Sooner or later, I need to begin to do what any candidate does in a presidential race; I need to begin to win.
President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.
When I was governor, I was looking for a way to unify our state. I realized music is about the only thing that unifies Tennessee.
We hear a lot about rebuilding Detroit, and we just spent $70 billion to bail out the auto industry - well, they need to be cost competitive, too. If they have high-cost energy, those suppliers are going to move to Japan or Mexico instead of Michigan and Tennessee.
As Governor, I could think of only one way to unify our State that was made up of so many different climates, political beliefs and people, and that was our music.
There are a growing number of conservatives and Republicans who, while they support the president and support the war in Iraq, wonder how many of these nation-building wars we're going to engage in and what the parameters of that are.
