Category: Politics Beat Blog

(NASHVILLE) — Some of the most quoted lines from poetry are those from Yeats’ “Second Coming,” which go: “The best lack all conviction/ While the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Forget, for the time being, “best” and “worst”; the jury is going to be out for a while as to which side is which in the great school-consolidation struggle, which showed up virtually out of nowhere last week.

Other than this distancing from a value judgment which we’re going to permit ourselves, the Yeats lines work just fine if reconstructed to read: “The city board lacks all conviction/ While the county board is full of passionate intensity.”

For, as Shelby County Schools board chairman David Pickler made plain Tuesday at the annual “Day on the Hill” of the Tennessee Schools Board Association (TSBA) in the state capital, once the state legislature let the consolidation cat out of the bag — in the form of House Bill 273 — the county board lost no time in uniting to go to war against the bill, which would limit all Tennessee counties to a single,unified school board and would, in effect, mandate school consolidation.

With impressive unanimity, the county board members put themselves on record as opposing the bill. And, Pickler maintains, stopped it in its tracks. “If Shelby County hadn’t raised hell about this bill, it stood a good chance of going through. I think that chance is over with now, though,” he says.

By “Shelby County,” it turns out, he means the non-Memphis parts of the county; further, it turns out it means the county school board. Taking it a step further, it could mean Chairman Pickler himself, who took the lead in organizing opposition to HB 273 — although his board colleagues were shoulder to shoulder with him from the very start.

By contrast, the city school board has waffled, big-time. President Barbara Prescott and board member Michael Hooks at first made bold to sponsor a resolution to support consolidation. Though the bill itself was not referenced, the timing of the effort certainly had the effect of underwriting the bill. In short order, city schools superintendent Johnnie B. Watson said Aye to the bill, and so did Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton.

A “Study” Is Called For

And then the city school board started to cave. Those members who favored consolidation in principle — most probably a majority, though the lack of a formal vote made moot the issue of a head count — began to back away from HB 273.

Prescott and Hooks withdrew their resolution, and Superintendent Watson agreed to a suggestion that the board “study” the idea of consolidation. That vote will come Monday night, and since it lacks utterly any controversy (not to mention any of the aforesaid conviction), it is sure to pass, probably without a Nay vote.

Watson tried his hardest not to, but he gave an ever-so-slight nod of the head when he was asked if a “study” of the school consolidation issue wasn’t the same thing as an obituary for a legislative measure whose life or death will be decided, most probably, within a matter of days.

That’s usually what a “study” amounts to when any authoritative body opts to do one, and studies of this particular issue date back some three decades (see City Reporter, page 6).

Prescott, Hooks, and other board members believed to favor city-county school consolidation tried to make clear their continued interest in the subject at a TSBA breakfast Tuesday morning at the Sheraton Hotel at Legislative Plaza. “It isn’t that we don’t favor consolidation. It’s just that this particular bill isn’t necessarily the way to go about it,” Prescott said. She, Hooks, and board member Lora Jobe talked up a strategy whereby the city board would vote to surrender its charter — thereby automatically falling under the purview of the county board.

The charter-surrender idea, of course, is a variant of one floated by Herenton back in the mid-1990s when — somewhat intrepidly and prematurely — he first raised the issue of consolidation. Herenton’s balloon drew verbal shotgun blasts of the sort that have greeted the latest consolidation talk.

A point of interest in that vintage proposal was Herenton’s insistence that he wanted to try to achieve governmental consolidation of city and county with minimal impact on the two existing school systems. Indeed, then and for years to come he would footnote any remarks he made about consolidation with the qualifier that the city and county schools should have common funding but independent governance.

The mayor’s attempts to reassure suburban opponents on the score of school-system independence didn’t convince opponents of consolidation, who suspected them of being a smoke screen. And Herenton’s relatively easy abandonment of the qualifier last week, when he wholeheartedly endorsed the current school-consolidation measure, prompted many a chorus of “told-you-so” out in the skeptical suburbs.

Herenton’s subsequent declaration that matters of race and class were involved in the opposition to HB 273 contributed to the hardening of opposition on the county board and in outer Shelby County at large.

Moreover, the TSBA itself — composed of all state boards, large and small, city and county, east, middle, and west — was able to adopt a formal resolution of opposition to the school consolidation bill without visible or audible opposition Tuesday.

Not a “Chinaman’s Chance”

That doesn’t mean that all districts see eye-to-eye on this or any other issue, of course. Prescott and Hooks both made a point of stressing their opposition to another bill supported formally by the TSBA — one which would allow for the proliferation of special school districts. The measure — favored by the Shelby County board — would amount to a resumption of the “toy town” struggle of 1997, Hooks said.

That battle stemmed from a bill, sneaked through that year’s General Assembly without attracting attention, that would have allowed virtually any unincorporated suburb in Tennessee, regardless of size, to become an independent “city.” After what Herenton described as a “life-and-death” struggle between urban and suburban forces, the state Supreme Court decided the issue in Memphis’ and other cities’ favor by declaring the bill unconstitutional.

As matters stand, the current city-county school consolidation bill has little or no chance. City board member Carl Johnson, who professes himself skeptical about the virtues of consolidation, referred to HB 273’s unexpected emergence into the light of day as a “fluke.” (It had come out of the House Education K-12 subcommittee with a 7-5 vote.) And Pickler noted with satisfaction that House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington, a nominal supporter of the bill, was now talking of the opportunity for “dialogue” which HB 273 presented.

“When a bill’s backer starts talking like that, that tells you something about its chances. I don’t think it’s got a Chinaman’s chance of getting out of full [House Education] committee,” said Pickler. Even so, he said, “technically the bill is still alive, so we’re going to keep fighting it until it’s laid to rest.”

Under the circumstances, that laying to rest may come sooner rather than later. To switch from Yeats to Shakespeare, the proponents of school consolidation may have let “the native hue of [their] resolution sickly o’er with the pale cast of thought … and lose the name of action.”

Cohen’s Day Out On the Hill

One of the guest speakers at Tuesday’s breakfast of the Tennessee School Boards Association (TSBA) in Nashville was state Senator Steve Cohen, the Midtown Memphis Democrat who had, as he told the assembled board members, just “graduated.”

Cohen referred to the final passage two weeks ago of his perennial resolution to permit a statewide vote on a Tennessee lottery. When it passed the House easily (after making it through the Senate previously without a vote to spare), the bill — like the November 2002 referendum which it authorizes — had survived a long struggle.

“It took 17 years,” Cohen observed to the TSBA members. “It felt like going all the way from kindergarten through college.”

Cohen’s lottery triumph is not the only success he’s having these days. He may be on something of a roll. A current bill of his to ban cell-phone use by teenage drivers is given good chances of passage, as is a measure allowing bearers of gun permits to wear their weapons into places where package liquor is sold. — JB

Despite concerns expressed by clients and University of Memphis staff members, Dean John Pepin of the University of Memphis Fogelman College of Business and Economics insists that the Fogelman Executive Conference Center (FECC) must be outsourced, along with the soon-to-open Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management and the FedEx Emerging Technology Complex.

The FECC, which is used by such companies as St. Jude ChildrenÕs Research Hospital, FedEx, International Paper, and the Shelby County Board of Education as a conferencing and corporate training facility, was established 14 years ago as a nonprofit educational outreach to the community.

Pepin says that the Fogelman College of Business and Economics is hard pressed to cover any FECC deficits, caused in part by university-required contracts for housekeeping and food services and by recent renovations to the 51 hotel rooms in the FECC. As a solution, the FECC staff and operations may be outsourced to a management company.

Several longtime clients have expressed their concerns about the changeover. CREDO’s Debbie Burnette, speculates that the costs will increase while the quality of service declines.

One training director of a major Memphis organization, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, says, “I do not see a for-profit organization managing with the same quality, customer service, and focus on the training and education community of Memphis as is presently done. Therefore I hope that the decision will not be made to sell off a very valuable community asset. That is more than the building. It is the focused service that makes the difference.”

The FECC, which currently is booked ahead as far as 2003, had more than $2 million in revenue last year and regularly receives glowing evaluation reports of the services and staff. Current employees have not been guaranteed a position upon outsourcing and will no longer receive university benefits, such as free enrollment in classes.

Employees of the FECC have asked that the decision be postponed until Shirley Raines, the new U of M president, takes office in May and has a chance to review the situation.

Three companies have submitted bids to manage the facilities. Among them is Wilson Management, spearheaded by Kemmons Wilson, founder of the Holiday Inn Corporation, whose donation built the Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management.

It is generally accepted these days that women, as a specific voting bloc, have a significant influence on political events — often determining the outcomes of elections, as in 1992 and 1996, when their disproportionate preference for Bill Clinton over his Republican and independent rivals arguably accounted for the ex-president’s victory in those years.

And in recent years women have increasingly run for — and won — political office. Both in the national Congress and in the Tennessee legislature, they play prominent roles, and when it came time recently for members of the Shelby County Commission to fill a vacancy in their ranks, there was such momentum to add a woman to the Commission that a relative newcomer and virtual unknown, Bridget Chisholm, was elected to the traditional African-American seat.

A number of recent and pending events underscore the growing prominence of women in local society and government.

Several Seek the State’s Top Job

Two women, Davidson County Sheriff Gayle Ray and state Representative Marsha Blackburn, have recently made a point of floating their candidacies for the office of governor.

And in the wake of U.S. Senator Fred Thompson‘s announcement last week that he would not seek the office, the prospective candidate list is sufficiently fluid that both Ray, a Nashville Democrat, and Blackburn, a Republican from suburban Brentwood, may have a real opportunity to impact the race.

Paula Casey, a longtime Memphis women’s activist and a partisan of yet a third prospective female candidate for governor, expressed satisfaction at the gubernatorial ambitions of Ray and Blackburn. “I’m glad to see women’s names finally being mentioned in this state for an executive position. Both have excellent credentials,” Casey said. But she felt compelled to add, “However, neither major party is known for supporting women. I’ll just be the most surprised person in the country if these women get support from either party’s infrastructure.”

(Casey’s own choice is another Nashvillian, Tennessee Association of Business education director Sharon Bell, a Republican who made an unsuccessful race in 1994 against veteran Democratic state Senator Doug Henry.)

Holden Leaves NARAS to Protest Rap Music

A Germantown woman prominent in Republican affairs, Cherrie Holden, has decided to publicly resign from the 32-member Board of Governors of the local chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Holden, who is also a member of the state Board of Education from Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District and was a state coordinator of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, has for the last year been one of five officers in the local NARAS chapter, holding the position of secretary-treasurer. She is business manager for High Stacks Records, which specializes in gospel recordings but recently did a retro album featuring the music of former Stax artists.

Her resignation is not meant primarily as a statement directed at the local chapter or even at NARAS at large, Holden says. She intends it as a protest against what she sees as alarming tendencies in the popular music industry — notably its acceptance of that nitty-gritty street variety known as rap.

Holden’s letter of resignation from the Board of Governors goes as follows:

“Our chapter has grown so much in the past several years and our industry has greatly changed. Along with these changes has come a very different focus for our organization. We have moved from a representative organization to a membership organization. The recognition of our art has also changed. No longer is there honor in rewarding the music industry’s finest for bringing the world music as a form of art. We find our industry now rewarding and lifting up the avocation of hate and violence through anger-filled lyrics of spoken-word obscenities known as Rap. We applaud beautiful young teenagers dressed up to allure, singing words that imply explicit knowledge well beyond their years. These are the role models that influence the youth of our nation.

“Thomas Carlyle once said, ‘Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine.’ I believe, as did Carlyle, the unique gifts we are given by God are to be used to offer this world refreshment from the daily struggles we face. So strongly do I believe that we have lost our focus that I feel I must resign from the organization that is lauding these things of which I wholeheartedly disagree. Once I believed that my service on this board could perhaps slow down or even reverse this disturbing trend by filling one position to hold an anti-vote. I was wrong and perhaps thought too highly of my personal ability to influence in this matter. I encouraged several of you serving now to join me in this effort. My apologies to you for leaving though I do encourage you to listen to your convictions.

“I hope that one day soon our country will understand the significance of rewarding that which is pure and wholesome and uplifting. I love you all and appreciate the opportunity to have worked with you.”

Holden said she had been somewhat aggrieved when the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia won a Premier Player award from the local NARAS chapter. “They’re angry and hate-filled,” she said. “We should not glorify that stuff. I’ve mainly been on the board to represent the local gospel community and spotlight them. If that [rap] is what the people want, I can’t approve it. I guess I’ll just make room for somebody that agrees with the philosophy of the organization.”

Holden said she had a telephone conversation Tuesday with local NARAS director Jon Hornyak, who called her from Los Angeles, site of this week’s Grammy Awards celebration. “He understands my position,” Holden said. “He said his position was one of free speech, that he didn’t want to exclude any genre of music. I can understand that, too.”

“Women of Achievement” Are Honored

Several prominent local women will be honored at 6 p.m. Sunday, March 11th, at the 17th Annual Women of Achievement dinner at Marriott East on Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

Awards at the dinner, timed for Women’s History Month, will be presented to the following: Dr. Janann Sherman (Vision); Anne W. Shafer (Courage); Cordell Jackson (Initiative); Lois A. Freeman (Steadfastness); Debbie Norton, Jalena Bowling, and Denny Glad (Determination); Jodie Gaines Johnson (Heroism); and the late Marion Keisker (Heritage).

Lincoln and His Legacies

In last week’s column and in the Flyer editorial, the term “Lincoln’s Birthday” appeared several times as a descriptor of this year’s annual banquet of the Shelby County Republican Party.

The actual name of the affair, chief event on the local GOP’s annual calendar, is the Lincoln Day Dinner, of course, and this columnist, who has attended many a Lincoln Day Dinner over the years, so described it. It came out the other way because of a proofreading error.

Like every other careful newsgathering organization, the Flyer has copy editors who check copy for misspellings, typos, and deviations from the paper’s accepted style. In a “Politics” column of some two weeks back, a proofreader’s alertness was able to substitute the right name (“RU486”) for a wrong spelling of the now available (and controversial) abortion pill.

Every once in a while an intervention is not so lucky. As all local Republicans know, Lincoln Day is a formal occasion at which they celebrate “Honest Abe” as one of the founding eminences of their party, not a celebration of the Great Emancipator’s birthday. In fact, some years Lincoln Day is not even held in February.

One of the rituals of the Lincoln Day Dinner is that each year two prominent local Republicans, a man and a woman, dress as Abe and Mary Lincoln. This year’s “Lincolns” were former Shelby County Commissioner Ed Williams and his wife Sue.

Williams is now the official county historian and can probably tell anyone who is interested the details of each and every local Lincoln Day Dinner. In fact, he’ll do it at the drop of a top hat. — JB

Although there was no particular reason for it to be so, the word had got
out in advance of last Saturday’s keynote speech by U.S. Senator Fred
Thompson at the Shelby County Republicans’ Lincoln Day Dinner that he
might ‘fess up as to his plans for 2002.

A good deal of suspense has been invested in the question of how
Thompson will resolve his options, which are: 1) to stay where he is and run
for reelection to the Senate; 2) to cut loose from the Senate and run for
governor; 3) to return to Hollywood (where he filmed 18 movies) as the
successor to Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti; 4) none
of the above.

Even the last option is considered possible (though unlikely),
since Thompson has always had an air of listening to those proverbial inner
drums and traveling at his own pace to his own destination. He is, quite
literally, not to be rushed — as his nervous would-be handlers in the 1994
Senate race, which he started slow and finished fast, found out, and as all
those who urged him in vain to run for president after 1996 also
discovered.

In any case, Thompson’s much-ballyhooed visit to Memphis on
Saturday attracted not only the usual thousand-or-so Lincoln Day banqueteers
but a largish corps of GOP politicians whose own plans for 2002 depend on
his.

Among them were U.S. Representatives Ed Bryant and Van
Hilleary, of Tennessee’s 7th and 4th congressional districts,
respectively; State Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Franklin); Memphis
lawyer David Kustoff; Memphis city councilman Brent Taylor;
State Rep. Larry Scroggs (R-Germantown); and Dr. Philip
Langsdon, a Germantown/Memphis plastic surgeon who was Shelby County GOP
chairman for two terms in the 1990s.

Until recently, Bryant and Hilleary were virtually
interchangeable as potential successors to Thompson or, alternatively, as
rival claimants to the governorship should Big Fred decide to stay put in the
Senate. A few weeks back, however, Bryant hazarded the intriguing ploy of
opting out of the governor’s race, come what may, and either running for the
Senate, if that race opened up, or running for re-election to the House.

The latter prospect quite naturally dismays the last several
persons on the aforementioned list. Messrs. Kustoff, Taylor, Scroggs, and
Langsdon all aspire to Bryant’s congressional seat and would like nothing
better than to see their congressman move up and out.

It was with that in mind that Bryant, one of the preliminary
speakers at Saturday night’s banquet, tucked his tongue in cheek and said from
the dais, “When it was time for me to come up here, I looked around and saw
David Kustoff and Brent Taylor and Larry Scroggs and Phil Langsdon out there,
and I was almost afraid to get up and leave my seat!”

He might have added the name of Blackburn, who was there with her
personal guru and adviser Raymond Baker. Blackburn was asked: Why had
she come? “For America,” she said. (She actually said that.) Another
Middle Tennessee pol in attendance put it otherwise: “She thinks that in
congressional redistricting, she’ll get put in the 7th, and she’s ready to go,
too, if Bryant tries to go up.”

Blackburn, it will be remembered, took a run at Bart Gordon’s 6th
District congressional seat in 1992 before doing a stint as head of the
state’s film commission and then running successfully for the state Senate in
1998. But he still has congressional ambitions, it seems clear.

But Blackburn and company will have to wait just a bit longer to
see where their destinies lie. As he indicated Saturday, Fred Thompson is not
ready to tip his hand. “I’ve got a few months to decide,” he opined before his
speech, which consisted mainly of Republican boilerplate and contained nary a
hint as to his political intentions.

If Thompson does eventually decide to run for the governorship,
he will almost certainly have the Republican nomination for the asking, and
Rep. Hilleary will be up against it. He continues to indicate that he remains
in the running for the Senate, and chief aide Jim Burnette, a former
state GOP chairman, promises that a race between Hilleary and Bryant would be
“one of the most polite races in history.”

But there are some who have concluded — on what evidence, it’s
hard to say — that an unspoken arrangement exists between Bryant and
Thompson, whereby the latter will indeed go on to run for governor, leaving
the way open for Bryant to succeed him.

In that scenario, or even in a less conspiratorial one that has
Thompson in a gubernatorial race, Bryant’s potentially win-win ploy is invoked
— one of appearing to have deferred graciously to Hilleary for one office
while relegating the other to himself.

In the event, of course, Hilleary — who recently took some
Tennesseans on a tour which included the Senate cloakroom and experimentally
sat in a lounge chair there which he declared “fits my fanny” — is prepared
to contest the senatorial issue with Bryant, and it remains to be seen just
how polite that turns out to be.

Okay, it was expected that Tom Moss, who was appointed Shelby County Commissioner last fall, would try to get himself assimilated as a member in good standing of the commission’s seven-member GOP majority.

After all, nominal Republican Moss had defeated mainstream Republican David Lillard and was named to his post basically by a Democratic-dominated coalition (the same one that at the selfsame meeting boosted lodge brother Shep Wilbun into the vacant Juvenile Court clerkship), and Moss, along with veteran Republican Clair VanderSchaaf (who voted with the Democrats both times), was supposed to be dog meat for righteously vengeful Republicans to gnaw on at reelection time in 2002.

So builder Moss, whose ascension to the commission may have been more a developers’ coup than anything expressly political, has tried to accommodate himself to his fellow Republicans.

But things have become almost surreal: There was Moss after Monday’s commission meeting complaining, “I don’t think we’re a solid enough bloc. I don’t think we’re exacting enough in return for what we give up.” We? Why, the Republican majority, of course!

“For example, we should have demanded a quid pro quo from the Democrats when Brigget [Chisholm] came on,” Moss continued, referring to the young African-American woman, thitherto a political unknown like himself, who was elected to the commission two weeks later to replace Wilbun (Moss’s seat was the one formerly held by the GOP’s Mark Norris, who left for the state senate.)

In other words, Tom Moss — who achieved office under the cloud of Democratic sponsorship — has now become the most zealous of GOP partisans: No more deals with the Democrats unless something of solid value to the Republican coaliation comes from it!

It’s really quite remarkable, this turnaround saga of Moss the hardnose.Though there are those who maintain that Chisholm is in the same developers’ camp as Moss, she herself boasts State Senator John Ford and U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. as her chief supporters.

And in a key vote Monday on a Southeast Shelby County development resisted by its projected residential neighbors, she voted one way (against), Moss voted another (for), and VanderSchaaf voted yet a third way, proposing an amendment that would have split the difference.

(The project deadlocked at six-and-six and thereby died, although it can — and probably will — be brought up again for reconsideration.)

But the interesting fact about the vote was that none of the three supposed New Bloc members were together on the deal.

It may be easier than one would have thought for Tom Moss to take on protective coloration he’ll need for next year’s election season. At last Saturday’s annual Shelby County Republican Lincoln Day banquet at the Adam’s Mark, Moss was observed having a chummy conversation with Chris Norris, the ex-commissioner’s wife and a bedrock Republican in her own right.

That was followed by an even chummier conversation with county GOP chairman Alan Crone, who was overheard to be asking the new commissioner out to lunch.

After Moss’s appointment, Commissioner Michael Hooks was recommending a wait-and-see attitude to his fellow Democrats. He reminded them that they had played a large role four years ago in the appointment to the body of Morris Fair, but, said Hooks, “he voted with us once or twice, and then he turned into just another Republican.”

Whether that’s totally accurate or not, it describes a conversion process that Tom Moss, in his turn, may have already begun.

“It’s interesting that, just as we take the turn into the 21st Century, in the Tennessee legislature we’ve finally caught up with the 20th.”

That was State Senator Steve Cohen on the comfortable predicament he is now in, with the state Senate having finally bought the lottery-referendum resolution he’s been vending in one form or another for 16 years, and with the state House poised to give an almost certain Yes next week.

The self-same House wasted no time Thursday in setting up for action. The body suspended its rules to read the lottery resolution for the first time Thursday, putting the decisive third reading and the final vote — when the measure needs a two-thirds majority for passage — on the calendar for next Wednesday.

Speaker Jimmy Naifeh said, “From a preliminary count it looks like there should be sufficient votes for the lottery resolution to pass the House.”

Chris Newton (R-Cleveland) said he is confident the House will have the 66 votes. “We want more than that,Ó he said. ÒWe want a resounding voice from the peopleÕs House. Then we can go on with the other issues without this lingering over everything else.”

Lottery opponents, meanwhile, have all but given up the ghost. “The momentum is with them right now. I don’t think there is any doubt that the votes are there,” said Rep. Bobby Wood (R-Harrison).

Gov. Don Sundquist has said he will sign the lottery resolution as soon as it passed and gets to his desk. Upon the expected House approval next week and the governor’s signature, there would be set in course a statewide vote on the lottery to be held at the same time as the November 2002 governor’s race.

A majority of people voting in the governor’s race would be required to approve the measure, which, in simplest terms, amends the constitution, removing the ban on holding lotteries. The resolution specifies that revenue from the lottery would go toward educational purposes.

The proceeds, which could run as much as $200 million annually, would go first to college scholarships for Tennessee youths to attend Tennessee schools. Any money left over would be used for school construction and early childhood learning programs.

Senate Was Big Hurdle

The big obstacle, of course, was overcome on Wednesday, when the Senate approved the referendum by the bare-minimum vote of 22-11 — getting the requisite two-thirds needed to get the referendum on the November 2002 ballot.

Wednesday’s Senate vote saw the lottery withstand some furious last-minute lobbing against it by both gambling forces based in Tunica, Mississippi, and conservative religious groups — an indication of what to expect when the statewide vote occurs next year.

But Cohen was content just now to bask in the present. “This is a victory for the people of Tennessee. I guess time is on my side,” said the euphoric senator after the Senate vote.

The lottery resolution was passed by a majority vote of both houses last year, and this year needed a two-thirds vote in the Senate and House.

Ironically enough, given the number of years it has taken for the lottery resolution to get to this point, actual debate Wednesday lasted only about an hour. Opponents focused on the dangers of gambling and warned that the resolution, if approved, cou ld lead to a return of corrupt bingo games of the sort that were banned after the Rocky Top scandals a decade ago.

Sen. Douglas Henry (D-Nashville) said the lottery would be “injurious to the people.” He said for the state to use lottery proceeds for education, “We would have to prostitute the state of Tennessee. We would have to drag our skirts in the dirt. . . .[W]e would have to say to children . . .’When you get old enough, you should buy a ticket. It will get you a fortune for nothing overnight.'”

And Sen. Roy Herron (D-Dresden) suggested during debate that an Attorney General’s opinion lef it unclear whether the Cohen resolution would permit casinos.

Cohen and his supporters warned against fear tactics and stressed that Tennesseans were mature enough to make a decision on the measure. “I ask 21 others to join me and cast the most important vote of your life to give the people of Tennessee the right to vote to help our schools and help our children.,” Cohen said before the Sernate vote.

And Sen. Ward Crutchfield (D-Chattanooga) asked, “In the final analysis, if your constituents are smart enough to elect you, why aren’t they smart enough to vote for this?”

Result Preordained?

In the wake of his triumph, Cohen said that he had resisted the temptation to roll the bill until next week, as a sometimes wavering supporter, Sen. Doug Jackson (D-Dickson), had suggested. “I knew that Lincoln Davis [D-Pall Mall] would be gone on Thursday, and I didn’t want to let things hang over the weekend,” said Cohen, noting that he had asked that the rules be suspended to permit both a second and third reading this week.

Cohen said the 22 Yes votes were exactly the ones he expected, and so were the 11 No votes. “Really, the vote total was decided in last year’s electons, and really on filing deadline. I knew that [new Shelby County Republican senator] Mark Norris would vote for it, and I knew that either [Democratic winner] Larry Trailor [Republican loser] Howard Wall in their [Murfreesboro-area] race would be for it. So it was set back then, with those two seats.”

Cohen professed disappointment in the resistance to his resolution by Senator Herron. who was one of the leaders of the opposition to the bill but, Cohen said, had consistently supported a virtually identifical measure while a member of the House several years ago.

In the end, the lottery may have benefitted from the intense debate caused by Gov. Sundquist’s call over the last two years for a state income tax. Opponents insisted that any new tax required a vote by the people, and they fell to looking for an alternative. Both circumstances helped the lottery proposal .

As State Senator Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County, perhaps the most arch of the Senate’s arch conservatives and a bitter foe of the income tax, said in Memphis this weekend, where she attended the annual Shelby County Republican Lincoln Day dinner: “In American you let the people vote. That works for the income tax, and it works for the lottery.”

Cohen could count on several such Republican votes to go with those from his Democratic base.

There’s a move on to entice outgoing Vice President Al Gore to consider taking over the reins of the University of Memphis – unclaimed since the resignation last year of former president V. Lane Rawlins to become president of Washington State University.

That’s the word from Cherrie Holden of Germantown, member of the State Board of Education from the 7th Congressional District, which includes substantial portions of Memphis and Shelby County.

Holden said several members of the university’s faculty urged her to take up the matter with her fellow Board members when the state board meets in Nashville next with with the members of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

The university’s search for a successor to Rawlins has run into serious and prolonged controversy, with no consensus nominee in sight and several faculty members expressing public embitterment that interim U of M president Ralph Faudree and communications dean Richard Ranta were eliminated from consideration by the Board of Regents search committee.

Gore was known to be interested in the open presidency of Harvard University but was among 450 nominees eliminated some weeks back by the Harvard Corporation search committee after Robert G. Stone Jr., a senior fellow of the corporation, publicly stated of Gore’s semi-declared candidacy “He doesn’t have the academic and intellectual standing.”

Attention is also being paid in political and media circles, off and on, to the prospect of a Gore candidacy in 2002 for the governorship of Tennessee. The Gore-for-Governor talk has been fueled by the encouragement longtime Gore ally Johnny Hayes has received by the vice president’s allies to seek the Tennessee state Democratic chairmanship.

Some have also speculated that Gore might be asked assume a ranking position at The Tennessean of Nashville, from which vantage point he could ultimately move up to an executive position in the Gannett organization or to the leadership of the chain’s Freedom Forum. Others have suggested that Gore might find a bully pulpit with the First Amendment Center of Nashville, yet another Gannett-related institution.

GREENVILLE, S.C.– The good folks (for that is how they see themselves) at Bob Jones University are no doubt astounded to find themselves for the second time in a year — nay, for the second time in a brand-new millennium — to be a focus of national, even world attention. Inexorably, it must seem, this monastic tribe is brought out of its preferred backwater by the presence of some or another prominent politician.

In 2000, it was George W. Bush, touching base with the hard core of the Religious Right to win a primary over the insurgent John McCain. Now, in a way, it’s president-elect Bush’s doing again. He went and nominated another paragon of conservative Christianity, John Ashcroft, to be his attorney general, administerer of the laws and beacon of justice for an increasingly diverse nation. And once the politically correct media found out that Ashcroft had been to Bob Jones last year to receive an honorary degree and speak (actually, the word seeped out in Ashcroft’s losing Senate campaign), he, too, was fair game. Why did he do it? What did he say to the faithful? Picky, picky!

That’s how it must have seemed, in any case, as the administration of President Bob Jones III settled in for another siege – this one occasioned not by national remonstrations over the school’s anti-Catholic persuasion nor by the oddities of its social practices but by the hunt for a possibly mythical tape. Unbelievably, given Ashcroft’s prominence as a U.S. Senator and — in May 199, when he made his remarks at BJU — by his potential presidential candidacy, his visit was not publicly noted. Not by the local Greenville, South Carolina, media, not by the national media, and not even by BJU’s own media (since commencement exercises, by their very nature, mark the end of a school year).

There was no particular evidence that Ashcroft – under fire as his confirmation hearings neared for his attitudes and actions concerning blacks, women, and civil liberties – had said or done anything inflammatory. It was more a case, as the general counsel for one prominent Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee put it, that “Ashcroft is trying to pretend that he’s beyond reproach, that he had no idea what kind of place Bob Jones University was or what kind far-right belief it stood for. There was the sense that anything he said at Bob Jones would have to indicate his eyes were open concerning its anti-Catholicism and its other bigotries and that, by being there, he approved of them.”

Hence, the Judiciary Democrats were almost as zealous as the media in trying to ferret out some spoor, some documentary evidence of Ashcroft’s deeds and statements at Bob Jones. When it was learned, late last week, that, in fact, a videotape did exist and that the school’s spokesman, Jonathan Pait, had reviewed it (read: Bob Jones III himself had checked it out), Pait made a point of saying (a) that the school would not release the tape to anybody in the media; and (b) it would be released to the Judiciary Committee if Ashcroft requested it to.

This last indulgence was cover for the root fact that Judiciary would have the tape, either by subpoena or by Ashcroft’s recognition that his nomination was doomed if he connived in the holding back of a document presumed vital.

The denial to the media was spite and sweet revenge, nothing else. As Pait confided later on (after Bob Jones had decided to let Larry King, who had been permitted to interview Jones at the time of last year’s flap): “We wanted to punish the liberal national media for their unfairness and their determination to slander Bob Jones University.”

Larry King was allowed to have the goods again, after two or three days of the most intense – and futile – courtship (or siege) by the rest of the national media. And the tape, when finally shown, seemed superficially to be fairly innocuous, not worth the fuss. Ashcroft, then a senator facing either a reelection race or a presidential bid, had been honored by the university along with U.S. Reps. Asa Hutchinson and Lindsey Graham, two of the managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The Missouri senator had been, as president Jones noted in his introduction of the tape on the King program, the first senator to call for Clinton’s impeachment.

So it was no great stretch to see that the honor bestowed on these three tribunes of the Congress was, in effect, intended as a rebuke to the reigning Caesar.

Ashcroft, in his brief remarks, played on that theme.

He reminded the listening students and faculty of what he said was a war-cry of the American colonists: “We have no king but Jesus.” He dilated upon the civil authority vis-ˆ-vis the “eternal authority,” and he said that “when you have no king but Caesar, you release Barabbas.” It was clearly an allusion to the recently aborted attempt by congressional Republicans to oust Clinton.

But it was also a rhetorical fallback onto the turf of government-bashers and religious interventionists, and that part might still give Ashcroft fits as Judiciary readies for its hearings with him, beginning on Tuesday. When president Jones had a chance to provide his gloss of the tape immediately after it was shown to the nation on the King show, he made haste to proclaim that Ashcroft’s acceptance of an honorary degree should not be held against him. “In no way does that imply that he endorses the granting institution. . .,” Jones said, by way of providing an absolution of Ashcroft against any presumed guilt by association. Was he surprised at the furor of the last several days? King asked. Jones replied: “Not considering the source. The raucous political left … makes a lot of noise.”

Jones said he thought Ashcroft’s words on the tape would “comfort” rank-and-file Americans and help the senator in his confirmation fight. He conceded, however, that his own support and that of his university might have hurt Ashcroft somewhat. “Sometimes I don’t like myself very well,” he jested. Acknowledging that much of America incorrectly believed that Bob Jones University was racist, he attempted to absolve Ashcroft of the taint, contending that it was unlikely the honoree had known of the school’s then existing ban on interracial dating among students.

Ashbrook was a “a fine godly gentle covictioned man,” Jones insisted -one fully deserving of confirmation.

As for Jones himself and his institution, he had once again – as he did a year ago on the self-same Larry King show – showed that he possessed some degree of flexibility. Not only did he admit that Bob Jones University could be an albatross, he could make unexpected forays onto secular turf, as when he pronounced about an emblem that sits atop South Carolina’s capitol: “The Confederate flag needs to come down; it’s an unnecessary offense to good people.”

It was instructive to remember last year’s appearance, when Jones had chosen the moment of his emergence – and that of his institution’s — in the national spotlight on the Larry King Show to make an unexpected about-face, revoking in prime time the school’s interracial dating ban.

This week Jones quoted a saying by Jesus: “Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and went on to say that John Ashcroft believed so, too. In a curious way, his very appearance on King’s secular medium and his behavior on his two Warholian nights reinforced the maxim. In the year since his first appearance, change had conspicuously occurred at his school. A visitor to the campus last year noticed that the school’s female students wore long, floor-length skirts, without exception. This year there were several coeds on campus conspicuously ambling about in skirts cut as high as the knee, showing a fair amount of leg.

Earlier, Pait had been asked about that and had said about the long skirts, which had been widely reported as being in obedience to a school mandate, “It was never anything but a style. I saw a picture during the year of Bill Clinton with Chelsea in front of the Taj Mahal. She was wearing a long skirt. She could have been a Bob Jones student!”

There was something odd about this coupling of the Clinton ambience with that of Bob Jones University – but something that was, in its own way, appropriate. For if there was anything that was demonstrated by these two Bob Jones moments, a year apart, it was that even the most isolated and different amongst us could be brought into a semblance of conformity with evolving national custom.

Between now and John Ashcroft’s confrontation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, and perhaps even afterward, many will continue to focus on the presumed rigidity of Bob Jones University and its backers The real story, however, might be the very obverse of all that. The main thing that seems to have happened in both of these highly publicized eyeball-to-eyeball encounters of church and state is that it wasn’t Caesar that ended up blinking.

In both cases it was the state, or the secular-minded, that ended up being rendered to.

GREENVILLE, S.C.– The good folks (for that is how they see themselves) at Bob Jones University are no doubt astounded to find themselves for the second time in a year — nay, for the second time in a brand-new millennium — to be a focus of national, even world attention. Inexorably, it must seem, this monastic tribe is brought out of its preferred backwater by the presence of some or another prominent politician.

In 2000, it was George W. Bush, touching base with the hard core of the Religious Right to win a primary over the insurgent John McCain. Now, in a way, it’s president-elect Bush’s doing again. He went and nominated another paragon of conservative Christianity, John Ashcroft, to be his attorney general, administerer of the laws and beacon of justice for an increasingly diverse nation. And once the politically correct media found out that Ashcroft had been to Bob Jones last year to receive an honorary degree and speak (actually, the word seeped out in Ashcroft’s losing Senate campaign), he, too, was fair game. Why did he do it? What did he say to the faithful? Picky, picky!

That’s how it must have seemed, in any case, as the administration of President Bob Jones III settled in for another siege – this one occasioned not by national remonstrations over the school’s anti-Catholic persuasion nor by the oddities of its social practices but by the hunt for a possibly mythical tape. Unbelievably, given Ashcroft’s prominence as a U.S. Senator and — in May 199, when he made his remarks at BJU — by his potential presidential candidacy, his visit was not publicly noted. Not by the local Greenville, South Carolina, media, not by the national media, and not even by BJU’s own media (since commencement exercises, by their very nature, mark the end of a school year).

There was no particular evidence that Ashcroft – under fire as his confirmation hearings neared for his attitudes and actions concerning blacks, women, and civil liberties – had said or done anything inflammatory. It was more a case, as the general counsel for one prominent Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee put it, that “Ashcroft is trying to pretend that he’s beyond reproach, that he had no idea what kind of place Bob Jones University was or what kind far-right belief it stood for. There was the sense that anything he said at Bob Jones would have to indicate his eyes were open concerning its anti-Catholicism and its other bigotries and that, by being there, he approved of them.”

Hence, the Judiciary Democrats were almost as zealous as the media in trying to ferret out some spoor, some documentary evidence of Ashcroft’s deeds and statements at Bob Jones. When it was learned, late last week, that, in fact, a videotape did exist and that the school’s spokesman, Jonathan Pait, had reviewed it (read: Bob Jones III himself had checked it out), Pait made a point of saying (a) that the school would not release the tape to anybody in the media; and (b) it would be released to the Judiciary Committee if Ashcroft requested it to.

This last indulgence was cover for the root fact that Judiciary would have the tape, either by subpoena or by Ashcroft’s recognition that his nomination was doomed if he connived in the holding back of a document presumed vital.

The denial to the media was spite and sweet revenge, nothing else. As Pait confided later on (after Bob Jones had decided to let Larry King, who had been permitted to interview Jones at the time of last year’s flap): “We wanted to punish the liberal national media for their unfairness and their determination to slander Bob Jones University.”

Larry King was allowed to have the goods again, after two or three days of the most intense – and futile – courtship (or siege) by the rest of the national media. And the tape, when finally shown, seemed superficially to be fairly innocuous, not worth the fuss. Ashcroft, then a senator facing either a reelection race or a presidential bid, had been honored by the university along with U.S. Reps. Asa Hutchinson and Lindsey Graham, two of the managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The Missouri senator had been, as president Jones noted in his introduction of the tape on the King program, the first senator to call for Clinton’s impeachment.

So it was no great stretch to see that the honor bestowed on these three tribunes of the Congress was, in effect, intended as a rebuke to the reigning Caesar.

Ashcroft, in his brief remarks, played on that theme.

He reminded the listening students and faculty of what he said was a war-cry of the American colonists: “We have no king but Jesus.” He dilated upon the civil authority vis-ˆ-vis the “eternal authority,” and he said that “when you have no king but Caesar, you release Barabbas.” It was clearly an allusion to the recently aborted attempt by congressional Republicans to oust Clinton.

But it was also a rhetorical fallback onto the turf of government-bashers and religious interventionists, and that part might still give Ashcroft fits as Judiciary readies for its hearings with him, beginning on Tuesday. When president Jones had a chance to provide his gloss of the tape immediately after it was shown to the nation on the King show, he made haste to proclaim that Ashcroft’s acceptance of an honorary degree should not be held against him. “In no way does that imply that he endorses the granting institution. . .,” Jones said, by way of providing an absolution of Ashcroft against any presumed guilt by association. Was he surprised at the furor of the last several days? King asked. Jones replied: “Not considering the source. The raucous political left … makes a lot of noise.”

Jones said he thought Ashcroft’s words on the tape would “comfort” rank-and-file Americans and help the senator in his confirmation fight. He conceded, however, that his own support and that of his university might have hurt Ashcroft somewhat. “Sometimes I don’t like myself very well,” he jested. Acknowledging that much of America incorrectly believed that Bob Jones University was racist, he attempted to absolve Ashcroft of the taint, contending that it was unlikely the honoree had known of the school’s then existing ban on interracial dating among students.

Ashbrook was a “a fine godly gentle covictioned man,” Jones insisted -one fully deserving of confirmation.

As for Jones himself and his institution, he had once again – as he did a year ago on the self-same Larry King show – showed that he possessed some degree of flexibility. Not only did he admit that Bob Jones University could be an albatross, he could make unexpected forays onto secular turf, as when he pronounced about an emblem that sits atop South Carolina’s capitol: “The Confederate flag needs to come down; it’s an unnecessary offense to good people.”

It was instructive to remember last year’s appearance, when Jones had chosen the moment of his emergence – and that of his institution’s — in the national spotlight on the Larry King Show to make an unexpected about-face, revoking in prime time the school’s interracial dating ban.

This week Jones quoted a saying by Jesus: “Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and went on to say that John Ashcroft believed so, too. In a curious way, his very appearance on King’s secular medium and his behavior on his two Warholian nights reinforced the maxim. In the year since his first appearance, change had conspicuously occurred at his school. A visitor to the campus last year noticed that the school’s female students wore long, floor-length skirts, without exception. This year there were several coeds on campus conspicuously ambling about in skirts cut as high as the knee, showing a fair amount of leg.

Earlier, Pait had been asked about that and had said about the long skirts, which had been widely reported as being in obedience to a school mandate, “It was never anything but a style. I saw a picture during the year of Bill Clinton with Chelsea in front of the Taj Mahal. She was wearing a long skirt. She could have been a Bob Jones student!”

There was something odd about this coupling of the Clinton ambience with that of Bob Jones University – but something that was, in its own way, appropriate. For if there was anything that was demonstrated by these two Bob Jones moments, a year apart, it was that even the most isolated and different amongst us could be brought into a semblance of conformity with evolving national custom.

Between now and John Ashcroft’s confrontation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, and perhaps even afterward, many will continue to focus on the presumed rigidity of Bob Jones University and its backers The real story, however, might be the very obverse of all that. The main thing that seems to have happened in both of these highly publicized eyeball-to-eyeball encounters of church and state is that it wasn’t Caesar that ended up blinking.

In both cases it was the state, or the secular-minded, that ended up being rendered to.

In an existential sense (to evoke a term you don’t see much anymore but still applies), Al Gore is up against it. After the public injury of losing an extended, public double-overtime contest for the presidency of the United States of America last month, his more sub-rosa quest for the presidency of Harvard, ended in something of an insult.

Two weeks ago Robert G. Stone Jr., a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation search committee publicly stated of Gore’s semi-declared candidacy, “He doesn’t have the academic and intellectual standing.”

And the Harvard Crimson rubbed it in by reporting last week that the search committee had “whittled” the list of contenders down, “discarding” some 450 nominees, “including Vice President Al Gore ’69.”

That made it all the more likely that Gore would have to follow through on his concession-speech pledge that he’d be coming home to Tennessee “to mend some fences.

If there ever was a homestead that could stand some mending, fences and all, it is the Tennessee Democratic Party, which hasn’t won a major statewide race in more than a decade now and hasn’t even fielded a serious statewide candidate since 1994 – a year which saw the governorship and both the state’s U.S. Senate seats pass into Republican hands.

Gore, who in November lost home-state Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes (enough to have won him the presidency, with or without Florida) was, ironically, the state party’s last big winner – having romped to a reelection victory in 1990 over a no-name opponent.

But that was then; this is now, a scant two months since Gore finished 80,000 votes behind GOP rival George W. Bush in Tennessee, in the process losing the [5th] Congressional district he once represented and salvaging his home county of Smith only by the narrowest of margins.

The state’s still-popular former two-term Democratic governor, Ned Ray McWherter, stumped relentlessly for Gore during the presidential campaign’s home stretch but kept running into versions of the same chorus. As he told the Associated Press two weeks ago, “They told me, `Ned, we’re glad to see you. You’re always welcome here. You’re our friend and always will be. But we haven’t seen or heard from Al Gore since 1992.’ “

Uncooked Seeds

It is now axiomatic that in his vice-presidential years the once cautiously conservative Gore evolved positions on issues like abortion rights, limited gun control, and rights for gays – to mention only a few – that were way out in advance of most Tennesseans. Add to that his well-earned reputation for personal stiffness and, as McWherter noted, his recent inattentiveness to a home-state constituency that he once, as a congressman and as a Senator, had favored with abundant “town meetings.”

Even the most casual observer of the late presidential campaign, and especially of the five-week Florida runoff, would be entitled to conclude that Gore’s quest for the presidency went far beyond political dedication. Psychic necessity, or at least an urge to self-definition, seemed clearly to influence Gore’s candidacy as much as any ideological matter had.

Just as Gore forbade his eminent father, the former congressman and senator and presidential aspirant, from intervening in his maiden congressional race in 1976, so did the campaigning Gore of 2000 keep Bill Clinton, whom he had served so faithfully as vice president, at an arm’s – nay, a continent’s – length.

Gore and his inner circle evidently convinced themselves that the various Clinton scandals – especially l’affaire Lewinsky of 1998 – were a detriment to his own presidential candidacy. And, indeed, many in the retiring vice president’s circle continue to believe that a Clinton hex was the major factor in creating a tight race and, ultimately, George W. Bush’s highly tarnished – even suspect – victory.

That Gore’s own failures – especially in the three debates with Bush – contributed significantly to the outcome is a fact that, at some level of consciousness, has to motivate this able and driven public figure, who, after all, had his moments in connecting with an audience (the convention address of 2000 being a clear example, his concession speech being another).

It is too pat to conclude that Al Gore the public figure still has a need to prove himself at the polls. But one doesn’t even need a Freudian primer to appreciate the uncooked seeds in a man who led a presidential race by half a million votes and probably will be demonstrated by various unofficial recounts to have “won” the key state of Florida as well.

An Opportunity

There are many good reasons for Gore not to hazard a gubernatorial race in 2002 in Tennessee – not the least of which is the state’s currently intractable fiscal crisis. And he is surely aware of the fate that befell Richard Nixon, another first-try loser for the presidency, in his unsuccessful 1962 race for governor.

Y

et Gore has the kind of analytical mind that lends itself to problem-solving (sometimes on a cosmic scale), and he is prideful enough to want to avenge this year’s loss in his own back yard. Moreover, he knows that other potential Democratic presidential candidates are out there (does the name “Hillary” ring a bell?) and that he may have alienated many in the party by the simple fact of his defeat last year.

How better to begin his redemption than by winning a race in Tennessee in 2002 – especially when there is a chance Gore would be opposed by another formidable personality, Senator Fred Thompson, and that the two of them would create the kind of energizing spectacle that the media looked for – and failed to get – in the aborted Guiliani-Clinton race of 2000?

And, perhaps, whoever is governor of Tennessee after 2002 will have a perfect opportunity to demonstrate economic ingenuity to a nation which may not be so giddily prosperous in 2004 as it was in 2000. (The signs of such a come-uppance are already being trumpeted, ironically enough, by the incoming president and vice-president.)

And what do we make of the fact that Thompson and Gore easily headed the list in last week’s poll by the Mason-Dixon organization of Tennesseans’ preferred choices for governor?

And who is to say that Nixon’s loss in California in 1962 – however abject it seemed at the time – wasn’t a necessary precursor to his ultimate presidential victory in 1968?

All of which is to say that, however remote a prospect it may seem just now, the state – and the nation – may have another Al Gore candidacy to kick around. Sooner than most think.

– JACKSON BAKER

AND IF NOT GOVERNOR. . .

Two more job prospects for Al Gore, both in Nashville.

First, how about editor of The Tennessean? Gore worked there as a reporter in the early Seventies under former editor and old friend John Seigenthaler, who is still an influential Nashvillian although no longer in the daily newspaper business. And he also knows current editor Frank Sutherland, who would surely be persuaded to move aside for his out-of-work colleague.

Gore could preside over editorial meetings, freshen his ties to his home state, and restore some of The Tennessean‘s fading prestige and liberal edge lost under the auspices of Gannett ownership. Then he could quickly move up the ladder to succeed Al Neuharth at USA Today or at Gannett’s Freedom Forum, which will be moving into its new headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.

A related possibility is an emeritus position with the First Amendment Center, a Gannett creation at Vanderbilt which sponsors symposiums and such. Gore would be a natural for the Center’s political bent and its lofty rhetoric. He could invite his old friends down to Nashville while they cool their heels until 2004.

Either job would return Gore to his home state and to Nashville, where he moved his campaign headquarters last summer. Neither post is exactly on the order of president of Harvard, but then Gore is not exactly Daniel Moynihan either, having dropped out of law school and divinity school at Vanderbilt.

Nashville has already rehabilitated an unpopular pro football team into a beloved Super Bowl contender. It could do the same for Al Gore.

– JOHN BRANSTON