Garrigan
The local Teamsters union has been making headlines—the kind that aren’t wholly surprising for an organization that used to be known for breaking people’s knee caps and for loyalty to the likes of Jimmy Hoffa.
WKRN-Channel 2 recently reported that Teamsters’ secretary-treasurer Joe Bennett was convicted 20 years ago of hiring a hit man to carry out a murder. And Teamster organizer Calvin Hullett, a former Metro police lieutenant, recently was arrested and charged with aggravated burglary for hiding cameras at a youth camp run by the rival Fraternal Order of Police union. The episode prompted a TBI investigation of the Teamsters, which sources tell the Scene may have since become much more expansive.
Meanwhile, what do local Teamster president Jimmy Neal, an Iraqi arms smuggler, a kooky Indian evangelist who was sued for allegedly defrauding charities and a Tennessee insurance executive being sued for ripping off old people all have in common?
That would be mayoral candidate Bob Clement. (Check out “See Bob Run,” Aug. 20.)
Clement has enjoyed a friendship with the Teamsters’ Neal, and the union—which faces a decertification vote Friday and is fighting to retain the right to be the official bargaining agent for Metro police—has endorsed the mayoral candidate. In a hand-delivered letter to Police Chief Ronal Serpas on Aug. 20, Neal called for the top cop’s resignation, saying, “We have concluded that you have squandered the respect that is due your office by your failings of leadership.” Another Teamster organizer told a Hermitage precinct roll call recently that if Clement were elected, Serpas would be gone the next day.
Asked whether Clement has promised the union he would axe Serpas, Clement mouthpiece Ben Hall consistently says no, telling the Scene that Clement has simply promised to review all Metro department heads. But in public talks, Clement consistently indicates otherwise, saying, “I am concerned about the morale of the police department” and hinting that Serpas’ head would roll.
A letter from Clement to Neal, leaked anonymously to the Scene, suggests the Clement campaign and the union may have an understanding. “Dear Brother Neal,” the letter, dated June 6, begins. “As we’ve discussed repeatedly over the past several months, I look forward to working with you to improve morale…. I would also like to thank you for your courage to support my candidacy early. As you know, the easy way out would be to wait and see how the race shakes out before taking a stand but in typical Teamster fashion, you took a stand based on what you thought was right and best for your members…. Thanks again for your ongoing support and friendship.”
These sorts of sketchy Clement connections have been largely ignored by the local media, given that Clement’s demagoguery on taxes and crime has the city’s stenographic media representatives at rapt attention. Of course, while Clement is all too happy to parrot this nonsense (see Political Notes on p. 12), its brainchild is his longtime strategist Bill Fletcher, who is probably more newsworthy than Clement himself.
Fletcher has boxed in Karl Dean on phony issues and kept Clement’s well funded but politically naïve foe on the defensive. In failing to hit back hard, Dean’s campaign is violating a tenet of politicking that has held since Michael Dukakis took it on the chin from George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential contest.
Speaking of ’88, it strikes us that Fletcher is sort of the Lee Atwater of this campaign, which would make Dean Dukakis to Clement’s Bush. Atwater was known as the “happy hatchet man of the GOP,” who, on behalf of Bush in ’88, was responsible for the infamous TV ad about Willie Horton, the murderer who committed rape while on a furlough from a life sentence in a Massachusetts prison.
Atwater was also behind Bush’s attack on Dukakis’ patriotism, using as leverage Dukakis’ veto of a bill requiring teachers to lead students in the recitation of the pledge in public schools—this, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court advised him that it was unconstitutional. “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” Bush regularly asked. In hindsight, Dukakis regretted that he didn’t punch back during that campaign. In a 1999 interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, he said, “[T]he lesson of ’88 is if the other guy is going to come at you, you can’t sit there and kind of blow it off. Now Bill Clinton learned from ’88. And as you recall, during the 1992 campaign, the Clinton campaign, and many of his staff people had worked for me and had been veterans of what I didn’t do, were ready for this. As a matter of fact, they had a small unit in the Clinton campaign that was referred to as the Defense Department and all they did was deal with the Bush attack. And people tend to forget this but, Bush went after Clinton every bit as hard as he went after me. But they were ready for it, they had a strategy for dealing with it and it was effective....”
Dean of course declines to comment on Clement’s fraternization with the Teamsters.Meanwhile, while Atwater asked forgiveness from many of those he’d wronged while on his deathbed, Fletcher would probably just send the nurse to fetch him a cigar.
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