Tag: Randy Boyd

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News News Blog News Feature

Peter F. Buckley to be Chancellor of UTHSC

Dr. Peter F. Buckley (Photo courtesy UTHSC).

Peter F. Buckley, MD, will become the 11th chancellor of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). A unanimous confirmation vote by the University of Tennessee System Board of Trustees was made Monday. His appointment is effective February 1, 2022.

Buckley, most recently dean of the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and executive vice president of medical affairs for the VCU Health System, succeeds Steve J. Schwab, MD, who has served as UTHSC chancellor for about 12 years. 

“I am delighted to follow the great legacy of my colleague and friend, Dr. Schwab, and to build on that legacy and all the great work of the faculty, trainees, and staff, not just in Memphis, but all across the state,” Buckley said. 

The pandemic has given the public a greater awareness and appreciation for academic health science centers like UTHSC, Buckley said. “They understand that science brings hope, science can change lives, science can save lives, and that science can do that in a very rapid way when we all work really well together,” he said. “There’s also a greater appreciation for the compassion and the skill of our clinicians, as well as an appreciation of the need to build up our clinical workforce all across the state, and of course, that is the hallmark of UTHSC.”

The chancellor is the chief executive officer of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s statewide operation, which includes six doctoral-degree-granting health science colleges — Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Graduate Health Sciences, and Health Professions — as well as major regional clinical health science locations in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Nashville. 

“As you look at the Health Science Center, while our home is in Memphis, our footprint through our campuses is really all across the great state of Tennessee,” he said. “And so, that’s what I see as the opportunity, the opportunity to maximize that community relationship within Memphis, while also being the health sciences provider of the clinical workforce for the entirety of Tennessee, to have our science impact the health of all Tennesseans, and to maximize the cohesion across all elements of our Health Sciences programs within its broad footprint across this great state.”

UTHSC and its clinical practice plans employ about 4,000 people statewide. The university is the largest educator of healthcare professionals in the state and operates Tennessee’s largest residency and fellowship programs.

While his focus is statewide, Buckley sees opportunity to continue to strengthen the university’s role in Memphis, home to its main campus.

“I think Memphis is on an amazing trajectory,” he said. “I think there is an opportunity for us to engage more with the business community, particularly with the biomedical device community. There are many firms located in Memphis that any other academic center across the country would absolutely be delighted to have that degree of resources and talent and support right in their own backyard.”

A native of Ireland, Buckley, and his wife, Leonie, emigrated to America in 1992. “Six years after that, we had the amazing joy of becoming American citizens,” he said. The couple have two adult sons, John and Brian, and enjoy raising Great Danes. 

Buckley describes himself as a servant leader. “Doctors are trained with the immense privilege of providing care to people, and that is a very noble service,” he said. “I have tried to cultivate that physician service model into being a servant leader, which is very important when your administrative job is to help faculty, trainees, and staff in their great work and to advocate for them, as well as to celebrate their accomplishments.”

Buckley served as the dean of the VCU School of Medicine since 2017. Prior to that, he was the dean of the School of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta for seven years, overseeing regional campuses across the state of Georgia. He chairs the Administrative Board of the Council of Deans of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and is on the AAMC’s Board of Directors. Buckley also serves as vice chair of the board of Intealth, an integrated organization that includes the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) and the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research (FAIMER), which is dedicated to advancing the global healthcare workforce.

A psychiatrist and expert in schizophrenia, Buckley is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and sits on the Data and Safety Monitoring Board of the National Institute of Mental Health. He has served on numerous boards and committees related to his clinical specialty and is a member of the Board of Schizophrenia International Research Society. With a background of studies in brain imaging and neurodevelopment, he has published more than 360 articles and more than 80 book chapters, and has received numerous awards for his academic, clinical, and research work.

A 14-member committee, along with an executive search firm, began the search process for a new chancellor in mid-summer, following Schwab’s announcement to step down. Buckley was one of two finalists who came to the Memphis campus for open forums in November. 

The chancellor serves as a member of the UT System leadership team, reporting directly to UT president Randy Boyd, and is the chief academic and administrative officer for UTHSC.

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Editorial Opinion

Bill Lee’s Surprise

During the 2018 governor’s race in Tennessee, the leading candidates were thought to be Diane Black, the ultra-conservative Congresswoman from the state’s Sixth District, and Randy Boyd, the affable social engineer and idea man behind many of then-Governor Bill Haslam’s governmental innovations.

Black had no trouble presenting herself as the right-wing politician and outright Trumpian that she was — supporting huge tax cuts for the wealthy, bashing immigrants, and expressing desires to curtail the EPA. Boyd was almost necessarily a moderate, given the progressive nature of the institutions he created — Tennessee Promise, Drive to 55, etc. — and their modest but real claim on the state’s exchequer.

But a strange thing began occurring during the gubernatorial race that year. Under pressure from his campaign advisors, Boyd began releasing ads and campaign bromides — loaded with hard-edged innuendo about the Second Amendment, potential welfare cheats, and illegal immigrants — that cast him in an altogether new light as some kind of hard-edged reactionary, determined to out-Black Black, or even to out-Trump Trump.

Meanwhile, on the stump, Boyd continued to talk reasonably about such subjects as education, health care, technology, immigration, workforce development, transportation, and urban strategies. Asked about his newly adopted public persona, Boyd said, “If I’m running to be the Republican nominee in Tennessee, I want Republican voters to see that I’m one of them.”

In the end, Republican voters failed to see either Black or the redesigned Boyd as “one of them,” opting instead for political newcomer Bill Lee, a Middle Tennessee industrialist/rancher who smiled winningly, avoided ideological abrasiveness in his speech, talked up his faith, and remained difficult to pin down on specific issues. A third-place candidate for most of the race, Lee became an obvious option to the mud-slinging match between Black and Boyd and ended up an easy winner, triumphing as well in the general election over Democrat Karl Dean.

So here we are in the second year of Governor Lee, no longer the Great Unknown. It turns out he has a few ideas, but most of those he has are far to the right of the spectrum — pushing school vouchers, vowing to end abortion, renouncing Medicaid expansion, denouncing “socialism,” rejecting adoption rights for LGBTQ parents, and — most recently — calling for “open carry” gun legislation, or “constitutional carry,” as advocates of unrestricted weaponry call it.

Cry your eyes out, Diane Black and Randy Boyd! Bill Lee out-Trumped both of you, even if it seems he did so by stealth. In a time when random gun violence increases apace, Tennessee’s governor has basically just called for more guns and the de facto elimination of curbs on their presence in the public sphere. Almost immediately, law enforcement officials, both locally in Shelby County and elsewhere in the state, expressed opposition to the proposed new legislation, and we fully support them. It will require serious effort in the legislature and luck, besides, to overcome this new threat. And let us hope, a la some famous musical advice, we don’t get fooled again.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bill Lee Closes Fast in GOP Primary

CREDIT: JB

JB

Gubernatorial candidate Lee works the room at Arlington’s Legacy Grill.

Is Bill Lee the new frontrunner among Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial candidates? A recent poll says that he is, and the Williamson County businessman is now promoting that assumption on a last, pre-primary tour of the state at “100 town halls” (two of them in Shelby County on Thursday, a week before final voting on August 2nd).

Given the lingering consensus that, Democratic blue wave or no blue wave, Republicans are still the majority party in Tennessee, does the prospect that — with less than a week to go — Lee has taken over the GOP lead from the duo long at the top, Diane Black and Randy Boyd, mean that he is the state’s likely new governor?

“Maybe” is the right answer to all those questions. The poll reflecting a sudden come-from-behind lunge from Lee is by JMC Analytics and Polling, a Louisiana firm that is new to the headlines in Tennessee. So, make allowance for a degree of skepticism. It is certainly true, however, from an aggregate of various other polls over the last several months, that Lee had been maintaining a reasonably close third-place position behind Black and Boyd and was theoretically within striking distance of the Black and Boyd, should either or both of them falter.

And it is widely believed that both Black and Boyd, whose campaigns had largely become mere mechanisms for attacking each other, had indeed faltered, especially since their attacks had become progressively meaner-spirited and less connected to reality — accusing each other of being swamp creatures secretly disloyal to President Trump, as well as mad taxers intent upon robbing Tennesseans blind while gaming the financial system to enrich themselves. At no time has there been a reasoned dialogue between the two contrasting Black’s hard-shell Trump-style conservatism with the progressive governmental ideas of Boyd, an entrepreneur and former idea man for current Governor Bill Haslam who prefers now to be called “Conservative Randy Boyd,” as if that were the name on his birth certificate.

Meanwhile, Lee — a multi-millionaire like his two main rivals — has been steadily touring the state in the supportive company of his wife, Maria, stressing his religious faith and his rebound from previous family tragedies that included the death of his first wife from a horseback fall. Looking like a casually composed latter-day Marlboro Man, Lee has eschewed desperate attacks upon his opponents in favor of promises to help build a ‘better life” for all Tennesseans. Steering clear of ideology as such, and lacking a political record of any sort, he styles himself as a “conservative” and an outsider.

His current pre-election tour of Tennessee, in the same 14-year-old RV he has been using for the past year or so, made two stops in Shelby County on Thursday — one at noon at the Kooky Canuck eatery downtown, another at mid-afternoon at The Legacy Grill in Arlington, he greeted supporters, schmoozed with diners, and in general acted like a low-key Man of the Hour.

The restaurant at Arlington was filled with people, who were first treated to a stock campaign video, which recapped moments from the life and times of Lee, who was seen describing his first wife’s fatal horse-riding accident in a subdued but straightforward voice.

“Over time, we healed, we grew, we started laughing again,” Lee said on the video, explaining that he had made it his mission to “ work to change others, to make life better for other people,” not just the “1,200 hard-working pipe-fitters, electricians, plumbers of the Lee Company,” but others, including the inner-city child he mentored and the “guy from prison” he helped make a transition back to society at large.

“I started to think, What if I could do that for everyone in Tennessee? I believe I can. I’m sure going to try.

A local pastor then introduced the flesh-and-blood Lee to the crowd as “a man’s man, “farmer, husband, father, grandfather … not a career politician — in fact, he’s never run for office before — a passionate lover and follower of Jesus Christ.”

Lee came up to the front, dressed in casual shirt and chinos, suggesting that people were looking for a “conservative man of faith” and offering that as a description of himself. Hailing some Memphis-area cousins that were in the crowd, Lee cited the “transformational” nature of his family tragedy and in short order was joined at the front of the room by Maria, “God’s gift to me.”

He promised to take better care of the state’s teachers. “We test too much, and we may be testing for the wrong things.” He spoke of his wish to reform criminal justice and reduce “the revolving door” of recidivism, lamented that 15 Tennessee counties, all rural, were officially designated as in poverty, and got an extended round of applause when he rounded on the “dishonest, deceptive attack ads” that, he implied, his major GOP opponents were committed to.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics,” he said. “There’s a lot more truth you can find in the person behind those ads than in the person in those ads.”

There was more in that vein, and a nod to his independence and the fact that he was “not beholden to anybody,” donors, lobbyists, or legislators. He likened his “outsider” status to that of President Trump. “That’s why he’s been so effective.”

After his remarks, he and his wife greeted an impressive number of well-wishers who approached them.

He was asked if really had taken the lead. “We certainly know there’s a surge, and the momentum is there. I don’t rely on polls, but I do rely on the momentum and the electricity I see. In today’s world, people want a conservative and an outsider, and that’s me.”

Asked to define what he meant by the term “conservative,” he said it denotes a “playbook for the fundamental approach to governing, that limited government and small government is better, that fiscal governmency includes not allowing government to grow beyond what it should, and understanding there are conservative social values like being 100 percent pro-life.”

Some might think of all that as boilerplate, but Lee makes such statements with a seeming frankness and a confident if modest attitude. He is not one for hard and fast policy points, but in a contest where image counts for much, he certainly looks the part, and, after several months of trailing frontrunners Black and Boyd for first-place honors in the Republican gubernatorial primary, he may indeed be peaking at the right time.

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Cover Feature News

Democratic Blue Wave or GOP Firewall?

In truth, there are several elections on the August 2nd ballot in Shelby County. 

One is a county general election, featuring contests for Shelby County mayor, sheriff, and various other county official positions, as well as for members of the Shelby County Schools board and Shelby County Commission, special elections for three judgeships, as well as a referendum on pay raises for county officials. And, for roughly half the voters of Memphis, a contest for an open at-large position on the City Council. 

Another election, involving primaries for major statewide and federal offices, includes races for governor, U.S. senator, the U.S. House of Representatives, and legislative positions in the Tennessee General Assembly. 

The outcomes of the county general election and the state/federal primaries will not only be consequential in themselves but will have significant barometric relevance to ongoing political currents — local, statewide, and even national. In particular, the most closely watched races will indicate the extent to which the current century’s ramparts of Republican dominance in Tennessee and Shelby County are still at full strength or whether, conversely, the much-rumored “blue wave” of 2018 will signal a Democratic revival.

Certainly, a Democrat — Lee Harris — is regarded as having a fair chance to prevail as Shelby County mayor, the first to do so since two easy victories in 2002 and 2006 by former county and city Mayor A C Wharton. Harris is a former Memphis city councilman and, more recently, the elected leader of the Democrats’ five-member remnant in the state Senate. He is opposed by David Lenoir, a two-term county trustee, who won a three-cornered Republican primary over County Commissioner Terry Roland and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos in May. 

GOP: Bill Lee, Diane Black, Randy Boyd, and Beth Harwell

The root fact is that the August 2nd county ballot will be the first real test this year of Democrats against Republicans, and might provide a measure of the respective prospects for either party in the months and even years to come.

As it happens, of course, balloting in the county general election, as well as in the state/federal primaries, is already underway, in an official early voting period that began last Friday, July 13th, and will continue through Saturday, July 28th. 

And, because of a controversy over the Shelby County Election Commission’s choice of voting sites that flared up in the couple of weeks before the process started [see Editorial, p. 8], public attention to the process of early voting was whetted to an unprecedented degree.

By the time the controversy was resolved in the courtroom of Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, Democrats and Republicans had seen early voting sites added in pockets of the county dominated by their constituents. The final number of sites was 27, fairly evenly distributed, and five of those sites — also apportioned equably party-wise — were enabled to operate for an extra three days each.

When the Shelby County Democrats for Change PAC held a reception and rally for party candidates in the Serenity Events Center in East Memphis on Sunday, the organizers proudly claimed a 68 percent to 32 percent voting ratio in favor of the Democratic state/federal primary versus the Republican one for Friday’s first day of early voting. If that kind of differential should continue and be reflected in the voting results of the county general election, chances for the putative blue wave would be looking good.

DEM: Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh

The two mayoral contestants will have had several public one-on-one matchups by the time final voting ceases on Election Day. In the first one, held last month at a meeting of the Downtown Kiwanis Club, Republican Lenoir seemed to gain some traction by selectively using Democrat Harris’ legislative record to make a “soft-on-crime” attack.

In the candidates’ second major encounter, held last week by the NAACP and the ad hoc Voting is Power 901 activist group at the National Civil Rights Museum, Harris made pointed efforts to rebut Lenoir’s charge and clearly found the environment more hospitable to his own message of progressive social change. Score it one-to-one as the opponents prepared to square off again this week before the Downtown Rotary Club.

Though this potentially nip-and-tuck mayoral contest will have exposed the two parties’ contrasting attitudes, the real battle was taking place in the political center. 

Lenoir’s pitch, based essentially on his claim of demonstrated competence, was centrist enough, his supporters hoped, to give him the same shot at independents and Democratic crossovers that current GOP Mayor Mark Luttrell enjoyed in two elections. Similarly, Harris’ professional gloss as a Yale Law graduate and his record in office of simultaneously working across the political aisle, and pursuing cutting-edge Democratic goals gave him a good chance to activate his base, demographically presumed to be a majority, while discouraging crossovers the other way.

Even the race for sheriff, not normally one characterized by political extremes, has a discernibly ideological edge this year, as was demonstrated by another NAACP/VIP901 debate last week, this one between Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner, the Democrat, and county homeland security director Dale Lane, the Republican.

Phil Bredesen and Marsha Blackburn

Among other issues, Bonner’s declared disinclination to cooperate with the Trump administration’s roundups of undocumented immigrants, locally, contrasted with Lane’s professed willingness to assist the operatives of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials as “fellow law officers.” (See Politics, p. 7,  for more.) 

Consistent with the blue wave theme, the August 2nd election ballot shows three Democrats running for the office of governor, and only one of them — political unknown Mezianne Vale Payne — has the look of a ringer. The other two Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and outgoing Democratic state House Leader Craig Fitzhugh — are major league, all the way.

Most analysts see Dean as the clear favorite, on the basis of his financial edge and backing from traditionalists in the party network, though Fitzhugh has the declared support of party legislators, educators, state employees, and various other rank-and-file groups.

There are three Democrats vying in the party primary for the U.S. Senate, too, and one of them is former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen. His party rivals, for the record, are named Gary Davis and John Wolfe, but there is no mystery about who the Democratic nominee will be. Bredesen not only has wall-to-wall support from rank-and-file Democrats in Tennessee, he is counted on by national Democrats of all persuasions to contribute mightily to the party revival that Democratic optimists (and numerous media analysts) have been forecasting.

And, just as there is no mystery about Bredesen’s looming victory in the Democratic primary, the identity of his Republican adversary in November, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional district, is also a given, though one Aaron L. Pettigrew also has his name on the primary ballot. Blackburn, who occupies a position on the hard right of the Republican Party, was a Trumpian before there was a Trump, and her all-too-obvious intent to move on to the Senate was probably a major factor last year in convincing incumbent Senator Bob Corker, a Trump critic, that it was time to bow out.

There is something of a coin-toss situation among Republican gubernatorial candidates.. Considering the fact that three of the six GOP aspirants — entrepreneur and former state economic development Commissioner Randy Boyd, 6th District U.S. Representative Diane Black, and Williamson County businessman Bill Lee — are multi-millionaires, that metaphor is almost literal. The fourth serious candidate in the GOP primary, state House Speaker Beth Harwell, has been hampered by her relative lack of financial resources.

Though only Black has a political profile arguably close to Trump’s (she’s an advocate for building “the wall” on the nation’s southern border, and she veers hard right on most other issues), all of the Republicans call themselves “conservatives” and are at pains not to put too much public distance between themselves and the president.

Boyd, in particular, seems determined in that respect, running ads that seem designed to depict him as more rigidly conservative than Black, though in person he is soft-spoken and thoughtful, a near clone in his thinking to current Governor, Bill Haslam, for whom Boyd designed such arguably forward-looking programs as Drive to 55 and Tennessee Promise. 

Lee, a genial man who campaigns heavily on his Christian faith and his rebound from family tragedies, is clearly a generic conservative, though one with few hard and fast positions. By general consensus (and such reliable polling data as exists), he has been running third and hoping for a stumble by one or both of the acknowledged GOP front-runners, Boyd and Black.

There are those who see Lee’s real purpose as building a profile for some future race. Harwell’s is more a case of sink-or-swim in a possible last hurrah, though she is well-liked enough to be called upon for further public duty, possibly by someone’s appointment.

In any case, Bredesen vs. Blackburn and the eventual gubernatorial matchup in November will measure the contrary tides of political sentiment in Tennessee. Apropos prospects for a blue wave, a look at the legislative races on the ballot, with Democrats vying for every available position and there being numerous races for which no Republican is contending, would almost suggest that Shelby County has returned to the circumstances of the old Solid Democratic South of the pre-civil rights era, in which the GOP was an outlier party.

That, to say the least, would be misleading. What the dearth of Republican candidacies, almost entirely in predominantly black areas, does represent, however, is a continuing lack of indigenous support in the inner city of Memphis, as well as a serious downturn in the party’s outreach results, whether through lack of serious effort or simple failure. In theory at least, the party is still trying, as would be indicated by the presence on the GOP ballot once again of Charlotte Bergmann, an African-American activist and a perennial candidate, once again seeking the 9th District Congressional seat.

The omnipresence of Democratic legislative candidates, meanwhile, signals a rekindled zeal among rank-and-file Democrats as well as in the leadership of a local party which was reorganized in 2017, after internal disunion and chaos resulted in the state party’s lifting its charter in 2016. 

Longtime observers of local and state politics recall a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the Republican Party, then a definite minority organization in both Shelby County and Tennessee at large, began fielding candidates in established Democratic fiefdoms. Largely unsuccessful at first, the GOP efforts eventually bore fruit, and, when social changes (most of them national in origin) began to weaken ancestral voting habits, today’s wall-to-wall GOP state government emerged.

Locally, though, the situation is far from being static. It should be remembered that the Republican sweeps and near-sweeps in the county elections of the 21st century are counter-demographic, in that they have occurred at a time when Shelby County’s emergent non-white majority has been ever enlarging. If the new flood of Democratic candidates in the suburbs can stimulate a dormant activism there and meanwhile activate the party’s urban base, generally somnolent in non-presidential election years, the political power ratio could transform quickly.

Or, as Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills put it, in a cautionary message to his party-mates back in February: “Since 2010, we’ve been lucky in Shelby County. Thanks to the leadership we’ve had, we’ve had good organization and we’ve had good candidates. The Democrats, on the other hand, have had just the opposite. They haven’t had good candidates and they haven’t had good organization. But for the first time in a long time, they have both of those things. They have a good organization. They have a good leader. And they have decent candidates at the top that’ll drive all the way down to the bottom. So we have got to turn our voters out.”

There are three state Senate seats at risk in the primary, and there are interesting contests in all of them:

In State Senate District 29, Tom Stephens is a token Republican entry. The real race is in the Democratic primary, between outgoing County Commissioner Justin Ford, a member of urban Memphis’ best-known political clan, and current state Representative Raumesh Akbari, a rising legislative star who won her House seat in a 2013 special election over Ford’s cousin, Kemba Ford.

Three Democrats are on the ballot in Senate District 31, where David Weatherspoon, a chaplain at Le Bonheur Hospital, seeks the party nod over Gabby Salinas, a cancer survivor and scientific researcher. A third Democrat is M. Rodanial Ray Ransom.

Salinas’ history of personal triumph over difficult odds makes for a compelling backstory, but Weatherspoon has a serious financial edge and support across party lines. Both Weatherspoon and Salinas are committed to supporting Medicaid expansion, which Republican incumbent Brian Kelsey, unopposed in his primary, has stoutly resisted.

No Republican is running in Senate District 31, perhaps because Democratic incumbent Reginald Tate is well-known for his close cooperation with the GOP leadership in the legislature. That fact has also generated a stout challenge to Tate in the Democratic primary from nursing entrepreneur Katrina Robinson, who is supported by several name Democrats, including current state Senators Sara Kyle and Lee Harris.

Of Shelby County’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives, only five have races on the ballot, and all these races are between rival Democrats. In House District 85, there is a four-way contest involving Jesse Chism, Ricky Dixon, Brett N. Williams, and Lynette P. Williams. In House District 86, long-term Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper has two primary opponents: Amber Huett-Garcia and Jesse Jeff. In House District 90, things begin to get truly interesting. Here incumbent John DeBerry — who, like the aforementioned Reginald Tate, is considered by many of his party-mates to be too cozy with Republicans — is challenged by Torrey Harris, a small-business owner. 

House District 91, vacated by Akbari, is being fought over by Democrats Doris DeBerry Bradshaw, Juliette Eskridge, and London P. Lamar, while House District 93 incumbent Democrat G.A. Hardaway has a contender in the Democratic primary, Eddie Neal. In House District 99, Antonio “Two-Shay” Parkinson,  is being challenged by fellow Democrat Johnnie Hatten.

House District 99 has a special distinction as a result of the recent untimely death of Republican incumbent Ron Lollar. It was too late to change the ballot; so Lollar’s name remains. Before the November election, the Shelby County Republican Party will be entitled to name a replacement. Some of the Republican names in play: county commission Chair Heidi Shafer, Shelby County GOP Chair Mills, Bartlett Alderman David Parsons, and County Commissioner David Reaves.

And David Cambron, the Democratic mainstay and ace recruiter who is as responsible as anyone for the stepped-up party showing, has a shot at winning a seat himself. He’s unopposed to be the Democratic nominee in House Disrict 99.See ‘Politics,’ , for more election preview.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Diane Black Gets a Little Help from Her Friends

CREDIT: JB

When is a statewide political campaign also a natio nal campaign? Or perhaps that question is best turned around: How much do and should national JB

U.S. Rep. Diane Black and American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, who endorsed her gubernatorial candidacy, engaged in some mutual admiration on Monday.

issues influence, or even become, the substance of statwewide campaigns?

The question is undeniably relevant to the current campaign for Governor of U.S. Representative Diane Black, a Republican who seems at times to be running a national campaign and who, perhaps not coincidentally, made Memphis appearances Monday in the company of Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Schlapp, a familiar presence on national TV political talk shows, was at a Monday morning press conference with Black on Monday, where he endorsed her gubernatorial candidacy on behalf of the ACU, the nation’s oldest conservative lobbying organization, and Carson was a scheduled speaker, along with Black, at a Monday nighty panel discussion of the ACU’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) at FedEx Forum.

Schlapp said ACU had “been in the trenches” with Black for years, praised her work with the House budget committee, and avowed that there was “no better champion in the congress for our conservative values.”

Black reciprocated her pride in her high annual scores with ACU evaluations on issues and made the case that ACU values accorded well with Tennessee “core principles.” People from states like New york and California who come here and insist on less conservative concepts should be told, “that’s not how we do it here” and advised to “go back” to those states, said Black, who warned against Tennessee’s becoming a “purple” state like North Carolina next door.

During a brief meeting with local reporters, Black defended her solidarity with President Trump and her emphasis on such matters as immigration control at the nation’s southern border.

Issues like “sanctuary cities” and “in-state tuition” for illegals,” both of which she opposes, are important locally, Black said. “As Governor, I’d be responsible for making sure Tennessee is safe.” She added that her recent endorsements by the National Rifle Association and National Right to Life reflected the reality of these organizations’ issues as “concerns right here in our state.”

Asked about her showing in a recent Vanderbilt University poll, which gave her high name recognition statewide but included figures showing her unfavorable ratings higher than her favorable ones, Black answered, “What does the poll really mean? If you break those polls down, you see that they include liberals and moderates in there, and I’m obviously a conservative.”

She said it was “essential that I define who I am and what I’ve stood for over the last 20 years. I’m conservative, and I get things done.” She rejected opponents’ charges that she was a “career politician” and said, “What I really am is a career nurse,” as well as “a businesswoman, an educator,” and someone vitally interested in public policy. “I’m a very well-rounded person,” she said.

More than any of her GOP primary opponents, including former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd, who has called her “D.C. Diane” Black identifies with President Trump, who has returned the favor by praising her, especially for her work as House budget chair.

“Tax reform and GDP growth. I’m very proud of that,” Black said. “The President has vision and is a strong negotiator.” She was somewhat more conditional on the subject of the President’s recent announcement of tariffs against American trading partners. “That’s something you don’t do when there’s no problem,” she said, mentioning the state’s agricultural producers as being potentially vulnerable to retaliation.

 “It could be difficult if it’s not done in a fair way,” she said of the new Trump hardline on tariffs. “But he is one who bargains and bargains well.”

Black would appear twice later on at the CPAC meeting, held in the lobby of FedEx Forum, first with both Schlapp and Carson in a panel in which she and the HUD secretary made much of their Horatio Alger-like rise from youthful poverty (both, as they told it, having been raised in public housing) and later, in a concluding panel with Schlapp, in which Black underscored her pro-life credentials and the two of them led what was by then a much-diminished crowd in a valedictory pledge-of-allegiance to the flag.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Big Week for Shelby County Politics Features Joe Biden

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

What a week! What a weekend! Local political junkies of every stripe had plenty of occasions to nourish their activism. In addition to several fund-raisers and meet-and-greets for specific candidates in this year’s elections, there were debates, forums, and other kinds of smorgasbords featuring several at once.

The highlight of local Democrats’ week was surely the appearance on Friday night of former Vice President Joe Biden, who brought his “American Promise Tour” to the Orpheum. Biden’s visit, a ticketed affair, was part revival and part book-tour stop (for Biden’s new volume, Promise Me, Dad: a Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, about his son Beau’s illness and ultimate death from brain cancer.)

With his regular-guy persona and tell-it-like-it-is style, Biden inarguably kindled the kind of political enthusiasm that Hillary Clinton could have used in 2016 and that Biden seems eager to deploy in 2020 against Donald J. Trump.

Not that Biden talked up a race; in fact, he got one of his most animated reactions when he complained about the unnamed Washington scribe who suggested that his book was a calculated bid for sympathy prior to a presidential run. The crowd’s murmur of outrage morphed into delighted laughter when Biden muttered something about administering a personal corrective to “the sonofabitch.”

Biden’s appeal is based partly on that kind of plain talk and partly, too, on his ability to revivify a kind of unpretentious patriotism that is either left unsaid these days or is more often obscured by the gaslight of insincere platitudes.

When host Terri Lee Freeman of the National Civil Rights Museum asked Biden what he had meant by writing that he was nostalgic for the American future, the author of that seemingly oxymoronic sentiment furrowed his brow as if wondering himself what he had meant by the line. But what followed was a wonderfully developed disquisition on the process of regaining the forefathers’ democratic dream of a just and honest realm that resolved the paradox perfectly.

On Saturday morning, Republicans turned out en masse for the opening of the party’s 2018 campaign headquarters in the Trinity Commons shopping center. Shelby County party chair Lee Mills introduced GOP candidates in the forthcoming county general election and federal and state primaries on August 2nd.
Partisans of both political parties got close-up looks at the rival candidates for Shelby County mayor and Tennessee governor when Republican mayoral candidate David Lenoir and Democratic candidate Lee Harris squared away on Wednesday at the Kiwanis Club. And four candidates for governor appeared on Thursday at a forum on legal issues before members of the Tennessee Bar Association.
At the mayoral event, moderated by WREG-TV anchor Stephanie Scurlock at the University Club, Lenoir put forth his standard goals of “great jobs, great schools, and safe streets” while boasting his achievements in managing Shelby county’s financial assets as trustee for the last eight years. Harris said he intended to focus on the themes of poverty, injustice, and residual segregation, and recounted occasions when he took the lead in resolving difficult issues as a city councilman and as state Senate Democratic leader.

Participating in the bar association event at The Peabody were Democrats Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh, as well as Republicans Beth Harwell and Randy Boyd. The candidates were interviewed sequentially by Commercial Appeal editor Mark Russell on such issues as criminal justice reform, judicial redistricting, and the desirability of changes in school-zone drug laws.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Remains a Beehive of Political Activity

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee’s Gubernatorial Candidates Make the Rounds in Memphis

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

With the coming of bona fide summer weather, the governor’s race has heated up accordingly. Last week in Shelby County saw numerous comings and goings of candidates. On Friday, Republican candidates Bill Lee and Beth Harwell checked in, Lee with a “town hall” at the newish Houston Levee Community Center, Harwell with a fund-raiser/meet-and-greet at the Holiday Inn Express in Millington.

Franklin businessman Lee, who has been running, in effect, as a fallback alternative to the heated race going on now in the GOP primary between poll leaders Randy Boyd, the former state Commissioner of Economic Development, and U.S. Representative Diane Black, is so far avoiding making precise policy commitments. But at his Friday appearance in Shelby County, Lee left little doubt that he is to be numbered among the conservatives on the Republican ballot, responding to a question about how to solve the gun-violence problem by touting the Second Amendment itself as the solution.

Harwell, whose slow start in the race has left her needing to be a late bloomer and a sort of fallback candidate herself, is, like Lee, taking overtly conservative positions — opposing in-state tuition privileges, for example — but her general demeanor tilts somewhat more toward the moderate side than does Lee’s.

Meanwhile, candidate Boyd took his 95-county bus tour to Millington on Monday for an early-morning meet-and-greet and then launched out on a round of stops eastward, beginning in Fayette County.

Friday saw Democratic gubernatorial candidate Craig Fitzhugh receive the endorsement of the Legislative Black Caucus at Fitzhugh’s Poplar Avenue headquarters, and the candidate from Ripley, who is retiring from his position as Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives, was back again on Monday for a fund-raiser at the East Memphis residence of well-known activist Jocelyn Wurzburg.

In addition to the Black Caucus boosting, Fitzhugh has also received endorsements of late from the Tennessee State Employees Association and the Tennessee Education Association. His Democratic rival, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, meanwhile, got an endorsement from the Win Back Your State PAC of former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley that carries with it a commitment from the erstwhile also-ran in the Democratic presidential primaries of 2016 to campaign in Tennessee for Dean, who has raised far more money than has Fitzhugh.

Another campaigner this week was state Representative Dwayne Thompson, who held his own town hall at the Houston Levee center on Saturday, a day after Lee. An audience member at the affair was Patricia Possel, who is vying with Scott McCormick in the Republican primary for the right to challenge Democrat Thompson, an upset winner in 2016 over then GOP incumbent Steve McManus. Possel, an advocate of measures easing the process of suburban deannexation from Memphis, grilled Thompson on the issue but seemed not to succeed in establishing much distance between her own positions and his.

• M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams, a frequent and so far unsuccessful candidate for public office, won a signal victory last week in the courtroom of Chancellor Walter Evans, who ruled that Williams was improperly prohibited by the state Democratic Party from running as a Democrat in his planned primary race against 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen. The controversy had been accompanied by accusations of racism against Cohen and state Democratic chair Mary Mancini from such backers of Williams as Lexie Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party’s primary board. Resolution of the case restores Alexandria-Williams’ name to the ballot.

UPDATE: Carter argues convincingly that she did not make the indicated adverse comments about Rep. Cohen, though she acknowledges being critical of Mancini and Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democrats..

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Politics Politics Feature

Taking Turns in Tennessee and Shelby County Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Among other outcomes desired by Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee was the voucher legislation long proposed by Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey but now dropped in light of opposition from suburban school advocates.

But Lee, whom a recent Whit Ayers poll shows to be running a strong third in the ongoing GOP primary to U.S. Representative Diane Black and former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd, is still a strong believer in partnerships between government and the faith-based community. It’s the premise of his current statewide tour, the third so far in the campaign of the Williamson County businessman and farmer. Monday saw Lee and his wife Maria at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Life Choices pregnancy care center in Memphis.

Lee was preceded to town by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean, the former Nashville mayor, who was hosted at a Friday luncheon by another faith-based group, the Memphis Baptist Ministerial Association, at Mt. Moriah Baptist Church on Wellington. Noting that in recent times Republicans and Democrats have taken turns with two-term incumbencies as governor, Dean said “It’s our turn” to occupy the governor’s chair. And he also noted in a conversation with reporters after his public remarks that Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, the two governors preceding whoever is elected this year, had both, like himself, served previously as mayors. 

Jackson Baker

Bill and Maria Lee in Memphis

Dean deemed his service as mayor, a nonpartisan position, to be good preparation for the task of presiding over a state like Tennessee, with a population that stretches ideologically from left to right but has, for most of its history, kept a political balance.

All’s Well That Ends Well: The Shelby County Commission, with a light and theoretically non-controversial agenda to deal with on Monday, saw a bit of drama.

One audience member, District 13 Commission candidate Charlie Belenky, took issue with the body’s setting a relatively quick April 2nd date to appoint a successor to departing General Sessions Judge Larry Potter. Belenky’s point was that any appointee would have a running start and an advantage over potential election rivals. The commission’s retort was that the traffic in Potter’s court was so brisk as to permit no delay.

JB

Dr Yahweh, a.k.a. Lance ‘Sweet Willie Wine,’ at the dock during Monday’s Commission meeting

Another audience member quarreled in vain with the commission’s long-established practice of awarding grants to local nonprofit charitable organizations, the case in point being one to Memphis Inner City Rugby.

And a final audience speaker, the ubiquitous activist Dr. Yahweh, delivered a long philippic against what he deemed the poisonous evil of fluoridaton in local water. Against all expectations, he ended up earning an ovation as a hero, not for his anti-fluoride message, but for his proud history, 50 years ago, when, as Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson, a member of the Invaders, he was associated with the cause of the sanitation workers striking that year and with the memory of the slain martyr Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 

All’s Well That Ends Well II: Ed Ford Jr., a two-term city councilman, now one of eight candidates (7 Democrats and 1 Republican) seeking Position 9 on the Shelby County Commission, drew a slew of heavy hitters to a Monday evening fund-raiser at Alchemy restaurant. On hand were such as realtor Bobbi Gillis, Cooper-Young mogul Charlie Ryan, Grizzlies exec Jason Wexler, several sitting commissioners and fellow council members, businessman/political broker Karl Schledwitz, and former Mayor AC Wharton.

A grateful Ford delivered himself of some lengthy remarks in which he extolled the current council and remembered being the seventh or decisive vote in several controversial council measures, notably including a controversial one that altered the benefits package of Memphis poilicemen in the interests of the city’s solvency.

Wharton, whose election loss in 2015 may have owed something to that moment, responded with a reminiscence of his own, backing up Ford’s view. And, as an incidental part of the general kumbaya, the former mayor co-existed jovially with Schledwitz, a 2015 supporter whose inadvertently leaked election-day prophecy of a Wharton loss to Jim Strickland had been the source of tension at the time. 

For further political news and pictures, see also the slideshow An Eye on Politics at memphisflyer.com.

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Politics Politics Feature

Two Approaches to Political Advertising

Anybody who’s been raised since the advent of television (which is everybody now alive) knows the importance of TV ads in political races. The advertising phase of several campaigns is just now coming into prominence. In the case of Shelby County political races, there are but two months to go before the May 1st election day in the Republican and Democratic primaries. Statewide races, which culminate in August, have a bit more lead time.  

Two new ads that are just now getting to be seen by the public indicate wholly different strategies. One is on behalf of Shelby County Trustee and GOP county mayor candidate David Lenoir. The other is for gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd of Knoxville, the former state Commissioner of Economic Development.

Though Lenoir is well known in local government circles, he is not exactly a household name. Accordingly, his new 30-second TV spot attempts to fill a name-ID gap between himself and primary opponent Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, a firebrand who is adept at gathering free media coverage for himself.

Lenoir’s spot begins with an image of a football helmet, which fades into a shot of the candidate as a young man, wearing the crimson uniform of the University of Alabama, and clearly game-ready. A voice-over then explains, “When an injury ended his dreams to play in the NFL, David Lenoir refused to stand on the sidelines.”

In fact, Lenoir, whose athletic career ended prematurely due to injury, was once a highly touted defensive end for the fearsome Crimson Tide. The duration of the ad shows images of Lenoir at work and on the campaign stump, looking both accessible and able, while the voice-over speaks of his “reduc[ing] county debt and saving taxpayers millions.” The ad promises that Lanier will “fight to protect our neighborhoods and strengthen our schools” and contends that Shelby Countians “need a mayor with drive and determination.” 

Lenoir has ample funding and will be able to play that ad, and subsequent ones, abundantly in the face of Roland’s newsmaking skills and hot-button pushing, and his other GOP opponent, Joy Touliatos, whose pleasant countenance is displayed on several well-placed billboards on county roadways. No doubt each of them has a TV campaign in mind as well.

Meanwhile, Boyd, a pleasant, mild-mannered man who was a highly successful businessman (Invisible Fences) before his service in state government, where he was known as a moderate, is up against a primary opponent in U.S. Rep. Diane Black who is as well-funded as he is and has a strong hold on her party’s ultra-right constituency.

So Boyd, who has run a couple of TV ads already, stressing his business success, his grit as a distance runner, and his ambitions on behalf of economic development and education, has belatedly decided to contest Black (one of whose ads boasts her readiness to “stand up to the weak-kneed people in my own party”) on her own ground.

Accordingly, while the images in Boyd’s new ad are similar to those in his previous ones, a voice-over intones that the candidate “believes that the right to life comes from God, not the government,” and that people “who can work should work and not permanently live on welfare,” while a subscript on the screen blasts the notion of sanctuary cities. The ad concludes, “What really matters is faith, families, and a good-paying job. A conservative businessman, not a politician.”

Asked about the ad over the weekend in Memphis, where he attended the GOP’s Lincoln Day banquet, Boyd said, “If I’m asking Republicans for their votes, I need to assure them that I share their values.”

The ad, an effort to co-opt an opponent’s issues, is clearly a gamble, and it remains to be seen whether it serves the candidate’s purposes or, alternatively, could backfire with GOP voters looking for a moderate candidate.