Left-leaning Vanity Fair has a feature item up on the Tennessee U.S. Senate race featuring Marsha Blackbrun vs. Phil Bredesen. The item appears to confirm everything people have been saying about Bredesen, from his playing “duck and cover” on issues, to his simply not being willing to take a real stand on anything.
Bredesen is making personal and political blandness the theme of his Senate campaign. He has come out against the president’s tariffs, but he has otherwise cannily refused to make the race a referendum on Trump. “Look, I’m not running against Donald Trump. I’m running for a Senate seat to represent the people of Tennessee,” he says in a campaign TV ad. In the wake of Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russians for hacking into Clinton’s e-mails, Bredesen was asked if the president should cancel his meeting with Vladimir Putin. “I don’t think that the actions of those indictments rise to the level that somebody ought to interfere with the president’s right to meet with whom they choose and when they choose, and so on,” he said. When Democratic Party leaders quickly denounced Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, Bredesen went defiantly anodyne: “I’ll be watching the process carefully, formulating my thoughts based on the qualifications presented, holding my judgment until after the hearings conclude, and then sharing with Tennesseans how I would vote.”
As the item points out, in his television ad, Bredesen says quite clearly, ” “Look, I’m not running against Donald Trump.”
He may be correct. But what he left out is that he is also clearly running away from him, as well as Rep. Blackburn, who has been and remains a staunch ally of President Trump.
Marsha Blackburn wears bright red jackets and spouts brighter red rhetoric. She claims to have “stopped the sale of baby body parts” by Planned Parenthood. She says the “science around [climate change] is not a settled science.” Blackburn packs a handgun in her purse and—if Tennessee voters promote her from Congress to the U.S. Senate—promises to “fight with President Donald Trump every step of the way to build that wall!”
Blackburn’s extreme conservatism would seem an excellent fit not simply for her home state, where Trump demolished Hillary Clinton by 26 points….
