LAMAR! – Memphis Flyer

Senator, this is perhaps the third time I have written to you publicly in 2020, the final year of your third term as our state’s senior senator. Like many Tennesseans, I have always considered you an excellent representative of our state, and a dedicated public servant. Unfortunately, 2020 was not America’s greatest-ever year. Nor was it yours.

I read with interest the interview you did last week with the Daily Memphian and paid close attention to your comments about Donald Trump, now the lame-duck president of these United States. This was the digital headline in the DM:

Alexander to Trump: ‘People remember the last thing you do’

That statement is certainly true, Senator, particularly when the “last thing you do” is particularly good or particularly bad. But did the thought not cross your mind that people might well remember the last things of consequence you have done as our outgoing senior senator?

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Lamar Alexander

Many Tennesseans know exactly what’s happened during this, your last year in office. Many of us will always remember what you did and didn’t do in 2020. Indeed, last week’s Daily Memphian headline might just as well have read:

Tennesseans to Alexander: ‘People remember the last thing you do’

How ironic, sir, that you will always be remembered for what you did and did not do in 2020, the year in which you announced your retirement. Ironic, in the sense that you first became our governor in the dying days of 1978, 42 years ago, when your predecessor, Ray Blanton, was removed early from that position, on account of his awarding pardons to all kinds of scoundrels. (Apparently, Donald Trump is now doing the same kind of thing, but that’s another story for another day.)

I interviewed you in Nashville in 1979, a month or two after you took office. Clearly, you were a vast improvement over Blanton. How sad, then, after such a long and illustrious career in our state and in Washington, D.C., that you too will be remembered now for the last things you did, carrying water, time and time again, for Trump, all the while endorsing, aloud or in silence, the wretched policies of this worst president in our nation’s history.

Last January, you helped make sure that the president, under impeachment, would not be convicted in the Senate, declining to bring John Bolton forward as a witness before the Senate Chamber. And for the next 10 months, after Trump’s acquittal, you said next to nothing about this de facto mob boss in the White House, who, in 2020 alone, came close to destroying our country, ignoring the coronavirus, all while time and again challenging America’s democratic institutions.

As best I can tell, Senator, you said nothing whatsoever about Trump’s ongoing failure to deal with the pandemic. You said nothing at all about his absurd focus on golf, glitter, and Twitter. Perhaps, as chair of the Senate Health Committee, you suggested privately that Trump might meet more regularly with the Coronavirus Task Force, but if so, that suggestion was never made public. Month after month, you said and did nothing about this president’s penchant for fiddling while America burned, putting the country’s economy, its institutions, and its public-health systems through the ringer.

Last week, when you spoke to the Daily Memphian, you gave Mr. Trump advice you apparently never had given to yourself. Why did you wait until November 23rd to make that headline observation, that Trump had screwed the pooch, when such an observation might have made a real difference six months ago?

Don’t worry, many of us will always remember the last year of your last term as our senator. At least you’re retiring shortly. Perhaps you’ll have plenty of time to think about how different things could and should have been, had you used your final year in office to try to make America great again. Instead, you chose to be part of the problem, making no real attempt to be part of the solution. That’s a tragedy, for us all.

Kenneth Neill is the founder and publisher emeritus of the Memphis Flyer.

In March 1995, I had multiple media obligations, one of which was that of regional correspondent for Time magazine. The magazine was generous to its scrubs, never more so than when it asked me to accompany Tennessee’s own Lamar Alexander on his announcement tour for a run for the presidency in 1996.

The tour began in Alexander’s hometown of Maryville, and it ended in Florida after a week’s travel to stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, Texas, and several other states where the then-ex-governor would be on the GOP primary ballot the next year.

The nature of such tours is that the candidate, accompanied by his campaign entourage and a press pack, flies to pre-planned venues and makes the same speech over and over.

Alexander’s themes were typically Republican ones of the time (holding down taxes and deficits) and were couched in generalities. At one point along the route, as I reported to Time, he got a phone call of encouragement from Ross Perot, the third option from the presidential race of 1992. (Asked about that on C-Span later that week, Perot clammed up, other than to grouse about “some reporter evidently sitting too close on the plane.” Actually, it had been an ad hoc chartered bus. In any case, I basked.)

Two points continually repeated by the candidate stood out — his lamentation that school kids no longer felt free to take a pocketknife to school (an obvious metaphor whose import escaped me) and his insistence on abolishing the Department of Education (an odd position, I thought, for a recent former U.S. Education Secretary and UT president).

I was most impressed (and grateful) at a meet-and-greet at the Sioux City airport when, in sub-freezing temperature, Alexander’s speech, in its entirety, went: “I know you all want your next president to be a man of good judgment. My judgment tells me we’ve got to get in out of this weather.” Much more than the pocketknife thing, that made for a human connection.

It seemed natural then — as it has ever since — to think of this personable man as Lamar, especially since his given name, plus an exclamation mark, was in fact his campaign slogan, festooned on bumper stickers, wall signs, and everything else.

He came close to making it all the way in the Republican primary, being edged out in the last week of the New Hampshire primary by Bob Dole, who paid for a blizzard of last-minute TV commercials attacking Alexander, improbably, as a mad taxer.

I always thought of Alexander as an executive personality and later, when he mounted a political comeback as a senatorial candidate, wondered how good a fit the legislative role would be for him. Even now, with the three-term senator retiring, I still wonder, since so much of that job consists of toeing, or having to confront, a party line laid down by somebody else. The senator’s problems of that sort became acute under the yoke of Donald Trump, and never more so than when Trump was defeated for re-election and seemed determined to ignore that reality and to fight to remain in office.

Lamar’s first few responses to that were hamstrung to the point of setting the bar for forthrightness at ground level. Example: “If there is any chance whatsoever that Joe Biden will be the next president, and it looks like he has a very good chance, the Trump Administration should provide the Biden team with all transition materials, resources, and meetings necessary to ensure a smooth transition so that both sides are ready on day one.”

If? Both sides? This was two weeks after the election, when there was no mystery whatsoever as to who had won.

More Lamar: “Al Gore finally conceded 37 days after the 2000 election, and then made the best speech of his life accepting the result.”

That’s a false equivalence if there ever was one. There were some 537 votes at issue between Gore and George W. Bush, in one state, Florida — unlike the many tens of thousands of votes dividing Biden from Trump in multiple swing states!

This week, Lamar got closer: “Since it seems apparent that Joe Biden will be the president-elect, my hope is that President Trump will take pride in his considerable accomplishments, put the country first, and have a prompt and orderly transition to help the new administration succeed.”

Leaving aside those “considerable accomplishments,” that was pretty much on target. Congratulations, Senator Alexander, and thanks.. As you concluded, “When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do.”