Those donations ought to buy a blowout tonight at the Adventure Science Center

"I scored $500,000 in donations, politicized the flood and beat a homeless guy.
This is one historic election party!"

Historic?

Leave it to the flacks to overspin the case.

Four years gone and Karl Dean is now fronting neighborhoods

Karl Dean spent most of his first term evading neighborhood issues. In one of his only community meetings with neighborhoods the message was clear: neighborhood issues are swallowed by his campaign rubrics "good schools" and "public safety." Otherwise, any neighborhood issues were to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The once robust Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods shriveled to insignificance in the past 4 years.

But none of those facts have stopped the re-elect Karl Dean campaign from re-writing history in the last 9 months. Now his PR handlers have practically repackaged him as the neighborhoods Mayor. Here's the snail mail solicitation he is sending out:

This song and dance would have played better in 2007.

The Mayor in Nashville speaks on IQT, Oshawa Mayor says he'll give Dean a call

Karl Dean is in a difficult place. News reports out of Canada say that IQT is both in bankruptcy and heading to its new home in Nashville with the payroll, severance and vacation cash it owes hundreds of Canadians it laid off. Mayor Dean has repeated economic development so much since 2007 that it is now hackneyed, but he's got to find a way to explain during his re-election campaign what to do with plans to subsidize a IQT in order to provide 900 jobs when the company just shed 1,200 jobs in Canada, where they reportedly received government subsidies too.

So, late this afternoon Hizzoner dispatched the usual talking points adjusted for the awkward situation at hand:

We were surprised and concerned to hear about the developments in Canada, and I was dismayed by the way the company treated its employees there. Rest assured, Metro taxpayers are protected. Metro’s agreements with IQT have not been finalized, and no incentive funds have been paid to the company. Consistent with my philosophy on economic development, the incentives offered to IQT are based on the company’s ability to bring jobs to Nashville. If they don’t create jobs here, they don’t get incentives. We are not moving forward on this deal unless we get answers from IQT that satisfy my concerns.

Meanwhile, back in the Great White North, the Mayor of the town IQT abandoned, angry that his constituents may not be able to pay their bills or feed their kids in the near future, intends to phone Nashville:

IQT paid its Oshawa employees $11 an hour but received incentives from the Tennessee government to move.

“How much lower can you go in terms of wages?” Ryan wondered.

Oshawa Mayor John Henry says he is going to phone the mayor of Nashville and the city’s chamber of commerce to tell them what kind of company IQT is.

“This is tragic for the community,” Henry said. “It is the direct jobs at IQT but also all the suppliers. All those people who had a working relationship with this company. Now (IQT workers) are going through the turmoil of trying to recover their money.”

It is probably difficult for even the best PR firm to market hundreds of new jobs a Mayor is going to create when news gets out that they torpedoed even more jobs and pinched wages-already-earned in someone else's community.

Another year of prosaic Nashville Neighborhood Defense Fund endorsements

Apparently the NNDF lobby group founded by former CM John Summers has decided to kiss the mayoral ring this year and give Karl Dean their endorsement rather than rocking the boat. And outside of their Burkley Allen endorsement, there really is not much in this slate that is inspired. The Mayor and Vice Mayor tabs leave me underwhelmed. Even NNDF's "urge" to the Mayor seems insipid even as it is devoid of any realism about this administration:

About those TEPid endorsements

I doubt very seriously that Tennessee Equality Project places much stock in my opinions of their political moves, but I'm thankful to have a blog to be able to note the curious logic of some of their endorsements. According to the Tennessean, they endorsed Karl Dean for Mayor (no surprise given that they held a campaign fundraiser for him long before his re-election campaign even launched). The curiosity here is that Karl Dean has made no effort to have Metro government join TEP's lawsuit against the state's suppression of the Metro non-discrimination ordinance (even more curiously, Tennessean blogger Michael Cass made it sound like the ordinance was initiated by the council under the influence of TEP when it seems to me that there were at least a couple of CMs leading the charge in the wake of Belmont).

David Briley may be endorsing Jason Holleman and criticizing Sarah Lodge Tally, but his re-affirmation of Karl Dean sounds una corda

I have to admit that when Karl Dean's former campaign opponent David Briley came out and endorsed the Mayor for re-election quickly and then held a community gathering at his house for the Dean Team I was left wondering whether he believed more strongly than some of us that Dean was somehow vulnerable to Craddock. Otherwise, the speed with which the endorsement was made seemed illogical (short of other dynamics that might be operating beneath the public radar).

A blog post published by Briley today seems to be interpreted by the news media and spun by the Mayor's loyalists as equal parts reaffirmation of Karl Dean and endorsement of Jason Holleman (who has been attacked mercilessly by the campaign to re-elect's hired goons and stooges while Holleman's opponent Sarah Lodge Tally is getting a little help from friends of Dean). I'm not convinced the parts are as equal as either the news media or the Dean Team would like us to believe.

Dean doubles communications staff "to serve the needs of the media"

The pipeline leading from newsrooms to the pistons of government is alive and well in Nashville, given Karl Dean's hiring last week of Bonna Johnson as his Press Secretary. Johnson left the Tennessean last April to become a Public Relations Manager (no surprise there, since today's brand of journalism many times has more to do with spin and flackery than with critical questioning and unflinching reporting). Now she's carrying Karl Dean's message back to her former colleagues at the Tennessean who will no doubt continue the brainwashing that prompted them to make him their "Tennessean of the Year." At the same time, the Gannett kids will get someone close to the Mayor who can influence things for them if necessary. Looks like there will be a good chance for mutual back scratching.

In the meantime it is reasonable to ask: does Johnson's hiring catapult communications office expenses to unnecessary heights in this recession? Karl Dean has been burning Metro revenues with multiple hires of former employees of Phil Bredesen in an attempt to shore up his administration in preparation for a statewide run in 4 years. Given that the Mayor annually requires Metro departments to cut their budgets, why isn't he demanding the same from his own office? We know what dedicating a single staff member to fondle handle the media will mean to the Mayor's elections aspirations, but are the "needs of the media" really worth what we're going to pay Bonna Johnson to spoon feed newspeak back to us for the paycheck? I guess it beats overpaying those former journos at McNeely Pigott & Fox for shoveling us similar Pablum.

Union: Music City Center build good for outside billionaires; for Nashville workers, not so much

A crane operators' union watchdog website indicates that Karl Dean has not delivered the local "jobs, jobs, jobs!" as promised:

the $600 million convention center project – the largest public project in Tennessee history – has not been the boon to Nashville workers that Karl Dean promised. Major contracts have been awarded to out-of-state companies including Missouri-based Ceco, owned by billionaire Michael Heisley, who also owns the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies. The Dean administration refuses to release data to back up their claims that the project is meeting their ever-shifting local hiring goal.

So, the re-elect Karl Dean campaign is going around promoting convention center construction as a shelter of local workers against the recession but the Mayor's Office is not being transparent with the actual hiring numbers so that voters can judge for themselves.

Washington blogger describes Stand for Children as propped up by wealthy, union-busting elites

According to Bellevue, Washington blogger thushara wijeratna the local chapter of Stand for Children is lobbying his state's legislature to make it easier for administrators to fire senior teachers without any due process. It's the easy route: teachers with seniority cost more, so call them "inept" and then cut them loose.

The blogger also reports that they get public support with deceptively worded polls, but otherwise SFC is not grassroots as advertised. Nashville Stand for Children has a pivotal role as the "advocacy" arm of a powerful friends-of-public-schools organization, but wijeratna's analysis would suggest that SFC's top-down structure is astroturf:

Maybe Danny Gokey is kind of a big deal and can't be cancelled

Martha O'Bryan needs volunteers via C. McTamaney (click on)

A local blogger seems appalled that Re-elect Karl Dean plans to burn money it doesn't need this weekend on a campaign event just because it can, and he has an idea for authentically supporting the city and a local non-profit:

it feel[s] like another case of folks in the administration having no clear sense of what is happening in the city beyond those things that they are involved in creating. It doesn’t seem like much to have a person in the office who checks the community calendars and keeps the office informed on what is happening in the city. Perhaps Billy Fields, the Office of Neighborhoods Director (someone I like very much) could take that on. But somewhere, somehow, folks are so tunnel visioned that there is little awareness of what’s going on out their own window, let alone throughout the city.

The Dean Machine expands with nonprofit advocacy organization's endorsement

The Nashville Chapter of Stand for Children, which describes itself as a "grassroots advocacy" organization for public schools, announced its endorsement of Karl Dean for Mayor saying:

Mayor Dean has demonstrated amazing commitment to our public schools. During one of the most economically trying times in our history, Mayor Dean has fully funded the schools budget every year since he has been in office. He listens to community and parent input

Except that the statement is somewhat disingenuous as the Nashville City Paper recently pointed out regarding 300 teacher displacements and the loss of federal funds:

the positions of 334 teachers — covering Metro elementary, middle and high schools — have been eliminated prior to next school year, with district officials hoping to relocate affected teachers to other schools. But there’s no guarantee that will happen — it boils down to a still-unknown number of openings elsewhere ....

The reality of eliminated teaching positions has gone largely underreported in Nashville, perhaps in part because Mayor Karl Dean has announced intentions to fully fund Metro schools.

Dean’s budget proposal for the 2011-12 fiscal year, which awaits Metro Council approval, supports schools financially to the level requested by the Metro Nashville Board of Education. However, the mayor and school board’s plan does not cover more than $30 million in depleted federal stimulus monies and approximately $10 million in vanishing federal-jobs program dollars. Official have known this day was coming, and it’s resulting in more than 300 terminated positions.

So, stating it as "fully-funded" is overstating the case, but this is an election year and organizations are jockeying for positions of influence on Karl Dean's coattails.

The Craddock candidacy post-mortem

It was a matter of time before CM Michael Craddock was going to bow out of the race for Mayor. His campaign really was like running a pump car up against a locomotive. And Craddock simply did not have any progressive chops to pull votes away from Karl Dean. He simply waged one too many culture wars over the years. I like the guy personally, but if he didn't lose my vote several years ago over the Kay Brooks/School Board fiasco or over English Only or on his latest vote against non-discrimination, there are any number of other votes documented on this blog that would have given me pause before pulling the Craddock lever.

Even the council member's attempt to play the populism card was not enough. I needed a nobler brand of populism.

Re-elect Karl Dean solicits journalists to join his community steering committees

An eyebrow-raiser:

Don't know how many other reporters received invitations to jump on the Mayor's campaign bandwagon, and surely the reporters are not at fault for getting solicited by Karl Dean's campaign. However, this does not allay concerns that news about Mayor Karl Dean is managed and filtered rather than reported, and it does not help the journos maintain a level of detached neutrality, if not objectivity.

You like me. You really like me.

I found this Re-elect Karl Dean Facebook campaign ad without really trying last week. I had added it as an update to a previous post on Sean Braisted's affinity for Hizzoner, but malfunctions at Blogger late last week deleted it. As I mentioned, Braisted seems to be trying to out-Kerr Gail Kerr on campaign boosterism. However, the ad sums up the whacked rationales for terms of endearment, since Mayor Dean did not himself overcome the flood or the recession.

By the way, any comments Enclave readers made late last week were stripped by the Blogger malfunctions, not by me. If you left a comment that disappeared, you will have to re-comment.


UPDATE: I suppose the days are over when Democrats identified with liberal blueprints like the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. There was a time I can barely remember when being Democrat meant standing for social justice and civil rights more than economic expansion, when it meant singing protest songs like "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" instead of patriotic hymns like "God Bless America."

Now being Democrat seems to mean posturing as conservative as one possibly can without actually joining the GOP. Case in point, Sean Braisted's response to a special Facebook contest of Tennessee Democrats that encourages its friends to complete the sentence "I am a Democrat because ..."

When I was young, this is the kind of stuff we heard from Reagan Democrats. Now worker and consumer protection, distributive justice, and common access to resources are afterthoughts to untrammeled growth, concentrated wealth, and trickle-down benefits. I guess the days when Democrats self-identified with critiques of the injustice, the classism at the heart of wealth generation and waging war are gone.

Another compare and contrast of Hizzoner: Dean feels our pain now

A year ago this weekend Karl Dean appeared on NPR and he seemed to have relatively detached tones about the degree of the disaster of 2010 Nashville flood in an attempt to encourage tourists to come to Nashville:

What a difference a day makes

Compare and contrast our Mayor one day sounding all GOP-ish campaigning against the federal government, but then conceding the next day that the lion's share of the help of flood recovery did in fact come from the federal government.

The neighborhoods Mayor

For 4 years now the Mayor's Office has been running a bait-and-switch against neighborhood organizations. In 2007 Karl Dean held a single "connecting communities" meeting, generally ignored neighborhood leaders' concerns and questions, and redirected attention to the mantra of education and schools. In 2008, the Mayor's Office in an newspaper article on neighborhood issues insisted that education and public safety were "the" neighborhood issues without reference to any other priorities. In 2009, the "Mayor's Night Out" meeting dedicated to neighborhoods was poorly communicated, and conditions that community leaders expressed as needing attention were not followed-up on. In 2010, Mayor Dean totally undermined an Antioch community task force's recommendations in order to attempt to dump Fairgrounds vendors into Hickory Hollow mall, insisting that he was helping Antioch and South Nashville neighborhoods and not the wealthy development interests behind the deal.

So, you will excuse my jadedness about the spate of "neighborhood gatherings" the Mayor has suddenly scheduled in 2011 to boost his re-election campaign and to gloss the thin veneer of grassroots. The first one was held in March in Madison under the auspices of a "food drive." Here is the Twitter exchange between me and one of the Tennessean reporters' feeds on the subject:

Michael Cass: Dean planning "neighborhood gathering" in Madison this weekend, asking supporters to bring food to donate to Second Harvest Food Bank
Me: Isn't that "neighborhood gathering" actually a fundraiser for the Dean campaign?
Cass: The announcement I saw only mentioned bringing food for Second Harvest, but I'll check.
Cass: Campaign says it's not a fundraiser; people can give if they want but aren't expected to.

Mayor Dean chooses to burn Metro cash reserves rather than to raise taxes during his reelection year

Apparently, the boldest plan Mayor Karl Dean proposed in today's "State of Metro" agenda is to use federal funds to motivate Nashvillians to stop eating to extremes. But aside from acting the Diet Tzar over money headed in from elsewhere, the Mayor, who intends to keep his office for a second term, has no intentions of raising revenues before the election to fill the expanding chasm between income and expenses:

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is choosing to dip into the city’s reserve fund to balance next year’s budget .... to avoid a property tax hike.

“The alternative of asking our citizens to pay more in property taxes while they struggle to make their own ends meet would not have been the right thing to do. This year, our approach to the budget will be the same. We will not raise property taxes.”

Asked if the city could go another four years without a tax increase, Dean – who is running for reelection – said he wouldn’t speculate.

I have seen nothing to indicate that the Mayor has plans for Metro to pay what amounts to a self-loan back to the schools' rainy day fund in the future.

Campaign behind the curve?

According to a specialist on local governments and economic development, outsourcing government functions (a.k.a. "public/private partnerships") does not live up to the cost savings promised and is actually the wave of the past, not the future:

Privatization peaked among local governments in 1997. From 1992 to 1997 new outsourcing contracts accounted for 18 percent of all service delivery, while in-sourcing was 11 percent. The ratios shifted in the 1997-2002 period with in-sourcing exceeding new contracts out by 50 percent. From 2002 to 2007 the rates were about equal (new contracts out were 11 percent, contracting back in was 12 percent). So the pendulum swings.

So, is this tweeted talking point pushing the envelope or falling behind the curve?