experience in
labor-management negotiations in Tennessee. “If you don’t talk with your enemies
they remain your enemies. There’s a lot to be learned just to be in somebody’s
presence,” he said.

Categories
News

After 10 Hours In Iraq, Sens. Corker And Alexander See “Clear Success”

Returning from a trip to Iraq, Republican Tennessee Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker “gave an upbeat report on progress in Iraq” to reporters this morning.

Alexander said a strategy devised by General Petraeus to work with local leaders and win them over to the U.S. cause has shown “clear success, province by province.”

“They are fed up with random murders of their children” by al-Qaida terrorists, he said.

“There are probably seven provinces where enough progress has been made to involve Iraqis in their own security,” claimed Alexander during the call with reporters.

Unmentioned in press accounts of Alexander and Corker’s trip, however, is the fact that they only spent half a day on the ground in Iraq.

Read more on the senators’ “fact-finding” tour at ThinkProgress.com.

www.thinkprogress.org
Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Laying It On the Line

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

It was in the suburbs and rural areas of West Tennessee that Bob Corker probably gained a decisive edge over Democratic opponent Harold Ford Jr. during the U.S. Senate election of 2006. Or so most post-election analysis indicated.

And Oakland, Tennessee, a fast-growing municipality in Fayette County, where the freshman Republican senator held a town meeting on Monday, is both suburban enough and rural enough to qualify as an integral part of Corker’s constituent base.

Residents of Fayette County are also, as Corker made a point of noting Monday, second to none in the fervor of their patriotic feeling.

So when Corker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, focused on Iraq in his remarks at the town meeting, it may safely be assumed that he was talking turkey, putting his true sentiments on the line.

One thing the senator made clear right away was his commitment to full financial and moral support to commanding general David Petraeus and the ongoing “surge” effort in Iraq, but Corker insisted that positive results were needed this summer, before the Senate takes up the issue of supplemental appropriations in September.

“We need to give General Petraeus the time he needs through this summer … to turn what has been a downward spiral … into an upward spiral for the people of Iraq,” Corker said. He employed the phrase “through this summer” over and over as a frame for his — and the Senate’s — commitment to the current military effort.

At one point, an audience member wondered if media reports from Iraq, “which I tend to think are more liberal in the presentation of the information we get,” could be trusted.

Corker’s answer was careful and measured. Petraeus had “tremendous concern” about prospects in Iraq, he said. The senator noted that he had discussed the war effort with Petraeus three times — in Washington, during a time of “energy and enthusiasm” before the general undertook his present field duties, again during a visit by Corker to Iraq, and once more during a recent briefing by Petraeus on a return visit to Washington.

“And I will tell you, he is very concerned,” Corker repeated.

There had been progress made in outlying provinces, where tribesmen had signaled their exasperation with an al-Qaeda presence, Corker said, but the picture in Baghdad was far bleaker, both in terms of mounting military confrontations and increased bombings and from the standpoint of the Iraqi government’s own insufficient effort, both military and political.

“Iraqi culture just doesn’t move at the same pace that we do,” said Corker, noting that the country’s government had been slow to move toward political reconciliation of the three basic Iraqi populations: Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.

“We’ve insisted on reforms, but there is tremendous hatred among the Iraqi people. These things are not happening yet,” Corker said.

“It’s a tough situation, and I know that, as you mention, the media paints it out to be a tough situation, but it actually is a tough situation. There are some successes that are taking place over in the hinterlands, if you will, that are away from the urban area of Baghdad. I don’t think that’s exactly what you wanted to hear.”

The senator was asked after the meeting if he supported the efforts of the 11 Republican members of Congress who met with President Bush last week and cautioned the president to let Petraeus, rather than himself or anyone else associated with the White House, serve as principal spokesperson on the war.

“I think that General Petraeus is the man on the ground. … I really do think at this point in the war’s evolution, it’s so politicized, that General Petraeus is respected by Republicans and Democrats, and I think people view him as somebody they can trust. … Politics are very thick right now, and he [Petraeus] is above politics, and I really do think that he’s the best possible spokesman.”

Asked about a possible presidential bid by former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, Corker made it clear he would be supportive of a Thompson candidacy. “I think Fred is going to run. He’s a great communicator, and not just our country, but the world, needs a great communicator.”

During the town meeting, Corker also emphasized his concerns about developing Tennessee’s biofuels industry as a partial solution to the nation’s energy needs and indicated his commitment to rethinking how health care is financed.

The visit to Oakland followed several earlier appearances by Corker in Memphis.

• Steve Cohen is no half-hearted booster of Kevin Gallagher for the open District 89 state House seat. That was the word last weekend from the 9th District congressman himself — disappointing though it may be to some of the boosters of Jeanne Richardson‘s Democratic candidacy for the seat.

There were claims here and there, even after Cohen’s yard on Kenilworth sprouted a Gallagher campaign sign a week or two ago, that Cohen intended to give only pro forma support to Gallagher, who was campaign manager for his successful run last year in Memphis’ 9th congressional district.

Not so, says Cohen, who went on to suggest, without elaborating, that if things got “nasty” in the race between the two Democrats, he would feel compelled to intervene on Gallagher’s behalf more directly than he has to date.

“I’m focusing on my congressional duties,” said Cohen, who professed to have no problem with Richardson’s candidacy, largely directed by his sometime associate David Upton, but acknowledged that the “hard core” of his former campaign staff was involved in the Gallagher campaign. The congressman also confirmed that he had made a substantial contribution to Gallagher’s campaign coffers and had encouraged others to do so.

District 89 was formerly represented by Beverly Marrero, who earlier this year was elected to succeed Cohen in state Senate District 30. The Democratic primary race between Gallagher and Richardson is regarded as nip-and-tuck by most observers.

Marrero and the previous District 89 representative, City Council member and mayoral candidate Carol Chumney, have both added their names to an impressive endorsement list compiled by the Richardson campaign.

Gallagher and Richardson will get their first direct opportunity to confront each other one-on-one next Sunday, May 20th, at a forum hosted by the Memphis Stonewall Democrats at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center at 892 S. Cooper.

Two candidates — Wayne McGinnis and Dave Wicker Jr. — are also vying in the Republican primary, which has so far attracted conspicuously less attention. Both party primaries will be held May 31st, with the winners competing in the special general election on July 17th.

Early voting in the District 89 primary race began Friday at Election Commission headquarters at 157 Poplar and will continue through Saturday, May 26th.

• Cohen’s predecessor, former Memphis congressman Ford, now chairman of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, was in Nashville Monday morning, where he, DLC founder Al From, and several prominent Tennessee political figures announced that the DLC’s “National Conversation” would be held this year in the Tennessee state capital.

Ford pronounced himself “very pleased” that the event would be held in Nashville, which was headquarters for his unsuccessful U.S. Senate run last year. “The South is a region with enormous opportunity for New Democrats, and we look forward to showcasing our ideas here,” Ford said.

The official DLC release added: “The National Conversation will provide a forum for an exchange of ideas on some of the most pressing challenges facing our country, including security, making America competitive in a global economy, poverty, and energy.”

Governor Phil Bredesen, honorary chair for the event, took part in the announcement, as did three honorary co-chairs: congressmen Jim Cooper and Lincoln Davis and Nashville mayor Bill Purcell. The event, which will take place July 28th-30th at the Opryland Hotel, is expected to attract some, if not all, of the active Democratic candidates for president.

• State House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, a Democrat, has been opposed by a succession of Republican challengers in recent years. He’ll apparently have one more to deal with in 2008: activist Jeff Ward, a longtime Tipton County activist and leader of the statewide organization TeamGOP, who said this week he intends a race for Naifeh’s seat.