Tag: Marsha Blackburn

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

RNC 2020: The Masque of the Red Party

You have to give Donald Trump this: He has good taste in music to close out with. It’s hard to beat the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” with which he ends his rallies. (Against the wishes of the Stones, it should be noted.) And singer Christopher Macchio’s renditions of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and the traditional “Ave Maria” (delivered from the Truman Balcony at the White House) were certainly powerful codas to the President’s climactic address at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, outdoing even an extended round of fireworks that filled the sky over the nation’s Capital.

That the White House, historically known as “the People’s House,” was able to be employed as a backdrop to the events and festivities of the four-day RNC affair was a consequence, in a way, of the deadly coronavirus pandemic that had made planned arena extravaganzas in Charlotte, North Carolina, and, later, Jacksonville, Florida, impossible. Invoking the protocols of the Hatch Act, Democrats had complained about their rivals’ appropriation of national structures and symbology for such partisan purposes, but, as in so much else, Trump just does what he wants and gets away with it.

Give him this, too: Though the pandemic had caused the RNC to uproot and move its venue, twice, Trump remained intent on flaunting his so far successful penchant for gambling. He wanted crowds? He got crowds — upwards of 1,500, packed in tight on the south lawn of the White House to hear him speak. Masks? We don’t need no stinking masks! No social distancing, either. It was Tulsa writ smaller but grander, and, if the late GOP African-American eminence Herman Cain had been a casualty of that earlier wager, Trump’s own luck, and that of his family and entourage, seemed to be holding.

Masks? We don’t need no stinking masks!

Once again, the president had hurled a defy to the fates. No one — or no one so prominent — has so obviously and so consistently moved unprotected amid tight groups of people during the six months so far of medical emergency. And in his RNC address, he sort of laid it on the line to the country: “Joe wants to shut down, to surrender to the virus,” he declared of Democratic nominee Biden, who had spoken of intensified health-safety actions, including a national mask mandate. Trump’s own preference? “The states have to be opened up — back to work, back to school.” All Americans are involved in Trump’s parley — and its consequences.

“Let’s Pretend”
If the situation required a bit of rhetorical let’s-pretend, so be it. Speaker after speaker at the convention either ignored the pandemic or treated Trump like a triumphant Horatio at the gate. Early on, he had clearly minimized the threat and procrastinated in dealing with the virus, which has so far resulted in 6 million cases and 180,000 American lives, a full quarter of the world’s total. But this week in others’ telling, and in his own, he would seem — by the simple act of incomplete and temporary halts on traffic to and from China and Europe —to have stopped Covid-19 cold. On the convention’s second night, Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, put the whole pandemic thing in the past tense. It’s over, folks.

In a convention only selectively attentive to realities, that was par for the course. On the convention’s first night, Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, sadly, had been among those slain in 2018 by a gunman at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, took the stage to praise President Trump, whom he’d met with after the shooting, as a “great man and good listener” and blamed the massacre on the emphasis on “restorative justice” by “far left Democrats.” Guns themselves and their ready prevalence in the land remained unmentioned.

Two nights later, logger Scott Dane contended that “crazy environmentalists” had somehow been responsible for the sporadically raging forest fires on the west coast and praised President Trump for his idea (so far unelaborated on) of “managing the forests.” Throughout the convention, in fact, “environmental extremists” were the villains of disparaging testimonies, right up there with “radical socialists” and “looters.” Those latter two categories were conflated, to the extent possible.

The McCloskeys

The McCloskeys, a couple from the St. Louis area who had brandished weapons at protesters of George Floyd’s murder, warned that the suburbs themselves were under direct attack. And ongoing events in Kenosha served, in both spoken and unspoken ways, to reinforce the sense of peril for Trump’s base. Never mind that the only deaths in that Wisconsin city had been those of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man shot by police, and two protesters gunned down by a right-wing vigilante.

In all fairness, though, there had been martyrs of out-of-control mobs, and several of these were spoken to — notably, retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, shot and killed by looters of a pawn shop he was trying to provide security for during a post-Floyd disturbance. There was a telling bit of having-it-both-ways during the emotionally moving description of the tragedy by Dorn’s widow, a white woman. The portrait of the late captain on a mantel behind her, was out-of-focus in such a way as to make his fact of his race indeterminate. Black viewers could see — and grieve for — one of their own, while those whites who chose to do so could remain uncertain about the matter.

In any case, for the RNC-ers, Kenosha was the ill wind from which some benefit could be derived. The concept of the Democratic nominee as “Sleepy Joe” had seemingly been mined for all it’s worth — and, on the evidence of Biden’s performance at the DNC convention, debunked. Now Biden was being described, by Trump and the president’s surrogates, as a “Trojan Horse,” a hapless government time-server for 47 years (a span alluded to over and over) who was now in the clutches of sinister elements to the point that an early RNC speaker had professed to be “terrified of Joe Biden coming after everything we’re building.”

Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general, made bold to reprise the discredited slander of “Biden family members” as Ukrainian grifters, but mainly focused on the Bidens in China, a country so repeatedly referred to in the RNC convention as a super-specter, the gravest menace to America. (Russia went unmentioned and, on the evidence of this convention, might have ceased to exist on maps of the planet.)

Ironies Abounding
It was a convention in which extremes, exaggerations, and ironies abounded — one in which Tennessee’s high-intensity junior Senator, Marsha Blackburn, mustering every word slowly and carefully, came off as a relative moderate, although she still could breathe some fire: “Democrats] close our churches, but keep the liquor stores and abortion clinics open. They say we can’t gather in community groups, but encourage protests, riots, and looting in the streets. If the Democrats had their way, they would keep you locked in your house until you become dependent on the government for everything.”

Senator Tom Cotton

Question: How is it possible that Kimberly Guilfoyle, now Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, who had, in a memorably screechy address, proclaimed of Trump Sr., “He liberates you. He lifts you up,” could have earlier been married to the laid-back Gavin Newsom, California’s currently serving Democratic governor?

The gaunt and ultra-grim-looking Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, meanwhile accused Biden of “coddling communist dictators” and failed to mention the exchange of love letters, as they were characterized by the President himself, between Trump and Kim Jung Un of North Korea.

In his 70-minute finale of a teleprompter address, Trump would recap all of the calumnies directed at Biden, declaring outright that, if the Democrat were elected, “China would own our country.” He characterizes himself as “the People’s President,” and the claim reflects a reelection strategy based less on foreign issues than on day-to-day concerns in the population. In that sense, the threat from China is presented as primarily economic (though, just in case, Trump credits himself with rebuilding the nation’s military).

Democrats note correctly that the nation’s economic recovery from the 2007-8 crash began under the “Obama-Biden” presidency (as Republicans now choose to characterize it), but Trump’s argument that his administration accounted for the most robust economy in American history still has legs. The President notes the addition of “9 million new jobs” in the last three months, while Democrats counter with the fact that some 21 million were lost just previously, in the coronavirus shutdown.

The president’s taking point remains, and the outcome of the election depends at least partly on the continuing viability of it vis-a-vis the ever-looming threat of the virus. In the either/or of things, the two tickets are each emphasizing a different side of the dichotomy.

“Family Values”
Then there are domestic factors — matters of tranquility, racial fairness, gender equity among them — to be reckoned with. It was no accident that the Republican convention featured an unusual number of women and African Americans to serve as proponents of the president. As identity groups, blacks and women are being counted on by Democrats, with some degree of confidence, as anchors of the Biden-Harris ticket. Trump and the GOP nevertheless are seeking such inroads there as are possible.

Though the LGBTQ community is overwhemingly Democratic, there are clearly a certain number of its members who opt for the GOP, and Republicans are not so foolish as to entertain the strategy of gay-bashing.The one issue on which there is no likelihood whatsoever of the twain’s meeting amicably on the battlefield of this election is abortion. There would seem to be no middle ground between being anti-abortion and being pro-choice. The Democratic platform opts for the latter and the Republican platform, such as it is, for the former.

For all the vau

The Rev. Franklin Graham

nting during the convention of his family members (all of whom appear to have been on hand, save those who have denounced him publicly), Donald Trump is not, and will never be, a symbol of “family values.” Nevertheless, his brand encapsulates issues of that sort as well as spokespersons for them (cases in point being the Rev. Franklin Graham and various smaller fry), and social conservatism is one of the cards Republicans are certain to play.

The exact power of that constituency is hard to estimate, though, as a voting bloc, it is arguably more dependable than are those forces galvanized so strongly right now by Black Lives Matter and other movements to redress historic wrongs. Assessments of strength and staying power in such matters are notoriously difficult to assess in polls.

Que sera sera, and, as a friend of ours is so fond of saying, events are in the saddle. Covid-19, George Floyd, and Kenosha have all reminded us of that. In any event, the Democrats and the Republicans have each had their show now, and, a little more than two months from now, (Postmaster General DeJoy willing) the Nielsen ratings will come in — with dramatic consequences, either way.

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Politics Politics Feature

Vandy Poll: Trump, Lee, Congress, and Other Issues

A new survey of Tennesseans’ opinions on several current policy matters indicates that the state still occupies a median place, more or less, in the spectrum of national opinion. The fall 2019 Vanderbilt University Poll polled 1,000 “demographically representative registered Tennessee voters” on subjects ranging from the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump to household issues and finds the state’s electorate to be hugging the middle lane of the road, as, historically, it most often has.

Regarding Trump, exactly half of the Tennesseans polled, 50 percent, expressed approval of the president, while 58 percent expressed disapproval of his efforts to persuade Ukraine to investigate potential Democratic opponent Joe Biden. Thirty-eight percent affirmed a desire to see Trump impeached and removed from office.

“Something new we’re seeing is that he’s dropped about 10 points in the suburbs,”  said John Geer, Dean of the College of Arts and Science, professor of political science, and co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll. “This reflects a broader trend of suburban discontent with President Trump across the country.” 

The state’s major statewide officials more or less passed muster with those polled. Governor Bill Lee‘s approval rating was 62 percent, while U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander and Marsha Blackburn earned scores of 46 and 44 percent, respectively. The Tennessee legislature, meanwhile, was approved by 56 percent, while the U.S. Congress earned the approval of only 28 percent.

While a general feeling of optimism prevailed among those polled, a third of the voters remained concerned about the matter of making ends meet and the problem of how to pay for health care. This latter feeling was especially strong in rural communities.

“When you ask people to evaluate something as complicated as the economy, you don’t actually know if they’re including themselves in the equation,” said poll co-director Josh Clinton, a professor of political science. “What this shows us is that even though most people feel like the state’s doing well, it doesn’t mean there aren’t still serious issues facing Tennesseans across the state — especially in rural areas.”

Anxiety was general across all demographic lines on matters such as the seriousness of the opioid crisis, the need for improved screening for gun purchases, and the importance of childcare, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent of voters said drug and alcohol dependence is the biggest problem in their community, and 68 percent approved of raising the legal age for tobacco to 21.

Agreement was widespread that guns should not be easier to buy. In the language of the pollsters: “47 percent said purchasing requirements should stay the same and 45 percent said they should be harder. An overwhelming majority — 86 percent — approved of background checks for gun show and private gun sales. The same proportion supported bans for people with certain mental health problems, while 68 percent supported the creation of a universal database to track all gun purchases. By contrast, only 51 percent supported a ban on assault weapons.”

As a corollary to the controversy that raged in Memphis before the removal of Confederate statuaries from Downtown parks, 76 percent of voters polled, with majorities from both parties, said a bust of former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest should be removed from the Capitol. Forty-seven percent said it belonged in a museum, while 29 percent said it should not be displayed at all.

Apropos the currently contentious issue of what the state should do about its nearly $1 billion in unspent federal anti-poverty funds, subsidized childcare emerged as the top priority by a significant margin. Forty-one percent, across all income and political backgrounds, chose childcare. The next most popular choice, job training, received 27 percent support, and the third, fighting the opioid epidemic, got 16 percent.

The poll showed that a current proposal of the Lee administration and legislative Republicans to shift Medicaid funding to a block grant model has generated more confusion than any other reaction, with 59 percent professing not to have an opinion about how TennCare should be funded.

On medical care in general, about a quarter of Tennesseans said they struggle with affording health care. Twenty-eight percent said they have unpaid medical bills, while 24 percent said they’ve put off care due to cost. There was a significant gender disparity, as well: While 17 percent of men said they’ve postponed care due to cost, 31 percent of women said they’d done so.

Undercutting their general optimism that the economy was promising, those polled nursed serious forebodings about their own predicaments. Thirty-two percent of voters said they worried about paying for the basics, like food, shelter, utilities, and transportation, while 52 percent reported being worried about not having enough to pay for emergencies. Fifty-three percent worry about affording college and retirement. And while 56 percent said everyone has an equal chance to get ahead, 40 percent disagreed, saying that today’s economy rewards only the people at the top.

…

Everybody had a point to make on Monday as members of the Shelby County legislation met at the University of Memphis to review the legislative agendas of local officials. From left to right here: State Senator Sara Kyle, District Attorney General Amy Weirich, State Rep. Joe Towns, State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, and ougoing state Rep. Jim Coley

…

A group of some 30 Memphians gathered at the Poplar and Ridgeway loop Tuesday as part if a nationwide protest in favor of impeaching President Trump.

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Memphis Gaydar News

LGBTQ+ Group Urges Blackburn: ‘Represent All of Us’

CREDIT: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn/Facebook

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn/Facebook

Blackburn and other Congress members filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court hoping to limit future protections for LGBTQ+ people int he workplace.

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn does not think federal employment protections extend to the LGBTQ+ community, according to a court document, but advocates are asking her to change her mind.

Several members of Congress (including Blackburn) filed a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, offering up their expertise on Title VII. That’s the portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts that prohibits employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.”
[pdf-1]
A case now before the Supreme Court could affect employers’ rights to fire gay and transgender employees. The Congress members’ brief says changing the law should be a legislative function — left up to Congress in other words — and not one to be decided in courts. But they do tip their hands on their feelings about the law.

”Title VII does not expressly include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes,” reads the brief. “The text and legislative history do not support the view that Title VII was intended to protect them.”

The case was brought by three people — a skydiving instructor, a funeral home employee, and a state-government child welfare services coordinator — who all claimed they were discriminated against because they were gay or transgender.

The “sex” part of Title VII was meant to protect women, the Congress members said in the brief. They explain “sex” in the brief by saying “sex” — in quotes — a bunch of times.
[pullquote-1] “Sexual orientation and gender identity, despite their connection to sex, are not ’sex,’ per se,”reads the brief. “Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based upon ‘things that cannot be defined or understood without reference to sex’ or ‘things that are directly connected to sex.’ Moreover, sex stereotyping is not a separate protected class, but rather a means of proving sex discrimination.”

Any way you describe it, amending the law could have real-world effects, the Congress members say, including ”collateral impacts on businesses and imposition on matters of conscience.” Oh, and the Affordable Care Act.

The brief was signed by eight U.S. Senators (Blackburn being one) and 40 U.S. Representatives.

On Tuesday, members of the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP) delivered petitions to Blackburn’s Memphis and Nashville offices urging her to remove her name from the brief. The group said 724 people signed the petitions at events in Memphis, Murfreesboro, and Nashville in the last month.
[pullquote-2] The petitions read, in part, “sex stereotyping is at the heart of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Your constituents in Tennessee need these protections and we ask you to speak for them.”
Tennessee Equality Project

TEP Shelby County chair Shahin Samiei delivers petitions to Sen. Blackburn’s office.

TEP Shelby County Committee Chair Shahin Samiei delivered the petitions to Blackburn’s office in Memphis Tuesday.

“Having spoken with scores of Tennesseans, a consensus resonates that being fired for who we love or who we are is inconsistent with our values,” Samiei said in a statement. “Fire me for being bad at my job — don’t fire me for being LGBTQ.”

TEP executive director Chris Sanders said the organization is contacted “every month” by LGBTQ+ people who have been discriminated against on the job.

“We need legal protections and we need Senator Blackburn to represent all of us,” Sanders said. “There is wide agreement across the political spectrum that everyone deserves the chance to earn a living.”

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Senator Marsha Blackburn Murders Police Officer

Marsha, Marsha, Marsha…

In an act of cold-blooded not giving a shit, Senator Marsha Blackburn created a fictional Memphis police officer then murdered him in a press release. She was responding to a tragic, true-life event that climaxed with the death of an African-American male following a confrontation with U.S. Marshals.

“My prayers are with the family of the fallen officer,” Blackburn wrote, expressing her shared grief with the imaginary wife and children of a true fake hero.

“We can’t let the fact that Blackburn’s police officer is a complete fabrication and probably a fantasy expression of her thinly veiled racism obscure the fact that she also killed the man,” says the University of Midtown’s frequently cited Crypto-criminologist Roger Datt.
[pullquote-1] While some observers have suggested that Senator Blackburn is an evil genius posing as a simpleton, Datt thinks this description misses the point. “What she is is a murderer,” he says. “Sure, she retracted her original statements. But what good did that do? The bad information was already circulating, and a fictional officer was already dead.”

The article is a parody, but this press release is real AF.

Popular political commentator Helmut Mann offered an opinion as to why Blackburn would create a fictional police officer only to murder him. Mann, known for his cheeky, Nazi-light views, and for being a snappy dresser, says there’s only one thing we can know for sure.

“This is most definitely not rooted in deeply held white supremacist values,” Mann says, offended by the very idea. “Nor is it a lazy, but effective projection of racist cliches designed to stimulate a political base or gin up unrest, and the need for strong authoritarian action. To even suggest something like that should be punishable by disembraining.”

Memphis activist Bing Hampton has organized a memorial for the dead officer who was never alive in the first place. “It’s bad enough that this event resulted in the actual death of a civilian of color,” Hampton says. “But the senseless death of an innocent, imaginary, probably white police officer is just too much to bear.”

“Blackburn is a true freedom fighter who’s struggling to ensure that everybody, including hostile foreign governments have a say in our public elections,” Mann asserts. “If she killed an imaginary police officer, you can bet your last ruble he probably deserved killing.”
——————————
Yes, this article is a parody. We’ve said so twice already!

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Cohen, Blackburn: Contrasting Views on Trump’s SOTU

Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09) watched President Trump’s second State of the Union message to Congress on television at his office in the Rayburn House Office Building  in Washington and released the following statement:

“I declined to attend this evening’s address because I want to hear the truth about the State of the Union from a President of the United States. The current president has no respect for the truth and is the subject of numerous investigations regarding his administration, his campaign, his foundation, his business and his inaugural committee. He has disgraced the presidency and does not deserve the respect and attention from Congress and the public that this address has historically received.

Rep. Steve Cohen

“We are all for border security but we will continue to disagree whether a $5.7 billion border wall is the answer. Diversity is our strength in this country and the President’s dog whistles about the nation’s golden yesteryears, his call to make America great ‘again’ is a false narrative to millions of Americans who fifty years ago did not enjoy the rights we now recognize for women, for minorities, for people with sexual and gender identity differences and for people with disabilities. We should not go backwards on women’s reproductive rights, voting rights, labor rights or health care.

“The initiative to stop the spread of HIV by 2030 is an admirable goal and I hope that we as a nation achieve it. I’m skeptical however of a plan to deal with this scourge from a President who would cut major safety net programs, like Medicaid, which delivers much AIDS care, and proposed cuts to the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program to give tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy.

“As a senior member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I welcome the President’s call for a major infrastructure plan, but its value will be seen in its details.

“I was pleased to see Alice Johnson of Memphis, whose commutation request I supported, in tonight’s crowd, but I have suggested pardons and commutations should follow a deliberative, prescribed procedure, and be delivered to thousands of people, not to a few dozen people with celebrity sponsors.

“The President tonight called for an end to ‘decades of political stalemate,’ but he has helped create it by attacking House Democrats, Speaker Pelosi and even Republicans like my former Senator Bob Corker who disagree with him. It would be a step in the right direction if members of the President’s own party weren’t routinely blind-sided by ill-conceived, pundit-inspired policies out of right field.

“I’m concerned about the state of the union and hope we can return to making progress on climate change affecting not just our country but the world. We need to have sensible gun reform. We must do more to protect people with pre-existing conditions, those living in poverty and hunger, our veterans and working families. That’s what will keep America great.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn Releases Statement Following State of the Union

Washington, D.C. – Tonight, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) released this statement following President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address before Congress:

“President Trump conveyed an inspiring message and a hopeful vision for our country in tonight’s State of the Union message. He expressed confidence in our nation’s future and extended a hand to Democrats to work together, in unity, to produce results for all Americans. Jackson Baker

Marsh Blackburn

“Bringing Knoxville Fire Chief D.J. Corcoran as my guest was a true honor. He and his wife, Wendy, who attended with Congressman Tim Burchett, lost their 22-year-old son, Pierce, in late December when he was killed by an illegal immigrant. The Corcorans are faith-filled Tennesseans who love their country, their family and their God. They have taken the tragic loss their family experienced and spread a message of hope that no American should have to experience the anguish of becoming an Angel Family. I am incredibly thankful they accepted our invitation to attend as our guests.

“As the president communicated in his speech, the state of our union is strong. Our nation is well-positioned to address our challenges in a way that meets the needs of the 21st century. I look forward to continuing to work with President Trump and with my colleagues of both parties to build on our success for the American people.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Post-Mortem, Pre-Birth

CREDIT: Laura Jean Hocking

A week and more since the election, the dust has settled, as they say, and the earth on which it rests looks, superficially, amazingly the same as it was before.

The landscape of Tennessee is still red-tinted, as it has been since the statewide elections of 2010 and 2014 and the post-census reapportionment of legislative seats, in-between. The state’s two Senate seats belong to the Republicans, as does the governorship, and a GOP supermajority will still be reigning in Nashville when the General Assembly reconvenes.  

But there are clear and obvious signs of change.

Politically speaking, there are two Nashvilles. The capital city’s name, used as a synecdoche for state government, or, alternatively, for the oft retrograde doings of the legislature, connotes all kinds of red-hued things. The actual city of Nashville, based on the voting habits of its electorate and the official acts of its public figures, is the most consistently blue spot in Tennessee; indeed, it is probably the last refuge on Planet Earth of the once-upon-a-time Solid Democratic South.

Laura Jean Hocking

Scene from Weekend Rally at Civic Center Plaza

Nashville is where not just blacks, who amount to 27 percent of the population, but politically ambitious whites find it worth their while to run as Democrats. Nashville’s legislators are still predominantly Democratic; the Congressman representing the city, Jim Cooper, is a Democrat, and so are its mayors; former Mayors Karl Dean, this year’s Democratic nominee for Governor and Phil Bredesen, the two-term Governor who carried the party’s banner in the 2018 U.S. Senate race being cases in point.

The cautious Micawber-like conservatism of Bredesen was on full display in the Senate race, as it had been during his gubernatorial tenure, and it was a source of continuing annoyance to a good many Democratic activists, who bridled at their nominee’s implicit and sometimes overt affinities for Trumpism, as when Bredesen, post-Senate hearings, embraced the Supreme Court candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh, or when, in a TV commercial, he seemed to relish the idea of working in tandem with the president (“a skilled negotiator”) to get pharmaceutical prices down.  

While these overtures might have seemed ill-considered cave-ins to many of Bredesen’s Democratic supporters, they might very well have represented the candidate’s actual views. Bredesen is, after all, the governor who drastically pruned the rolls of TennCare and, in his first year in office in 2003, imposed across-the-board budget cuts of 9 percent in state spending. (By comparison, his victorious ultra-right-wing Republican opponent in 2018, Marsha Blackburn, had only demanded an 8 percent omnibus cut back then, as a state senator.)

The root fact may be that Bredesen, an import from the Northeast who made a fortune in Nashville as a health-care entrepreneur, is, politically, the exception who proves the rule about Nashville — someone who, upon entering politics, branded himself a Democrat because that was the “right” label for someone running for office in Nashville.

Whatever the case, Bredesen got 71 percent of the votes this year in Nashville as compared to 66 percent in Memphis. The rest of the state went for Blackburn by a 70 to 30 ratio, percentage-wise.

It is difficult to imagine James Mackler, the youngish Nashville lawyer and Iraq War vet who was talked into bowing out of the race to accommodate Bredesen’s race, doing much worse, statewide. And the progressive ideas Mackler unfolded during his brief candidacy might well have proved as rousing as Beto O’Rourke’s similar approach did in Texas, making the Lone Star congressman’s race there a close-run thing and elevating him into national prominence. We’ll never know. It was assumed, probably correctly, that only Bredesen could raise the requisite amount of cash for a competitive statewide race in Tennessee.

Similar reasoning underlay the nice-try but no-cigar race by Karl Dean against the GOP’s new-look gubernatorial winner, Bill Lee.

The state Democratic Party, incidentally, did what it could financially to augment several of the legislative races in play on last week’s ballot, including races mounted in Shelby County’s most suburban corners against long-term Republicans thought to have an unbreakable hold on power.

There was Gabby Salinas, the Bolivian-born cancer survivor and research scientist who, running as a Democrat, pleaded the cause of Medicaid expansion against its chief antagonist, the supposedly entrenched Republican state senator and state Senate Judiciary Chairman Brian Kelsey, in District 31, a sprawling land mass extending from Midtown and East Memphis into the suburban hinterland of Bartlett, Germantown, and Collierville. Gabby, as she was everywhere known, came within 2 percent of ousting Kelsey, who squeaked out a win of 40,313 to 38,793.

Democrat Danielle Schonbaum made things look relatively close in her contest with the veteran Mark White in House District 83, another East Memphis-Germantown-Collierville amalgam where she polled 11,336 votes to White’s 15,129. Even closer was fellow Democratic newcomer Allan Creasy, who won 10,073 votes against incumbent Jim Coley‘s 12,298 in District 97, a somewhat gerrymandered slice of Bartlett and Eads.

And, of course, there was District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), where Democrat Dwayne Thompson, who managed to upset Republican incumbent Steve McManus in the Trump year of 2016, expanded his margin of victory from 14,710 to 10,493 over Republican warhorse Scott McCormick in a reelection bid.

If those outcomes on the suburban rim look familiar, they are the contemporary Democratic equivalents of the kinds of gains Republicans made in the period of the GOP’s ascendancy, beginning in the late 1960s. Just as the GOP did in its rise to power, the refurbished Democratic Party, led by Corey Strong, made a point of challenging every available position, an effort that Republicans could not or would not match.

Unmistakably, Shelby County’s Democratic totals were swelled enormously by the African-American voters who are the essence of the party’s base here. But this year the effort made by white Democrats, focused in the Germantown Democratic Party, whose president Dave Cambron doubled as the party’s chief recruiter of candidates, and by millennial-dominated groups like Indivisible and Future 90 and new leaders, like Emily Fulmer, was intensified to a point of fever pitch.

Fulmer and others were galvanized into action again on Saturday, in a rally on Civic Center Plaza of hundreds who braved cold weather to protest the prospect of a post-election move against the Robert Mueller investigation by President Trump.

Unmistakably, Democratic sentiment in Memphis and Shelby County is again on the rise, after a decade or two of slumber.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Shut Up, Phil.

So I’m sitting quietly at my neighborhood bar, nursing a beer, chatting with some of the regulars, when a new guy walks in.

“What’ll you have, pal?” says Ray, the bartender.

“What a stupid question,” the guy says. “But then, you ask a lot of stupid questions. Gimme a Diet Coke.”

“Okay, comin’ right up, sir,” says Ray, thinking to himself, “what an asshole.”

But Ray’s a congenial guy. He likes to keep the peace. So he slides a Diet Coke across the bar and tries to make conversation. Pointing to the TV, he says to the newcomer, “Helluva thing, those wildfires out in California, eh? Dozens of people killed, whole towns burned to the ground. Schools, houses, cars, everything. It’s pretty bad.”

“Nah, they got what they deserved,” says the new guy, loudly. “It’s just bad forest management. They ought to cut off federal funding to those people. Sad!”

At this point, the other customers in the bar are beginning to notice. There’s an awkward silence in the room, until a perky dishwater blonde at the right end of the bar speaks up.

“You know, I actually think you’re right,” she says. “The only way to stop a bad forest with a fire is a good forest with a fire.”

“That makes a lot of sense, Marsha,” says another customer. “In fact, that’s just the sort of creative bipartisan thinking I could work with, if I were given a chance.”

“Shut up, Phil,” says Marsha. “You’re boring the crap out of everybody. Nobody wants to hear it any more.”

“Yes, ma’am, I suspect you’re right,” says Phil. “I’m just trying to point how easy-going and inoffensive I am.”

“Yeah, shut up, Phil,” says the new guy. “I just met you, and even I can see you’re a loser. Think I’ll call you Flounderin’ Phil.”

“Hey, you don’t need to talk to Phil that way,” says Mario, another regular. “He’s totally harmless.”

The new guy turns to look at Mario. “You look kinda brown, Pedro,” he says. “You some kinda gang member? You come up here in a caravan? You MS-13?”

“No, I was born in Puerto Rico. I’m an American. I live here. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

“Puerto Rico, eh?” says the new guy. “That was some really bad hurricane management you people had down there. All those fake death reports. Ridiculous. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Sad!”

“Wait a minute,” says Mario. “You think you can just come in here and start insulting everybody and get away with it?”

“Sure, I can. I’m a very stable genius. I have the best words. I could take you out and shoot you in the middle of Union Avenue and people would still love me.”

“Why, you son of …”

“You know,” says Phil, cordially interrupting, “you’re probably right, sir. And that’s just the kind of strong leadership I could work with, if given a chance …”

“Shut up, Phil!” says Mario.

“Yeah, shut up, Flounderin’ Phil,” says Marsha.

The new guy takes a sip of his Diet Coke and looks in the mirror behind the bar. “Looks like I’m having a bad hair day,” he says. “I’ll be right back. And you,” he says, pointing a tiny forefinger at Marsha, “I’ll need two cans of L’Oreal Ultra Freeze hairspray, stat. Follow me. And don’t make me grab you.”

“Yes, sir!” says Marsha, beaming, obviously smitten by the manly newcomer.

As they head to the men’s room,
Mario turns to Ray and says, “What could she possibly see in that guy?”

“What could anybody see in that guy?” says Ray. “He’s a total jerk.”

“I don’t know,” says Phil, cautiously. “He has the kind of hair I could work with, given the chance …”

“SHUT UP, PHIL,” says everyone.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election 2018: Winners, Losers, and Close Calls

CREDIT: JB

JB

The thrill of victory was experienced by (l to r) Aaron Fowles, Steve Mulroy, and Racquel Collins, opponents of the losing referendum to repeal Instranr Runoff Voting.

Note: For reasons that remain obscure, the following text, published in the early morning of November 7, vanished from online, to be replaced by an earlier election-highlights brief that was posted on election night itself. I am happy to see the longer piece, like Lazarus, freed from untimely interment and restored. — jb

When the final report was done, the last round poured, the surviving hors-d’oeuvres wilted, the election results locally mirrored those nationally. There were lots of near misses, college tries, and moral victories — mainly among Democrats who had aspired to overturn the verdict of 2016 (or, in many ways, of the last few decades).

But the inherent limitations of the near miss, the college try, and the moral victory would rapidly become obvious as the reality of defeat and the resilience of the status quo sunk in.

The purest and most unsullied triumph locally was enjoyed by the band of activists in Save IRV Memphis and their sympathizers, who resisted a concentrated effort by the Memphis City Council on behalf of three ballot referenda that, the activists contended, were designed to protect the incumbency of Council members.

To start there, the count was 62,316 for and 104,431 against in the case of Ordinance No. 5669, which would have repealed the prior 2008 referendum authorizing IRV (a method of vote -counting that successively redistributes runner-up votes in a given race until a majority winner emerges). The vote was 67,220 for and 101,607 against for Ordinance No. 5676, which (via language that was ambivalent, to say the least) would have lengthened term limits for mayor and Council members from two to three four-year terms. And Ordinance No. 5677, which would have abolished runoff elections altogether, lost out by a vote of 77,223 for and 91,184 against.
The Democratic candidates, all first-time candidates, who attempted to oust Republican state legislators in the suburbs, made a good run of it, but fell short. In the most avidly watched race, Gabby Salinas, the three-time cancer survivor and budding scientist lost to incumbent District 31 state Senator Brian Kelsey by the relatively narrow margin of 40,313 for Kelsey to 38,793 for Salinas.

Republican incumbent Mark White turned back Democrat Danielle Schonbaum in the District 83 House of Representatives race, 15,129 to 11,376. And incumbent GOP state Representative Jim Coley defeated Democrat Allan Creasy by a vote of 12,298 to 10,073 in District 97.

More decisive victories were won by Republican incumbent Kevin Vaughan over Democear Sanjeev Memula in House District 95 and by the GOP’s Tom Leatherwood (a ballot replacement for the late Ron Lollar) over Democrat Dave Cambron in District 99.

Democratic state Rep. Dwayne Thompson, an upset winner in 2016 in House District 96, retained his seat by a vote of 14,710 over 10,493 for Republican challenger Scorr McCormick.

In the races for Governor and the U.S. Senate, local totals were:

For Governor: Democrat Karl Dean, 173,699; Republican Bill Lee, 105,369
For U.S. Senator: Democrat Phil Bredesen, 188,923; Republican Marsha Blackburn, 95,351.

Those local totals were almost diametrically opposite the statewide ones, which showed resounding victories for Lee over Dean, 1,291,458 (59.3 percent) to 846,186 (38.8 percent); and for Blackburn over Bredesen, 1,224,042 (54.7 percent) to 981,667 (43.9 percent).

Though arguments on the point can and will rage indecisively, the statewide results possibly reflected the natural dispositions of red-state Tennessee in cases where the Democratic challenge is muted by politesse. Dean and Lee reciprocated their gentlemanly approaches to each other, while Bredesen’s acknowledgement of partisan differences was minimal to the point of non-existence.

Bredesen surely qualifies for the 2018 “Oh, Yeah?” award for his mid-race statement to Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: “I’m in the fortunate position that people on the left are enraged enough that they will find almost anything I do, with the D after my name, acceptable.”
Count that as arrogance or as self-deception. It was demonstrably incorrect.

Bredesen’s public embrace of President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and his suggestion in a late ad that he and Trump (“a skilled negotiator”) could blissfully work together to lower drug prices were downers to his base, whereas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s throwdown of the gauntlet to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race almost brought him a victory. Texas is clearly no more liberal a place than Tennessee.

The local difference in the gubernatorial and Senate races manifestly arose from the demographics of Shelby County, where Democratic turnout was at levels approximating those of presidential years. The stout showing of the Democratic challengers in legislative races was also buoyed by the turnout, a continuation of sorts of the blue wave that crested so strong in the august election.

The turnout factor was also prominent in the blowout win of 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen over GOP perennial Charlotte Bergmann, 143,690 to 34,710, though it was not too much help to Democratic challenger Erika Stotts Pearson in the wider West Tennessee expanse of the 8th Congressional District, where Republican incumbent David Kustoff triumphed, 66,889 to 32,578.

More to Come:

There were races in most of Shelby County’s suburban municipalities, too — the most dramatic being those in Germantown and Lakeland, where the issues of city spending and economic development loomed large.

In Germantown, Mayor Mike Palazzolo apparently won reelection by the razor-thin margin of 10,240 to 10,113 for challenger John Barzizza, who declined to concede, pending a final certification of results. The main issue in the mayoral contest was Palazzolo’s backing of Thornwood, a mixed-use development on Germantown Parkway.

Meanwhile, Palazzo’s coattails proved unavailing for two candidates he endorsed for city positions: Scott Sanders, a Barzizza endorsee, defeated Brian White in an alderman’s race, while Robyn Rey Rudisill lost a School Board race to angela Rickman Griff. Two other mayoral endorsees, Alderman Mary Anne Gibson and School Board member Betsy Landers triumphed over Jeff Brown and Brian Curry, respectively.

In Lakeland, where the primary issue was Mayor Wyatt Bunker’s development plans, including those for a new high school, Bunker was upset by challenger Mike Cunningham, 2,648 to 2,324.
Apparent winners for the city Commission were Richard Gonzales and Michelle Dial, while School Board winners were Kevin Floyd, Laura Harrison, and Deborah Thomas.

Categories
Cover Feature News

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

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Glitches as Usual

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

Election officials facing off with the media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Cusp of Decision

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

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

Karl Dean

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

Marsh Blackburn

Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Nonpartisan Event Stirs Partisans

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

But they got some. Big-time.

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

Jackson Baker

GOP’s White and Democrat Craig Fitzhugh at WTEDC event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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