Phil Bredesen

Philip Norman Bredesen Jr. (; born November 21, 1943) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 48th governor of Tennessee from 2003 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected in 2002 with 50.6% of the vote and re-elected in 2006 with 68.6%. He served as the 66th mayor of Nashville from 1991 to 1999. Bredesen is the founder of the HealthAmerica Corporation, which he sold in 1986. He is the last Democrat to win and/or hold statewide office in Tennessee.

Since 2011, he has been chair of Silicon Ranch Corporation, a firm that develops and operates solar power stations. On December 6, 2017, Bredesen announced he would run for Bob Corker's open seat in the United States Senate, as Corker chose not to seek reelection in 2018. On August 2, 2018, he won the Democratic primary and faced off against Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn. He lost in the general election on November 6, 2018. After losing the Senate race, he and his campaign team founded Clearloop, a renewable energy startup.

Bredesen has been widely characterized as a moderate Democrat who is fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

Bredesen was born in Oceanport, New Jersey, the son of Norma Lucille (Walborn) and Philip Norman Bredesen. His parents divorced and his mother was employed as a bank teller. During Bredesen's childhood, his grandmother, who sewed for a living, lived with the family. Bredesen grew up in Shortsville, New York, 30 miles from Rochester. He attended Red Jacket Central Elementary and Secondary School in the adjoining village of Manchester.

He received a scholarship to Harvard University, where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in physics. In 1967, Bredesen moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, where he did classified work for Itek and received a draft deferment during the Vietnam War.

In 1968, Bredesen worked for the campaign of Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bredesen launched his first political campaign in 1969, when he ran for the Massachusetts State Senate. He was defeated by a popular incumbent Republican, Ronald MacKenzie.

Bredesen joined pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle & Company in 1971, and moved to London in 1973 to manage one of the company's divisions. In 1974, he married Andrea Conte. In 1975, the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where Conte had been recruited by Hospital Corporation of America. In Nashville, Bredesen founded HealthAmerica Corp., an insurance company. He sold his controlling interest in HealthAmerica in 1986, and because of the wealth he earned from the company, did not accept his gubernatorial salary.

In 1987, Bredesen ran for mayor of Nashville. He finished second out of 10 candidates with 30% of the vote, behind only 5th District Congressman Bill Boner, who won 46%. Since Boner fell short of the necessary threshold for an outright victory, he and Bredesen faced each other in a runoff. Boner won the runoff, 75,790 votes to 66,153, largely by emphasizing that he was a Nashville native while Bredesen was a Northerner.

In December 1987, Bredesen ran in the Democratic primary for the 5th District congressional seat left open by Boner's victory. He finished a distant second behind Bob Clement, son of former governor Frank G. Clement.

Ahead of the 1991 mayoral race, Boner was accused of marital infidelity, and declined to run. Bredesen won the election, defeating Councilwoman Betty Nixon, 78,896 votes to 30,282.

As mayor of Nashville, Bredesen added more than 440 new teachers, built 32 new schools and renovated 43 others. He also implemented a back-to-basics curriculum to teach students the fundamentals of learning. Under the Bredesen Administration, the NFL's Houston Oilers (now Tennessee Titans) were brought to Nashville and furnished with a new stadium, Nissan Stadium; the NHL awarded Nashville its first of four new expansion franchises, the Nashville Predators; and Bridgestone Arena was built. Bredesen also attempted to lure the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves and later the NHL's New Jersey Devils to Nashville, but both efforts were unsuccessful. A new downtown library was built as a cornerstone of major improvements to the entire library system, the city's downtown entertainment district was renovated, and two parks, Beaman Park and Shelby Bottoms, were established.

Bredesen did not run for a third term in 1999. The Metro Charter had been amended in 1994 to limit city council members to two consecutive four-year terms, and was worded in such a way that it appeared to apply to mayors as well. Although mayors had been permitted to serve a maximum of three consecutive terms since the formation of Metro Nashville in 1963, Bredesen did not make an issue of that.

Since leaving the governor's office in 2011, Bredesen has been the chairman of a solar energy plant developer.

Viewed by many as a moderate Democrat based in the South, Bredesen was touted as a potential presidential candidate in 2008, but he said he had no interest in joining the wide field of Democrats seeking the nomination. He did not comment on joining a Democratic ticket as Vice President of the United States. On June 4, 2008, Bredesen endorsed Barack Obama for U.S. president. Following the withdrawal of former Senator Tom Daschle as nominee for United States Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration, The Atlantic correspondent Marc Ambinder reported that Bredesen was being vetted as a possible replacement. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius was eventually chosen for the post.

On September 26, 2017, incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Bob Corker announced he would not seek reelection in 2018. On December 6, 2017, Bredesen announced that he would run for Corker's open seat. Bredesen won the Democratic primary on August 2, 2018, with 348,302 votes (91.50%). Marsha Blackburn won the Republican primary on the same day.

In April 2018, Corker said that Bredesen was "a very good mayor, a very good governor, a very good business person" with "real appeal" and "crossover appeal", and that the two of them had cooperated well over the years, but that he would vote for Blackburn and contribute to her campaign. Corker said that he would not campaign against Bredesen. After Corker's praise for Bredesen, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Corker that such comments could cost the Republican Party its Senate majority. Shortly after Corker's comments, President Donald Trump tweeted an endorsement of Marsha Blackburn, who was running for the Republican nomination in the Senate race. During the campaign, Trump attacked Bredesen.

According to Politico, Bredesen represents a "center-right coalition" including "Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans." During the campaign, Bredesen said that he opposed Trump's tariff policy, saying that the tariffs amounted to a tax on Tennesseans and "they will drive up prices, hurt our economy and will cost jobs, especially in our important automotive sector". Bredesen praised Corker for publicly opposing Trump's tariff policy.

In October 2018, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift endorsed Bredesen. The endorsement was notable because Swift had never been publicly political before. She said Blackburn's "voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me" and shared a link to the nonpartisan voter registration website Vote.org, which saw a significant spike in page views and new registrations.

Blackburn defeated Bredesen in the November 6 election. Although polls showed the race to be close for much of the cycle, Blackburn pulled ahead after the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which are believed to have mobilized Republican voters. In the general election, Bredesen lost by just under 11 points, taking 43.9 percent of the vote to Blackburn's 54.7 percent. He carried only three counties — Davidson, Shelby and Haywood. The race was called for Blackburn less than half an hour after the polls closed.

Bredesen has been described as a moderate Democrat. According to The Tennessean, he is a "political moderate", "known for his middle-of-the-road, fiscally conservative politics" and has "occasionally irritated liberals in his party". On The Issues, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization that examines politicians' records and statements, identifies Bredesen as a "moderate populist conservative". According to the Political Encyclopedia of U.S. States and Regions, Bredesen has embraced both fiscal conservatism and social liberalism "in a way that has a broad appeal to voters across the political spectrum". In his 2018 Senate campaign, Bredesen ran on a moderate platform.

The New York Times wrote of Bredesen's 2018 campaign that "in an indication of how precarious it can be to run statewide as a Democrat in the South, he also made no mention of his party and did not refer to President Trump by name."

Bredesen has said the Affordable Care Act "needs fixing." In 2018, he said, "I was not a fan of the Affordable Care Act but when it passed, I said, 'it's the law of the land, let's make it work.'"

Bredesen is pro-choice on abortion. He supports legal access to abortion, but did not consider it a defining issue of his platform. He supported a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in 2006, but supported the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. He supports non-discrimination protections for same-sex couples. Bredesen is a supporter of capital punishment.

Bredesen had an A grade from the NRA Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) as governor, but in 2018 was downgraded to a D grade. During his Senate campaign, he has expressed his support for the Second Amendment and described himself as a gun owner. His campaign disagreed with the D grade and has responded that Bredesen "agrees with 80-plus percent of NRA's positions [but] differs, for example, by supporting gun show background checks." In the wake of the February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Bredesen called for universal background checks for gun purchases (including those made at gun shows), tighter checks for mental illness, and a ban on bump stocks. As governor, he vetoed bills to allow guns in bars or restaurants that serve alcohol. He also signed into law a bill allowing gun owners with handgun permits to carry their firearms in public parks. In 2009, Bredesen said he would not veto a bill exempting certain firearms from federal regulations, allowing the bill to become law without his signature, but he had vetoed a similar bill earlier (his veto was overridden).

Bredesen married Susan Cleaves in 1968. They divorced in 1974 and had no children. Later that year, he married Andrea Conte in Wheatley, Oxfordshire, England. The two have one son, Ben. He identifies his faith as Presbyterian.

Bredesen is a licensed pilot as well as a hunter and outdoorsman. He also paints as a personal hobby alongside his business and political career. During his tenure as governor, he occasionally used his own artwork for the official governor's holiday cards. In 2006, the card featured a painting titled Afghan Girl, which was based on a photograph taken during a visit Bredesen made to Afghanistan earlier that year.