Cooper: Elected office or business? GOP voters must consider

Will the record of U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, be a help or a hindrance in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary campaign?
Will the record of U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, be a help or a hindrance in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary campaign?

Once you serve a term in elected office, you have a record.

U.S. Rep. Diane Black is learning that can be a double-edged sword, and for the first time in more than 65 years that may not be what Tennessee voters are looking for in a resume for governor.

The Gallatin Republican used her office to her advantage in the first television advertisement promoting her primary campaign. In it, a wall-mounted television in the background of a hospital shows footage of President Trump calling forth the congresswoman last December following his signing of a tax cut bill that she helped author.

The implication couldn't be clearer - that Black is an intimate of the president, who is popular in the state. But, she says, she didn't help write the bill for the president but for the nurse who is passing by the camera in the ad. The spot then launches into a mini-biography of Black as a former nurse and onetime single mother who faced the same struggles as the viewer is expected to assume the nurse does today.

In her second advertisement, she is driving a car as she excoriates the practice of human trafficking and explains how as governor she would make ending it in the state a priority.

Few could argue with her logic in doing so, though U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., whom she criticized last October when he described the White House as an "adult day care center," has been working on the issue for years.

However, as the USA Today Network-Tennessee pointed out, the week before the second spot began airing, Black missed a vote on a bill that would allow state attorneys general and victims of human trafficking to sue websites that help facilitate the practice.

Indeed, at the time, she had missed 29 of 101 votes the U.S. House had taken this year and 50 since she launched her gubernatorial campaign in August, the most of any in the state delegation.

Some of the votes were largely meaningless, but others concerned U.S. energy policy, the Dodd-Frank banking law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Truth in Lending Act and the country's cybersecurity collaboration with Ukraine.

When the human trafficking vote occurred, Black was in Tennessee appearing alongside Vice President Mike Pence at a National Religious Broadcasters meeting.

Like Black, Speaker of the House Beth Harwell, also a gubernatorial candidate, has a record as a state legislator since 1989.

Although she is not allowed to raise campaign funds during the state legislative session and her campaign hasn't launched television advertising, the Tennesseans for Good State Government political action committee (PAC) has released two ads on her behalf.

The first touts her accomplishments and doesn't mention her candidacy but ends with: "Beth Harwell - conservative reform for Tennessee." The second also doesn't state she is running for governor but suggests her leadership in combating the opioid crisis in the state.

Three complaints have been made to the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance against the speaker, alleging the PAC spent beyond legal limits on the ads and that she doesn't have the money to back a loan she made to her campaign. On Wednesday, the body delayed dealing with the complaints until May.

Unlike with Black, though, other than the complaints, there was little pushback to the ads. That might have something to do with the findings of a February gubernatorial preference poll commissioned by the Bill Lee campaign that had Harwell in a distant fourth among the four GOP candidates.

Meanwhile, businessmen Randy Boyd and Lee don't have records to defend from terms in elective office.

Although Boyd served as an unpaid education adviser for Gov. Bill Haslam and then as his commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development (late 2014-early 2017), he spent most of his career growing the Radio Systems Corp. he started in 1991.

The closest Lee, a cattle farmer and chairman of a family home services business founded by his grandfather, came to public office was serving as the 7th Congressional District's appointed representative to the Tennessee Higher Education Committee.

Time will tell if the lack of political office will be a plus for the pair. The last governor elected without previously having to face the voters was Frank Clement, a young attorney and veterans leader who defeated incumbent Gov. Gordon Browning in the 1952 Democratic primary and went on to defeat Republican Beecher Witt in the general election.

Since then, the state has had two former mayors (Haslam and Phil Bredesen), two former congressmen (Don Sundquist and Ray Blanton), one former state legislator and speaker of the House (Ned McWherter), one former state representative and commissioner of agriculture (Buford Ellington) and one once-defeated candidate (Lamar Alexander, who had lost the governor's race to Blanton in 1974).

Black has done nothing unusual or unforgivable by missing votes while campaigning (even when one of the votes was on an issue she says she cares about), but with a businessman in the White House and Congress's popularity in the depths, Republican voters may be looking elsewhere.

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