You can thank me (or throw eggs at me), not the miscounting in Florida, for Al Gore not being the president of the United States. You see, Tennessee did not vote for its favorite son in 2000. I was a voter in Tennessee in 2000. Had Gore been able to carry the state that knew him best, there would have been no need for recounts in Florida.

Throughout the three weeks of recounting, the media descended upon Florida. No one came to Tennessee to ask us why we had not voted for our own former U.S. Senator.

We did not vote for him because we didn't approve of him. He had been raised both in Washington and on a tobacco farm in Tennessee. Tobacco is big business in Tennessee. Tobacco subsidized his ambitions.

But suddenly, when he was picked to run for vice president by Bill Clinton, he was crying on national television about his sister who had died from the lung cancer demon. He hated tobacco. So why was he still making money off it?

We watched his wife, Tipper, get a national makeover as well. We sort of liked Tipper. She had launched a campaign against smut in the music industry. She didn't want her children listening to obscene lyrics. So she invented a rating chart to be placed on album covers, much like movie ratings were posted in theaters. That way, parents would know if the content was child-friendly without the parents having to listen to every song.

But the day Al no longer liked tobacco, Tipper's smut meter died. The Gores bent to Clinton's desire for Hollywood money. Our conservative Democratic senator was unrecognizable. Even his past pro-life voting record was now out the door. What had happened to his principles?

Then we weren't too happy with his vice presidential record. We watched him pressure (among other shenanigans) the Immigration and Naturalization Service to leapfrog its procedures to legalize a million aliens in swing states in time to vote in the November 1996 general election. Allegedly, 30 percent of that million had criminal backgrounds. Afterward, Clinton massaged their pet Democratic issues to prompt them to the polls.

Tennessee doesn't think much of the Oscar-winning movie star version of Al Gore, either. For a global-warming alarmist, he leaves a rather large carbon footprint in Nashville. He justified his reckless consumption of energy in his 10,000-square-foot home by purchasing carbon offsets. Tennesseans think that is rather like a bridegroom vowing to buy his new bride jewelry every time he cheats on her. So is that a commitment or not?

Now, Tennessee has another candidate: Fred Thompson. Tennessee likes old Fred. His local version and national version are the same:pro Second Amendment, pro-life, pro-military, pro- small government, pro-strong borders. As a character actor, Fred is the real Hollywood insider, yet his principles haven't wavered. He hasn't even become a vegetarian.

Granted, he didn't become a senator until he was 52, and many of us don't flip-flop much after we are in our senior years. But growing up with yesteryear family values and attending college prior to the hippy era, I doubt Fred had much chance to be an anarchist during his adolescence. Plus, we saw Fred as a public figure as an assistant U.S. attorney, campaign manager for Sen. Howard Baker, co-chief counsel to the Watergate Committee and serving on several high-level committees.

On second look, Gore hasn't flip-flopped either. He has consistently done whatever was politically expedient at the time. He does have a core principle and he stays true to it: Get elected by any means necessary.

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