The Gubernatorial Destabilization Act Of 2008

By Kleinheider Posted on October 4, 2008 at 9:21 pm

Evans Donnell assumes that Lincoln Davis’ no vote on the bailout means he running for Governor. Maybe. Then again, he’s a pretty populist conservative Democrat, always has been. He might have voted that way regardless of his intentions.

The vote that interests me the most among the Tennessee delegation was that of another possible Gubernatorial candidates, this one on the GOP side. Rep. Zach Wamp, while voting with the GOP and Davis against the bailout on Monday switched course Friday and voted with bipartisan elite consensus for the bailout.

Now, Wamp has said if Bill Frist does not run for Governor, he likely will. Likely puts it mildly. In many ways, Wamp already is running. Wamp, despite no serious opposition in his Congressional race, has been buying up billboards, some very much outside his district. Wamp is a candidate.

The question is: why break ranks with the populist conservatism amongst the grassroots of Tennessee if you intend to run for Governor? Why let Lincoln Davis and Marsha Blackburn get to your Right on what was a very visible, important vote?

Was it to curry favor with some of the high roller types that he may need to fund his campaign coffers? Or is it something different? Was Zach Wamp sending a message to the moderate Republican powers-that-be in Tennessee that he is not a bomb-thrower, that he can be counted on to compromise and make the hard choices needed to govern.

If Bill Frist does not run for Governor on the Republican side, Mayor Bill Haslam of Knoxville, like Zach Wamp, is another candidate looking hard at the race. Haslam is a man very much of the Lamar Alexander/Howard Baker school of almost non-ideological, pragmatic GOP governance.

In a way, the fact that in a Fristless Governor’s race Wamp’s chief rival would likely be Haslam makes Wamp’s vote even more intriguing. One might think that Wamp positioning himself in a potential race against Haslam would want to place himself as the conservative alternative to the Knoxville Mayor, even at the cost of painting himself a bombthrower.

This is exactly where Marsha Blackburn is positioned. While the congresswoman gave some indication she was on the fence, she ultimately elected to vote with the conservative grassroots and against the bailout. Blackburn is also talked up as a possible Gubernatorial candidate. If the question of who the “true conservative” would be in a Governor’s race that included Blackburn and Wamp, clearly, with this vote, Blackburn has further solidified her case.

But is the title of “true conservative” in a statewide GOP primary really something worth having? What Wamp might have been weighing in the politics of this vote was the history of statewide politics in Tennessee and his fellow class of 1994 revolutionaries’ role in it.

While there have been many Republican statewide victories in Tennessee, no one outside the moderate Howard Baker wing has ever been successful. Van Hilleary, in his run for Governor in 2002, and Ed Bryant, in his two runs for Senate, have been kept on the outside of higher elected office.

An ideological movement conservative candidate has rarely won a statewide GOP in this state. And when they do, like Van Hilleary, they lose.

This may be, in the end, what caused Wamp to eschew Blackburnism and vote the way successful statewide GOP politicians like Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander voted on one of the most crucial measures the Congress has taken up since the authorization of War in Iraq.

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Tags: 2010 Governor's race, bailout, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Lincoln Davis, Marsha Blackburn, Zach Wamp  

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