NASHVILLE – Gov. Phil Bredesen today called rumors he might switch to the GOP the “craziest idea I have ever heard” and asserted he remains a “happy Democrat.”
Rumors began swirling around the state Capitol this week that the governor, a fiscal conservative who has been at odds with the Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress over health care reform, was thinking of making a switch. The rumor began outside Tennessee, Gov. Bredesen told reporters.
“I had a call from a fellow governor saying, ‘What’s this I hear?’ and I had no idea what they were talking about,” Gov. Bredesen said. “And they told me, and I said that is the craziest idea I have ever heard. I believe that I shot that (rumor) in the heart pretty quickly.”
He said he tracked the report to the Democratic Governors Association only to learn from them that someone on a Sunday political talk show “had said something about there’s a Democratic governor somewhere so they’re all speculating about who that might be, me or Joe Manchion up in West Virginia, somebody out in Wyoming.”
Gov. Bredesen said he assured Democratic officials that “it was not me … I love being in the party and I was a happy Democrat just as I’d been since I was a freshman in college.”