Is Lamar Alexander the last of the problem solvers?
Two national political reporters recently asked me if I thought, from a Tennessee perspective, the coming retirement of Sen. Lamar Alexander would constitute the “end of an era” for collaborative government.
It’s a good question. You should ponder it, too, if you appreciate solid progress on actual policy over the noise and empty pot-shots of shallower officials. Working across party lines is always the harder path, but it’s more productive in the long run.
Call it bipartisanship, or just working with others, but there are important examples in our Tennessee history. We appreciate this manner of conduct now because of its vanishing rarity in the capitols at Nashville and Washington.
Washington is very different today
The reporters recalled Alexander’s long relationship with his mentor, Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., elected in 1966. As some like to tell it, Alexander learned his politics at Baker’s knee, but the truth is they learned plenty from each other, over long years.
In 1974 Alexander ran for governor and lost. He tried again four years later, won, and served from 1979 to 1987. During that period Baker would become the Senate majority leader.
Tennessee has had a run of extraordinary national leaders since the 1940s: Cordell Hull, Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore Sr. and Baker, Jim Sasser, Al Gore, Fred Thompson, Bill Frist, Alexander, Bob Corker in the modern era.
By this measure, today’s Washington is different.
President Donald Trump fosters such an overlay of stop-action anger that most senators feel his furies are best avoided. Congress initiates new laws largely by avoiding the grouching bear, and Alexander, too, has had to play a different ballgame.
This is true of his recent enactments: the 21st Century Cures Act, the Music Modernization Act, streamlining the federal aid application process for college students, and passing the Great Americans Outdoors Act this year.
Good policies came from working quietly.
How Tennessee avoided stalemate with a divided government
Before the colors fade, I can report on the deeper time when Alexander hung his Stetson at the state Capitol. I was an eyewitness there as a member of his staff until 1986, when my own career moved away from government.
The early 1980s were a fraught time for Tennesseans: Family incomes were low, unemployment high, hopes dim. The real test of any governor is how much is accomplished in times of so-called “divided government” — when the governor is of one political party and the legislature’s majority of the other.
Through Alexander’s eight years as governor, there was never a year when Tennessee state government did not have this condition.
Normally it’s a recipe for stalemate, as in much of Washington today. But much was accomplished here by Democrats and Republicans working together. They addressed hardships, seized opportunities and produced results.
A half-century later folks still speak of these:
h Enactment in 1986 of the modern highway program, leaving Tennesseans with zero road debt for 30 years. (Gov. Ned Mcwherter, the Democrat who followed Alexander, had helped pass it as speaker of the House and then took the commitment forward into his own term.) The state did not pass a major highway construction investment again until 2017.
h Full funding for state universities and introduction of the Career Ladder, which made Tennessee the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well.
h Tennessee became America’s third-largest automaker. Nissan came first, then General Motors, then thousands of just-in-time auto parts suppliers.
h It was much later, in 2005, when Nissan moved its U.S. headquarters to Williamson County, but executives then credited the Tennessee tradition of governors, senators and mayors putting party differences aside to help compete.
Alexander, with his Senate election of 2002, became the only Tennessean ever to be popularly elected governor and then U.S. senator.
He now has served a total of 26 years in the two jobs. This will end soon now.
As the curtain shortly falls on that long era of collaboration, what then? What will happen next with two new senators who seem so happily to be all about Trump?
Keel Hunt is the author of “Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee to the 21st Century and Could Save America.” Read more at www.keelhunt.com.