A screenshot of a social media posting by Chattanooga City Councilman Chris Anderson.
A screenshot of a social media posting by Chattanooga City Councilman Chris Anderson.
Columnist David MartinNo, this is not an endorsement. I don’t get to do that on this page, anyway.
Rather, it’s a word of advice to local Democrats tempted to take Larry Grohn’s campaign kickoff lightly. In short: Don’t do it. You should think of him as a legitimate contender to be Chattanooga’s next mayor.
Tuesday evening, with the hot August sun blaring into his eyes – and the faces of a handful of sign-toting supporters behind him – Chattanooga City Councilman Larry Grohn announced from the steps of City Hall that he intends to unseat Mayor Andy Berke next March. His speech was brief and straightforward, and nothing he said caught anyone off guard. Flashy it was not. He did, however, unveil a relatively catchy tagline: “Believe in Better.”
Within a few short hours of Grohn’s announcement, one of his council peers (I’ll let you guess which one) took to social media to mock him, the sparse attendance of the event and the racial composition of his backers. Apparently, Grohn’s campaign kickoff was a bit too Caucasian.
In no time, Grohn was compared to Donald Trump in the comment section of that Facebook post, where it was then naturally suggested that he’d be a bad candidate for people of color. His fellow councilman even went so far as to call him “a racist, white, Tea Party liar.”