Tennessee: Bredesen says governors ‘obligated to be in contact’

NASHVILLE — Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said Thursday he doesn’t believe a governor “has to tell everybody what they’re doing every moment” of the day, but “they are obligated to be in contact.”

“I think ‘going to ground’ in the sense that you are not contactable in the case of an emergency is a huge problem,” Gov. Bredesen told reporters. “But the ability of a governor or anybody else to take a vacation and not necessarily announce to the world exactly what they’re doing day by day, I think is perfectly within the zone of reasonableness.”

His comments came amid ongoing furor over South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who admitted Wednesday that, during a seven-day period when his staff said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, he actually was in Argentina visiting a woman who has been identified in numerous news accounts as his mistress.

Like Gov. Sanford, U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., first was elected to Congress in 1994. Both were part of the GOP “revolution” that was built on a “Contract with America” as well as the invocation of conservative moral values.

“We are very saddened by the circumstances surrounding the family of Gov. Sanford,” the congressman said in an e-mail Thursday. “We will continue to pray for Mark, his wife, Jenny, and their children as they work through this difficult time.”

Gov. Bredesen’s staff in the past sometimes has been secretive about vacations taken by the governor and his wife, Andrea Conte, claiming such matters are “personal.”

In 2006, when he was running for re-election, Democrat Bredesen was hospitalized for more than 24 hours for an apparent tick bite before anyone informed news media where he was.

Staffers claimed the governor was in full control and running state government from his Nashville hospital bed. But after a short return home he soon was off to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota being checked out as a precaution.

The tick incident, meanwhile, ended up launching a movement to clarify Tennessee’s laws on gubernatorial succession in the event of a governor being incapacitated. But recommendations by a commission ended up going nowhere in the General Assembly.

Speaking Thursday, Gov. Bredesen said “there’s a difference, obviously, in the cases in which you’re talking going on vacation — I’ll go away for a couple of days or for the 4th of July weekend. There’s never been an occasion that I can think of ... (where) I was not instantly reachable.”

The governor said he now has a satellite telephone that keeps him in contact. He recalled again how, during one point last summer, he was on a remote fishing vacation in Alaska with his son while final negotiations were going on to persuade Volkswagen to build its new automotive assembly plant in Chattanooga.

“Last summer, when the Volkswagen deal was coming to a close, that was the week that I was on vacation with my son, and I spent an inordinate amount of time on that vacation holding a satellite phone and talking to people, including the Volkswagen people, about that,” Gov. Bredesen said.