Thursday, July 1, 2010
Politics Governor Reveals Odd Choice for Role Model: RFK
Posted by Jeff Woods on Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 8:31 AM
"I was always a huge admirer of Robert Kennedy. Not so much JFK. Robert Kennedy was one of the last really passionate men who was willing to risk real things in politics. He has been, in absentia, a kind of a mentor for the way I've tried to approach things."
OK, that's weird. Our governor's self-image seems a little distorted. All this time, while everyone else was wondering why he ran for governor in the first place if he didn't want to do anything, did he picture himself as dashing, complex and charismatic? A better role model for Bredesen would have been Jimmy Carter the technocrat. But by comparison, Carter was a fiery guy.
Bredesen bared his soul in a speech to the Girls State program at Lipscomb. Erik Schelzig has the report. The governor also said:
He's not interested in running for the Senate: "I can't think of anything in politics that I would like to do less than that. Because I think so much of the really interesting stuff that's going on in our country is happening in the states and locally."
He learned about hardball politics in his first campaign for mayor: "The other side was planting all these rampant rumors that when we came to town we were homeless; that I showered and changed in the Shoney's; and that my wife 'walked the streets.' And once you've been through that, there's not much someone can say in a political ad that causes you too much difficulty."
He ran for governor because Ned McWherter told him to: "He called me in and sat me down and told me to run for governor. I had never met a governor in my lifetime, so when one sits you down and tells you run for it you certainly think about it seriously."
He caught a lot of grief from Democrats when he tossed all those sick people off the TennCare rolls: "I heard from Democrats around the state basically explaining to me that I was a footnote, that not only was I not going to be re-elected as governor, but that I would probably not win the Democratic primary. Interestingly the public in general ... were much more commonsensical. I said, 'If that's the case, so be it.' And you know, a year later, I came back and became the first governor in over a century to win every county in the state."
Comments (5)
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This is all rather out of character. It's interesting and seems very real. Still, as the saying goes, "I knew Bobby Kennedy, and you sir ...."
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Bredesen didn't do anything? Jeff maybe you were asleep the last 8 years while he turned state government from an albatross to a more efficient machine with reserves.
Or when he created needed programs like Pre-K.
Or when Tennessee weathered the economic downturn better than other states.
It's not that Bredesen only did what was popular it's that he did the job most Tennesseans realized needed to be done.
Bredesen has governed as a competent and ethical technocrat, but it is a testament to how little he has actually accomplished that his devoted fans always trot out pre-K. Sure, it was a good thing for the state but the key move happened five years ago, in his first term. So the enduring legacy of a two-term governor is "he expanded pre-k in year 3"? Wow.
While I'm no fan of Gov. Bredesen, you guys have to remember that politics is the Art of the Possible: Bredesen had to manage Tennessee, with its regressive tax structure, low education, bad health, high poverty, and aggressively-ignorant legislators. Pre-K seems like a simple, no-brainer thing, but he's had to struggle mightily to establish it and preserve it up to now.
I have a bad feeling we'll miss Bredesen once we get a look at his successor.
I'll take the bait. It seems, here in the bowels of a blog that makes Mad magazine seem like serious reading, that anyone who's to the right of Che Guevara is somehow unfit for office or politically unaccomplished. The liberal intellegentsia just can't forgive Bredesen for not pursuing an income tax. But here in the real world (you know, the place that's situated outside of the three-mile stretch between East Nashville and Vanderbilt), about three-quarters of Tennesseans believe Bredesen has done a pretty good frickin job.
Don't like 900 new pre-K classrooms? How about the Books from Birth initiative that puts books in the hands of kids, ages 0 thru 5, every single month of their early childhood -- especially kids from the very poorest families? How about CoverKids, which gives Tennessee one of the highest percentages of children with health care in the country? How about investments (for once) in programs to fight infant mortality? How about Bredesen's complete and utter embrace of Obama's national education reform agenda? Nah. That's just a bunch of nothing, right?
Don't like children, BB? How about aggressive recruitment of clean-energy technology and jobs -- so much, in fact, that the left-leaning Pew Environment Group said Tennessee is leading the country? How about FDR-style stimulus-funded attacks on unemployment in places like Perry County? Oops, nevermind. Who cares about rural folks when you've got a nice cushy tenured position at Vanderbilt, right BB? Or how about VW and Nissan? Oh right, corporate welfare. Or how about taking on the nursing home industry and recarving the way the state distributes more than $1 billion in long-term care funds so that elderly people can access home- and community-based care and grow old (and die) with dignity in their own homes? Oh right, you'll be in a Vanderbilt-funded assisting living facility; no sweat of your back.
Don't like progressive policies on aging, job creation and strategies for weaning our state from the teet of BP and the rest of Big Oil? I could go on, but what's the point. There will always be Bredesen bashers on the far left and the far right? They both chafe about the same irrefutable, immutable truth: The man is likely to leave office as the most popular governor in modern history. Eats at you, doesn't it?
