A Few Good Men

Tennessee Democrats don’t have much to cheer about in the wake of the last election, and pointing to good news at this point mostly looks like grasping at straws. Presidential nominee Albert Gore Jr. failed to carry his own state. Republican Sen. Bill Frist rolled to easy reelection over a token opponent who got little help from his own party. It was the third consecutive major statewide race in which the party ceded victory to an incumbent Republican. The GOP also continued to hold five of the nine seats in the state congressional delegation.

If there was any good news, it was the success of Democratic candidates in maintaining nominal control of the state Senate in the face of a major Republican push. Democrats also retained control of the state House, although the Republicans did pick up one seat.

Of course, the Democratic “control” of the Senate is largely fiction. Although they hold an 18-15 edge, the Democrats have not really been in control since 1987. Faced with ouster by his own party 13 years ago, Lt. Gov. John Wilder and a rump faction of Democrats bolted the party caucus and aligned with Senate Republicans under a power-sharing arrangement that saved his position. Although Wilder and the Democratic caucus have made peace in recent years, his control rests on Republican support—even if he loses another showdown within the Democratic caucus.

Wilder’s sympathy for Republicans in general may have diminished a bit this past fall.

The Senate leader’s erratic maneuverings on tax policy inspired Gov. Don Sundquist to encourage a Republican challenger in Wilder’s home district. Wilder won anyway with the help of a deluge of special interest money. And his alliance with the Senate Republican leadership remains strong.

But the bigger point is that Democrats showed they could still win elections in the state despite their largely dormant status in major races. They have not fielded a serious candidate in any of the three statewide races since the Republican sweep of 1994, largely mirroring the way the Republicans went underground after the defeat of Winfield Dunn in 1986 until the 1994 races.

In that regard, they may be ripe for a second comeback in the state. Republicans generally started making inroads in the South following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and they had their greatest early round of successes in Tennessee. In 1971, they held both Senate seats and the governorship before the Democrats retooled and began winning back major offices.

The key was finding candidates whose positions and perspectives were in step with the views of Tennesseans and who stayed distant from the excesses of national Democratic politics. At its most grotesque, that took the form of Al Gore dodging any mention of his party’s presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, during the 1984 election. Former Gov. Ned McWherter kept his distance, meanwhile, by mixing folksy country charm with a willingness to do business with the key Republican moneymen.

But the successes of the 1980s faded—chiefly because it’s hard to play a national Democratic role and still be well positioned to win Tennessee statewide. Put differently, a Democratic candidate without the burdens of national issues stands a much better chance of winning in the state. (Indeed, that’s partly why Democratic gubernatorial nominee Phil Bredesen ran significantly ahead of Democratic Senate candidates during the 1994 debacle.)

By showing they could win heavily contested races in the kind of suburban areas that have led the way in Republican growth—Rutherford and Sumner counties, for example—Democrats have shown there is a residual infrastructure and base of support that could make future victories possible.

But, outside of the state of Missouri, it remains a political truth that you can’t beat somebody with nobody. The potential for a Democratic renaissance hinges on fielding good candidates at the statewide level, and the party’s efforts in that direction have been feeble at best.

To be sure, it is somewhat of a misconception to talk about the party as though it were a single, cohesive monolith pursuing a coherent strategy designed by a central leadership with the power to impose its will on recalcitrant elements. It’s been more than half a century since Boss Crump lost his grip on statewide politics, and the game has changed considerably.

Politics in America is now entrepreneurial. Candidates select themselves and step forward to run when they believe the time is right and they can assemble a winning coalition. Party structures are useful because they help set the borders on the playing field and represent a kind of permanent summary of the aggregation of interests.

But because parties are based at some level on common principles, that means their members must accept some common responsibility for their overall success. Officeholders who fly the flag of a particular party have an ongoing responsibility for its continued success.

What hasn’t been evident among Tennessee Democrats is any sense of unselfishness on the part of party leaders. Memphis Rep. Harold Ford Jr., for example, spent much of 1999 and early 2000 flirting with a Senate run against Frist. The flirtation enhanced Ford’s personal stature, but it did little for the party. Ford was clearly not serious, but his professed interest prevented anyone else from getting a campaign rolling. In the end, Democrats were stuck with the obscure Jeff Clark, who threatened to test the lower bound for Democratic votes set by blowhard has-been John Jay Hooker.