ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 26, 2005
WASHINGTON - - Bill Frist is a statue in search of a pedestal.
He has a droning, cinderblock speaking style coupled with an unquenchable sense of his own destiny. He is currently the majority leader of the U.S. Senate and would like to be elected President of the United States in 2008.
This is not a laughable notion. The Republicans lack a clear front-runner. There are many interested: John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, George Allen, Mitt Romney and Frist, to name some of the more viable ones.
None is a stopper, however. None can keep others out of the race. And, speaking ability aside (Bob Dole was the Republican nominee in 1996, after all), Frist has an impressive resume: A surgeon, a senator, a former chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and now majority leader.
His fellow senator from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, said a year ago of Frist's presidential possibilities: "He's got the pole position in practical, tactical terms…."
But First has run into a few potholes recently.
The difference between pandering and groveling may be a fine one, but Frist seemed to cross the line in March when he questioned the diagnosis that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. "I question it based on a review of the footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office," Frist said on the Senate floor. "She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."
Even before an autopsy confirmed that Schiavo was blind and virtually without a brain, Frist came in for criticism for his video diagnosis, which seemed to have more to do with wooing the Christian right than serious medicine.
Not long after, Frist was neatly outfoxed by McCain, who helped form a coalition of Republicans and Democrats to oppose Frist's plan to scuttle the filibuster rule on judicial nominees.
Having pandered to the right on one issue and avoided the center on another, Frist then went left in July by endorsing the federal funding of embryonic cell stem research.
(A "Statue in Search of a Pedestal" was the title of a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette written in 1976 by Noel Bertram Gerson. Lafayette ended up a national hero in two countries, but who knows if Frist is a Lafayette.)
If his life weren't complicated enough, Frist recently became the subject of a civil investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department over his dumping of stock in his family's company shortly before the price nosedived.
Frist has denied any wrongdoing, but the knives are out. "We don't need Martha Stewart in the United States Senate," said former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga. (who was defeated in 2002 by a candidate handpicked by Frist.)
And speaking of knives, there is a terrible episode in Frist's past, which he hopes voters will forgive, if not forget: As a medical student, Frist went to animal shelters, asked for cats, pretended he would give them a good home and then cut them to pieces in medical experiments. Years later, he apologized.
He probably will get a pass from the media on this, since it happened years ago and the media will find it beneath the "dignity" of a presidential issue.
But of the 102.8 million households in the United States, 33.2 million of them have at least one cat in them as a pet. Some 39 million cats receive Christmas gifts from their owners and some 13.4 million cats have their birthdays celebrated.
And, according to the American Pet Association, these are the reasons that cat owners acquired their cats: Someone to play with, 93 percent. Companionship, 84 percent. Help children learn, 78 percent. Someone to communicate with, 62 percent. Security, 51 percent.
In looking over that list, I would say that pet owners might prefer their cats to Bill Frist in each and every category.