Acting Mayor of Nashville David Briley is echoing the themes and policies of disgraced former Mayor Megan Barry in his new television ad, titled “Moving Forward.”
The ad began airing Thursday on both local broadcast networks and cable outlets. With a bank roll in excess of $400,000, Briley is expected to keep his ad campaign on both broadcast and cable outlets until election day, May 24.
Two of his rivals in the mayoral race–State Rep. Harold Love (R-Nashville) and former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain–are currently running television ads on the local cable system.
You can watch Briley’s ad here:
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Here is the trancript of the ad, which features the voice of Briley only:
These days, it seems like everyone is on the move.
As Nashville’s new mayor, it’s my job to get us all moving in the same direction: forward.
We’ve worked hard to build our economy. Now let’s work on what’s important to families.
By building stronger and safer schools.
Working for more affordable housing.
And finding new traffic solutions we all can agree on.
Because when we’re all moving forward, no one gets left behind.
In 2015, when he was running for vice mayor, Briley ran a very different sort of ad, titled “Son of Dave.”
“David Briley wears a black leather jacket and shades — and calls listening his ‘superpower’ — in the first television ad of Nashville’s vice mayoral race, released on Wednesday,” The Tennessean said of that ad when it aired in July of 2015:
The offbeat 30-second ad called “Son of Dave” begins with a voiceover that sounds like a preview of a blockbuster action film.
“In a world where the vice mayor has superpowers to solve all Nashville’s problems …,” the narrator says in an ominous voice, with jets zooming over Nashville’s AT&T building and the Parthenon.
But the commercial then suddenly flips to the more familiar Briley, an attorney wearing a sports jacket. He proceeds to highlight his main campaign theme and reel off three failed projects of outgoing Mayor Karl Dean that critics accused of lacking public input.
A little less than three years later, one of the main criticisms Acting Mayor Briley is receiving from his rivals in the May 24 special mayoral election is that he failed to listen to the voters when he continued to push the $9 billion transit plan that they ended up rejecting decisively in the May 1 referendum, 64 percent to 36 percent.
The “moving forward” message where “no one gets left behind” in Briley’s television ad was not reflected in the 2019 budget he proposed last week, according to At-large Council Member Erica Gilmore, one of Briley’s more well known rivals in the May 24 election.
In a statement released on Friday, Gilmore said “[t]he budget proposed by Acting Mayor Briley is a Promises Made, Promises Broken Budget.”
“Nashvillians have been told we need ‘continuity’ in this month’s election. But this budget reflects continuity for some, and broken promises for everyone else,” Gilmore added.
“Acting Mayor Briley insisted ‘most citizens will not notice any difference at all.’ I could not disagree more,” Gilmore continued.
You can read the rest of the story on Gilmore’s criticisms of Briley’s proposed 2019 budget for Metro Nashville here.
