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Jim Sasser, Tennessee's last Democratic U.S. senator, dies at 87 • Tennessee Lookout [1]
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Date: 2024-09-11
Jim Sasser, a three-term representative from Tennessee to the U.S. Senate and former chair of the state Democratic Party, died Tuesday at 87.
Sasser was the last Democrat to hold a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee, during an era when Democrats dominated state politics. His 1994 defeat with hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the party’s dominance in the Volunteer state.
Bart Gordon, a Democratic congressman from Murfreesboro from 1985 to 2011, praised Sasser as a dedicated public servant who spent a good portion of his professional life either working for Tennesseans as a senator from 1977 to 1995 and serving the United States as an ambassador to China from 1996 to 1999.
Gordon first met Sasser in the early 1970s when the former senator was chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party and Gordon on the party’s executive committee.
“He had a love for the United States Senate as an institution and as really a vehicle to try to accomplish that public service. I think he accomplished that, and he did it in a bipartisan way,” Gordon said.
Sasser, a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, spent much of his early professional years working as a political activist and then the Democratic Party operative, including for the campaigns of U.S. Sens. Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr.
I've always viewed government as the friend of the ordinary people, and politics as being an interesting avocation and a way of effecting positive change. – Former Sen. Jim Sasser in 1994
Former Republican Sen. Bill Brock defeated Gore in his 1970 Senate reelection campaign, which Sasser managed. Six years later, Sasser ran for the Senate himself and beat Brock, going on to win two more terms.
Sasser steadily rose through the ranks of the U.S. Senate, becoming chair of the powerful Budget Committee in 1990, which gave him a chance to become the U.S. Senate Majority Leader if he won reelection in 1994 and Democrats retained the majority.
An Associated Press article from May 1994 says Sasser was “known for caution” and focused on “bringing projects back to Tennessee during his first years in Washington.”
“I’ve always viewed government as the friend of the ordinary people, and politics as being an interesting avocation and a way of effecting positive change,” the Associated Press quotes Sasser as saying, calling him “corny.”
Former Rep. Jim Cooper, a Nashville Democrat who also ran for Senate in 1994, said Sasser always remained close to his Tennessee working-class roots, remaining a fair and humble person, who never acted like a big shot.
Sasser’s 1994 loss to political newcomer Bill Frist, who rode a wave of self-funding and anti-Democrat sentiment, was a tough pill for him to swallow.
“To be dragged down by (former President) Bill Clinton was really painful for him,” Cooper said. “He could have followed Howard Baker as another majority leader from Tennessee.”
Frist would ascend to the U.S. Senate Majority Leader position nine years later in a twist of irony.
After Sasser’s defeat, Clinton appointed him ambassador to China. While he was serving in Beijing, protests erupted when the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, leading Sasser to gain national media attention as tried to ease tensions.
After his time in China, Sasser and his wife lived in Washington D.C., moving to North Carolina to be closer to his family later in life. But he kept ties to Tennessee, donating his congressional papers to Vanderbilt in 2013.
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