As the eagerly
attentive denizens of the planet’s seven continents surely know by now, the
Shelby County Democrats were able Monday night to enforce a ban against
Republican officeholders at their annual Kennedy Day Dinner. There were, both
literally and figuratively, no elephants in the room.
There were,
however, some conspicuous elephants outside the room, and Governor Phil Bredesen,
titular head of Tennessee Democrats, alluded to them in
an aside to his keynote address. These were the disabled Tennesseans and their
sympathizers who picketed the event from positions on the Central Avenue
sidewalk outside the Holiday Inn where the dinner took place. In his speech,
Bredesen gave these protesters against his TennCare cuts backhanded praise for
exercising their constitutionally protected freedom of speech, just as — or so
he informed his Democratic audience — he had given them a few minutes of his
time before entering the hotel.
The governor’s solicitude for the demonstrators was given appropriate applause.
But Bredesen might have merited greater praise had he dealt with the TennCare
issue in some other way than by repeating his well-worn mantra that, to maintain
the state’s solvency, he had no other choice than to make the draconian series
of cuts that left many of the seriously disabled protesters uninsurable.
We seem to recall
that state senators Steve Cohen and Rosalind Kurita, both Democrats, had
proposed increasing the state cigarette tax so that the resulting revenue might
have seriously mitigated the scope of the TennCare reductions. The governor, up
for reelection this year and an economy-minded administrator under any
circumstances, chose not to support such a measure. More crucially, perhaps,
Bredesen took an adamant stand against new taxes of any kind — especially that
bugaboo of the state’s recent past, an income tax — and boasted of Tennessee as
a “low-tax state.”
It’s true that
Tennessee’s rate of per-capita taxation is phenomenally low compared to the
national average and to that of the great majority of states. The corollary is
that Tennessee is a low-services state as well, and that’s nothing much to brag
about.
It should be noted
that Bredesen spent much of his speech insisting that his fellow state Democrats
marshal their energies this year toward the goal of electing 9th Distict
congressman Harold Ford Jr. to the U.S. Senate — the same Harold Ford Jr. who
just voted, against the Democratic majority in Congress and along with House
Republicans, to make permanent President Bush’s giveaway tax cuts for the
wealthy.
It is all well and good for the Democratic Party to
safeguard the sanctity of its guest list on formal party occasions. We just wish
the party — and its spokespersons — would be equally resolute in upholding
Democratic traditions and policies that, once upon a time, benefited the most
needy and deserving in our midst.
