A Warning For Bill Frist?

Bill Frist might use today not just for prayerful reflection, but political self-analysis because New York Times columnist David Books has what almost sounds like the beginning of a political obituary thread.

No, Frist can’t be counted out in the 2008 Presidential sweepstakes yet since he has scored big points with the people with whom he wanted to score them, even though he lost some key battles. And related battles aren’t over yet. But Books’ column “What Makes Fill Frist Run” is not a column Frist will want to reprint in full and hand out to primary voters. Some key parts:

It took guts to break off the grand wedding that was in the works – to risk alienating everyone he had grown up with for the sake of the woman he had suddenly come to love. Furthermore here was a Bill Frist who knew his own heart.

One doesn’t quite get that sense about Majority Leader Bill Frist today. These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role. And because he is behaving in ways that don’t seem entirely authentic, he is often trying just a bit too hard, striking the notes more forcefully than they need to be struck.

That is what happened during the Terri Schiavo affair. It’s not quite fair to say that Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a TV screen, but he did put himself on the wrong side of the autopsy that came out last week. He did betray his medical training, which is the core of his being, to please a key constituency group.

And it wasn’t a case of cynical opportunism. Frist’s story is more subtle than that.

He then goes into an analysis about Frist, his apparent thirst for public service and people Brooks says he met in Nashville who still talk about Frist’s kind acts. And THEN:

There were two things Frist was not: political and ideologically conservative. He barely voted before he ran for Senate….(And) for his first years in the Senate, Frist seemed to fit the mold of the Tennessee Republican, the mold of Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander – conservative but pragmatic, energetic but not confrontational.

But the Senate changes people. Senators are endlessly polished and briefed; they spend their days relentlessly speechifying. The White House beckons, and some come to seem less like human beings and more like nation-states. Opinions turn into positions. Beliefs grow more abstract. Individual traits become parts of the brand…..

He notes that since 1961 every Senator who has run for President has lost — and says Frist seems to have changed:

Frist too appears to have been gradually altered. Many who’ve known him say it’s hard to square the current on-message leader with the honest young man of “Transplant,” the stiff, ideological politician with the beloved community leader who made such a mark on Nashville. ..Sometimes in their quests to perform greater acts of service, people lose contact with their animating passion.

His point is that the earlier Frist is the one the country could use and the one who should be out there now because he’d be so appealing.

Some things about this:

• This is not a column that sounds as if it’s praising a strategically and tactically brilliant leader. It’s a WARNING SHOT fired across The Good Ship Frist’s (which increasingly resembles the Titanic) bow.
• Frist’s problem is that he has become as transparent in his thirst for the White House and in his efforts to get support from a particular constituency as Al Gore was in trying to change his persona to compensate for bad news he saw in the political polls. Some politicians can politically worm around with grace, and style and get a pass; Frist can’t — and he isn’t. People are WRONG who call him the GOP’s new Nixon.
• This kind of column isn’t usually written about a powerhouse politician who is going to get people to fall on the sword for him. A few key defeats and Frist’s problems could increase.

Another thing to remember. When Trent Lott bit the dust, if you recall, Frist was touted as a confidant of President George Bush who is said to have wanted him in that post as “his” man, representing a new image for the Republican party — a surgeon, a (relatively) young, dynamic politico, a more “compassionte” conservative. Frist’s recent battles and blunders have squandered that blank-slate imagery which he has himself filled in with a new definition of him as a political panderer that is likely to limit his appeal not only in primaries but in any general election.