This One's a Corker

OK, then, a Tennessee election roundup it is.

As you all know by now, former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker vanquished his two rabidly conservative rivals in the GOP Senate primary yesterday. He'll now take on Harold Ford, Jr., in the November general. It promises to be a great race. Corker won by a comfortable margin, finishing with 48% of the vote, compared to Ed Bryant's 34% and Van Hilleary's pathetic 17%. (In a rare moment of prescience, I predicted something like this here. Don't expect it again.) Bryant and Hilleary are both Newtoid former congressman from the vaunted "class of '94." Bryant reached his highest visibility as an impeachment manager back in the Clinton-lynchin' good times of 1998, whereas Hilleary was the GOP nominee for governor just four years ago. So these were serious challengers, at least on paper. But Hilleary ran a disasterously bad campaign. His treacly "Send a Soldier to the Senate" ads were unwatchably cringe-inducing, reminding us as they did that his own staffers used to call him "Gomer" behind his back.

Bryant complained last night that this would have been a competitive race if the hard-line conservatives hadn't split their votes between two candidates. I don't think it would have made a difference. Corker still would have won, although the margin would have been closer. Hilleary's strengths were in southern and central Tennessee, geographically closer to Corker, who ripped through east TN and most of middle TN, leaving Bryant with the west and the Clarksville-Franklin corridor just west of Nashville. So had Hilleary dropped out, my guess is that a decent number of those votes (even if not a majority) would have gone to Corker. Corker also took the unusual step of going negative early, and at a point when he had just gone up in the polls. His attacks on Bryant and Hilleary, whom he dubbed "the twins"--"career politicians" who had voted to raise their own pay yada yada yada--were factually creative. They also allowed Ed and Van to team up and double barrell Corker over his honesty and integrity, so that, rather than fighting each other for the conservatives, they honed in on moderate Bob. Corker won anyway. Money will do that for you. Gobs and gobs of money. The race also shows that the old Howard Baker wing of moderate GOP party politics is not dead in the state.

So what does this mean for the general? Corker took some hits to his integrity in the primary, and he had to swerve pretty far to the right to cut off the twins. Historicallly, he's a pro-choice pragmatist who wasn't afraid to raise taxes in the name of civic improvement. But he had to go anti-tax, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant for the campaign. We'll see if any of that hurts him against the crafty Ford, who is nothing if not opportunistic. Ford, for what it's worth, looked great last night. His victory speech (he got 80% or so in a barely contested primary) was powerful and elegant. He sounded like a great orator from the southern past, working his cadences like an old pro and reaching out magnanimously to both his recent rivals and his new opponent. Or maybe he was just Bill Clinton with a dash of Jesse Jackson. Speaking of the Big Dog, Clinton was in Nashville last night to rally the Ford faithful: $150 a ticket, $1000 or $10,000 if you wanted a little "special" time to bask in the glow of His Greatness. From what I saw on the telemevision, Clinton was on his A-game. The Ford people say they raised a million-plus $. Nice little war chest, eh.

Clinton's speech seemed to suggest the theme of the coming campaign: the Senate shouldn't be about rabid ideology or smearing your opponents, it should be about tangible results for ordinary voters. Gas prices, minimum wage, Iraq. Where are Bush's results? My guess is they'll try to lash Corker to Bush, who is no longer very popular, even in TN.

A couple of final thoughts. First, I saw Corker at the City Cafe last week, the local "Meat & 3" where you go to see all the local pols congregate. As far as I could tell, he did no pressing of the flesh, not unless you went up past his all-prepster-white-boy entourage and introduced yourself (which I didn't, although I did talk to a couple of local candidates in other races). This doesn't seem like smart behavior for an aspiring senator in a place known for its politicking and informality. Maybe, like me, he was just enjoying the fried chicken and turnip greens. Still, I expect he'll have to adjust. I was also surprised to see that he's not a very big guy, probably about my size, and not much bigger than Emery. I'm pretty sure that Emery could take him in a dark alley. Of the two, Ford has the more impressive physical presence. These things shouldn't matter (like race), but often they do. Corker may have the overall edge in this race, but there are a lot of intangibles. As a final note, I'd say that, whoever wins, we'll be better off than we are now. Either Corker of Ford will be better than that scheming panderbot, whose name I forget, currently stinking up the seat.

[Saturday morning update: the local ABC affiliate reported last night that a recent Rasmussen poll gives Corker a 49-37 % lead over Ford. Rasmussen has something of a reputation as a GOP shill, and he tends to estimate Bush's approval ratings at 5-10% higher than any other national pollster, so take this with a grain of salt. Yet the numbers sound plausible to me. Corker looks, at least on TV, like what Tennesseans want their sentaor to look like, and he's very popular with both Dems and Pubies in the Chattanooga area.

Nonetheless, Corker has already started to go negative, blasting Ford as a "career politician," and unleashing the aforementioned "scheming panderbot" to label Ford "the ultimate Washington insider." I guess that, as George W's personal shower-boy, he'd know. Ford has been strong in defense, asking whose party it is that controls every branch of the federal government: "His politics to attack and lie and distort, I mean, that may work in the Republican primary but it's not going to work in this state. . . . If Mr. Corker thinks so low about politics, why is he running? I think it's arrogant of him and Mr. Frist, who's also worth a lot of money, to be critical of those of us who are trying to serve poor people, working people, and the middle class people in this country."