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Meet ’n’ Greet Clement talks it up.
Photos by: ericengland.net
There were about a dozen people crowded around mayoral candidate Karl Dean while, 10 steps away, his opponent Bob Clement could hardly muster so much as a huddle. But it wasn’t because Clement was without traction in his bid for Nashville CEO. In the previous few days, he’d received endorsements from the police and the service workers and was the beneficiary of positive chatter from Metro Council members happy to be so heavily courted by Clement. No, these simply weren’t his people. In fact, at this Jewish Federation of Nashville gathering at the Jewish Community Center Monday night, one woman walked up to Dean and, dramatically putting her hands over her eyes, told him that he simply must get a recording of the conversation she’d just had with Clement, that it would win him the race were he to obtain it and publicize it.
“It was unbelievable, unbelievable,” she kept saying, offering no specifics.
It was clear that the woman wanted Dean to agree about her apparent stupefaction over Clement. The 63-year-old former congressman who’s been in politics for some three decades had just awkwardly read his speech from behind the podium before he, like Dean, was asked to mill around with guests and take questions informally. Dean, meanwhile, had spoken extemporaneously in front of the podium without using notes, which led one of the attendees to quip to the Scene, “Dean is somebody who knows what he wants to say, and Clement is somebody who knows what Larry Woods wants him to say,” referring to Clement’s childhood friend and longtime adviser.
At any rate, as the woman spoke, Dean simply stood there, smiling and politely declining to take the bait. When she finally walked away, he seemed genuinely relieved. From there, he took dry questions about the stuff of Metro government: subarea plans, school board accountability, etc., echoing more than once his central message during his opening comments: “We need to stay committed to education as a priority, and that is my vow to you. That is what I will do.”
Such has been his tack since the beginning of the runoff campaign, which started two weeks ago with his first-place and Clement’s second-place finishes in a general election that saw the two men separated by only 545 votes. His relatively passive approach to self-defense has led to a minor mutiny among supporters, many of whom would like to see Dean rebuke his opponent more aggressively.
Meanwhile, Clement has been schizophrenically yo-yoing between positive and negative messages and giving all the appearance of a desperate candidate, even if he’s not. At this event, Clement didn’t ingratiate himself with the generally liberal, Jewish audience by referring to “illegals” in the part of his new stump speech in which he rants against undocumented workers. Although, even in this crowd, there were a few voters happy to hear Clement’s tough talk. “I just don’t think illegals should get in the front of the line,” Clement told one man who thanked the candidate for speaking out on the issue. “They’re breaking the rules, and here we’re going to reward them? It’s not fair. It’s not right.”
Cool Hand Karl Dean takes the high road.
For all the red meat he’s slinging on the immigration issue, Clement has been retreating a bit from his wrathful election night-speech (“I believe the people of Nashville want you to earn your way to victory…not buy it”) and later appearances on weekend talk shows. Clement personally has been on his best behavior at public events since then, though he weakly claimed at one that Dean threw the campaign’s first barbs.
During his speech at the opening of his Jefferson Street headquarters Friday, Clement actually extolled the virtues of positive campaigning. Asked afterward to explain why, if he likes positive campaigning, he’d been criticizing his opponent—namely, saying that, as public defender, Dean defended “the worst of the worst criminals”—Clement claimed Dean went negative first. “In his TV comments, he talked about ‘old politics’ even in the first election. You know he was referring to me,” Clement said.
Then things got even weirder. Asked how his runoff campaign was going, Clement said, “Really fine,” before comparing himself to a fasting Jesus lost in the desert. “You know, it’s called 40 days and 40 nights. I remember reading in the Bible there’s another fellow who did that once upon a time, Jesus Christ, and he was tempted by the devil three times. But it’s an interesting experience, and we’re going night and day and weekends and reaching out particularly to the other political camps. We’re getting a great response.”
Actually, as the chattering classes speculated about whether the three unsuccessful mayoral wannabes would endorse for the Sept. 11 runoff, one by one Howard Gentry, David Briley and Buck Dozier declined to do just that. None gave a particularly good reason, leading to speculation that they all were merely doing what good politicians do—protecting their backsides for a possible future race and from the wrath of a new mayor, should he ultimately be the candidate they didn’t support.
Briley did flirt heavily with a Clement endorsement before ultimately being convinced that to do so would betray his mostly liberal supporters. He particularly opened the door to a cold blast of criticism when he spent several hours campaigning with Clement in East Nashville on Saturday. When the Clement camp blitzed a press release around town saying as much, Briley’s supporters were befuddled by what seemed to be a budding bond between the two diminutive men. The whole episode led Briley to issue a statement saying he’d be staying out of the runoff fray. “After meeting with both of the candidates, I have made the decision not to formally endorse either candidate in the race.”
Another Aug. 2 loser, at-large council member Buck Dozier, said he prayed on the matter and then decided that God wanted him to stay out of it. “Over the past year, I have grown to respect both men for their commitment to public service and for their sincere desire to make our city an even better place to live and work,” Dozier said. “Nashville would be well served by either of these gentlemen as mayor.”
A few days earlier, outgoing Vice Mayor Howard Gentry, a close third in the Aug. 2 race, said he decided not to make an endorsement after asking himself the question, what’s in it for Howard?
“The king is the mayor,” Gentry said on WTVF-Channel 5+’s Inside Politics. “I could be a kingmaker, but who am I at the end of all that? I don’t choose to take a position in the new administration. There’s nothing I want from the mayor other than to move the city forward in the way that I think is best. So being the kingmaker to me does not excite me. What it says to me is that I’m utilizing the voters who trusted me and believed in me to position myself as something else. That is smart politically, but I just don’t choose to take on that role right now.”
At the same time, Gentry couldn’t resist tossing a mudball at Clement for opening a Jefferson Street campaign headquarters. “I think to put an office on Jefferson Street right now creates visibility. It might attract a vote or two, but it’s not going to sway the election by doing that, and I think it’s a late move that probably should’ve been thought about a little deeper than that,” Gentry said.
But while Clement’s former competition may have rebuffed him, the candidate is getting the nod from virtually all of Nashville’s blue-collar labor institutions. Besides the police and service worker endorsements, the Clement campaign tells the Scene that blessings from both the firefighters and the Central Labor Council are forthcoming. At the same time, Clement staffers are chafing at the failure of media outlets to play up their candidate’s new support and are threatening to make an issue out of it.“We’ve got huge momentum at the ground level, and it’s largely being ignored by the mainstream media, which is just blatantly unfair,” a Clement source complains. “It’s like it hasn’t happened. Your average person doesn’t even know about all our endorsements.”
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