Tag: Dave Cambron

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Politics Politics Feature

Mackler, Coleman Show Their Stuff to Local Democrats

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Following their good results in the election year 2018, which saw variations on blue wave voting in every governmental sphere except, arguably, the elections for statewide office, Democrats in Shelby County are wondering how best to follow (and improve on) that act, going forward.

Two of the party’s would-be standard-bearers were on display last Wednesday night at Coletta’s Restaurant on Highway 64, where the Germantown Democrats hold their monthly meetings.

One was James Mackler, the Nashville lawyer and Iraq War vet who declared for the U.S. seat of then Republican Senator Bob Corker in 2017 and backed out a year later in deference to former Governor Phil Bredesen‘s decision to run for the same seat. The other was Eric Coleman, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who is the party’s nominee for the vacant District 32 seat in the Tennessee state Senate. Mackler has declared for another run in 2020, for the Senate seat that Lamar Alexander has indicated he will vacate.

Jackson Baker

Germantown Democratic president Dave Cambron introduces James Mackler.

That both of these aspiring exemplars are combat veterans is, arguably, a sign of an ongoing process within the Democratic Party of reactivating roots and former constituencies. (The current Shelby County party chair — Corey Strong, who is due to be succeeded by a new chair in a local party convention process in March and April — happens also to be a veteran.)

In a thinly veiled reference to what many Democrats judge to have been a lackluster race by Bredesen, who lost to Republican Marsha Blackburn, one questioner asked Mackler how it was possible to run for statewide office in Tennessee without being suspected either of not being Democratic enough nor being middle-of-the-road enough.

Mackler’s answer was swift and to the point. “The pundits will say you can’t criticize Donald Trump in Tennessee,” Mackler said. “Donald Trump only cares about himself. He’s making the country worse, not better. I intend to tell the truth, and the people of Tennessee will respect that.”

Eric Coleman

As for the rest of the question, “It’s fair to say Tennessee has a lot of under-served communities. I’m going to go to these communities, not as a politician but again as a veteran, a husband, and father, and listen to people.”

Mackler promised to be a positive example, “the kind of person your kids can look to and be guided by, someone who will share credit when things are accomplished and take blame when they are not.” He added, “That’s what I think leadership is.”

Among the subjects discussed by Mackler were the prospect for investment in jobs and infrastructure, a need for background checks in gun sales, his “disgust” at efforts to stigmatize transgender members of the armed services (“Not for a moment did I question the sexuality or the orientation of the person in the helicopter with me.”), and term limits (“My little girl asked me, “Daddy, don’t other people get a turn?”).

Among other things, Coleman, a paraplegic as a result of his service, discussed his background as a procurement specialist in the Navy, talked about the incoherence and recklessness of the nation’s fiscal policy under Trump, and attributed much of the problem to the president’s experience and background in the seamy world of New Jersey wheeling and dealing.

Coleman said it was difficult for a Democrat to win in District 32 (which takes in much of eastern and northern Shelby County, as well as Tipton County), “only if we make it so.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Getting Out the Vote

The tradition of presidential-election years holds that the American electorate really doesn’t begin to pay serious attention to the candidates’ campaigns until Labor Day has come and gone. That holiday happens this weekend, and the local branches of the two major parties got a running start on things with events held last week.

The Republicans brought out some of their leading lights Tuesday night at the annual Master Meal banquet of the East Shelby Republican Club, the county’s largest. First up on the dais at the Great Hall in Germantown was David Kustoff, who recently won the GOP nomination for the 8th District congressional seat and, given the Republican propensities of that district these days, has every expectation of serving in Washington next year.

Kustoff made it clear that he hopes to do so in tandem with a President Donald J. Trump, to whose candidacy he gave unstinting verbal support. Though the brash New York billionaire has had highly publicized trouble gaining traction, even in pockets of his own Republican base, Kustoff said predictions of a Trump defeat by Hillary Clinton were the results, essentially, of myopia on the part of an unsympathetic media, and he called the roll of candidates, ranging from Ronald Reagan to current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who, he said, had won out despite negative forecasts in the press.

Kustoff’s commitment to the cause of Trump was further embodied in the opening on Wednesday night of this week of a “combined election headquarters” at 1755 Kirby Parkway, housing the “Kustoff for Congress” campaign as well as Trump’s Memphis-area efforts and the campaigns of other local GOP candidates.

Also toeing the line for a top-to-bottom Republican effort at the Master Meal were state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, and visiting state GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood, although Luttrell, who had also sought the GOP nomination in the 8th, gallantly focused most of his praise on Kustoff.

Perhaps the most telling commentary Tuesday night came from Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, who earned a Trump-like shoot-from-the-mouth reputation of his own during his rise as a political figure. Against all expectations, Roland, who has already launched a campaign to be elected county mayor in 2018, became something of a conciliator — enough so that, as he neared the formal end of his one-year term as chairman on Monday of this week, he received standing ovations from his commission colleagues at each of the legislative body’s last two public meetings. By way of suggesting that Trump’s own rough edges might smooth out during a term as president, Roland, who is West Tennessee chairman of the Republican nominee’s campaign, said of Trump, “Folks, six years ago, that was me!”

• For their part, a sizeable swath of the county’s Hillary Clinton supporters turned out last Wednesday night at a standing-room-only meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club that required the opening of a partition to combine two separate meeting rooms at Coletta’s Restaurant on Appling Road.

Among those present for the occasion were Tyler Yount of Chattanooga, a statewide organizer for the Clinton campaign, and Rickey Hobson of Somerville, the Democratic nominee in the 8th District congressional race. Although attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia were there to recount their experiences at the convention, the main focus of the meeting was that of organizing a get-out-the-vote effort in Shelby County.

Although the long-troubled Shelby County Democratic Party organization is temporarily defunct after its decertification week before last by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini, and apparently won’t be reconstructed until a local party convention can be held in March, various informal Democratic groups — the Germantown Democrats, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and the county’s Young Democrats among them — seem intent on organizing a significant GOTV effort.

According to Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron, a headquarters to house a coordinated local Democratic campaign will be opened on Poplar soon.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Shelby County Democratic Party Is in Crisis Mode Again

CREDIT: JB

JB

Challenges by Del Gill (back to camera) to SCDP chair Randa Spears were a recurrent fact of life during a stormy year for the local party.

Yes, Virginia, there are functional, thriving Democratic Party organizations in Shelby County. There are the Germantown Democrats, whose monthly meetings at Coletta’s on Highway 64 are well-attended events attracting a variety of speakers on political and social issues. There are the Democratic Women of Shelby County, who include a cadre of committed activists. There are the Young Democrats, who are attracting new blood into the party and who are constantly interfacing with local elected officials to disperse useful information about governmental processes.

Nor is this a complete list, notes Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown club. The aforementioned organizations and several others, he notes, continue to conduct useful meetings, assist with political campaigns, and serve as organizational nuclei for interested Democrats, in and out of election years.

So yes, Democratic Party organizations are live and well in Shelby County.

It’s just that the Democratic Party of Shelby County, the official organization which in theory is the party’s flagship, may not be one of them. Cambron, a former SCDP vice chair who served a brief term as acting chairman last year during a difficult moment for the local party, declined to comment on what is shaping up as another period of crisis.

As of earlier this month, the party lacks a chairperson, former chair Randa Spears having resigned for reasons that may have something to do with her desire to focus more on the duties of her job at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital but may also have to do with what various Democrats describe as a kind of chaos that has descended upon the Party’s affairs.

These Democrats say that Spears, who was elected chair of the party in March of 2015 in the wake of a financial scandal involving previous chair Bryan Carson, has had to contend with persistent tension at party meetings involving Del Gill, her runner-up in the chairmanship election who, at meeting after meeting, has employed an unrelenting variety of parliamentary maneuvers to challenge the chair’s control.

Gill, of course, does not see himself as the problem. Rather, he appears to regard himself as a long-term, committed party member who has so far been unfairly frustrated from realizing his own leadership ambitions. He sees himself as a Democratic purist who has mastered both Roberts’ Rules of Order and the party’s own regulations, while his foes see him as pedantic to a fault, disruptive by nature, and egregiously self-absorbed.

In any case, he has to be regarded as a leading candidate for the local party’s chairmanship, which will be up for grabs again in June at a meeting presided over by Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope, a former party vice chair now serving as acting chairman. Several members of the party’s executive committee say privately they intend to resign if Gill is elected.

The leadership vacuum is just one of the party’s problems, of course. Another is that, for the second year in a row, the local party has failed to meet deadlines for filing financial reports with the state Registry of Election Finance and faces the prospect of stiff financial penalties as a result.

Then chairman Carson, Spears’ predecessor, was forced to resign in early 2015 when it was found that the party had not only missed the state Registry’s deadlines but that, as was revealed in an audit conducted by party member Diane Cambron, Carson could not account for some $6,000 in party fund expenditures.

It was then that David Cambron, Diane Cambron’s husband, became acting chair. He served in that role until the election of Spears in March, 2015.