Lessons Learned

So much about this strange time is so difficult to navigate because these waters are uncharted. We haven’t been in this place before, and we cannot imagine what comes next.

Across a million homes we feel alone, at loose ends, even lost. It is hard to know with confidence what tomorrow will look like, let alone next year. So far, we have only questions: How well will our community function in all its aspects when we come out the other end of this tunnel?

A crisis is a stress test, both of leaders and of social systems. Strengths and weaknesses are revealed in each, but also how to make a city stronger.

Even as the coronavirus runs its course through Tennessee, there are seeds of ideas that offer reason for hope. The central question is this: What lessons will we learn that will make us better prepared next time?

There are already learnings we can draw from this crisis, if we will. I am not referring only here to the halting public health responses of some hesitant government officials as this pandemic rose up – though there are lessons aplenty there – but rather to the broader capacity of citizens together with policymakers to draw lessons and make real progress out of all we have experienced.

We need a careful inventory now of lessons we have learned the hard way this time. How might our social systems have been better prepared?

We know, for instance, that these topics are among those that will need some focused attention:

·      What do children, parents and teachers really need to continue with education when the school buildings are closed. And all the children, mind you, not only those in homes blessed with internet connections and computers?

·      How can the city’s infrastructure of essential nonprofit agencies – our social safety net – be fortified to survive and serve families who need them most? This is not just about money, but important lessons about collaboration, smart questions about consolidation, and more.

·      What about the homeless, who live on the edge of life, and are least able to cope? Congregant housing especially doesn’t work when an infectious disease is raging. Some other cities are better at this.

·      What do first responders need to be better provisioned?

·      What about our elections, like the one coming in November? Coronavirus will likely still be in our communities then, and no one should have to choose between voting and fear of grave sickness. (Someone is going to have to explain to me better why Tennessee cannot manage to let voters vote by mail.)

Each of these raises serious but proper questions of policy, resources, technology, and distribution. In short, what we need in a sustained crisis episode is the ability to “work remotely” on a scale that is full and fair, whether in education or business or public service. And these lead to tough questions about technology spread, including access and costs.

What else would you add? Let’s call this our “Agenda for Next Time” and it ought to be comprehensive, because each item on it will constitute a new category of work to make ourselves ready. The key will be broad consensus, organization and collaboration between citizens and policymakers.

And who should lead this? It should be a broad civic exercise, not just a job for City Hall. The scope of this is more than a municipal agenda. Addressing it ought to engage much of the city, if not the Nashville region, because so many have witnessed what sudden disruption was like. 

We also know this conversation across the city cannot be done in the usual way, with public gatherings in cafeterias and assembly halls, because we may not get to do those again for a while. But a smart application of new technology can help us achieve a comparable dialog.

Nashville knows how to do this.

The only wrong idea will be to let time pass and not see to this, failing to learn from this moment just because the virus has made us sick and so weary. But we need to make ready.

The hard truth is that another threat will come. The good news is we can strengthen ourselves for that day.

_____

2:00 PM Update On Sunday afternoon, Governor Cuomo of New York said this: “I don’t want to just reopen. We learned a lot of lessons here. Painfully, but we learned a lot of lessons. How do we take the lessons we learned, take this pause in life and say, ‘When we reopen we’re going to be better for it, and we’re going to reimagine what our life is, and we’re going to improve for this pause.’ What have we learned, how do we improve, and how do we build back better?… There is no return to yesterday in life. It’s about moving forward. ”

50 Years of Earth Day

I don’t remember as much about the first Earth Day, in 1970, as I do the one ten years later.

By the time of the tenth anniversary I was working at the state capitol. A few days prior, an enterprising young reporter rounding up some Earth Day notes phoned me. She said someone had mentioned that I rode my bike to the office every day. I probably said “So what?” but somehow this activity fit into her narrative of grassroots participation. It turned out to be part of a photo essay with scenes of lots of people doing Earth-y things.

At the time, I lived out on Lealand Lane and my bike route to work crossed the Lipscomb campus, then up Belmont Boulevard to 16th, and beyond. It was a pleasant ride that only got dicey when I got downtown, competing with the traffic, the sudden opening of car doors, and all. Screaming helped. (Some cities may have had bicycle lanes back then. The Music City did not as yet.)

Also by this time, I had found a new secret at the capitol building. On the northeast corner of the ground floor, I discovered a shower. Someone told me that particular suite had once been the office of Anna Belle Clement, the top staff assistant and patronage coordinator to her brother Governor Frank Clement (1953-59, 1963-67). By this time, “Miss Anna Belle” was a state senator, with a different office down in the Legislative Plaza. But I was glad for the surviving perk, as it helped the transformation from shorts into office attire.

Anyway, Earth Day. Fifty years of observing it now. This time has seen much progress for the condition of the environment we all share, especially in the U.S., and much of that through the bipartisan wins in Congress. 

Some of the effort was local, but the most profound progress was in federal policy, during the Nixon Administration, with the establishment of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. In Tennessee, state legislation enacted during the Republican administration of Governor Winfield Dunn – together with bipartisan advocacy by Democrats who dominated the General Assembly – helped to clear streams and skies of pollution. Other reforms were imposed by Congress upon the TVA.

There have been policy backslides from time to time, like the Trump administration removing the U.S. from the Paris Accords, but overall much progress. Chattanooga and Nashville are good examples, of course, where the chronic sooty air eventually gave way to clearer skies and streets after much legislation combined with civic resolve. Before the industrial pollution was checked in Chattanooga, for instance, they say you couldn’t see the sun in the sky at high noon.

In Washington, the occasional administration tries to reverse or scale back some of the toughest standards that history and humans have won. That is happening again now (examples abound) but now at least the stakes involved in climate change are more broadly understood as harmful to everybody. It’s never easy, and progress we know is never assured.

It’s smart to let each observance of Earth Day remind us how it pays to stay vigilant in defense of our streams and our air and our planet. Much mischief and retreat and degradation can happen on all the other days of the year.

The Second Surge

My column of yesterday (over on the Tennessean and Commercial Appeal editorial pages) seems to have struck a fast nerve with readers on the timeliness of overdue Medicaid expansion in our state.

Responses came in many forms – via email, calls, social media – for which I’m always grateful. More important, it’s a time-sensitive issue for our state’s leaders, and time grows deadly short for making ready.

If you haven’t read the column as yet (“Put politics behind us, expand Medicaid”) see it here https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/04/18/coronavirus-tennessee-put-politics-behind-us-and-expand-medicaid/2988895001/

These were among the many comments from concerned readers…

“Thank you for your strong and truthful editorial today in the Tennessean and Commercial Appeal!  Governor Lee does seem to be the person to focus on at this time.”

“I am praying and sending positive thoughts that our governor and legislators will listen to you and finally take the right and moral action. Covid 19 should be reminding them of our common humanity and inspire their action for the common good. Your column gives me that hope.”

“Your column, Put politics behind us, expand Medicaid’ was spot on. As an RN and TN resident, I see such need in the many ways you outlined. Here’s hoping Governor Lee and our State officials take heed and proceed in a compassionate and thoughtful manner to improve TN health care and healthcare system.”

“Great column today on Tennessee's failure thus far to expand Medicaid to those who desperately need it. Shameful and immoral. Should be rerun daily until the damned Republicans get the message.”

Of course, it remains to be seen whether a sufficient number of Tennessee policymakers will rise to this extraordinary occasion and make expansion happen. But it’s possible the push to “re-open the economy,” as they say, is also forcing the question of Medicaid expansion in a new and forceful way.

People are worried.

It’s a hard spot that elected officials find themselves in right now: the rising impatience to restore businesses and jobs, on the one hand, and on the other the continuing fears of causing (inadvertently) a second surge of the coronavirus by ending the stay-at-home orders too soon. But being in position to make hard choices is why governors and legislators wanted their jobs in the first place.

Why not, in making this jobs/health choice, increase the odds on the side of smart preparedness. As our state leaders run the risk of possibly easing the quarantines too soon (and, reading the daily news, you can feel it coming) the least they can do for us now is to say “Yes” also to Medicaid expansion. Put the Obama-era politics aside, at last, and face this sudden new reality squarely and humanely for the people you serve.

Say “Yes” to the more than a billion dollars in federal funding that waits on Tennessee. That is what Medicaid expansion can bring to uninsured Tennesseans and to the hospital capacity needed to serve them.

It’s the one thing Gov. Bill Lee and our lawmakers can objectively do to increase the odds in our favor: Ensure that Tennesseans are insured and that hospitals and their staffs are ready in the disastrous event that, God help us, this virus should surge again.

What Matters Most

A few years back my good friend Roy Herron, in West Tennessee, wrote a book of essays he titled Things Held Dear: Soul Stories for My Sons. It was a small book only in its page count (138) but large in its stories of humanity that Roy called up from his own life.

The foreword to Roy’s book was written by his political mentor Ned McWherter, a Democrat, the longtime speaker of the state house and later governor of Tennessee. And one of the complimentary blurbs about the book was written by Bill Frist, from the other side of the aisle. At the time Frist was a U.S. senator and, four years later, would be the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate.

These men were not enemies but friends, in the way that we thought of the best public servants (of either party) in that middle period that seems now like ancient history. Roy, who trained as a lawyer and a Methodist minister, came by his own politics in the old-fashioned way: He grew up in it. When McWherter was elected governor, in 1986, Roy followed him as state representative for Weakley County. Later on, he was the state senator from that district, then chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party.

His book with its stories of farming and hunting, community and patriotism, come to my mind on this Easter/Passover weekend, in this time of far-flung trouble, when my own thoughts are diving more deeply to the central things in life that matter most to me:

• To my own immediate family, near and far. Especially these.

• To the good people in all the communities who struggle with hardship.

• To the other good people who help them, either with strong arms or good philanthropy.

These thoughts of loved ones and of others are what keep me most centered. They keep me appreciative, help me in the current isolation to keep fear and worry in their place. Considering all these, so much of the rest falls away. It just falls away.

Then I reflect on my own good luck so far - how I am able to do my work remotely, from home, even as many cannot for lack of a device or a connection. And how my circumstances contrast so starkly now with the many who live closer to the edge of life than I do: those who cannot shelter full time, who must shield themselves as best they can against the frightening infection, in order to hold on to a paycheck. And how many of these support the rest of us.

I think of the health care workers serving on the front lines who risk infection to save others (like my sweet niece, a nurse who works in the COVID-19 unit in Chicago). I think of all the young parents doing their best to maintain a semblance of education for their children whose schools are shut down. And how unevenly that must play out across the city. We understand why the schools must be closed now, and yet none of this is normal. None of it is easy. None.

Family, friends, strangers, the poor, and all the good helpers – these are who matter most. In truth, they always matter most. May we all remember that, not only in this fraught spring and summer but also in whatever shape the next “normal” takes, and whenever that day may come.

What we must all hold dear, now and also then, is each other.

John Prine

“…When I die let my ashes float down the Green River

Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.”

© Warner Chappell Music, Inc

When I first heard those words, the Tennessean photographer Jack Corn and I were up in the coalfields of East Tennessee, learning about the strip mines. John wrote his words about Muhlenberg County, in Kentucky, not in the Tennessee mountains, but his lines were for me about the broader damage of the exploitation of the land anywhere - the resources removed, both physical and economic, and the devastation and the degradation and human poverty left behind on the scarred land.

At that early point, John Prine had written his “Paradise” ballad not long before this. It lines and laments were for me both current and also timeless, and I saw coal strip mining with new eyes.

The last time I saw John Prine, in person, was a couple of years ago in a long security line at the Nashville airport. He was chatting casually with a woman in front of him who had turned and recognized the recognizable face of the celebrity behind her in the line. In Nashville, we don’t intrude on the privacy of our celebrities, but when he turned back to me I couldn’t help myself. All I said was something lame, like “I’m a big fan, and have been for a long time.” Whereupon he engaged with me for a few moments, ever smiling.

Then he resumed wrangling his guitar case and bag, I offered to help, but he waved me off. He was the complete, self-sufficient traveling man and musician. Headed for another concert somewhere else. Then he was gone.

I was struck how this kind man, this composer and artist who had entertained thousands at a time, was traveling alone. But his music - and those lyrics that were praised over time by Cash and Kristofferson and Dylan and Raitt - spoke to our souls. Spoke to the many millions of us, and to each of us one at a time.

Abnormal Politics

The notion of a Governor or a President with no public service experience may seem quaint and charming – until it’s not.

The idea of “throwing the bums out” may be exciting for a moment at election time, until it turns out that the real trouble are the clueless new guys. This is the case in Washington now.

We are also at a delicate point with the State of Tennessee considering an inexperienced team in the front office. With the worst of the COVID-19 hospital demand surge coming, the rest of us hope the administration of Gov. Bill Lee is making smart choices.

Their flip-flops on how much information on the COVID-19 impacts to release publicly has not been a good look for the governor. The delay in giving a firm order to “stay at home” may yet prove deadly.

What kind of ideology is it that keeps a state’s leaders from expanding Medicaid to help so many thousands of Tennesseans facing illness uninsured? The answer is staring the governor and legislature in the face: Expand Medicaid now. Why do they not? People are now at risk in Tennessee communities both urban and rural. And over a billion dollars of Tennessee’s money is just sitting there in Washington.

Lee seems uneasy with his own responsibilities. Yes, he is a good man. Yes, the members of the legislature are good people, by and large, and they too come from good homes and fine families. The problem is they are all still gripped in a hoary, threadbare old political myth – and are fearful of throwing it off even at a time like this. The opposition to Medicaid expansion is a vestige of the old Republican politics of the Obama era.

Let’s at least see the thing clearly: When the former Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who had lost the governorship to Gov. Bill Haslam, was speaker of the state Senate he made up his mind to defy Gov. Haslam on the issue. Haslam saw Medicaid expansion as the hope for better health management for a quarter-million Tennesseans. But Ramsey, an adroit politician, made it a test of anti-Obama Republicanism, and the legislature fell in line.

But that was then. This is now. And the rank-and-file legislators now serving don’t even talk about it anymore, let alone explain why they remain opposed. It is, in fact, a shameful legacy that lives on – until someone calls a halt to the nonsense. That’s what Gov. Lee could do now. There is no objective reason why this cannot happen and quickly, except for an ugly history of politics that no one will even squarely address now. Our governor who has no such baggage could save the day.

This isn’t about Obama anymore. It’s about your neighbors. It is no longer about political vendettas in Washington. Forget all that. It’s about a test of courage and leadership now at the state capitol. This is about a life-or-death reality that too many Tennessee communities are facing in the current pandemic. 

This crisis is the time to do it, but the window is closing. When the legislature returns on June 1 – unless they are called back sooner – this is the time for an action agenda for human health, welfare and life. The governor ought to lead that conversation, rejecting this abnormal political baggage which had nothing to do with him.

Medicaid expansion is the answer. It’s not complicated for a quarter-million uninsured Tennesseans still trapped in the coverage gap.

A special legislative session ought to be convened this month. We can argue whether anything else ought to be included in the call – for example, how to help people vote safely in a pandemic – but it makes abundant good sense to expand Medicaid now.

In our state Capitol legislators need a dose of reality on health insurance – not more tired anti-Obama rhetoric – and the governor can supply it, if he will. What we need is a new resolve and action to save people.

Tennesseans are already dying in this COVID-19 nightmare. A thousand more of us are staring death in the eye, and too many community hospitals have closed. We are all facing a grim and fearful future. What this moment requires is courage and fresh thinking, and leadership of the type for which you were elected.

The time to make ready grows short.

The Missing Words

Someday a fair and balanced history of this anxious time will be published, and I think it will be full of ‘D’ words.

Words like Dithering, Delay, Denial, Distraction, Doubt, Distrust, and Dysfunction – and the story of how, in the face of Disease and Death, our President spoke to us of Democrats and the Dow.

Most of us tend not to think about our leaders until we need them. But when large crises come – tornado, flood, pandemic – that is when we need able leaders most. A crisis, in turn, is how a leader is tested. Clearly, the coronavirus is now such a test of our leaders at all levels.

I remember, on 9/11, how we were drawn to the words and pictures of President George W. Bush and how he spoke to us about the attack on our nation. Ten months earlier I had voted for Gore, not Bush, and yet on that awful September day our President Bush seemed a good man, who felt what we felt, and was able to speak in a noble way to our stricken and fearful hearts.

Over this past week the presidential historian Jon Meacham has written helpfully about presidents who were exemplary in crisis leadership. He wrote also of the wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For each of these, both decisiveness and language together had high value and much power, and all of it spoke to our deeper resolve as a people. Such leadership made for clarity in those moments and, in the fullness of time, informed the deeper history that we honor in our past.

Something of that grade of leadership is missing now. It’s a level of communication that we need in this current time of crisis, as surely as we need the CARES Act. When the door of every home is shut, when the streets outside are silent, when the center of every heart is troubled, we need more than the promise of an SBA loan, or a check bearing the president’s signature.

In this silent spring of empty schools, empty streets, empty shelves – and no confidence how long we will live this way – something fundamental is missing. The one who should be there for us with steadiness and empathy is not, and others who might speak out in the strange void do not, but instead keep their silence for fear of angering him. This is no way for a nation to live through one of the hardest of times.

And this is exactly why we are drawn instead to the steadier voices of (some) governors and mayors when we observe them being more constant, less peevish, clearer-headed, competent, and nobly decisive.

These seem in this moment to know much better than political Washington not only what things we need – like our jobs and paychecks back – but also what the fuller measure of real leadership requires of them.

A Wise Man Passes

Word came this evening, in a sudden flurry of sad and reflective messages, that Tommy Wiseman has died.

This news has put me in a swirl of remembering, thoughts both personal and public, about the good life of this fine Tennessean, this stalwart citizen and our friend of happy memory.

Wiseman dwelt in many quarters of our public arena, and in each of them he lived and served with great probity and good humor. His long career took him from lawyering to lawmaking to judging, and along the way he also touched most of the important cases and moments of Tennessee’s history of the past half-century. (Just one example was the Geier case that desegregated higher education across our state.)

The day I met Wiseman was in 1974, when he ran for Governor. It was a steamy morning in July, far away from the newsroom in Nashville. There were so many candidates running that year (twelve Democrats, four Republicans) that our newspaper could not cover the race in the traditional one-on-one manner. Instead, a half-dozen Tennessean reporters were deployed statewide by region. The editor’s assignment to each of us was to write something about any candidate who came through your zone on a given day. My territory was Memphis and rural southwest Tennessee.

I remember, like it was this morning, that morning when Wiseman rode in my car. (He had a tight schedule that day so offering him a ride was the only chance I’d have for any solo time with him.) As I steered us past soybean fields, he talked knowledgeably about Tennessee’s agriculture policy, and he answered my every question.

He struck me then and later on as an exceptional sort of politician – engaging, thoughtful, seriously interested in current issues - the type you hope we can see more of, then and especially now. In fact, it was in that car, then and there, that I decided my own vote would go to this man in the August primary. He lost that one, running third behind the Democrats Ray Blanton and Jake Butcher. Years later, after Blanton and Butcher were both doing time in federal prisons (for different crimes), Wiseman would famously say of his loss in the 1974 primary: “I came in first among the non-felons.”

Years before this, Wiseman had been a leader in the state House of Representatives, where he was an ally of the young Speaker Ned McWherter. Later he served as the State Treasurer, which is one of the constitutional officers elected by the General Assembly. Later on, President Carter put Wiseman on the federal bench.

I especially recall visiting him in his home one morning in 2011. I wanted to capture his memories of the days surrounding Blanton’s eventual downfall. By the morning of our interview, Wiseman was no longer the chief federal judge for Middle Tennessee (he had taken senior judge status in 1995) but his aging eyes were clear and his memories ever sharp.

He remembered the night all right, and in great detail. Among other stories, he explained to me how a particular writ that he had signed in his chambers late that afternoon, at the U.S. Attorney Hal Hardin’s request, had kept an especially dangerous felon in the state prison even as the governor’s office was releasing others. (Sitting there Wiseman even spelled out for me, from memory, the long Latin word that is the proper name of that writ.)

Today there will be many Tennesseans, especially lawyers, who will have their own recollections of Judge Wiseman and his good life and long service. To me, he was first a friend who remembered my name, from a long time ago on a two-lane through a soybean farm, and as a public servant who did right by all the people.

Tommy was what his last name said he was: A wise man. He was of a particular time, to be sure, but also a man for all time. I doubt we will see his like again. And that, for we who remain in this sideways time of different government, is the greatest sadness of all.

The Sum of All Fears, Part 2

On Wednesday evening, we received a message from a friend in central Italy. She was forwarding an anguished note from a friend of hers in Bergamo in that country’s Lombardy region. The note reported dire conditions there from the spread of COVID-19 infections. Italy’s hospitals and medical personnel, she said, are being overwhelmed by many thousands of citizens crowding into emergency rooms.

“The news media in the US have not captured the severity of what is happening here. If you are in Europe or the US you are weeks away from where we are today in Italy. Today the ICUs in Lombardy are at capacity – more than capacity. They have begun to put ICU units in the hallways. If the numbers do not go down, the growth rate of contagion tells us that there will be thousands of people who in a matter of a weeks will need care. What will happen when there are 100, or a 1000 people who need the hospital and only a few ICU places left?

“On Monday a doctor wrote in the paper that they have begun to have to decide who lives and who dies when the patients show up in the emergency room, like what is done in war. This will only get worse.  There are a finite number of drs, nurses, medical staff and they are getting the virus. They have also been working non-stop for days and days. What happens when the drs, nurses and medical staff are simply not able to care for the patients? …You have a chance to make a difference and stop the spread in your country. Soon you will not have a choice, so do what you can now.”

President Trump tells us the US government has finally begun to scale up to the urgency. I hope that is correct, because a true national mobilization is what we need. Our own nation is lagging behind others in coronavirus testing capacity. But we also live in a federal system where state governments have essential roles, too, and it appears there is a great unevenness among the 50 states in the their pandemic preparedness. Take Tennessee, where two connected things came to light in the past week:

1.   State officials in Nashville spoke in soothing tones, yes, but were clearly struggling to get their messages straight on how they will keep citizens and local jurisdictions sufficiently informed about the danger.

2.   More deeply, we are also seeing unfold - no longer in theory but in real time - the true effects of Tennessee’s failure over eight years to expand the Medicaid program. It’s been the legislature’s stubborn refusal that has failed to draw down available dollars, to help our hospitals and people who need more support in the face of the present pandemic.

At this moment, is it possible for our state government to be any less helpful? I can’t imagine how.

On one hand, the state’s Health Department struggles with basic coordination. First, they wouldn’t even name the counties where new cases were being discovered; two days later, under pressure, they said ‘OK, we will.’ At the same time, the legislature just seems oblivious and fixated on exactly the wrong things: Bloviating about making the Bible our official state book, and showing great enthusiasm for the very idea of abolishing the requirement of permits for people who carry guns.

And yet there are concrete things the governor and legislature can be doing now in the face of this very real, present emergency, if they but will. The most helpful would be to expand Medicaid, at long last, in order to draw down millions in available federal dollars that hospitals and hundreds of thousands of Tennessee citizens already need. More than a dozen Tennessee hospitals have closed since the General Assembly first said ‘No’ to Medicaid expansion, as proposed by the former Gov. Bill Haslam. And twenty of Tennessee’s 95 counties – where nearly one in 20 Tennesseans live – have no hospital at all, according to the Sycamore Institute. 

Our legislature could vote next week to expand Medicaid, but its majority Republican members must finally put aside old Obama-era political grudges and get proactive in the face of a true public-health crisis. Further, what about any idle facilities in the un-served counties. With ingenuity and resolve, these might be brought online quickly with proper staffing and equipment (think ventilators) to add new ER or ICU capacity for the human demand that is looming. (In New York City, as you read this, triage tents are set up outside emergency rooms, and medical staffs are being re-deployed as needed.)

The frightening fact is that Tennessee is light-years behind some other states. Ohio and Kentucky, for example, seem well ahead of Tennessee now in pandemic preparedness. Why is that?

Like it or not, that urgent warning from Italy the other night is quite relevant to Tennessee in this anxious moment, and our policymakers must do more than tell us to stay home and wash our hands. (We can take care of that ourselves, thank you.) What we need elected officials to do is step up and do what only government can, and agree that a better-funded Medicaid program ought finally to be in your toolbox and fast. We need you to do for us now what’s smart, not what’s stale and narrowly political, and put aside the tired vendettas of political Washington. This isn’t about Obama anymore. We need you to give your counties and towns the material help they need to be ready for this pandemic that is wholly unprecedented in our lifetimes.

’Soon you will not have a choice, so do what you can now.”

My Neighbor, Across Town

This is a city of good people.

When the worst happens, as it did here one week ago tomorrow night, much is revealed to us and about us. In the wake of those horrific churning tornadoes, we have seen not only images of destruction and stories of suffering and death, but also of the good works of people we don’t know or commonly notice. 

With all respect to James Agee: Let us now praise men and women who deserve to be famous but are not – the neighbors helping neighbors, no matter anyone’s zip-code, title or position. All those who become more visible to us all in a hard time like we’re going through now.

·      The first responders going door-to-door in darkness, asking about the missing, searching for the hurt, pulling them free of crushing debris that used to be safe bedrooms.

·      Utility crews doing the dangerous work of clearing downed power lines from sidewalks, yards and streets.

·      Regular citizens pitching in by the hundreds, bringing along whatever they have on hand – claw-hammers, crowbars, chainsaws, and also strong arms and stout backs.

·      And all the professionals from the city’s nonprofit agencies, and remember their donors, too. Without philanthropy, the work of our essential nonprofit organizations is never a given. Such is the social infrastructure of how our modern city works.

To my eye, the most impressive scenes of the past week have been all the volunteers, the Nashvillians who are turning out in great numbers in this time of great need.

You never know who will show up, who will be there in the morning to make God’s work their own. Not until the skies clear and the forgotten sun comes up again. Only then do we see, up and down every wrecked streetscape, the good people who interrupt their own routines, who inconvenience themselves to come forward, and do the hard work of recovery and maybe salvation.

They have included students, young marrieds. singles, and seniors. They come to work, period, and others come to feed them and give them rest and cool water. Because first responders and volunteers grow tired, hungry and thirsty doing this exhausting work to make the community whole again.

And they all – both the victims in need and the volunteers who come to their aid – otherwise live in every corner of our city. We should remember especially that, you and I, when all this is over. That won’t be for awhile, so note now that they have come from all parts of the city to help out.

Nashville is a big patchwork that reminds me of my grandmother’s quilts that we cherish in my family: All those pieces of fabric of many colors, each with a story from a different place, stitched together into a whole that becomes something beautiful and gives us warmth. It is this, specifically, that shows up in Nashville at a time of trial like this. What you see in all those news photos are people coming together, across all kinds of lines, to help our city heal.

I remember one morning, back in 2006, hearing my friend Pastor Enoch Fuzz deliver a benediction at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast downtown. The occasion was Mayor Bill Purcell’s State of Metro Address. In the hall were the usual suits and swells from their sundry office buildings. 

Fuzz, on the other hand, has been the pastor at Corinthian Baptist Church since 1986, and he works much closer to the streets. He began his prayer with a call for understanding and peace around the world and for the world’s leaders, but then he invoked the names of Nashville neighborhoods.

“Lord, bless Bordeaux and Belle Meade, Bellevue and Bell Shire,” he said. “Bless Whites Creek Pike and West End Avenue. Bless Herman Street and Hillsboro Road. Make us all become a blessing.”

I remember thinking the good pastor’s prayer was running a little long; people had places to be, you know. Then I realized what he was doing: By calling out the many neighborhoods that Nashvillians call home, Pastor Fuzz was lifting us up to remember to love one another across the city – not only the neighbor next door but also the family on the other side of town.

It was a unifying prayer and a blessing to remember, even now. We might all say it, together, on this very morning of recovery and a thousand scenes of neighbor helping neighbor, each of us in need of the other.

The Sum of All Fears

Just when we most need a credible White House, the new five-syllable word on all our lips – coronavirus – now looms as the name of a global public health emergency.

This is the time we need calm and credibility from the top. We need a reassuring word, smart leadership, and clear instructions about what to do, what to know, how to take care of our families.

Instead, what we read and hear from the White House briefing room is more palaver about the enemies that the President sees, the “hoaxes” he perceives, and how they are still out to get him.

It’s always about him, not the rest of us.

From where I sit, all this has pulled into a very sharp focus the limitations of Donald Trump’s ill-equipped, odd-ball administration – the President’s own unpreparedness, his inability to put aside his own personality and personal needs, his struggle to manage anything let alone a global crisis, his beefs with science and scientists.

It is a dark, dispiriting world that Trump is making of our good nation. That gloomy strategy has many dimensions, and most of it is appearing in real time now.

What’s Most Important?

It’s not the stock market. It’s the people.

Trump’s first response has been market-based and campaign-based, not science-based. We are reminded how he doesn’t read, not even the briefing papers he is given to inform him on the nature and scale of the virus. 

Who’s in Charge?

His designation of his VP Pence to lead the coronavirus response team was in no way calming. It was objectively odd because Pence also rejects science, and he brings no plausible track record of leading such an initiative. 

Question: Why Pence and not, say, Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, one of the world’s leading authorities on infectious diseases.

Answer: Because Pence is a reliable automaton, and because Trump trusts no one who isn’t inescapably under his thumb, ever tuned to Trump’s personal approval and political interests. And because a Bill Schaffner and his colleagues across the U.S. are, at the end of the day, solid scientists.

‘Lies, All Lies’

We are also now seeing the most damaging – and dangerous – single thing that Trump and his goons have intentionally done to our nation: Their relentless undermining of anyone’s trust in news media.

Everybody complains about media, and normally that’s OK. In normal times, even newspaper publishers, editors and reporters are OK with the harmless bellyaches. But nothing about this time is normal. Trump has made it so.

In a complicated society, we all need good arbiters and honest presenters of objective facts, especially in times of emergency – war, epidemics, disasters from floods to wildfires. By Trump’s assaulting of any and all news media, to his own political ends, the rest of us are experiencing how this shameful, selfish strategy puts our own families and communities at risk in the face of a threat like coronavirus.

What we all need now is for our President to grasp three truths…

1. Most of us outside Washington and your golf resorts mainly don’t care about your politics, or what political enemy you see behind this tree or that shrub. Just do your job, if you can.

2. We want solid, science-based, public-health information now. Not necessary to inter-lace it with your political worries and name-calling.

3. This isn’t about your re-election. It’s about us and protecting our families.

And we will thank you, going forward, to kindly drop the word “hoax” from your talking points when referring to a global health emergency that has now touched every continent and killed thousands around the world. And counting. 

The Field Narrows

I’ll admit to it: I am a Politics Nerd.

Always have been, I think, at least since high school anyway, and maybe even before that. I came by the condition honestly. Both my parents loved the game and were each elected to local public office in their day. A good many of their friends who would be guests in our home were, somehow or other, connected to municipal or state governments. (Richard Fulton, who was my Mom’s classmate at East High School, even went to Congress and came back as our Mayor.)

For me, politics became important and also like a sport. My eventual absorption in it extended into, through, and past my own time on staff at the local newspaper. Of course, there I learned from masters, who understood politics innately, followed it closely as it related to power centers in the city, and they also wrote beautifully about it. 

At some point, it gets to be a chronic condition: You get to wondering who might run for Senate in other states, or for mayor in Chicago or Memphis, or Columbia or Carthage. At some level, it all matters: It’s how communities organize themselves. They either move forward or they don’t. We have, to be sure, seen both types here in Nashville over time.

All of this is partly why I not only vote but follow the race for President in all its manifestations, twists and turns:  The caucuses, the primaries, which candidates are making progress, who’s not. Because of my condition, I even zoomed in on the live news coverage of those Iowa caucuses of two weeks ago and actually understood what was going down in all those gyms and church basements. That nobody could count it at the end of the night was, for me, merely a detail.

The Democratic debates this season have been fun to follow, too – and especially that one broadcast from Las Vegas on Wednesday night this week. By now, the field has been winnowed sufficiently – down to six women and men – that we can actually grasp distinctions in candidate style and substance. This race remains a moving target, of course, but some clarity is emerging. Three observations…

·      For all the clamor and coverage of Mike Bloomberg bringing his billions into the race, and how his campaign has been hiring staff across the country, I was shocked at how un-prepared he was for some obvious questions about his record (e.g., the multiple NDAs with former employees, that stop-and-frisk policy when he was mayor of NYC).

·      In contrast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren seemed utterly prepared – and especially for Bloomberg. It was her finest hour so far.

·      The clashes between Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were somewhat hard to watch, but also refreshing. In my view these are two outstanding candidates, very smart, and either could be a transformative president.

Of course, it’s much too early to expect any clarity as to outcome. That may not come until the national convention. So be it. But it’s good to be paying attention along the way.

And it’s good to remember, too, even as we hear the personal attacks, that no candidate is perfect. To wait for one without flaws is to wait for one who is not coming. Neither Superwoman nor Superman is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves, judging as best we can.

There are months to go before the November election, with its verdict on whether President Trump gets a second term. But early voting is underway now across Tennessee ahead of our presidential preference primary on March 3 - our part in Super Tuesday, which helps determine who will run against Trump. Especially this time around, it’s important for us all to participate this year, whenever the polls open.

I’ve already voted. Have you?

The Trump Watch - Year 4

You and I may not live to see it, but someday historians will give a keen-eyed accounting of what the oddest of all Presidents, Donald Trump, did to our country.

Yesterday will surely appear in the darkest column. It was the day Trump’s chief minion and advocate, the Attorney General William Barr, intervened on his boss’ behalf in the Roger Stone case.

Stone, one of the creepiest of Trump’s creepy circle, was not only accused but had been convicted outright of lying to Congress and of thwarting the investigation into the Russian meddling affair of 2016. He was about to go away for up to nine years.

Then on Tuesday morning Trump tweeted his displeasure with that sentencing recommendation. By dinner time Barr had fixed it. No problem, sir.

Four assistant U.S. attorneys, who had recommended that punishment, promptly resigned from the case. One of them resigned his DOJ job altogether. Of course, the Republican majority in the Congress is still silent in the face of all this. Trump proceeds to one more of his rallies and grins the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

This is serious stuff, and I fear there is much more to come, now that this President is unleashed and unbound. Even the constitutional referees have now left the field in Washington. Anything goes.

Who in authority will speak to any of this now? Anyone?

The door to God knows what stands wide open.

What else is coming?

A Dreary Monday

Back in Nashville this morning, where it’s raining cats and dogs, my thoughts on the past week of national politics are as dreary as the view outside my window.

I have good friends who are fighting the Good Fight. Every day they are either going door to door on behalf of one or another candidate for president, or helping new voters know how to get ready. (The Tennessee primary and the rest of Super Tuesday are just three weeks away now.) But one can be forgiven on this wet Monday morning for admitting to a feeling of despair, wondering when the sun will shine.

Take the Iowa Democratic caucuses of last week. 

It’s hard to grasp the entirety of what ails the national Democratic Party now, let alone to have any clarity on how one candidate will find a way to unity ahead of the general election in November. This morning it is especially baffling why the DNC does not insist on a wholesale re-structuring of how its nominees are selected. Members of the big Executive Committee seem more interested in packing for a festive national convention, like in the old days. They seem trapped in delusion.

You might say the Republicans should do the same – so unrepresentative of America are Iowa and New Hampshire – but Republicans figure the 2020 game is over already. Why upset the apple cart? As with the so-called “Impeachment Trial” they know, especially now, that the fix is in.

I have written before that if there’s one organization in our nation capable of blowing what ought to be a golden political opportunity, it is the Democrats in their “transparent” apparatus. I offer that thought again this morning.

Then consider Trump’s State of the Union speech, and what it foretells of the incumbent’s campaign through the summer and fall..

I found much of the speech troubling – as to facts and the actual record of his regime – but even I will admit he delivered a powerful, masterful political message, using all the tools at a President’s disposal.

Any Democrat who denies its effect on U.S. voters is sadly in denial.

May the weather, and my mood, improve soon.

What the Rest of Us Must Do

I don’t know about you, but on Friday morning I had to take a long walk. For me, there was a lot to sort out from the night before.

As midnight approached late Thursday came the final confirmation, for any who might have needed it, that the Trump/McConnell Fix was in on the Trump impeachment. The Senate’s Trump Majority determined that the nation need not hear from any witnesses at all about what has happened in the White House. So firm and complete and unrestrained now is Donald Trump’s power over what used to be called the ‘Grand Ole Party.’ (What a quaint expression that seems this morning.)

Of course, this particular Fix was in from the beginning, yes? Only by Friday morning did we realize how thorough and unalloyed it has been. The Trump Party has had its 51-seat majority from the start. By midnight Thursday, no matter how exhaustive the House managers’ preparation for impeachment and trial had been, Republicans in the Senate fell in line, as Republicans do. And most of them didn’t bother to speak their reasons why.

o

When I was a lad (meaning, in my younger 20s) I was assigned to be The Tennessean Washington correspondent for six months. I was part of a new rotation between full-time DC reporters, our most recent correspondent Elaine Shannon having departed for a job at a national newsmagazine.

This assignment worked out conveniently for me, as it came when I needed to be in the capital city as part of my journalism degree program. After the holidays, I would need to depart Washington for the main campus in Evanston, Illinois, for the final two quarters of my program.

So I was not there long, but I was there long enough. Plenty of time to learn for myself how our capital city is not a real city at all. Of course, there are DC neighborhoods that suffer and survive as the urban poor do in any U.S. city, but most of that is ignored by the governing class on Capitol Hill.

In my time there, Tennessee’s congressional delegation had a different character. Super-majorities were still largely Democratic, not Republican. Tennessee’s elected representatives were of both parties. The state’s delegation included Senators Howard Baker Jr. and Bill Brock, both Republican, but on the House side, the Democrats Joe L. Evins and Dick Fulton and Harold Ford Sr., among others. Different characters than now. Different times than this.

When I arrived in DC, I was quickly struck by how the place was always about work and politics, all the time. In the evenings after work, Hill staffers and journalists who covered their bosses would socialize but invariably even those conversations would return to work-day subjects, to politics, to the things most of us across America prefer to leave behind at the office when quitting time comes.

In today’s Washington, that aspect is still the same, only worse.

Most members of Congress hardly talk to those on the other side of the aisle, except at a few social events where fraternization won’t count and doesn’t matter. More generally, with a notable few exceptions, there’s very little real collaboration across the partisan line. And in that void, I imagine it must be so easy for a member to get so wrapped around the axle of procedure and ideology that little else matters. Exceptions are unusual.

Add to this the Trump Effect – his hammering via Twitter of any who might disagree or seem to stray, the collapse of the old Republican Party into a cult of worship or fear, the rise of the hair-trigger social-media trolls – and it’s little wonder so little good comes of it.

o

I read yesterday that my friend Jon Meacham, the Tennessean and much-honored historian of the presidency, had observed of the current moment that President Trump is now “functionally a monarch” in view of the Senate’s acquittal of him.

The furthest any senator seemed willing to venture was to call Trump’s actions on the Ukraine affair “inappropriate” – but no censure.

Left unaddressed were any other aspects of the destructive effects Trump has had on our nation. The messages at midnight Thursday seemed to side-step the real trouble that Trump has unleashed. 

It seems to me not enough simply to bemoan the culture wars, when a full airing of facts might have helped all know how best to vote in nine short months. There is still time for that; we just cannot look to the Senate for any help.

Senators might have voiced at least a little concern of what presidential behaviors they were condoning, what kind of future they were accepting. You would think. But they did not. None of that.

o

On this Sunday morning, the prospect of an even less-restrained Trump paints a very dark picture indeed. It is an image of danger. It is a specter of a different country.

My answer this morning: So now we must vote. All of us.

And we can help others know how important it is to register, and to vote. The real heroes of the moment are not politicians but the many souls who are leading the registration drives – city by city, state by state – especially among young people who will vote for the first time.

This is the action that counts and will matter most for our country.

Voting is what the rest of us must do now.

o

'What Will Alexander Do?'

So yesterday afternoon, I take a call from a reporter for NBC News in Washington – so desperate is everyone in DC to know where Sen. Lamar Alexander stands on the Witnesses Question.

To be clear, I have no clue. I haven’t spoken with him in many weeks.

But this week, on Capitol Hill and across much of Tennessee, eyes are now trained on my old boss – not because he is loud on the matter of President Trump’s impeachment but because he has been publicly so silent.

POLITICO magazine put the spotlight on Alexander before the weekend, reporting that other senators on both sides of the aisle are following closely what the Tennessee senator says. This is partly because he is seen as a possible swing vote (most immediately on the procedural question of whether to call witnesses in the Senate trial) but also because of his history of building bridges.

Even I get questions about all this as a former Alexander staffer when he was governor (30-plus years ago) and now as a newspaper columnist with a platform. People come up or write in asking me: “How do you think Lamar will vote on impeachment?” or “Why doesn’t he speak out on Trump’s behavior?” or just “What will Alexander do?” These queries come by phone, email and on the street at least once a day.

“I don’t know” is my usual answer. Some days, I have snapped, “Ask him yourself!” And at least a few have done so. (I know because several have sent me the reply, by now surely a form-letter, that came back in the mail from his office.)

For a few days I thought I could guess the answers, but then decided I was only projecting what I hoped he would do. Then over the weekend came the Bolton Book Bombshell, which appears to have undone (somewhat) the iron-clad GOP position to refuse to call any witnesses.

o

The desperate searching by Washington reporters - like the one who called even me down here in Nashville, thinking Lamar might have blabbed secretly to one of us (he hasn’t) - all of that is understandable on one level. Outside Alexander’s own family, I’m one of a handful of old friends who have known him best, or at least have watched how he has worked over his public life. I’ve also written the closest thing we have as yet to his political biography. My two books on Tennessee’s political history – the Coup and Crossing the Aisle – tell many stories about many people, but the story of Alexander’s remarkable career runs like a river through it all.

In the impeachment case now, except for its extraordinary scale, I can imagine Alexander doing generally what he’s always done on great policy questions – working quietly toward a solution, usually with a preferred outcome, building consensus without fanfare, working both sides of the partisan aisle, behind the scenes, and keeping his own private tally of who stands where. This was true of his major legislative goals as governor on education, roads, health policy, and also with the major domestic policy breakthroughs in Congress over the past decade, including the needed reform of the war-time “No Child Left Behind” program and passage of the “21st Century Cures Act” (both of which came out of the Senate committee he chairs).

Throughout all that, over 40-plus years, typically Alexander has never grabbed for any premature public credit – knowing there will be plenty to go around once the job is done, after a result is in hand. And, whatever the subject, it’s always a careful process. For the past three year, any senator determined to get good policy enacted, must know that an errant word here or there can send a good bill to oblivion; suddenly this President whose signature you need abruptly won’t sign.

I imagine that’s an especially hard maneuver in today’s Washington – what with the omnivorous 24/7 news coverage (as with the network researcher who phoned even me yesterday), the hair-trigger social media, the rising intolerance across our larger country, and the rampant partisanship now practiced by many (but not all) of the other the politicians.

It’s a job that’s made no easier by the craven Hobson’s Choice that Trump lays on his own party. (My way or the highway – take it or leave it. And if you leave, just know that I and my “base” will vindictively destroy your career.) With Trump, the fear itself is plenty enough if your own political job is more important to you than your principles.

Alexander, in my rather long experience, is not like that. He usually plays a longer, quieter game. It’s his silence that frustrates his friends also. People wonder why everyone isn’t saying all that they might to help remove the unfit Trump from his office, that dreadful human being, so un-wise and un-prepared to be President, who uses shock and distraction with a surgeon’s skill.

But public silence also affords a wisp of maneuvering room for any who may prefer for an ouster to happen.

o

The way the evidence against Trump has mounted up, the longer the tally sheet may stand now with the names of senators who are – privately so far – willing to call witnesses. The true count will not be known until the last day, when every Senator must either announce Yea or Nay.

I expected all this would develop slowly, and then it would happen fast. In the Senate, the notion of strength-in-numbers works both ways.

While the public fuss in DC this week is over “witnesses” and “more evidence,” it seems to me the key facts of Trump’s conduct in office are well known at this point - much of it by the President’s own public statements of the past few months. The key document now is that private tally sheet of senators, which only the shrewdest counters can know. In fact, it was the word “tally” in the news reports of this morning that suggest there’s much new scrambling behind the scenes – and, for me, the word reminded me of Alexander’s history of finding consensus.

Most important now is that when enough senators know in their hearts that no more proof is needed – and thus know which button they will eventually press in service to history – that will be the moment to vote.

o

Speaking of leaders, there’s another relevant item in Alexander’s personal history that comes to mind now.

We should remember that day in March of 2011, when he announced he was stepping away from the GOP’s formal leadership apparatus. He was, at the time, chairman of the Republican Conference Committee, meaning he was No. 3 in the leadership line.

Here’s why that could be noteworthy now: When the President is of the same party, there’s a political straight-jacket that sits on the Senate Majority Leader and his very top-most lieutenants. It’s a duty to support, in lock-step, whatever the White House wants. (This, of course, has played out over the past three years not only in this impeachment imbroglio but on everything from Trump’s judicial nominations to his priorities like the border wall and the separation of families.) Alexander resolved nine years ago to be a good Republican, but not that sort of lieutenant – that particular kind of GOP machine operative and enforcer.

Read his words from the 2011 announcement, explaining why he was stepping away from the internal apparatus:

“…Stepping down from leadership will liberate me to spend more time working for results on the issues I care most about. I want to do more to make the Senate a more effective institution so that it can deal better with serious issues. There are different ways to provide leadership within the Senate. After nine years here, this is how I believe I can now make my greatest contribution. For these same reasons I do not plan to seek a leadership position in the next congress. I said to Tennesseans when I first ran for the Senate that I would serve with conservative principles and an independent attitude. I will continue to serve in that same way. I am a very Republican Republican. I intend to be more, not less, in the thick of resolving serious issues.”

In my mind’s eye, Tennessee’s senior senator is now doing precisely that. At this moment, the serious issue that needs “resolving” is Trump’s removal. It’s a task ill-suited to the formal, monolithic GOP leadership structure of the Senate. The apparatus should perform this work but cannot free itself to do.

Alexander, though, is free to “work the floor” unofficially.

How, in the end, will he vote? We’ll see.

o

There’s one other recurring comment that has come my way, from Tennesseans impatient with Alexander at the moment. They typically mention Howard Baker and Watergate, that time in the early 70s when it was President Nixon who was walking on the razor’s edge, and they will say this:

“Lamar should remember the courage of his own mentor, Senator Baker.”

To that one, I say, “I’m confident he does.”

o

Child Care: The Crisis Tennessee Can Solve

Policymakers who are closest to their people – whether in Washington or Tennessee – know best that the most important issues today are those that beset young families.

And the broadest manifestation of this – the need that is most savagely unaddressed with policy and funding – is the cluster of conditions we can fairly call “the child care crisis.” It’s real - as real across Tennessee as it is anywhere in America. And it has many faces…

·      Child care providers in great numbers have been closing their doors, going out of business. This is happening for a number of economic and/or regulatory reasons, but no one in authority at the state government level seems willing or capable of connecting the dots and of devising a better (read “more coordinated”) policy.

·      In this void, young parents especially in single-parent households therefore genuinely struggle to find and hold jobs, because those departed providers were essential parts of their daily domestic support systems. It can be devastating when the floor falls through like that. Frankly, I wonder if anyone in the Governor’s office, or the legislative staffs, or at the Department of Human Services even knows the true magnitude of this policy failure.

·      And the cities where this silent catastrophe is most concentrated, in turn, eventually see their broader foundations weakened. And this is happening not only in the populous cities.

All of this constitutes a daily, cynical loop - a cycle of despair - that should not be happening in any county in this time of prosperity. Yet too many of our policymakers ignore it all.

In Tennessee, as we all now clearly understand, nearly a billion dollars has either been ignored, rejected or returned in the face of this silent catastrophe. And never with a satisfying explanation for this confounding, backwards condition: this domestic disaster in thousands of Tennessee homes, on the one hand, and the availability of billions in federal dollars on the other.

This most urgent set of issues seems to get the least attention from the reigning supermajorities. Not just in broken, distracted Washington, but at our state capitol, too. The best they can do is mouth Washington talking points. Which help nobody, not even in Washington. No wonder government is so despised.

Young parents, who wake up every morning in the grip of this crisis, despair because the thing is largely silent. The legislative majorities seems to prefer ignoring it. Tennessee news media are telling the story. See this recent piece: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/09/14/childcare-tennessee-workforce-child-care-needs-cost-revenue-families/2266422001/ (Note how that piece is dated last September, and realize how this child care issue is not a new one. It’s only the baffling reality of all that available funding that’s arguably new - how it sits idle as families need help.)

This is an outrageous condition across our state. Young families who struggle deserve much better than this sort of lackadaisical government.

Can no one in authority connect the dots? Do they not see the need nor hear the despair?

This is the one crisis that Tennessee can solve, if our leaders will.

Opening Day

In Nashville this is how we know it’s January: The temperatures drop, the rest of the birds fly south, and the Tennessee legislature rolls back into town. It’s all as certain as the next morning, though that part about the legislature can be especially chilling and as cheerless as the winter wind.

“Now is the time,” the 19th Century statesman Daniel Webster is said to have once said, “when men work quietly in the fields and women weep softly in the kitchen. The legislature is in session, and no man’s property is safe.”

Today was Opening Day for the 2020 session. On the House side, 2019 was clearly a hard year for the Republican super-majority, most of the travail having little to do with official business. To make a very long story mercifully short, the problem was Rep. Glen Casada (who still represents District 63 in Williamson County, by the way). The speakership was the highest political job Casada ever wanted, and yet he couldn’t hang onto it. Because he could not handle power.

Casada had trafficked in favors and tolerated low behaviors, thinking these would give him job security. In the end, he was left with no job and fewer friends, their memories of his patronage having dimmed by then, as memories will.

So today a new speaker, Cameron Sexton of Crossville, gaveled the House to order, and the mood on the hill is considerably more upbeat.

o

Last Thursday I caught up with Speaker Sexton just ahead of this new session. It was my fourth interview with him. (The first was on August 13, soon after the House GOP caucus had agreed to put the big gavel in his hands.) In our visits, to my eye and ear, Sexton’s bearing and tone are as different from his predecessor’s as June is from January.

There is about Sexton an air of freshness and candor, not furtiveness nor conspiracy. He looks at you with steady eyes. He is measured in his answers but has sidestepped none of my questions, either on pending legislative issues or his own life story. Already he seems at ease with his new role. He appreciates the complexity of the legislature (where he has served since 2010), and he travels statewide broadly and publicly.

His visits into distant districts across the long state serve multiple purposes, of course: They help him cultivate working relationships among his fellow members, and help prepare Sexton himself to lead the House forward.

Sitting in his new speaker’s digs on the sixth floor of the Cordell Hull Building, you get from Sexton a sense of humility, his gratitude that people trust him, his respect for his fellow members, and a reverence for the institution of the House and its long history.

How you launch a new regime is important because it telegraphs much. Sexton will be tested soon enough – every Speaker is – but for the record we should note that this is how he began.

o

Speaking of relationships, here’s something to watch over the coming months: How will Speaker Sexton and Governor Bill Lee develop their working routine? They are both Republicans, true enough, but in a super-majority we have learned there are many rooms. Word is these two barely know each other outside ceremonial handshakes.

How often and how fluidly they might collaborate remains to be seen. (Baseline: Remember how the TANF story unfolded last month, and before that how the divisive issue of private school vouchers ended for the whole House at the close of that tortured session last year. Neither of those episodes put anyone in mind of healthy coordination.)

I believe Sexton, at this moment, is more attuned than Lee to notions of “legislative independence” relative to the governor’s office. On one level, that’s understandable; Sexton has served in government for ten years, Lee only one. Some governors have started in office seeming to regard the General Assembly not as a co-equal branch but as a board of directors. Not so in government.

As we are also reminded now, watching extreme Washington, the branches of government are importantly different – separate in their powers and prerogatives - and for good historical and constitutional reasons.

o

Anyone who worked with the late Ned McWherter in his day can tell you how he had a pocketful of colorful expressions. My favorite among those was when he would say, “Let’s just ease along.”

That didn’t mean he was indecisive. Partly, it was his way of dealing with all the advice that come a Speaker’s way. More fundamentally, he knew that the passage of time (even a small breather) could give better perspective, cool hot tempers, on occasion bring wisdom, and thus consensus could rise.

After four interviews with Sexton, I’ve noted that he uses just two other words for a similar effect: He says, “We’ll see.” In our visits, he can be drawn into long answers on various issues, but he also knows that rendering quick judgments on every question is not in a speaker’s job requirements. This will come in handy for Sexton, as it did for McWherter, as he deals with 98 other members. The speaker speaks when he’s ready.

o

A strong presiding officer, meaning a speaker who is honest in his word but sparing in his palaver, can often be a facilitator of quiet progress. On the Senate side, the affable Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is another model of this. Sometimes he will plant a seed of an idea or, with a well-timed word, slow down a questionable bill. 

To understand his character, I once asked Sexton to tell me the names of his “mentors.” He was quick to name McNally. Their friendship dates back to McNally’s earliest legislative campaigns in East Tennessee.

Their mutual regard is reminiscent of another pair of long-serving speakers: two Democrats, McWherter and Lt. Gov. John S. Wilder. Today, of course, it’s the Republicans who hold those same positions, with McNally and Sexton now sitting atop the houses of our state legislature.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that their alliance will prove positive for Tennesseans in this very different age. I suspect it may help them both as leaders. It might even inspire Governor Lee to sharpen his own game.

How might all of that unfold?

o Will McNally and Sexton collaborate often and share much in the months and years ahead?

o Will Lee make a point of getting their counsel early and often? Will they each require their respective staffs to cooperate at a high level, especially on matters that will affect millions (of people, of dollars) that ought not be purely political.

o Will they ditch the jargon of broken Washington and instead focus squarely on the health and welfare of Tennesseans and rise above the breakage here? Or will too much narrow ideology get in the way?

We’ll see.

‘Where Did the Courage Come From?’

Word came on Sunday that Congressman John Lewis of Georgia is gravely ill. The diagnosis: Pancreatic cancer, Stage 4.

His office told reporters, in Mr. Lewis’ own words, that he intends to fight back and plans to lick this latest foe. This man of great strength, great courage, and great heart has fought many fights, and most often he has triumphed.

John Lewis has been a member of Congress for 32 years. Elected 17 times. Health permitting, he would be elected that many more. For those who remember the path he has walked (and we should all remember) you know he is also as connected to Nashville as to Atlanta and Georgia’s 5th District.

It was to Nashville he came to college and seminary, at Fisk and American Baptist. It was here that this man of modest height grew tall in prestige. Here, when he was 20, he was arrested and jailed with other peaceful but determined young people - from Tennessee State University, American Baptist and Fisk - for daring to integrate lunch counters on Church Street.

That’s when they all soared into history.

o

If you’ve ever met John Lewis, this man who paired a kind and knowing smile with the preacher’s thunder, you did not forget him. I was blessed to meet him three times, once in Atlanta (a chance encounter in a shopping mall) and twice more in two private homes in Nashville:

First. I was walking through the Lenox Mall in Buckhead when I spotted the congressman talking with two other men. I couldn’t resist telling him I was from Nashville, how much we appreciate him and his story here. He shook my hand, and I remember he described Nashville as “the beloved city.” That expression, from the Bible, was not original with Mr. Lewis but he said it a lot about Nashville. So formative was his time here as a young man.

Second. In November of 1998, Pam and Phil Pfeffer hosted a remarkable evening reception for the author David Halberstam on the publication of his book The Children and to honor many of the people the book was about. (The Children is now the primary reference for understanding how all those young people had helped to ignite the Movement in 1960s – the courage it took, the verbal and physical abuse they withstood to bring about justice, and the long-term examples they set.)

Pfeffer was then president of Halberstam’s publisher Random House. I caught up with Phil this morning, and he reminded me that reception had been the first time so many of the original participants had re-convened in Nashville since the Sixties. To this day, on my own bookshelf, is my copy of The Children. In its front pages are the autographs of Congressman Lewis, Halberstam, Hank Thomas, Gloria Johnson-Powell, George Barrett, Dr. C.T. Vivian, the Rev. Jim Lawson, and of John Seigenthaler, all of whom were there that night. (This morning, as I scanned their signatures and sentiments, I reflected on how so many of these heroes of the Movement are now gone.)

Third. Fourteen years later, at Seigenthaler’s home in Whitworth, came another special evening. Congressman Lewis had returned to Nashville that morning for a large midday tribute event honoring Seigenthaler, then 81 years old. The retired editor/publisher, in turn, had invited several dozen other friends to his home, mostly from the newspaper days, at the end of that day to meet Mr. Lewis.

It was a festive reunion, but at a point in the evening Seigenthaler called for silence, said he was going to ask Rep. Lewis to say a few words, and then as our host he would open a brief period of Q&A. The congressman spoke with great eloquence and strong feeling of the days of sit-ins, arrests, and the rough stuff. He connected all that to our present day, and how the struggle must continue - racial discrimination being maybe less visible now, he said, but it’s still insidious.

Then followed a half-dozen questions from others, but I only remember one. It was Seigenthaler who asked it, and it stilled the room:

“John Lewis, where did the courage come from?”

This black man from Georgia, who in his youth had been beaten and bloodied, who had persevered and rose into history, gave his answer. It reminded me of Halberstam’s own words about him in The Children:

“Jim Lawson had prepared them well,” David wrote. “He had taught them what to expect. Most important of all, they had each other. There was strength not so much in their numbers, although that helped, but in their shared belief. Jail was not crushing; it was, (Lewis) thought to his amazement, liberating.”

o

God bless John Lewis.

Our best wishes, deepest respect, and much love from your Beloved City.

In Praise of Public Works

Today is called ‘Boxing Day’ in Britain. The day after Christmas is, to me, a time for clearing away boxes, paper, and other jetsam of the Christian holiday.

That’s not how Boxing Day began, nor does the term have anything to do with boxing the pugilist sport. It dates back to Queen Victoria’s time, when the fortunate would bundle up gifts and give them to the less fortunate. It also became a day off for servants.

My own transatlantic, American notion is that the day after Christmas is when the more fortunate families also clear away the debris of generosity, the leftover rubbish of our gift-giving, and toss out what’s finally left over from all the commercial excess when the fun is finally done.

So, what happens to all that stuff the morning after? That’s part of how Public Works is here to serve you and me across our city. And it wouldn’t kill us to be grateful.

When you think about it (and most of us don’t) the 400-plus employees at DPW do a staggering job, considering its scale: They not only help us clean up at Christmas week, but all the 51 other weeks, too. This Boxing Day is a good day for us to be thankful. Across Davidson County, as you read this, the crews in their big trucks are circulating dutifully, mainly quietly, always wordlessly, emptying garbage cans and recycling bins. If not this morning then whatever day is your street’s turn.

DPW is one of the largest agencies of Metropolitan Government with hundreds working while you and I sleep. And they not only haul away trash but repair potholes, fix broken sidewalks, mow grass in the rights of way, and much more.

With the holidays approaching, I caught up with my friend Mark Sturtevant the other day. He’s the director of the public works department, and Mark calls his people the “unsung heroes” of the community. He says what they mainly do is “help define the quality of life” for residents and visitors of Davidson County.

In October alone, Public Works crews picked up 12,950 tons of trash from 139,184 homes in the urban services district. They also trim tree limbs away from streets and roads, change out traffic signal bulbs, make and install street signs, clean up roadside litter – the kinds of stuff you and I either can’t or won’t do. They get up way before I do and work longer hours.

Today and tomorrow, when you spot the crew that works your street, give at least wave, and a kind word. It’s about being grateful, regardless of the season.

God bless them all.