Back in January Gayle Jordan, a cutting edge candidate for southern Tennessee's 14th senatorial district (including Ardmore, Fayetteville, Lewisburg, Murfreesboro and Shelbyville) penned a guest post for his about her campaign, Running Blue in A Red State. Trump won her district by 50 points... but she explained why she is undaunted by the challenge. This week our old friend Aleurophile follows up for us with a new post contrasting Gayle with her crackpot GOP opponent, Shane Reeves. Please read it through and if it inspires you, please consider contributing to her campaign by tapping on the Blue America state legislative thermometer on the right. Aleurophile is rightfully impressed with Gayle's campaign and, now that she has won her primary, is looking forward to the special election on March 13.
Shane Reeves is her GOP opponent. He touts himself as a successful small businessman and a novice to politics. Well, he inherited his family’s pharmacy business and recently sold it for $66 million. His father was mayor of Murfreesboro, the largest city in the region. In other words, Shane Reeves misrepresents himself rather seriously. That’s the polite way of putting it. Or, maybe like Hope Hicks he tells "little white lies"-- bless his heart (as we say here in the South)!Reeves also opposes Medicaid expansion for Tennessee, favoring public-private partnerships (see our own Zen Trainer's heart-felt plea for Medicaid expansion-- and opposition to Shane Reeves-- here. And why wouldn’t he? In July 2016, Reeves’s own company, TwelveStone Health Partners, was given $1 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money in a "reimbursable grant" to fund 200 jobs (so you may reimburse taxpayer money, but you don’t have to? Gee, wonder how that goes?).Do you like people who hang their clean laundry in public? I kind of don’t like it. Whatever happened to the GOP belief in the virtues of a free and competitive market? Didn’t we used to hear an awful lot of Republican bleating about how the Obama Administration was picking winners and losers? This little waltz of corporate welfare was orchestrated by Randy Boyd, currently a candidate for governor and then commissioner of Tennessee Economic and Community Development. After he got the money, Reeves donated $5K to Boyd’s campaign. According to the Tennessee Star article that is my source for all this, the grants are supposed to be given only in exceptional cases and the newspaper could get no comment from Boyd on what made Reeves’s case exceptional. The paper reports, too, that as of September 2017, Reeves was employing only 122 workers, not the 200 he’d contracted to hire.Punching Nun’s marketing strategy for Shane Reeves’s company TwelveStone Health Partners To promote his company, Reeves has hired a marketing firm called Punching Nun Group, which obligingly places its clients’ strategies online together with clients’ favorable comments. We can see that Reeves whole-heartedly applauds their plan that he use leadership positions in the community to expand so as to better compete with mom-and-pop businesses (if perchance you can’t read the tiny print go here). Or at least that’s what the garbled grammar says to me. So, while Reeves may tout himself as standing up for small businesses, he’s actually in competition with many of them (healthcare is a major economic driver in central Tennessee) and has already shown a predilection for using his political connections to create an unfair advantage for his own business. If he succeeded in helping pass the public-private partnerships he envisions, I wouldn’t want to bet that he’d become poorer as a result.If that’s not enough, Reeves loves to brag about his “A” rating from the NRA, and sent out this flyer AFTER the Parkland massacre. Lovely guy, really. And guns for freedom, not hunting. Sounds just a tad militia-y to my ears.The wheelings and dealings going on behind the sanctimonious facade is all of a piece with Reeves’s adoration of Trump, who he insists holds the same Tennessee values of family, faith, and freedom that he claims are the touchstones of his own moral character.Hmmm... or is he drawn to Trump, the outrageous bigotted womanizer? Because he sure likes to hang with disgraced and despised Congressman Scott DesJarlais-- and contribute to his coffers. In fact, Reeves has hired DesJarlais’s stepson, Tyler Privette, to work on his campaign. In 2016, Privette served as DesJarlais’s campaign coordinator, so it seems unlikely that he has only a small role on Reeves’s staff.This cartoon appeared at the time the scandal broke out. DesJarlais did not deny the affairs and ended up paying a fine to the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for his ethical misconduct.Personally, if I were Reeves’s campaign manager, I wouldn’t advertise that I drew only a handful of people to an event at which a US Congressman appeared. Just sayin’. Remember DesJarlais? He’s the anti-abortion rights arch-conservative family values Christian Republican and doctor who stepped out on his first wife six times including with patients and subordinates and who paid for at least three abortions (details here and here). Hmmm... guess they don’t teach what causes pregnancy in med school anymore. His defense of the first abortion his first wife had is astonishing: she had a medical condition that made it inadvisable for her to bear children. So even to protect her, he still couldn’t figure out how to prevent her pregnancy? Or, perhaps we should say that the story is not really and truly credible, and DesJarlais is pro-life in DC and pro-choice in Tennessee. Divorce documents from this marriage allege violent behavior by DesJarlais (to some of which he admits) as WaPo reports. DesJarlais’s voting record on domestic violence-- he voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act-- was connected to his past behavior by Democratic opponent Lenda Sherrell. Even Mark Levin called DesJarlais a sleazeball, yet Reeves has contributed $3,000 to DesJarlais and, let’s not forget, hired his stepson.OK, to summarize: we’ve got a little-white-lie-telling, NRA-touting, Trump mini-me who seems to be positioning himself to use public office for private gain (as I said, Trump mini-me), has kissing-close ties with a disgraced Congressman, and who is doing it all while hiding behind the Bible! Does it get worse? Yes it does!Tennessee’s Lt. Gov. weighs in, demonizing Gayle Jordan, perhaps in a way that could incite violence against her. I personally will adopt the "Dangerous Woman" tag to go along with "Nasty Woman!"The Tennessee GOP has launched a campaign slamming Reeves’s opponent, Democrat (and fellow Kossack) Gayle Jordan because she’s an atheist. SHE, we’re meant to believe, is a dangerous woman who’ll undermine traditional Tennessee values! Given all the above, this is laughable, and it methinks it bears a whiff of eau d’desperation (one could not help but notice, in going through his financials, that Reeves has paid for a poll). Certainly the response from the Twittersphere has been resoundingly pro-Gayle-- and pro-Constitution, I may add-- and several have pledged votes and money to her. Here's Gayle fabulous response.And this is where you come in, dear reader! This election in ONE WEEK AWAY-- March 13-- and early voting has already begun (through March 8). Gayle has been running a dynamite campaign, but her opponent is wealthy and she needs our help.Gayle IS dangerous: she’s accomplished, articulate, compassionate. She’s an Ironman athlete, an attorney, a farmer, a mother of four. Her campaign has gained a lot of steam, so it’s no wonder the GOP is desperate!Please contribute what you can to Gayle’s campaign. If you’re on Twitter, follow & retweet her to help her get her message out (@Jordan4SenateTN)Greenbacks needed to flip it blue in Tennessee!
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