Gov. Bredesen's busy week

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen had a busy week before the holiday weekend --- interviewed at a Democratic leadership gathering up North and then back home during more legal proceedings surrounding disgraced former state Sen. John Ford.

Bredesen belonged in both places. On a blog with RealClearPolitics.com, he represented himself well and quite honestly in an interview. He put it on the line about Obama and his chances here and other places in the South. It was a good read, darn it.

The governor also handled himself well in court testimony regarding Ford. I'm not going into all the new details concerning this disgraced politician. For a more ethical and credible General Assembly, if that is possible, Ford's ouster has been most welcome.

Bredesen was simply asked about a conversation Ford tried to have with him concerning a deep-pocketed company possibly doing more business with the state. Bredesen is in no way directly connected to the scandal of Ford or Operation Tennessee Waltz. He's way too smart for that, and he's a walking mega-million dollar corporation himself.

Yet indirectly, Bredesen was connected to the ethical problems that befell the General Assemby this decade by retiring Rep. Frank Buck. The General Assembly's conscience told me he met with Bredesen early in the governor's first term to tell him about all the shenanigans. Buck said he felt that a new governor with a reputation of being tough with legislative bodies could wrangle real ethical reform out of the General Assembly before another scandal hit.

Well, we all know what happened, much to this state's shame. The FBI had to come in and straighten out our own house. Bredesen's office, in a reply for my Tennessean column several years ago citing Buck's meeting with the governor, remembered the conversation differently. It only said that the governor respectfully disagreed with Buck's recollection.

Frank Buck is as honest a politician I've ever met, even to a fault. The first time I wrote about him, it was to criticize him for using the word "wetback" in discussion of legislation. Buck apologized, but added that the term was just frequently used in his upbringing and in his locale.

To his credit, Buck never used it again, and we became friends as much as professionals can and should. He never treated me with disrespect. And my wife would grumble when the cell phone would ring before 7 in the morning as Rep. Buck was driving to Nashville from Dowelltown.

Taxpayers should know that Rep. Buck could have used your money and stayed the night during legislative session in Nashville and go out to drink with lobbyists and get some campaign donations. But he didn't believe in feeding the incumbency monster, so it was turned on him regularly by Democratic Party leaders in the House. And yes, Frank Buck was a true Democrat.

Each re-election, the leadership would turn the machine on Buck and field a string of primary candidates. So Buck would drive around his district, tell folks about the opposition faced, and told them if they wanted him representing them for another two years in Nashville, he probably would need some financial support. This story is kind of like Davy Crockett did -- or we'd like to think -- in his day representing Tennesseans in Congress. These examples are indicative of real populism, not the kind of stuff we get now from Tennessee Democrats.

I depended on Buck for direction sometimes in the different world of General Assembly, in addition to encouragement that there were still some elected representatives left who would take on a bureaucracy that was hurting taxpayers and the vulnerable alike. My leukemia cut short our relationship as he was trying to fill in the loopholes left by the Naifeh/McMillan after-the-fact effort reform effort. As reporter John Rodgers of the City Paper reported earlier this year, the General Assmebly is starting to return to its old tricks.

But Buck won't be there to watch out for us anymore. This rural, Sam Ervin-style attorney of candor and strength will return to run his law office and take care of his grandchildren simultaneously.

Meanwhile, Bredesen has more than two years left in office, Naifeh is thinking about running for governor in 2010 and Bill Purcell has retreated to Harvard. So this is what we mostly have left for Democrats in Tennessee. There are bright spots like Congressman Steve Cohen and several folks in the General Assembly -- but there are from enough to stem the descending darkness. No wonder the celebrated, GOP muckraker Bill Hobbs is having a field day. Tennessee is losing a distinctive and effective two-party system of choices.

Voters should demand change or run up a white flag.

In my Tennessean column, Buck said Bredesen told him that he really didn't have the political capital and time to tackle ethics in the General Assembly. Remember the old Civil Rights' slogan? If not now, when? If not us, then who?

And so it goes -- a busy week for the governor in which Real Clear Politics did not once ask him if he was on the short list to be Sen. Obama's VP choice and testimony about a meeting that was symptomatic of the ethics problem at the General Assembly.

Despite all the fireworks this weekend, I just kind of feel flat.


To read the Bredesen interivew, go to:

http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2008/07/notes_from_the_dlc_bredesen_un.html