Storm and Stress A public money matter and a private candidate matter concern state Democrats. by JACKSON BAKER This weekend, as the state Democratic Party's executive committee prepares for its regularly quarterly meeting in Nashville, looms as a time of decision for the party. Two matters will be hashed out -- one publicly, the other privately. What will definitely be on the agenda is a resolution, proposed by committee members David Upton of Memphis and Bill Owen of Knoxville, that would give the state party more say-so than has been customary over how campaign money from the Democratic National Committee will be spent in Tennessee this year. What will be talked about sub rosa and probably not for public consumption is the dissatisfaction some party members are experiencing regarding their U.S. Senate nominee, the controversy-plagued Jeff Clark of Murfreesboro. Though it has abated somewhat now, there was some semi-public wondering-out-loud by a few committee members recently as to whether Clark could be replaced with another candidate by the executive committee. The degree of realism -- or lack of it -- for that proposal is best evidenced by the name floated by the discontents for a possible substitute: that of U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis, who decisively rejected the idea of running against incumbent Republican Bill Frist earlier this year and is unlikely to reconsider. The Upton-Owen resolution has better prospects. It merely proposes that an existing pro forma procedure be made real. "What normally happens," explained Upton, "is that the coordinating committee which runs the statewide version of a national campaign comes to us at the end of the campaign year and says, 'We spent thus and so.' What we want them to do is what they're already obliged to do, fill us in on their plans on the front end." Both Upton and Owen said that the state party needs to ahve a tighter working relationship with its presidential-campaign arm -- directed this year by State Senator Roy Herron of Dresden and co-chaired by Rep. Ford, former Governor Ned McWherter, also of Dresden, and former state party chairman Jane Eskind of Nashville Owen discounted reports that he had also been involved in a Dump-Clark movement. "Nothing to that at all. I've contributed to his campaign and want him to succeed," said Owen, who acknowledged, however, asking state Election Coordinator Brook Thompson, "on behalf of a constituent," what the procedure might be if the state executive committee opted to replace one duly nominated statewide candidate with a substitute. "It turned out to be too complicated to deal with. I passed that on, and that was the end of it. It wasn't my concern, anyhow. The only thing that's on my plate is the resolution," Owen said. Clark Embittered In private conversation, Clark has been virtually apopleptic in recent weeks concerning what he regards as an unfair vendetta against him by two former students of his at Middle Tennessee State University. Their accusations of harassment by Clark, a professor of computer sciences at MTSU, have, he alleges, largely prevented his getting an audience for hs charges that opponent Frist, an opponent of a Democratic plan allowing patients to sue their health maintenance organizations, is a tool of the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs. "We find it amazing Bill Frist's fellow doctors had to come to Tennessee to try and straighten him out," Clark said this week about a visit to Tennessee by American Medical Association officials concerned about Frist's positon on the proposed national Patients Bill of Rights, favored both by physicians' groups and patients' lobbies. As Clark noted, Frist has become something of a campaign spokesman for Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush on healthcare issues and is "actually out initiating hits" concerning medical policy. "He is the guy saiyng for the Republicans he has all the answers." The problem from Clark's point of view is that too many distracting questions have been raised about himself in such venues as the Nashville Tennessean, the Nashville Scene, the Nashville publication In Review, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, and the website publication TennPolitics.com (published by this columnist). All have published accounts lately concerned charges by two former MTSU students -- Lori Ann Parr, who has charged Clark with having harassed her by entering a supply closet where she was taking an exam and leaning over her, jamming his crotch into her face; and Tom West, who says Clark sexually harassed other students and verbally harassed Thau exchange students at MTSU. The latter charges were investigated in 1998 by the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, two representatives of which interrogated students on a list submitted by West and found no corroboration of his statements. The charges against Clark by Parr are actually buried within a lawsuit she has filed agains the university at large, charging MTSU with conspiring to deny her a degree. Clark himself is not a subject in the suit, though Parr has filed a police report and asked university officials to issue a finding that he harassed her. So far nothing has happened, and Parr has taken this reluctance on police and school officials' part as proof of a conspiracy. Clark, of course, sees it as simple confirmation that nothing every happened. An Exonerating Eyewitness? Another MTSU student -- Treyton Williams, an MTSU student in 1997 and now a computer sciences instructor at Columbia State -- said last week that he was in the same closet at the same time as Parr, also taking a test, and that nothing resembling what Parr alleges occurred. Williams said that both he and Parr were assigned space in the large supply closet by Dr. Nathan Adams, chairman of MTSU's Department of Accounting and Computer Information Systems, in order to take an examination. "I was at the far end of the closet, and she was at the near end, by the door when Jeff entered," Williams said. "He didn't say or do anything in her vicinity, but he came to my end and reached over me to get some supplies. He was always joking; so he said something like, 'You're in the way of progress,' when he did it." After getting the supplies he came for, Clark left the large walk-in closet without any kind of interchange with Parr, Williams said. "He definitely didn't lean over her.". Williams said that he was in the closet with Parr the whole time she was taking her exam and that no incident of the sort she has described in complaints and lawsuits -- the crotch incident, in particlar -- could have occured. "I was in there the whole time she was taking her exam, I didn't leave for any purpose, and I was there when she left," said Williams, "and I never saw anything like what she said happened. I couldn't have missed it, either." In her lawsuit, Parr alleges that Williams was part of the general harassment she endured from MTSU because of advice he gave not to buck the University or the Democratic Party, of which Clark was then treasurer. "That couldn't have happened," Williams says. "I didn't even know Jeff was in politics until a couple of weeks ago when I learned he was a Senate candidate." Williams' account was denounced as a lie this week by Parr, who cites a tape she made of a telephone call to her by Williams in the wake of the closet incident. She alleges that Williams was never in the closet at the time of the incident and that the falseness of his contention is made evident by the recording. Says Parr: "Throughout the tape, I discuss the incident with Jeff Clark assaulting me in the supply closet while I was nine months pregnant, but not once does Treyton assert on the tape that he is in the supply closet with me; in fact, he sympathizes with me in my fears of being alone with Jeff Clark, of my being afraid of him, and agrees that women in the department are afraid of Jeff Clark, and he states, and I am quoting directly, that Jeff Clark is an 'equal opportunity harasser.'" She also belies Williams' statements about not knowing Clark was in politics. Says Parr: "Further on in the phone conversation, as Treyton is threatening me with the power of the department -- and Jeff Clark -- he states. . .: 'Clark's tenured. You're not gonna shake that tree. Clark's in the Democratic Party in Tennessee. You're not gonna shake that tree. Why don't you go and look on his wall and see who he's shaking hands with. He's shaking hands with Clinton. You're not gonna shake that tree.'" Parr says that "Clark is. . .willing to threaten and intimidate people into submission to lie to the press to cover up for his indiscretions" and insists that Williams was on a mission to abort her efforts to file her federal suit (now pending) against MTSU. 'No Big Deal,' Says Cocke Whatever the facts of the matter, it remains unlikely that the state executive committee will take up the problem at its meeting this weekend. Shelby County Democratic chairman David Cocke, who will be in Nashville for Saturday's executive committee meeting and for a corollary one of county chairs, says, "I assume that matter is playing itself out. There doesn't seem to be anything of substance there yet. The fact is that accusations made during a campaign have to be subject to careful scrutiny. Most of us are very skeptical about accusations like that." Cocke said, "We should give the accused the benefit of the doubt, not the accuser. That's how our system works." He said the situation reminded him of the "what the Reublicans tried to do with Clinton, suggest that becaue it could happen, it did happen," but he added he did not attribute the accusations against Clark to the Republican Party. "The bottom line is that it will have no effect, either on [Vice President Al] Gore's race or on local races. Maybe not even on his [Clark's] own race," Cocke said. In any case, the balance sheet of the separate allegations made by Parr and West against Clark stands this way: none of the several investigations (including one by MTSU affirmative action director Forrestine Williams) into either set of allegations has so far sustained them. Corrections and clarifications: (a) Last week's column about the forthcoming selection of party candidates for the position of Shelby County register misspelled the name of Joe Reves, administrative assistant to the late Guy Bates. (b)The Shelby County Republican Party will hold a convention to select its nominee, not a steering committee meeting; and (c) the position of register was inadvertently referred to once as that of Probate Court Clerk. The Democrats' executive committee will choose this Thursday night between multiple candidates for the November ballot; the Republican convention will be Sunday.

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