I’ve had to start this column over about four times because stuff just keeps happening with no regard for my deadline. Luckily for me, however, nothing I’ve seen has changed my opinion that there’s a new wind blowing in these parts.
I can’t quite put my finger on the moment I first started thinking that things might be changing, although I detected a slight breeze last month when the GOP-backed property tax referendum failed to attract enough signatures to get on the ballot. But that was only a faint stirring. Pretty much nobody who knew much about city politics, and really, hardly anybody but the Polish Wind guy who was fundraising off the signature drive and the people he snookered into funding him actually thought they were going to pull that off. It’s hard to get a referendum onto the ballot. And that’s a good thing, lest we end up like California. I shouldn’t have to tell Republicans how bad that would be.
So, I guess the earliest real sign that things were changing came last week when I started seeing new parent groups getting together and making plans to attend the September school board meeting to advocate for protecting kids from covid with face masks, contact tracing, reporting and vaccine promotion. Since school board and county commission meetings had heretofore been the preserve of the anti-mask, anti-vax, give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death crowd, this was more than a hint of a sea change. But would it materialize?
Then on Tuesday, another sign was delivered in the non-partisan city primary. It wasn’t a big election, as elections go – just five incumbent-occupied city council seats up for grabs with no mayoral race to attract voters – so unless you are a hard-shell Republican activist whose political barometer is set to county politics, there were no real surprises. All the incumbents ran first in their districts, contrary to the boastful predictions of local GOP activists who had to make do with second place after predicting a “sweep.”
Still, the Republican foray into city neighborhoods that have heretofore not gifted them many votes was successful enough to land their candidates’ names on the November general election ballot and give them a chance to present their cases citywide, and they did far better than the left-leaning City Council Movement (which failed to get a single candidate into the runoff and is probably kaput) so there’s that.
Going forward, perhaps the randy boys of the Knox County GOP might weigh the benefits of lowering expectations versus swaggering braggadocio. Testosterone overload is a thing.
Take their star candidate Jim Klonaris, a slick-talking, big-spending, fashionably stubble-faced restauranteur who attracted lots of donors and blanketed District 4 with yard signs. He could benefit from recalibrating his approach. Not only did he finish second to incumbent Lauren Rider, but he got his butt whipped at the voting place they both call home – Precinct 11, Central United Methodist Church, where Rider walked away with 74.66 percent of the vote to Klonaris’ 9.3 percent. He even got smoked by City Council Movement candidate Jen McMahon, who drew a skosh more than 16 percent there.
My last clue of changing times came at the school board meeting the day after the election when a new crowd indeed made themselves known. And yes, the same collection of freedom lovers who’ve been raising hell at county meetings for the past year showed up, but they were vastly outnumbered by the new bunch, which was an impressive collection of parents, teachers, physicians, scientists and citizen activists. I didn’t tally the numbers but counting those who weren’t allowed into the building because of crowd limitations, the frequent flyers were outnumbered and outclassed.
The cherry on top of my little pile of evidence that things are changing was the ousting of incumbent board chair Susan Horn, who has been praised by her cousin-in-law Jason Zachary for acting on her conservatism.
While I realize I’m conflating events happening in separate arenas, it’s all part of the same political movements. And it hasn’t been a good week for Knox County Republicans.
And finally, since this is, after all, an opinion column, if I were Jim Klonaris and my neighbors did me that way, I’d think about moving back to Farragut.
I’ll leave you with this clip from The Tennessee Holler, which caught a school board member napping at Wednesday’s meeting.
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.