David Weatherspoon – Memphis Flyer

The pending visit to The Orpheum on Friday by former Vice President (and possible 2020 presidential candidate) Joe Biden for his “American Promise” tour highlights what continues to be a busy election season.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd last week underscored the importance of Shelby County in his election campaign by making the county the site of two different stops on his current 95-county bus tour of the state.
Boyd kicked off his bus tour in Millington on Monday, and after making several stops elsewhere in West Tennessee, returned to Shelby County on Saturday for a meet-and-greet lunch in the Collierville town square. Among the several Shelby County officials at the affair, either as backers for Boyd or as courtesy visitors, were County Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett, Mayor Mike Palazzolo of Germantown, Germantown Alderman Mary Ann Gibson, trustee and county mayor candidate David Lenoir, former county Mayor Jim Rout, state Representative Mark White, and, serving as master of ceremonies for the occasion, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Boyd, who went on to make a day of it in Shelby County, attending the FedEx St. Jude golf tournament and the Germantown Horse Show, noted that he had taken no salary while serving as director for economic development under Governor Bill Haslam. Boyd promised not to do so as governor, either, unless, as he jested, “some of you who have Invisible Fence stop purchasing new batteries, in which case I may need to renegotiate.”
Boyd, one of several independently wealthy candidates for governor, made his fortune as the inventor and vendor of Invisible Fence, which establishes electronic barriers for domestic pets.
David Weatherspoon, who held the latest version of his “listening tour” at Cheffie’s Restaurant on High Point Terrace on Monday, is expecting to get an earful — and maybe a bagful — of support from members of Shelby County’s health-care community at a June 26th fund-raiser scheduled for Germantown Country Club.

Among the hosts for the affair are Gary and Glenda Shorb, Meri Armour, Ed Barnett, Richard Glassman and Susan Lawless-Glassman, David and Julie Richardson, Nadeem Shafi, Kip and Martha Frizzell, Charles and Kalyna Hanover, Melody Cunningham, and Michael Rohrer.

Weatherspoon, whose campaign treasurer is Ed Roberson, the erstwhile director of Christ Community Health Centers, has made support for Medicaid expansion (“a no-brainer decision”) a key point in his campaign for the District 31 state Senate seat now held by Republican Brian Kelsey (as, for that matter, has Gabby Salinas, the other Democrat running in the forthcoming Democratic primary of August 2nd).

Kelsey is a sworn opponent of former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and its Medicare-expansion component, and was the sponsor of legislation requiring approval by both chambers of the General Assembly’s Republican super-majority before expansion could take place, dooming Insure Tennessee, the state’s variant of the plan. The rejection, according to Weatherspoon, has cost Tennessee $4 billion in federal funding and contributed to the closure of 10 community hospitals.

• Headquarters Openings: Two candidates drew large crowds for opening new headquarters last week. Democratic county mayor nominee Lee Harris set up at 2127 Central Avenue on Friday, and a Memphis headquarters was established at in the Highland Strip by the campaign of former Governor Phil Bredesen, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Tennessee may be a certifiably red (i.e., Republican) state, and, indeed election results in recent years, even in Shelby County, which has a theoretical Democratic majority, have generally been disappointments to the once-dominant Democratic Party.

And the official Party itself has only been reconstituted in the county for a few months after various internal fissures and dissensions caused it to be decertified by the state party in mid-2016.

But none of that has stopped a veritable flood of would-be Democratic office-holders from declaring their candidacies for election year 2018 as the filing season gets going in earnest. Most unusually for a minority party, in fact, many of the races on the ballot this year are being contested by multiple Democratic entries.

That starts at the top of the ballot, as two name Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are vying for the office of governor. (Even more Republicans are running: six gubernatorial candidates in all, most of them with serious networks and campaign funding at their disposal.)

Jackson Baker

Forrest fan Jenna Bernstein taking her leave

It seemed for a while that there might be a Democratic primary contest for U.S. Senator as well, until the well-backed entry of former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen convinced a promising newcomer, Nashville lawyer James Mackler, to withdraw in favor of Bredesen, whose second gubernatorial win in 2006 was his party’s most recent statewide hurrah. (At least two name Republicans — 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher are vying for the GOP nomination.)

In any case, Democrats are also doubling up — and not just in the marquee races. There are competitive Democratic primary races at virtually every election level.

Take the case of state Senator Brian Kelsey‘s reelection bid in Senate District 31. The long-serving Germantown Republican sent out several S.O.S. emails to supporters this week informing them that he has a Democratic challenger and asking for campaign donations.

The opponent Kelsey had in mind was Democratic activist Gabriela “Gabby” Salinas, who did indeed announce her availability last week as a Democratic candidate in District 31. And she has a backstory that gives Kelsey reason for his concern. Salinas, who survived childhood cancer as a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and went on to do research work herself at St. Jude, was also a survivor later on of an automobile accident that took the lives of family members.

Nor is Salinas the only Democrat seeking to unseat Kelsey. Another declared candidate for the seat is David Weatherspoon, one of several first-time office-seekers on the Democratic side.

On Monday, one of the Democratic Party’s recognized stars in Nashville, state Representative Raumesh Akbari, announced she would seek to fill the state Senate seat left vacant by Lee Harris, who is running for Shelby County mayor. And Akbari has a Democratic opponent in the primary, her House colleague, Joe Towns.

There are numerous other races on the ballot in which Democrats are competing with each other for the honor or capturing an open seat or one currently held by a Republican. One such case is the Shelby County Commission District 13 seat, a swing seat now occupied by Republican Steve Basar.

Both former Election Commissioner George Monger and political newcomer Charles Belenky are competing for that one. Monger, a former boy wonder who became a music manager at 15 and ran for the City Council at 18, declared his candidacy over the weekend, while Belenky turned up as a citizen critic of a purchasing contract at the commission’s regular public meeting.

And where a seat is traditionally considered Democratic, the infighting can be brisk indeed; two Democrats — Eric Dunn and Tami Sawyer — are vying for the Commission District 7 seat; four seek the seat in Commission District 8: David Vinciarelli, Daryl Lewis, J.B. Smiley Jr., and Mickell Lowery; while Commission District 9, vacated this year by the term-limited Justin Ford, is being sought by no fewer than five Democrats — Edmund Ford Jr., Ian Jeffries, Jonathan L. Smith, Jonathan M. Lewis, and Rosalyn R. Nichols.

• Monday’s first county commission meeting of the year was an abbreviated affair, starting at the late hour of 4 p.m. to accommodate attendees at the well-attended funeral at Idlewild Presbyterian church of the late public figure, Lewis Donelson.

On a day when the city was visited by groups of protesters partial to the now-removed statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the commission was the site of one such protest — from one Jenna Bernstein of Tampa, who said she had come all the way from Florida to call for the expulsion from the commission of Van Turner, head of Memphis Greenspace Inc., which purchased two parks from the city prior to removing their Confederate monuments.

Bernstein’s mission received fairly short shrift, resulting only in a brief debate between Commission chair Heidi Shafer (nay) and Commissioner Walter Bailey (yea) as to the right of a non-resident to be heard. Shafer’s view prevailed.