1988: A year that echoes in Georgia Republican politics to this day

I’ve covered a lot of political conventions — national, state, Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Reform. I saw Ronald Reagan’s last convention speech and Barack Obama’s first. Of all these, the 1988 Georgia Republican state convention in Albany was hands-down the most dramatic.

Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had easily won that year’s presidential primary, but supporters of televangelist Pat Robertson showed up in large numbers at the local caucuses where delegates to the state convention in Albany were selected. Although Robertson had suspended his campaign, supporters hoped to play a role in shaping the party platform. Hundreds of Republicans from both camps went to Albany, claiming the right to control the convention.

With the Albany Civic Center in an uproar, state GOP chairman John Stuckey abruptly declared that the business of the convention couldn’t go forward. As he attempted to bring it to a close, the gavel slipped from his hand and flew from the stage.

Then the party regulars, the Bush people, rose en masse and left the arena, waving farewell to the Robertson insurgents who were busy taking over the stage, as a soloist sang a hymn on a portable sound system. In a quirky way, that memory has always reminded me of the closing scene from the movie “Zulu.”

“I feel like I’m on a surfboard, riding a tidal wave,” Robertson’s brash young Georgia campaign manager, Brant Frost IV, said then. “The Republican Party is the vehicle.”

The struggle for control continued all the way to New Orleans, where the Republican National Committee approved a deal brokered by the Bush campaign and seated a compromise delegation for the national convention.

The uneasy truce between “the country club-oriented party,” as Frost derisively called it, and the more countrified newcomers who would go on to support Pat Buchanan four years later proved to be a formative event for the Georgia GOP in the years before it gained control of state government.

Stuckey passed away in May at the Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville. Fred Cooper, who chaired the Georgia Bush campaign in 1988, died in June. They were both interviewed in 2017 as part of the Richard B. Russell Library’s Two-Party Georgia Oral History Project, which should prove very useful for future researchers. You can still hear Stuckey’s disdain for the Robertson insurgents when he accuses them of “things that ANTIFA does today.”

As the Republicans of Stuckey and Cooper’s generation moved into retirement, Frost continued his involvement in Republican Party politics, often playing the role of the outsider challenging the establishment, as he became ever more an insider. His son and daughter also now hold prominent positions in the state party.

In 1993, Frost also founded a business, First Liberty Building and Loan. The private loan company promised deals that “all looked like a slam dunk,” in the words of one disgruntled investor. It also leaned heavily on Frost’s conservative connections, billing itself as a company that was building the “patriot economy.”

Last week, First Liberty announced it was cooperating with federal authorities in the orderly conclusion of its operations and suspending all payments to investors — never words you want to hear if you’ve sunk money in a business.

Judging from some of the comments in stories about the firm’s collapse, a lot of people who had no business whatsoever investing in this kind of inherently risky operation are now left wondering if they’ll ever get anything back. It’s impossible to say how much these investors were influenced by friendly plugs for First Liberty on right-wing radio shows.

But we can take this sad occasion to say something that should be said more often. Politics, no matter what kind of politics, has nothing to do with the value of an investment. Any appeal that suggests that it does should be viewed with suspicion. A dollar will turn left or right, depending on where it wants to go.

Questions have been raised about possible connections between First Liberty and a political action committee controlled by the Frosts. In the meantime, the state has launched its own inquiry into First Liberty. Frost is still riding a tidal wave, but it doesn’t have the promise it seemed to offer in 1988.