At least one former candidate in the Nashville mayor’s race is making an endorsement: Kenneth Eaton.

We Support Bob Clement As Our Next Mayor! Check Back soon for a full Site Update, as Well as a letter of Support from Mr. Eaton. Karl Dean Does not have the Experience to run this city. Karl Dean Is a Continuation of the Purcell Administration. Bob Clement Is the Change Nashville Needs!

Buck Dozier followed the odd tradition of politicians referring to themselves in the third person earlier this week, and Eaton has taken it one step further by opting for the second person “we.” Both Clement and Dean have understandably coveted endorsements that don’t appear to be coming from Dozier, David Briley, and Howard Gentry. Is this an endorsement that Clement wants, though?

I’ve read the phrase a “continuation of the Purcell administration” a few times lately in a negative light. Is following in Purcell’s footsteps a bad thing? Some Nashvillians, and they’re not all in Eaton’s camp, would say yes.

Why would any politician endorse an opponent in a runoff election? One of the questions on many area political watchers’ minds since Nashville’s mayoral election has been whether any of the also-rans will publicly lend their support to either of the “finalists.”

I’d definitely like to know whom each of the former candidates will vote for, but now that Buck Dozier is off the fence about staying on the fence, it isn’t likely to happen. I’m having a hard time coming up with reasons why a candidate should make an endorsement, but I can think of plenty why it’s not a good idea to pick a side once the battle lines have been redrawn:

• Making enemies: Picking one candidate over another might come back to haunt you, especially if you pick the losing candidate. Why would Briley, Dozier or Gentry want to gamble their influence in the next administration on the razor-thin margin of a few hundred votes?
• Alienating your base: How happy would most of Briley’s camp have been to see him endorse Bob Clement? How happy would most of Dozier’s voters have been to see him endorse Karl Dean?
• Swallowing a bitter pill: It’s a rough transition to go from trying to take votes away from an opponent to publicly asking voters to give him more.
• Impropriety: Everyone will wonder what it took, if anything, to”earn” an also-ran’s endorsement. It might be easier to revisit your own agenda down the line if you haven’t made it look like someone’s just returning a much-needed favor.

The reasons I see for making an endorsement, at least in this race, are three: One, you’re convinced one candidate is significantly worse than the other to the extent that it would hurt the city if that candidate won the runoff; two, you want a job in the next administration and don’t mind the potential backlash from such a political pick-and-roll; and three, you’re absolutely not running for anything again and don’t care what anyone else thinks about what you do. Endorsing one candidate over another in such a close race is risking something else: your own political future.

What is it with politicians of all stripes and the third person? Former mayoral candidate Buck Dozier is yet another to refer to himself as though he were someone else:

Dozier says both Clement and Dean “have asked me for their support. Nobody’s offered me a job or anything like that. I want to make sure the city’s in good hands. We’ve got a lot at stake in the next decade.” Dozier acknowledges his endorsement may not mean that much. “Most people will make up their own minds regardless of what Buck Dozier does.”

When Buck finds out what Buck is going to do, he’ll let you know. Or maybe not.

Today’s weather forecast (above by the hour) is right out of Election Commission Administrator Ray Barrett’s dreams: sunny with a very low chance of rain. That means that the will of the electorate (at least one-third of it) and GOTV efforts by the individual campaigns should be well served today.

Whom does the weather benefit most? I’ve read plenty of theories about this over the years. The ones that stand out in my memory are that minority populations and casual/undecided voters may be more likely to vote when the weather is accommodating. That could benefit Howard Gentry and Karl Dean, who have both gained momentum of late. As Roger Abramson observed yesterday, late momentum tends to draw the attention of voters who are not as immersed in the day-to-day happenings of the race. Supporters of David Briley have maintained for weeks that Briley’s strong grassroots efforts will pay dividends in a strong and perhaps surprising turnout in his favor today, so the good forecast may benefit him as well. This is debatable, but I’ve also heard it said that lower turnouts in this race might benefit candidates such as Buck Dozier, who has a solid but modest base of Church of Christ voters. A higher turnout may hurt or help Bob Clement depending on whether name recognition is more or less significant when more voters head to the polls. I can see reasonable arguments in both directions.

The best news is that we all can stop speculating, at least until tomorrow, for an hour or two tonight once the results come in. If you haven’t made it to the polls yet, stop procrastinating and cast your ballot.

I learned two things this morning from reading about the City Paper’s recently conducted mayoral poll: One, the mayoral race is very much in play for at least four candidates, though it may be headed toward a Bob Clement-Karl Dean runoff. Two, a poll is only valid if you like the results it generates. Well, at least that’s what seems to happen every time one is released:

“You can do these polls any way you want to — unscientific and random polls are of little concern to me and my campaign,” [Buck] Dozier said. “We are going after the likely voters who vote in this kind of election — not just people who are registered,” he said.

[David] Briley’s campaign said the race is far from clinched. “Our internal polling continues to show that this is a wide open race. We believe this race will be won on the ground,” said spokeswoman Emily Passini.

In a race where five candidates have significant support, I think there is an element of truth in both Dozier’s and Passini’s comments. I definitely see scenarios where Dozier and Briley can make the runoff. At the same time, though, what else can you say when you are trailing in a poll a week before Election Day except that the poll isn’t accurate?

This may be the first time during the campaign, but I definitely agree with Ben Hall on one thing: “While not directly addressing the poll, Clement spokesman Ben Hall said, ‘The only poll that matters is the one on election day.’” Is anyone else ready to stop pontificating and see how it turns out?

I’ll admit that I know very little about District Attorney Torry Johnson beyond the fact that he spent considerable time last year pondering–and then declining–a run at the city’s top office. Reportedly, he was the business community’s top choice and, at least in the media, appeared to be emerging as the insider’s favorite for the job. Compared with what was at the time an underwhelming three-candidate field (Clement, Dozier and Gentry) that was not inspiring much excitement among the electorate, Johnson looked like a safe bet to serve as Nashville’s next mayor.

Since that time, progressive candidates David Briley and Karl Dean have entered the race and, according to several polls, rank fourth and fifth among the candidates behind, among others, apparent frontrunner Bob Clement. There has been plenty of speculation that either Briley or Dean ought to leave the race to allow the other an opportunity to make what is expected to be a runoff against Clement.

Did Johnson’s ambivalence about running create the Briley-Dean quagmire that may scuttle both campaigns and result in Clement, whom many regard as an undesirable candidate, landing in the mayor’s office?

From what I have read, I do have the impression that Johnson is a person of integrity who after some legitimate soul searching decided that the timing wasn’t right for him to hit the campaign trail. Nonetheless, the timing of his decision may have a dramatic impact–for worse or for better–on the next several years of Nashville’s future.

Are David Briley and Karl Dean just a “sideshow” compared to the real mayoral race? City Paper Editor Clint Brewer, writing at the publication’s new Political Animals blog, thinks so:

To date, the Battle of Bongo Java has dominated the minds and mouths of the city’s political set - the tug of war between brainy Councilman At-Large David Briley and former Metro Legal Director Karl Dean. Both men appeal to the crowd in town that finds a Clement administration totally unacceptable, more so for the decidedly verbal country twang with which Clement would represent the city than for anything he actually would or would not support. Why most of these same good Democrats were all too happy to see Clement stay for over a decade in the U.S. Congress - voting on little things like the global war on terrorism, health care and the federal highway bill - but cannot now back him in a mayoral race is dumbfounding.

 

The Dean/Briley croquet match is really a sideshow in this race, unless Dean is able to dump an obscene, seven-figure lump of cash into television between July 5 and August. Members of his kitchen cabinet have bandied about a figure of $1.5 million, but that presumably would be for the entire gig - election and run-off race - and he has already spent a fair amount thus far.

As a consistent voter who has never cast a ballot for Bob Clement and would prefer not to see Buck Dozier come out on top, I hope Brewer is wrong. With a field scattered in so many directions and none of the candidates yet capturing the city’s imagination the way Bill Purcell did in 1999, it’s hard to determine anything for certain with the election only a month away.

I think one conclusion is still safe to draw, though: Having two progressive candidates isn’t doing those of us likely to vote for either of them–or the city–any favors.

I’ve been meaning to weigh in on Jeff Woods’ column from last week’s Nashville Scene, the one where he takes the Campbellites (better known as the Church of Christ) to task. This is the column where Woods omits the words “from forty years ago” after “typical Christer:”

It is a loose network of independent churches with no creed, so it’s hard to generalize about its beliefs. But in addition to the standard conservative Christian articles of faith, the typical Christer thinks a church piano is the devil’s instrument, it’s wrong to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birth—and, oh yes, everyone but members of the Church of Christ is going to spend eternity in hell. [Emphasis on "typical" added.] Some church members dispute that last tenet as a mite judgmental, so we asked Dozier to explain.

“That isn’t true” that the Church of Christ thinks everyone except its own members is going to hell, Dozier says. “Probably years ago there were some who may have said that, unfortunately. They’re all dead, I think. We don’t believe that now.”

That’s good, because heaven would be a sparsely populated place if only Church of Christ members went. There aren’t many in the world—something less than 2 million. Nashville, though, has been blessed or cursed with a lot, depending on your point of view.

As a Church-of-Christ preacher’s kid’s kid with zero plans of preaching from the pulpit, I have plenty of frustration for, irritation toward and disagreement with the denomination, one I stopped attending in the fourth grade. Having attended a denomination-based school from grades one through twelve, though, I take issue with Woods’ use of the word “typical.”

In my experience on the Lipscomb campus, I’d say plenty of the students didn’t espouse at least the latter two of those beliefs, though some of the faculty did. There weren’t too many would-be dorks among the student body looking to champion the cause of accapella music, either, now that I think about it. To say that the beliefs Woods describes are representative of the typical church attendee today, I think, is inaccurate.

I won’t be voting for Carolyn Baldwin Tucker or for Buck Dozier this summer–unless, and Heaven help us if it happens, Dozier winds up in a runoff with Clement as his only opponent–but it doesn’t have much to do with their feelings about instrumental music. I personally just don’t think either candidate is representative enough of the more cosmopolitan and progressive community Nashville has become since the “typical Christer” started letting go of some of his or her exclusivism.

Buck Dozier did take one moment at Thursday’s mayoral forum to drift from his talking points, and it was a strange detour.

Massachusetts native Karl Dean responded to a question about his being the only one of the mayoral candidates in attendance who is not a Nashville native with what is now a familiar answer about his having “chosen to live here” and that he stayed because his wife grew up in the city. Dozier began his reply to an unrelated question by awkwardly putting his hand on Dean’s shoulder and saying, “I’d like to say to my good friend Karl Dean that I’m glad you came [to Nashville], and I’m glad you stayed. I want you to feel welcome, though I’m not sure you always do at these forums.”

Dean flashed a puzzled expression briefly in the wake of Dozier’s remarks and then waited while Dozier returned to answering the question at hand. At his first opportunity to answer a subsequent question, Dean replied playfully, “Buck, I’ve been here since 1978, I’ve had three children born here, and I’m working on [my] accent. I’m going to get there.”

I hope to see the results for this unscientific Nashville Business Journal poll change dramatically in the next few weeks. I have no idea how many readers have voted at this point, but, as someone who would prefer Briley, Dean, Dozier and Gentry over Bob Clement, this isn’t the starting point I’d have chosen.

How much of this is sheer name recognition? With the major players ramping up their advertising campaigns, we should have a good idea by June or July.

Buck Dozier led off his remarks by saying that he grew up in Sylvan Park and that he didn’t come from “great wealth or a political pedigree,” subtle but clear shots directed at Dean, Clement and Briley. Perhaps taking a page out of Purcell’s original campaign book, the one where Purcell used a desk to make his case for being Nashville’s neighborhood mayor, Dozier said that the symbol that best represents his campaign is a table, one where everyone in the city could sit down to solve Nashville’s problems. Dozier explained that the table makes sense for his campaign because he is a “natural consensus builder.”

As every candidate did, Dozier said that education would be his top priority as mayor. A teacher and coach for 10 years and a youth minister for 14 years, he discussed his innovative and ambitious Athens project intended to raise a $1 billion endowment for public education during the next 10 years that would not be used for “brick and mortar projects.” Dozier said that public safety would be his second priority in office and noted his experience as Metro Fire Chief in making the case that he would be the best candidate to make Nashville the “safest city in the nation.”

Dozier wrapped up his opening remarks by describing his management style as “steel and velvet” because leadership requires both great courage and great compassion. I tend to agree with that statement, and I’m only worried about one and not the other when it comes to Dozier: I sense that he has plenty of courage given his public service background, but I wonder whether he has the open-mindedness and the compassion required to lead an increasingly cosmopolitan and progressive Nashville. Seeing Dozier tonight for the first time as a candidate, I’m not sure whether he does or doesn’t, yet.

Buried in the Local News section of today’s Tennessean is a brief article by reporter Michael Cass disclosing that mayoral candidate Buck Dozier raised $70,000 during the most recent reporting period. It can’t all be about the money (can it?), but Dozier’s total significantly trails Bob Clement ($175,000), Karl Dean ($165,000) and David Briley ($131,000). As Cass observes, Dozier has raised more than $400,000 overall, but the bulk of those funds were raised over the course of last year, when Dozier was the sole candidate for the office for a significant portion of time. He now has roughly $210,000 in hand. Dozier was all positive in comments about his fundraising efforts in a related news release:

“We continue to demonstrate that our campaign is in for the long haul, and that we will have the resources we need to run a strong, competitive race for mayor.”

I’m wondering if he is demonstrating just the opposite. Despite assumptions across the city that the five candidates are headed toward a runoff, is it possible that the field might narrow in the weeks ahead?

Howard Gentry, the fifth “major” candidate, has yet to disclose his results for this latest reporting period but must do so today. This may be a mere formality for Gentry, but it may also signal an eleventh-hour scramble to assemble every last possible cent prior to the deadline. It is important to note that Gentry raised $101,000 in the last reporting period and waited until the deadline on January 31 to report then, too. I’m very curious to see where Gentry falls in comparison to Dozier and what both totals will mean for a race that is just beginning to heat up.