Bob Corker, elected in 2006, is the junior senator from Tennessee. He was born in South Carolina, grew up in Chattanooga and graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1974 with a degree in industrial management. Just a few years out of college, he started his own successful construction company, which he sold before he turned 40. Before that, Corker took a church mission trip to Haiti, which inspired him to help create Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, a non-profit organization designed to get low-income families into affordable housing. In 1994, he ran for the Senate, finishing second in the Republican primary to Bill Frist, who went on to defeat Democratic incumbent Jim Sasser that year and eventually became the Senate majority leader. After his defeat, Corker was named state finance commissioner by Republican Gov. Don Sundquist, giving him responsibility for state government spending. After 18 months, he returned to private business, purchasing two real estate and development companies in Chattanooga. In 2001, he won election as Chattanooga mayor and got credit for reducing violent crime and revitalizing the city’s waterfront. Read More
Bob Corker, elected in 2006, is the junior senator from Tennessee. He was born in South Carolina, grew up in Chattanooga and graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1974 with a degree in industrial management. Just a few years out of college, he started his own successful construction company, which he sold before he turned 40. Before that, Corker took a church mission trip to Haiti, which inspired him to help create Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, a non-profit organization designed to get low-income families into affordable housing. In 1994, he ran for the Senate, finishing second in the Republican primary to Bill Frist, who went on to defeat Democratic incumbent Jim Sasser that year and eventually became the Senate majority leader. After his defeat, Corker was named state finance commissioner by Republican Gov. Don Sundquist, giving him responsibility for state government spending. After 18 months, he returned to private business, purchasing two real estate and development companies in Chattanooga. In 2001, he won election as Chattanooga mayor and got credit for reducing violent crime and revitalizing the city’s waterfront.
While still in his first term as mayor, Corker in October 2004 announced he would run to succeed Frist, who stuck to his initial campaign promise to serve just two terms. By the end of the year, Corker had raised $2 million. Two former Republican congressmen also ran, Ed Bryant, who lost to Lamar Alexander in the 2002 Senate primary, and Van Hilleary, who lost to Democrat Phil Bredesen in the 2002 governor’s race. Corker drew on his personal wealth and spent $5 million through mid-July to introduce himself to voters and defend against attacks that he was insufficiently conservative. Bryant and Hilleary claimed Corker raised property taxes in Chattanooga and criticized his support for abortion rights during his 1994 Senate campaign. Corker responded by calling his opponents “ineffective career politicians” and talked about his background as a successful businessman and mayor. He said he was “wrong” on abortion in 1994 and that he opposed the right to abortion, although he agreed with exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Corker ended up winning by a comfortable margin as Bryant and Hilleary split the conservative vote. He carried nearly every county east of Nashville and a half-dozen west of it, winning 48% to Bryant’s 34%; Hilleary finished third with 17%.
The Democratic nominee was Rep. Harold Ford of Memphis, who, in the absence of serious primary opposition, was able to conserve his resources for the general election. Youthful, ambitious and telegenic, Ford was an attractive candidate. The son of former Rep. Harold Ford Sr., he was first elected to the House in 1996, just months after graduating from law school, and his record was sufficiently moderate to make him a competitive statewide candidate. The national media took great interest in the race. Ford was seeking to become the first African-American senator popularly elected in the South and from a state that had never before elected a black candidate to statewide office. For much of the general election campaign, it appeared Corker might defy Tennessee’s recent Republican trend in national elections and lose a seat that was critical to the party’s hopes of retaining its Senate majority. Corker struggled to unify the party after the contentious primary and failed to gain traction in the two months following the August primary. Meanwhile, Ford ran a nearly flawless campaign. Corker’s efforts to frame Ford as too liberal for Tennessee fell flat in the face of Ford’s centrist positions on illegal immigration, the Iraq war, border security and gay marriage. Ford also put Corker on the defensive about his business dealings.
The last Democrat that Tennessee elected to the Senate was Al Gore in 1990, and in the 2000 presidential race, George W. Bush embarrassed Gore by defeating him 51%-47% in his home state. Plus, as the scion of a Memphis political dynasty, Ford had to weather distractions caused by several family members, including his uncle, former state Sen. John Ford, who was indicted on federal corruption charges the day after Harold Ford filed to run for the Senate. Then, John Ford’s sister—Harold’s aunt—won the special election to replace him but she was ousted by the state Senate in April amid allegations of vote fraud. Meanwhile, in the racially-charged House race to succeed Harold Ford, his brother, Jake, unexpectedly ran as an independent candidate against white Democratic nominee Steve Cohen.
Heading into the final weeks of the campaign, the election appeared to be a dead heat. But Corker gained momentum after Republicans launched a series of attack ads and zeroed in on Ford’s personal story, characterizing it as a life of privilege and emphasizing that he went to preparatory school in Washington and graduated from an Ivy League university. Corker’s ads described his rise from a laborer who poured concrete. In late October, the Republican National Committee weighed in with a controversial ad featuring purported on-the-street interviews with regular people, including an attractive young, blonde and white woman, claiming that she had “met Harold at the Playboy party,” a reference to news stories that Ford had attended a Super Bowl party hosted by Playboy magazine. The commercial ended with the woman saying, “Harold, call me.” Critics called the ad racial politicking, while Republicans insisted it was about values. Corker’s campaign asked television stations not to air the spot.
Corker won 51%-48%. Whites voted 59%-40% for Corker and blacks voted 95%-4% for Ford. Ford won 61%-38% in the Memphis area, while Corker carried the Nashville area 50%-49%. Corker far outpaced Ford in East Tennessee, winning 58%-40%. Ford carried Middle and West Tennessee 52%-46%.
In the Senate, Corker tried to further separate himself from the controversial attack ads. He introduced a bill to allow candidates to approve commercials and direct mail pieces from political parties before they are released to the public. While he was a reliable vote for Republicans on issues such as opposing embryonic stem cell research and troop withdrawal timetables in Iraq, Corker broke with the party on some high-profile issues. He backed an energy bill to raise gas mileage standards for cars and trucks. He joined a bipartisan effort to promote a 2008 energy bill allowing offshore drilling while also emphasizing renewable energy sources. In 2007, he voted for a Democratic bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and also played a crucial role in negotiations to renew federal funding for the state’s TennCare Medicaid program.
In January 2008, Corker got a seat on the Banking Committee. When committee ranking Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama refused to participate in bipartisan talks about a bailout for the collapsing financial industry, Corker engaged in meetings with Democratic Chairman Christopher Dodd that produced the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. In late 2008, when the big three domestic auto makers sought a multi-billion-dollar bailout, Corker criticized auto executives who appeared before the committee, chiding their plans for securing government loans and waiting for mergers, and telling the head of Chrysler: “While this is happening, you’re going to be going to spas and getting facials and hopefully finding someone to marry you.” In December, Corker offered an alternative proposal that required retiring autoworkers to accept most of their benefits in stock rather than in cash, forced bondholders to accept a steep cut in the value of their bonds and required wages and benefits comparable to American employees of foreign automakers. Outrage was expressed in various quarters in Detroit. But Corker’s conditions were in large part followed by President Barack Obama’s task force on the auto companies. As General Motors and Chrysler at least partially recovered, United Auto Workers leaders called for organizing Southern plants. “I can’t imagine any company wanting the UAW to be part of their company,” Corker told the Detroit News. “It’s the employees who decide. My sense is that they will view their economic self-interest being better served by not being affiliated with the UAW.”
Corker was unusually active for a junior member on financial regulation, the big issue before the Banking Committee, in 2009 and 2010. By then, he had built a good working relationship with Dodd, who encouraged him to engage in informal meetings with Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. The two sought the views of top current and former regulators. When Corker saw the Obama administration plan, he said that its proposals for a systemic risk regulator and a consumer finance protection agency were not responsive to the causes of the financial crisis. “One question that needs to be asked is, if we had proper regulation at the various functioning levels, do we need a systemic risk regulator?” Corker told American Banker.
In early February 2010, when Dodd concluded that negotiations with Shelby on the bill were going nowhere, Corker once again agreed to work with Dodd, despite complaints from Shelby and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. On the sensitive issue of creating a consumer finance protection agency, strongly backed by liberal Democrats, Corker, Dodd, Shelby and New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg agreed to put the new CFPA under the authority of the Federal Reserve. But Corker continued to be troubled by what he regarded as the too-big-to-fail treatment of major banks and other financial institutions. He told National Journal: “What you want to do is create an orderly dissolution, an orderly unwinding. . . . a resolution mechanism like the one we have for the FDIC.”
Yet it proved difficult to close the deal. And on March 11, Dodd announced that he would unveil his own bill without support from Corker or other Republicans. Corker complained that the unilateral action was ordered by the Obama White House, but he was also critical of fellow Republicans, saying they had made a major strategic error in not reaching a compromise and that GOP assertions that the bill would increase the likelihood of bailouts were overstated. Dodd’s bill was passed in committee along party lines, with some provisions unacceptable to Corker and he ended up voting against the final version. He said on the Senate floor, “I don’t think either side of the aisle deserves a badge of honor as it relates to the way this has been discussed.” At a May 2010 meeting between Obama and Republican senators, Corker told the president that in his view the White House role in the legislation was “duplicitous.” On another major financial issue, Corker in 2010 called for limiting the Federal Reserve to a single mandate—preventing inflation.
After a report revealed that top executives at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were rewarded with some $13 million in bonus pay, Corker introduced a bill in November 2011 to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 10 years and replace them with a private mortgage market. In 2008, the struggling companies were taken over by the federal government in a conservatorship to keep them afloat. In the summer of 2011, Corker joined with Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. in an attempt to delay a rule sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. that placed limits on bank fees charged to retailers for debit card transactions. Corker argued that the cap on transaction fees would actually hurt small, community banks. The Corker-Tester bill garnered 54 votes, but that was not enough to overturn a filibuster.
Corker jumped into the debate over cutting federal spending in 2011, and again, did so in a bipartisan way. He and Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill sponsored a bill to require reductions of federal spending from 24.7% of gross domestic product to the 40-year historic average of 20.6%, with the White House budget office charged with making simultaneous cuts in entitlement and discretionary spending if Congress did not meet the targets. When the Republican leadership and President Obama brokered a deal to raise the debt ceiling in early August 2011, some hardline conservatives carped that the package wouldn’t lead to more substantial deficit reduction. However, Corker voted for the deal. “While these spending cuts weren’t of the magnitude that I would’ve liked to have seen, I think this is a very good first step,” Corker said on the Senate floor.
On energy issues, Corker sought unsuccessfully in May 2009 to bar draw-downs of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down the price of oil and in February 2011 he opposed a new regulation requiring the cost of transmission lines for alternative energy sources to be paid by utility ratepayers in states not served by them. On an issue of interest at home, he worked with fellow Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander to strip from the 2010 Federal Aviation Administration bill a provision that would facilitate unionization of Memphis-based FedEx. In December 2010, he and Alexander cast key votes for ratification of the New START treaty after Corker got assurances from appropriators of funding for the modernization of nuclear weapons.
As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker sought to re-assert congressional authority on national security. After several trips to Afghanistan, Corker told ABC News in the summer of 2011 that the current level of nation building in the country is “just not sustainable.” He complained that the Obama Administration did not sufficiently consult Congress on military engagement in Libya, and he introduced a resolution with Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. asking for Obama to provide a detailed justification for the U.S. operation. Corker voted against a June 2011 committee bill to authorize military action in Libya.
After the 2010 elections, there was talk that Corker might get serious opposition from a tea party candidate in 2012. Technology consultant Zach Poskevich, a political novice and self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative,” has already declared a primary challenge to Corker. But a poll for Republican Gov. Bill Haslam showed that 72% of tea party sympathizers expressed favorable feelings toward Corker in spite of his work with Democrats on major issues. Corker has a sizable campaign war chest and could be tough to beat in 2012.
