Bredesen vs. Blackburn

On Sept. 26, 2017, the day Republican Sen. Bob Corker announced he would not run for re-election, Phil Bredesen started getting calls from longtime members of his inner circle. They wanted him to get back in the game. 

A former Nashville mayor and Tennessee governor — and the last Democrat to win a statewide election in Tennessee since The West Wing went off the air — Bredesen has been a fantasy candidate for forlorn state Democrats since he left the governor’s mansion in 2011. Although the party has started to produce some younger talent — state Sen. Jeff Yarbro and Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke reportedly mulled runs for Corker’s seat last year — it’s hard to beat Bredesen’s credentials. When he ran for re-election as governor in 2006 he won all 95 counties, and he left politics with approval ratings north of 70 percent.

Bredesen and Corker are longtime friends who came up together in state politics, and it was never likely that the two would face off in an election. But with the Republican incumbent vacating the seat, Bredesen’s former aides and old allies urged him to at least consider making a run for it. Even Bill Freeman, the Nashville businessman and Democratic super-donor who was once a bitter political nemesis to Bredesen, said publicly that the former governor was “in a class by himself” as a Democratic leader and potential candidate. (Freeman is a co-owner of the Scene.)

By mid-October, Bredesen had started telling members of a tight circle of friends and advisers that he was seriously considering a run. Internal polling showed that while a generic Democrat trailed a generic Republican, Bredesen could have a real path to victory. He called some of his friends in the Senate, including Virginia governors-turned-senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, to determine whether he’d even like the job and be able to have the kind of influence that would make it worth the weekly flights to and from Washington, D.C. 

It was late November when Bredesen gave his team of aides and advisers, many of whom had worked on his gubernatorial campaigns and in his administration, the green light. At 74 years old, he was ready to get back on the stump.

“You’re healthy, you’re energetic, you’ve got some life left in you, what are you gonna do with it?” Bredesen says, describing his thinking during a recent interview with the Scene. “I’d much rather be doing something like this, trying to fix the problem, than sitting on a boat somewhere, sipping a piña colada.” 

Soon longtime Bredesen aide Will Pinkston, who is now a Metro school board member, and Bob Corney, Bredesen’s former communications director, were holed up in a one-bedroom apartment at The Melrose feverishly trying to pull together a campaign team. Corney is serving as Bredesen’s campaign manager, while Pinkston is a senior strategist. 

Bredesen announced his bid Dec. 7. Over the next 24 days before the fourth-quarter fundraising deadline — and before the campaign had a formal fundraising infrastructure in place — he raised more than $500,000. Democrat James Mackler, a Nashville attorney and Iraq War veteran who had been campaigning and raising money for months, dropped out within days of Bredesen’s announcement, clearing the way for the presumptive nominee.  

Now the Democrats have what most observers consider their ideal candidate for this state in this moment. Bredesen is a centrist Democrat, selling pragmatism over ideology, who associates believe can turn out the supporters who elected him years ago while also peeling off some moderate Republicans and independents who are turned off by President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.  

Bredesen’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, represents the pro-Trump faction almost completely. 

A former state senator who has been in Congress since 2003, Blackburn has built her reputation on tea-party-style politics and frequent cable news appearances. She has embraced Trump as tightly as just about any elected Republican. 

In her campaign announcement video, Blackburn said: “I’m a hardcore, card-carrying Tennessee conservative. I’m politically incorrect and proud of it.” In May, the president flew to town and pledged his support for her at one of his now-regular freewheeling rallies. 

Blackburn has Ward Baker, one of the GOP’s most prominent and formidable operatives, steering her campaign, and she has put up big fundraising numbers so far. But there have been signs of doubt about her candidacy, if not distaste for it, from within the Republican Party. 

Gov. Bill Haslam was reportedly Corker’s preferred successor, but he declined to run. The months after Corker’s initial retirement announcement were filled with reports of Republican insiders in Tennessee and Washington urging Corker to reconsider — among them former U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, who dropped out of the Republican primary and called on Corker to run. Eventually, Corker reiterated that he would not run again. But even then, for a time, he raised Republican hackles by speaking kindly about Bredesen and declining even to say Blackburn’s name. In television interviews he referred to her as the “nominee” and on one occasion as “this person.” Since then, he has insisted he supports Blackburn, even if he won’t campaign against Bredesen.  

Now, with the general election campaign in full swing and Election Day set for Nov. 6, Bredesen and Blackburn look set to produce the state’s most competitive U.S. Senate race in more than a decade. It’s a contest that is certain to draw millions of dollars from state-level donors as well as outside groups looking to influence an election that is seen as pivotal for both parties. A Blackburn victory would be a major milestone for a wing of the state Republican Party that has ascended to power in the legislature and dominates Tennessee’s congressional delegation, but has been locked out of statewide office by more moderate establishment figures. And Blackburn would be the first woman from Tennessee elected to the U.S. Senate. If Bredesen wins, he’ll be the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate election in Tennessee in 30 years.  

In their own ways, both Bredesen and Blackburn are trying to sell voters on their independence. And it’s true that each has a track record of pissing off members of their own party. 

At a forum on business issues earlier this month, both candidates drew laughs from the crowd with references to their political pasts. Asked about how she’d assert her independence as a senator, Blackburn quipped, “I think asserting my independence is something that I’ve never been really short on.” In response to the same question, Bredesen said the Democratic Party “isn’t a religion,” and noted dryly that he didn’t believe he’d go to hell for upsetting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

Bredesen has been accused of heresy before. In 2005, two years into his first term as governor and with the state facing a budget crisis, he kicked upwards of 200,000 Tennesseans off TennCare, Tennessee’s state Medicaid program. Bredesen today cites his navigation of the crisis and handling of the TennCare program as an example of his willingness to choose pragmatism over toeing a party line. But it angered liberals then and now. 

Evaluating Bredesen at the end of his tenure in 2011, Bruce Barry wrote in the Scene that the TennCare episode had exposed the outgoing Democratic governor as callous and narcissistic, and that on this and a number of other issues Bredesen had “been a profile in moral gutlessness.” 

More than a decade later, Bredesen says there are some ways in which he might have approached the situation differently, but he does not ultimately regret the action he took.

“That was kind of an emergency issue for the state,” he says. “I did what I had to do to keep things standing upright.”   

For proof of her independence, Blackburn can easily point to her membership in an unruly corner of the House Republican caucus that has caused headaches for party leadership for years. But her badge of honor is the fight over a state income tax that dominated her tenure in the Tennessee state Senate. That fight saw Blackburn as one of the leaders of a raucous revolt against Republican Gov. Don Sundquist.

When the Scene asks Blackburn how someone who has been in Congress for 15 years can convince voters that she is not a career politician or a Washington insider — labels all political candidates, and especially Republican candidates, seek to avoid — she refers back to the income tax fight. For her, it is an example of her willingness to buck the party establishment and to side with the people. 

“[Tennessee families] don’t consider me as someone — and thankfully, it’s because I have never been — someone that was part of the D.C. elite,” says Blackburn, who is speaking via phone from a campaign stop in East Tennessee. “And there are elites on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republican. That’s what ‘draining the swamp’ is all about — is making sure the power and authority goes to the people, that we focus on being a government of the people.”

Later, after responding to a different question, she returns to the notion of career politicians, noting, “When I was a senior in high school, Phil Bredesen was running for an office in Massachusetts. He was running for a state Senate seat. He has run for Congress, he ran for Nashville mayor and won and served, he ran for governor, so he’s been running for a really long time.”

In a way, Bredesen is making his own populist pitch by promising to prioritize the needs and wants of Tennesseans over partisan political considerations. Sitting in the corner of the Johnny Cash Museum downtown, sipping a cup of coffee, he tells the Scene he wants to “look at national issues through the lens of what is it that Tennesseans want, as opposed to what is it that the president wants or the Democratic Party wants or the Republican Party wants.”

Bredesen cites his vocal opposition to the president’s proposed tariffs, or taxes, on imported goods, which have provoked retaliatory tariffs by American trading partners. In particular, he has highlighted the negative impact such tariffs would have on the Tennessee’s automobile industry, as well as exports like Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Bredesen has close ties to the former. As governor, he led the effort to bring Nissan’s North American headquarters and a Volkswagen assembly plant to Tennessee.

Blackburn has also said she is “not a fan” of the tariffs.

“I fully appreciate that China has had a trade war on us for decades and that we have lost jobs because of this,” she said at the recent business issues forum. “And that we have to address this in order to move to free and fair trade. But that short-term impact is something that causes me some heartburn.”  

But as you’d expect, the two diverge sharply in other areas.

On immigration issues, Bredesen says we have a “moral obligation” to so-called Dreamers, people who were brought to America illegally as children, and says that “making them the scapegoats and leaving them up in the air as to what their future is and what to plan I just think is irresponsible.” Blackburn celebrated Trump’s decision last year to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, saying policies like DACA “offer the false hope of amnesty that led to a surge of illegal immigration and stole jobs from American citizens by giving illegal aliens work permits.”

As harrowing reports about the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border dominated the news in June, Bredesen called the policy “effectively child abuse.” He urged the president to stop it. Blackburn called the situation heartbreaking, but repeated misleading-at-best rhetoric from the Trump administration, blaming the crisis on “liberals” who “would not pay to enforce our immigration laws or build appropriate facilities for asylum seekers.” 

Bredesen called Blackburn’s comments “ridiculous.” 

“This was a specific decision that was taken by our Department of Justice to do this,” he told the Knoxville News-Sentinel. “There was no need to do it.”

At a Rotary Club gathering in Nashville on Monday, Bredesen said abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a proposal gaining support among some Democrats — is a “really stupid idea.”

Bredesen’s June comments about Trump’s border policy came at an event focused on a different crisis — opioid addiction, which Bredesen has called a “full-blown health emergency.” It’s a topic that has placed Blackburn under intense scrutiny.  

Blackburn was one of the subjects of a joint exposé by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post about the effects of a bill she sponsored that weakened the DEA’s ability to block suspicious shipments of drugs. Sponsors of the bill claimed it was needed to make sure patients had access to pain medication, but critics and whistleblowers in the investigation have said the change contributed to an increase in opioid deaths. Not only is Blackburn seeking to represent areas that have been ravaged by the opioid-addiction crisis, she  received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from groups associated with opioid manufacturers and distributors between 2013 and 2017. (According to Open Secrets, Blackburn has received more than $800,000 from the pharmaceutical industry since 1991.) 

Speaking at the June event, where he visited a hospital that treats babies born with opioid dependency, Bredesen referred to Blackburn’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry. “If you want to see the swamp at work,” Bredesen told reporters, “it’s somebody who gets these huge contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, then sort of quietly does something that defangs the [Drug Enforcement Administration] and their ability to intercept these large shipments.”

Blackburn has defended her role in the legislation’s passage and taken offense at the suggestion that campaign contributions influenced her position on it. If there have been “unintended consequences,” she has said, the law should be fixed.

As she campaigns in East Tennessee, a region that has been hit hard by opioid addiction, the Scene asks Blackburn what she would do as a senator to address the crisis. 

“I’ve looked at this one as a mom,” she says. “Having friends that have children that have suffered from addictions. I have a solid record of what I have done to get more resources to local law enforcement, to work with providers to bring accountability and transparency.” 

She continues: “[Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio] and I are working on legislation that is $1 billion in resources for our local law enforcement, for first responders, putting money into recovery communities so that we are going to be able to put more attention on ending really what is an epidemic and a scourge on our society.”

On the campaign trail, Bredesen has repeatedly invoked the idea that elected officials in Washington, D.C., need to take on —  rather than shrink away from or avoid — the big problems and propose big ideas. One of his: enlisting the Tennessee Valley Authority to expand high-speed internet service into rural areas throughout the TVA’s seven-state region. Bredesen has highlighted the absolute necessity of the internet in daily life and argued that the TVA is well positioned to include rural broadband expansion in its mission. 

Blackburn agrees with the importance of expanding internet access and has supported policies aimed at doing so — albeit policies Bredesen says hardly put a dent in the problem. More fundamentally, Blackburn opposes expanding the size and scope of a government utility like the TVA. Moreover, the Trump administration has revived an Obama-era idea of privatizing parts of the TVA, an idea that Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has called “loony.” 

When I ask Bredesen what he’d say to riled Democrats who want to see him embody their outrage at the president, his answer is blunt. 

“I am not running against Donald Trump,” he says. He then adds with a slight laugh, “You can’t make me run against Donald Trump.”

He says his time in state politics taught him that “every time there’s a dustup somewhere does not mean I need to roll my sleeves up and dive in.” As for how he’d decide which Trump statements or actions he’d respond to and which ones he’d try to ignore as a senator, Bredesen says he’d weigh in on things that overlapped with his job in the Senate. In other words, he’s not interested in talking about, say, Trump’s ongoing feud with former aide Omarosa. 

“It doesn’t seem to have a nexus to being a senator, he says. “Let the reporters earn their money some other way.”

If Bredesen sounds like a man insisting on decorum at the dinner table as a tornado barrels down the street, the reason is simple, albeit surprising to some. He says he doesn’t believe the Trump presidency represents an emergency. 

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he says. “This country was set up to have the legislative and judicial branches be a check on the power of the executive. The founders were very concerned about the unbridled power of the executive and so on. I think the Congress is not doing that job right now. I think the Republicans are too much invested in the notion that they’re there to support the president of their party. I think the Democrats are too much invested in the notion that they’re there to oppose the president of another party. And I think the same happened in reverse during Obama’s term.”

Bredesen is a Tennessee Democrat who rose to prominence in an era that seems like the product of a completely different political universe compared to today’s. That puts him in an interesting position. Asked about a hypothetical Tennessee voter who voted Bredesen for governor in the Aughts and Trump for president in 2016, he leans forward in his chair. 

“Just by the numbers, there are a lot of them,” he says. 

It would seem so. Bredesen was dominant across the state in 2006, and 10 years later Trump carried Tennessee by a margin of 26 percent. Acknowledging that there is a swath of Republican voters he couldn’t get then and won’t get now, he expresses a familiarity with the sort of person who could have both a Bredesen bumper sticker and a “Make America Great Again” hat.

“For a lot of these voters, they’re people who are just estranged from what’s going on in Washington,” Bredesen says. “A lot of them were estranged from what was going on in Nashville, and I was able to bring them into the mix that way. So what I’m just doing is trying to be appreciative of the culture of different places and have solutions to problems that one of them could say — setting aside the ‘D’ and ‘R’ label — ‘Yeah, you know, that makes sense.’ ”

He references his childhood near the Finger Lakes region of New York, which he describes as a “conservative, very rural part of the world.” 

“It’s not Fifth Avenue is what I’m saying,” Bredesen says. “It’s 350 miles from there and conservative.”

He estimates some 70 percent of his extended family voted for Trump.

“I know them, they’re not racist and they’re not stupid and they’re not crazy,” he says. “It’s a different culture with people who see the world in different ways than someone who lives in Nashville, or certainly in Washington.

“I think there’s a combination of — first of all, they look at Washington and what they’re doing has got no relevance to what I care about for me and my family, number one,” he continues. “And number two, and even worse, they look at Washington and they see people sort of looking down on that culture. So I feel like I’ve got a foot in that world.”

Blackburn’s feet have been firmly planted in the Trump camp since before he became president, and her support has been unwavering despite Trump’s racist rhetoric and the numerous sexual assault and harassment allegations against him. After the revelation of an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump was recorded bragging about groping women, Blackburn called the comments “indefensible.” But she did not withdraw her support for the the Republican Party’s then-nominee for president.

Corker, the Republican Blackburn is seeking to succeed, also spent many months defending and standing by Trump, but eventually he broke (after announcing his plans to retire). He has since described the president as reckless and dishonest, even once referring to the White House as an “adult day care center.”

When I ask Blackburn why Corker is wrong about the president, she sticks to talking about policy and, particularly, tax cuts.

“The people of Tennessee voted for President Trump and his agenda,” she says. “And if you were to be with me out on the campaign trail, you would hear people say every single day, ‘I support President Trump’s agenda.’ Tax cuts are working in Tennessee. People like the fact that tax cuts are working. 

“And I will tell you they do not see these as crumbs,” she continues. “Nancy Pelosi, and of course Phil Bredesen, called them crumbs too. People don’t like that. $1,700 a year for a family in Tennessee that they’ve got back in their pocket is a way for them to buy a new refrigerator or freezer or pay school fees or take a vacation or go to some UT football games. That is real money.”

But as for the president himself, is there a line he could cross that would make Blackburn withdraw her support for him despite agreeing with his policy agenda?

“Sometimes the president speaks or uses words or says things that I would not choose to say,” she says. “[But] the people of this state support his agenda and what he’s accomplished.”

In a seemingly telling slip of the tongue, she goes on to say that those Tennesseans who support the president’s agenda “want to see more conservative judges — or, not conservative — constitutional judges.”

They are pleased with Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, she says, and look forward to seeing his second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, confirmed. As it happens, Bredesen’s comments on the judicial confirmation process have indicated he would not necessarily have opposed either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh. At the forum earlier this month he expressed opposition for creating “litmus tests” for judicial appointees.

In a television ad that hit the airwaves at the start of the general election, Blackburn touts Trump’s personal endorsement of her and is seen pledging her allegiance to the president before a crowd of MAGA rally attendees.

“Tennessee needs a senator who is going to support President Donald Trump,” she says in the ad. “I am going to be there to stand with President Donald Trump and take your Tennessee values to Washington, D.C., to fight with him to get the job done.”  

As he says, Bredesen might not be “running against Donald Trump,” but that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t on the ballot.