Typical black pol/canidate answer to being excluded...race card.
No hardball as Bredesen, Hilleary start pitch
By Paula Wade wade@gomemphis.com
August 15, 2002
NASHVILLE - The first gubernatorial debate between Democrat Phil Bredesen and Republican Van Hilleary started like an evening's coffee chat about health care, with the candidates sparring only on the issue of how to rein in medical malpractice premiums.
In the first televised debate between the major parties' candidates for governor, aired Wednesday night only in Nashville and Chattanooga, the most striking differences between the men were those of style and approach.
Both men agreed that the state should expand long-term care options for the elderly and disabled, but neither would say how they'd pay for it. Both men said they favor TennCare reforms that lower the health program's benefit levels and pare TennCare rolls.
Both said they favor insurance reform of some type, although Bredesen was more specific about what he means by reform:
"We need to sit down with providers and insurers and the interest groups and employers and agree on some basic level of benefits we can count on," in private-sector insurance, Bredesen said.
They repeated their stock answers on taxes:
Hilleary promised to "roll back" the state's recent 1-cent sales tax hike without raising any other tax, and actually asked viewers to "read my lips" as he forswore an income tax on his watch.
Bredesen said the tax issue is dead, and that the big task now is how to manage the state's business for the next four years on existing tax levels.
"I am not for the income tax, and in four years if I were to change my mind I would make that issue part of that effort," said Bredesen.
When the time came for the candidates to ask each other questions, Bredesen offered a philosophical softball: whether health care is a basic right or a privilege. Hilleary neatly sidestepped it by saying "it is a moral duty of society to provide access to health care . . . not just government."
But Hilleary's question about malpractice insurance and limiting medical liability was half-accusation: "Will you side with the plaintiffs' trial lawyers instead of the mothers and the physicians and children and everybody else . . . ?"
Bredesen calmly responded that Tennessee has not become a haven for high-award medical liability suits, but that if it became a problem, he would "sit down with the plaintiff bar and with medical professionals and business. . . . I am not going to try and divide the world into black and white, good and bad and drive a wedge between different groups of people."
Hilleary responded that he did see the malpractice issue as "black and white, good or bad," and would favor liability limits.
When asked how they'd fix TennCare, Hilleary listed measures already started by the Sundquist administration, whose rewrite of TennCare will force at least 100,000 Tennesseans off the rolls.
From the beginning, Bredesen stuck to his theme of competent management, contrasting his experience as a health care entrepreneur and Nashville mayor to Hilleary's four terms in Congress.
"There's a lot you learn in managing a company through good years and bad years that I think is so relevant to our state today. I've never been a status-quo mayor and I'm not going to be a status-quo governor," Bredesen said.
In the closing statement, Bredesen took his only shot at Hilleary, comparing him with another former congressman, Gov. Don Sundquist: "We've tried someone out of the legislative branch in Washington for the last eight years and it didn't work."
Hilleary, in his closing statement, accused Bredesen of believing "that mere management is enough, and that we need an HMO technician as governor. . . . I say we need a leader. A leader starts out with a bedrock set of principles that do not change."
Contact Nashville Bureau reporter Paula Wade at (615) 242-2018.