It hasn't been a good week for The Knoxville News Sentinel. First, their endorsed Democratic candidates got hammered into last week. Now the one candidate who the paper has spent endless amounts of time and ink trying to personally trash-in a way that leads one to believe that the editorial board has a personal vendetta-is a Tennessee State Senator-elect.
It is no secret that this writer has been friends with Stacey Campfield for a number of years and helped him in ways that we were capable of on a couple of his previous House campaigns. In return, Campfield has equally been an avid supporter of ours, indeed it was Campfield in 2006 who first encouraged a certain fellow who used a power chair and walked with a limp that he should use his writing abilities to his advantage and not be afraid to become more involved in local politics. Today this writer serves on the Jefferson County GOP Executive Committee, in no small part because of a visit with Campfield four years ago in which he encouraged greater civic involvement to promote conservative ideas.
When you are involved in politics, you deal with all kinds of people, and certainly a lot of folks who have been successful in their fields of endeavor or in their political quests. You encounter a lot of people who pour great resources into politics for personal or professional reasons. There isn't anything wrong with that at all, but many of the above described people are "suits," that is to say that they wear the suit of the politics that are most likely to benefit them-such is human nature.
Then there are those supporters of Stacey Campfield who comprise his inner political circle, and many of them could be seen with him at the Crowne Plaza upstairs following the Republican victory celebration earlier Tuesday night. Many of these people had supported Campfield not out of their excess, but out of their want, and not because of what they might get in return, but only because they believed in what Stacey Campfield stands for. My wife made the comment afterwords that being there was different than other such gatherings we frequently attend. "Everyone there was like us," she said "they were just common people, like someone you would meet walking down the street."
Perhaps that is the real reason the News Sentinel doesn't like Stacey Campfield. He isn't an just an elitist, and he is a common man's conservative, not just the establishment's man. He can represent all the people of his district because he is like so many of them, and his supporters are as diverse as all of his constituents. The paper has reason to fear because those are the reasons that Campfield will likely be a Senator for a very long time indeed.
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