The calls from reporters and pundits just kept rolling in on
election day and later that night after the polls closed. Someone asked what Park Overall had learned
during her bid for the Democratic nomination for a US Senate seat. She answered in her trademark Southern
deadpan, “I learned that politics is a lot crazier than Hollywood. It’s a lot more ruthless, I think.” Tennessee voters not only helped incumbent
Bob Corker roll easily into the Republican nomination, but they managed to get
an unknown, self-described “Proud Patriot” named Mark Clayton on the ballot for November as the Democratic nominee, (although the Tennessee Democratic Party has publicly disavowed him) keeping Overall off the general election ballot.
Overall’s brand of patriotism is one of relentless watchdog
for the Tennessee people and the places they call home. The whole story about her run for office at the
nod of some Democratic party leadership can’t be seen in the overall vote totals. You have to break down the votes
to see that Overall carried Unicoi County, where Nuclear Fuel Services quietly
received a 25 year extension of its operating license, announced publicly August 2nd by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. You have to look at how Overall won the
Democrat vote in much of East Tennessee that lives downstream of the Nolichucky
River. Overall won the Democratic vote
by a landslide in Knox County, where she had the endorsement of the Knoxville
News Sentinel. She even won her party's vote respectably
in her home Greene County, where she joked that she must have been about the
third lonely Democrat to vote yesterday.
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| Park Overall Democratic US Senate Candidate In August 2012 Primary |
“The people vote against their own self-interests,” lamented
Overall. She grew up in Greeneville and
decided to settle there after New York and Hollywood lured her away in earlier
years. In the 90s, she added her voice
to many others to stop Champion from polluting Tennessee’s Pigeon River. Overall has a reputation for speaking up when
some of her neighbors won’t, frustrated with what she sees as a government
that’s not working for ordinary people and concerned about poverty, health and
environmental struggles in her own backyard.
Raised by parents to be politically active, Overall is unapologetically a “yellow-dog Democrat,” and she feels a deep urge to seek the
truth in matters that affect her Tennessee neighbors. Waiting for results at the local election
office, Greene County Democratic Chair Barbara Britton said, “She tells it like
it is, which is what I like…I like some of her ideas, we just have a lot of
work to do.” The markedly reserved Britton
said she and Overall both attended Greeneville High School just a few years
apart. Overall candidly shared that she thinks most
Democrats suffer from an identity crisis, “I don’t think Democrats know what
they are anymore.”
While realistic about the insurmountable odds against a
Republican incumbent, many Tennessee Democrats had pinned their hopes on
Overall at least bringing attention to issues of the day by opposing Corker in the
general election. Despite yesterday’s
disappointment at the polls, support for Overall still runs deep, largely
because of her willingness to question officials like the NRC in the matter of
why so many of her East Tennessee neighbors have suffered from cancer. “I’m just a wildcard that upsets the hell out
of ‘em.”