Bob Clement is eating a bagel with cream cheese at the Green Hills Noshville and trying to explain away his past associations with some truly unusual characters. The cast includes an Iraqi arms smuggler who supplied poison gas to Saddam Hussein and a nutty preacher from India who was recently arrested at a Beverly Hills, Calif., hotel on suspicion of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor. (More later on these guys.)
“That’s a nothing story,” Clement protests, shaking his head vigorously and cutting a what-have-you-gotten-me-into glance at his media consultant, Bill Fletcher, who is squirming in his seat and gazing pleadingly at your correspondent.1 At about this moment, another member of Clement’s entourage, campaign co-chair Trish Poe, pipes up. “Don’t you think we should all look at the good side of everyone?” she asks. “Like Jesus Christ did?”
Clement ignores Poe and cleverly, if abruptly, turns the conversation to his opponent in the mayoral election. “Why don’t you ask Karl Dean the question about the people he’s represented as public defender?” Clement says, tearing off a chunk of his bagel. “It’s not that half his public life he’s represented murderers and rapists and child molesters....”
It’s not? No, Clement explains. It’s that Dean did his job well and, as a result, some defendants received lighter sentences than if an attorney of lesser competence had represented them. “I really don’t think that’s what society wants,” Clement says. “That’s what I’m saying.”
It’s not one of Clement’s more lucid moments,2 placing him in apparent opposition to certain key provisions of the Bill of Rights. But who cares? Certainly not Clement, whose campaign polling shows many voters favor this line of attack against Dean. And considering the way things have been going for Clement, anything’s worth a try.
Once the most promising political figure in Tennessee—the son of an enormously popular governor and the youngest candidate ever to win a statewide election—Clement finds himself running at age 63 in ghastly triple-digit heat for an office he would have thought beneath him in his halcyon days. Worse, he might very well lose—and to a political neophyte who wouldn’t stand a chance without ready access to his heiress wife’s cash.
Just to make it into the Sept. 11 runoff, Clement had to attend nearly 50 community forums, where he read his answers to questions from little groups of people (he eventually memorized some of his opinions), and he had to sit on the same stages with the rest of the candidates, who included a couple of mere Metro Council members and a used car salesman, of all people.
Then despite all that, Clement, who started the campaign with a formidable lead in the polls over his much lesser-known foes, finished second in the Aug. 2 election 550 votes behind Dean, who seized the momentum on the strength of $1 million worth of TV ads. Since then, in a fight for his political life, Clement has been relentlessly pressing the flesh all over town and swiping Dean at every opportunity like a cornered animal. Did we mention that it’s really hot out there?
Fletcher sizes up the situation nicely. “We’ve gone overnight from a Sunday school picnic to a steel-cage death match,” he snarls.
And not a moment too soon. The way Clement was dropping in support before Aug. 2 he might have fallen right out of the runoff if the election had been held a few days later. It hasn’t been pleasant for his political friends to watch. By most accounts, Clement is truly devoted to public service. “I’ll put it this way, Bob’s a decent man,” says Walter Bussart, a close friend of Clement’s for more than 40 years. “I’ve never known him to do anything that was rewarding only to himself.”
But many are wondering if this isn’t one too many campaigns for Clement. For them, it’s hard to watch one of the state’s best-known Democrats shamelessly running a classic right-wing Republican campaign, railing against taxes, crime and illegal immigrants. In some circles, Clement has become a farcical figure, mocked for his befuddled public comments and his bizarre hillbilly drawl.3
“It’s really sad,” says one friend, who asks not to be named. “I think he’s genuinely a pretty good-hearted guy, but he’s just lost in this mayor’s race. He’s a lost ball in high weeds. He just doesn’t know the issues. He doesn’t even act like he’s ever attempted to engage. The guy just has to have an office to have an identity. It’s kind of like he’s saying, ‘This is the last office I can find to run for.’ ”
Back at Noshville, Clement is fielding more questions about his shady associations, which may cast light on the clarity of his judgment and could become relevant to any evaluation of his qualifications to serve as mayor.
First, there is Dr. K.A. Paul, a.k.a. Anand Kilari, a.k.a. “the Billy Graham of India,” the globetrotting supreme leader of a U.S.-based outfit called Gospel to the Unreached Millions. In 2004, the wispy, mustachioed Paul, an Indian-born Christian evangelical, hired Clement along with other former members of Congress to sing his praises and help him shake the money tree for his cause. Clement accompanied Paul to Haiti, where the reverend pleaded for peace with the violent leader of rebel forces, and to Liberia, where he urged the murderous dictator Charles Taylor to resign. At the time, Clement was effusive in his praise of Paul. The New Republic quoted Clement as saying of the evangelist: “He’s just overwhelmed with faith. He makes things happen that others think, ‘There is no way that can happen.’ ”
Turns out, as the Houston Press reported in an exposé in 2006, Paul has been rebuked by at least three religious organizations and was sued for defrauding a charity out of $850,000. Paul once claimed another minister’s leper colony as his own and videotaped the lepers for a promotional video, according to the Press. He also abandoned nine American missionaries in an Indian prison and fled to the United States in his Boeing 747, Global Peace One, a plane with a pile of unpaid bills for fuel and maintenance. He’s not really a doctor, either. In May, he was arrested at a Beverly Hills hotel on suspicion of trying “to get freaky,” as the Press put it, with a 14- or 15-year-old girl. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to charge him.
Paul, who speaks frenetically—with the clipped cadence of someone who’s had too many lattés—disputes all these reports. “One hundred percent, nothing can be proven,” he tells the Scene from his cell phone in India. He says his California arrest was part of a White House conspiracy. “I threatened Karl Rove over the Iraq war,” he says. “That’s why I was arrested. I’m glad you asked about it.” As for Clement, Paul says, “He was a dedicated global peace ambassador.”
Clement, on the other hand, doesn’t have much good to say about Paul anymore. “He’s a most controversial character,” Clement tells the Scene. “After one year [working for Paul], I told Dr. Paul, ‘I cannot represent you any longer, and I’m moving on with my life.’ I’m aware that he’s in trouble. I don’t know any of the details. But I know one thing, after one year, that was enough for Bob Clement.”
Shady character No. 2 is a guy named Sahib Al-Haddad, an Iraqi-American businessman who ran an international trading company in Nashville in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, Clement and a business partner sold 148 acres of undeveloped land in western Davidson County to Haddad for $704,000, taking as part of the payment an I.O.U. for $598,000, according to public records. That was two years after a chemical shipment organized by Haddad’s firm—1,100 pounds of potassium fluoride, which is used to make deadly nerve gas—was seized at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. In 2003, Haddad was sentenced to five years in prison in Germany for conspiring to buy equipment to make a giant cannon for Iraq. He had been identified as a major supplier of Iraq’s chemical weapons program before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and had been trying to organize an arms-buying spree for Iraq in 2002.
Clement now says he left his business deal with Haddad to his associates, and he himself never had any direct dealings with Haddad. “Never met him,” Clement says. “Don’t know the guy. I never met the guy and don’t know anything about the guy. Never negotiated with the guy.”
Finally, there’s Mack Johnson, a longtime Clement pal who was accused in a class-action lawsuit of cheating old folks out of thousands of dollars. According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs bought what they thought was vacation insurance from Johnson’s company, Trip Assured. But then when their vacations were canceled for medical or other emergencies, Trip Assured wouldn’t pay up. Despite dozens of complaints over three years, the state Department of Commerce and Insurance didn’t order Trip Assured to stop selling insurance without a license in Tennessee until 2006. The lawsuit’s plaintiffs say Clement and his wife, Mary, were to blame. Mary Clement runs the department’s Division of Consumer Affairs, which received the complaints.
The Clements have vacationed in Johnson’s Florida condo, and Johnson flew Clement in his plane during Clement’s failed 2002 Senate campaign. “He’s been my friend over the years,” Clement says. Does Clement think Johnson was ripping off old people? “No, I don’t.”
No one claims Clement participated in any illegalities or was even personally involved with any of these characters’ shenanigans. But should these associations give voters reason to question Clement’s discernment?4
“I know a lot of people,” Clement responds. “I know thousands of people. I probably know more people in this state than any other person. If we’re going to base my future on the fact that I happen to know someone, Lord help us all.”
After which, Clement’s up from his seat, out of Noshville and back on the campaign trail in his seemingly never-ending quest for votes.
In the beginning, there was Bob. Or at least that’s the way it must seem to an entire generation of Nashvillians who probably can’t remember a time when Clement wasn’t running for something or at least publicly talking about it.
He got an early start, traveling as a boy with his father, Frank Goad Clement, in a kind of political vaudeville show. When Frank Clement had a sore throat, Bob would give speeches. Frank Clement became the youngest governor in the country when he was only 32. He served as governor from 1953 until 1959 and again from 1963 to 1967. He was a moderate on racial desegregation, and he made school textbooks free for the first time. He was famed for his oratory and gave an electrifying keynote speech to the 1956 Democratic National Convention.
Bob Clement started his political career in 1972, at age 32 just like his father, by winning a seat on the old Public Service Commission. He ousted the incumbent by an amazingly lopsided 3-to-1 margin. Clement still boasts about this victory, perhaps because there hasn’t been a lot in his career to gloat about since then. In 1978, he lost the Democratic nomination for governor in the election that Republican Lamar Alexander eventually won.5 In 1982, Don Sundquist beat Clement to take the 7th Congressional District seat in West Tennessee. In 1987, Clement managed to win again, defeating Phil Bredesen and Jane Eskind in a bruising campaign to become the congressman in Nashville’s 5th District.6 It’s a safe Democratic seat, and Clement held it against token opposition until 2002. In the meantime, he considered running for governor in 1994, but was scared off by the entry into the race of the wealthy Bredesen, who would largely finance his own campaign.7 Sundquist beat Bredesen that year, and Clement thought about challenging the Republican’s re-election in 1998. But Sundquist had raised $3 million in campaign contributions and then handicapped any potential opponents by pushing through an election finance law that limited donations. So Clement stayed on the sidelines. He finally gave up his congressional seat to gamble on succeeding Fred Thompson in the Senate in 2002, but lost to Alexander.8
The foregoing chronology of Clement’s career begs the intriguing question of why he has insisted on running for public office so many times, even in the face of repeated rejection by voters. His family explains it by saying it’s just in his blood,9 and Clement himself says, “I’ve always felt like I had a special gift when it comes to working with people to solve problems.”
Ask Clement’s political acquaintances—friends and foes alike—and they unanimously recite the insiders’ conventional wisdom about Clement’s psychology: to wit, Clement adored his father, who died in a car wreck in 1969,10 and has been desperately trying all his life to live up to big Frank’s reputation. This has been especially difficult for Clement, one can imagine, since his father was a strapping, larger-than-life man, a legitimately charismatic figure with broad popular appeal and a spellbinding speaker, while the diminutive Clement—who is 5-foot-5—is awkward and stiff publicly and not given to compelling speaking. It’s probably not helpful that he resembles Wally Cox, the actor of Mr. Peepers TV fame and the voice of Underdog.
“The guy’s simply not happy unless he’s in the public light,” one friend says, “and he probably does enjoy public service. But I think it’s got more to do with having a need for approval. Shit, he’s always been like that. I’ve never seen anybody so immersed in the shadow of his father. He’s never gotten a glimpse of sunlight outside the shadow of his father.”
According to Dr. Michael J. Diamond—clinical psychologist, expert on father/son relationships and author of the new book My Father Before Me—Clement is probably experiencing a relatively common psychic condition. “It’s father hunger,” he tells the Scene. “A man grows up with a hunger to get something from his father, to prove something to his father, to get his father to approve of him, to show the world that he’s as good as his father, this sort of thing.”11
Friends say that when Clement was growing up in the governor’s Curtiswood Lane residence, his father was basically absent because he was busy tending to official duties (plus Frank was a hard drinker), so Bob was mainly raised by prison inmates and cooks, etc., who worked at the mansion. That fact may play into Clement’s apparently insatiable desire to please his father, Diamond says.
“He wants to be as big as his father in the world. At the same time, he doesn’t have that relationship with his father to make him feel like it’s OK to be whoever he is. So he remains like a little boy, trying to show off for his father and get his father to pay attention to him. Even though the father may be dead. Because it’s not really about the father anymore. It’s about his internal sense of his father. Most men who do this don’t even understand that they’re doing it. It’s like they’re constantly on a treadmill. They’re playing it out, just trying to show their father that they are big. It’s a sad story. Emotionally, he’s empty, still searching for something.”12
Diamond’s theory is speculative, of course, since he’s never even met Clement. Still, there may be something to it. After losing to Alexander in 2002, Clement went to work as a corporate consultant and lobbyist but says he was experiencing an “empty feeling.” That’s why he sought the mayor’s office, he says. “I just wasn’t ready to throw in the towel yet,” he explains.
It could be his last hurrah. In an otherwise unremarkable city election, we could be witnessing the last campaign of a Tennessee political legend. Despite a career filled with disappointment, Clement insists it’s been a good run. Others may have expected the son to enjoy the same popularity and success as the father, but Clement says he wanted only to serve the public.
“Dad at the age of 16 would go around—and I’m sure he sounded half crazy—he’d say, ‘I’m going to be governor of Tennessee.’ Well, I never said that. I knew at a young age that I would run for public office, but I didn’t have any particular office in mind.... Public service has always been my first love.”
Asked whether he might have worn out his welcome with voters, Clement sighs almost as if he’s resigned to the possibility of losing again. “Well, I think some people do feel that way,” he says.
If he does lose, would he run again? “Whether I’d ever put my name on the ballot again, most doubtful,” he says. And then Bob Clement smiles. “What are you going to do if you don’t have Little Bob around?”
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1. Fletcher, notorious as a master of political dark arts, arranged this 30-minute interview in a rare moment of weakness, after weeks of balking at this newspaper’s requests. (A request to talk with Clement’s wife and children was denied.) A one-time reporter for the now-defunct Nashville Banner, Fletcher makes TV ads for Democratic candidates around the country and has represented Clement for 20 years. He is given to colorful talk and likes to quote from The Art of War, the Chinese military treatise written during the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu. Of his plans for Karl Dean in the mayoral contest, Fletcher has said, “We’re going to stick a needle in his back and suck out his spinal cord.”
2. A contest to name the strangest thing Clement has said in this campaign would be impossible to judge. He recently compared himself to Christ lost in the wilderness. In his first televised debate with Dean, he said, “Yes, I know how to say yes.” Other Clement sayings: “Let’s turn lemons into lemonade” and “Cleanliness counts.”
3. Clement has endured ridicule since his college days because of his otherworldly way of speaking. At his fraternity house at the University of Tennessee, “somebody new would come in and he’d say, ‘I’m Boooooob Clement.’ He’d really draw it out, and everybody mocked him and made fun of him,” says Walter Bussart, a fraternity brother of Clement’s. But Clement was always good-natured about it. “He was a typical college student,” says Bussart, a Lewisburg lawyer and 1994 gubernatorial candidate. “He didn’t really try to get any benefits because his dad was the governor. He ran for president of the freshman class and won. We had some rush parties, but I never saw Bob crawling around on the floor or anything like that.”
4. Clement isn’t generally thought to be especially intelligent. As one friend puts it: “Let’s just say he’s kind of unsmart, you know what I mean?” To try to counteract that notion, Clement produced “30 Ideas in 30 Days” earlier in the mayoral campaign, but aides later acknowledged most of the so-called ideas were pilfered from others.
5. It was in the 1978 gubernatorial campaign that Clement obtained the nickname “Little Bob,” by which he is still referred in certain political circles. The crooked banking tycoon Jake Butcher, who eventually won the Democratic primary, called a news conference to respond to attacks from Clement. As political reporters from that time remember it, Butcher said, “I was talking to my children yesterday and they asked me a question that was really tough for me to answer. They said, ‘Dad, why is Little Bob attacking you like this? We thought Little Bob was your friend.’” Clement recalls, “I immediately jumped on that. I said, ‘Well, I accept that characterization, Mr. Butcher, as long as you understand I represent all the little people of Tennessee.’ And he never said it again. I guess he was trying to belittle me, but he only said it one time.” Clement even painted “Little Bob” on a campaign truck driven by 16-year-old Dave Cooley, later to become one of Phil Bredesen’s closest aides. Cooley recently left the deputy governor post to return to corporate public relations.
6. Clement’s alleged affair with a Cumberland University librarian was the bombshell story that broke during this 1987 congressional campaign. The librarian’s spouse sued Clement, the former university president, citing “alienation of affection” from his wife, and a seemingly incriminating taped phone conversation between Clement and the woman was made public. Clement denied the affair and countersued, which led to the librarian’s husband withdrawing his lawsuit and publicly apologizing.
7. Wealthy political opponents—i.e., Butcher, Bredesen, and now Dean—have bedeviled Clement throughout his career. “I must draw ‘em,” Clement says, laughing. “I must be a magnet. For some unknown reason, these rich guys say, ‘Well, Bob Clement’s in the race. I’m going to get in that race, too.’ I didn’t inherit much money, but I did get a rich name.”
8. After the Senate campaign, doctors discovered during a routine checkup a malignant tumor on Clement’s lung. He had the tumor removed and says he’s been cancer-free since. Because he lost the Senate race, he says, he had to give up his U.S. Capitol doctors and go to a new physician, who found the tumor. “So I feel like losing that Senate race saved my life,” he says. In an interview with the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Clement’s wife, Mary, credits God with saving Bob’s life. The Clements attend Nashville’s Christ Church, a large Pentecostal congregation many of whose members speak in tongues and believe in faith healing. Clement himself isn’t believed to be quite that spiritual and is known to enjoy a drink of whiskey from time to time. According to churchgoers, when Clement was baptized in the 1970s, he stepped in the pool and cried, “Damn, that water’s cold!” To which his preacher said, “Bob, I don’t know if you’re ready for this baptism or not.” After the story of Clement’s baptism appeared this week on the Scene’s blog, Pith in the Wind, he offered this clarification: “I said dang. I didn’t say damn. It was wintertime, and that water was cold. I can assure you when I got out of that water, I was feeling it.”
9. “It’s just a way of life,” says Sara Kyle, Clement’s cousin and chair of the Tennessee Regulatory Authority. “Some families are involved in medicine, education or farming, you name it. The Clements do politics.”
10. Even today, nearly 40 years after his father’s death, Clement constantly talks about him. He tells anecdotes in which he speaks as if he is channeling his father. Here are two stories that Clement tells: “You know my father—once upon a time I asked him, I said, ‘Dad, you didn’t win that race.’ And he said, ‘No son, I didn’t lose the race. I just didn’t get as many votes as the other fella.’” And also: “In the Clement campaign, we do have a big umbrella concept. I always asked as a kid, I said, ‘Dad, why are you so nice to such-and-such and he’s not for you?’ And my father would say, ‘Well, son, he may be next time.’”
11. The parallels here to George W. Bush are striking. There has been widespread speculation that Bush’s own father complex has spawned many of his actions. The North Korean despot Kim Jong Il may have this problem, too.
12. His father’s name was the entire reason he was ever a viable political candidate for any public office, but in an ironic way, it also may have diminished the credit Clement has received for what he has accomplished. Expectations were always high for Clement. Then again, it’s debatable whether Clement has accomplished very much. In Congress, he was known for a high level of constituent service—helping old ladies get their Social Security checks and providing other assistance dealing with federal agencies—but not much else. According to Lamar Alexander during their 2002 Senate campaign, Clement was the primary sponsor of only 64 bills in his 15 years in The House. Of those, only five became law, and four of those were to name October “Country Music Month.”
