Tag: Phil Bredesen

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Politics Politics Feature

Party Talk: Partisanship Draws Post-Election Attention

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The run-up to the statewide election of 2010 may have been, in retrospect, the first time the seismic shift in Tennessee from Democratic to Republican dominance became obvious.

Then-Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, had served for the maximum two terms and was about to vacate the office. The Democratic field that year was full of worthies, as you would expect with an open seat. So was the Republican field.

There had been ample harbingers of the shift to come. In 2007, the venerable John Wilder, a nominal Democrat, had lost his speakership in the state Senate to the GOP’s Ron Ramsey, and a year later, the Republicans had captured a one-vote majority in the House.

Jackson Baker

Zach Wamp

The changeover accelerated during the 2010 governor’s race, as the Democratic candidates, noticing a diminishing lack of enthusiasm for their cause, began dropping out one by one. Memphian Jim Kyle, then-leader of the state Senate Democrats and now a Shelby County Chancellor, commented at the time, “I kept looking for Yellow Dog [committed] Democrats, and kept finding Yellow Dog Republicans.”

The race came down to three Republicans in the end — Ramsey, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, and Chattanooga Congressman Zach Wamp.

Haslam, regarded as the more moderate of the three, won, and Wamp, who waged a credible race as an Everyman-styled conservative, finished second. The Chattanoogan’s subsequent political history is, by the standards of Tennessee politics, somewhat unusual. Still regarding himself as a conservative and a Republican, he has been at pains to present himself as a “post-partisan truth-teller.”

Which means that Wamp and his son Weston, who has made efforts to establish a political career of his own, have regarded themselves as free to publicly criticize Donald J. Trump.

Wamp has of late been actively tweeting in favor of acceptance of the presidential election results — an act surely unique enough among Republicans to merit special mention.

A recent Wamp tweet, rebutting the no-surrender Trumpians: “What? Common [c’mon?] guys. Truth matters. Get real. Quit making stuff up and misleading people. Conservatives must stand for truth. #CountryOverParty.”

Another one, directed at current national GOP chair Ronna McDaniel, a vocal defender of the Trump holdout: “I was working my butt off to elect conservatives before you were a grown-up. Today I am ashamed of your service as Chair of the RNC. Time for you and your ilk to go. Truth matters. Your lies hurt our cause.”

And yet another: “The National Council on Election Integrity is spending $2 million on an ad urging a transition. On the board of this org: @GOP like Michael Chertoff, Dan Coats, Bill Frist, @BillHaslam and @zachwamp. Get to Work.”

Meanwhile, as was noted here last week, Tennessee’s outgoing U.S. Senator, Lamar Alexander, is — however circumspectly — advocating for acceptance of the election results and the need for an effective transition. In a recent interview with the Tennessee Journal, Alexander cautioned: “What we have to watch for is that what happened to the one-party Democratic Party doesn’t happen to the one-party Republican Party. … Middle Tennessee was grabbing all the power and leaving East Tennessee and Memphis out. … And now we’ve gone full circle, where we have a one-party system, which again is starting to concentrate power in Middle Tennessee. … We Republicans have to watch out for being self-satisfied, not broad enough in our thinking. We don’t want to develop the flaws the Democratic Party started to develop in the 1960s.”

Meanwhile, the aforesaid Democratic Party will be looking for new leadership as of January, as Mary Mancini, who has headed the state party for the last six years, is stepping down. Potential successors are beginning to emerge, and more of that anon.

Under Mancini’s guidance, Democrats were able to increase the number of competitive races, including several in Shelby County. One of their winners, new District 96 state Representative Torrey Harris, replaced former Rep. John DeBerry, who was disallowed as a Democratic candidate by the state party and forced to run as an independent. DeBerry has been compensated for his pain by receiving a new job — annual pay, $165,000 — as an assistant to GOP Governor Bill Lee. That’s outreach and then some!

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Cover Feature News

Pipe Dream: Megasite Sewer Line into the Mississippi River Causes Strife

Only human waste and sludge stand between the Memphis Regional Megasite (MRM) in Haywood County and a possible economic development grand slam nearly two decades in the making.

Really. That’s it. At least, that’s the story according to Bob Rolfe, Tennessee’s Commissioner of Economic and Community Development (ECD). “The greatest challenge to the Memphis Regional Megasite is the lack of a wastewater discharge plan,” Rolfe told a committee of state lawmakers last year. “That is the pacing item. That is what all the site consultants tell us.”

But Rolfe has a two-pronged plan to fix that problem.

The first part: He has to get a permit. If the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) gives it to him, Rolfe will be able to build a 35-mile pipeline that will carry human waste and industrial waste from the site in Haywood County to the Mississippi River.

Bob Rolfe

The second part: He has to acquire land. Rolfe calls them “easements across land,” meaning, he needs to run that pipeline across property belonging to private land owners. Many along the path have already accepted money from the state to allow it to dig up their land and run an 18-inch pipeline three feet below the surface.

But some land-owners say they won’t take the money; they don’t want a sewage line running through their property. To deal with those folks, Rolfe has teamed up with Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery to take their land by eminent domain. And Rolfe assured those lawmakers that Slatery has “developed a very good game plan.” Get the permit. Get the land. Bada-boom. Bada-bing. A brighter economic future for West Tennessee. 

“This project would be a game-changer for West Tennessee, every county in West Tennessee,” state Senator Ed Jackson (R-Jackson) told the committee last year. “It’s so important that we get this thing, and get it right.”

We still don’t have the thing Jackson was talking about. Not yet. The long, windy road to the MRM’s success now leads to the end of that pipeline, puking waste and sludge into the Mississippi at a rate of up to 3.5 million gallons per day. If that sounds gross, remember: Folks pushing this project hope it happens really soon — the sooner the better.

The goal of the ongoing megasite saga — employing Tennesseans and bringing economic benefits to the area — still lies at least three years away, ECD officials said recently. The series is a slow burn. But important episodes in that series are happening right now.

Since the beginning of the process, much of the cast has changed — including three governors, four ECD Commissioners, and hosts of state lawmakers — but much of the rebellion remains. Environmentalists, Haywood County residents and land owners, and free-market advocates have pressed back against the whole project, the sewage line, and the eminent domain process, some of them for more than a decade, and they’re still on the show.           

But the primary tension remains: Should we continue to pour taxpayer money ($143 million appropriated, $87 million spent, and $80 million more needed) into a project that offers no guarantee of financial return? And secondarily: What are the environmental impacts of the megasite to West Tennessee if the megasite dream is realized?  

Since you wouldn’t start watching Game of Thrones on season three, let’s go back to Memphis Regional Megasite season one to catch you up. 

Previously on Megasite

Then-Governor Phil Bredesen birthed the megasite in 2006, when it was pitched as a center for solar panel production. In 2009, state officials purchased the six square-mile plot for $40 million. At the time, similar megasite deals had brought Volkswagen to Chattanooga (East Tennessee) and Hemlock Semiconductor (Middle Tennessee) to Clarksville in billion-dollar deals. State officials had not brought anything even remotely as big to West Tennessee. 

In 2009, Bredesen said he wanted to take federal stimulus funding and build a $30 million solar farm on the megasite plot, again in hopes of making Tennessee a hot-bed of the solar industry. Haywood County Mayor Franklin Smith told WMC Channel 5 at the time that, with the solar farm, “the governor is making a statement that he’s serious about helping West Tennessee by developing our megasite.” 

The solar farm opened in 2012. It now produces enough energy to power 500 homes for a year. 

Governor Bill Haslam was elected in 2011. By 2014, he asked for and was awarded $27 million to reroute State Highway 222 from the site and connect it to the interstate. Haslam said the site would need a total of $150 million in taxpayer investment before it could attract a major automaker to the site.  

At the time, the Haslam adminstration was also fighting with environmentalists on a plan to dump megasite wastewater into the Hatchie River, considered one of the state’s most pristine waterways. Haslam lost that fight. 

In 2015, the Haslam administration launched a new marketing campaign for the megasite. Later that year, Haslam’s ECD Commissioner Randy Boyd fretted to Nashville Public Radio’s Chas Sisk that the site’s massive size may be standing in its own way. 

“Nissan, Volkswagen, Hankook, and Boeing could all fit on half that space,” Boyd told WPLN. “There was a time when people thought we could put one factory in 4,100 acres. But as it turns out today, there’s nobody that needs 4,100 acres.”

Boyd’s idea was to possibly split up the site, making it more attractive for smaller manufacturers and reducing the need to pump out so much wastewater. 

By 2016, environmentalists had beaten a plan to dump the site’s wastewater into the Forked Deer River. Haslam said his team was slowly building the infrastructure needed to lure an investor to the site. His team was also exploring ways to dump that wastewater into the Mississippi River. That year, Haslam and Boyd headed to Asia on a 10-day trip to meet with manufacturers about the megasite but came home empty-handed. 

Megasite dreams were dealt another blow in 2017, when Toyota and Mazda picked a megasite in Huntsville, Alabama, for a $1.6 billion plant. That facility employs 4,000 and makes an estimated 300,000 cars each year. 

Rolfe, then the state’s new ECD commissioner, said the MRM was passed over because it was not “shovel ready.” But that wasn’t the first prospect to pass on Haywood County. 

“Last year [2017], we had a candidate for large, international project of about 1,100 jobs and  $800 million in investment,” Rolfe told lawmakers in 2018. “The major reason they decided to build in an adjacent state was that their megasite was further along with infrastructure — closer to shovel ready — with a lower cost of development.”

Rolfe said another prospect in 2016 would have brought 1,000 jobs and $450 million in investment. They built in an adjacent state because of that state’s tax structure, Rolfe said. Later in 2017, Rolfe said he would ask state lawmakers for an additional $72 million to make the site “shovel ready.” He kept his promise but later upped the total to $80 million. 

That year, 2018, was a gubernatorial election year, and the megasite was a hot topic. Then-candidate Boyd said the site was already shovel ready and proposed doubling down on it. Almost every candidate — Boyd, Craig Fitzhugh, Karl Dean, Beth Harwell, and Bill Lee — told The Jackson Sun the megasite was a good project and they’d push to make it happen. Only Diane Black proposed something different. She said she wanted the 4,100 acres to be part of an agricultural hub, one that would work with the University of Tennessee in a new Agricultural Research Center.

As he left office earlier this year, Haslam told The Daily Memphian that not landing a tenant for the megasite was one of the biggest disappointments in his eight-year term. But he also kept high hopes for the megasite’s future. In that story, Haslam said the site is a big one, designed for the “big catch.”

New Governor Bill Lee told The Daily Memphian in January that he was committed to finishing the project. Later that month, Rolfe told The Daily Memphian that the project wasn’t finished but that the Lee adminstration would not seek any new money for the megasite unless they landed a tenant. 

To date, $143 million has been given to the megasite project. As of October 2018, $87 million had been spent on it. While some lawmakers seemed surprised at the figure, Rolfe said $220 million has been the “consistent” number always needed to “have this campus shovel ready.”

At that joint committee of lawmakers last year, then-state-Senator (now U.S. Congressman) Mark Greene asked about ROI — return on investment. How many jobs, he asked Rolfe, would it take for the state to break even if lawmakers gave the project another $80 million? He didn’t get a direct answer from Rolfe at the time but did his own math, instead. 

“If I look at an average income [of workers at the site] as $60,000 and workers spend money on things we get sales tax from,” Greene began, “it comes out to be that 5,000 jobs are necessary to get us a 20-year payout.”

By Greene’s math, the hit from the megasite wouldn’t need to just be a home run. It’d need to be an economic grand slam in the state, surpassing Volkswagen and weathering 20 years of economic booms and busts before Tennessee taxpayers ever made back their first nickel.

Competition?

Many of those interviewed for this story worried that focus on the megasite for all of these years has left neglected existing-yet-abandoned manufacturing sites such as the International Harvester plant or the Firestone plant in Memphis.   

“One adminstration after another is saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do for West Tennessee,'” said Nick Crafton, who owns land in Haywood County close to the megasite. “But it’s sucking all the oxygen out of every other project across the region. 

“Now, they’re talking about busting up [the megasite] and that’ll be in direct competition with the local industrial parks that these companies might otherwise be looking at.”

However, the Greater Memphis Chamber said it is “100 percent supportive” of the continued development of the megasite. Shelby County has a “serious lack of ‘development ready’ sites to begin with. Further, given the megasite’s size, it is not competition with other sites here. It’s in competition with other ‘sites of its ilk across the Southeast.'”

All of this is according to Eric Miller, the Chamber senior vice president of economic development, and a Haslam-appointed member of the Memphis Regional Megasite Authority Board. 

“Our efforts as a region and state should be to make that site the premier available site in its category to help our region compete for much-needed tax dollars from new investment and jobs,” Miller said.  

Plans for the proposed Memphis Regional Megasite pipeline

Down by the Water

The Mississippi River sloshes gently against a concrete boat ramp. The ramp angles into the muddy water from a wide, flat spot called Duvall Landing in Tipton County, about 45 minutes north of Memphis. A mud-splattered truck with a boat trailer sits in the chilly breeze, the only tenant of a parking lot big enough to swallow an airplane hangar. The lot is covered by a half-inch of mud, and a look at the detritus on the bank makes it clear that the river crested and receded here not long ago. 

A kayak-and-canoe blog called RiverGator (www.rivergator.org) says the parking lot is a “notorious hell-raising party place amongst locals.” The description matched the evidence of discarded Bud Lite bottles, spent shotgun shells, and lighters that littered the ground, and an enormous bonfire circle.

Just north of that scene, state officials hope to snake a wastewater pipeline the width of a large pizza (18 inches) out into the main channel of the Mississippi. If the stars align, and they win that large manufacturer to the megasite 35 miles away, that pipe could send up to 3.5 million gallons a day of human feces and industrial waste into the river.

Party at Duvall Landing with the pipe going full blast, and you could clock about 145,800 gallons of shit and sludge sliding right by your bonfire every hour.

“People out here have to actually get in the water to launch their boats,” said Jo Cris Blair, administrator of the Say No to the Richardson Landing Poopline group. “Will they get sick? We have no way of knowing. Will the fish start glowing in the dark? We have no way of knowing.”

But Blair said the wastewater will destroy farmland, settling into soils after floods. It’ll also impact the local wildlife — fish, birds, and deer — and “it will really hurt the fishing and boating community.”

The Pipe and the River

Blair said the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are turning a “blind eye to the situation.” As for politicos, only Millington Chamber of Commerce executive director Terry Roland and state Representative Debra Moody (R-Covington) have shown any concern for it.

Another spot — about a mile north of Duvall Landing — was the original site for the pipeline’s outfall. But it was moved due to the concerns of locals who felt the waste would harm the environment. 

Blair said she thinks the new Tipton County spot was picked because Memphis can’t take any more waste and Shelby Forest is protected.

Rolfe told lawmakers that TDEC helped his office pinpoint the new location and suggested they run it into the “deep channel” of the river. Standing at Duvall Landing, the Arkansas side of the river seems a mile away. Each second you stand there, more than 8.5 million gallons of muddy water slides by. If the pipeline was running at full capacity — up to that 3.5 million gallons per day — it would add an average of 40 gallons of sewage from the megasite each second. 

Feed the phrase “dilution is the pollution solution” into Google, and you’ll find environmental groups telling you that it is not. There’s a loophole in the federal Clean Water Act that allows for dumping waste into certain bodies of water if they can provide specific “mixing channels.” Deep water with lots of volume can dilute the pollution and limit its effects; that’s the idea. 

Does it work? It’s hard to say with the Mississippi. It’s so wild and so big that it’s been tough to make and maintain a water-quality tracking system. 

In a previous story on this topic, Renee Hoyos, the executive director of the Tennessee Clean Water Network (TCWN), said that the river drains one third of the United States and has “been used as the nation’s toilet.” It was her sense that “by the time [the river water] gets to Memphis, it is in pretty bad shape.”

In 2017, she told the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Water that the TCWN and nine other agencies like it had formed the Mississippi River Collaborative to track and fight pollution in the river. 

“Right now, states in the Mississippi River basin pollute the river with so much nitrogen and phosphorus, that beaches are regularly closed, dogs are dying, and drinking water is under constant threat. We want a numeric standard for [nutrient pollution] nationwide. EPA has battled this problem for decades to no avail.”

The beaches Hoyos mentioned are likely those along the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollution in Mississippi River water plumes out when it hits the gulf. The pollution helps algae grow. That algae sucks the oxygen out of the water and kills everything living there. In 2017, the dead zone was the size of New Jersey. It’s forecast to be larger this year, thanks to heavy rains. 

What’s in a River?

The Mississippi River water at Memphis is already polluted. It contains chlordane, a now-banned pesticide, that — taken in high doses — “can cause convulsions and death,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also contains polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCBs), a now-banned substance used to make capacitors, adhesives, floor finish, and more. Doses of PCBs can cause cancer and much more, according to the EPA.

As for human waste, the megasite actually has to have it. Crafton, a chemical engineer, explains that human waste naturally treats industrial waste. But Crafton says the only human waste so far is coming from the city of Stanton. It’s only 452 people, he says, not enough to treat the volume of waste from the proposed megasite. But the concern doesn’t just lie at the end of the pipeline. From end to end, the pipeline will cross rivers and streams 54 times, according to TDEC, and they could all be affected by pollution, should the pipe burst or leak. 

It’s still unknown exactly what kind of pollution the megasite pipeline would add to the Mississippi River. That’s because no one knows what kind of company will eventually be on the site or what kind of manufacturing will take place there. Blair said ECD’s application does include heavy metals and “an unknown amount of hexavalent chromium.” If that sounds weirdly familiar, the same compound was the center of the Erin Brockovich case. 

“We know what this particular contaminate can do to people,” Blair says. “And for them to literally say ‘an untold amount’ is beyond terrifying.”

Residents along the proposed pipeline are fighting back. Motions are ongoing in a lawsuit led by attorney Jeff Ward against TDEC. Ward is working pro bono, but the group has a GoFundMe page to help pay for other legal expenses. 

The Next Step

The next episode in the megasite saga is a public hearing set for Thursday, April 25th, at Dyersburg Community College. TDEC’s early opinion of the pipeline is that it will “result in no more than de minimis [meaning trivial, or minor] degradation to water quality.” But the division will take public comments into account and the final decision will come down to “the lost value of the resource compared to the value of any proposed mitigation.”

Should TDEC grant Rolfe and his team the pipeline permit, he’s told lawmakers he’ll begin the process of taking lands (easements) from those who don’t want to sell. The process is expected to wrap up in six to nine months. If they get all those, pipeline construction can begin and is expected to take 18 to 24 months to complete.

“In the meantime, if [ECD] successfully recruits a company to the megasite, construction of the tenant’s facility on site can occur parallel to the wastewater pipeline buildout,” reads a statement from Rolfe’s office. “Under such a scenario, we could have a tenant open and operating on the Megasite within three years.”

Categories
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
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bredesen Says Senate Race is “Knife Edge” Affair, Takes Election Commission to Task

CREDIT: JB

JB

Speaking to supporters at Railgarden, former Governor Phil Bredesen appeals for a good turnout at the polls. 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen (l) was one of several Democratic officials attending the Thursday lunch, which was hosted by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris.

With only days to go before final votes are cast on November 6, former Governor Phil Bredesen made it clear that he is counting on a good turnout in Shelby County to bolster his bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by incumbent Republican Bob Corker.

Bredesen, the Democratic nominee, is opposed by Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn, currently the U.S. Representative of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. Speaking at a luncheon at Railgarden, he said he thought there were enough Democrats, independents, and independent-minded Republicans in Shelby County to help him across the finish line, but “it really is about turnout.”

But it wasn’t just the numbers and availability of voters that he considered important. Asked about various charges and counter-charges involving the Shelby County Election Commission, Bredesen seconded in general the concerns expressed by local Democrats.

“I do think that the Shelby County Election Commission, from what I’ve seen, needs to gets its act together here, and I hope they can put some time and energy to it by next Tuesday,” said Bredesen, who continued without referring to specific controversies. “There have been some issues coming up that don’t exist in other places. I think they should make sure that everybody who is supposed to vote gets to vote and the results are put out in a timely fashion without politics going on. They’re certainly capable of doing that.”

The former Governor said that, as he had anticipated, “the election is very close, on the knife edge, and I think — I certainly hope — I’m on the right side of the edge.”

Bredesen went light on specific issues, though he mentioned health care as a problem transcending ideological positions. “Social Security and Medicare are not Democratic laws. They are American laws,” he said.

As he has stated in his previous public statements and in ads on his behalf, Bredesen made it clear that he intended to avoid taking purely partisan positions, either in his campaign or in office if elected. “I still have this high-school civics view of our government,” he said. “The job of leadership is not to divide each other, but to find common ground.”

Making a point of lamenting the attack-ad nature of the Senate contest and other campaigns these days, he said, “I hate what is going on. It‘s not what the founders intended.” He defended both his recent statement that he would have voted to confirm President Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, for the Supreme Court, and a TV ad in which he suggested working closely with the President, “a skilled negotiator,” to bring down drug prices.

“I think people across the spectrum do not want people of one party or another,” he said.
“I believe fundamentally in working together.”

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.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Spooky Times: Helpful Halloween Costume Ideas for 2018

CREDIT: Tony Posnanski via Twitter

Halloween is only a couple of weeks away. Hard to believe, right? With temperatures still hovering in the 80s, coffee shops might as well serve their pumpkin spice lattés in hollowed-out coconuts. Festively arranged seasonal gourds look out of place when the outdoor pool at the YMCA is still open.

For some, the past 22 months or so have felt like an endless haunted house of confusion and outrage. Behind every door awaits a new “Oh, what now?” Some are merely head-scratchers, like the unexplained and unnecessary deregulations gifted to niche interest groups. Others, true oh-my-God-how-is-this-happening nightmare fuel, like the enduring detention of immigrant children, deteriorating relationships with allies — Canada? Really? — and the shameful display of victim-shaming and mockery that recently took place a few miles south of us at a Southaven campaign rally.

As for the aforementioned unseasonal heat, according to UN scientists we have until 2030 to stem the rapidly escalating damage wrought by climate change. How about that Paris Agreement?

Tony Posnanski via Twitter

Beer-Lovin’ Brett

Yeah, spooky times have indeed arrived. I can’t blame you if you haven’t started thinking about your Halloween costume yet. So here are a few ideas to help you stand out among all the Sexy Handmaids and save you from the line to buy the Halloween store’s last raggedy wig on October 30th.

This first one is easy and timely — then again, who knows what will happen between now and the end of the month to bury those contentious Senate hearings in our collective consciousness? You might not be the only Beer-Lovin’ Brett at your Halloween shindig, but you’ll be comfortable and you’re guaranteed to have a good time even if you don’t remember it. Snag a black robe (pants optional for the Justice of the Party, woo!) and behave like the overprivileged jerk in an ’80s college movie. A beer helmet is not required, but drinking beer and talking about how much you like beer are. Sneer and rant about left-wing conspiracies and cry about your high school bros in the same sentence. You’ll get a lifetime appointment to a roaring good time.

Next, this unconventional couple costume might look like a dinosaur and a unicorn, but tuned-in Tennesseans know who you really are: former governor/Senate hopeful Phil Bredesen and a Moderate Republican! The Moderate Republican doesn’t have to be a unicorn, of course. It can be any made-up or extinct creature or a visual manifestation of wishful thinking. Let that imagination run wild! And let your dino — “Democrat In Name Only” — date chase you around all night. Bonus points if he arrives with another group of friends and ditches them to buy a round for the guy in the Brett Kavanaugh costume. What are they going to do? Hang out with Marsha — the woman whose positions are so toxic, even human vanilla scoop Taylor Swift had no choice but to speak out? He’s their ride home so they have no choice. What an exciting time for our state.

If you’re as exhausted by politics as I am, you’ll enjoy these next two. This is Memphis, after all, where “Everything sucks, let’s basketball” is a cherished coping mechanism. After a disappointing year in Hoop City, we needed a little hope. FedExForum was packed to the rafters for Memphis Madness, with thousands of fans eager to catch a glimpse of two people. Not Penny Hardaway and coveted recruit James Wiseman, silly. According to a few sports-talk dudes, the true men of the hour were Justin Timberlake and Drake, two Real Memphians who totally rep the city all the time and not just when it’s convenient. If you plan on staying in this Halloween, have a friend start a rumor that you’re attending a party as Drake or JT. Don’t actually commit yourself. If anybody asks, say nothing. Don’t show up. See how ridiculous that sounds, Tiger fans?

Finally, sticking with the theme of ridiculous Tiger fans, one of my favorite sports phenomena. Inspired by the timeless catchphrase of chatty fans, I call this last costume “I’ll Hang Up and Listen.” If you have any University of Memphis or Memphis State gear, all you need is a cell phone and an arsenal of terrible sports opinions. Yell things like “I been follerin’ the Tigers since Moe Iba and I never seen defense this bad! Go Tigers” and “Penny needs to play [insert walk-on here] more; that kid’s got a cannon! Go Tigers” into the phone. The less coherent, the better. If you can’t think of anything clever, call for someone’s job and name-drop a coach or obscure player from 40 years ago. Sure, this isn’t unique to Memphis, but I like to keep it local.

I hope these ideas help you create a memorable Halloween look. If not, you can always bring back Sexy Mitch McConnell. Happy Halloween!

Jen Clarke is an unabashed Memphian and a digital marketing specialist.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Blackburn, Dean, Lee, and Donald Trump All in Memphis Area

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The semi-lull in politics that had lasted from the mid-summer election of August 2nd until Labor Day is now unmistakably over, as the present week’s events well indicate.

On Monday night, Tennessee was favored with the presence of one Donald J. Trump, who turned up for one of his patented political rallies in Johnson City, in the far corner of northeastern Tennessee. Trump was on hand to bolster his own permanent campaign as well as the hopes of 8th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by incumbent Republican Bob Corker. On Tuesday night, he appeared at a rally in Southaven. (For a report on the president’s Southaven visit, go to memphisflyer.com.)

Jackson Baker

Trump in Johnson City

On Monday, the president, professing happiness at “being back in the great state of Tennessee with thousands of hard-working American patriots,” also made a point of ladling out grace notes to every other leading Republican in sight. His beneficiaries included Congressmen Phil Roe, John Duncan, Chuck Fleischmann, and Scott Desjarlais (“my favorite name in politics”), Congressional candidates Tim Burchett and Mark Green, Governor Bill Haslam, Lt. Governor Randy McNally, and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee.

Trump took time to brag on a new trade arrangement with Mexico and Canada, designated by the letters USMCA, an anagram that, unlike the predecessor association of NAFTA, cannot be said as a word. Though the new trade pact is considered somewhat more advantageous to American milk producers and automakers than was NAFTA, its primary advantage, as Trump sees it, may be that it’s one more replacement for a now-discarded creation of his Democratic predecessors.

The president also defended his current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and disparaged several Judiciary Committee Democrats who oppose Kavanaugh — notably Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Dianne Feinstein of California.

But Trump reserved most of his criticism for Phil Bredesen, the former Tennessee governor who is Blackburn’s Democratic opponent for the Senate seat. The election of Bredesen, he said, could mean the loss of Tennessee gun-owner’s Second Amendment rights, the escalation of taxes “beyond your wildest imagination, the likelihood of mass unemployment, and the takeover of medical care by the government.”

The Bredesen campaign later issued a point-by-point refutation of these charges, along with the following summary: “From Day 1, Governor Bredesen has been clear — he is not running against Donald Trump. He is running for a Senate seat to represent the people of Tennessee. As he said in Chattanooga this evening — if Tennesseans are looking for someone to continue the D.C. gridlock and shouting, he’s not their candidate. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has gotten very good at this after 16 years in Washington. If what Tennesseans are looking for is someone who will get things done, then Phil Bredesen is applying for the job.”

That statement, consistent with the general run of Bredesen’s TV commercials, which stress his political independence and demonstrated ability to work across the political aisle, both complements and somewhat contrasts with the former governor’s action last week in announcing that, if elected, he would not support current Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York for reelection to the Senate leadership post.    

Bredesen took that position during a debate at Cumberland University in Lebanon, and it came off then as a concession — needless, some Democrats worried — to his Republican opponent’s frequent attempts to tie him to the national Congressional leadership of Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

Jackson Baker

Mike Stewart in Germantown

• Meanwhile, there’s more politics in the offing locally. As I write this, there is to be a Tuesday night debate at the University of Memphis between the aforementioned Lee and his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean. Dean is scheduled to stick around for a meet-and-greet Wednesday night at Railgarten, and Senate candidate Blackburn was advertised for a GOP luncheon at Owen Brennan’s, also on Wednesday.

Local Democrats have been getting help from elsewhere, too. State Representative Mike Stewart was in Shelby County the weekend before last, speaking at a picnic of the Germantown Democratic Club and bringing aid and comfort — some of it rhetorical and devoted to the macro level of politics.

Said Stewart: “We have got to take this country back — neighborhood by neighborhood, councilmanic district by councilmanic district, statehouse district by statehouse district.” 

Stewart scourged “this very radical Congress that would not compromise” and a national Republican regime that, he said, “stymied at every turn” progressive efforts.

He made the case that several local House districts now belonging to Republicans were in range to be captured. “These districts are changing,” he said. “We can turn these districts blue. These suburban districts are where the fight is at.”

On hand for the event was a prime exhibit of Stewart’s thesis: State Representative Dwayne Thompson of House District 96. Thompson upset then incumbent state Representative Steve McManus two years ago in the district, which includes parts of Cordova, southeast Memphis, and Germantown, and which, as Stewart had indicated, had indeed undergone significant demographic change.

Thompson had worked the district with all due diligence back in 2016, knocking on what he estimated to be “thousands of doors,” and his effort certainly was the largest reason for his victory. But another major component was the significant financial aid that the state party shifted his way, by way of targeting the district.

In 2018, the state Democratic Party is once again involved as an active principal in the legislative races of Shelby County, and Stewart’s very presence was a clear symbol of that. This year the state party seems to have identified two more districts capable of turnover — District 97, in the Bartlett-Eads-Lakeland area, now represented by the GOP’s Jim Coley; and District 83, in the East Memphis-Germantown overlap, now represented by Republican Mark White.  

The Democrats running for those seats — Allan Creasy in District 97 and Danielle Schonbaum in district 83 — have reportedly been pinpointed for accelerated financial aid from the state party’s coffers, as has the reelection effort of Thompson, who is opposed by Republican Scott McCormick in District 96.