Van Hilleary wants to be our next governor. He says we shouldtrust him. But his professional and political records leave plenty of room for doubt.
by Joe Sullivan
When Van Hilleary first ran for public office in 1992, according to a greeting on his gubernatorial campaign website, "I put my career on hold and ran against Annabelle Clement O'Brien for the state senate on an anti-income tax platform."
Yet it's anything but clear that Hilleary, then age 31, had even launched a career let alone put one on hold. Nor was opposition to a state income tax anywhere on the radar screen as an issue in his 1992 campaign.
A close look at these distortions can shed light on just how much store to place on what's become a major theme of his gubernatorial campaign: namely, his trustworthiness. They also paint a picture of a man who seemingly lacked direction in his life until he got into politics.
As the front-runner for this year's Republican nomination to succeed Gov. Don Sundquist, Hilleary has obviously found his calling since then. Even his harshest critics attest to the political prowess that has made him a four-term congressman in a district that previously had been a Democratic bastion. But they also point to his lack of any business or professional accomplishments as casting doubt on his qualifications to serve as chief executive of a state with a $9 billion budget that's now in the midst of a fiscal crisis.
A Decade of Irresolution
After entering UT in 1977 from his native Spring City, Van Hilleary didn't make much of a mark academically or in campus life—except for Air Force ROTC. He majored in business, but none of the several business school faculty members of that time who were contacted recall him as a student. Even among his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, he's remembered as a withdrawn sort of guy who didn't take much part in fraternity activities.
Andy Hoover, who was president of Sigma Chi and of the UT student body during Hilleary's senior year, recalls that, "Van certainly wasn't known as a stellar student. He wasn't involved in extracurricular activities, nor in the fraternity...He would have been the last person in the fraternity that I would have picked out to do anything."
When pressed to identify fellow students who would remember him more favorably, Hilleary responds, "They are all still on active duty in the Air Force and can't speak for publication."
After graduating from UT in 1981 and getting his commission in the Air Force, Hilleary went to pilot training school. Then came the most traumatic experience of his life: He busted out. "When I didn't make it through pilot training it was a major blow because I'd never worked hard for something and not been a success. I think it's a fair statement to say that I was trying to find my way," Hilleary recalls.
Although he gave up his active duty status, Hilleary served out a three-year full-time hitch in the Air Force Reserve where he became a navigator. He remains a reservist to this day with the rank of major.
After leaving full-time duty, Hilleary returned to Spring City, where he went to work for a small textile firm that his father, Bill Hilleary, had launched in 1982. The firm, SSM Industries, was a successor to the much larger Southern Silk Mills over which Bill Hilleary had presided until its bankruptcy in the late 1970s. When asked whether working for his dad agreed with him, Van Hilleary responds with a monosyllable: "No."
In 1985, Hilleary returned to UT to start a Masters in Public Administration program, but he never finished it. Instead, he opted in 1987 to go to law school at Samford University in Birmingham. Why the switch to law school?
"I probably went for all the wrong reasons. I was sort of, I guess, trying to find myself a little bit. I never really planned on being a practicing lawyer, especially. I never ruled it out, but that was never a driving goal." After some reflection, he adds that, "When I went to law school I thought what I probably would do is come out and maybe begin for a short time to practice law in sort of a real estate practice, create a title company and then move into selling real estate and then move into developing real estate. That was kind of the plan."
Upon graduation from law school in 1990, Hilleary didn't pursue that plan; but then again he didn't have much time to do so right then. In August, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for the Gulf War. In the fall, Hilleary's Air Force Reserve unit was called up to active duty. He flew 24 combat missions as a C-130 navigator during Desert Shield and Desert Storm and got several decorations before returning to civilian life in April 1991.
Upon returning home, again he made no move to start a law practice or real estate career but rather went back to work at SSM. How come?
"You know what, as I sit here now I cannot tell you. I guess I was—well, to be honest with you I don't know why," Hilleary responds.
One might suppose that Hilleary really had a political career in mind but doesn't want to come right out and say so. However, he insists that such was not the case. "I've always thought politics was interesting, but I always thought that was something I'd do at age 50 or maybe age 55 after I'd done other things," he says.
Yet in the fall of 1991, Hilleary and his father approached then-Republican state party chairman Tommy Hopper about running for the state Senate. Hopper recalls that he didn't give them much encouragement initially, particularly in terms of the campaign funding they were seeking, and Hilleary is clear that he didn't decide to run until just prior to the filing deadline in May 1992.
When asked about the career-on-hold statement (adorned with his personal signature) on his gubernatorial campaign website, Hilleary ascribes the phrasing to a longtime political operative on his behalf, Brad Todd. "You can ask Brad Todd about that. Those were his words, so you ask him," Hilleary says testily. Then reflecting back again, he adds, "I was in between events in my life and so instead of starting in what I would have started, I didn't start it. So I mean it's a legitimate statement, but I would not have phrased it like that."
A complicating factor in making a Senate race was that Spring City is in Rhea County, which was represented in the senate by a stalwart Republican and longtime Hilleary family friend, Gene Elsea. So a Senate race would mean a move into a district comprising Cumberland, Roane and other counties to the north that had long been represented by Democrat Annabelle Clement O'Brien. Sister of former Gov. Frank Clement and the wife of a State Supreme Court Justice, O'Brien was an institution, but she wasn't getting any younger.
At the time of Hilleary's decision to challenge her, lawyers in Kingston recall that he announced he would be opening a law practice there in Roane County. One of them, Gerald Largen, sought him out with what was intended as a cordial invitation to attend a meeting of the Roane County Bar Association. "His reaction was as cold as anything you'd get in the Arctic Circle," Largen recalls.
The only office Hilleary ever opened in Roane County was a campaign headquarters in Harriman where he and a staff of two devoted full time to the effort to unseat O'Brien. By now, Hopper had warmed to Hilleary, and the state party contributed $50,000 in cash and at least that much in kind to the campaign. "It was the most we put into any Senate race that year," Hopper says.
It was a heated campaign with many issues, but opposition to an income tax (which O'Brien also opposed) wasn't one of them. True, Hilleary opposed tax increases in general, including the half-cent increase in the state sales tax that Gov. Ned McWherter had guided through the legislature that year to help finance his Better Education Plan.
But it was opposition to abortion on which Hilleary placed his emphasis. O'Brien was pro-choice, and Hilleary exploited her position to the hilt. In one campaign mailing piece he wrote that, "She supports legal abortion and was given an unqualified endorsement this year by Tennesseans Keeping Abortion Legal and Safe... on this crucial issue, Mrs. O'Brien and I have very different opinions. I believe in the sanctity of human life and oppose the killing of innocent babies."
Hilleary proved an effective and tireless campaigner and nearly upset O'Brien. But after a narrow loss he was faced with a career decision once again. And despite his aversion to working for his father, he once again went back to work at SSM.
"I went back to work for dad because I took a pretty good beating financially in that race, and I knew instead of having to learn something from scratch I could go back and do something I already knew how to do and therefore make more money more quickly. So that's what I did," Hilleary explains.
While Hilleary was losing his 1992 state Senate race, Al Gore's victory as Bill Clinton's running mate opened up Gore's U. S. Senate seat. In early 1993, the Congressman from Tennessee's Fourth District, Democrat Jim Cooper, entered the race to succeed Gore—a race he would lose in 1994 to Republican Fred Thompson.
One might suppose that Hilleary was quick on the uptake to run for Cooper's seat, but he maintains that that was not the case. "As soon as Jim Cooper announced he was going to run for the U. S. Senate, I had people looking at me who felt I had done so well against Annabelle because the three counties that I carried against her were also in the congressional district, and Rhea County was also in the district. That gave me a four-county base, which in that long district was as good as anybody had. So I had people looking at me, but I wasn't looking at it. I was beat up financially and wanting to heal up financially."
What finally spurred him to run, he says, was the Clinton tax increase of 1993. That, along with Clinton's national health care plan, his stance on gays in the military and his personal demeanor left him highly unpopular in the district and made it vulnerable to a Republican challenge.
"Van just happened to be the right guy in the right place at the right time," says Hoover, who was one of four Democrats who contested for the district's Democrat nomination. But the winner of that Democrat primary, Jeff Whorley, gives Hilleary more credit. "You can call it c'est la vie, but he showed a lot of grit and determination," Whorley says. "He keeps throwing the music out until he finds the right note, and the right note in that campaign was: 'Whorley's going to vote for Clinton, and Hilleary's going to vote against Clinton.'"
During the campaign, Hilleary portrayed himself as director of planning at SSM, but there's doubt how long and to what extent he really worked there even prior to the campaign.
Dave Seera, who held various systems and managerial posts at SSM from 1985 to 2000, recollects that Hilleary didn't work there for more than a year during all that span of time. "It just wasn't what he wanted to do with his life," says Seera, who now manages a bank systems services firm in Dayton and is a Hilleary admirer.
Hilleary says, "All I know is that I was working 14-hour days until I got into the campaign."
Darling of the Eagle Forum
Phyllis Schaffly burst into national prominence in the 1960s as a crusader against the Equal Rights Amendment in particular and the feminist movement more generally. In 1972, she founded the Eagle Forum as a vehicle for traditionalist women to oppose "liberationist" groups like the National Organization of Women. After the U. S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, Eagle Forum became a spearhead for the right-to-life movement. And over the years it's evolved into a well-funded champion of arch conservative candidates and causes.
The organization's 2002 Congressional Candidate Questionnaire sheds light on its agenda. Along with such bedrocks as "Do you oppose the judge-invented notion that abortion is a right protected by the U. S. Constitution?" there are brickbats on a host of other issues. Among them: Will you vote NO on all tax increases? Will you vote to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts? Will you vote for legislation to stop illegal aliens from entering or remaining in the United States? Then there are numerous questions that reflect hostility toward the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.
When Hilleary went to Washington in 1994, he selected as his chief of staff the woman then serving as Eagle Forum's executive director, Susan Hirschmann. How Hilleary arrived at this choice is not entirely clear. Hirschmann, who is now chief of staff for House Majority Whip Tom Delay, recollects that an Eagle Forum director in Tennessee may have recommended her.
Shirley Curry of Waynesboro, who's served on the Eagle Forum board for many years, says, "I don't remember for sure, but I probably did. I do remember how pleased I was when she joined him. I knew she would be able to guide him correctly."
According to a former House leadership aide who insists on anonymity, when Hilleary entered Congress he was like a puppy. "He'd go around saying, 'Golly, I can't believe I'm here'," the former aide recalls. Among GOP veterans, Hirschmann was privately referred to as "The Congressman" and Hilleary was nicknamed "Gomer."
Nor has Hilleary progressed as well in Congress as most of his contemporaries. Of the 42 members of the class of 1994 who remain in the House, 32 have either gained appointment to one of the three most influential House committees (Ways and Means, Appropriations, and Energy and Commerce) or else become subcommittee chairmen on other panels. Hilleary is not among them.
Hilleary serves on the Armed Services, Budget, and Education and Workforce Committees—each of which fits with his interests. And he also stresses the importance of his position as one of 15 deputy whips—a position he acquired after Hirschmann went to work for Delay. "Every week we try to figure our what legislation to try to push through with only a five-vote majority. The skills I've been able to really hone in Washington are exactly what's needed in Nashville," he claims.
But Knoxville's Rep. Jimmy Duncan belittles the role of deputy whip. "Most of the time a deputy whip is just somebody who does a nose count," Duncan says. "Van goes around and asks us how we're going to vote and has us put a checkmark on a sheet. It's a job most of us wouldn't want, and I can't see that it amounts to much."
Hirschmann disagrees. "Without people like Van we'd never get anything done. He knows how to go to members and find out what it takes to get their votes," she says from her perspective as Delay's chief of staff.
And Hilleary could be dogged in pursuit of a legislative goal. In 1996, he alone among Tennessee Valley lawmakers fought to block TVA from requiring a $1,000 deposit on boat docks on its lakes to cover the cost of repair or removal if their owners allowed them to fall into disrepair. He succeeded in getting the prohibition attached to an appropriations bill in the House, but TVA lobbyists managed to get it removed in a House-Senate conference committee. Hilleary had the last word, however, by getting it slipped back into the final appropriations bill of the year—one that was already on its way to the President's desk before the TVA lobbyists knew what hit them.
And Hilleary did excel at doing what a great many Congressman consider their number one priority: getting reelected. His share of the vote in a district where he started out as an underdog grew with each succeeding election from 56 percent in 1994 to 66 percent in 2000.
"Van is singularly responsible for making that district Republican," says Hopper, who became a regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee after his stint as state party chairman. "He's a great campaigner; he works really hard at constituent service, and he did an outstanding job of working with local elected officials who needed things."
Even Hoover, who is now a lawyer in Pulaski, credits him on these accounts. "Giles County [of which Pulaski is the county seat] is 90 percent Democrat, but he carried it in the last election. And while he knows that I'm a Democrat who's opposed to him, he always makes a point of stopping in to see me when he's in Pulaski."
Trust Me
By way of introducing his gubernatorial candidacy to a television audience earlier this year, Hilleary told the viewers, "I've been in business and been in the military and have a law background though not by practice. I think it's a pretty good background to take to the job. But the biggest skill you have to have is garnering people's trust. That is the glue that holds everything else together."
Yet just how much trust can be placed in a candidate whose stance on many key issues has seemed to bounce around about as much as his earlier career plans? Consider taxes and TennCare—issues that he has chosen to intertwine.
"I think what's irresponsible is trying to push through a major tax increase before we figure out what TennCare ought to be costing this state," Hilleary told the same television audience. And he went on to say, "We've had blue ribbon commission after blue ribbon commission on TennCare, but no implementation. We all know what needs to be done. We can't have benefit levels that attract very sick people here. We have to redefine who the uninsurable are so we don't have one-fourth of the people on TennCare...We have to make sure people who are on the rolls are eligible...and we all know someone who's on TennCare who could afford to pay something in the way of the premium that they're not paying."
Yet a month later, Hilleary announced the formation of a Healthcare Advisory Council. "The council of 14 industry experts will examine TennCare reform proposals and other healthcare issues to advise Hilleary on policy decisions," the announcement stated. But the man he named to head the council was Rusty Siebert, who served as TennCare's director during the first year of Gov. Don Sundquist's administration, and thus was part of what Hilleary considers to be the problem with TennCare. Indeed, Siebert is perhaps best remembered for parading around the state proclaiming that all anyone had to do to get on TennCare was produce a letter from a health insurance company turning them down for coverage.
In fact, the Sundquist administration, after being thwarted by court orders and the Clinton administration, has been pushing ahead over the past year with TennCare reforms on all the fronts that Hilleary enumerated. Premiums and copays were increased last July 1 for enrollees with incomes above the poverty line—very substantially for those at higher levels. Eligibility and income verification procedures have been strengthened, and an application is pending for requisite federal approval of changes that would: (1) reduce benefits for the 600,000 of TennCare's 1.4 million enrollees who aren't entitled to federally set Medicaid benefits; and (2) set more stringent standards for qualification as uninsurable.
TennCare officials estimate that all these changes, when fully implemented in 2003, could save the state $50 million to $150 million a year. Hilleary claims that savings of $350 million to $400 million can be realized but offers no substantiation for his claims.
Even if Hilleary's higher figures were accepted and effected immediately, they don't begin to cover the $850 million "structural" deficit the state is facing for the fiscal year beginning July 1, atop a $350 million deficit that must also be covered in the current fiscal year. Next year's structural deficit is just the sum of this year's shortfall and the $500 million in non-recurring revenue, mostly tobacco settlement money, that the Legislature plugged into this year's budget. And not even these sums take into account the $350 million in additional revenues Sundquist is seeking, foremost for education in a state that ranks dead last in its support of same.
Hilleary is just as ambiguous about the state's fiscal crisis as he is on TennCare. On the one hand, he dismisses the deficits as the temporary result of a "terrorist-enhanced recession" that "we'll take care of in short order." On the other, he blasts the Legislature for resorting to the use of non-recurring revenues in an attempt to balance this year's budget and vows that he would never do the same. Yet this very blast spotlights, perhaps unwittingly, the fact that the state had a serious fiscal problem even before the recession, let alone the impact of 9-11, kicked in.
Hilleary says his top three priorities as governor will be "educating our children, educating our children and educating our children. The way you move the state ahead is to raise our education system up so that you can compete for the jobs of the future. That is the key for the next governor's successor or failure."
A Hilleary position paper amplifies on his educational agenda: "He believes Tennessee cannot move forward until it raises its educational expectations and standards. Raising standards means holding school systems more accountable for the performance of individual schools. Raising expectations means giving principals the ability to manage their schools and creating public charter schools that will spark innovation to help children learn and push all schools to perform... Most of the needed reforms in our K-12 education system can be achieved without large increases in funding. Higher education, on the other hand, has borne the brunt of the real budget cuts in Tennessee over the last several years. Van supports additional funding for our institutions of higher learning where we have seen classes cut and our best professors leaving for better jobs in other states."
How would he pay for the additional funding? Until recently, he's claimed that no new taxes would be needed, but of late he's begun to give himself some wiggle room. If TennCare cuts aren't sufficient to close the budget gap, he told a gathering in Blountville recently, then he would find another revenue source "that will not put us at a competitive disadvantage with other neighboring states."
When pressed by journalists as to what that source might be, he tartly responded that, "It should be enough that a Republican running for governor tells you that will happen."
The one source Hilleary categorically rules out is a state income tax. In his "career-on-hold" message on his website, he states in bold face, "I was against an income tax then. I am against an income tax now. I will vigorously and actively oppose all efforts to impose any tax on the wages and earnings of the people of Tennessee." Yet this opposition hasn't been as much of an eternal verity as he'd have you believe. As recently as a year ago he made an exception for an income tax that was subject to ratification by the electorate in the form of a constitutional amendment.
Hilleary's trust theme is clearly intended to distance him from Gov. Don Sundquist and the front-runner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, former Nashville mayor Phil Bredesen. In Sundquist's case, it's a matter of overcoming the wrath he incurred among Republican regulars when he switched from a no-new-taxes posture to support of an income tax after his re-election in 1998. As for Bredesen, Hilleary says in a mailing piece, "the choice is clear, a big spending liberal Nashville mayor who raised taxes THREE TIMES or me, a common-sense conservative congressman who keeps his word by voting to lower taxes on American families by billions of dollars."
Hilleary pays little heed, at least publicly, to his Republican primary opponent, Jim Henry, whom Hilleary dismisses as someone who has "single-digit standing in the polls." Yet as a former Republican leader in the state Legislature who has since become a successful Nashville businessman, Henry appears well qualified for the post. And he dismisses Hilleary as someone who "doesn't get it, hasn't done it and isn't up to it."
But Hilleary's 1994 congressional opponent, Jeff Whorley, cautions that, "It's dangerous to run against him on grounds that he's not qualified. He's a shrewd politician even if he's not a policy person. He's works hard to close the deal, and he should not be underestimated."
March 2, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 18
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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