BREAKING: Haslam De-Populates Rural Tennessee

Okay, so ECD is cutting 58 jobs. That kind of thing happens. Cutting 1/3 of a department's staff seems a little bit steep, but it is what it is.

However, let's talk about what those 58 people did. They were essentially the economic development staff for about 56 counties in our state that cannot afford their own staff. How in the world are these counties, many of which are already losing population as it is, supposed to even try to tread water without assistance from the state?

The state government has had no problem with intervening in local governance against various localities' will (see HB600 and HB1805, among others), but when local governments need the help of the state, our Republican government cuts their legs out from under them.

There are counties right now that are smaller today than they were in 1900. It is very nearly immoral to blithely sign away the hopes of any further growth in the rural areas of our state.

Ned McWherter built roads to give our rural areas a chance and directly created jobs. Bill Haslam cuts staff that serve rural areas, letting them wither on the vine with no evidence of such a move creating jobs in any real way.

You get what you pay for, Tennessee.

Lord Jim

Throughout the history of mankind, dictators have arisen and have attempted to rule over the societies from which they came. The story usually goes the same: a man* is smart, strong, clever, or some combination thereof, and gains influence over those around him. He looks around, decides that he might just be smarter, stronger, and/or cleverer than the other folks down the block, and decides to build his influence over them. Then he looks to the next town, state, etc., and before he knows it, he's a full-blown dictator. He goes, he sees, he conquers. It's all about moving the next step up the ladder, conquering the next village or the next nation.

We've even seen some of these guys in our own United States. Boss Tweed in New York. Huey Long in Louisiana. E.H. Crump in Memphis. That's leaving aside the surely-innumerable poobahs of rural and urban America who ruled their fiefdoms with an iron fist before the promulgation of (enforced) election laws.

These days, surely! such barbarism is past us. No man or woman can be elected** and collect unto themselves such power and might that the mountains and the riverside alike bend to their will.

It's probably true that nobody could run the show like old Boss Crump used to be able to. But by George, that doesn't keep some misguided souls from trying.

Enter our good friend, State Representative/Councilman/Planning Commissioner Jim Gotto.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking, "Why's David using all those old titles for Jimmy G?" Well, let's establish one thing at the outset: Jim Gotto is currently sitting on three legislative bodies, the Metro Planning Commission, the Metropolitan Council, and the State House of Representatives. Is that right? No, it's not. But that's an issue that's already been addressed elsewhere.

What Goodman Gotto has done is attempt a sort of reverse dictatorship. Rather than follow the traditional path of aggregating power over ever-increasing areas until someone presents you with a Dictator badge or certificate***, Gotto has won election to a state body and is attempting to use that to reach back and achieve dictatorship over the city of Nashville. And for that, he deserves to be defeated.

Let's reflect first on what's really happening here. As I hypothesized earlier, a good (so to speak) dictator must possess some combination of intellect, intrinsic power (of body, personality, etc), and cleverness. Jim Gotto has none of these, except maybe a little bit of cleverness, in sufficient amount to be likable enough to win a Metro Council seat. He won election to the House because of an historic deficit in Democratic turnout. Now, he's serving the interests those smarter and more powerful than him, AKA Glen Casada.

So what exactly is our little Lord Jim doing? Well, first he decided to usurp the authority of the Davidson County Election Commission by using state law to change the Metro election dates to coincide with national elections. Why? Nobody knows for sure. He suggested that it was to avoid another redistricting mess like we had this year...20 years from now. Maybe he actually hopes that Tennessee and Nashville will continue to trend more Republican, and that with metro elections happening at the same time, that partisanship will bleed down into the local offices. Maybe he wants the GOP's voter suppression techniques to be brought to bear against low-income, minority, or otherwise-threatening voters for metro elections, just like state and national elections. Who knows. But that was just him getting started.

For his next trick, Lord Jim decided to work in concert with his allies on the Council to gerrymander progressive and labor-friendly incumbents out of their seats. Councilman Bo Mitchell, champion of labor issues and bitter enemy of councilman at-large Charlie Tygard, was the target. Working with Tygard and Eric Crafton on the council side, Lord Jim put on his Planning Commissioner hat to re-draw Mitchell's district into a new one with his friend Seanna Brandmeir, who is also running for district council. Carrying the water on the Planning Commission side was Commissioner Tonya Jones of Bellevue. That initiative, like the election date proposal failed, so Jones just decided to run against Mitchell and try to solve the problem the old-fashioned way.

It turned out that the third time was the charm for little Lord Jim, as he decided to become Mayor of Nashville**** and veto legislation passed by the very body he came from, the Metro Council. The CAN-DO ordinance was passed, after much debate, to prohibit Metro contractors from discriminating in employment based on gender identity or sexuality. Before the ordinance even passed, the folks who hold Lord Jim's strings met to talk about how to defeat it. Once it did pass, the now-infamous HB600 was swiftly introduced, and Lord Jim got his bosses at the legislature to pass it, and they in turn got their rubber-stamp governor to sign it, despite very mixed signals from the very business community this legislation was meant to 'protect.'

Having made himself planning czar, Mayor, and election administrator, Lord Jim most recently tried to make himself superintendent of schools. HB1805, a Democrat-sponsored bill to move school start dates to the end of August (apparently to make cheap high school labor available at Dollywood through the end of summer), had an opt-out provision whereby legislators could exempt their counties from the bill's requirements.***** As our schools have enough of an uphill battle as it is, the rest of the (Democratic) Davidson County house delegation decided to exempt metro schools from this bill. 'Not so fast,' thought Lord Jim. He got the amendment killed to exempt MNPS and leave our students subject to a bill meant to help folks at Dollywood.

Luckily, the sponsors pulled the bill and the mandated school date changes will not come to pass this year. But why did Gotto do that? Just to show he could? To look at his fellow Nashvillians in the House, whose combined years in the legislature total more than 150% of Gotto's life span, and just sneer at them from his position in the majority party? It beats me.

But what I do know is that in just over 7 months as a state representative, Jim Gotto has repeatedly shown little concern for the rights of local governments and has taken every opportunity to use his multiple offices to serve the interests of himself and those who control him. It's shocking, it's disgusting, and it's utterly reprehensible.

If there's one good thing the Democrats of Davidson County and Tennessee can do next year, it would be to relieve Lord Jim of his title and self-appropriated authority. This isn't the way a responsible, well-meaning official behaves, and this isn't the way a democracy works.


*I'm using that gender identifier because, well, I'm referring to history, and historically, dictators have been men. No value judgments implied.

**That might be the important caveat to this whole idea. Nowadays, Ozymandias runs some corporation.

***While these guys definitely are no little Caesars, see for example Kelly Kiesling, Tim Wirgau, and Mike Sparks, all of whom rose from positions in their respective county governments to the Legislature last year, along with Gotto.

****The "Jim-Gotto-has-made-himself-mayor-of-Nashville" theme was first iterated by my friend Sean Braisted.

*****Let's talk about this for just a minute. Why is it that a legislative body should be able to exert a kind of executive authority that is ordinarily reserved to local school boards? The legislature ought to be in the business of setting a framework within which the executive and judiciary branches operate, not dictating the minutiae of policy.

Hello Again

Hello there ladies and gentlemen, sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything. New post forthcoming.

For those of you who might have followed a link from social networking medium expecting an actual post, my apologies. Just a minute.

The Culture War

So, as I said in my first post, sometimes I'll write about things not directly related to current events. This is one of those times. I'm not claiming to be expounding the great truths in the proceeding paragraphs. Just putting some thoughts onto this convenient, digital paper.

I just got finished reading an excellent book by the great historian Barbara Tuchman called The March of Folly. The general theme of it is that one of the great constants in human life is folly, the making of decisions contrary to one's self-interest despite evidence showing the foolishness of those decisions. Examples of folly in government are rife throughout mythology and history: the Trojans and their acceptance of the fatal Horse; the Renaissance popes and their willful ignorance of the coming Reformation; the British and their ham-fisted response to the restless American colonies; the American government and the grave it dug for itself in Vietnam. In the end, she prescribes no solution for this deep-seated tendency in human behavior, except to be prepared for its inevitable occurrence.

It was a minor, well-known point made in the final section on Vietnam that got my gears turning: the draft was biased against the less-privileged. Tuchman wrote, "Everyone who could took advantage of the draft extension allowed during the pursuit of higher education, while the less advantaged classes entered uniform. The inequitable draft, first sin of the Vietnam war on the home front, and intended to reduce cause for disaffection in the social sector, dug a cleavage in American society in addition to the cleavage in opinion."

Tuchman wrote those words in 1983. While she was referring to a row plowed at the end of the 1960s, I think that like a stretch of land that has borne the same rows of tobacco for season upon season, the furrows lasted in American society long after the breaking of the soil ceased. The rich continued their education, and enjoyed a survival rate that one might expect from the treacherous halls of the ivory tower. The poor got to go see how their odds were in a war zone. Some of the poor got to come back intact, and they were (in some cases literally) spit upon. Needless to say, some degree of bitterness ensued.

Twenty to thirty years later, the resentment had not yet abated, and had joined forces with a litany of other angers (anger at the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, anger at the widening income gap, anger at the North for Reconstruction) to become fodder for the Republican party to exploit with a false, cynical populism ginned up against the effete, free-trading, welfare-stating, South-hating, Volvo-driving, latte-sipping hippy liberal Democrats. John Kerry, a legitimate war hero (among many), is shown windsurfing and is bashed by other Vietnam Veterans who question everything he did in the war. Max Cleland, a triple amputee and Bronze and Silver Star recipient, gets defeated by a Republican who got an educational deferment from the war based on the idea that Cleland's identity as a Democrat means he must be unpatriotic and soft on terrorists. The Republicans' ability to keep the trenches of resentment clear of obstacles (like, say, common sense) is still impressive, and our politics remain bitterly divisive.

As these thoughts were occurring to me (in a much less organized manner, if that's imaginable), my mind strayed to the great national efforts that preceded Vietnam, in Korea and of course, World War Two. What was different then? Well, many returning veterans from Korea found that as the years past, they quickly integrated back into society and their struggle became known as the "forgotten war." But it was also a smaller war, less present in the mind and on the television screens of the public than Vietnam.

The Second World War, on the other hand, was an enormous undertaking of our society, unlike anything that came before it or has come since. Virtually everybody served, at home or abroad. Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush sent their sons off to war, and so did the nameless butchers and bakers on the other side of the tracks. Every man risked his life as much as the other, and the bombs and bullets did their jobs without prejudice. The broadest possible slice of (male) American society saw the world, and those that came home did so with a different outlook on foreign and domestic affairs. What resulted was a politics of consensus, a meadow unbroken until Ms. Tuchman's plows of folly arrived to unearth the political climate we all know and loathe.

So there you have it, a sort of mental open thread that will undoubtedly reprise itself as I keep writing this thing. You might disagree with me now, and I might disagree with myself later. But I hope it's at least been thought-provoking.

The first real post

So now I've finished with the introductions, and it's time to write something real. I've been chewing on this one for a while now.

The past couple of weeks have been interesting ones nationally and locally in the area of political expression. From the halls of Congress to our classrooms to the machinery of our state's Democratic Party, discussions have abounded about what things should be said, what things should never be said, and who can say what, when.

I think that's a good thing. Without realizing it, our nation has fallen into a long discussion about the nature of political discourse. I'll avoid talking about how "meta" that is. But I don't think such discussions can do anything but strengthen our political culture.

Some folks have criticized the editor of the new edition of Mark Twain's classic Huckleberry Finn for removing all instances of the N-word. Others have criticized Tennessee Democratic Party chairman Chip Forrester for suggesting that members of the executive committee were out of their depth in choosing to vote for one of his opponents. Others have condemned Sarah Palin for helping set the tone nationally that may or may not have led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of several others. And others criticized the House Republicans for selectively editing the Constitution when they read it aloud in the early days of the new Congress.

For the purposes of this little essay, who's right on these issues and who is in error is irrelevant. What's made me proud has been the way in which everybody from my grocery clerk to my grandmother to my President has taken the opportunity afforded by these events to discuss the way we speak to one another as a nation.

In a nation whose discourse is largely dictated by a few media companies, such democratization of punditry is a healthy thing. Of course, in the case of most of the aforementioned news items, they were indeed fed to us by the national media. But what I've heard from the people I run into on a daily basis is not just a rehashing of tired MSNBC or Fox News talking points. The talking heads were just a catalyst for a great national dialog still taking place and sustaining itself without relying on a live CNN feed to stoke interest. This poll shows that the public did not take the word of those on TV for gospel when the elected and unelected opinionmakers of the left claimed that harsh rhetoric led directly to the Arizona shootings. Instead, Americans have formed their own opinions in the refreshing quiet of their own souls and in concert with their friends and family.

So talking about how we speak to one another seems to have brought about a truer, broader exercise of our right to free speech than I can recall experiencing in some time. Inevitably, the old media will try to rein in the untrustworthy masses, and young Zuckerberg will find another way to channel our thoughts in the guise of providing greater outlet for self-expression for the masses. But little spurts of independent thought like we've experienced in the past fortnight will continue to keep our democracy fresh.

Well, Well, Well

I guess I've started a blog. The thing I said I'd never do.

So I guess I'll say a few basic things about myself and what I intend this little journal to be.

I was born and raised in Gallatin, Tennessee, just about 30 miles northeast of Nashville, and that's the place that I'll always consider to be home (no matter how Republican it may get). I'm a proud product of public school primary and secondary education, having graduated from Gallatin High School in 2004. Both sides of my family have roots going back for generations in Middle Tennessee, and I feel that about as strongly as I feel the wind on my face or the ground underneath my feet. I'll probably talk a lot about Tennessee's past and my family's past as I continue with this exercise, so be prepared.

Since 2006, I've been actively involved in Democratic politics in this state. I fell more or less randomly into a position as a field intern on Harold Ford, Jr.'s campaign for US Senate in the fall of that year, and quickly realized that it was a path I wanted to pursue further. The next year, in the summer between my junior and senior years at Vanderbilt, I was a field staffer on Karl Dean's mayoral campaign here in Nashville. After graduating, I worked briefly for Mike Padgett's primary campaign for US Senate before moving to the Tennessee Democratic Party's coordinated campaign, doing field work for 4 state House and Senate races in Middle Tennessee. After that, I helped get the campaign to defeat the English Only ballot initiative in Nashville started, before moving to DC early in January 2009. I spent a year there at George Washington University's Graduate School for Political Management, and while there (after a lovely spell of unemployment) I worked at the Change to Win labor federation. After helping them figure out that they couldn't afford to pay me anymore, I moved baczk to Tennessee last February, and in April, began my job with the Tennessee House Democratic Caucus as its Deputy Political Director, where I served through the 2010 elections. Now, I work for the Southeast Laborers District Council, where I'm focused on helping the locals in our District develop their political programs, among other things.

My other great interests are history and music. I majored in History at Vanderbilt, and while my degree says I concentrated in European History, my focus shifted while I was there to American History. I wrote my Senior Honors thesis on the breakup of the Democratic Party and the rise of the Republicans in Tennessee between 1948 and 1970. I'll probably talk about that a lot, too, as well as Generational Theory, which I think is the best interpretation of American History out there. As far as music goes, I love listening to it, and I love playing it. My mom is a piano teacher (let me know if you're interested in lessons), so I started playing piano at the age of 4. Since high school, I've taken up guitar, as I've found it to be a little bit more portable. I'll probably talk a little bit about music, too, but maybe not as much as other stuff.

Anyway, there you have some bullet points about me. As far as this blog goes, one item I guess should be clear about is that I know the only thing I will be right about almost 100% of the time is that my opinions are correctly represented here. I won't claim to be the absolute arbiter of truth in media, and if you read this and think I'm getting too big for my britches, let me know, civilly.

I also will not be endorsing any candidates here. I'm a Democrat, and have given Democrats my blood, sweat and tears. But while I might occasionally criticize or praise individual politicians, pundits and parties, such talk should not be construed as a recommendation that you or anybody else vote one way or another.

As I get more familiar with this, I'll probably set some other guidelines for myself. But for now, this will suffice.

Welcome.