Robert Nelson Clement (born September 23, 1943) is an American politician and academic administrator. He is a member of the Democratic Party and served in the United States House of Representatives, representing Tennessee, from 1988 until 2003, when he retired to run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate.
Early life
Clement is the son of former Tennessee Governor Frank G. Clement. During his father's third run for governor in 1962, he joined his father on the campaign trail, often making speeches when his father developed throat trouble.
Clement graduated from Hillsboro High School in Nashville. He went on to attend the University of Tennessee graduating in 1967. He served in the National Guard from 1969 to 1971 and also served in the reserves until 2001, retiring as a colonel.
Clement considered buying a telephone company while he was studying at the University of Tennessee, but his father would not lend him the money. He gained knowledge about the Tennessee Public Service Commission which regulated phone companies and other utilities. Clement wanted to work for the commission's staff.
In 1972, Clement ran against Hammond Fowler in the Democratic primary for the incumbent's seat and won. He won by a 3 to 1 margin which was the most lopsided defeat of a statewide incumbent in Tennessee history. He went on to win against Republican nominee Tom Garland in the general election in what was otherwise largely a good year for Republican candidates in Tennessee. (No Republican was ever elected to the Public Service Commission in the state during its existence which later played a factor in its abolition in 1996. At 29 he was (and still is) the youngest person ever elected to statewide office in Tennessee history.
In 1978, Clement ran for the Democratic nomination for governor. He ran second in the primary narrowly behind Knoxville banker Jake Butcher, who had finished second in the Democratic gubernatorial primary four years previously.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter tapped him for an unexpired term on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He tried to stop the overbuilding of nuclear reactors in the TVA service area, later telling The (Nashville) Tennessean that the agency was trying to pay for the projects by raising rates when there was plenty of power available. He stepped down in 1981.
Congressional career
In 1982, Clement announced his candidacy for the 7th Congressional District, his family's home district. The seat was being vacated by five-term incumbent Republican Robin Beard, who was leaving it to run against Senator Jim Sasser, and had been renumbered from the 6th in redistricting. Clement won the Democratic nomination, but lost the general election to Don Sundquist, a businessman from Memphis who would later become a two-term governor. It was the first (and as of the 2010 elections, only) time that a Democrat had come within single digits in the 7th District and its predecessors since it fell into Republican hands in 1972. Clement said years later that he'd made a mistake by trying to run the same kind of campaign that his father had in his glory days.
Temporarily out of politics, Clement remained active in Democratic circles. He also had a large network of contacts through his ongoing service in the National Guard. In 1983, Clement became president of Cumberland University, a struggling private junior college in Lebanon, east of Nashville. Cumberland had once been one of the most prestigious universities in the South, but had fallen upon hard times, never fully recovering from the Great Depression and the widespread availability of lower-cost public higher education after World War II. The nadir probably occurred when it was forced, for financial reasons, to sell its once-renowned law school (which Clement's father had attended) to what is now Samford University in Birmingham and downgrade to a junior college. During Clement's tenure, the school regained four-year college status, and shortly later, full university status. He also tripled the school's private donations.