Nice Guy Finishes First

To try to capture the mayor’s office, Bob Clement cobbled together a coalition of courthouse hacks, old folks, right-wingers and country bumpkins. At one time, that might have been a winning formula in Nashville. Not anymore. Tuesday, voters again showed their inclination to elect the candidate who they think best fits their image of Twang Town as a progressive city with a bright future. In rejecting Clement, the age-old pol with the hillbilly drawl running in his umpteenth campaign, 52 percent of Nashville voters chose the newcomer Karl Dean, another mayor in the mold of Bill Purcell and Phil Bredesen—a cosmopolitan, Northeastern transplant who speaks without a trace of Southern accent.

While the Clement gathering at the Millennium Maxwell House Hotel had the jocular atmosphere of the deck of the Titanic—a band playing upbeat music to crowds with long faces and a sense of doom—Karl Dean was introduced for his victory speech by Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”

Dean described a moment Tuesday evening after the polls had closed, when he found himself alone with his opponent at the Cathedral of Praise polling precinct, and the two shook hands to congratulate one another on a campaign well played. “We’re in this together. And I couldn’t think of a better ending,” Dean said, surrounded on a stage by folks both predictable and curious—erstwhile mayoral candidate Howard Gentry, who finished third in the Aug. 2 general election and declined to openly support either runoff candidate, was among the latter.

“I think the city saw this as an important election,” Dean told a press gaggle afterward, adding that he credits Clement in part. “He brought voters out, and I applaud him for that.”

For Clement, it was almost certainly the end to a long and generally lackluster career that was based almost entirely on name recognition—a precious political commodity that he inherited. Clement’s father, Frank, was an enormously popular Tennessee governor in the 1950s and ’60s, but the son never enjoyed the same electoral appeal. He lost two statewide races—one for governor and one for the Senate—and couldn’t win a congressional seat in an unfortunate foray into West Tennessee. Tuesday’s defeat must have been particularly disappointing given that it came in Nashville, whose voters elected Clement to Congress seven times in the major successes of his nearly four decades in politics.

In what was likely his last concession speech, an emotional Clement told a story about his father, as he has done countless times to political audiences.

“I’ve had so many wonderful experiences in life,” Clement told the dejected crowd, before the spiel turned somewhat bizarre—and a bit defensive. “Karl, I couldn’t be negative if I wanted to be. And you know that’s true. I’m a positive person. I look to the future. I don’t look to the past. I know I would have been a great mayor. I remember something my father told me a long time ago. I asked my dad when he lost a race, I said, ‘Dad, you lost this race.’ And he said, ‘No, I just didn’t win as many votes as that other fella.’ That’s the way I feel.”

Afterward, Clement acknowledged to reporters that, as a lifelong Nashvillian, he might have been out of step with the city’s changing electorate. “I guess I’m on the endangered species list when it comes to Nashville,” he said.

Clement was seen as the prohibitive favorite at the start of the mayor’s contest, especially after District Attorney Torry Johnson decided against running. All the smart money went Clement’s way. But as he filled his war chest, with substantial donations from real estate developers, the city’s so-called progressives—a mix of liberal Democrats and moderate Lamar Alexander/Bill Frist-voting Republicans—went looking for a credible challenger. In their view, Clement was a special-interest slot machine and not smart enough to be mayor. As their anybody-but-Bob candidate, they hit upon Dean, the Metro law director whom they saw as fresh, intelligent, telegenic and—most importantly—wealthy enough to self-finance his campaign.

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.)