Meet the Amazing PhilBot 3000

To all the national media touting Phil Bredesen as Barack Obama's running mate, we ask one question:

Lately, Bredesen's stock has fallen in the media, while Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden are the hot possibilities. But who really knows what Obama's thinking? All we know is that he's hinting he'll pick a Beltway outsider, someone not identified with Washington. Bredesen fits that description as well as anyone. Anything's possible. Bush picked Cheney, didn't he?

So with Democrats gathering this month in Denver for their national convention, the Scene offers its own critique of Bredesen in the public interest and in the hopes of saving Obama from his biggest mistake since he joined Jeremiah Wright's church. (Barack, no need to thank us now. We can do fist-bumps later, OK?)

Style over substance, as they say, so let's begin with this. The No. 1 reason Obama shouldn't pick Bredesen: He's a black hole of charisma.

Educated as a physicist at Harvard, where you just know he wore a pocket protector, he speaks in a nasal monotone about "optimum solutions" and "polyglot systems." He reads Chemical Week. If he's really letting his hair down, he might shift into "confession mode" and tell you some deep secret about himself, like how fond he is of processing data before making decisions. Right brain/left brain theory doesn't seem to apply.

"I believe in data," he says.

He frequently repeats words weirdly like an android with a glitch in its interface with humans. This quirk is more pronounced when Bredesen is uncomfortable—say when he's asked about TennCare, the health insurance program for the poor and chronically sick that he famously dismantled.

Of what remains of TennCare, he says, "It's gotten into a much healthier place, not as healthy as it could have been, but it's a better, it's a better, it's a better place."

Our geeky governor would never outshine Obama on the campaign trail. No worries there.

The really crazy thing is that Bredesen ever won an election at all. It probably had something to do with the roughly $10 million of his own money he's poured into his campaigns. I knew there was something strange about him the first time he ran for governor in 1994. Jetting to Knoxville on his plane, I asked him about criticism just thrown his way by one of his more irascible rivals in that race. The substance of this rebuke of Bredesen escapes me after all these years, but the candidate's response was more memorable.

"That's sheer sophistry," Bredesen snorted. To understand Bredesen, a reporter needed a dictionary. I looked it up. "That's bullshit" is what I think he was trying to say.

On his first trip to the state's hinterlands, he went to a traditional political event in West Tennessee—a raccoon supper in a sweaty VFW hall filled with good ol' boys. Standing awkwardly near the door in his suit and tie, he gawked at the greasy meat on the paper plate somebody handed him. To keep up appearances, an aide had to make him eat it.

Around this time, Bredesen, who made his considerable personal fortune as a health-care CEO, assured me he wasn't running to be a Michael Dukakis-style technocrat. But he couldn't tell me exactly what he did want to do as governor. That would come later, he promised. He never really got around to saying.

Which brings us to the No. 2 reason Obama shouldn't pick Bredesen: He's not really a Democrat.

Look at how he's governed. Notably, there's that blood splattering his Italian loafers from the TennCare massacre. After campaigning as the candidate with the business acumen to save the program, he killed it.

More than 200,000 people—most of them categorized as uninsurable in the private sector because of pre-existing conditions or chronic illnesses—were tossed off the rolls. That's not a very Democratic thing to do.

Bredesen, typically thinking of the problem as strictly a budgetary issue, insists that killing TennCare was necessary to control spiraling costs.

"It was too hard to turn around the Titanic so they just threw everybody overboard without life jackets," says one former administration official who was perturbed by the decision.

As it turned out, according to critics, savings fell not so much to the state but to the federal government, which immediately stopped giving Tennessee $800 million in 2-to-1 matching money. The actual spending of state dollars, on the other hand, went up $60 million in the first year, according to a comptroller's report. The administration blamed the increase on health-care provider rate increases.