Nice Guy Finishes First

It took $1 million and four months of TV advertising, but Dean—spending lavishly from his heiress wife’s coal-mining fortune—went from fifth place and single digits in the polls to finish first, 545 votes ahead of Clement, in the August election. Dean had seized the momentum as the runoff began, but Clement immediately put Dean on the defensive. He accused Dean of trying to buy the election with his wife’s money and made the dubious assertion that Dean was soft on crime because he represented criminal defendants as Metro public defender in the 1980s. Clement even needled Dean for growing up in Massachusetts. (That was one of Clement’s obvious appeals to Nashville’s Southern chauvinists. His campaign produced an Internet video with a soundtrack straight out of Hee Haw. It was as if Clement were running for mayor of Petticoat Junction, as one commenter to the Scene’s Pith in the Wind blog put it.)

Except for references in TV ads to “old-style politics,” Dean was relentlessly positive, not only refusing to counterattack but failing even to give an effective explanation of why he thought he’d make a better mayor than Clement. In an odd twist, he drew criticism in the media for refusing to go negative. The Scene compared Dean to Michael Dukakis, whose loss to George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign set new standards for campaign cluelessness. Even Dean’s own advisers were frustrated. Over drinks, one griped to Scene staffers, “We’re talking about a candidate with about as much political sense as this beer mug.”

Clement wanted to make the election a referendum on taxes. Dean needed to make the election a referendum on Clement. His 14 years in Congress were decidedly unproductive, and he was making lavishly expensive promises as a mayoral candidate while at the same time vowing not to raise taxes.

Finally, only four days before the election, Dean went on the offensive. He held a press conference at the concrete wasteland known as the Clement Landport, which was supposed to serve as a mass transit hub when Clement secured its $4.6 million funding as a congressman. Dean called it “an idea with a lack of forethought and no follow-though.” He said, “People are tired of politicians making promises they can’t keep.” A TV ad went up, slapping Clement for his tax votes in Congress. At the time, the race was a statistical dead heat. The ad might have put Dean over the top. Or maybe Dean was right all along: voters wanted a positive candidate, and what did the trick was his last warm-and-gooey commercial in which one of his children tousled his hair.

Even if not many observers realized it in the beginning, Dean was always likely to emerge as the winner. And not just because of his wealth. (All told, he threw more than $1 million of his family money into the campaign and outspent Clement by around a half-million dollars.) But also, as law director under Purcell, Dean was heir to voters’ good feelings about the city’s advancement and relative prosperity. Multiple polls have shown the public is content with Nashville’s direction over the past 16 years under Bredesen and Purcell, and Dean promised to continue that.

By contrast, Clement was running as the populist underdog and trying to make people angry about taxes. It was a miscalculation by the Clement campaign and chief strategist Bill Fletcher, who believed the Nashville electorate was trending conservative and was gullible enough to fall for a political cliché—the no-tax pledge. A City Paper opinion poll in the campaign’s last days showed nearly 60 percent thought a property tax increase could sometimes be justified. Fletcher should have read his own campaign’s polls more closely.

Clement has told the Scene that it’s “most doubtful” he will run for political office again. He’s spent all the political capital he has, it seems. In fact, by virtue of his tough campaign talk during the past few months, he’s probably made a few enemies—not the least of whom is Metro Police Chief Ronal Serpas. In multiple speeches, Clement hinted that he would target Serpas for firing.

In fact, perhaps the best quote of election night came from someone in the media gaggle.

“If I were Bob, I would not drive fast.”