Naifeh’s Revenge
Dick Cheney’s coming to town. How ’bout holding that voting board open again?
by Liz Murray Garrigan
Ironically enough, Democratic House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh couldn’t count on his own ranks—even his majority leader and some committee chairs—to support his income tax plan last week. But Republican minority leader Steve McDaniel was one of the few Republicans who voted with him. Clearly—and to state the obvious—things are bollixed up at the legislature.
So what’s a little more drama?
This Wednesday—the day the Scene hits the streets—Vice President Dick Cheney is the headliner at the state Republican Party Statesmen’s Dinner. It’s the biggest fundraiser of the year, at $200 a head, and it starts at 6 p.m. at the Renaissance Hotel. Wouldn’t it be a shame if Naifeh called the House into session and kept the members there—including those wanting to get to the annual GOP gathering—until well after their chicken and rice had grown cold and Cheney had warned us all once again that no one is completely safe? What if the speaker called for a vote and kept the board open again for a couple of hours?
Certainly, such a hilariously spiteful stunt—suggested to us, incidentally, by a dedicated GOP partisan—would get national headlines for Naifeh, who’s already a pariah in the eyes of the people he’d be targeting anyway. He’d get credit for pulling the rug out from under the vice president. Not only that, the Tennessee Republican Party chairman, state Rep. Beth Halteman Harwell, would be held captive in the House chamber.
There have been lesser ideas—such as the candidacies of many of the House members.
His and his
Gubernatorial candidates Philleary or Vandesen—that is, Republican Van Hilleary and Democrat Phil Bredesen—were so similar in their post-income-tax-vote rhetoric last week that their statements could have been swapped.
“The income tax came to a vote today, and it clearly failed,” Bredesen said in a prepared statement after the state House fell five votes short of a 4.5 percent levy on income. “Now it’s time to move on.”
“It’s time to drop the income tax as an option and move on,” Hilleary echoed in his own prepared statement.
In fairness, GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Henry and Democrat Charles Smith—the respective alternatives (and good ones) to their parties’ frontrunners—also tended to strike similar notes, acknowledging the state’s fiscal hole and challenging their opponents to have a modicum of intellectual integrity.
But at least their sameness is honest.
Pondering Phil
No one seems to begrudge it—and they’d look like fools if they did—but Metro Council member Phil Ponder, who is among those running to replace former Vice Mayor Ronnie Steine in the Aug. 1 election, can only stand to gain from the boosterish Summit Medical Center radio advertisement in which he stars.
In fact, the Summit ad, which began airing before Steine took his political plunge in early May, is more about Ponder than it is about the hospital. It discusses his council membership and his artistry for a good while (in radio ad terms, anyway) before getting to the real point: that, as a cancer patient, Ponder was treated at Summit.
The ad amounts to an in-kind contribution for Ponder’s political campaign, which will be a boost in his race against at-large council members Chris Ferrell and Howard Gentry, who are also running for the vice mayoral position. Given spirited primaries for the U.S. House and Senate, the governor’s office and the state legislature, turnout for the Aug. 1 election is expected to be relatively high—perhaps as many as 100,000 voters or more in Davidson County.
It costs a lot to reach them all, so who wouldn’t accept a political ad that’s not a political ad?
To reach Liz, call 244-7989, ext. 406, or e-mail liz@nashvillescene.com.
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