If political success were measured only by quick-wittedness, on-the-stump prowess and great oratory, Gayle Ray probably wouldn’t win any contests. In fact, earlier this year, the talk was trending negative.
There was a lackluster interview on Teddy Bart’s Roundtable radio show early in her congressional campaign. Then there was an appearance before the influential downtown Rotary Club that didn’t impress a number in the audience.
To this day, the Democratic sheriff’s stump speech isn’t taking home any prizes. But that doesn’t appear to matter. With Ray, what you see is what you get, and she has amassed a grass-roots following that makes her one of the more impressive political fixtures in Davidson County.
“I think Gayle Ray is the most popular figure in Davidson County right now,” says Tom Lawless, a Nashville attorney who, incidentally, is seeking the Republican nomination for the same 5th District seat.
Ray is known for having what may be the finest grass-roots, turn-out-the-vote effort in Davidson County. With political origins in a sort of progressive, Green Hills-ish, neighborhood milieu, her political networks leapfrogged countywide with her election to sheriff in 1994.
In this campaign, many of Ray’s volunteers from her first campaign for Metro Council district have returned. There are the community activists from past initiatives in education and the environment. Others are supporting her because she has targeted for attack the exposed left flank of her chief opponent in the contest, Jim Cooper, whom Ray brands a “conservative.” Still others who have leaped into the fray have come from Daron Hall’s recent successful campaign for sheriff. Hall, a longtime Ray protégé, stunned the city with a much larger than expected primary victory over a well-financed Leo Waters in May. The overlap between Hall’s campaign and Ray’s is considerable—the cavernous warehouse south of downtown from which Ray is running her race formerly served as Hall’s headquarters.
Then there’s the woman thing.
Alma Sanford, a semi-retired attorney with two grown children, is a Ray volunteer who quite clearly has drunk the water. She initially heard about Ray because of Emily’s List, a political organization that supports women candidates for political office. She began researching Ray’s record, found much to like, walked in the warehouse and volunteered. “I’m giving every minute I can,” Sanford says. “What’s been so exciting is the level of commitment of people who have just walked in the door.”
The 5th District congressional race, whose primary is Aug. 1, officially commenced when Bob Clement, the incumbent congressman, decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Increasingly, the contest appears to be one between Ray and Cooper. Another strong candidate, Ronnie Steine, exited the contest amid revelations of shoplifting. Yet another, state Rep. John Arriola, is something of a dark horse with a strong following among seniors.
The differences between Ray and Cooper are both tactical and ideological. At the tactical level, Ray is less well funded, is being blown out of the water by Cooper’s massive television spending and is thus more dependent on her volunteer network. She points out, however, that candidates who have been outgunned on the spending front have won before—Bill Purcell, for example, against Dick Fulton in the 1999 mayor’s race. Cooper, meanwhile, is expected to continue running TV ads until election day; he is currently recuperating from surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his colon.
There are also clear differences ideologically between the two candidates. Ray has branded Cooper as too conservative for the district, reciting a laundry list of issues on which Cooper has appeared to cast Republican-like votes. Cooper, meanwhile, has begun charging that Ray simply doesn’t have a grasp on the issues, and argues that the 12 years he served in Congress from the state’s 4th Congressional District makes him the better candidate.
“You have got to understand national issues,” Cooper spokesman Mike Kopp says, discussing what he contends are factually inaccurate statements Ray has made concerning Medicaid in Tennessee. “Obviously, she doesn’t.”
Ray doesn’t appear ruffled by the charges. In fact, one wonders if anything gets to her. “My response to charges like that is that my experience is on the ground of the county. I’m not a Washington insider, but I’m a Nashville insider. It’s not just that I’ve made the jails work—being a sheriff is a very good example of how I have the ability to come into a situation and immerse myself in a job in a very short period of time and know what’s going on.”
The differences between Ray and Cooper are biographical as well. Cooper was born into privilege, but Ray was far from it as a child. Her father managed a Murfreesboro cemetery; her mother was a cafeteria manager who later became a teacher’s aide. Ray grew up in a house in the middle of the cemetery; she likes to joke that it was difficult getting friends to come over to play.
Both of Ray’s parents were diabetics and died from related illnesses. Times were hard—she remembers no family vacations, save for going to a state park once in her childhood. “It was a wholesome life,” she says. “The values of hard work, of being raised in a family of modest means, were good ones. Some people have a tendency to look at me as a yuppie from Green Hills, and because of my education I’ve gotten where I am. But my real roots are with working people of modest means.”
Ray graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a degree in English in 1967, got a master’s in English from the University of Arkansas two years later, and then taught for three years at Louisiana State University, where she met her husband. Ultimately the couple returned to Nashville, where she held various teaching jobs before quitting to raise two children. For about a decade, she stayed at home before embarking on a serious tour of volunteer work.
There was a stint as president of the League of Women Voters and then a period in which she helped start Project Pencil, an education initiative that matches businesses with public schools. She was involved in the activist group Parents for Public Education and also launched an effort to oppose the relaxation of auto emissions tests in Nashville.
In part because of an education bond issue that was put before voters in 1990 but failed, Ray decided to run for Metro Council. “I thought the only thing to do would be to get council moving on education,” she says. It was around this time that she was also finishing up an MBA program at Belmont University. In 1991, she ran against a popular 24-year incumbent council member and beat him by 20 percent of the vote. Many were shocked at the margin.
While in the council, Ray began holding education committee meetings in the most decrepit schools to impress the need for school improvements. After three years, Ray decided to run for sheriff, in response to the managerial deficiencies she witnessed in the sheriff’s office under Hank Hillin. “I just went with my gut,” she says. “None of Hillin’s numbers made any sense, and his spreadsheets were all nuts.” Ray won that race as well, again by a margin of 20 percent, becoming the only woman sheriff in Tennessee.
“I had no idea what to expect when I walked in that job. But people by and large want to do a great job if you give them the vision and the tools and the training.”
Few would dispute that the office made significant progress under Ray. While some say the credit should be shared with the Bredesen administration, which funded many of the improvements she undertook, the record is a good one. The sheriff’s office today, Ray says, is the only such office in the country to be accredited by the American Correctional Association in three different categories: administration, training and the jails themselves. As well, during Ray’s term, the county was released from federal court supervision related to overcrowding.
If everything appears rosy, things are still a work in progress. The Purcell administration has expressed concerns about an overcrowding issue with the system’s female inmates, which might lead to the return of federal supervision of the system. But Ray says the female numbers are constantly being monitored and that a new women’s facility is currently under construction to relieve the pressure.
The budget of Ray’s office increased from $30 million the year she became sheriff to $46 million this year. Hillin, among others, has attacked her for spending so much. But the numbers are partially misleading, owing to the fact that significant state dollars are included in those figures. As well, an additional 1,000 inmates are in the system. Then again, it’s obvious she had some funding help to get her work done.
After eight years as sheriff, Ray says she decided to leave the sheriff’s post and began to look for new opportunities. Hall, her top aide for years, decided to run to replace her. Ray supported him. When Clement announced for the Senate, she says she saw a chance to bring her “values of Middle Tennessee to Washington.” She points to the ideals of fairness, family, hard work and justice in her basic stump speech. Strangely, the emphasis on values is almost a replay of the basic Republican campaign speech in the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994.
But Ray has also made a point of saying she would be a more dependable Democratic vote in Congress than, say, Cooper.
“I can’t see voting against the minimum wage,” she says, which Cooper did. (He voted for another, lower plan.) “I can’t see voting against the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the Family and Medical Leave Act. I go back to my orientation to justice and my belief in fairness. These are just basics that I can’t compromise on.”
Ray is thoroughly pro-choice, and has received the Planned Parenthood endorsement. She even says the issue of third trimester abortions should be up to a woman and her doctor. Ray is for prescription drug benefits under Medicare (a no-brainer these days) and favors the death penalty (but thinks it needs review). For added measure, she can’t believe that Cooper once voted against the Equal Rights Amendment.
Such talk of Cooper’s conservatism naturally raises the hair of the Cooper folks. They contend that Ray is distorting his position. They also say she doesn’t have the command of the issues that he does. In fact, when Ray was recently asked how she felt about the Clinton tax increase in 1993, which Democrats point to as being responsible for reducing the federal deficit, she could not immediately recall it. “If it reduced the deficit, I would have voted for it,” she says. Cooper spokesmen also point out—in what is a decidely minor error—that Ray’s Web site promotes expanding Medicaid coverage “to give women, particularly those in rural areas, access to contraceptive services.” But Medicaid in Tennessee, the Cooper team points out, was replaced by TennCare in 1994.
Unlike Cooper, or even Arriola, Ray has no body of votes to examine except for her brief tenure in the Metro Council. But she has been on the receiving end of a number of endorsements, including the influential AFL-CIO. That’s partly because she’s seen as more electable than Arriola, who has strong labor credentials, and she is also seen as more left-leaning than Cooper.
What may turn the tables in the race are these two ingredients: who the seniors tend to support and level of turnout. The voter profile in this primary is less likely to resemble a young activist and more likely to be a senior concerned about health care and housing. Meanwhile, Ray is expected to benefit the most from a low-turnout race.
Gayle Ray, who has shocked observers before, is probably praying for rain.
