Welcome Instapunditeers...
And thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link. Turnabout is not only fair play, it's a big part of what makes blogging fun, so here's a link to Reynold's comments on the income tax battle, and a snippet thereof:

"Tennessee's elected leaders have tried to address this problem by sleight-of-hand rather than persuasion. Every time they've done that, they've hurt their own credibility, and every time they've hurt their own credibility, they've reduced their ability to sell it in an aboveboard fashion."

Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Almost three years ago he wrote this essay analyzing the defeat of Gov. Sundquist's income tax proposal in a November 1999 special session of the legislature. Step into the wayback machine... it's worth it. Even almost three years later, Reynolds' piece accurately analyzes the forces and reasons that defeated the income tax. He's also very perceptive about how the income tax battle symbolizes the deteriorating power of Big Media.

"The powers-that-be aren't anymore: Without talk radio and the Internet, Tennessee would probably have an income tax now. The major media were almost all pro-tax, and anti-tax groups got little publicity, most of it negative and condescending. Used to the old way of doing things, state politicians (many of whom barely use e-mail) missed the groundswell of opposition until it was too late. Tax opponents, meanwhile, simply bypassed the traditional gatekeepers in the media and took their case directly to the people. The people responded."

It's good reading, and three years later, nothing has changed - except the power of the alternative media to influence public policy has grown, while the power of Big Media continues to shrink.

This year, the proposoed income tax was backed by the Tennessee's biggest newspapers, its governor, and top leaders in the House and Senate. It had regular cheerleaders in the political press, such as The Tennessean's Larry Daughtrey (see below). The pro-income tax side even had a well-funded lobbying group, the badly misnamed Tennesseans for Fair Taxation.

The opposition had no no well-funded and organized counterpart to the pro-tax lobbying organization and didn't have the backing of the major newspapers. The Tennessee Institute for Public Policy, very involved in the first two years, was absent from the debate this year. (Full disclosure: I worked for TIPP for five months in 2001.) The ragtag opposition had just three small websites (this one, TaxFreeTennessee.com and TnTaxRevolt.org) and their readers, who often took it upon themselves to dig up the truth about Tennessee's budget, taxes, government waste and other relevant facts and pass it on to one or more of those websites, or to a few talk radio hosts.

Yet... and this is the cool part ... we won.