March 11, 2005

Will the GOP Challenge Bredesen in 2006?

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen may have a well-funded GOP challenger in 2006. That's good news because Bredesen is not invincible. His complete mishandling of TennCare makes him vulnerable, and his condescension toward social conservatives and social-conservative legislation may prevent him from winning as many Republican votes as he did in 2002.

The potential challenger is B.C. "Scooter" Clippard Jr., a well-connected and politically active businessman who is currenlty the Chief Development Officer for FirstBank and President of the Ayers Foundation.

Here's hoping Clippard gives it a shot. Bredesen's gross mishandling of TennCare reform is the biggest vulnerability, and the longer that debacle festers, the more there will be calls from Bredesen's fellow Democrats to raise taxes to prop TennCare up. The longer Bredesen - who won the governor's mansion because his healthcare industry credentials lent credence to his claim that he could "fix" TennCare - fails to bring real reform to TennCare, the less reason Tennesseans will have to re-elect him.

Tennessee voters elected Bredesen in 2002 because of his healthcare industry expertise, in order to fix TennCare, in order to stave off tax increases. So far, he's avoided raising taxes, but he has nothing to show on TennCare reform after more than two years in office. Two years, and hundreds of millions more dollars wasted by an unreformed TennCare.

Bredesen won narrowly in 2002, defeating Republican Van Hilleary by a scant 52,657 votes out of the 1,618,613 total votes cast for the two men. It would take only a small shift to reverse Bredesen's 51-48 percentage-point win. Viewed against those numbers, Bredesen's plan to cut 320,000 people off of TennCare looks like a big political gamble.

And what if Bredesen succeeds in cutting those people from the rolls - or implements his alternative plan of cutting out TennCare's prescription drugs benefit? Would he gain enough new votes from Republican taxpayers tired of funding TennCare's excessive and inexorably rising costs to offset the tens of thousands of Democratic votes he's bound to lose among the 320,000 former TennCare beneficiaries (not to mention their family members) whose healthcare he took away?

I doubt it.

Against that backdrop, a conservative businessman with a sensible TennCare reform plan that would provide basic safety-net coverage to the most Tennesseans possible - a real market-based fiscally-sustainable plan for reform rather than Bredesen's detail-free 2002 promise - could win support among moderate Democrats who lost coverage under Bredesen.

Bredesen's poll numbers are already dropping in heavily Democratic West Tennessee - the core of any Democratic Tennessee governor's base - because his plan for TennCare involves cutting people off instead of reforming it on their behalf.

Mr. Clippard, if you run for governor, you really need to give South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford a call and ask him about his Medicaid Choice plan.

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For more scrutiny of the Bredesen record, see Bredesen Watch.