Bill Frist – Memphis Flyer

Bill Gibbons is running for governor in 2010, IF:

There’s really only one “if” that could forestall a
gubernatorial campaign by the long-term District Attorney General – and that’s
the likelihood of former U.S. Senator Bill Frist making a run for it.

It is no secret that Frist is thinking about a race. The
former Senate Majority Leader and (for a time) presidential wannabe has said
so, and he’s making the kinds of speaking rounds across Tennessee that only a
serious aspirant for statewide office would commit himself to.

Frist’s timetable for deciding would seem to be set for
late this year or early next year. In the meantime, he’s the elephant in the
room that other Republican gubernatorial hopefuls have to worry about. Among
those others: 7th District congressman Marsha Blackburn of Brentwood;
Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey of Blountville; 3rd District congressman
Zach Wamp of Chattanooga; and Mayor Bill Haslam of Knoxville.

Whatever course the others may take, Gibbons is explicit
about one thing: “If Frist runs, I’ll support him.!” But he’s equally
insistent that, otherwise, he’s likely to be in the running. “I make no bones about it. I’m serious about this,” he said at Saturday’s “Bob Patterson Barbecue” event, sponsored by
the Shelby County Young Republicans and held at Kirby Farms in honor of the late
Trustee, who died unexpectedly early this year.

Patterson held such an event annually at the same venue,
and this year’s commemorative affair drew a fair number of local office-holders
and candidates, just like the ones presided over by Patterson himself.

Gibbons has almost always been in attendance at those
events, and the subject of his potential further political ambitions has
occasionally come up in conversations. Usually, what he told questioners was some
variation on the theme that he was concentrating on his current duties. That’s
right out of the political playbook.

No doubt he is still taking care of business, and but he’s
no longer reticent about wanting to move on. After service on both the Memphis
city council and the Shelby County Commission, Gibbons was named in 1996 by
former governor Don Sundquist to fill a vacancy in the District Attorney
General’s office. He has since been reelected twice.

Gibbons also served in the administration of former
governor (now U.S. Senator) Lamar Alexander, and he chanced a run for Memphis
mayor in 1987.

The hustings two years hence will probably be crowded, as
is always the case after a two-term governorship. Democrat Phil Bredesen is now
completing the second of his two terms permitted by the state constitution.

Among the possible gubernatorial candidates so far
mentioned by themselves or others on the Democratic side are former 9th
District congressman Harold Ford, former state House of Representatives majority leader Kim McMillan, former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell, and 4th
District congressman Lincoln Davis.

“Thomas Boggs’ life was a remarkable Horatio Alger story, but his business success only hinted at the real reasons that it is our opinion that his life was marked by greatness. More to the point, it was his unshakable humanitarian, compassionate, and loving attitude toward his

hometown and the people in it.”

We begin our eulogy to a dear friend, Thomas Boggs, with this borrowed encomium from an equally dear friend, Tom Jones of the Smart City Memphis blog. We do not intend this as plagiarism — merely as a necessary part of our homage to Boggs, the owner of the greatly successful Huey’s restaurants, the partner in other food franchises, and, as Jones suggests in this passage from his own eulogy, one of the city’s preeminent humanitarians.

And we might add that words coming from Boggs’ friend and neighbor Jones, who tragically lost a daughter himself this past week to cancer, the same ailment which felled Boggs, carry special weight. For Thomas Boggs, like Emily Jones Schrader, left this world too soon.

His fellow restaurateurs presented Boggs, a former president of the Memphis Restaurant Association, with the MRA’s Civic and Community Leadership Award last year in tribute to his numerous civic and charitable endeavors. We remember him, too, already ravaged by cancer but almost obscuring the fact by his ever-resilient energy and by the enduring charm of his smile, lending himself, for the most selfless of reasons, to this or that activist cause during these last two years.

Boggs was a musician early on, with the Box Tops and other popular groups, and, all the way to the end, his spirit never stopped rocking. In the telling of his many friends, a group in which we proudly include ourselves, it never will.

Frist the Healer

Former Senate majority leader Bill Frist was in town this week, addressing the East Memphis Rotary Club on the theme of health care. Frist described himself as “much more egalitarian than the typical Republican,” and, for the most part, he sounded like it. Speaking no longer as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration, the onetime heart surgeon said the nation faced a crisis in providing health care to some 47 million uninsured, and that there had been a lack of leadership “at the presidential level” in resolving the crisis. Asked to compare the health plans advocated by the three leading candidates for the presidency, Frist did so fairly, summing up the advantages of each, and seemed to our ears to tilt toward the semi-voluntary plan advocated by Democrat Barack Obama. “He counts in the costs,” Frist said approvingly.

The former senator spoke more about his recent health missions to Africa than he did politics, though he found time to issue a condemnation of what he called “bi-modal” government (that which most of us refer to as excessive partisanship). The sentiments Frist uttered on Tuesday were unexceptionable, though we wonder if his own sponsorship of the Medicare drug bill of some years back hadn’t contributed more than a tad to the $35 trillion unfunded liability of Medicare now. Even so, this native son made sense in much of his diagnosis, and we’ll be listening close to such remedies as he may want to propose.