Author Archives: Tom Baxter

We’re in the year of the ground game. Campaigns still spend tons of money flailing at each other on television, but it was the ground game that ambushed Eric Cantor in Virginia, and saved the day for Thad Cochran in Mississippi.

And in Georgia, it was the strength of David Perdue’s ground game which gave him the winning edge in the U.S. Senate primary runoff.

With the ground game’s importance in mind, perhaps the biggest story that didn’t get a lot of attention last week was the consolidation of a Democratic ticket which is a first in the nation’s history.

The names of Connie Stokes, Valarie Wilson, Doreen Carter, Liz Johnson and Robbin Shipp haven’t generated as many headlines, combined, as the sixth Democratic woman on the ticket, Michelle Nunn. But these five African-American women candidates could potentially have a big impact on Nunn’s race, as well as Jason Carter’s bid for governor.

Polls are like drops in a bucket. A single poll, like the one last week which showed challenger Jason Carter leading Gov. Nathan Deal by eight percentage points, is only a solitary ker-plunk. It’s what accumulates in the bucket that can reveal where a race is headed.

The Real Clear Politics chart on this race shows 13 publicly released polls so far this year, and Deal has led in 10 of them. Interestingly, the three polls in which Carter has led — an InsiderAdvantage poll in early March, a Rasmussen poll in late May, and the Landmark Communications poll last week — all were conducted by polling firms which are Republican in their leanings.

For a few minutes during Sunday night’s U.S. Senate primary runoff debate between David Perdue and U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, the air got about as thick as it has in this entire, long and nasty contest. This was their only televised face-to-face encounter, but it’s possible that in these last humid July days before the vote, things could get hotter still.

“I would have expected a little bit more of you,” Kingston said after Perdue had declared that stories about a problem donor showed the congressman was “open for business.”

But Kingston then proceeded to give as good as he got, accusing his opponent of a “sweetheart deal” when Perdue’s cousin, the governor, named him to the Georgia Ports Authority board while a trucking company he co-owned did business at the facility.

A few minutes before the June jobs report was released last Thursday morning, the wise guys on “Squawk Box” went around the table predicting what job growth would be. Even the optimist on this panel was far short of the 288,000 new jobs reported by the Labor Department. Later that day, as the nation prepared for Independence Day, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average passed 17,000 for the first time in history.

Also last week, a Quinnipiac University poll showed a plurality of Americans thought Barack Obama was the worst president since World War II.

What is wrong with this picture?

Maria Saporta’s column gives a good sense of what’s at stake for transportation policy in Tuesday night’s Clayton County Commission vote on putting a full-penny MARTA sales tax on the the ballot in November.

The commission’s vote could mean a lot to statewide Democratic candidates on the ballot this fall, as well.

In 2010, when Gov. Nathan Deal was elected, voter turnout in Clayton County totaled 61,339. In the presidential election year of 2012, turnout in the county was 92,748. So that’s about 31,000 votes that spell the difference between voter enthusiasm in Clayton and the lack of it. In a close statewide race that could also spell the difference between victory and defeat.

We have come to a place in American politics where, when a six-term U.S. senator from Mississippi wins his primary, it can be called “stunning,”  with at least a small amount of justification.

Fifty years after Fannie Lou Hamer and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought to be counted at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, black votes spoke loudly Tuesday in Mississippi, although not as Ms. Hamer might have imagined they would speak.

Political lightning can be tricky to judge. You can’t always tell from the following thunder how close it has struck.

Last Tuesday evening there was a bright flash over Virginia, and the thunder that followed it reverberated across the country. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat at the hands of an unheralded college economics professor, David Brat, was quickly pronounced the greatest political upset, ever. By many standards — the difference in money spent, polls, the fact that a majority leader had never been defeated in a primary — there was justification for that claim.

New challenges produce new terminology, and there was plenty of it being thrown around Monday at the first meeting of the Rural Hospital Stabilization Committee, the latest blue-ribbon panel tasked with solving a problem no one else has been able to tackle.

The committee members were briefed on the details of the newly-created Rural Freestanding Emergency Departments — RFEDs. The result of a relaxation of state licensing rules, these are emergency facilities designed for rural counties where full-service hospitals have closed. They’re intended to work with larger facilities within a 35-mile radius, treating patients on site for no more than 24 hours.

This has been an interesting time to be in France, as quite a few Atlantans seem to have been last week.

The results of the European parliamentary elections stirred no more notice over here than Kim and Kanye’s Paris-Florence wedding pageant did over there. This “earthquake,” as French Prime Minister Manuel Valls described it, nevertheless has serious implications for the United States.

It’s tempting to say that if Marine Le Pen, who took her party to its first-ever national victory, were magically transformed into an American politician, she’d be the chair of the Republican Party in six months and its presidential standard-bearer by early next year.

(Dear Readers: The results are in now, and there will be plenty for everyone to chew on for a week or two, which is about how long I plan to be gone. See you again in June.)

U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey has not had an easy time in the Republican U.S. Senate primary, but in his last, desperate ad of the season, his campaign produced the image which, far more than crying babies or old station wagons, best expresses what this year has been like.

One by one, Gingrey’s rivals appear as shaky celluloid images which disintegrate as the charges against them are recited: Karen Handel’s vote for Youth Pride, “that promotes teenage homosexuality,” David Perdue, “championing Common Core with Obama,” and Jack Kingston, “siding with liberals, surrendering to ObamaCare.”

My response to last week’s announcement that the coolest college station in the universe is about to be replaced in the daytime by another broad slather of upscale national chat has been tinged with a degree of geezer guilt.

I’ve always considered WRAS, Album 88, a point of civic pride. It used to strike me, fiddling around the dial as I drove around the country following one story or another, that no college station matched it for attitude and energy, and few stations of any kind equaled its studied sense of cool.

So the deal in which Georgia Public Broadcasting will take over the Georgia State University station’s airtime from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. left me indignant, but also with the sinking realization that the Album 88 of my imagination is still playing Bananarama and Fun Boy Three.

It was a good thing former Gov. Sonny Perdue had his own transportation when he left office in 2011, because he might have had trouble getting a ride.

Critics charged that the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction had marked time in office, with little more to show for his two terms than Go Fish Georgia. Republicans groused that he hadn’t been a “real” Republican; Democrats still regarded him as a turncoat, and a corrupt one at that.

There’s no small irony, then, in the way this year’s Republican Senate primary is shaping up. The two candidates who seem to be making the most headway are those with the closest connection to the former governor: David Perdue, his cousin, and Karen Handel, whose first job in government was as Sonny Perdue’s deputy chief of staff.

What the solar power business needs at this point in its development is another Steve Jobs.

Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers, had a unique knack for making the most disruptive technologies seem smooth and cool and inoffensive. Early in its history, Apple introduced the Macintosh as an act of defiance against the Orwellian sameness of IBM. But those hard edges quickly melted into the rounded corners of the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone. Apple products have become the tool of all factions and the emblem of none.

Renewable energy, including solar, has much the same gadgety appeal as the the Apple products, but while Apple harpooned the recording industry as we knew it with one shot when it introduced iTunes, the renewables are circling a more dangerous whale: the electrical utilities and their political allies.

Recently a group called Smart Growth America issued a report on sprawl in the nation’s metropolitan areas, and to the surprise of no Atlantans, we were No. 1: the most sprawling large metro area in the country, again.

Actually, we were ranked No. 220, but that’s because Smart Growth America considers it a bad thing when people have to live a long way from work or a grocery store, and metro areas gobble up huge chunks of the countryside.

Many Atlantans have a different view. They don’t like their long commutes, but look upon sprawl as an emblem of booming economic health. For years, as the sprawl reached record proportions, a widening circle of metro counties made it on the list of the nation’s fastest growing.

Last week National Journal editorial director Ron Brownstein led an interesting teleconference devoted to the various ways in which the American electorate is being reshaped by changing demographics. One of the trends he noted was the increasing economic edge which those with college degrees have over those who don’t, with the graduates of the nation’s most elite schools at the top of the heap.

Consider the U.S. Supreme Court, for example. From 1900 to 1950 there were always between one and three graduates of the Harvard or Yale law schools on the court. Today the only justice who didn’t graduate from one of these schools is Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and that’s only because Ginsberg transferred from Harvard Law to Columbia Law after her marriage.

The verdict which came down Friday in the Stacey Kalberman trial was bad news for Gov. Nathan Deal. Worse still was the enthusiasm with which that verdict was rendered.

You just don’t see that many discharged juries flocking around the successful plaintiff to embrace and congratulate her very often at the end of a civil suit. That was the scene last week after Kalberman, the former state Ethics Commission director, was awarded $700,000 in damages, plus court costs and back pay to kick the state’s tab up over a million, for being fired in retaliation for her tough investigation of Deal’s 2010 campaign finances.

Last week a century or so of political experience sat around a lunch table in Cobb County and pondered this question: Has there ever been a U.S. Senate race in which neither the Democratic nor the Republican candidate had previously held elected office?

We’re pols, not political scientists, so there may have been some race we don’t know about or overlooked. But all agreed that we’d never covered or worked on a race of that description. It may be time for a little more rigorous research into that question, because just such a race has appeared on the horizon, shimmering like a pundit’s mirage.

If Michelle Nunn and David Perdue become their party’s nominees, their race would be a striking sign of the American public’s alienation from politics and distrust of incumbency in general.

Want to hear a good Georgia joke? Last week the Alabama legislature passed a medical marijuana bill and ours couldn’t.

Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. In both states, Republicans sponsored the bill, there was a lot of citizen support and a broad consensus over the issue. But in Georgia an unrelated measure requiring insurers to cover autism therapy for children was amended into the bill, and both causes went down in flames. There were some problems in the bill, but it wasn’t the problems that doomed it. It was the bolloxed nature of the process.

That was common in the session that closed last week. It was a banner year for show-out, red-meat election year bills. But whenever the subject shifted even slightly away from the billboard issues like guns and ObamaCare, this legislature collapsed into incoherence, unsure what it believed about much of anything and incapable of moving forward.

If Bo Callaway had become governor in 1966, it’s quite possible the obituaries of the past weekend would have proclaimed him the most important political figure of his time in Georgia. But by losing the race in which he got the most votes, Callaway’s real impact on our state may have been far deeper than it would have been if he had occupied the governor’s office.

Twice since the Second World War — a cynic might say at least twice — the leadership of Georgia has been determined by something other than the pure will of the people. One episode — the chaotic period  following the death of Eugene Talmadge, the governor-elect, in 1947 — led directly to the other in 1966.

A court ruled the state legislature acted improperly when it elected Herman Talmadge to replace his father in 1947, so after the younger Talmadge was elected governor by the people in 1948, he passed legislation formally ratifying the legislature’s power to elect the governor if no candidate got an absolute majority in the general election — the law that would deny Callaway the governor’s office in 1966.

Little noticed amid all the furor last week over the Obama Administration’s failure to include the Savannah port-dredging project in the next federal budget were the latest dispatches from the Panama Canal Zone. They might have helped everyone sleep a little easier over the delay.

The federal money was desired and expected because Savannah is racing with other East Coast ports to be deep and wide enough to accommodate the larger container ships coming with the completion of the Panama Canal Zone widening project next year.

We’ve already raised questions about just how big a hurry there really is to prepare for this new trade. Now comes word that massive cost overruns and contract disputes have pushed back the opening of the expanded canal from June to December of next year, or possibly longer.