Bredesen To Campaign For Obama

By Kleinheider Posted on August 19, 2008 at 7:06 pm

The Honorable Phil Governor wants to help bring Barack Obama across the same chasm he traversed in relating to culturally conservative southerners:

Later this week, Bredesen will stump for Obama in Ohio, tagging along as Obama attends – in the governor’s words – “some town meeting with ordinary people.”

Bredesen said Tuesday, as he faced questions at home about a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer running unauthorized background checks, that he wasn’t being critical of Obama, just offering some “tough love.”

“I’m certainly a strong supporter of him, I have endorsed him, I’m a Democrat, I’m going up to spend two days in Ohio campaigning for him,” the governor said. “I think as a lot of his friends think – I’m certainly not the only one saying that – he’s got some connecting to do across this gap that exists, and I hope he will step up to that and do it.”

Bredesen then waxed philosophical, saying that he felt Obama’s pain in trying to talk “across the chasm” with people from different backgrounds. He compared his experience with Obama’s, saying that “being from the other side of the Mason-Dixon line… I certainly have found over the years that I’ve started out facing a lot of people like in rural Tennessee across kind of a chasm.”

BREDESEN’S PREVIOUS TALKING OF THE MESS ABOUT OBAMA:
In the Sentinel
In the Times
In McClatchy
In WSJ

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