Tennessee: Is Cabinet Bredesen’s exit plan?

NASHVILLE — With Gov. Phil Bredesen saying he wouldn’t mind swapping his current job to push universal health care on the national stage, Tennessee lawmakers have a warning:

Don’t underestimate the attractiveness of leaving behind an increasingly difficult “mess” back home.

The list of challenges facing the Democratic governor in the last two years of his term include making massive budget cuts, contending with a GOP-dominated Senate and struggling with a bitterly divided House in a General Assembly that may increasingly view the governor as a lame duck.

“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,” observed Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro. “He’s got two years left. Why not (leave)?”

Gov. Bredesen’s name has come up in lists of candidates for the position of secretary for U.S. Health and Human Servicesm but Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is considered the frontrunner for the job, which will be filled by President Barack Obama.

On Wednesday, the governor said the chances of Mr. Obama naming him to the post are low. Liberal groups have pounded away at the governor’s history of making cuts to TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid.

Bredesen spokeswoman Lydia Lenker said the national attention hasn’t diminished his enthusiasm for being governor.

“Not a day goes by when Phil Bredesen doesn’t say, ‘I love being governor,’” she said.

Republican Lt. Gov. Ramsey, who would succeed Gov. Bredesen, said he thinks the governor genuinely is attracted by the prospect of being able to influence national health care policy.

“The next couple of years aren’t going to be any fun in state government because of the deficit we’re facing,” said Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, R-Blountville and Senate speaker. “And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon. So that is obviously one reason that I think he’d be willing to accept this.”

While some in Nashville — the Tennessee State Employees Association for one — have described the governor as a lame duck, he maintained in a recent Times Free Press interview that he doesn’t see himself that way.

“I promise you that up until Christmas time (in 2011) I will be doing something useful,” he said. “Life is way too short and valuable for me to waste two years sitting around.”

“Sort of a mess”

There is no shortage of challenges at home, including what is now expected to be a $1 billion revenue shortfall. Tennessee, like most states, reels from a ferocious national recession. The governor has been looking at budget cuts of up to 15 percent.

“He does have sort of a mess,” said Ed Cromer, editor of the Tennessee Journal, a nonpartisan political newsletter.

The governor “has got a House that’s practically been fighting the Civil War and a speaker without a party,” Mr. Cromer said.

Rep. Gary Odom, D-Nashville and leader of the state House, said he thinks a national position might look pretty nice to the governor at this point.

“If you’re asking me if Phil Bredesen would accept a cabinet position, my answer would be: In a New York minute,” he joked.

Still, Rep. Odom said, the governor “enjoys solving problems and we know there’s plenty enough problems in Washington that need to be solved.”

But if the governor is looking for comfort, he may not find it in Washington. National attacks against his potential nomination for Health and Human Services continue flying.

The latest salvo was fired Friday by CQ Politics columnist Madison Powers, a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Mr. Powers, who was associated with a variety of liberal causes in Nashville during the 1970s and 1980s, flayed Gov. Bredesen in his latest column, saying that first as Nashville mayor and then as governor, “a clear and consistent picture emerged of a political figure who is arrogant, autocratic, and seemingly allergic to legislative accountability.”

Earlier in the week, Gov. Bredesen said he is getting “mugged” by national liberal groups and figures there is a “low” probability he will be nominated.

“I certainly have some detractors and some baggage, and some of those detractors are part of the core of support of President Obama,” the governor mused aloud to reporters.