There are all kinds of ways to look at the Senate campaign in Tennessee: the last hurrah for two of the durable figures of state politics, a local skirmish in the war for control of the U.S. Senate, a measurement of the state’s shifting partisan alignment, an indicator of how ugly politics has gotten in recent years, or, most prosaically, a contest between two politicians.

Republican Lamar Alexander, two-time governor, cabinet secretary, business mogul, president of the University of Tennessee (but not, despite his persistent efforts, of the United States), is trying once again for statewide office, and he says he’s having a great time, except when he’s getting worked over by his rival. “My opponent is running a negative campaign that is not worthy of the Clement family name,” he says.

The opponent is Bob Clement, veteran Democratic congressman from Nashville, son of a chronic governor, former president of Cumberland University (which once lost a football game 221-0, although not during Clement’s tenure), failed gubernatorial candidate, and irrepressible fount of ambition. Clement is fighting an uphill battle against the better-known Alexander, who on the whole has had a more successful career, even if he hasn’t won a statewide general election since 1982.

“But Alexander’s never faced anything like he’s facing here—a constant fist in the face,” says Bill Fletcher, Clement’s communications director. “Raw aggression matters.” Alexander is one of the people who presumably went into politics to do good and ended up doing very well indeed, amassing a small fortune from board memberships, exceedingly well-timed investments and a rain-making role in the founding of one publicly owned company. Over the years, he’s taken ethical lumps for these dealings, but probably never with the kind of ferocity the Clement campaign is dishing out.

The result has been a campaign that has not been a pretty sight to see. The two men are contending for the Senate seat made vacant by Republican wastrel Fred Thompson’s late decision that he’d rather play a district attorney on television than be a senator in real life. Both men have been important players in state politics since the early 1970s, and both are using up their last chance to fail at the polls. Alexander served two meretricious terms as governor and later became federal education secretary before seeing the gloss worn away in a pair of presidential runs. Clement, after a promising start in which he got elected to the state Public Service Commission and appointed to the Tennessee Valley Authority board, suffered a series of setbacks before settling comfortably into a safe congressional seat.

For Alexander, the race represents one last chance to get back a bit of the limelight; for Clement, it is an up-or-out bid to live up to some of the hereditary promise of his early career. Of course, the late-life ambitions of two local politicians would be of scant significance were it not for one other factor—the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. The one-vote edge that gives the Democrats control of the Senate also has given added importance to this race, where both parties stand ready to throw resources into the contest. President George W. Bush has already made multiple visits to the state to boost Republican candidates.

That the seat is in play is a reflection of the state’s teetering partisan alignment. Republicans overturned the traditional order with their sweep of 1994, an outcome that has left the state with an array of premier officeholders that may overstate the level of Republican sentiment. At this point, Tennessee is probably a state that leans Republican, though the right Democrat can win. Moreover, nominal Democratic control of both houses of the state General Assembly points to lingering Democratic atavisms. The result has been a fairly white-bread campaign on the issues with each candidate blandly setting himself out as a traditional representative of his party: Alexander a strong defense/low taxes Republican and Clement as a tolerance/social welfare Democrat.

To be sure, neither is an extreme example of his breed and both are doing their best to crowd the center for the election. Alexander has stressed his support for Bush on foreign policy matters and on economic matters. The foreign policy issue is normally a loser in American elections, but has a special salience in the post-Sept. 11 environment. He’s a supporter of making permanent the Bush tax plan—which currently phases in over 10 years before evaporating completely. That’s mainly a position for rallying the Republican hard core, and Alexander is restrained about making excessive claims for its value in fixing the current stumbling economy.

On issues like the environment, where Republicans are typically vulnerable, Alexander shows a deft notion of how to split the difference. On oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, for example, he backs the Bush administration on supporting drilling, but then tries to soften the blow by calling for some of the revenues produced to be earmarked for parks and outdoor recreational facilities. Clement says his campaign is about “security”—which he defines broadly as both national and social.

Democrats generally will have a hard time getting around the Republicans on national security issues this year, so Clement simply takes the issue off the table by saying “me too” on matters such as the recent war-with-Iraq resolution, which he supported. Then he changes the subject to more comfortable areas such as prescription drug benefits, a patients’ bill of rights and corporate accountability, issues about which he believes the voters lean more Democratic.

Clement is not, however, a hard-core liberal, and indeed his support from the party’s left wing lags behind his broader Democratic support. This reflects 15 years in Congress as a fairly judicious straddler on a range of difficult issues. He’s been an on-again, off-again free trader, a modest abortion rights supporter and a skeptical backer of welfare reform legislation. On the kinds of issues that hurt national Democrats in the South—gun control and the death penalty, for example—Clement has gone his own way, either from expedience or conviction, and supported the locally popular view (against gun control and for the death penalty).

Moderation is not a total virtue in politics, however. While Southern Democrats should be judicious in their embrace of the national party, they also need to recognize critical moments, as Clement most notably failed to do in deserting Bill Clinton on the key tax vote in 1993. Many vulnerable Democrats laid down their political lives on that occasion, while Clement reposed in his safe seat. Similarly, Alexander can look back on the moderation of his own relevant years, and he benefited from his willingness to do something other than mouth the predictable Republican tax cant.

“Taxes weren’t my main issue as governor—income growth was,” he says, noting that virtue was its own reward. “I haven’t met too many people who want me to dig up those four-lane highways.”

This political battle is one of time and circumstance. Alexander started off better known statewide, better financed and better positioned on the political spectrum. Clement’s challenge has been to reintroduce himself around the state and present himself as someone who will better serve the interests that the people of the state care about. It’s an uphill challenge against so gilded a politician as Alexander. While his gubernatorial years were truly not everything that everyone thinks they remember, and while the years since have earned him little in the way of added luster, Alexander remains one of the state’s most polished politicians. While he might give off a cold blue flame, he burns brightly nonetheless.

So Clement is faced with the challenge of chopping away at Alexander, trying to reel him in with the sort of bare-knuckle tactics focused on Alexander’s personal finances. Alexander, meanwhile, has counterpunched by linking Clement to the failed Butcher banking empire of the 1970s, where Clement held a board sinecure. It would, one supposes, be nice if the candidates would revert back to a Periclean campaign with a high-minded discussion of the “issues” by men wearing the contemporary equivalent of togas, but the die is now cast and the candidates will fight it out on the current lines.