Bredesen Bows Out
Humility in Short SupplyI hadn’t planned to write again about Phil Bredesen as he winds down his second mayoral term and prepares to clear out his courthouse office in a few weeks. Once the Dell Computer misadventure became a fait accompli, Metro elections assumed center stage, and the Bredesen administration slipped into an appropriately low-key end game. But then I read Bredesen’s arrestingly egotistical interview with Tennessean editors and reporters published in the Sunday paper a couple of weeks ago, and well, frankly, I just can’t help myself. I’ll leave it to the media critics to pass judgment on the newspaper’s sycophantic post mortem of Bredesen’s administration. It appears, though, that eight years of largely uncritical, even adoring, media coverage has gone to the man’s head – he clearly believes his own notices. So let’s have ourselves a bit of a reality check.
Bredesen told The Tennessean he’d like to be remembered as "a progressive mayor who really made some changes in the way government worked here." In fact, there is little in the Bredesen record that could even remotely be labeled progressive. A successfully progressive administration would be able to boast of significant gains in education, economic welfare, environmental protection, urban quality of life, and racial and social justice, to name a few key areas. Yet Phil Bredesen’s accomplishments in these realms are marginal at best, and in some cases nil or even counterproductive.
On education, Bredesen can rightly claim credit for refocusing the city’s agenda on the need to invest money and energy on improving schools. The costly so-called desegregation plan will yield significant bricks-and-mortar improvements in the school system’s physical plant, and possibly help shape an enduring civic consensus about the importance of public education as an urban big-ticket item that really matters in a city’s future. Unfortunately, it isn’t terribly likely to do much to desegregate educational opportunity, and significant gains in overall academic achievement appear to lie on a distant horizon. The system is doing more to help at-risk kids and improve underperforming schools, but these things happen against the backdrop of a still underfunded school system that is inching toward acceptability, not excellence.
The city’s economy is doing pretty well by some conventional indicators (low unemployment, for instance) but not so well by others (unpredictable tax revenue). Bredesen boasted in the Tennessean interview that economically "we’ve created a vastly different, more stable place." By "stable" does he mean we can anticipate that the Metro School Board’s need to cut spending significantly at the eleventh budget hour will be an annual exercise? On a positive note, the closure of the Bredesen administration could mean an end to the tiresome argument that spending hundreds of millions of Metro dollars on corporate welfare in the form of a stadium and corporate relocation incentives somehow has no adverse effect on the city’s ability to invest resources in other areas.
On environmental issues of local and regional concern, the Bredesen record is essentially vacant. Solid waste management remains hardly better off than the day he took office. Bredesen championed an expanded life for trash burning in the heart of downtown, relying on dubious numbers to persuade a compliant Metro Council that no better alternatives existed. On the narrower issue of recycling, Bredesen observed in the Tennessean interview that "recycling has always been kind of a mess." Nashville’s recycling system is a mess because the mayor for the last eight years took little interest in it beyond a cynical assessment of short-term costs. If you want to view recycling through a lens of market capitalism, fine, but don’t call yourself progressive.
Tourist quality of life has expanded under the Bredesen administration, but urban quality of life for those who live here has advanced only slightly. Much of Bredesen’s efforts in this area were geared toward livening up the riverfront and Second Avenue, which, yes, now bustle many nights of the week. But welcome as that nocturnal vibrancy might seem, it is confined to the innermost core of the downtown area. Bredesen fervently denied in the Tennessean interview that neighborhoods and quality-of-life issues have been ignored for bigger projects. Really, though, does anyone seriously think Nashville is significantly more pedestrian-friendly, more bicycle-compatible, more historic preservation-minded, or otherwise more progressively oriented toward traffic and mass transportation then it was eight years ago?
Bredesen can make little claim of meaningful progress in the area of social justice, which encompasses matters as diverse as racial integration, affordable housing, human relations enforcement, gay/lesbian discrimination, and the like. An increasingly professional approach to the police and sheriff functions is a good start, but on the whole the last eight years have seen Nashville move minimally beyond its Southern cultural stereotype on these issues.
Is Nashville a better place than it was eight years ago? Sure it is, and Phil Bredesen deserves credit for thoughtful, ethical management of city government during that period. But let’s not confuse competent management with visionary, progressive leadership. Nashville remains a mildly interesting mid-sized American sprawl that motors on far from the vanguard of cosmopolitan urban design – a city shielded from exciting possibilities by its departing mayor’s smokescreen of self-congratulation.
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