Southern revolt on the ascent of Hillary

    THE first signs of a Democratic revolt against Senator Hillary Clinton’s much-anticipated march on the White House are emerging in the American South, where one of the party’s most successful state governors called last week for Democrats to consider other candidates.

    In a calculated snub of Clinton’s accelerating bandwagon, Governor Philip Bredesen of Tennessee warned that voters were “kind of dissatisfied” with the Democrats’ current presidential contenders and that Clinton would face an “uphill road” to win the White House.

    Bredesen is a soft-spoken, ruddy-faced figure who makes no effort to dodge potentially embarrassing questions. Asked about Clinton, most Democrats gush about how wonderfully she has performed as senator for New York.

    Bredesen instead replied: “People love her or they hate her and I don’t know in the end how all that plays out. But I sure hope there are other people who would step forward.”

    Who should those others be? “It may well be someone that nobody has thought of . . . the sense I get is that people are really hunting around and looking for something different.”

    Bredesen, a former mayor of Nashville, believes his party has “somehow gotten itself divorced” from the blue-collar constituency it has always relied on for presidential success: “I’ve always felt the Democratic party was a kind of alliance between the academics and intellectuals and working-class men and women. I think what happened is that in my lifetime, the academics won.”

    As a result, the governor said, the party had lost its broad appeal. He mocked other Democratic candidates who think connecting with middle America means quoting a few verses from the Bible or being photographed with guns.