Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, photographed on Jan. 11, 2024. (Photo: John Partipilo)
The first time I started paying close attention to politics was during the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry.
I was a 23-year-old, first-year teacher who had recently left a job as a youth minister at a Southern Baptist Church and was starting to unpack my belief systems.
Since I wasn’t ready to tackle the religious aspect of that system, I settled on the political portion.
We all remember the “aw shucks” persona of Dubya; we’ve seen the heart-warming video of him slipping Michelle Obama a piece of candy at John McCain’s funeral. It almost made us forget the unnecessary war in Iraq and the housing collapse a few years later. It’s hard for us to reconcile the persona of Bush with some of the decisions made on his watch, but then we remember who his vice president was, and it all makes a little more sense.
What started as a casual following of the national political narrative has evolved into an almost myopic focus on state and local-level policy, and what I’ve seen out of Nashville the last few years scares the hell out of me because it’s affecting people I know and love on a personal level. It also worries me because I’ve seen this playbook before, and it didn’t turn out too well.