Yankee Doodle Dean

It’s a little after 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning and Karl Dean is going door to door on East Nashville’s Russell Street, writing “Sorry I missed you” on his campaign leaflets and sticking them in the door jams of homes where no one answers. (His campaign staff insists he only stop at the homes of frequent voters, as there’s no time to waste on people unlikely to cast ballots.) The guy who self-financed $1 million in television advertising to help him make the Sept. 11 mayoral runoff is wearing a pair of New Balance running shoes that should have been retired about a decade ago, the rubber soles yellowed with age.

After the voter shuts the door, Dean walks back toward the sidewalk, critiquing himself out loud: “I don’t think saying construction downtown will be ‘compelling’ is really the right word,” he says, shaking his head and smiling self-deprecatingly about the awkward utterance.

While Dean was elected three times as Davidson County public defender—there are still a few campaign matchbooks around his home on Hampton Avenue, which date his first foray into elective office—he was never contested and until announcing his race for mayor at the end of last year never really experienced the day-to-day rigors of retail campaigning.1 He acknowledges that it’s foreign to him but doesn’t seem to view it as too much of a liability—at least not one that can’t be overcome.

“It doesn’t come naturally,” the 51-year-old Dean says of campaigning, as sweat starts to run down the side of his face on this 99-degree day. “I don’t, like, walk into a room and immediately think that people are just dying to hear what I have to say.” At this point, Dean’s press secretary, Janel Lacy, pipes up, saying what a long way the shy Dean has come in matters of pressing the flesh.

But Dean’s case of political ineptitude may not be a complete handicap, as some voters may well view a neophyte politician’s insecurities as somewhat endearing. And there’s a precedent for similar gawkiness among Nashville mayoral candidates, the poster child for this syndrome being Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who served as mayor from 1991-1999 and was given more to doodling in physics problems than chatting it up with voters at backyard bean suppers. Like Dean, he used personal wealth to help get elected.

If Dean prevails against longtime political figure Bob Clement in the runoff, now just under two weeks away, he will be the third mayor in a row to hail originally from the Northeast, settling here as a young man for love or work or both. And like both Bredesen and Mayor Bill Purcell, Dean is well educated, bookish and wholly unassociated with any of the trappings of, as Dean puts it, Nashville’s “old-style politics.”

It was at Vanderbilt Law School where Dean met the woman who would become his wife, the Nashville native who would reel him in and convince him to settle here.2 On a recent morning, the petite Anne Davis strolls into Atlanta Bread Company for an interview with the Scene dressed in a T-shirt, spandex athletic pants and sneakers, wearing not a smidge of makeup and having just come from walking the couple’s two golden retrievers, Dizzy and Lucky.3

She’s not shy about defending her and her husband’s choice to use money inherited from her late uncle, coal mining businessman Joe C. Davis, in this election.4 Her husband’s opponent has criticized that decision loudly, most notably on election night Aug. 2, when he read a speech zinging Dean for relying on the inherited wealth. “Our city is not for sale to the highest bidder,” Clement bellowed.