As Ned Ray McWherter goes to his grave, he takes with him the white, rural, conservative wing of the Democratic Party, not just in Tennessee but across the South. McWherter and the movement have passed on.
But for several beautiful years there, McWherter, who died of cancer Monday at age 80, and his rural West Tennessee Democratic Caucus (yes, it existed) held almost every lever of power in the corridors of the state Capitol. Their control began when McWherter overthrew a slick Nashville prima donna, Jim McKinney, as speaker of the House in 1972. And their hegemony reached its zenith with McWherter's victory in the 1986 gubernatorial election over the urbane and well-spoken Republican Winfield Dunn.
By then, McWherter had fine-tuned his good-ol'-boy shtick into a political art form. When translated into an actual governing philosophy, its focus was on efficiently run government, miles and miles of road construction, economic development, and an early (if ill-advised) call for health care for everybody. It wasn't sexy, but it worked.
McWherter was a hulk of a man, often wearing cowboy boots and smoking a cigar or pipe. Where life ended and art began, it's difficult to know, but he was, by various turns, hilarious, vulgar, authentic, earthy, and country to the core. He was suspicious of the rich, though he was rich himself, and he often made fun of educated people, though he was as smart as they come. As he once chided Dunn in a debate, "Winfield, I may not know Shakespeare, but I do know numbers."
This much we know: He was born poor, dropped out of college three times when his knees kept blowing out in football tryouts, and nearly came to financial ruin after he tried selling shoes in places that included remote Caribbean islands. We know this because to the small audience of captive reporters who followed him around the state, he would often ramble on about, say, his sharecropper father who often struggled in a hardscrabble environment, his loving mother who raised the family, and the Sears catalog in the outhouse that served as the family's toilet paper. What McWherter the brilliant politician understood, at his peak, was how to relate to average working Tennesseans — people who had once used the Sears catalog too.
There were moments covering McWherter on the campaign trail that trumped any reality TV show. One day as a young reporter for the Nashville Banner, I climbed onto McWherter's campaign plane with a Tennessean reporter. The candidate arrived, plainly irritable, and lurched for a tray stacked with sandwiches. He started tearing them apart and eating just the lettuce. Then he devoured the parsley and celery sticks set aside as decoration, his great big paws stuffing greenery into his mouth. Someone thought to ask what was the matter.
McWherter looked up from his airplane seat: "When you don't take a crap, you get a crappy attitude." That launched a discussion of roughage. Within days, as word of McWherter's constipation spread, it became standard procedure for reporters to ask for an update. He always answered.
As governor, McWherter seemed to relish doing everything that his predecessor, Lamar Alexander, had not. He focused on management, reducing the state payroll, and a "pay-as-you-go" philosophy that lowered the state's reliance on bonds. It was McWherter's Depression-era mindset at work.
While Alexander had ignored the state's mushrooming prison population, McWherter built more prisons. McWherter also built miles and miles of roads, vowing to connect every county seat with an interstate. He also oversaw the dismemberment of Alexander's merit pay plan, designed to pay better teachers more.
Any discussion of his legacy must include two controversial items. First, McWherter passed an education plan that involved raising the state sales tax half a penny. This came in response to a lawsuit that found Tennessee had unfairly funded its school systems around the state. McWherter had originally intended to pay for his education plan by introducing an income tax, the third rail in Tennessee politics. When the income tax wouldn't fly, the more regressive sales tax passed instead.
Second, McWherter introduced a health care plan to cover uninsured Tennesseans. The plan — TennCare — involved replacing Medicaid with various private managed-care organizations. Good idea. But TennCare flew wildly off the rails, and later governors, chiefly Phil Bredesen, had to deal with the money pit it created, however well-intended.
But on this and most any other issue, McWherter's door was always open. I can't tell you how many times we would breeze past his receptionist, waltz on into his office, and ask whatever we needed. When he became governor, all meetings were open, in his office or elsewhere. On top of that, he opened his personal finance records to anyone and everyone. He gave us just about everything — tax forms, stock trades, personal financial statements. He was a remarkably transparent guy.
As time wore on, McWherter's political clout rose. In the conservative wing of the national Democratic Party, particularly in the South, McWherter was a power. He was a confidant of Bill Clinton's team in crisis moments, often trooping up to Washington to give advice on how to get their act together. Years earlier he had gotten behind Jimmy Carter's presidential bid, and the two exchanged staff and advice. When Al Gore first ran for president, it was no accident that Gore's only serious victories came in a string of Southern primaries orchestrated by McWherter. Ned brought the traveling press corps along to Montgomery and Jackson and Atlanta so we could watch him put it together for Gore. You never met so many redneck Democrats in your life.
McWherter's honesty and straightforwardness inspired a loyalty among staff and supporters that made him an incredibly magnanimous force. Tragically, against the steady advance of the Republican Party across the South, the Democratic Party that he led has mostly vanished.
He was a man to be taken utterly seriously, but he could also be an absolute riot. In the end, one remembers him flying down a two-lane road to yet another campaign speech, his so-called Redneck Express barreling through exhausted little towns filled with falling-down barns, and the little old ladies serving fresh lemonade from hardware store washtubs, and the old farmers grinning from under their hats, and McWherter standing up to the patient and forgotten crowd and telling them that he was one of them.
It was a sight to behold. And it will never be again.
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