Tag: Randy Boyd

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Shelby GOP Does Another Lincoln Day, With a Few Differences

CREDIT: JB

JB

Senators Tim Scott and Bob Corker at Lincoln Day

As usual, the ballroom of the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on Saturday was filled to capacity for this year’s version of the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet. But, in what is shaping up as a year of serious competition in GOP primary races, there were some interesting deviations in party harmony.

A couple of them came from the event’s keynote speaker, U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who told an odd joke that was probably meant affectionately but came off, no doubt inadvertently, as seeming to be at the expense of U.S. Rep. Diane Black, who had introduced him and whom Scott had acknowledged to be a friend.

The joke’s beginning was itself inauspicious. Scott began to describe a “dream” in which U.S. Senator Bob Corker, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and Black had all died the same day. As “big shots,” they were all instructed by St. Peter about the special rules of Heaven. Corker, caught trying to turn a real estate deal, was the first to be charged with a transgression.

The Senator ended up being chained to Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer as a punishment, while “a voice that sounded like thunder” proclaimed: “Bob Corker,you have broken the rules of Heaven, and this is your punishment, for all eternity!”

Next, Blackburn was chained to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi for some obsure misprision, and the same voice thundered, “Marsha Blackburn,you have broken the rules of Heaven, and this is your punishment, for all eternity!”

Then the clincher. In the dream Scott saw Rep. Black chained to Super Bowl quarterback Tom Brady, and, inevitably, the thunderous voice began to sound again: “Tom Brady, you have broken the rules of Heaven….” Etc., etc.

That quirky knee-slapper was followed immediately with a sentimental recollection by Scott, an African-American and the first Republican of his race to be elected to the Senate from South Carolina, of his grandfather’s being enabled to cast a vote for Barack Obama as the first African American to be elected President. The fact that Obama was a Democrat apparently compelled the Senator to tell the Republican audience, “Of course, I canceled his vote out.”

All of that was the fun stuff. But there was some intra-party dissension for real, in the course of the evening — some of it stemming from the fact of Black, one of several Republican candidates for Governor, being asked to introduce Scott, whose presence she had been helpful in arranging.

That didn’t sit well with the camp of at least one other candidate, former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd. According to several accounts, Chip Saltsman, Boyd’s campaign manager, confronted County Republican chair Lee Mills, impresario for this year’s Lincoln Day affair, and upbraided him for what the Boyd people saw as giving Black an unfair advantage. Saltsman allegedly used the ‘p’ word.

Meanwhile, Boyd’s press aide, Bonnie Brezina, got into something of a tangle with Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, a candidate for County Mayor who had purchased three tables at the banquet for friends and supporters. According to Roland and others, Brezina attempted to claim one of the tables, close to the dais, for Boyd and supporters, and an argument ensued before she relented.

Saturday was otherwise a good day for Boyd, Saltsman, and Brazina, who opened up a Shelby County headquarters for the gubernatorial candidate in the same Poplar Plaza space that had been used by Jim Strickland in his victorious 2015 race for Mayor. On hand for the affair were such supporters as Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and two new Boyd endorsers, Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo and County Commissioner David Reaves, all three of whom delivered extended statements of praise for Boyd.

Another candidate who did a previous event in Memphis before attending the Lincoln Day festivities was Beth Harwell, the Speaker of the state House of Representatives. At the request of former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and Shelby County Defender Stephen Busch, both principals of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Foundation, Harwell went to the South Memphis headquarters of the Foundation to discuss with them the Foundation’s activities in mitigating the effects on children of adverse experience early in life.

From a news-media point of view, the dominant point of interest at Lincoln Day was the chance to ask Senator Corker about newly prevalent rumors that he is reconsidering his previously expressed decision not to run for reelection. To several reporters individually, and to a whole scrum of them after the banquet, Corker said he had nothing new to say about the matter and disclaimed any adverse feeling about either Rep. Blackburn, who has become the obvious frontrunner in the GOP primary, or “the Democrat running,” former Governor Phil Bredesen.

JB

Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo, gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd, Commissioner David Reaves, Mayor Mark Luttrell, and Boyd aide Bonnie Brezina at the candidate’s Memphis headquarters opening

JB

House Speaker/gubernatorial candidate Beth Harwell, Public Defender Stephen Busch and former Mayor A C Wharton discuss the work of the ACE foundation on Saturday.

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Politics Politics Feature

Dogs and Ponies

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

It is still 2017, which means that candidates for election in 2018 see their task as introducing themselves to the electorate and, when gathered together on the same stage with their declared primary opponents, are still making nice with each other, more or less.

Such was the case this past Friday night at a gubernatorial forum arranged for GOP hopefuls during the annual convention of the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women, a weekend affair held at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn.

There are six declared Republican candidates to date, and they all sat together in a row on stage, ready to be evaluated by several hundred women from Republican clubs across the state. Although a few of them may have appeared together on ad hoc occasions before, this was evidently one of the first times they were all assembled en masse, and the semiotics of the affair were such as to put them all — four women and two men — on an artificially equal footing.

In fact, three of the female candidates — 6th District Congressman (she prefers the term) Diane Black, state Senator Mae Beavers, and state House Speaker Beth Harwell — all wore nearly identical shades of red. The fourth, Kay White, a Johnson City activist, wore a dun-colored outfit, and that shade of difference, no doubt a happenstance, happened to coincide with her status as an outlier of sorts, with nothing like the name recognition or advance ballyhoo of the others.

The two men — former state Commissioner of Economic Development Randy Boyd and Franklin businessman/farmer Bill Lee — both wore standard blue jackets, though Boyd’s belonged to a suit and Lee’s to an informal outfit that included khaki pants and an open-collared shirt.

Jackson Baker

Karl Dean waits turn to speak at a Democratic meeting

Here, too, in a way, medium was message: Boyd, the earliest declared candidate, looked like what he was, a key member of Governor Bill Haslam‘s state government, the deviser of Tennessee Promise, Drive to 55, and numerous other Haslam initiatives. Lee, by contrast, sported a folksier look consistent with his professed persona as a non-politician type, a Cincinnatus ready to put down his plow and come to the aid of the commonwealth.

Interestingly, both men are doing idiosyncratic turns on a venerable Tennessee tradition — the solitary cross-Tennessee trek, whereby a candidate goes from place to place, starting at one end of the state, usually East Tennessee, meeting and greeting all the way, and ends up with a ceremonial final splash in Memphis. That was the literal finale for then-gubernatorial candidate Lamar Alexander in 1978, who walked his way across Tennessee in a plaid shirt and took a tentative dip in the Mississippi River at the very end.

Lee, in fact, had formally arrived in town only the previous day, via tractor (though he is basically a cattle farmer), concluding a “95-Counties-in-95-Days” pilgrimage begun in Mountain City on the North Carolina border. He got here in time for a Thursday night riverboat ride sponsored for the GOP rank-and-file by the Shelby County Republican Party, then met up with some local folks in Millington on Friday at a pizza cafe.

Boyd, who has been in Memphis a multitude of times already, is theoretically still on his way here. A veteran marathoner, he is about mid-way on a run across the state, doing eight miles a day and then holing up in this or that township, making a point of greeting as many local folks as he can before moving on. He went back to his route after Saturday’s forum, though he is liable to be in town a few more times for fund-raisers and such before he technically concludes his trip.

At this stage, the differences between candidates on issues can largely be divined by reading between the lines. On Friday night, all were professed conservatives (as, indeed, all Republicans describe themselves, even the few bona fide moderates in today’s right-tilting GOP), all are four-square for traditional values, all are budget hawks, all want government to create a climate propitious for business.

The most zealous partisans seemed to be Black, who began her political career as a state legislator opposed to TennCare; Beavers, a self-styled “Christian constitutional conservative” with low tolerance for taxes or diversity on social issues, and White, a veteran Tea Partier and former Trump campaign official (who, paradoxically, had kind words for Democratic icons JFK and Harry Truman).

The closest thing to a one-on-one clash was Black’s questioning of optimistic Tennessee employment figures immediately after Boyd had enumerated them, though she did not call him out by name.

The forum was what cynics might call a dog-and-pony show, in that there was more show than substance, though there were ample opportunities for seasoned members of the audience to let their imaginations do some divining. 

The GOP gubernatorial primary will be a hard-fought affair, with several of the candidates able to boast both personal wealth and significant financial support, and the eventual nominee will no doubt win by a plurality, probably a narrow one. In such circumstances, major disagreements are inevitable, and the polite relations of Friday night almost certainly will be just a memory.

• Meanwhile, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, one of two declared Democratic candidates for governor (the other is state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley) turned up at a well-attended district meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Party in Collierville, touting three issues in a brief speech: education, jobs, and health care.

Unlike the Republicans, who tended to talk up their opposition to Common Core, Dean emphasized a need to raise teachers’ salaries. And he won tumultuous applause with a promise to pursue Medicaid expansion, something no GOP candidate is likely to entertain.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Tennessee GOP Hopefuls Aim at Governor’s Office

The process of giving elective birth to Tennessee’s 50th governor got underway this week, with the first filings of campaign financial disclosures. At this embryonic stage of the race, Randy Boyd, Knoxville multi-millionaire businessman and former commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD), shapes up as the gubernatorial frontrunner among Republicans — which means frontrunner generally, in our red state.

Governor Bill Haslam is a Boyd buddy and appointed him to the ECD, providing a statewide stage to perform to the general applause from the state’s politically astute business leaders.

Randy Boyd

Boyd has hired veteran political operative Chip Saltsman to run the campaign, has lined up public support from a bunch of mayors and a few legislators (mostly East Tennesseans), is working hard and can self-finance — putting in $2 million in direct funding rather than the traditional loan — while collecting another $2.3 million from other donors.

The lame duck governor, of course, isn’t publicly endorsing anyone in the primary, but many of his best political friends see the election of Boyd, who’s already facing attacks from arch conservatives, as the next best thing to a third term for the mild-mannered and moderate incumbent.  

At the other end of the spectrum, politically and financially, is Republican state Senator Mae Beavers of Mount Juliet, who has the strongest right-wing credentials in the field and a small corps of devout followers. Theoretically, if she can maintain that status, Beavers might have at least a long shot at winning the nomination. But she’s not known statewide and reported just $56,721 raised in her first disclosure, including $20,000 transferred from her state Senate fund.

U.S. Representative Diane Black of Gallatin, the House Budget Committee chair, has told a lot of folks she wants to run but is hesitant while serving as moderator in federal funding fights among Washington GOP factions. The delay in a campaign kickoff has already hurt her prospects, and a budget blowup could hurt more — or help, if everything falls into place. She and her husband, David, are multi-millionaires and reportedly ready to spend whatever it takes in playing hard-ball catchup. Black is a formidable campaigner who has a past that includes surviving bitter political clashes and overcoming personal problems. Her overall prospects in a governor’s race are something of a mystery at this point.

Senator Mae Beavers

House Speaker Beth Harwell has already earned a note in state political history by becoming the first woman elected to lead a chamber of the General Assembly. She touted two decades of political experience in announcing her candidacy, having toyed with the idea since at least 2009. That experience, though, has brought negatives as well as positives as Harwell — usually rather reluctantly while striving for some middle-ground stance — chose sides in GOP super-majority squabbling.

In January, she came within 10 votes of losing reelection as speaker, and another roll of the dice at that table would be risky. To the gubernatorial table, she brings about $1 million in seed money available in existing accounts, some self-funding capability, and a long list of potential donors — enough for a respectable run to wind up a political career one way or the other.

Bill Lee, a multi-millionaire Franklin businessman and cattle farmer, is generally regarded as an extreme underdog in making his first run for political office, despite almost matching Boyd in money matters with about $1.4 million collected from friends and a matching amount loaned to his campaign. Lacking an established political base, Lee has been making a pitch to evangelical Christians and presents himself as to the right of Boyd, though not nearly as much in that direction as Beavers — so far. His candidacy threatens to drain some votes from others, but probably not enough to do more than gain experience for another run somewhere down the road.

President Trump’s move to put Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris on the U.S. District Court bench, rather than leave him to follow through with talk of running for governor, means no major candidate from West Tennessee to enjoy that geographic loyalty Boyd seems to be developing in the eastern part of the state. So Boyd enters the western arena on equally unknown footing with the others, all from Middle Tennessee, and maybe benefits a bit.

Arguably, Harwell does, too, since the two legislators run in the same legislative political circles.

Tom Humphrey, formerly with the Knoxville News Sentinel, is a contributing editor of the Tennessee Journal. See Politics, p. 8, for his musings on Democratic gubernatorial candidates.

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Politics Politics Feature

GOP’s Lee Puts His Hat In

Shelby County got a look on Tuesday at Franklin businessman Bill Lee, who formally announced his run for the 2018 governor’s race over the weekend and embarked on what he called a “95-county, 95-day RV tour” of the state.

Lee had acknowledged the likelihood of his candidacy when he appeared, along with other gubernatorial propects, at the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet in February. While in Memphis, he met with reporters and pursued a schedule that included a stop at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission and a visit with Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson, among other local meetings.

“Basically, I’m on a listening tour,” Lee said. His personal bio includes lifetime residence on a cattle farm and management of a company that deals in heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and home improvements. He says he wants to focus on growing jobs and paying attention to overdue rural needs, all while avoiding the expedient of raising taxes.

So far, only Lee and former state director of economic development Randy Boyd, among Republicans, have made official announcements, but other likely GOP gubernatorial candidates are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, state House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville, and Congresswoman Diane Black of Gallatin.

So far, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is the only declared Democratic candidate, though state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is considered a probable entry.

• This week’s Flyer editorial, (p. 10), makes reference to a press conference scheduled for Thursday at the National Civil Rights Museum on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, a nonprofit group whose efforts are coordinated with those of the Equal Justice Initiative, a national organization.

In tandem with the press conference, which relates to the project’s plans to create memorials for victims of lynching (numbering in the neighborhood of 40, according to publicist Howard Robertson), the project has announced a memorial event for one of the victims, Ell Persons, “a 49-year-old black man accused without evidence of murdering Antoinette Rappel, a 16-year-old white girl.”

That event, an “interfaith prayer ceremony,” will take place on May 21st at 3 p.m., “near the site of Summer Avenue and the Wolf River,” where the lynching, not a hanging but a burning at the stake, took place exactly 100 years earlier.

Participants will include representatives of white and black churches, the NAACP, and other individuals and institutions. The public is invited, said Robertson.

• The first of six “community forums” scheduled as part of the effort to re-establish an official Shelby County Democratic Party will take place on Saturday at noon at Black Market Strategies at 5146 Stage Road. The host for that event will be state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

A second event, at 6 p.m. on May 3rd, will be held at the Gallery at 1819 Madison, co-hosted by the Shelby County Young Democrats and the College Democrats. There will be a third forum at the Pickering Center in Germantown on Tuesday, May 9th, hosted by the Germantown Democrats, and a final forum will be held at 6 p.m. on May 15th, at Abyssinian Baptist Church, 3890 Millbranch, under the sponsorship of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Gubernatorial Hopeful Boyd, an East Tennessean, Has Roots in These Parts

CREDIT: JB

JB

GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd with Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell in the Mayor’s office this week

Former state Commissioner of Economic Development Randy Boyd of Knoxville, an early-bird candidate for Governor in 2018, was making the rounds of West Tennessee this past week to show the flag — and in the process to divulge some local roots.

Some of them were even more local — and more personal — than he knew, as he discovered from a stop at the Vasco Smith Shelby County administrative building on Wednesday morning. Boyd had a dual purpose there, to sit down for an interview with the Flyer in the11th floor conference room of County Mayor Mark Luttrell and to overlap that with a courtesy call on the Mayor.

In the Flyer interview, Boyd, the founder of Radio Systems, Inc., which manufactures and distributes a line of electronic pet-related products (“Invisible Fence” being one well-known example) had disclosed the fact that he had been the first member of his family line to be born and raised in East Tennessee and that seven generations of his immediate forebears had resided in the West Tennessee counties of Madison, Obion, and Crockett.

“You’re from Fruitvale?”

In fact, said Boyd, he had made a point of paying homage to his family connections by including as a stop on his announcement tour last month the Crockett County hamlet of Fruitvale (population 64), where he spoke from the stoop of J.O. Boyd’s General Store, which had belonged to one of his relations.

“I believe I set a record for the smallest place to make an announcement from,” Boyd said.

Later, when Luttrell, having disposed of some pre-scheduled mayoral business elsewhere, entered the conference room and joined the conversation, he, too, was apprised of Boyd’s West Tennessee pedigree.

“You’re from Fruitvale?” exclaimed the delighted Luttrell, who went on to explain that he himself had spent some growing-up time in nearby Bells, (population 2,437), also in Crockett County. “Bells is a city, compared to Fruitvale!”


Some reminiscences were swapped back and forth, until it got to the point that both men were fondly recalling individuals from the area that they jointly knew. At one point Luttrell mentioned a lady named Myrtle Rose Emerson. “Aunt Myrtle!” Boyd responded.

All of that may have been a revelation of sorts, but Boyd and Luttrell could already claim a longstanding relationship in their official capacities. As Boyd had noted to the Flyer, he had worked with both Luttrell and the current Mayor’s predecessor, A C Wharton, in developing a program of community-college tuition aid called “Shelby Achieves,” which, along with “Knox Achieves,” in Boyd’s home environs, had been the precursors of the statewide Tennessee Promise program that Governor Bill Haslam has credited Boyd with developing.

For “High Quality Jobs” and “More Local Control”

As Economic Development Commissioner, Boyd had a hand in several of Haslam’s better-known major programs, including Drive to 55 and  Tennessee Reconnect, and he made it clear in the interview that, as Governor, his intent would be to keep on keeping on with such initiatives.

Indeed, in discussing the era of technological and economic progress that he would like to oversee as Governor, Boyd’s very manner of speaking, a rapid-fire but highly focused and by no means off-putting stream-of-consciousness style bespoke an obvious intensity of purpose transcending ambition.

Boyd said that, upon entering government at Haslam’s invitation “my goal was to create a mission for the state. He struck an almost Trump-like note when, in speaking of entrepreneurs, he praised “people who would be disrupters, coming in with new ideas.” His three “key goals” he enumerated as completing the Drive to 55 program (the number representing an ideal minimum of Tennesseans with college degrees or certificates), bringing in “high quality jobs,” and creating a “rural task force [to] take care of people left behind.”

“The state cannot reach its goals unless Memphis reaches its,” said Boyd, who extrapolated a bright future for this area from the fact that Memphis was “Number One in the country” last year in FAFSA filings (applications for federal student aid to attend college).

Boyd sounded one note that would surely be of comfort to Memphians who see state government, at least the legislative part of it, as having increasingly overriden the prerogatives of local government. “I prefer having more local control,” he said, conferring his disapproval of “occasions when people in Nashville think they know better.”