At the beginning of 2019, as a newly elected governor, Nashville Republican Bill Lee, an industrialist of sorts, prepared to inaugurate his first four-year term, it became my task — both self-assumed and officially assigned — to write as authoritative a take as I could possibly make on what this ascendant Tennessee executive-in-chief had in mind to do.
As the Flyer’s chief politics writer, my job at the onset of a new state administration would be to chronicle the opening of a new session of state government, focusing significantly on the early actions and intentions of the General Assembly. The problem was that the issue allocated (or, as we say, budgeted) for just after New Year would be on the streets before the first gavel was destined to fall on the opening of the 2019 General Assembly.
The solution was to shift gears and write instead about the mind of the Governor-elect, and, if we could get to him beforehand, to dilate upon his plans and his intentions as against the actions of the General Assembly. The calendar permitted me to take in his formal inauguration (and with it access to the rhetoric of his acceptance address and the theater of the state ceremony).
To accomplish my end, however, I needed to flesh things out with the kind of detailed explanations from him on his plans that would be unlikely to turn up in a formal acceptance address. Accordingly, I made overtures through what was then but a thin group of gubernatorial retainers and got his assent to take part in a remotely conducted interview on the eve of his installment. The result was done partly via phone calls and partly through his answers to a questionnaire I sent to him. I had covered his election campaign fairly extensively as well and had that to go on, along with one of those superficial and polite relationships writers have (ideally) with their sources.
The piece, a Flyer cover story, begun on Memphis turf and completed in Nashville during inauguration week, turned out more or less successfully.
Dated January 31, 2019, it was entitled “Fresh Start in Nashville” and focused mainly on Lee’s expressed support for criminal justice reform, one of the few planks in his inaugural platform that could be called remotely “progressive.” (His views on that issue were actually praised by Tennessee ACLU head Hedy Weinberg!)
Most of his positions on other issues — education, public safety, government spending, what have you — were antiseptic Republican generalities. All in all, the profile probably suggested the same thing that Lee’s campaign had: Here was a man who had a pleasant exterior and was something of an enigma, enough of one to allow such benefit of the doubt as one might have toward a political figure.
Curiously, in the collection of bromides and generalities that constituted his answers to my questionnaire, there was one glaring omission. I had asked what he might do regarding the dormant industrial megasite that for more than a decade had been out there in Haywood County, a stone’s throw from both the needy cities of Memphis and Jackson, a bane to his several gubernatorial predecessors’ efforts to find a big-time industrial proprietor to make it more than a jumbo-sized vacant lot.
Lee shied away from answering that part of the questionnaire, saying he’d have to think about it. And think about it he presumably did for the next couple of years, even as the more straightforward positions he claimed for other issues dissolved into his version of a bully pulpit, one in which the adjective “bully” predominated. Attacks upon “socialism”; idealization of guns and school vouchers; restrictions on LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and other non-insiders; clampdowns on efforts to minimize the spread of Covid-19 — all this was his legacy.
Until, lo and behold, it is Lee, after the failures of all his immediate gubernatorial predecessors, who has actually succeeded in getting somebody big-time — the Ford Motor Company, for crying out loud — to commit to a $5.6 billion factory at the megasite, to make electric-powered vehicles (read: environmentally friendly ones) and to open up economic prospects for the beleaguered backwaters of West Tennessee.
A nice pre-election move, that, and maybe enough to justify a new look at Lee’s developing legacy.
