The governor isn't lobbying for that HHS job, and none of his aides is wasting even a little bit of time worrying over it. That's because the entire administration is consumed with the ferocious struggle to balance the state budget and rescue Tennessee from the economic clusterphooey. That's what the administration has been telling us. But Bredesen aide Will Pinkston somehow found the time to dash off this angry little 1,006-word response to Georgetown University's Madison Powers' CQ Politics critique of Bredesen's health care record. Powers memorably called the governor "arrogant, autocratic, and seemingly allergic to legislative accountability."

In his diatribe, which appears as a comment to Powers' column in a single block of type like a missive from the Unabomber, Pinkston accuses the professor of making an "intellectually dishonest attack" against our governor. Pinkston goes on:

In perhaps the most outrageous portion of his column, Powers actually inserts words in Bredesen's mouth and claims he denigrated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a 2005 speech to the National Press Club. The entire text of the speech, which can be found easily online, reveals the governor leveled no such criticisms -- not to mention the fact that neither Reid nor Pelosi were even in their current leadership positions at that time. Instead, the Press Club speech demonstrated the kind of thoughtful approach to healthcare reform that is emblematic of Bredesen's approach to governing in Tennessee.

We wouldn't want to upset Reid or Pelosi, would we? Certainly not if we crave a spot in Obama's Cabinet. After the jump, you can read Pinkston's entire defense of Bredesen:

Update: Would Bredesen take a Cabinet job? "In a New York minute," Gary Odom says. "You're looking at 19-14 (GOP majority) in the Senate; you're staring at a $1 billion budget deficit, you got total disarray in the House," observes Sen. Bill Ketron. "He's got two years left. Why not (leave)?" And Lydia Lenker enters our "Whopper of the Month" contest with this: "Not a day goes by when Phil Bredesen doesn't say, 'I love being governor.'" The complete report from Action Andy Sher.

Update II: Sebelius causes stir with schedule change.

Will Pinkston's CQ comment:

Madison Powers' Feb. 13 column on the future of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services amounted to an intellectually dishonest attack on Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, whose name has been mentioned as a possible candidate to lead the agency. While Bredesen is not campaigning for the Cabinet post, those of us around him are loath to let attacks on him go unanswered. Powers' critique of Bredesen is startling, both for its ferocity as well as its lack of understanding of events surrounding the Volunteer State's Medicaid restructuring in 2005. Powers' treatise is beset by major errors of both commission and omission. He mischaracterizes Bredesen's longstanding philosophy on the need for universal health care at the federal level. And he altogether ignores, or at least distorts, the facts about what happened in Tennessee's Medicaid program, known as TennCare. Because Powers failed to put the situation in proper perspective, please allow me to do so. When Bredesen took office in 2003, he inherited what undisputedly was the most financially troubled Medicaid program in America. With 1.3 million people covered, Tennessee had the highest Medicaid enrollment in the nation on a per-capita basis relative to its population. Meanwhile, it had one of the lowest per-capita revenue collections. Total cost of the pharmacy benefit alone in TennCare had grown greater than the total cost of Tennessee's higher education system. At that time in the United States, the average number of prescriptions each year was 10. In the South, it was 11. In TennCare, it was 30. A study by McKinsey & Company found TennCare was on track to consume virtually all new state revenue, leaving little additional for education, public safety and other vital priorities. On top of its unsustainable growth, TennCare faced fundamental operational problems. Prior to Bredesen's taking office, the program had been dramatically expanded under the premise of managed care. But most of the managed-care organizations (MCOs) responsible for administering the program had become insolvent. Fueling problems was the fact that the program was hamstrung by pre-existing legal settlements in federal courts that made it impossible to effectively administer the program and bring costs under control. To save TennCare from the brink of collapse, Bredesen worked overtime to negotiate with legal advocates. He sought relief from federal legal settlements so adult disenrollments would not be necessary. When advocates refused to grant relief, he kept working hard to hold adult disenrollments to a minimum, while maintaining and later expanding full coverage for children and establishing a series of safety-net programs to provide continued assistance to adults. It is important to note that the adults who lost coverage would not have qualified for Medicaid assistance in virtually any other state. That does not diminish the difficulty that enrollees experienced during that period. But it underscores the fact that TennCare was and is unique among U.S. Medicaid programs, which will always complicate efforts to finance it. When Bredesen scaled back TennCare, he did the only thing he could do to keep the program from bankrupting the state. Tennesseans approved, resoundingly. In 2006, voters returned Bredesen to office for a second term with the largest re-election support in Tennessee history -- mainly on his record of bringing TennCare under control in a responsible and humane manner. Today, TennCare is financially stable for the first time. The program's managed-care organizations are solvent, and TennCare is the first Medicaid program in the nation to require its MCOs to earn accreditation from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Working through the federal courts, the state gained limited flexibility inside the pre-existing legal settlements. Fraud and abuse are being aggressively attacked, with savings going back to the program. Following enrollment reductions, TennCare remains one of the most comprehensive state health plans in the nation, with approximately 1.2 million enrollees, or about 100,000 less than it had in 2003. Unfortunately, none of this context is mentioned by Powers in his column. Additionally, he makes several statements that are patently inaccurate. For example, he suggests that Bredesen opposes universal comprehensive health care. To the contrary, the governor has for years said and reaffirmed as recently as this week that he believes in a national solution for health insurance. Powers claims that Bredesen's support of patient co-payments -- fairly standard practice in most financially sound health plans -- is somehow part of a conspiracy to create an "economic disincentive for health care utilization." In perhaps the most outrageous portion of his column, Powers actually inserts words in Bredesen's mouth and claims he denigrated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a 2005 speech to the National Press Club. The entire text of the speech, which can be found easily online, reveals the governor leveled no such criticisms -- not to mention the fact that neither Reid nor Pelosi were even in their current leadership positions at that time. Instead, the Press Club speech demonstrated the kind of thoughtful approach to healthcare reform that is emblematic of Bredesen's approach to governing in Tennessee. Finally, most troubling is Powers' visceral attacks on character and values despite not knowing the governor and likely never having met him. He certainly made no effort to contact the Governor's Office to solicit differing viewpoints or even confirm the veracity of his claims prior to publication. As a Georgetown academic and a CQ Politics columnist, he demonstrated either a total lack of intellectual curiosity or, worse, a complete disregard for the facts. In Tennessee, we've got thick skin. Bredesen, in particular, is used to criticism, which obviously comes with the territory when you're making tough decisions. But Powers' commentary amounts to one of the more irresponsible and inaccurate attacks we've seen. Not long ago, New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote that opinion pages are, quite properly, "home to a lot of provocative opinions." But he added: "All are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact." Unfortunately, Madison Powers' column is built on shifting sands of half-truths and distortions about what actually happened in Tennessee.