Frist tours, not talking about presidential run
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During his August congressional recess, the Senate Majority Leader had come to the town to talk about farm issues and rising fuel costs with some 200 people at the Willie German Equipment Co.
He was asked about his White House intentions several times, said Jeremy German, manager of the company’s Somerville store and son of the owner, a Fayette county commissioner. All got the same answer he told the Associated Press this week.
“I really am 100 percent focused, all of my energies, on leading the Senate for the remainder of my term — these next 18 months. … After those 18 months, I’ll decide,” Frist said.
Observers wondered why a potential front-runner for the presidency spent almost the entire break in his home state of Tennessee, while other rumored candidates showed up on “Meet the Press,” went abroad and toured important electoral states.
Frist treated hurricane victims at the ravaged New Orleans airport, but asked not to have reporters follow him. He stayed focused on Tennessee issues, but allowed himself to be seen as passive when a popular base was slated for realignment.
He began his vacation with what some saw as a political misstep: breaking with President Bush and prominent evangelicals to advocate stem cell research on the Senate floor. Days later in Nashville, the Family Research Council held its televised “Justice Sunday II” rally. Frist, who had headlined the first “Justice Sunday,” was not invited.
By the time August was over, a Florida-based group was airing ads in the presidential markets of Iowa and South Carolina declaring that Frist, “supports public funding for research that actually destroys human life.”
The leader spent August putting his political eggs in a Volunteer orange basket. Just before break he scored hundreds of millions for Tennessee projects under the locally popular Highway Bill, notably an extra $100 million for western Tennessee’s stretch of the proposed Interstate 69.
Then, in August’s other big political money grab-bag, he watched as a federal panel recommended stripping a Nashville Air National Guard base of its planes along with hundreds of jobs. Most conspicuously, he refused — along with all of Tennessee’s other congressional Republicans — to sign a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Gov. Phil Bredesen’s lawsuit to halt the realignment.
Frist says he did “everything humanly possibly that could be done,” to save the base, such as talking to federal commissioners on the base’s behalf. But when local advocates learned he had written a letter in support of the threatened Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota — which was then saved by the commission — before writing on behalf of the Nashville unit, sparks flew.
“I say it’s definitely going to hurt (Frist) right there in this community where the 118th is housed,” said retired Col. Don Deering, executive director of the Tennessee National Guard Association. Frist has pledged to help the base get another mission.
Privately, home was comfortable. Frist spent most of the month visiting schools, workplaces and health clinics, showing up at NASCAR races, jogging with his wife and relaxing. It was so pleasant, Frist planned to come back as the Senate was about to reconvene, for one last visit to the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration. But when Hurricane Katrina hit, he headed to the Gulf Coast as a medical volunteer instead.
Frist wondered if it might be seen as the grandstanding he’d so conspicuously avoided throughout the rest of August.
“People may have been even critical for me going down there. But the best way for me to get information is to jump right in the middle of where the action is and participate as a volunteer physician and see where communications broke down … and come back and legislate properly,” he said.
And there is another possibility: That the spotty recess is proof that Frist really isn’t mobilizing for a presidential run. At least not yet.
“It’s not the action of a man who has assembled a smart team to help him run for president,” said Tom Perdue, a former political consultant who ran the 1994 campaign that put Frist in the Senate. “He is acting on his instincts, his compulsions and his conscience. Honest to God, I don’t think (politics) is what is prompting him or propelling him because I know him in a way most people don’t.”
Frist described himself that way as well.
“People don’t get the fact that I’m a doctor, I’m a healer. That’s my life, that’s my profession, it’s what I took an oath to, and that I am spending 12 years in public service and putting all my energies into that,” Frist said.
“But I’m a non-career politician, I’m a citizen legislator, my whole life is medicine and healing and a portion of it is being spent in public service. And people have a hard time grasping that.”
Those who met him during the home-state tour may have grasped that after all. “He’s a good Tennessee boy and I like that for one. He’s done a lot for states … (and for) patients and doctors. He seems like an honest person,” said Dustin Deaton, 18 and a senior at Tullahoma High School. So does that mean the 6-foot-2 football center asked him The Question?
“I was going to,” Deaton said. “But he didn’t call on me.”