Stockard on the Stump: It’s not debatable, Blackburn shifting for money

As early voting begins in Tennessee’s gubernatorial primary election, frontrunning U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn appears to think she has the Republican race wrapped while simultaneously showing signs of paranoia.

Blackburn is set to hold a fundraising reception Aug. 26 in Atlanta (can you get there from here?), 20 days after the primary election. Supporters are asked to mail checks to Marsha for Governor, at a post office box in Atlanta or contribute online with WinRed, a small-dollar fundraising apparatus. Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, a potential Senate replacement, is her treasurer.

The fundraiser invitation goes out amid reports that Blackburn’s federal campaign donated $4.8 million to Club for Growth Action, a dark-money group using another political action committee to hammer opponent, Rep. John Rose of Cookeville, for being soft on illegal immigration and China. At the same time, a group called the American Exceptionalism Institute is starting to air ads criticizing her fundraising practices throughout a long political career.

Meanwhile, folks are being denied and disappointed by the absence of a gubernatorial debate.

No matter how hard groups such as the Tennessee Press Association and NewsChannel5 tried to put the three main candidates on a stage to battle it out before the primary, they were thwarted, mainly by Blackburn.

If you ask her, though, they’ve already gone head-to-head, but without the other two candidates, Rose and state Rep. Monty Fritts, realizing it. Maybe it was a dream.

Asked why she refuses to debate, the 74-year-old Blackburn said in an email response to Lookout questions, “For months, the Republican candidates running for governor have shared the stage many times at Republican Party events all across the state. We need to be coming together as conservatives, not making it easier for the Democrats to win in November. Just look at Knox County, where there’s a mini-Mamdani running for Knox County mayor, who traveled to Venezuela and marched in support of Nicolás Maduro, a Marxist, narco-terrorist dictator.”

We’re not sure what that candidate has to do with the price of tea in China … (oops, can’t say China because Blackburn has crushed all the fortune cookies, even if they’re made in America).

But by that line of reasoning, Fritts and Rose, both 62, should be marching to Blackburn’s drum, instead of questioning her refusal. 

Rose wanted to debate as far back as last year, and Fritts told the Lookout he’s challenged both opponents to spar when they’ve been in the same room.

“I think ‘iron sharpens iron’ is a tremendous approach,” Fritts said. “And I would be reluctant to vote for anyone who is going to be the executive head in cases of tornadoes or floods or whatever crisis … if that person didn’t have the wherewithal to sit down in front of the people and discuss or debate their ideas. That would concern me.”

Young Republicans held a debate in East Tennessee recently, sans Blackburn, and another forum was scheduled in Chattanooga but failed to materialize, according to Fritts.

“There were three people there: me, myself and I,” he said. “Neither of the others showed up. I appreciate all the floor time.”

As a result, Tennesseans haven’t been able to see how the candidates perform under pressure. 

For what it’s worth, Fritts said he and Rose were set to debate but that the congressman wanted all sorts of conditions, including the last word on every question.

Rose, who recently put another $4 million of his own money into the campaign after raising only $259,000 last quarter, defended the strategy, saying he’s held 54 town halls while Blackburn has focused on “closed-door fundraising” at invitation-only events, in addition to small donations from out of state, which are expensive to gather.

“They’ve been playing the game of ‘I’m going to be your senator or I’m going to be your governor,’ and that’s been pretty effective,” Rose said of the Blackburn campaign.

But while it could net a win, that strategy doesn’t translate to healthy democracy. More than likely, it will lead to governing by edict.

Time out from crime fighting

A group of district attorneys is going after Memphis District Attorney Steve Mulroy for writing an op-ed criticizing a seminar on police use of force.

Sent out by District Attorney Mark Davidson, president of the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference Executive Committee, and signed by seven other DAs, the statement accuses Mulroy, a Democrat, of making “sweeping conclusions based upon a single training program while suggesting that prosecutors who decline to prosecute officer-involved shootings are simply validating a culture in which deadly force is routinely excused.”

They call his words “reckless” and say that every officer-involved shooting will be handled based on the facts and evidence.

In reading and re-reading Mulroy’s column, though, this casual observer found that he didn’t go after district attorneys or police but after the company, Force Science, that put on the seminar and could be training law enforcement officers.

“One thing I learned was a DA can’t prevent police killings if the police are trained to kill,” Mulroy wrote in the op-ed. He detailed what he termed a “siege mentality” in which instructors mocked the concept of “de-escalation” and the use of “trained mental health officers” to deal with cases in which people are suffering meltdowns.

Mulroy wrote that the prosecutions of officers involved in the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Eric Garner in New York City were called “witch hunts” and that the danger of chokeholds was downplayed at the seminar. 

Further, he said the use of deadly force by police was always justified in the situations instructors described at the training.

“At worst, in controversial situations, the instructor would simply say, ‘The optics are bad,’” Mulroy wrote.

No doubt, shades are required in this atmosphere.

Whether this was worth an op-ed is debatable, though it is important to let people know how police officers are being trained in an escalating police state. Asking for a refund might not have sufficed.

But while Tennessee’s Republican leaders have accused him of being soft on crime, even considering whether to expel him from office, the response by Davidson and other district attorneys leaves some doubt about their comprehension skills. 

Did we read the same op-ed, because their response is more of a political attack than a dissection of Mulroy’s seminar critique. (It should be noted that former Memphis DA Amy Weirich, a Republican whom Mulroy defeated in 2022, works for Davidson and the liberal outcast, Davidson County DA Glenn Funk, is not among those signing the statement.)

Then again, there is nothing new under the sun.

It’s only money

Nuclear fuel manufacturer TRISO-X received an $11 million state grant this week to go toward construction of a fuel facility and research and development center in Oak Ridge, potentially leading to 1,140 jobs, according to Gov. Bill Lee.

The move comes after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the development of advanced small modular reactors. A subsidiary of Maryland-based X-energy, TRISO-X is the ninth company to benefit from the state’s nuclear energy fund, which was initiated by the governor in 2023-24 with $50 million and has grown to $95 million.

Lee has said he considers nuclear power a critical part of national energy independence. 

Oak Ridge’s role in the Manhattan Project and producing atomic bombs is well documented, along with the importance of Oak Ridge National Laboratory for nuclear energy research. 

But will this be Lee’s legacy? After all, the amount of money spent on this program pales in comparison to that for private-school vouchers, which is edging toward $700 million.

“Get back in the race”

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development has recouped $92 million from companies that received FastTrack grants after they fell short on hiring and investment targets. But $20 million remains to be collected, according to a Center Square report.

Since 2016, the state has made grants totaling $169 million to 71 companies, including Nashville’s SmileDirectClub, which went bankrupt, and Chattanooga-based battery materials maker Novonix, which failed to create the 290 jobs it promised, according to the report. 

Long criticized for picking winners and losers, some of which have been real stinkers, the state’s business grant program has been under fire recently for giving $30 million to Starbucks to bring a regional headquarters to Nashville.

Gubernatorial candidate Rose has been blasting away at the Starbucks grant, saying the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion and “weird transgender” programs don’t mesh with Tennessee values. No doubt, everyone is worried about whether trans people take their frappuccino with pistachio or caramel. (Their black coffee doesn’t quite make the grade, by the way.)

The problem is that this resistance to Starbucks, and it doesn’t come from Rose alone, is putting Tennessee in danger of becoming a homogenous state with no character, no variety and no room for rebels. Blackburn also said that people moving here need to leave their “blue” views at the state line.

If you look around, though, Starbucks coffee shops sit on just about every corner in the state, so somebody must like spending $6 every morning for a fancy cup of Joe. 

“Just one more mornin’ / I had to wake up with the blues / pulled myself out of bed, yeah / put on my walkin’ shoes.” *

* Allman Brothers Band, “Dreams”