Gubernatorial candidate Jim Henry says he's fighting for responsible government and tax reform. But first he has to fight the perception that the Republican nomination is already sewn up.
by Joe Sullivan
The "Jim Henry for governor" TV spots are
running only on select cable channels now. But starting July 1 they will hit every network station in every major media market in the state.
"House Republican leader, Republican Party chairman, businessman, family man," intones the voice-over. And then the man who bears a considerable resemblance to actor Leslie Nielsen appears on the screen to say, "Confidence in state leadership is an important
ingredient in this election. I'll reconnect the people of Tennessee with their government. Better schools and colleges, low taxes, jobs, a
smaller, more efficient government. That'll be our agenda."
The media blitz (at least as much of one as Henry's $1 million-plus in campaign funds will buy) marks the start of a stretch run in which Henry must come from far behind to overtake the front-runner in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Congressman
Van Hilleary.
A poll conducted for WBIR-TV by Survey USA shows Henry getting 21 percent of the vote, compared to Hilleary's 43 percent if the Aug. 1 primary were held today. But that's a big improvement over the single digit numbers that a man who's not well known outside of government and business circles had been polling until quite recently. What's most striking about the polling numbers, though, is the high undecided vote.
"An undecided vote of 40 percent or more according to some polls is unbelievably high for this late a stage in the race," says Tom Ingram, the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership president who served as Lamar Alexander's gubernatorial campaign manager back when and is now an advisor in Alexander's U.S. Senate bid. Although Hilleary has been the universally proclaimed front-runner since long before Henry belatedly got in the race last fall, Hilleary's support levels have never gotten above 50 percent of likely Republican primary voters. Henry backers are not alone in proclaiming that Hilleary's campaign is
faltering.
"When you have a front-runner whose support appears to be soft coupled with a large undecided vote, there's room for a surprise if
the underdog plays his cards just right," Ingram goes on to say.
Underdog Henry's card playing has to start with making himself
better known to the electorate at large. Beyond that, he's got to
establish his qualifications for governing a state with deep financial problems and explain how he would go about resolving them as well as his goals for the future. So just what manner of man is Jim Henry,
and what are his capabilities for rising to this challenge?
Building Consensus
After graduating from Hiawassee College and serving in Vietnam, Jim Henry returned to his hometown of Kingston, married his high school sweetheart and got into the real estate business.
It wasn't long, however, before he got into politics as well. In 1971, at the age of 26, he was elected to the Kingston City Council. Two years later he became the city's mayor, and in 1978 he was elected to the state Legislature. Once there, he rose quickly through the ranks to become the House Republican leader through much of the 1980s.
That made him a point person for then-Gov. Lamar Alexander's agenda, the centerpiece of which was the Better Schools program.
"Jim got a lot done on Better Schools and on our budgets by working with Democrats and Republicans," says Bill Sansom, who was then Alexander's commissioner of finance and is now the CEO of
H.T. Hackney Company in Knoxville. "Since we were in the minority, we needed that and he brought it, especially his close working
relationship with [then-House Speaker] Ned McWherter."
By the end of the Alexander administration in 1986, Tennessee ranked higher nationally in education funding (both K-12 and higher ed) than ever before or since. Not that McWherter wasn't committed to further education progress during his years as governor. But his administration was bedeviled by court orders mandating huge outlays for more prison space, by the escalating cost of the federally mandated Medicaid program, and then by a 1991 court decision directing the state to more nearly equalize school funding between more affluent metropolitan school systems and poorer rural ones.
By the time of that decision, Henry was no longer in the Legislature. He'd been defeated for re-election in 1990 by Democrat Dennis
Ferguson, a defeat that some ascribe to Henry's spreading himself too thin by taking on a post as Roane County's economic development director in addition to his legislative post and his real estate agency. Veteran Kingston lawyer Gerald Largen has a somewhat different take on it. "As sometimes happens to even the best of us, Jim got a little complacent. Dennis just outhustled him," Largen says.
But McWherter needed bipartisan support in putting through what became his Better Education Program of 1992 just as much as
Alexander had in the mid-'80s. Democrats in Davidson and Shelby counties were deserting him in droves over the BEP's allocation
formula for diverting state funding away from their school systems. And the BEP's far-reaching reforms also contained many other
controversial features, including a new methodology for evaluating school performance and a requirement that school superintendents
be appointed rather than elected.
So who did McWherter call upon to help him mold a bipartisan
coalition for the BEP? None other than Jim Henry, who came back to Nashville as a consultant. As Henry recalls his role, "I mainly met with the governor's cabinet and described how we built the coalition that passed Lamar's Better Schools program, how you have to have public support including the business community and media." But in the view of some McWherterites he was mainly instrumental in winning the support of key Republican legislators, especially in the relatively
well-to-do Tri Cities area.
Whichever, it was a testament to his consensus-building skills.
Longtime Roane County Executive Ken Yeager, who has known Henry in both a legislative and an economic development context, attests to those skills as follows: "Jim knows how to listen to people, to take all viewpoints into account and then to pull people together. Yet at the same time he's a strategic thinker who never loses sight of the big
picture. He's just an extraordinary individual." �
From Politician to Executive
After leaving the Legislature, Henry worked for a time as executive director of Tennessee's Resource Valley, a multi-county economic development agency based in Knoxville.
"I was very much impressed by him. He always worked
well with people and was a good problem solver," recalls
UT President Emeritus Ed Boling, who was Resource
Valley's chairman at the time.
In 1994, however, Henry's career took a very different path. He was enlisted to become the chief operating officer
of OmniVisions, then a fledgling firm that specialized in
providing therapeutic services to retarded and emotionally disturbed children in state custody.
A big reason for Henry's attraction to this field was his experience with his own son, John. The youngest of the
Henrys' three children, John was diagnosed early on as severely retarded, and he is also afflicted with cerebral palsy. Later, the diagnosis was changed to autistic, and while he remains in his family's care at age 24, he has learned to communicate by using a specially designed typewriter. "A lot of parents would have institutionalized a boy like that but the Henrys wouldn't hear of it," says Largen. On becoming OmniVisions' CEO in 1997, Henry pushed the firm's growth as a placement agency, both for foster care and adoption. "Children need to live in a home environment... regardless of the degree of disability and labels. Children have the greatest potential to grow and develop in a home setting," a company brochure states. Under Henry's leadership the company itself has grown to revenues of more
than $33 million and a profit of more than $1 million last year. He also engineered an employee buyout under which he and many of OmniVisions' 700 employees have an
ownership stake.
A Gubernatorial Challenge
A year ago it looked as if Van Hilleary might run unopposed for the Republican gubernatorial nomination—or at most with token opposition. U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, on whom many Republican leaders were banking, had taken his name out of the running in February (a year before he announced he would not seek re-election to the Senate).
The one other serious contender, Knoxville businessman and former commissioner of economic development Bill Baxter, then withdrew from the governor's race in April.
Meanwhile, Hilleary was busily lining up support from party regulars and building a campaign war chest that would total over $2 million by year's end. The more strident he became in insisting the state had a spending problem, not a revenue problem, however, the more GOP moderates began questing for an alternative.
While he didn't announce his candidacy until October, Henry became persuaded to run in August. Former
Alexander administration officials, such as Sansom and
venerable Memphis attorney Lewis Donelson, loomed
large in that equation.
"All of us who'd watched what was happening to our state, to see us getting into such a terrible state of disarray, made us want to get involved again," Henry says. "For three years, the state Legislature failed to deal with the financial crisis that is destroying people's confidence in
our state's ability to attract new jobs, provide adequate healthcare for our most needy citizens—and most importantly of all, we were on the verge of literally destroying our education system."
Unlike Hilleary, Henry believes the state's biggest
problem isn't excessive spending but rather a defective
revenue structure. "The state needs a new tax system. This one's broke," he declares. But it doesn't follow that he
supports an income tax.
"While I have never supported an income tax, I do support tax reform," he says. "I think we need a constitutional convention so people can look at all the taxes and all the options before they decide what to do. We have spent the last 30 years arguing over an income tax. It has been very emotional and overshadowed any realistic look at serious tax reform. Unfortunately, tax reform has become synonymous with an income tax. It doesn't have to be that way. We have $4 billion of exemptions to the sales tax. Is that right? The people must get a chance to review what we are doing to see if it makes sense. That's what tax reform has to be about and what I will push for as governor."
Henry's idea of pushing harks back, as does a lot of his thinking, to Alexander days. "One thing I learned from Lamar is that the governor's job is out with the people more than it is in Nashville. You go to schools, you go to courthouses, you go to industrial parks and you talk to business people. And the last place you go is to the Leg-islature. When Gov. Alexander presented the Better Schools Program, he did it to the Tennessee Press Association, and then he had a hundred editorial board meetings before he ever went to legislators."
But wouldn't a constitutional convention, which couldn't be convened until 2004, leave the state in limbo for too long and, given the current climate of opinion in the state, lead to an income tax prohibition?
Henry thinks not. In the meantime, he says he'd look at extending the sales tax, vehicle taxes and other revenue sources to meet the state's needs on a temporary basis. Should the Legislature enact an income tax, Henry, unlike Hilleary, would not call for its repeal. Rather, he would view it as another temporary measure. When it comes to predicting the outcome of a vote on any more permanent constitutional changes, he gets very guarded.
"When the people look at the facts properly presented
to them by people that they trust, I think they will come up with a workable solution," he says. "And of course, as governor I would want to make a recommendation after
I saw how much money we could save and how much money we need."
Henry believes there's room for making state government more efficient through consolidation of departments and better management practices. Where TennCare is concerned, he believes the Sundquist administration is on the right track with revamping it to bring benefits for those who lack commercial health insurance in line with those who have it. But he would go further in verifying eligibility for TennCare. "I'd let a private company handle that," he says. "It gets it away from the politicians that want
to get people on TennCare—and, quite frankly, some
state social workers have a propensity to put people on TennCare because, you know, that's their passion. So, I think you need to privatize that."
At the same time, he scoffs at the notion that the state can resolve its budget crisis just by cutting spending.
"All this talk by Bredesen and Hilleary about managing our way out of the financial mess isn't realistic. There is so much of the state budget that comes from the federal government, is set by law or decreed by court order that simply can't be managed in the sense that a corporate CEO would manage things. There is only a relatively small amount of money, compared to the total state
budget, the Legislature and the governor have any
direct control over."
Because higher education falls into this discretionary category, Henry observes that it has "taken most of the hits over the past 10 years." He takes great pride in the fact that in the latter years of the Alexander administration, the state's public universities were fully funded per a formula developed by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. The THEC formula essentially benchmarks higher ed outlays in Tennessee to those of surrounding Southern states. After a decade of decline, funding this past year stood at 88 percent of formula, and it would take a $215 million increase to restore full funding in the fiscal year ahead.
While he doesn't hold out that it can be accomplished overnight, Henry says he is "committed to restoring full funding of THEC. It's not something that moves you ahead. It just gets you even."
Above all else, though, Henry's campaign message is that his knowledge of state government, his executive experience and his consensus-building skills make him the best-qualified candidate to lead the state. "If you can't show where you can lead, it doesn't matter what you're for or against," he says.
Taking on Hilleary
How well he can get that message out to Republican
primary voters over the six weeks that remain until
election day will depend in large part on how well fortified he is financially. Conventional wisdom says that it takes about $1.5 million to run an effective statewide campaign in Tennessee these days. Henry acknowledges that he
hasn't raised that much but insists his $1 million-plus
(he won't say how much plus) will be sufficient.
Yet Hilleary had raised over $2 million prior to last year-end, which was the last date on which candidates
had to make a public report under Tennessee's campaign contribution disclosure law. They won't have to report again until a week before election day, so there's no way of knowing how much Hilleary has got to spend. The prevalent belief, however, is that Hilleary's fund raising has slumped this year to the point that he's been having to eat into the $2 million just to cover the overhead expenses of a campaign organization that's much larger than Henry's.
"It doesn't matter how much you've raised at this point," Henry says. "What counts is how much you've got left to spend."
One media advantage that Henry clearly has is the expected endorsement of most, if not all, of the state's major newspapers. Several have already weighed in,
primarily with expressions of contempt for Hilleary.
"The cure for admiring Republican gubernatorial hopeful Van Hilleary is to listen to what he says," observed the Kingsport Times-News in a recent editorial. "Like many
of his supporters in the Legislature who claim that Tennessee's revenue problem is a spending problem in disguise, Hilleary's campaign for governor has been an empty exercise in ducking tough questions, making promises he can't possibly keep, and just generally muddling through."
A Chattanooga Times editorial headlined "Van Hilleary's Fictions" goes on to say, "Rep. Van Hilleary came to town the other day proclaiming that the Republican gubernatorial primary to be held in August 'is already over,' that he's already won the party's nomination. If his self-serving prediction—which he arrogantly uses to avoid debate with Jim Henry, his chief primary opponent—turns out to be true, it would be a shame. Republicans can do better. Mr. Henry, mayor of Kingston for eight years and a state legislative leader for 12 years, clearly has a larger vision and a better grip on the state's biggest problems: the budget crisis, health care and education. He is a conservative who approaches the issues rationally and with a view toward actually resolving the most pressing problems."
In her weekly political column in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Susan Adler Thorp advised her readers, "Don't be too concerned if you're perplexed by some of Hilleary's statements and don't believe you understand them. Less than two months before the primary, the worrisome question is: Does Hilleary?"
Perhaps some light will be shed on that and other questions during an hour-long Hilleary vs. Henry forum that WBIR-TV (Channel 10) will air this coming Sunday evening, June 23, at 8 p.m. As of Metro Pulse's deadline, though, Hilleary remained non-committal as to whether he would participate. If not, he will be represented by an empty chair, and Henry will have the floor to himself to demonstrate his gubernatorial mettle. m
June 20, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 25
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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