[5][6] Clement considered buying a telephone company while he was studying at the University of Tennessee, but his father would not lend him the money.

[2] In 1979, President Jimmy Carter tapped him for an unexpired term on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

[2] 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.

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.

In 1983, Clement became president of Cumberland University, a struggling private junior college in Lebanon, 30 miles (50 kilometers) 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.

Clement, who had moved to Nashville by this time, resigned as president of Cumberland on August 22 to run in the Democratic primary for the balance of Boner's term.

He won the nomination over a crowded field, including most prominently Phil Bredesen, future mayor of Nashville and two-term governor of Tennessee, who finished second.

As the Republicans had long since lost interest in a seat they hadn't won since 1875 (Democrats have faced only token opposition since 1972), Clement's victory in the special election of January 19, 1988 was a foregone conclusion.

Clement faced former Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County law department director Karl Dean in a runoff election on September 11, 2007.