Just four floors separate Gov. Don Sundquist’s re-election campaign headquarters from the Tennessee Democratic Party’s offices in the 1808 West End Avenue office building. But they share more than the same address.

As the reformist John Jay Hooker sailed to victory in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last week, both the Sundquist campaign and the Democrats found themselves on the defensive. Hooker proposes fundamental campaign finance reform that would outlaw contributions from people who are not potential voters. And that proposal “is one where both parties are equally hurt. There aren’t many of those,” says Jennifer Duffy, an editor at the Cook Political Report, an independent, Washington, D.C.-based newsletter that analyzes gubernatorial and congressional races.

Hooker’s victory last Thursday has been noted by the national media, and his campaign for the November general election may continue to receive publicity outside Tennessee. But Duffy predicts that the Michigan Democratic primary win of Geoffrey Fieger, Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s loud-mouthed attorney, may tempt national journalists to exhaust their expense accounts in Detroit before—or instead of—traveling to Nashville to cover Hooker. Fieger will face Republican incumbent Gov. John Engler in the fall.

Duffy admits that Hooker is “colorful,” but when it comes to press coverage she predicts that he may be “overshadowed by someone more controversial. [Tennessee] definitely won’t be the centerpiece. You won’t be the spotlight.”

In a 1996 interview with the Washington Post, Fieger referred to Jesus as “just some goofball that got nailed to the cross.” And there are more incendiary utterances where that one came from. In the same interview, Fieger said, “In 2,000 years we’ve probably made somebody who is the equivalent of Elvis into God, so I see no reason why not to believe that in 2,000 years Elvis will be God.”

What’s more, Fieger is apparently prepared to spend big bucks in the general election, perhaps even twice the $1 million he spent in the primary.

According to still unofficial results from the state, Hooker took about 42 percent of the Democratic primary vote and won in 83 of the state’s 95 counties. (Mike Whitaker, Hooker’s strongest opponent, won in his home county of Tipton and 11 others.) Curiously enough, Hooker, who did it all without spending a single dime, has been modest in discussing his accomplishments. That’s not typical behavior for Hooker, who frequently likes to say that he “loves the sound” of his own voice.

Nobody's nominee

“It’s hard for me to fathom that it could have turned out so well,” says the sanguine Hooker, who credits his win almost exclusively to residual name recognition from his gubernatorial primary victories in 1966 and 1970. “You couldn’t have written a book and had it turn out better.”

His words drip with raw curiosity when he asks why the state’s leading Democrats and even the governor let Whitaker lose. “They had the absolute capacity to beat me,” he says. “I didn’t beat Whitaker. They beat Whitaker.”

Hooker says Sundquist is much worse off having him as the Democratic nominee than if Whitaker had been embraced by the party’s leadership. And he says his reform message will become even more relevant as voters continue to hear about Sundquist’s seemingly bottomless campaign funds.

Tom Ingram, a former paid Sundquist political advisor and now president and CEO of the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, says he doesn’t believe Sundquist would have been better off running against Whitaker. However, he does concede that a Sundquist-Hooker race will probably be “more interesting for the media.”

Ingram says he’s “crazy about John Jay Hooker. I mean, I love the guy, even though we haven’t spoken in several years.” He characterizes the Democratic nominee as a “brilliant character,” but he opposes Hooker’s arguments that campaign contributions from non-voters amount to bribery and that retention elections for the state’s appellate judges are unconstitutional. Ingram says Hooker “always makes an interesting argument. I mean, that’s part of his charm.” But his advice to Sundquist is to “stay his course, repeat his message, and run his own race.”

Hooker contends that the Democratic Party would have been better off if it had elected Whitaker. He says he intends to be a torchbearer for a broad political-reform message, adding that he has no interest in being spokesman for a Democratic party that, in his view, is just as “corrupted” by special interests as its Republican counterpart is.

Hooker has no plans to carry anyone else’s water, and he’s made it his practice to alienate anyone and everyone with a smug, status quo view of the political system. That list includes all the Democratic leadership, especially Vice President Al Gore, who Hooker thinks was foolish not to have done more for Whitaker.

A Scene request to Gore’s office for a statement about Hooker’s nomination drew only a brief response. “John Jay Hooker has been elected as the Democratic nominee fair and square,” a spokesperson told the Scene. “He has demonstrated strong name recognition, and that is what will surely give him the base for his campaign.”

Whitaker is a smart, down-to-earth West Tennessee trial lawyer who might have been refreshing to voters—if anyone had paid attention to him. But the Democratic leadership—including Gore and the speakers of both the state House and Senate—refused to give him the time of day.

A couple of years ago, Gore was willing to get into a public, petty feud with Sundquist over which of them would be named honorary chairman of the state’s bicentennial celebration. But he took little interest in this summer’s Democratic primary, even though its results could have had a serious impact on his presidential campaign in 2000.

Now that Whitaker’s out of the race, it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens this fall—whether Sundquist is reelected or Hooker wins—Gore can now rest assured that he won’t get support from the Tennessee governor’s office.

Hooker may be a Democrat like the vice president, but he’s an equal-opportunity ideologue. Gore’s Buddhist temple fundraisers and shameless telephone shakedowns from federal buildings don’t sit well with a reformer who believes campaign contributions from anyone who can’t actually vote for a candidate are a form of bribery. “If I’m going to criticize Sundquist for taking bribes,” Hooker says, “I’m going to criticize Gore for the same thing.”

Whitaker says he didn’t talk a lot about Hooker during the primary because “his platform is so narrow and mine was so much broader that we just couldn’t engage him.” But now that the primary is over, Whitaker says he’ll support Hooker. “As a defeated candidate, I’m not going to walk away from the party,” Whitaker says. “He won fair and square. The bottom line is, John Jay Hooker is the Democratic nominee for governor, and I support the nominee.”

Whitaker also says he believes Hooker could beat the governor. “I think there’s a chance that he can win, yes,” Whitaker says. “The negative on Sundquist is so heavy.” What’s more, Whitaker now says the impact of Hooker’s reform message probably shouldn’t be underestimated. “When he talks about money and donations he may have hit a nerve, and that nerve may get him elected,” says Whitaker.

Party poopers

Media coverage of Hooker’s primary win and the state Democratic Party’s failure to find a more likely opponent for Sundquist has focused too much on the “inside baseball” issue of whether the Democratic Party is still viable in Tennessee, says Bob Corney, the party’s executive director.

But discussion of the party’s viability is legitimate, says the Cook Political Report’s Jennifer Duffy. “I think people are going to look at Tennessee as an example of the party not doing what it needed to do, to at least nominate Mike Whitaker, a credible candidate,” she says.

The Tennessee Democratic Party has made a feeble showing during this gubernatorial cycle. First the party failed to field the “consensus” candidate it promised; then, when no other major candidates emerged, the Democratic leadership declined to support either Whitaker or Hooker. Duffy’s assessment is, “Once the millionaires sort of took their leave of this race, I don’t think anybody thought there was much there.”

Hooker characterizes today’s Tennessee Democratic Party as a “fantasy.” And there are signs that he may be right. There was a time when leading Democrats were deeply involved in the works of state politics. As a result, they enjoyed close working relationships with Capitol Hill reporters. Now, however, the party’s leaders are relative strangers to the media. In a Saturday follow-up story on the election, The Tennessean even referred to Corney—who’s held what should be a high-profile position for more than a year—as “Bob Corning.” And the writer was not an overprivileged intern shipped in from Yale University for the summer. The story ran under the byline of one of the paper’s most experienced political writers.

Corney acknowledges that his party failed to identify a “consensus” candidate, and he does give Hooker a certain amount of credit. “I don’t discount John Jay Hooker one lick,” Corney says, adding that the approximately 116,000 votes Hooker received across the state “are not a fluke.”

Corney says he and Hooker do agree on at least one point: that politics has “degenerated to the point that there’s a conventional wisdom that you have to have a lot of money to run for office.” Corney also notes that, “on a sort of philosophical level, there’s not that large a difference” between what Hooker is saying and what the party’s leaders believe. However, Hooker has filed lawsuits against elected officials who have accepted campaign contributions that he deems questionable, although they are legal under current law. And those lawsuits have rankled the Democratic leadership. “Where there is a difference is in the way Hooker talks about people who are operating within the framework of the law,” Corney says.

Hooker’s victory in last week’s election gives him a platform from which to make his case for political reform, which he boils down to the phrase: “Let everybody play.” But it also offers a notoriously proud man, whose remarkable life has frequently been interrupted by personal and professional disasters, the kind of recognition that has eluded him for so long. Winning last week, he says, gives him “a permanent place in politics for as long as I want to assert it.”

And yet, no matter what the pundits say, Hooker had everything to lose in last week’s election. “I had my soul on the line,” he says, insisting that he would have been “sickened” by a loss, since it would have “denied” him the opportunity to make his case. But he also admits that he would have been disappointed “because I’m human. Nobody likes to lose.”