Photo of Phil Bredesen, former Tennessee governor, taken during a campaign event at the Kingsport Farmer’s Market. Photo via Brandon Smith
On Oct. 11, the day following the Knoxville Senate debate, I was able to sit down with the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, and ask him a few questions. The Stampede would have liked the opportunity to interview Marsha Blackburn but were unable to make this a reality due to time constraints.
Rather than debating policy, Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn has been quick to associate Bredesen with other Democrats in office. The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Blackburn tried to link Bredesen with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton almost two dozen times alone at the debate in Knoxville. In response to this, I asked Bredesen what he could say about himself personally that we may not know from what has aired on TV.
He explained that when he was the governor of Tennessee, he ran as an independent and that he often made decisions that upset people along party lines. For example, he explained that he was not supportive of the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” This resulted in him receiving multiple upset phone calls from then-President Barack Obama.
He continued to say that, “I just believe that the way you solve problems is to kind of put the problem out on the table and don’t start out looking at it through a tinted lens.”
For my next question I explained that at Milligan College we have three guiding principles: scholarship, community, and faith. These are also principles that many Tennesseans live by.
After asking how he would balance the three as a senator, he responded, “[T]hat certainly is a good triad. I think scholarship is important, but I think both community and faith are stronger legs of that stool.”
“It does no good to be a very smart scholar if you don’t either have a commitment to your community or if you don’t have a value set that comes from faith,” he continued.
Earlier this year, Forbes magazine reported that there is $1.5 trillion of student debt in the U.S. alone. Bredesen has proposed to streamline federal student loans into a single new comprehensive program. Therefore, I asked him to go into more detail as to how his program would function differently than the one currently in place.
“First of all,” he responded, “the loan program we have now is very complex… there are six different types of loans and payback schemes, [and] I think the interest rate is higher than it needs to be.” He went on to say, “Let’s just consolidate everything into a single loan account that as you go through school you can draw down on that loan account; let’s set a set of standards for how you can draw into that account…. I think it’s possible to put together a program that’s much less oriented towards making money for financial intermediaries and more going in it for what students actually need.”
Recently, Taylor Swift endorsed Bredesen on Instagram. Within 24 hours after doing so, about 2,000 people in Tennessee registered to vote. This is more than 60 percent of the total number who registered in all of September. On this note, I asked what his campaign has done, or what he thinks should be done, in order to get more young people interested in voting.
“You have to give them some things to vote for, and if there are candidates who, they really believe are going to change something, or are espousing something consistent with their views, [then] I think they are a lot more likely to turn out and vote for that instead of saying ‘it is your civic obligation.’”
I asked Bredesen if he could provide a major example of a time when, as governor, he worked with Republicans on a significant issue. “The biggest one was the TennCare reform process. When I came in, the TennCare system, which is the state’s Medicaid system, was a complete and utter disaster. It’s hard to describe how terrible it was.” According to Bredesen, in the budget for his third year, the program needed an increase of $650 million. “We had to cut $300 million out of everything and had no money to pay for pay raises…” Bredesen and Republicans then worked towards a solution to fix the problem.
My final question was for him to provide an example of an issue he agrees with Marsha Blackburn on. He said, “She certainly has expressed concern about the tariffs the president has put in place, and I would say I express much stronger ones than she has, but I think we would probably agree in general that things like these steel tariffs are hurting us.”