Turn Tennessee Blue! (Unite behind Karl Dean!)
Fri Aug 03, 2007 at 09:24:12 AM PDT
Want to turn Tennessee blue? It starts right now in Nashville!
We face a classic battle between an old-school DLC candidate (Bob Clement) and a new-blood progressive (Karl Dean) in the runoff for mayor next month.
Don’t care who runs the Nashville Metropolitan government? Here’s why you should:
Tennessee, like Virginia, is a red state that just needs the right leadership to turn blue. Our two Senate seats and 11 electoral college votes are not out of reach, if we choose the right candidates and elect the best leaders!
Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, and Jim Webb have transformed their state into a national battleground for Democrats. We need that kind of bullpen here in Tennessee! And electing Karl Dean mayor is a great start.
Dean is cut from the same cloth as Governor Phil Bredesen—who won all 95 counties in Tennessee in his landslide re-election last year, a first for any governor. Bredesen broke down the GOP barrier and made it possible for a Democrat to win in Tennessee again.
Clement (in classic DLC style) is prepared to massacre his fellow Democrats and his own party’s reputation in an attempt to grab power. Clement is already bragging about how nasty his campaign is going to get. In fact, Clement shocked the crowd by going negative in his victory speech last night when he made it into the runoff (finishing a very narrow second place to Karl Dean in yesterday’s election).
Karl Dean immediately became a champion of the poor and disadvantaged after he graduated from law school, and was twice elected public defender of Nashville. Clement is threatening a barrage of vile, insincere attacks against Dean for being public defender—accusing Dean of trying to get rapists and murders back on the streets. Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to have a mayor who doesn’t understand why we have a public defender—or wants to pretend he doesn’t.
Hopefully, these disgusting attacks will backfire, as they often do in local elections. It seems Clement has learned nothing from his disastrous (and entirely negative) campaign for US Senate in 2002 when Lamar Alexander seized the open seat in a landslide.
In yesterday’s election, local progressives were split between David Briley (an excellent metro councilmember) and Karl Dean. Now it is time for all Nashville Democrats to rally around Dean as our new champion and standard bearer.
And it's not just Nashville Democrats who should answer the call -- but progressives across the state and around the country who want Tennessee to abandon the failing, divisive ways of the DLC and establish new leadership that will bring our state back into the blue!
Permalink | 13 comments