Tennessee Senate race 2014

As has become increasingly evident — and was predictable from the start — the November 4th election ballot in Shelby County lacks the punch and volatility that was so evident in the August 7th “big ballot” election, with its myriad of party primaries, judges’ races, and eccentric personalities.

The one possible marquee race for local and statewide voters, that for the U.S. Senate, saw both candidates — the highly favored Republican incumbent, Lamar Alexander, and his Democratic challenger, Knoxville attorney Gordon Ball — stumbling this week in their efforts to gain momentum and positive public attention.

Alexander, it will be remembered, polled only 49.5 percent — a minority — of the total Republican primary vote on August 7th, a circumstance that prompted him to go hat-in-hand last month in search of support from his closest challenger, Tea Party-backed state Representative Joe Carr of Lascassas.

Carr polled 40.6 percent of the primary vote, despite having spent only $1.1 million on his campaign against Alexander’s $7.1 million, and despite restricting his efforts essentially to his Middle Tennessee bailiwick. Carr campaigned very little in East Tennessee and was basically a no-show in populous Shelby County, home of another challenger, wealthy radiologist/businessman George Flinn, who polled 5 percent of the vote as a late entry.)

At their post-election meeting in September, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on Carr’s home ground in Rutherford County, Alexander asked for his runner-up’s support but failed to get anything more than an assertion from Carr that he would “think about it.” The TNReport.com news site reported this week that Carr, having duly thought about it, still isn’t ready to endorse the GOP incumbent.

“It’s not up to me. It’s up to Senator Alexander. The ball’s in his court,” Carr was quoted as saying. Reportedly, he is insisting that the senator, who has issued a series of ambiguous statements about the hot-button issues of Common Core and immigration, be more explicit in opposing the former and standing against any variant of amnesty on the latter. (For what it’s worth, Democrat Ball has done just that.)

Apparently, there are other obstacles to a rapprochement between Alexander and his former primary challenger. Carr is said to be have been resentful that Alexander failed to return “five or six” would-be concession calls from him, beginning on election night, and made a point of extracting an apology from Alexander on that score when the two of them met in September.

Carr was evidently rankled also by a poll released shortly before the August election that misleadingly showed Senator Alexander leading his challenger by 30 percent.

If Alexander was having his problems in squaring personal and political accounts with Carr (and, by implication, with hardcore Tea Partiers), Ball remained luckless in his attempts to get Alexander to even talk directly about their differences on a debate platform (though the two will appear, along with other statewide candidates, in a Farm Bureau forum two weeks from now).

The Democrat had troubles of another kind, too, stemming from a Buzzfeed.com report that Ball’s campaign website consisted almost entirely of boilerplate cribbed verbatim from the published platforms of other Democratic Senate candidates — including Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

One example of many may suffice.

Warren: “We need to put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges, upgrading our water systems, teaching our kids, and protecting our communities — earning paychecks and keeping Massachusetts growing.”

Ball: “That’s why it is so important that we get people back to work right now, rebuilding our roads and bridges, upgrading our water systems, teaching our kids, and protecting our communities, earning paychecks and keeping Tennessee and America growing.”

Buzzfeed’s disclosure of this and the numerous other examples of cloned prose on Ball’s website forced an embarrassed response from the candidate (“I had no idea that this material was cut and pasted on my website from other sources.”) and a righteously phrased demand from state Republican Chairman Chris Devaney that Ball exit the race: “Gordon Ball, with nearly everything on his website plagiarized, should do the same and halt his fraudulent campaign today.”

Trace Sharp, a spokeswoman for the Ball campaign, would later set forth the obvious, that a campaign staffer, since departed, had assembled a series of statements on issues from various sources that Ball could concur with and placed them on the candidate’s website.

To reprise Horatio in Act One of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.” Virtually all candidates, all of the time, lean heavily on boilerplate prepared by staffers for their public statements. Unlike major addresses, which usually are designed specifically for candidates by their speechwriters (or improved by the candidates themselves), talking points and website pronouncements hardly every reflect much originality.

To be blunt, it is highly doubtful that most of the aforesaid sources for the Ball website — Senators Manchin, Brown, Hagan, and Warren — were the actual authors of the remarks cribbed by the unidentified Ball staffer. And it surely wouldn’t be that difficult to uncover remarks made by Republicans — Alexander and Carr, say, on the evils of the “Obama agenda” — that displayed a remarkable sameness.

Still and all, this week’s disclosure was a setback for Ball, as Carr’s latest blowing-off of Alexander was for the Senator.

• But, if the U.S. Senate race may so far have failed to inspire many Tennesseans, other issues on the November 4th ballot — notably four constitutional amendments — were beginning to gain traction.

A case in point is Amendment One, which would essentially nullify a 2000 state Supreme Court decision that struck down the state’s power to impose significant restrictions on the right to abortion — going further in many ways than the U.S. Supreme Court itself had.

The amendment reads: “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother.”

Proponents of the amendment say that it merely makes the Tennessee Constitution neutral on abortion. Opponents say it is designed to roll back the hard-won rights of women and cite the last prepositional phrase, from “including” on, as being especially ominous.

Resisters to Amendment One had back-to-back meetings this week. The Tennessee Democratic Party held a Tuesday night fund-raiser at the Racquet Club to oppose the amendment, and Planned Parenthood was host for a scheduled “Clergy Perspective” event opposing the amendment at Evergreen Presbyterian Church.

Adherents were also active. Two examples: Proponents of Amendment One were conspicuous in passing out literature at the two-day Bartlett Festival at Freeman Park this past weekend, and an organization called Concerned Women for America held a press conference in Nashville on Tuesday to announce results of a poll purporting to show Tennesseans favor the amendment.

All of this is tip-of-the-iceberg. Clearly, much more public activity is coming on this issue, as, for that matter, on Amendment Two, which establishes a method of selecting state appellate judges via gubernatorial appointment, coupled with legislative ratification; and on Amendment Three, which would enact an explicit constitutional ban on a state income tax.

• Some 70 attendees at a “legislative forum” held by the Tennessee Nurses Association (TNA) last week got more gratification than they may have expected from a cross-section of public officials and candidates.

The number one item on the TNA’s wish list seemed to be a call for legislation in the next session of the General Assembly that would confer “full practice authority” on several categories of advanced nurse practitioners.

Such authority, sanctioned in only 16 states, would grant the qualifying nurses latitude, independently of supervising physicians, to write prescriptions, make medical assessments, order tests, and make referrals.

Among those endorsing the request were U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat; state Senate candidate Flinn, a Republican; Democratic state Representatives Karen Camper of Memphis and Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley; and Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate Tom Emerson.

Gordon Ball, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator, was in Memphis last week, and he sat down for a lengthy interview on his campaign and his hopes for an upset victory over incumbent Republican Senator Lamar Alexander.

As Ball noted, Alexander had eked out his renomination on August 7th, polling slightly less than 50 percent of the total vote in a Republican primary in which he was opposed by state Representative Joe Carr, a Tea Party supported Middle Tennessean, and George Flinn, the multi-millionaire Memphis physician/businessman.

Carr, who finished strong with 40 percent of the total vote, had gone unmentioned for most of the primary campaign, Ball noted, but toward the end of the race, Alexander had begun making formal attacks on his main challenger by name. “When he started mentioning Joe Carr, it was a sign that things were getting tight for Lamar,” Ball said.

Ball has challenged Alexander to a debate but doesn’t expect that to happen. “Lamar’s going by the incumbent’s playbook. He’s not going to debate me. He will never mention me, unless it gets close.”

From that standpoint, the Democratic nominee can take heart from a response to his candidacy this week by the state Republican Party, which has not only mentioned him but has incorporated his name in a brand-new website entitled ObamaBallAgenda.com.

According to the site, Tennessee faces a veritable liberal onslaught this fall in the form of various nationally sanctioned candidates and causes. And, “at the top of the ticket, will be a man who would be one more vote for Barack Obama’s harmful agenda — Gordon Ball. Mr. Ball, a liberal personal injury lawyer from Knoxville, will only serve to empower Obama and strengthen Washington’s stranglehold on our economy.”

Ball sees the relationship between himself and the national Democratic Party quite differently. Noting the disinclination of the Obama presidential campaign to pump much in the way of resources into Tennessee during the 2008 and 2012 races, the Knoxvillian said, “I think the national Democratic Party has written Tennessee off. That’s not good for the state.” But he shrugged and said, “That’s all right with me. We’ll run without them.”

A corollary to what Ball sees as a lack of interest in Tennessee from national party sources is the fact that the Tennessee Democratic Party itself is not exactly in the pink of political health. Rather famously, the party has, within the past decade, lost control of the governorship and the General Assembly, becoming little more than a token minority in both the state House and the state Senate.

And, for the second time in the past two statewide elections, Tennessee Democrats have failed to mount a serious challenge in a major statewide race. In 2012, the party suffered the embarrassment of seeing Mark Clayton, an off-brand candidate with alleged membership in an anti-gay hate group, become its nominee against GOP Senator Bob Corker in an almost unnoticed Democratic primary.

And in 2014, via yet another back-burner primary, the Democratic candidate who emerged as the party’s nominee for governor, to oppose well-heeled incumbent Republican Bill Haslam, is one Charlie Brown, a retired construction worker from Oakdale, Tennessee, whose victory in a large but largely anonymous primary field owed much to his name, redolent of a well-known comic-strip character and alphabetically first on the Democratic primary ballot.

With the wry grin that seems an innate part of his persona, Ball commented, “I wish I had his name recognition.”

But the fact is, Ball represents what both Democrats and Republicans recognize as a serious political possibility. He and fellow Knoxville attorney Terry Adams conducted a primary race that, in the quality of its rhetoric and intensity, was something of a throwback to the now vanished time when Democrats ruled the state. Their race went down to the wire, with Ball, considered the centrist in the race, prevailing on August 7th with 36.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, against 35.6 percent for Adams, an unabashed liberal.

The two Democrats had actually agreed on most issues — including a need for an increase in the minimum wage, support for parity pay for women and the pro-choice position on abortion, provision of equal opportunity for the gay community, and full-throated backing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee, where, Ball says, some 160,000 people can’t get medical care and 28 hospitals are in danger of closing for lack of the ACA-provided Medicaid-expansion funds.

He and Adams had differed most notably on Ball’s espousal of a flat tax, which Adams considered regressive and counter to the needs of working people and a possible barrier to his post-primary support of Ball. Again, the Ball shrug — indicating, in this case, flexibility on the issue. “We need tax reform. I don’t think anybody disagrees. I just want to be in middle of that debate. And I’m for whatever helps the middle class remain strong and viable and that can raise money to pay off our $17 trillion debt.”

In any case, Adams wasted little time climbing aboard the Ball bandwagon and now serves as his former opponent’s East Tennessee co-chair.

One edge that helped Ball in his primary campaign was the wealth amassed during a long and successful legal career. To a certain degree, he can self-finance, as he did during the primary, shelling out some $400,000 for TV ads. He knows, however, that Alexander himself is flush and suspects that Governor Bill Haslam, scion of his family’s Pilot truck-stop fortune and beneficiary of a hugely successful GOP fund-raising campaign, will help the GOP out-spend him.

The point gnaws at Ball. “I’m going to make a strong statement,” he said: “This state is controlled by the Haslam family. Think about it. They own Bob Corker. They own Lamar Alexander. And they have the governor’s seat. Now what else do they want? … It’s just not right that one group of people controls this state. If you don’t think that’s happening, you’re living on another planet.”

Citing polls by Rasmussen and The New York Times that show something like a 47 percent to 32 percent edge for Alexander, Ball predicts the kind of shrinking in the incumbent’s margin that occurred late in the Republican primary, and partly for the same reason — distrust for the incumbent among Tea Party Tennesseans.

“We don’t agree on every issue, obviously, but they see Lamar as being for Common Core [in education] and amnesty [on the immigration issue]. They’re against Common Core and amnesty, and so am I.”

Ball is buoyed by hopes of making inroads among such disaffected Republicans and by what he sees as a largely united Democratic Party (though certain well-known Democrats like former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell and former Congressman John Tanner — “lobbyists now,” Ball says dismissively — are backing Alexander.)

He has worked up a good case of scorn for Alexander, whom he once supported and whom he now sees as having fallen ito irrelevance from what had been a valuable public career. “How do you go from a job that pays $150,000 to being worth $40 million?” he asks rhetorically. “He just needs to take his money and go home.”

Ball gibes at the incumbent Senator, who back in 1978, dressed in a plaid shirt, had based his campaign for Governor on a walk across the state.” Things — and Alexander — have changed, Ball maintains.

“He said in the primary that citizens of the state of Tennessee could ask him questions if they saw him walking down the street. Well, I’ve been in Tennessee for 65 years, and I’ve never seen him walking down the street. If I ever do see him, I’ve got some questions for him.”