I've been reading here on FR that the Bush Whitehouse is pushing Alexander for the TN Senate candidate. Lamar! and his wife had so many scuzzy deals they made Clinton and Hillary look like very garden variety statehouse pol sweetheart dealers. But the big thing was how the media and the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment wouldn't make a big deal of Alexander's business dealings that made him a rich man from investments he could never have gotten in on without being "sponsored." It wasn't until Steve Forbes made an issue of it that it made the news and had commentators like Don Imus calling Alexander a "crook."
Lamar Alexander strikes me as the perfect establishment politician. He has never struck me as the type of politician that is capable of attracting support on the basis of his ideas. I am left with the conclusion that he is a deal-cutter -- which, by the way, probably makes him well suited to sit in the Senate
Frankly, I think that Alexander's candidacy for the Senate could easily be derailed by almost any other Republican with a pulse. Look at what happened to Riordan in California.
Returning to Alexander's alleged unsavoriness for a moment, I have always thought that the reason that they didn't go after Hillary on the Cattle-futures deal was that financial chicanery of this type is the standard way of bribing politicians these days. If they nailed Hillary, where would the bloodletting end? Spiro Agnew seems positively straight-forward by comparison when you consider the fact that his bribes at least came in a Brown Paper Bag.