Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Lonnie Spivak, chair of the Davidson County Republican Party, in studio to talk about the revival of the Davidson County GOP and its annual picnic coming up in July.
Leahy: In studio, our very good friend, the chairman of the Davidson County Republican Party, Mr. Lonnie Spivak. Good morning again, Lonnie.
Spivak: Good morning, Michael.
Leahy: I see you’ve got your drink from Waffle House. Is it your routine, Lonnie, that you come here every other Friday for half an hour and we talk about what you’re doing to build the Republican Party in Davidson County, along with your excellent executive committee? I think your routine is you go to Waffle House for breakfast.
Spivak: Especially on the mornings when I get up at 3:30 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. in the morning, I’ll stop and definitely fuel up on some coffee. But it was one of the things that my dad and I would do when he was alive. We’d meet at Waffle House for breakfast and there are some older guys that I hang out with and it’s a kind of a thing that connects me with my dad, even though he’s still not around. I continue the tradition.
Leahy: I got to tell you this, I love Waffle House.
Spivak: It’s good stuff. It is a great American business. And you know, the people there are hard-working. And you go in there and you get good food and it’s not very expensive. I mean, it is just a great, great, great institution. I have an idea for you, Lonnie. Let’s talk to whatever Waffle House you go to and see if we can get a live broadcast from there someday.
Spivak: It’d be great.
Leahy: You think they’d like that? I bet they’d do it.
Spivak: I think they’d do it.
Leahy: Hats off to everybody at Waffle House. And when there’s a like a natural disaster mm-hmm, FEMA and other emergency administrators look at is if the Waffle House back up and running. Because they have the system down for emergencies. If the Waffle House is back up and running, they know that the emergency, uh, is turned to the corner.
Spivak: At least they try to be open seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Leahy: Twenty-four hours a day.
Spivak: Twenty-four hours a day. Hats off to those people who work the night shift.
Leahy: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Spivak: My experiences with them have really only been good.
Leahy: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the organizational things that you’re doing. And again, remember people who come into Nashville say, oh, well, we don’t have any organized Republican activity. Well, we do have some activity. And now for our listeners, it’s time to get off your whiny box and go to one of these events. What do you have going on here, Lonnie?
Spivak: We’re bringing back the annual Davidson County Republican Picnic. We’ve got our save the date; it’s gonna be July 15th. It’s going to be at Edwin Warner Park in Shelter Six from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Then that evening is the Statesman’s Dinner.
You can have a full day of Republican activities in Nashville. There’s a lot going on. I’m hearing rumblings that the speaker at the Statesman’s Dinner will be a certain governor from a certain southern state. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: Now that’s a good clue. (Spivak laughs) A certain governor from a certain southern state.
Spivak: I haven’t heard that it is 100 percent verified, but that’s the rumblings I’m hearing. It’s going to be a great time. We’ll have more information coming out the about that soon. Our events committees working on putting all the details together and I hope to have some really exciting news about that soon.
Leahy: Has the Davidson County annual picnic been off for a couple of years?
Spivak: It’s been off for several years. They’ve not really done the picnics that we did back in the early 2000s, where it was like open to everybody to come. For the last several years, it’s more been for volunteers and executive board members, and families. But it’s really important for us to do these events to get the Republicans in Nashville engaged and connected to other Republicans and Republican candidates. So it’s extremely important.
Leahy: A, it’s a sign of life. And B, here’s the thing I learned way back when I started @topconservators on Twitter. This would be 2008, and I started making a list of all the conservatives on Twitter. Nobody had that. This was way back then, and I learned something about conservatives.
They were lonesome, and they were competitive. In other words, they wanted to see who would have the most followers because I ranked them by the number of followers that they had. It was a lot of fun, and of course, it led to the Tea Party movement.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Lonnie Spivak” by Lonnie Spivak. Background Photo “Davidson County Courthouse” by Luckiewiki. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Lonnie is doing a great job in a very tough situation!