Tag: Gordon Ball

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

How to Fail in Politics 101

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Toward the end of his just-concluded campaign for U.S. Senate, Democratic candidate Gordon Ball, son of a moonshiner (that was one of his never-fail best self-descriptions), a self-made multi-millionaire Knoxville lawyer who made his money and his name suing polluters and greedy corporations, altered his presentation in a perplexing way.

To back up: Ball had always been determined, as he put it, to take a broom against the feckless Washington, D.C., power community that he saw, in the original and negative sense of the term, as so much rascal flats. He would fulminate against the major inhabitants of this gone-wrong Potemkin Village, particularly Republican opponent Senator Lamar Alexander, whom he castigated for what was made to sound like an ill-gotten $22 million net worth, including $620,000 reaped from a $1 investment in the now-defunct Knoxville Journal. “A finder’s fee,” Ball scornfully quoted Alexander.

“If you want to change things in Washington, you’ve got to change the people,” Ball said. And he would name names of those who had to go — Mitch McConnell, the would-be Senate majority leader from Kentucky who was drenched with oil and gas and Koch money and would do nothing but obstruct any modest agenda put forth by Democrats, and Alexander, who opposed minimum wage and women’s rights and veterans’ rights and so much else, and needed to go home and tend to his garden of greenbacks.

So far, so good, I thought, as I heard all this at a morning stop last week at the IBEW headquarters on Madison. He’s coming on as a populist and demonizing the opposition and pitching to his base. But afterward, when we reporters had a chance for some private words with Ball, something he’d said on the road that I’d read in somebody else’s coverage kind of chafed at me, not in an ideological sense but in purely practical terms. So I had to ask.

Had Ball actually included on this list of desirable purgees the name of Harry Reid, the bespectacled ex-pugilist from Searchlight, Nevada, who’d risen to become Senate Democratic Majority Leader and who was constantly at battle with Senate Republicans determined to filibuster every proposal brought by the Obama administration?

Instead of reading my question as a rhetorical one, maybe even an implied rebuke (What’s to gain from attacking your own party leadership?), Ball took what I’d said as a prod. He’d overlooked Reid, whom, in various articles along the trail, he’d said he wouldn’t be able to vote for as leader. He apologized for having omitted Reid’s name at the IBEW rally and added it back in. “Yes, let’s include Harry Reid in there, too. We need to get rid of Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander and Harry Reid!”

It scanned wrong with my sensors, mainly because it diluted Ball’s respectably populist message, already nudged a little bit toward that shadowy, ill-defined reform constituency — the Tea Party — that had repudiated Common Core, as had any number of classroom teachers, who disliked the standardized tests and career-binding teacher scores that came with it as heartily as the Tea Party folks hated what they saw as governmental over-reach.

These were the folks who contained so much of the undecided vote that Ball needed in order to make up the gap shown in the final Middle Tennessee State University poll — reputedly showing Alexander (the same Alexander who netted only 49 percent of the Republican primary vote in August) with 42 percent, Ball with 26, and the rest, 32 percent, undecided. “I’ve got to get almost all that undecided,” Ball would tell me on election eve.

We can all do the math and see how much of it would have had to break Ball’s way — and, since this is being read after the election, we can now see for ourselves how much of it did break toward the challenger.

Something tells me that the Knoxville Democrat’s rhetorical throwing of his current party leader, Reid, on the same trash heap as Alexander and McConnell was worth very little to his hopes and, indeed, was likely counter-productive.

I am sure there are extant studies on the efficacy of this kind of acrobatic tactic, in which a candidate separates from his party, or from what he perceives as the unpopular national version of it, in hopes of ultimately gaining both re-entry into his party’s good graces and –more importantly — immunity from its adversaries.

Maybe even their toleration. Heck, maybe even their votes!

If there aren’t such studies, there should be, and, meanwhile, with a conviction based entirely on my intuitive sense, coupled with case after case of actual results. I say this sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing maneuver is a loser, always.

First, there is no reason to believe, literally no reason, that a disparagement of some symbolic party colleague whom one’s political adversary has made an arch villain will gain a single vote for oneself. Those who would agree with the disparagement are already on the other side, for that and any number of other assorted reasons.

It’s just a guess, but I believe a candidate would do equally well with the opposition voter by heaping rhapsodic praise on the party colleague whom the other guys have demonized. A wash, is my guess.

On the other hand, he would certainly get better results with his own party base and ideological constituency with the latter course, which might have the salvific effect of rousing them to solidarity and sincere effort on one’s behalf.

Another case in point — speaking of McConnell — is that of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky who, for much of the past year, had been running neck-and-neck with the venerable GOP Senate leader.

Here of late, however, McConnell seemed to be pulling away a bit, and either as partial cause or maybe just as an objective correlative to that fact, Grimes has apparently tried to join McConnell on the anti-Obama bandwagon, refusing four times in a brief televised performance to say she had voted for Obama for president.

As Memphis Leftwing Cracker blogger Steve Steffens noted with some dismay, along with fellow Democratic blogger Rick Maynard, Grimes had demonstrably been a convention delegate of Obama’s — something requiring a positive embrace and avowal of a candidate on a relatively public scale. And now she was denying him? Thinking … what?

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Steffens and Maynard both concluded.

I am one who thinks current Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Roy Herron is doing good work, and I always thought he was a conscientious, effective state Senator, but, while I recognized the head of steam Republican Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump had going in the 8th District congressional race of 2010, I thought Herron, a longtime fixture in the area,  was competitive until he began pandering to what he perceived as his home folks’ animus against national Democrats, and ended up repudiating the then-Democratic House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whom he vowed to vote against.

Same arithmetic as with all other such cases: No gain from the opposition camp, while there is a palpable unease in one’s own party ranks, resulting in resentment, resignation, and fatalism that probably cost votes.

And need we mention the 2006 U.S. Senate race, in which the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Harold Ford Jr., made a concerted effort to dissociate himself not only from national party luminaries but from established party talking points on issues such as gay rights, a Draconian bankruptcy bill, opposition to the war in Iraq, and even from the party label itself.

At his headquarters opening in Memphis in 2006, he declaimed at one point, “I’m not a Democrat running up to Washington yelling ‘Democrat, Democrat, Democrat!”

And sure enough, Ford, who in other ways was running what may have been the last truly competitive statewide Democratic race against a Republican, lost to Republican Bob Corker and never got a chance to go up thataway yelling “Democrat, Democrat, Democrat” or “Blue Dog, Blue Dog, Blue Dog” or whatever other mutated and minimized form of party identity he was willing to own up to. 

Maybe “Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street”? That’s where he works today, having thus far failed to rekindle popular excitement for another political candidacy, here, there, or anywhere.

Radical thought: Maybe it actually pays to embrace one’s political party, its principles, and its personnel. Maybe that’s how you get elected.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Election Year 2015 is Upon Us

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Even as time was running out on the elections of 2014, with early voting ending this week in the election process that ends Tuesday, November 4th, the stirrings of Election Year 2015 were at hand. 

Among those in attendance at a Monday morning rally for Democratic candidates at the IBEW building on Madison were Kenneth Whalum and his wife Sheila. And while neither was quite ready to commit to a candidacy for Memphis mayor by the New Olivet Baptist Church pastor and former school board member, both seemed to relish the thought of a follow-up race to the Rev. Whalum’s surprisingly close second-place finish to Deidre Malone in last May’s Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor.

“Maybe it’s time for another tour of India,” joked the reverend, who had been absent on that East Asian sub-continent for a prolonged period just before election day but who finished strong, a fact indicating either that 1) absence made the hearts of voters grow fonder; or that 2) a more vigorous late effort on Shelby County soil might have put him over.

Either scenario, coupled with the fact that his appeal of a 2012 school board race narrowly lost to Kevin Woods had been finally disallowed by the courts, clearly left the irrepressible Whalum available for combat.

Who else is thinking about it? The proper question might be: Who isn’t?

Also present at the IBEW rally was former Shelby County Commission Chairman James Harvey, who is already committed to a race for Memphis mayor to the point of passing out calling cards advertising the fact.

“Changing parties again?” a passer-by jested to Harvey, a nominal Democrat who, in the past year or so on the commission, often made common cause with the body’s Republicans.

“I need ’em now!” responded Harvey, good-naturedly, about his attendance with other Democrats at the IBEW rally, which featured Gordon Ball, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator, at the climax of his statewide “No Show Lamar” bus tour; District 30 state Senate candidate Sara Kyle; and District 96 state House of Representatives candidate Dwayne Thompson.

Not so sunny was another attendee, Memphis City Councilman Myron Lowery, who, when asked if he was considering another mayoral race (he ran unsuccessfully in the special election of 2009 while serving as interim city mayor) answered calmly, “No,” but became non-committal, to the point of truculence, at the follow-up question, “So, are you closing the door?”

Lowery has confided to acquaintances, however, that he is indeed once again measuring the prospect of a mayoral race, while simultaneously contemplating a race by his son, management consultant Mickell Lowery, for his council seat should he choose to vacate it.

Another council member, Harold Collins, has formed an exploratory committee and is contemplating a mayoral race based largely on the theme that the current administration of Mayor A C Wharton is acting insufficiently in a number of spheres, including those of dealing with employee benefits and coping with recent outbreaks of mob violence.

Another councilman considered likely to make a bid for mayor is current council Chairman Jim Strickland, who has built up a decently sized following over the years by dint of his highly public crusades for budgetary reform. He, too, has often been critical of the incumbent mayor.

In accordance with assurances, public and private, he has made over the past year, Wharton himself is still considered to be a candidate for reelection, though there are those who speculate he may have second thoughts, given his advancing years and the increasing gravity of fiscal and social problems confronting the city.

The mayor’s supporters tend to pooh-pooh such speculation and suggest that only Wharton is capable of achieving across-the-boards support from the city’s various demographic components.

Others known or thought to be considering a mayoral race are former state legislator and ex-councilmember Carol Chumney (who has run twice previously); current county Commissioner Steve Basar; and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams.

The list of potential mayoral candidates is a roster that may grow larger quickly.

• In introducing Ball at the IBEW rally, state Democratic Chairman Roy Herron contended that incumbent Republican Senator Lamar Alexander‘s poll numbers were “going down and down and down and Gordon Ball’s are going up and up and up, and those lines are going to intersect.”

In his own remarks, Ball charged that “my opponent has spent millions of dollars trying to smear and discredit us” and cited that as evidence of how seriously Alexander was taking the threat to his reelection.

The Democratic nominee spent considerable time addressing the recent publicity about a suit brought against him by one Barry Kraselsky, an Alabama resident who recently purchased a Florida condo from Ball and is accusing Ball and his wife, Happy, of having “duped” him by removing items from the property.

Ball said he was being sued for $5,300, even though he had posted an escrow account of $5,000, which was available to Kraselsky, whom he said was a “charlatan” and a major Republican donor. “We’re going to take care of him after November 4th.”

In remarks to reporters after his formal speech, Ball, who opposes the proposed Common Core educational standards, contended that Alexander, who has mainly been opaque on the subject, was a supporter of Common Core, which is opposed by many classroom teachers. Ball noted that Alexander had bragged on well-known teachers’ advocate Diane Ravitch, who is now a Common Core opponent, in Lamar Alexander’s Little Plaid Book, which the senator published years ago.

“He doesn’t mention her anymore,” said Ball. “He and [state Education Commissioner] Kevin Huffman and [educational reformer and Common Core supporter] Michelle Rhee are in this together.”

Also taking part in the IBEW rally were Whalum and Ashley Coffield, CEO of Memphis Planned Parenthood, who passed out to all the candidates T-shirts opposing Constitutional Amendment 1 on the November 4th ballot. Amendment 1 would in effect nullify a 2000 decision by the state Supreme Court that granted more protection to abortion rights than have the federal courts, as well as empower the General Assembly to legislate on a variety of potential new restrictions to abortion.

• The Shelby County Commission, which was unable on Monday to come to a decision on proposed changes in County Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s amended health-care plan for county employees (see this week’s Editorial) also was somewhat riven on another – more explicitly political – issue.

This was a suit filed by seven commissioners in Chancery Court against current Chairman Justin Ford challenging his right to arbitrarily keep items off the body’s agenda.

The plaintiffs are the commission’s six Democrats and one Republican, former vice Chairman Steve Basar, who previously voted with the Democrats to stall the committee appointments by Ford, who was elected in this fall’s first organizational session by a combination of his own vote with that of the commission’s five Republicans. As the GOP’s Heidi Shafer explained at the time, the outnumbered Republicans had a choice between Ford, who has fairly consistently voted their way in previous years, and Bailey, who rarely has.

Basar was aggrieved by having been denied votes for the chairmanship, which he believed himself to be in line for, by most of his Republican colleagues.

Subsequent attempts to place items on the commission agenda proposing rules changes that would threaten Ford’s authority have been arbitrarily removed by the chairman.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee Senate Candidates Hit Snags

As has become increasingly evident — and was predictable from the start — the November 4th election ballot in Shelby County lacks the punch and volatility that was so evident in the August 7th “big ballot” election, with its myriad of party primaries, judges’ races, and eccentric personalities. 

The one possible marquee race for local and statewide voters, that for the U.S. Senate, saw both candidates — the highly favored Republican incumbent, Lamar Alexander, and his Democratic challenger, Knoxville attorney Gordon Ball — stumbling this week in their efforts to gain momentum and positive public attention.

Alexander, it will be remembered, polled only 49.5 percent — a minority — of the total Republican primary vote on August 7th, a circumstance that prompted him to go hat-in-hand last month in search of support from his closest challenger, Tea Party-backed state Representative Joe Carr of Lascassas.

Carr polled 40.6 percent of the primary vote, despite having spent only $1.1 million on his campaign against Alexander’s $7.1 million, and despite restricting his efforts essentially to his Middle Tennessee bailiwick. Carr campaigned very little in East Tennessee and was basically a no-show in populous Shelby County, home of another challenger, wealthy radiologist/businessman George Flinn, who polled 5 percent of the vote as a late entry.)

At their post-election meeting in September, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on Carr’s home ground in Rutherford County, Alexander asked for his runner-up’s support but failed to get anything more than an assertion from Carr that he would “think about it.” The TNReport.com news site reported this week that Carr, having duly thought about it, still isn’t ready to endorse the GOP incumbent.

“It’s not up to me. It’s up to Senator Alexander. The ball’s in his court,” Carr was quoted as saying. Reportedly, he is insisting that the senator, who has issued a series of ambiguous statements about the hot-button issues of Common Core and immigration, be more explicit in opposing the former and standing against any variant of amnesty on the latter. (For what it’s worth, Democrat Ball has done just that.)

Apparently, there are other obstacles to a rapprochement between Alexander and his former primary challenger. Carr is said to be have been resentful that Alexander failed to return “five or six” would-be concession calls from him, beginning on election night, and made a point of extracting an apology from Alexander on that score when the two of them met in September.

Carr was evidently rankled also by a poll released shortly before the August election that misleadingly showed Senator Alexander leading his challenger by 30 percent.

If Alexander was having his problems in squaring personal and political accounts with Carr (and, by implication, with hardcore Tea Partiers), Ball remained luckless in his attempts to get Alexander to even talk directly about their differences on a debate platform (though the two will appear, along with other statewide candidates, in a Farm Bureau forum two weeks from now).

The Democrat had troubles of another kind, too, stemming from a Buzzfeed.com report that Ball’s campaign website consisted almost entirely of boilerplate cribbed verbatim from the published platforms of other Democratic Senate candidates  — including Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

One example of many may suffice. 

Warren: “We need to put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges, upgrading our water systems, teaching our kids, and protecting our communities — earning paychecks and keeping Massachusetts growing.”

Ball: “That’s why it is so important that we get people back to work right now, rebuilding our roads and bridges, upgrading our water systems, teaching our kids, and protecting our communities, earning paychecks and keeping Tennessee and America growing.”

Buzzfeed’s disclosure of this and the numerous other examples of cloned prose on Ball’s website forced an embarrassed response from the candidate (“I had no idea that this material was cut and pasted on my website from other sources.”) and a righteously phrased demand from state Republican Chairman Chris Devaney that Ball exit the race: “Gordon Ball, with nearly everything on his website plagiarized, should do the same and halt his fraudulent campaign today.”

Trace Sharp, a spokeswoman for the Ball campaign, would later set forth the obvious, that a campaign staffer, since departed, had assembled a series of statements on issues from various sources that Ball could concur with and placed them on the candidate’s website.

To reprise Horatio in Act One of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.” Virtually all candidates, all of the time, lean heavily on boilerplate prepared by staffers for their public statements. Unlike major addresses, which usually are designed specifically for candidates by their speechwriters (or improved by the candidates themselves), talking points and website pronouncements hardly every reflect much originality.

To be blunt, it is highly doubtful that most of the aforesaid sources for the Ball website — Senators Manchin, Brown, Hagan, and Warren — were the actual authors of the remarks cribbed by the unidentified Ball staffer. And it surely wouldn’t be that difficult to uncover remarks made by Republicans — Alexander and Carr, say, on the evils of the “Obama agenda” — that displayed a remarkable sameness.

Still and all, this week’s disclosure was a setback for Ball, as Carr’s latest blowing-off of Alexander was for the Senator.

 

• But, if the U.S. Senate race may so far have failed to inspire many Tennesseans, other issues on the November 4th ballot — notably four constitutional amendments — were beginning to gain traction.

A case in point is Amendment One, which would essentially nullify a 2000 state Supreme Court decision that struck down the state’s power to impose significant restrictions on the right to abortion — going further in many ways than the U.S. Supreme Court itself had.

The amendment reads: “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother.”

Proponents of the amendment say that it merely makes the Tennessee Constitution neutral on abortion. Opponents say it is designed to roll back the hard-won rights of women and cite the last prepositional phrase, from “including” on, as being especially ominous.

Resisters to Amendment One had back-to-back meetings this week. The Tennessee Democratic Party held a Tuesday night fund-raiser at the Racquet Club to oppose the amendment, and Planned Parenthood was host for a scheduled “Clergy Perspective” event opposing the amendment at Evergreen Presbyterian Church.

Adherents were also active. Two examples: Proponents of Amendment One were conspicuous in passing out literature at the two-day Bartlett Festival at Freeman Park this past weekend, and an organization called Concerned Women for America held a press conference in Nashville on Tuesday to announce results of a poll purporting to show Tennesseans favor the amendment.

All of this is tip-of-the-iceberg. Clearly, much more public activity is coming on this issue, as, for that matter, on Amendment Two, which establishes a method of selecting state appellate judges via gubernatorial appointment, coupled with legislative ratification; and on Amendment Three, which would enact an explicit constitutional ban on a state income tax.

 

• Some 70 attendees at a “legislative forum” held by the Tennessee Nurses Association (TNA) last week got more gratification than they may have expected from a cross-section of public officials and candidates.

The number one item on the TNA’s wish list seemed to be a call for legislation in the next session of the General Assembly that would confer “full practice authority” on several categories of advanced nurse practitioners. 

Such authority, sanctioned in only 16 states, would grant the qualifying nurses latitude, independently of supervising physicians, to write prescriptions, make medical assessments, order tests, and make referrals. 

Among those endorsing the request were U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat; state Senate candidate Flinn, a Republican; Democratic state Representatives Karen Camper of Memphis and Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley; and Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate Tom Emerson.

Categories
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.”