Tag: Marsha Blackburn

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Opinion Viewpoint

Roll of the Dice for Tennessee Democrats

CREDIT: JB

With the announcement of former Governor Phil Bredesen that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker, it looked like the Tennessee Democratic Party would have not one, but two primaries at the top of their ticket in August. However, the withdrawal on December 13th of newomer James Mackler leaves the Senate primary all to Bredesen, at least for now.

This would have worked well in Shelby County, where county-wide Democratic candidates face a general election in August at the same time as state and federal primaries. In recent years, with few statewide candidates, this has hurt local Democrats, who were wiped out, except for Assessor Cheyenne Johnson.

The gubernatorial primary features House Democratic Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, who is beloved by his caucus and has a good reputation for working with local leaders, and former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, who is given some of the credit for the rapid growth in Davidson County. They are similar in age and temperament, and each has a good working knowledge of government operations.

However, the true divide among Tennessee Democrats was more visible in the Senate primary. The initial entrant in the race was Nashville attorney Mackler, whose bio notes that he quit his job in the early 1990s in order to enter the Iraq War. He entered the race before Corker announced that he would not seek re-election; however, Corker’s withdrawal from the race did not prevent Mackler from demonstrating why he wanted the office or from assailing the presumed GOP front-runner, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn.

Mackler is only 44 years old and had not sought public office prior to this race, which had some longtime Democrats worried about how he would do in a statewide election. That said, he appeared to have the ability to draw younger voters, as well as those who have stayed out of the process, back to the voting booth. As reviews of the 2016 election have indicated, non-voters have hurt Democrats the most —  with a lack of enthusiasm being a major problem.

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency dramatically increased leftward activism here and throughout the country; the Democrats need to be able to turn this interest into votes.

This begs the question of why a 74-year-old former governor, who has not been on a Tennessee ballot since 2006, would enter a Senate race when he has never been a legislator, only a mayor and a governor. Bredesen’s entry video indicated not that he would serve as a rebuttal to the GOP, but that he would work across the aisle with legislators to get things done. He did not even indicate that he would work to save the Affordable Care Act, upon which many Tennessee lives depend.

JB

Bredesen in his campaign-announcement video

For some of the activist groups that have risen in the aftermath of last year’s election, the question that will be asked is this: Who is this guy, where did he come from, and has he been paying attention? For younger Democrats, who may not be old enough to remember his administration, Bredesen is reminiscent of a past they never knew.

Only longtime Democrats, with nostalgia for the days when they held power, seem to be excited over a Bredesen candidacy. He is certainly to the right of those new activists, who are raising new generations of Democrats. While Mackler is not exactly Bernie Sanders, his appeal would have skewed younger and more in line with the people knocking on doors and making phone calls.

Without Mackler in the race, Bredesen can focus on the general election. A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee poll taken in October, before Bredesen’s entry, showed him with a 46-41 lead over Blackburn, which may have been the deciding factor for him to get in the race.

As the headliner of the Democratic ticket, he won’t just be responsible for his own victory, he will be expected to help raise turnout levels in down-ballot races, especially those in the state legislative races. It’s a lot to ask from someone who won’t have been on a ballot for 12 years; for Tennessee Democrats, it appears to be the best chance at this time.

Steve Steffens, is a longtime Democratic activist and the proprietor of Leftwingcracker.com weblog.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bredesen Enters U.S. Senate Race

CREDIT: JB

The other shoe has dropped in the case of Phil Bredesen, now a full-fledged candidate for the U.S. Senate. The former governor of Tennessee from 2003 to 2011  JB

Bredesen in his campaign-announcement video

and the last Democrat to hold major statewide office in this increasingly red state, Bredesen had been publicly flirting for at least two months with the idea of returning to active politics as a Senate candidate.

Founder of a highly successful health care enterprise in Nashville, Bredesen served several effective terms as mayor of that city and, after one unsuccessful race as Democratic nominee for governor in 1994, losing to Republican candidate Don Sundquist of Memphis, he was elected Tennessee’s chief executive on his second try in 2002, defeating the GOP’s Van Hilleary.

In his political races, Bredesen, a native of upstate New York, would joke about his origins elsewhere by saying, “I got here as soon as I could.”

While there are no sure things in politics, the entry of Bredesen is no doubt troubling news to fellow Nashville Democrat James Mackler, a lawyer and former Iraq war veteran who had previously declared for governor, as well as to state Republicans, now observing a potentially divisive race for the GOP Senate nomination between 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District Congressman Stephen Fincher.

The GOP establishment wasted no time in officially dissing Bredesen’s candidacy.

Scott Golden, chairman of the state Republican Party, issued a statement beginning with the statement that “[former Governor Phil Bredesen’s record represents the Tennessee of yesterday when Democrats labeled extreme unemployment rates, higher taxes, and a total lack of government transparency as ‘prospering,’” and going on to cite alleged improvements in the state’s circumstances since then.

And Michael McAdams, regional press secretary for the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee, greeted the former governor’s announcement by saying, “Phil Bredesen officially announced he’s running for U.S. Senate today, and national Democrats couldn’t be happier. Bredesen is exactly the type of big government liberal national Democrats love.”

Both statements are somewhat at variance with the actual political state of things during Bredesen’s incumbency. Far from being a “big government liberal,” Bredesen angered many in the liberal wing of his party by presiding over a period of enforced austerity, drastically pruning the state’s TennCare rolls and imposing across-the-board budget cuts that were one percent more severe than the ones recommended the year before by the ultra-conservative Blackburn, then a state senator.

Republicans were seriously hampered in their efforts to oppose Bredesen’s reelection in 2006 because, in the view of many observers, the Democratic Governor had in effect enacted the chief elements in the Republican platform of that time. Bredesen was opposed in 2006 by a GOP sacrificial lamb, state Senator Jim Bryson of Nashville, who lost badly.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether Bredesen, politically inactive since leaving the governor’s office (though he had publicly floated his availability for a cabinet position in the Obama administration) , will strike voters in 2018 as yesterday’s newspaper.

There is no doubting, however, that he posseses residual name recognition and will have financial and political support in his race that no other Democrat running statewide since his tenure in office as enjoyed. Moreover, the video in which he announced his candidacy seemed clearly in line with the conservative hues of Tennessee in 2017.

Referring to his background as a businessman, Bredesen declares in the video that “We all know Washington is broken..[while] back here in Tennessee, we have some real problems.” He boasts his resistance as governor to a state income tax and says, “The Affordable Care Act needs fixing.”

He laments that Congress is “immoral the way they keep borrowing money with no end in sight.,” and contends, “I’m running for the Senate because I have the right kind of experience and the actual track record that it will take to start working across party lines to fix the mess in Washington and bring common sense back to our government.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Bredesen Bubble; County Government Showdown

CREDIT: jackson baker

Since Phil Bredesen‘s name was first dropped as a possible Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker, the former governor has done a neat back-and-forth on the prospect, first expressing no interest, next rising to the bait, and then leaving the idea open as both fellow Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a running guessing game as to his intentions.

That quandary persists right up to the minute, with a decision by Bredesen likely to come between the composition of these lines and their appearance in print. Or not.

The effect has been to paralyze or at least inhibit the momentum that declared Democratic Senate candidate James Mackler might otherwise have achieved. First-time candidate Mackler, a lawyer and Iraq war veteran from Nashville, has had difficulty emerging from the shade of anonymity despite a well-turned-out mailer or two and some impressive appearances before limited audiences — like the meet-and-greet/fund-raiser he held a month ago in the East Memphis home of Bryce Timmons, in which the personable candidate demonstrated in his remarks what could be a fetching mix of progressive political positions and, on the basis of his military service, some old-fashioned patriotism.

That the Bredesen mystery was ripe for solution was the thrust of a lengthy report in the latest edition of the nonpartisan “Smart Politics” newsletter published this week by the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

Eric Ostenmeier, the resident “Smart Politics” sage, begins his account with a sense that a decision by Bredesen is imminent and casts the issue in a somewhat skeptical light. Says Ostenmeier: “The ‘will he or won’t he’ question may finally be answered this week with regards to a Phil Bredesen 2018 U.S. Senate bid, but, in the meantime, a new ‘Smart Politics’ report examines how unusual it would be for the former Tennessee governor to win the seat.”
Ostenmeier proceeds to review the history of Tennessee ex-governors who sought Senate seats during the last 100 years and finds that only one, Republican Lamar Alexander in 2002, who succeeded, while the handful of Democrats who’ve tried it — the most recent being Frank Clement in 1966 — have come up short.

Another caveat noted by Ostenmeier is the fact that, if Bredesen runs and is elected, he would enter the Senate at the age of 75, making him “the fifth-oldest to win a first term via an election, the second-oldest to enter via election since the passage of the 17th Amendment, and the oldest to enter via direct election for a full term.”

Meanwhile, the aforesaid Alexander, meeting with reporters in Nashville Friday after an appearance before the Greater Tennessee chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, had this to say about a potential Bredesen candidacy:

“He would be a formidable candidate. He was a popular governor. I think what he would have to explain to the people is how electing one more to the Democratic number in the Senate would help the people of Tennessee, and my argument would be if you want conservative judges and lower taxes and deregulation, then it’s better to have a Republican majority.” 

Alexander’s lines themselves bespeak a certain respect, born of fruitful relations between the two of them for the eight years of their simultaneous service from 2003 to 2009, when a term-limited Bredesen left the governorship. Beyond that, and the Republican senator’s obligatory bromide in favor of the mother ship GOP, Alexander’s meta-message is one of elementary and neutral caution to the two party-mates — former 8th District Congressman Stephen Fincher and 7th District Congressman (her preferred title) Marsha Blackburn — who will slug it out for the Republican Senate nomination.

What Democrats might divine from Alexander’s evaluation is less obvious. The fact is that the political views of Bredesen, a moderate Democrat who governed the state with a tight rein on expenditures, are probably closer in spirit to Alexander’s own than they are to the ultra-conservatism of Fincher and Blackburn.

And, with old Democratic loyalties having long since washed away in most of rural and small-town Tennessee, it remains to be seen whether the current rank and file of youthful, urban-based Democrats will respond more enthusiastically to a Bredesen than to a Mackler. It is certainly true that the former governor would have a commanding lead among old-line party types and traditional donors.

If Ostenmeier proves correct in his projection of a timely decision by Bredesen this week or soon thereafter, we will soon know whether this kind of speculation is academic or on point.

•
Another issue that, at press time, was due for some kind of likely resolution this week is that of the showdown over opioid litigation between Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and the County Commission, a clear majority of whose members have lined up behind the defiant leadership of commission chair Heidi Shafer.

The matter ended up this week in the courtroom of Chancellor Jim Kyle, who was asked to rule on Tuesday on Luttrell’s request for an injunction and restraining order against Shafer and her fellow commissioners.

The latest chapter in what has been an ongoing power struggle between the two branches of county government stems from Shafer’s bombshell announcement last week that she had, in the name of the county, engaged the national law firm of Napoli Shkolnik to seek damages from a wide variety of principals — drug manufacturers, pharmacists, physicians, and distributors (licensed and otherwise) — allegedly responsible and potentially liable for the adverse effects of widespread opioid addiction in Shelby County.

Luttrell, who contended that his administration had already been weighing the options for such legal action, promptly objected that Shafer was attempting a usurpation in the face of language in the county charter giving the office of mayor complete authority over legal contracts and establishing the county attorney, appointed by him, as the sole administrator of legal actions on behalf of Shelby County government.   
Another burr under Luttrell’s saddle was the fact that, to serve as co-counsel with Napoli Shkolnik, Shafer had named former Commissioner Julian Bolton, whom the commission had formerly sought to employ as an independent counsel of its own but, thwarted by County Attorney Kathryn Pascover‘s adverse ruling, had been forced to hire on instead as a “policy advisor.” Bolton’s involvement in the proposed opioid action thereby constituted an end run of sorts around Pascover’s ruling and Luttrell’s authority.

Whatever the outcome of the hearing in Chancellor Kyle’s court on Tuesday, the issues implicit in the mayoral-commission confrontation were certain to linger and continue to fester.   

At its Monday regular meeting, the commission overwhelmingly adopted a stern resolution presented by Commissioner Terry Roland, the language of which “directs” Luttrell and Pascover to desist from their lawsuit against the chair and commissioners. The resolution further seeks financial compensation for the commissioners’ legal expenses and, as an ultimate challenge, “prohibits the County Attorney or the Administration from entering into any litigation without the prior consent of the Commission by majority of their vote.”

Breathtaking as that resolution was (however questionable in its provenance), it fell short, in terms of its immediate effect, of another, more practical resolution that was held back from being introduced on Monday. This one, also prepared by Roland, called for a vote of no confidence in Pascover (and, by implication at least, of Luttrell) and is likely to be introduced at the commission’s December meeting, if not at a special called meeting beforehand.

Whatever the result of Kyle’s hearing, or of any formal mediation the two warring county branches might engage in by choice or by dictate, this power struggle is not even close to being over. The issue of opioid litigation is more a symbol of pre-existing intractable differences and a pretext for dealing with them than it is an animating reason for those differences.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Taxing Times

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

“The average American family would get a $4,000 raise under the president’s tax cut plan. So how could any member of Congress be against it?”

That was Sarah Huckabee Sanders, speaking about President Trump’s tax “plan” last week. Trump claimed (falsely, amazingly enough) that his plan would be the “largest tax cut in American history.” Not even close, but who’s even counting the lies these days?

As writer Franklin Leonard smartly pointed out: “If I give 10 apples to one person and no apples to nine people, the average person has one apple. Why are nine people mad at me?”

This is a spot-on analogy for Trump’s approach. The real tax breaks under the plans being put forth by the administration and the GOP will go to the wealthy and corporations. The middle class will get squat, and as a bonus, the plan just passed by the Senate cuts $473 billion from Medicare and nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next 10 years. These cuts will affect 125 million Americans.

Some break, eh?

Factcheck.org analyzed the Senate tax plan and released a report that stated in part: “For the highest earners — those in the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent — nearly all would see lower taxes. Ninety percent of the top 1 percent — those earning about $900,000 and above in 2027 — would get a tax cut, averaging $234,050.”
Conversely, middle-income households ($50,000 to $90,000 incomes) would receive an average tax break of $660, and, according to Politifact.com, “by 2027, more than one of every four middle-income families would pay more in taxes.”

As has been the case in recent weeks, there was pushback from Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, who urged the president to quit negotiating before the final budget process begins. Corker has seldom been a warrior for the middle class, but at least he’s not groveling before Trump. That won’t be the case with the Republicans running to take Corker’s seat in 2018 — Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn and former Congressman Stephen Fincher.

Fincher was in the Flyer offices last week being interviewed by Senior Editor Jackson Baker. He talked a good game: “People want somebody to represent us and not fall into the trap of status quo politics, caring only about the next rung up on the ladder,” Fincher said. “Marsha’s a career politician, a career candidate, used to being on Fox News every night. I’m just a farmer from Frog Jump.”

That sounds good, but then the Frog Jump farmer added: “I intend to support President Trump. I think his policies are 100 percent spot-on.”

Lord help us. I keep wondering when the American public will begin to see this Tea Party/Trump agenda for what it is — a total capitulation to corporatism and oligarchy. It is not “Christian.” It is not “conservative.” It is not “patriotic.” It is a greed-based perversion of our democracy. And Trump’s divisive, childish, self-absorbed antics are dividing us more with each passing day.

I posted a column by satirist Andy Borowitz on Facebook the other day. The title was: “Trump Says He Is Only President in History with Courage to Stand Up to War Widows.” Borowitz “quoted” Trump as saying “You look at guys like Obama and Clinton and the Bushes, when it came to war widows, they all blinked. For years, we weren’t winning at widows.”

I count it as an indication of how far down the Trump rabbit hole we have gone that some people who read this weren’t sure it was satire. “Is this real?” one woman wrote.

Not yet. But when the president of the United States is so mentally fragile that he would attack the pregnant widow of a soldier killed in combat and call her a liar on Twitter, we’re getting close.

One assumes Fincher and Blackburn would approve.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

New Names on the Marquee

A longtime intimate of Harold Ford Jr. was asked the other day if the former Memphis congressman — who, as the Democratic nominee in 2006, lost a U.S. Senate race to Republican Bob Corker by a hair’s breadth — would trade the wealth and standing he has since acquired on Wall Street for the alternate biography that would have followed from a win over Corker.

The answer was quick and unequivocal: “In a minute.” He might have said, but didn’t, “In a New York minute,” since the Empire State has, for some years now, been Ford’s abode. The man, who had worked in close harness with Ford for the duration of his political career in Tennessee, went on to say, “He wanted to be president.”

Should “wanted” be “wants”? Whether it is a matter of his own uncooked seeds or just that various political talk shows want access to his expertise and/or residual star quality, Ford is a staple these days on cable TV — a frequent guest, for example, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, where he offers informed centrist commentary when queried on topical issues and affairs of state by the show’s host. Joe Scarborough is often peremptory with his guests but usually deferential with Ford, whom he refers to familiarly as Harold.

Upon the close of a recent colloquy with Ford, Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida during the Tennessee Democrat’s own time there but an independent now and a member-in-good-standing of the resistance to Trump, smiled fondly and declared that Ford just might be the man to close the gap between right and left factions in the opposition.

The same note was also struck recently on an installment of Real Time With Bill Maher, when the eponymous host ended a group discussion that included Ford with a statement to the effect that he and the audience could be looking at the Democrat who could mount a successful challenge to Trump.

It must be said that in neither case did Ford respond with either a mock protest to the idea or a concurrence with it. With a certain modesty, he just allowed the sentiment to be expressed, while there were detectable murmurs of assent from others onstage or in the studio audience.

But how? Ford, no longer an office-holder, lacks the usual political perch from which a bid for national office could be mounted. Just after his loss in 2006, in a race that saw him featured on the cover of Time as a possible avatar of something new in national politics, Ford taught politics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and became titular head of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a center-to-right party organization that had been the launching pad for Bill Clinton‘s own ascent to the presidency.

As Democratic politics shifted leftward during those years of a George W. Bush Republican administration, the DLC ceased to be much of a force and eventually ceased to be, period. Meanwhile, too, a new and ambitious young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had seized the limelight and, along with it, first dibs on a quest to become the first black president (an honor Ford’s supporters had long assumed to be his).

Ford’s views on fiscal matters had always tilted surprisingly rightward for a Democrat, and an African-American in particular. Indeed, that fact had been a sticking point with self-styled progressive Democrats in Tennessee and something of a brake on their ardor in Ford’s contest with Corker. But those views were consistent with Ford’s next move, which was to New York and Wall Street, where, a married man now with a family, he works as a rainmaker and managing director for the Morgan Stanley brokerage firm.

Early on in his New York residence, Ford took a flyer at a possible run for the Senate seat held there by fellow Democrat Kirsten Gillebrand, but the conservative social views he had expressed as a candidate in Tennessee worked against him in New York despite his efforts to update them in conformity with his new milieu, and he was forced to abandon his trial run.

So whither now? Lack of an office in government did not hinder Trump’s political ambitions, but Ford, for all his ubiquity on cable, is not on the same plane as a national celebrity. 

Ironically, were native son and periodic Memphis visitor Harold Ford still an official Tennessean, he might be the subject of renewed blandishments from Democrats anxious to field a candidate for the Senate seat which Ford’s former opponent Corker is abandoning. That may be happening, anyhow.

 

• Meanwhile, there is continued action in Tennessee on the Senate front and another possible blast from the past for Democrats, with no residential barrier to running.

Phil Bredesen, the state’s last Democratic governor (and last Democratic winner of any statewide office) made no bones of his wish to remain in government following his term-limited exit from office in 2010, but the hoped-for invitation from the Obama administration never came. (Bredesen had been rumored for secretary of Health and Human Services.)

Now, prodded by some of the aforesaid desperate Democrats — and notably by party moneyman Bill Freeman of Nashville — Bredesen announced Monday that, despite an earlier rejection of the idea, he is thinking seriously about a Senate run. Watch that space!

Last week,  prior to Bredesen’s statement, James Mackler, the Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet who is already a declared Democratic candidate, was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the East Memphis home of Brice Timmons, where he demonstrated significant gifts as a speechmaker, articulating a lively point-by-point case against both putative GOP nominee Marsha Blackburn and President Trump. 

Mackler’s affair drew a fair number of longtime Democratic activists and donors.

On the Republican side, the former 8th District Republican congressman Stephen Fincher is serious enough about a possible Senate run — despite the presence in the race already of a like-minded conservative, 7th District U.S. Rep. Blackburn —  to have embarked on a statewide “listening tour” which took him to Memphis this week. More about that anon.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Marsha Blackburn’s “Unintended Consequences”

Sometimes in this trade, the act of choosing a headline can be a difficult matter. Not so in this case. The headline of this editorial happens to be the phrase used by 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn to describe the ill effects of a 2016 law she sponsored that loosened regulations on the prescription of addictive opioids, and it constitutes a wonderful irony.

Blackburn, now a declared Republican candidate for the soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat currently held by Bob Corker, has found herself in hot water as a result of her role in passing the law — as documented over the last weekend in a collaborative effort by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and the Washington Post newspaper.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn

Fallout from the investigation has been enormous and immediate and bipartisan and potent enough to force the withdrawal of Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Tom Marino as President Trump’s nominee to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the nation’s Drug Czar. Marino found himself in sudden and unexpected disgrace after the CBS-WaPo revelations that he had been among a handful of members who zealously pushed through Congress the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016. As the investigation demonstrated, that innocuously titled measure, pushed by self-serving drug manufacturers, camouflaged provisions that, according to former Drug Enforcement Administration official Joe Rannazzisi, purposely struck down important sageguards. The result, he said, was that “unscrupulous” pain-pill hucksters gained the virtually unlimited ability to ply their trade and inflate the nation’s current opioid-addiction crisis to pandemic proportions.

Rannazzisi also told investigators that Marino and Blackburn, two of the bill’s 14 sponsors, had been especially active in pressing the DEA and the Justice Department to withhold their initial objections to the legislation, which went on to virtual unanimous passage by Congress.

But, speaking of unintended consequences, “virtual” is a crucial qualifying word. To what may well be Blackburn’s future discomfort, a likely opponent of hers in the forthcoming GOP Senatorial primary is former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher, who, either by choice or happenstance, happened not to be in Washington when the 2016 vote on the bill was taken. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Fincher has elevated the burgeoning opioid-addiction crisis to the very top of his potential issues to run on. And whoever gets the Democratic nomination for the Senate is likely to follow suit.

As one of the 2016 bill’s prime movers, Blackburn finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having been either classically negligent in relation to the bill’s dangerous provisions or willing to overlook them in the service of drug companies that had been especially generous in their donations to her political benefit.

In any case, she — like other members of Congress who failed to interdict this pernicious measure — will have to provide some convincing explanations for their dereliction, and we can at least hope for some enlightenment on that score in next year’s campaign.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Filling in the Blanks

If Rip Van Winkle happened to be not a fictional character from a previous century but  a current resident of Shelby County, Tennessee, he would not have had to nod off for a full score of years to wake up to a drastically changed landscape.
If he’d just blinked his eyes about midway through last week, he might have missed significant doings in the race for Shelby County mayor and that for United States senator.

State Senator Lee Harris

The first major change in the projected 2018 political lineup occurred on Wednesday with the carefully stage-managed entry into the county mayor’s race of Lee Harris, a Democratic state senator and former Memphis City Council member whose ambitions to keep on moving up in the political hierarchy were clearly signaled back in 2016 when he flirted with the idea of challenging 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen in that year’s Democratic primary but thought better of it.

As the senator confided in a recent conversation, “I can serve anywhere” — the choice of a particular political office being something of a pure variable.
Harris’ interests in running for county mayor had been obvious for most of the current year but were screened somewhat by an elaborate Alphonse-Gaston scenario in which he appeared to be deliberating along with close friend and University of Memphis law faculty colleague Steve Mulroy, a former county commissioner and a mayoral candidate in 2014, as to which of them would actually make the 2018 race.

The veil was dropped abruptly on Wednesday via an interview in The Commercial Appeal, a venue choice made after scouting out the possible advantages of announcing in other media.

Harris has a reputation as a progressive but one adept at working across the aisle, a fact indicated by his partnership with Republican lawmakers on criminal justice issues and with GOP state Senator Brian Kelsey in seeking to safeguard the Memphis Sand aquifer.
As of now, Harris would appear to be the likely Democratic nominee against the winner of the three-way Republican mayoral primary between County Commissioner Terry Roland, County Trustee David Lenoir, and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos.

But two other eminences with credentials both with Shelby County Democrats and with the civic and social universe at large are still meditating on a possible mayoral entry. Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd holds numerous political IOUs as a political donor and broker, a holdover following from his past as a Democratic state representative and two previous near-runs for mayor, and ample access to financial support.

Equally well-positioned is Shea Flinn, currently an influential Memphis Chamber of Commerce vice president and a former progressive spark-plug on the city council. Flinn’s access to funding, too, would be considerable, and, in a political environment not over-stocked with charisma, he has more than his share.
Either one of these figures, running in the Democratic primary or even as an independent, would have a dramatic effect on the outcome.
The other major development last week was in the race for the seat being vacated by Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker, whose decision not to seek reelection did not prevent him from continuing to make political waves. (See Editorial, p. 8) To no one’s surprise, 7th District U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn, an arch-conservative, quickly announced as a GOP candidate, though she withheld her announcement until Governor Bill Haslam, a favorite of moderate Republicans, publicly opted out.

Another conservative GOP prospect is former 8th District Congressman Stephen Fincher. And the party’s centrist wing still hopes to convince Memphis philanthropist and longtime party eminence Brad Martin to make the race.

The state’s Democrats may end up fielding a serious candidate, as well. Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke is seriously contemplating a Senate race, while Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler is already in the field.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

TN Races for Governor, Senator, Heat Up!

The deluge is upon us. At a geometrically increasing rate, aspirants for significant public office on the 2018 ballot are coming front and center with announcements of candidacy, kickoff events, and the like.

By the time this issue hits the streets, the previous week or so will  have seen appearances in Shelby County by two major gubernatorial candidates, a new announcement for Shelby County mayor, fund-raisers for several more candidates, and continuing waves of speculation about new candidacies to come.

It was already apparent that Tennessee will have a hotly contested governor’s race in both major political parties (and a couple of potshots delivered at primary opponents by Republicans Diane Black and Mae Beavers in Memphis appearances emphasized the point). 

Now, with the announcement by U.S. Senator Bob Corker that he won’t seek reelection next year, the number of prospective Senatorial candidates, Republican and Democrat, is beginning to proliferate as well.

It seems a certainty that Corker’s seat will be sought by 7th District U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (a Republican whose district included portions of Memphis before reapportionment in 2011). Governor Bill Haslam has also hinted he may run for the Senate, and there have been serious efforts to draft philanthropist/industrialist Brad Martin, a longtime Memphis GOP eminence who once served as a state representative but has figured mainly in the donor ranks for decades.

Possible new Senate entries on the Democratic side include former state senator and current Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, who has begun to send out emails advertising his interest, and current state Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville. Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler is already a declared candidate.

Inasmuch as Tennessee Democrats have been unable even to field serious candidates in statewide races for several years, this show of interest has to be a boost to the party faithful, especially since two Democrats of note — Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are declared (and active) candidates for governor.

The state’s Republicans feel, with some justification, that the real races will be run in their primary ranks, and two of their hopefuls were in town during the last week — 6th District Congresswoman Black and state Senator Beavers (who resigned her seat in August to focus on her race for governor).

Black was the beneficiary of a meet-and-greet breakfast at Owen Brennan’s Restaurant on Friday, and her status as a potential front-runner was signaled by the number of mainstream Republicans on hand, including longtime GOP national committeeman and former RNC general counsel John Ryder, who introduced her.

Black presented herself as a laissez-faire conservative and a believer in local options whenever possible. She also made a strong pitch for “values” as an issue and suggested that “one or two opponents,” who went unnamed, had latched on to that issue in a copycat way.

One of those opponents may have been Beavers, who was the sole gubernatorial candidate to show up at a well-attended forum held at the Germantown home of John Williams on Saturday. She certainly hit the values issue hard, confirming that, as the Nashville Scene had averred, she saw Jesus as a universal answer to governmental problems. “True, but that’s not all I said” was her response.

Beavers filled in some of the other blanks: opposition to Common Core, to transgenders’ freedom to use bathrooms of their choice, to state aid of any kind to illegal immigrants, to medical marijuana, and to add-on taxes in general. (Meanwhile, her husband Jerry Beavers and other supporters on hand circulated in the crowd and accused other candidates, notably Black and House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville, of various insufficiencies.)

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Politics Politics Feature

Scrum for Corker’s Seat?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As of the 4th of July weekend, there was no significant change in the prospective lineup for next year’s race for governor to succeed the term-limited Republican incumbent Bill Haslam.

The two definite Republican entries — former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd and Nashville businessman Bill Lee — are still the only formally declared candidates on the Republican side. Fourth District U.S. Representative Diane Black, state House Speaker Beth Harwell, and State Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville are still the main GOP figures on the maybe list. (Norris also remains one of the serious maybes to fill a vacant federal judgeship.)

Former Nashville mayor Karl Dean is the only Democrat to have made a 2018 governor’s race official, but state House Democratic Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is considered a likely candidate, as well.

All that is same-old, same-old. Where there is renewed speculation on the statewide political scene is in regard to the U.S. Senate seat now held by Republican Bob Corker. The Senator is chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and is also an important and active member of the Senate’s Banking and Budget committees.

Since his election in 2006 in a close race with Democratic nominee Harold Ford Jr., Corker has steadily become one of the more prominent GOP voices in Congress. In 2016, he was seriously considered by then-candidate Donald Trump as a possible vice-presidential running mate. And there have been off-and-on rumors that Corker wants to run for president at some point.

It has long been assumed, and still is, that Corker will be a candidate for reelection to his Senate seat, which comes due again in 2018. But other scenarios have been floated — including a possible Corker race for governor in tandem with a Haslam race for the Senate seat that would then be open.

Whatever the case, other candidates are eyeing a race for Corker’s seat next year. At least one Democrat, Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet James Mackler is already running and has sent out an elaborate mailer statewide boosting his candidacy.

And there are also Republicans who are looking covetously at Corker’s Senate seat — especially on the GOP’s right wing and in its Tea Party constituency, where Corker’s oft-professed readiness to work across the aisle with Democrats on various issues has aroused suspicion.

The senator may also have raised hackles on the Republican right with recent statements expressing concern over actions by Trump, such as the Senator’s statement, in the wake of his firing FBI Director James Comey in May, that the president seemed to be on a “downward spiral.”

More recently, Corker has vowed to block arms sales by the administration to member nations of the Middle Eastern Gulf Cooperation Council, including feuding U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

UPDATE: Senator Corker’s office has forwarded this comment on the Senator’s proposed block on the arms sale:

Just wanted to note that the senator spoke with Secretary Tillerson in advance of sending the letter regarding future arms sales and that his goal is to give the administration leverage as it works to resolve the dispute.

The White House press secretary also made positive comments about the senator’s efforts, noting the administration shares his goals…

:

White House response:

Q: Senator Corker says he will use his authority as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to block the sales to Saudi and Qatar until that crisis is resolved. Is that a constructive step in your view?

Sean Spicer: I think we share Senator Corker’s goal on two fronts. One, obviously we want to resolve the situation. I know that the states that are involved are viewing this as a family matter and Secretary Tillerson is helping to facilitate some of the that. We believe that is positive. We share that concern. We also share the concern about terror financing that Senator Corker has, and I think we can work together on both those goals.

Seventh District Congressman Marsha Blackburn is said to have considered a Senate race, and other names mentioned as possible Republican opponents for Corker include Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett, State House Representative Andy Holt, and Americans for Prosperity Tennessee state director Andrew Ogles.

Another possible GOP challenger is Mark Green, the state senator from Clarksville who was recently nominated by President Trump to become Secretary of the Army but had to withdraw from consideration amid objections to his ultra-conservative social views from Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Previous to that, Green had been considered a prominent prospect to run for governor, but he has since said no to resuming that quest. A brand-new website boosting his possible candidacy for the U.S. Senate has appeared under the auspices of Nashville activist Rick Williams, however, and it is known that Green has ambitions to serve on the federal scene.

• Shelby County Democrats, whose squabbling and ineffective local party organization was decertified as dysfunctional by state party chair Mary Mancini two years ago, are about to rise again.

David Cocke and Carlissa Shaw presiding, bylaws will be adopted and representatives will be elected to serve on two distinct local bodies — a county committee and a new group to be called the Democratic Grassroots Council.

The county committee will function as the party’s executive arm, while the new council will deliberate on policy, discuss possible projects, and in general serve as a sounding board for party objectives.

• No rest for the weary department: The Shelby County Commission, having punted on approval of a budget at its June 26th meeting and thereby having missed the traditional July 1st deadline beginning the new fiscal year, was scheduled for another try at resolving differences during committee meetings this Wednesday.

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Politics Politics Feature

First Licks in the Tennessee 8th District

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As introductory campaign events go, the forum for 8th District congressional candidates held Tuesday night last week by the East Shelby Republican Club at Germantown’s Pickering Center was somewhat tentative — as most such debut cattle calls are — but it contained plenty of foreshadowing of the slings and arrows to come.

Four of the main GOP players were there — state Senator Brian Kelsey, radiologist/radio executive George Flinn, Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, and advertising man/consultant Brad Greer of Jackson. Missing among the touted contenders were former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The outlier of the group, both geographically and, to a large extent, philosophically, was Greer, whose chances for prevailing are maybe not quite as good as those of then state Senator Marsha Blackburn when she ran for the 7th congressional seat in 2002 against three Shelby Countians— the aforesaid Kustoff, then Shelby County Commissioner (now state Senator) Mark Norris, and then Memphis City Councilman Brent Taylor. 

Blackburn, whose home base was Brentwood in Williamson County, campaigned well across the 7th District, even in Shelby County. She would win easily, taking advantage of the split vote among Shelby County natives, none of whom exactly ran like a house afire anyway.

But if Greer’s public image is not as well honed as was Blackburn’s, who at the time was one of the preeminent leaders of the anti-income tax movement in Tennessee, he has even more opponents from Shelby County than had Blackburn in 2002, and thus can count on an even more advantageous split.

Jackson Baker

(l to r) Brad Greer, George Flinn, Brian Kelsey, and Tom Leatherwood in Germantown

Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood (to list them in the order of their campaign financial holdings) could very well divide the vote in their home county of Shelby, wherein resides 55 percent of the 8th District electorate. And that could pave the way for an upset victory for Greer, whose Madison County bailiwick is closer to the traditional heartland of the District, which since 2010 has been served by Crockett County resident Stephen Fincher, who is voluntarily relinquishing the seat.

That might especially be the case if the 8th District votes according to the same pattern as in March on Super Tuesday, when the distribution of votes for the hotly contested Republican presidential primary was, according to Greer, 60 percent in the non-Shelby part of the district and only 40 percent in the Shelby County bailiwick of Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood.

To be sure, Greer has some competition of his own among fellow Jacksonians Hunter Baker, David Bault, and George Howell, none of whom, however, have raised much money at this point or figure to run well-supported races. And prominent Madison County kingmaker Jimmy Wallace, a major force behind Fincher, is putting his eggs this time in the basket, not of Greer, but of Kelsey, who also has good support and fund-raising potential in the Memphis area.

For the record, candidate cash on hand, as of the first-quarter reporting period, was: Flinn, $2,930,885; Kelsey, $439,005; Kustoff, $319,682; Luttrell, $144,570; and Greer, $103,713. No one else had amassed $100,000, or anything close to it. (And Flinn’s total should be taken with a grain — or perhaps an airplane hangar — of salt. Like Donald Trump at the presidential level, he is wealthy enough to self-finance, and, unlike The Donald, actually does so to a substantial degree; he does minimal fund-raising as such.)

All of the foregoing is a recap of the basic paper facts. Last week’s forum at the Pickering Center gave a partial foreshadowing of how the race might be run and of some of the intangibles involved. Herewith are some (admittedly sketchy) reviews of how and what the participating candidates did:

First up was Greer, who established the fact that he represented rural Tennesseans and had handled 18 West Tennessee counties in the 2006 U.S. Senatorial race for Republican victor Bob Corker. He distinguished himself from the others when an audience member asked about trade policy, and Greer wasted no time blasting away, Trump-like at the purportedly ruinous effects of various free-trade pacts on ordinary working folk. “I don’t give a good rat’s ass about other countries before my fellow countrymen,” Greer declared, in what may have been the line of the night.

Flinn was next, and right away declared his fealty to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump. He went on to express, as he does in his now-frequently-appearing TV ads, some of the well-worn GOP shibboleths of recent years, fretting that “we’re being killed by entitlements,” and promising to “represent you to D.C., not D.C. to you.” (I can’t help fantasizing about what would happen if the genial and accomplished Flinn dispensed with such pedantic bromides and let fly something defiant about the independence secured by his self-financing, a la “If you like Trump, you’ll love me!”)

Kelsey was third to speak, and in his allotted two-minute introductory spiel, he must have used the self-defining phrase “proven conservative” perhaps 50 times. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but variations on the phrase dominated his brief remarks to an overwhelming degree. In fairness, he did get to elaborate on his record during the Q-and-A portion of the evening, touting his sponsorship of a constitutional amendment to ban a state income tax and his enmity-to-the-death for Medicaid expansion.

Most compellingly, Kelsey signaled his willingness and intent in the future to attack the absent Luttrell, a supporter of Governor Bill Haslam’s ill-fated “Insure Tennessee” proposal: “We have Republicans in this very race who supported extending Obamacare.” And later: “As I mentioned before, we have Republicans who want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.” 

And there was Leatherwood, whose hold on his county register’s job owes much to a neighborly demeanor and a competent, customer-knows-best attitude but who, when running for offices of partisan consequence, prefers to present himself as some kind of avenging Robespierre of the Right. He vies with Kelsey in his contempt for “socialism” and regard for “free enterprise” and, on matters of education policy, gave notice of his wish to purify both state (“Frankly, TNReady is merely Common Core by another name”) and nation, promising to support the abolition of the Department of Education.

In brief, Flinn, Kelsey, and Leatherwood all essentially stuck to well-worn Republican talking points, and Greer evinced at least some disposition, in this year of Trump and Sanders mass assemblies, to go yellow dog.

The next forum for these Republican contenders is scheduled for this Thursday night in Dyersburg.