Political Notes
Jon Crisp, the mouthy chairman of the Davidson County GOP, is slinging mud in the mayor’s race via the Internet. Crisp, a financial contributor to mayoral wannabe Bob Clement, is busily circulating email and posting blog entries lambasting Karl Dean, Buck Dozier and perhaps others by now. (Who can keep track?)
How convenient for Clement. He keeps his hands clean while Crisp does the dirty work. Crisp’s Internet bombs aren’t widely read, of course, but they do sometimes reach the eyes of donors, and fund raising is what all the campaigns are about at this early stage.
Crisp denies that he’s acting at the behest of Clement as a kind of surrogate attack dog.
“I’m not going to go out and be a shill for some campaign,” Crisp says innocently. “I do things of my own free will. I’m chairman of the Republican Party, and it’s my job to point out people who are detrimental to the conservative cause.”
Crisp is especially harsh toward Dean. After Dean recently released his crime-fighting plan, Crisp unleashed this mass email: “Karl Dean is an extremely liberal politician. He supports gay rights and marriage, and Karl Dean worked tirelessly for years to release some of Nashville’s most violent criminals back onto our streets as Metro’s Public Defender, and now after he’s decided to run for the office of mayor of Nashville, he’s got a plan on crime! Outrageous!”
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The Dean camp isn’t pleased and suspects Clement handler Bill Fletcher is the puppet master pulling Crisp’s strings, though the Clement camp of course denies it could be engaged in such unspeakable slander (though manufacturing PACs to get around campaign finance rules is OK). Dean has told the Scene in recent weeks that he has no plans to run away from his several-term stint as public defender, a tenure of which he says he’s proud.
Meanwhile, the Clement campaign sees Dean as the ex-congressman’s most serious rival. Dean is fresh, telegenic and—most importantly—able to self-finance his campaign from his wife’s family wealth if necessary. As Crisp so ably points out, though, Dean is likely to be hindered by his tenure as public defender—a position that’s anathema to the knee-jerk law-and-order crowd and therefore not known as a particularly successful springboard to higher office.
One Clement poll shows Clement ahead of the pack with 30-plus percent support, followed by Howard Gentry in the mid-teens (the black vote), Dozier at about 10 percent, and Dean and David Briley still in the single digits—which means there are plenty of undecided voters at this point.
A more recent poll commissioned by one of Clement’s opponents shows the former congressman’s numbers have fallen, according to one competing campaign operative: Clement at 22 percent; Briley and Dozier at 17 percent and 18 percent, respectively; Gentry with 14 percent; and Dean, the latest to jump into the race, at 3 percent. The numbers don’t mean much now, except to suggest that Clement isn’t the unbeatable juggernaut he’d like to appear. Given his high name recognition, he’d prefer to be polling better at the start of the campaign. Just about everybody in Nashville knows Clement. But do they like him?
Rules of engagement
Meanwhile, Clement’s camp is apparently the only mayoral campaign that is insisting on rules for candidate forums before agreeing to attend. “Clement would be very pleased to participate in the above forum,” one campaign staffer wrote in a recent email about one such June event. “However, we have already had some very negative experiences in forums. In the interest of having a process that is fair, impartial and consistent for all, we want the following rules to be applied to this Forum.” The email cites them as follows:
1. All mayoral candidates will be invited.
2. There will be consistent times for answers to be given and a time limit will be set. We suggest 3-4 minutes.
3. There will be a specific time limit set for an opening statement. We suggest 3-5 minutes.
4. All candidates will answer the same questions.
5. If questions from the audience are permitted, they will be written and given to the moderator, who will ask all questions.
6. The order of speakers will rotate with each question.
7. The questions will be disclosed to the candidates in advance.
8. There will be a specific time limit set for a closing statement. We suggest 3-5 minutes.
10. The candidates may use notes if they wish.
11. No visuals or props will be permitted.
12. The identity of the moderator will be given to the candidates a week in advance of the forum. The moderator will not be a contributor or supporter of any candidate.
13. An adequate audio system consisting of microphones for the candidates and speakers.
14. All candidates will be seated together at a table.
15. All candidates will be provided a copy of the rules in advance.
16. A timekeeper with large cards indicating 3, 2, 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Larry Woods, Clement’s top advisor, tells the Scene that such rules are standard and cites both the League of Women Voters and the Commission on Presidential Debates as organizations that use them. “These rules are not anything onerous for anybody.”
But an aide for a competing campaign scoffs at the formality Clement is demanding for a local political race. “With all due respect, the term ‘formidable debater’ does not spring forth when I hear Clement’s name. If I were him, I admit I’d probably insist on pre-imposed rules designed to overcome (1) the inability to think on my feet and (2) the inability to address topics in depth.”
Fred fever
Fans of Fred Thompson are casting Tennessee’s favorite B-actor to play the part of an authentic conservative in the presidential race, but it’s going to take an Oscar-winning performance for ol’ Fred to pull off this role.
GOP voters aren’t happy with their choices at this point. In a new CBS/New York Times poll, 57 percent said they wish there were more candidates, and conservative primary voters were more likely than moderates to say so.
Social conservatives don’t like the two GOP frontrunners—Rudy Giuliani and John McCain—and they don’t feel there’s anyone else in the race with a chance to win. That would seem to open the door for Thompson, who said over the weekend on FOX News Sunday that he’s thinking about running. It’s not too late. Thompson could quickly tap into the sizable Lamar Alexander/Bill Frist money network. But once his views become better known, will he still appeal to the social cons?
Along with Lamar Alexander, Thompson is the spawn of Howard Baker, one of the old moderate silk-stocking Republicans (remember them?) back in the days before the GOP was commandeered by ideological Bible-thumpers.
Thompson is soft pro-life. He’s against abortion but doesn’t really want to do anything about it. He’s not even sure it’s a good idea for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
On immigration, he’s waffling now, but previously seemed to support comprehensive reform and some sort of guest-worker program on the order of what Sen. Bob Corker has advocated.
He’s tolerant of gays, thinking the issue of civil unions ought to be left to the states. He was a key ally of McCain’s on campaign finance reform, not a popular issue for conservatives. As an old trial lawyer, he fought tort reform.
“Certainly, Sen. Thompson would be popular in Tennessee as a native son, but there are many who would want to look more closely at his record on abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues,” says David Fowler, a former state senator who is now president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee.
Thompson says he may wait until this summer to decide, but odds are he’s not really serious about running. Thompson never seemed all that thrilled about campaigning for the U.S. Senate—and the rap on him is that he’s lazy—so it’s hard to imagine that he would commit to an all-consuming White House race.
It’s more likely that he’s just enjoying all the flattering buzz surrounding his potential candidacy. Maybe he’s positioning himself to become a kingmaker in the race by making a big, splashy endorsement of his buddy McCain.
Phil Bredesen: blogger
Tennessean editor Mark Silverman says Gov. Phil Bredesen, who was using email in the early 1990s long before the editors at the newspaper much considered the medium, jumped at the chance to blog on the paper’s website during his recent trip to the Arizona border to observe National Guard troops.
“It was one of those ideas that came out of a news meeting discussion about the fact that he was going out there, and we had the opportunity to go. And I’ll be honest with you: what we didn’t want was three days of newspaper stories in a row that were going to same the same thing.”
Instead, editors asked writer Leon Alligood to approach the governor about blogging. “He loved the idea,” Silverman says.
Asked whether the experiment constitutes a coziness between the state’s top official and the capital city’s daily, he says he doesn’t think so. “I think that at a certain level of politics and government, people are sophisticated enough to know that sometimes a newspaper and its website constitute being the reporter and sometimes they are a conduit. In some ways, it’s no different that giving the governor an op-ed or publishing government listings. I think he’s sophisticated enough to understand that, and so are our readers.”
Meanwhile, Silverman says, “He’s an observant guy and a very forthright guy, which kind of makes for a good blogger.”