As Mark Norris of Collierville, the Republicans’ state
Senate majority leader, and Doug Jackson of Dickson, the Democrats’ vice caucus
chairman in the Senate, were chatting it up on the House floor after last
Thursday’s election of constitutional officers, the talk came around to the 2010
governor’s race.
Maybe it was just opening-session badinage, a means of
relieving some of the lingering cross-party tension that accrued to the
controversial election of House Speaker Kent Williams of Elizabethton, a
Republican who won the post with Democratic votes. Or maybe it was just a
natural conversational outgrowth of the friendly relationship the two party
leaders seem to have.
Or maybe it was true ‘gen.
In any case, Jackson had some news for Norris, who had just
been good-naturedly evading a reporter’s point-blank questions about Norris’
possible plans to run for governor in 2010. The upshot of that was that Norris
wasn’t ready to close the door on a race, despite the already announced
Republican candidacy of District Attorney General Bill Gibbons, a fellow Shelby
Countian.
It was then that Jackson made a surprising – and apparently
serious – affirmation: “Tim McGraw is going to run. And he’s going to be
campaigning with his band.”
Although the name of County-Western star McGraw had
surfaced a time or two last year in connection with a governor’s race, and both
McGraw and wife Faith Hill had commented on the prospect of his running for the office as a Democrat, this may have been the
first time the idea of a McGraw candidacy had been put forth by a bona fide
political insider. The first time in 2009, anyhow.
If a McGraw candidacy does materialize, it wouldn’t be the
first time a major C&W personality had campaigned for governor in the manner
indicated by Jackson. Hall of Famer Roy Acuff did it on the Republican ticket in
1948.
In recent years, McGraw has broadened his frontiers, doing some
serious acting and getting involved in a number of civic and charitable causes.
He and Hill, staying in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in
Georgetown, are among the celebrity attendees at this week’s Inauguration
activities in Washington.
It needs to be remembered that when McGraw began his career
as singer and performer in the early ’90s, his first song to reach a C&W chart
was called “Welcome to the Club.” Maybe he needs to retool that one.
