Firecracker Frist

Despite what it may seem, I don't have a jones to go after Bill Frist. It's just that his position as Senate Majority Leader, essentially put into that position by the White House, makes him a meaty target, and the ineptness of his leadership makes him an easy one. In yesterday's Washington Post, Mike Allen provides a very positive, if not exactly gushing, profile of Frist attending the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte, NC. He's apparently a rabid NASCAR fanatic. Let's let Frist tell it:

"I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee," he said. "Nashville Speedway was about, probably, four miles from my house. My first recollections of stock car racing were being in my house on Bowling Avenue, and on warm summer nights, when I was 7, 8 years old, listening to the sounds of cars."

He only lived a scant four miles from the Nashville Speedway? He must have gasoline running through his veins! You've got to wonder why he threw away an exciting career on the pit crew for Princeton, Harvard Medical School, and the life of a surgeon. I started to write about how Nashville isn't that large a city, and four miles is essentially across town, but then I realized that four miles is a long way in any city. Find your own address on a map, and draw a circle with a radius of four miles to see the broad diversity of neighborhoods and landmarks within that area. Are you intimately familiar with all of them?

In regards to Nashville itself, one of its quirks is that streets change names as they move from one part of town to another. The primary street linking the Frist family manse with the Nashville Speedway goes by four different names between the two. They may be four miles apart, but they're in totally different worlds. Bowling Avenue is one of the most exclusive addresses in Nashville. Belle Meade, the community of which it is a part, is the fifth richest in the nation. I also spent part of my youth in Nashville, though not in that area. I was about five miles from the speedway (but even farther from Frist--he was west of the racetrack, and I lived southeast), so NASCAR isn't in my bones to the same extent as it is in Frist's (although the main thoroughfare between my old house and the speedway only changes its name once). I also guess that the roar of the engines fades between the fourth and fifth mile, because I could never tell there was a race on just by sitting on my porch and listening (unless Frist has ears like Superman and can hear a penguin splashing at the South Pole from anywhere on Earth, in which case he could have heard the race just as easily from my backyard as from his).

Being the lifelong racing fan that he is, though, Frist must have been mortified when someone finally told him he'd mispronounced Sterling Marlin as Sterling Martin. Maybe Frist was laying outside on the grass listening to the stock car races instead of watching the local sportscasts that would've mentioned Sterling's dad Coo Coo Marlin. And the Marlin are a Tennessee dynasty. Not only did Frist insult NASCAR royalty, he dissed a constituent, too.

For a scalpel taken to the entire profile and not just a few Nashville details, take a look at yesterday's Daily Howler.