Today our red-state Governor is red-faced about the London Times story we wrote about here. Our quiet spoken Governor is the talk of the tabloids. It was bad enough when he failed to welcome Howard Dean, ahem the new DNC chair, to the state. It wasn't too cool when the Democratic Governor called Medicaid a program more fitting for a "socialist economy." Now he's gone and offended the most powerful Dems in the country by dissing Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the White House.
Newsmax takes the remarks of one clueless governor and tells us that southern democrats are in complete agreement:
Southern Democrats are growing increasingly restless over the prospect of having Hillary Clinton head their party's presidential ticket in 2008 - and at least one of them is speaking out.
"I sure hope there are other people who would step forward," Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen told the London Times over the weekend. "People love [Clinton] or they hate her, and I don't know in the end how all that plays out."
The New York Post puts the whole affair in bold caps and terms it a: DIXIE DISS FOR HILLARY.
Closer to home, the Tennessean tells us the Governor is "dismayed" at the London Times story in which he repeatedly says that Dems can find a better candidate than Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Bredesen's office yesterday tried to defuse a possible controversy over critical comments he made about Clinton to The Times of London that were quoted in its Sunday editions, saying emphatically that the comments were reported out of context.
The governor's office even contacted the New York senator's office to offer a conciliatory gesture to set the record straight, said Lydia Lenker, Bredesen's press secretary. She said the comments in The Times were accurate, but a small portion of an almost hourlong interview about the current and future state of the national Democratic Party. She said Bredesen is ''dismayed'' by the way his comments were portrayed, Lenker said.
In other words, the disparaging comments were accurate, but the Governor did not think they would be the focus of the story. The Governor did not think the story would be titled: Southern Revolt on the Ascent of Hillary.
Maybe red-faced Bredesen should have recalled that Hillary Clinton is wildy popular in London, and good old red-state governors are not. Maybe he should have recalled that if the Brits had their way, Hillary Clinton would win hands down, and over there they do elect women to the highest office.
For sure, it didn't occur to Bredesen that the famous Clinton healthcare plan was a whole lot closer to the Brits' system than what Phil Bredesen has come up with.
This Friday, Tennesseans from across the state will march on the Capitol here in Nashville. Some will come in wheel chairs, some will be too sick to march, but they will come anyway. Tennesseans will go to all this trouble just so they can tell Phil Bredesen that they really do need their healthcare.
Bredesen's number one campaign promise was the promise to fix Tenncare. We didn't know he would fix it by taking healthcare away from 323,000 disabled, elderly, poor and otherwise medically needy people. We didn't know that our Democratic Governor had his sights on "going down in history as the Father of Medicaid Privatization."
Unless our big millionaire governor of the small backward state of Tennessee gets his act together, he may have to settle for going down in history as a one term governor.
