In 1991, state Sen. Douglas Henry explained to The Tennessean his notion of honor. “If Mrs. Henry and I were out and somebody offered her an insult, it would be my responsibility to punish him on the spot,” the aristocratic Southerner told the morning daily.

Well, candidate Jeff Wilson, who’s hoping to remove Henry from his 21st District state Senate seat, is not insulting Mrs. Henry, at least as far as we know. But he is most certainly trashing the male member of the duo.

“How long should the state have to suffer so that one man could pursue his hobby of being in the state Senate?” says Wilson, a former journalist turned software developer. In fact, Wilson’s entire campaign hinges on the premise that as chair of the Senate’s Finance, Ways and Means Committee, Henry is to blame for the state’s long-running fiscal soap opera. “He’s helped make the mess. I’ll help clean it up.”

From now until the Aug. 1 Democratic primary, Jeff Wilson, 46, will portray himself as the embodiment of fresh and progressive thinking while painting his 76-year-old pro-life rival as an entrenched and stale member of the Tennessee General Assembly and as an author of the budget stalemate. That strategy might work, as a potentially close race develops in the district, which covers the southern and western parts of the county.

Then again, Henry’s notions of fiscal conservatism, morality and tradition—coupled with a seemingly incongruent progressive streak—have pitched a broad tent covering an array of devoted supporters. A quintessential Southern gentleman whose grandfather C.A. Craig was one of the founders of the National Life insurance company, Henry was born into wealth and has served in the state Senate since 1971.

“Labels don’t matter much when you talk about Sen. Henry,” says former Metro Council member Stewart Clifton, a liberal who currently does lobbying and consulting work for various nonprofits. “In terms of issues that I would consider progressive, including program and funding bills for children in need, he has been completely progressive.” Clifton says, however, that he does differ with Henry on the issues of taxes and abortion.

Belle Meade businessman Ed Nelson, chairman of Nelson Capital Corp., has known Henry for nearly 50 years. “I believe that Sen. Henry is very sensitive to all financial matters that come before his committee,” Nelson says. “He has a great sense of fair play.”

And it also helps that as chair of the Senate finance committee Henry is able to keep a watch on funding initiatives that would harm Davidson County. “He is really great at catching things that affect local governments,” says Anna Windrow, a lobbyist who represents Metro. “He has been on the finance committee so long that he has a corporate memory.”

But Wilson claims that the senator is living off his past accomplishments while not receiving scrutiny for his starring role in one of the state’s most disdained institutions, the Tennessee General Assembly. “Some of the achievements they talk about were 10 and 20 years ago,” Wilson says. “There is a political clique that consistently supports Sen. Henry that overlooks the fact that he is wrong on so many issues.”

And perhaps the most important issue Henry is “wrong” about, Wilson says, revolves around the state’s fiscal crisis, in which lawmakers are struggling to scrap together about $800 million to balance the budget. In past years, lawmakers have crafted Band-Aid solutions to overcome deficits that have required closing state parks and raiding one-time-only funds. With a respectability level hovering somewhere between the Catholic Church and Arthur Andersen, the General Assembly has managed to infuriate all political persuasions, from those who thump for an income tax to those who want to slash spending.

During this debate, Henry has not been a player. Recently, Tennessean political columnist Larry Daughtrey described his finance committee as “increasingly irrelevant.” Maybe that’s because Henry himself hasn’t proposed a viable solution to the current mess.

“I’m not sure many people understand the realities of the state budget,” Henry says. “You can’t cut across the board.”

But Henry is not keen on an income tax either, which for many people is the alternative to cutting spending on education and health care. “The income tax is viewed as a bad idea by most people in Tennessee, including myself,” he says. “A tax on earned income is a penalty for success.”

So where does that leave Henry? The state senator has come up with his own solution: implement a statewide property tax and broaden the sales tax base to include more services. But neither of those ideas have a lick of support on the Hill, leaving Henry a lonely and inconsequential figure at a time when a senator of his stature could be dominating the stage. Henry does say that he could support an income tax if it were the only alternative to the hard-core DOGS—or bare bones—budget; but he has not exactly gone out of his way to express that point of view.

Wilson proposes a mix of spending cuts and tax reform. He favors shifting TDOT revenue from motor vehicle registration fees to the general fund and opposes the construction of state Route 840 North. Other cuts he favors include scrapping plans for new state golf courses and rooting out TennCare enrollees who are eligible for group insurance.

But while he preaches fiscal discipline on the one hand, Wilson also favors tax reform. In fact, in an almost unheard of admission for a political candidate in Tennessee, Wilson says that he could vote for an income tax—yes, you read that correctly—as long as the General Assembly discontinues the sales tax on groceries and repeals the Hall Income Tax. (The Hall Income Tax is a tax on interest and dividends from stocks and bonds.) An income tax also has to be “structurally fair,” he says. “I’m for an income tax if it meets those criteria.”

Wilson is hoping that his message of spending cuts and tax reform will resonate with voters who are suffering from Henry fatigue. “It’s very frustrating to look at where we are and then think that we’re going to elect the same people and keep on stagnating,” says Susie Ries, who serves on Wilson’s steering committee and formerly served on the board at the University School of Nashville. “Jeff is a qualified candidate, but some of the support he is enjoying is simply because people are tired of Doug Henry.”

“Quite honestly, I am just terribly frustrated with Sen. Henry’s lack of leadership,” adds F. Clark Williams, who chairs Wilson’s campaign and serves on the board of Belcourt Yes!

Of course, while the newly redrawn 21st District is a predominantly Democratic one, that doesn’t mean its inhabitants relish paying an income tax. In fact, according to political commentator and former House majority leader Tommy Burnett, Henry’s anti-income tax stance will help him, even while frustration with the General Assembly runs deep. “Sen. Henry could cut campaign slogans that say, 'I could have solved the budget crisis with an income tax, but how many of you people would have liked it?’ ” Burnett says. “I think in the long haul his opposition to an income tax helps him, even in the Democratic primary.”

But Burnett says that the conditions are ripe for a possible upset. On the same day that Democrats will be choosing between Wilson and Henry, Republicans will be voting in important primaries for governor and the U.S. Senate. Some of Henry’s conservative supporters will face tough choices between voting in the Democratic primary or the Republican one. “I think it could be a close race because a lot of the Republicans who normally vote for Sen. Henry won’t be voting for him,” Burnett says.

Meanwhile, there is a Republican running in the Senate race. Former Metro Council member Tom Alexander is his party’s lone candidate. Few observers expect that he’ll be much of a factor in the general election.

Wilson, meanwhile, is trumpeting his progressive credentials. One of those that he is shouting from the rooftops is his pro-choice stance on abortion. “Sen. Henry is a strident opponent of a women’s right to choose, and I am strongly pro-choice,” Wilson says. “I respect women and their right to control their own bodies.”

Meanwhile, Henry says, “If I have to choose between the life of a child and the accommodations of the mother, I suppose I have to come down on the side of the child.”

The senator’s liberal allies, including Clifton, say they can put aside Henry’s pro-life views, because the issue is not relevant on a state level. But Jeff Teague, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee, says that the senator recently supported a proposed referendum that would have the effect of restricting abortion by curtailing a woman’s privacy rights. “For anybody to say that a state legislator can’t affect choice is wrong,” he says.

State Sen. Steve Cohen, a Democratic ally of Henry’s who disagrees with him on abortion, says that Henry’s pro-life stance needs to be understood in a broader context. “A lot of people who are pro-life have no concern for the baby once the baby is born. They are pro- life to birth and that’s it,” he says. “But Sen. Henry is for helping the mother with pre-natal care, early childhood development and different kindergarten programs.”

Linda O’Neal, the executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, recalls that it was Henry who rewrote the state’s adoption law, which sought to reduce the number of children in state custody. “He has been instrumental in improving laws and services for children in Tennessee,” she says.

On the television drama The West Wing, a show not known for its subtle worldview, politicians neatly fall into two categories: bleeding-heart liberals and red-blooded conservatives. Henry is not as easy to pigeonhole, which will make Wilson’s task of unseating him a challenging one. After all, Henry is a lawmaker who decades ago smoked marijuana (in a nearby state where such an activity was allowed) to help him decide whether the drug should be decriminalized. Henry wound up voting in support of keeping pot illegal, but his quirky diligence on the matter is indicative of how he has managed to appeal to a cross-section of supporters.

Making matters more difficult, Wilson is not well known among the Democratic rank and file. Formerly the editor of the Nashville Business Journal, Wilson left Nashville from 1992 to 1998 while his wife, also a journalist, worked her way up the media food chain. By his own admission, he has participated only sporadically in local politics, doing some volunteer work for the doomed Al Gore campaign. Contrast that to Sen. Henry, who, in addition to serving the district for 31 years, seems to be on hand at every ribbon-cutting, church luncheon and barbecue in south and west Nashville.

But if public disgust with the General Assembly intensifies, Wilson might be able to ride an anti-incumbent tide. “If you had a company that was going backward and its leaders had been on the job for three decades, the stockholders would change the board of directors,” Wilson says. “That’s what we now have the opportunity to do.”

It would have been easy for Henry to retire amid dutiful applause for his long record of public service. And while he seems to be in good health overall, the aging politician spent two days at Vanderbilt Hospital recently after experiencing shortness of breath. Henry says that he received a clean bill of health from his doctor and walks as much as 1.5 miles a day.

Still, Henry could be spending most of his time relaxing at a condo in Palm Beach, catching up on his favorite hobby of devouring scholarly texts on history and politics. Why choose to remain mixed up in an ugly tax debate while fending off a challenger 30 years his junior? “The government of the state of Tennessee is where I find my fulfillment in life,” he says. “That’s what I do and what will I continue to do.”

Wilson is not impressed. “If Sen. Henry had retired and two or three other people entered the race, I would have been working in my garden this summer.”