Author Archives: Tom Baxter

It was interesting last week, while channel-surfing between clips of one Republican congressman blessing out a park ranger and another admitting he didn’t know what the House GOP could ask for to save face and back away from the budget crisis, to catch some of the recent British Conservative and Labour Party conferences on CSPAN.  A lot about British politics looks very familiar, but there’s much that seems very different, indeed.

A big difference is that these are two parties talking among themselves, and to each other. Their language is often saltier — Prime Minister David Cameron  spoke of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s economic proposals as “Red Ed and his Blue Peter economy” — but at least they’re talking.

Some of the differences between their current politics and ours are only cyclical. Over there the Conservatives are in power, so the party more like the Republicans defends the pace of the economic recovery while the party more like the Democrats attacks it. Some of the similarities are more fundamental.

When I was an intern reporter at the Montgomery Advertiser, there used to be a basement bar downtown that I’d hit with the older guys after our late-night deadlines.

A keyboardist who was a music professor at Alabama State would arrive an hour or so later, and sometimes in the wee hours he’d be joined by other musicians who’d finished their gigs elsewhere. He played a fine, cool version of “Yellow Bird.”

One of my most lasting memories from those days was the night the Alabama legislature finished its session and, to my astonishment, the bar ran completely out of liquor.

Some may been shocked when a reporter covering the U.S. House vote tweeted that members walking off the House floor Saturday night reeked of booze. Having by now covered the finales of many legislative sessions, I wasn’t so surprised. “Yellow Bird” came lilting back into my mind.

Last week’s capitol-steps pep rally for the Green Tea Coalition, a left-right, pro-solar alliance which has its roots in Rep. Jeff Chapman’s unsuccessful attempt to pass a bill limiting profits on cost overruns at the two new nuclear reactors being built by Georgia Power at Plant Vogtle, was one of several related and equally curious developments across the region this year.

Last month, with little advance notice, the Alabama Public Service Commission voted for what was described as the largest reduction in Alabama Power Co.’s allowed rate of return in 25 years.

Since then a lot of questions have been raised, and Alabama Power has basically said that nobody’s rates are going to go down any time soon.  But the mere fact that the Alabama PSC went through the motions of a rate reduction was a reflection of the political heat generated by the lone dissenting vote on the panel, Commissioner Terry Dunn, who had pressed to have testimony taken under oath in the hearings preceding the vote.

For a vivid picture of how Georgia’s fiscal priorities get fixed, let’s compare the state’s refusal to join in the Medicaid expansion with its determination to move ahead with the deepening of the Savannah River channel to the Port of Savannah.

The Medicaid expansion issue, aka the ObamaCare issue, is very controversial, with advocacy groups lining up on both sides to turn up the heat in the lead-up to Oct. 1, when the uninsured can begin signing up for health care exchanges, and Jan. 1, when the expanded Medicaid program begins. As much as they disagree on everything else, neither side would argue that the economic consequences are very high for the state. Tim Sweeney of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an advocate for accepting the expansion, has estimated the cost for each month of delay to be between $240 million and $300 million.

The harbor dredging project also involves getting money from Washington, but in this case the lack of controversy is almost unsettling. When every important political leader in the state from Kasim Reed to Paul Broun is on board with something, you know it’s either a no-brainer, or nobody’s using any brains.

Generally speaking, shortening the calendar would be viewed as a way to make a race more interesting. The Republican state officials who went one better on a federal court order and got next year’s primary date moved all the way back to May 20 had just the opposite in mind, however.

By moving the primary date back into the school year and holding the runoff in July, they reasoned, a broader turnout will be guaranteed. That reduces the chance that the party nominates someone so far to the right that they’re vulnerable to Democrat Michelle Nunn in the U.S. Senate race. Moving up the calendar also gives incumbent Gov. Nathan Deal’s rivals in the party less time to pester him.

Here’s one instance in which political calculation and good government end up in pretty much the same place. Whatever the short-term implications of the calendar changes, holding elections at a time when a broader number of voters will participate is probably, in the long run, a good thing.

Over the weekend, President Obama did exactly what, in theory, he’s supposed to do. This action was branded almost immediately by friend and foe alike as the biggest blunder of his presidency.

Some of Obama’s own advisors were said to be taken aback when he told them he’d decided to put the question of whether to take military action against Syria to a vote by Congress.

“This erratic conduct leaves U.S. foreign policy in a shambles,” Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative whose resistance to congressional interference stretches back to the Iran-Contra affair, fumed in a Politico op-ed. “This could be the biggest miscalculation of of his presidency,” a senior House Democrat said.

What Obama had done to cause such an uproar from all sides was to follow to the letter the advice of Sarah Palin, who called on him to seek congressional approval in a Facebook post the night before he announced he would do so. In football terms, this used to be called a quick kick.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell make a great tag team for a nonpartisan effort to pass immigration reform because, as Barbour noted after a session hosted by the Essential Economy Council this week, neither is nonpartisan in the least.

Getting Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee when the Contract with America was signed, to co-chair an initiative on this sensitive political issue with Rendell, who chaired the Democratic National Committee during the tangled 2000 presidential election, does show broad support for an agreement on immigration reform.

But it’s broad and thin, with very little chance Congress can pass a bill this year, and the certainty that moving it next year with congressional elections looming won’t be easy.

The first couple of times I was asked to write an advance obit for Bert Lance, back at the AJC several years ago, I refused to do it. There was no way, I argued, that I could be objective about him. And I certainly can’t now that he’s gone.

I owed him tremendously. When I went back to writing after several years as an editor, covering the runup to the 1988 presidential campaign, I got on the list of people Lance kept in contact with by phone on a more or less daily basis from his office in Calhoun. We had a mutual friend in John Mashek, who over the years wrote for UPI, U.S. News and World Report, and the AJC. Mashek also introduced me to Jack Germond, the legendary political writer who died the day before Lance.

All these were pols of the old school, plugged into the fine intricacies of American politics, on a first-name basis with party chairs down to the county level from across the country, and famous for their Roladexes.

A few weeks ago I was writing a column about how Georgia’s fastest growing counties are no longer in the Atlanta Metro area, and so I emailed some questions to the go-to source on subjects like that, Doug Bachtel, the University of Georgia demographer who founded the Georgia County Guide. He answered me promptly and I put some of what he had to say in the column.

Bachtel was one of those people I’ve known and depended on for decades, but always at a distance. It was a complete surprise to learn last week that he had died of complications from multiple sclerosis. Our brief email exchange must have been among the last of many thousands of exchanges he’d had with the media during his career. On just about any subject related to broad trends in the state, he was a reliable and widely quoted source of factual data for many years.

Simply to attempt a county guide in a state with of 159 of them was an act of boldness, and over time the guide, along with the Georgia Municipal Guide and Georgia Housing Guide which he also edited, has become an invaluable source of information about the state.

Last week, Politico reports, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie gave a rave notice to a movie about a Democratic, anti-war civil liberties advocate.

“Copperhead,” a film about northern opponents of the Civil War and the abuse they suffered, “will hit close to home for every conservative fighting to preserve our Constitution and our American way of life,” Viguerie emailed his followers. “Copperhead is about standing up for faith, for America, and for what’s right, just like you and I are doing today.”

The connection may seem a little odd, but it comes at a time when Copperheadism is very much alive in the Party of Lincoln. The Obama presidency, and in particular, the long battle against the Affordable Health Care Act, has quickened the already thumping pulse of anti-government dissent on the right. Moreover, the Copperheads’ mistrust of Yankee meddlers could well strike a sympathetic chord among today’s Tea Party activists.

They still remember that brief and glorious moment when everything clicked. The campaign they worked on didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, but a decade later, they can say they were there at the dawn of a new political era.

Last Friday night, a group of veterans of the 2004 Georgia for Dean campaign gathered at Manuel’s to remember those days and — apropos of the kind of campaign they ran — connect with others during the evening via Skype.

If you look it up, you’ll see that John Kerry and John Edwards split nearly all the vote in the Georgia Democratic presidential primary that year, and Howard Dean, the anti-establishment former Connecticut governor who later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was a washout. But the numbers don’t tell all the story.

In military terms, the engagements which took place here 149 years ago Monday marked one more indecisive but ultimately fateful turn in the bloody Civil War campaign to capture this city. Atlanta didn’t fall to Union troops until Sept. 2, 1864, although there was no more major fighting. The conflict on July 22, which took the lives of more than 9,000 men, including a general each side, was recorded in history as the Battle of Atlanta.

Politically, few battles have had as immediate, or as lasting an impact as this battle and the larger campaign of which it was the centerpiece.

Fifty years ago this month, Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. became the only elected Southern official to testify for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision to “go beyond the niceties of racial harmony” and take a firm stand on the issue of segregation had been a “torturous” one, Allen’s son, Inman Allen, told the Atlanta Rotary Club Monday.

It was “a uniquely courageous and dramatic testimony that many have suggested was a pivotal moment in this country’s journey toward a fully integrated society,” Allen said, speaking to a group which his father once headed and of which his grandfather was a founder.

Few big developments have been telegraphed as thoroughly as last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling voiding Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, so it was no surprise the response from all concerned was nimble.

It took almost no time at all after the court’s ruling was published for several of the Southern states which had been held in check by the law to bound forward with plans to implement voter ID laws and maps that had been deemed discriminatory by the courts.  And it took only slightly longer than that for liberal groups to begin mass fundraising appeals based on the impending outrage.

If the three Southern women were fictional characters, they might be the co-habitants of one hell of a summer-read novel. But all of them are real, and in a week when there was plenty of other stuff to make news of, they stepped unexpectedly into the spotlight.

We all know the character of the brassy Southern Magnolia who works her way to the top with energy and pluck, not always helped by her no-count relatives. Very often this character is tightly wound, capable of coming unstrung with frightening speed. So it has been with Paula Deen.

In the week when the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a significant chunk of the Voting Rights Act, racial commentary in our country centered mainly around Deen’s use of the N-word. There’s no little irony in that she got to this very public place by way of a law suit which started out as a sexual harassment case directed primarily at her brother, Bubba Hiers, brought by a white woman employee.

With protesters in the streets across the globe from Istanbul to Sao Paulo, what has been going on every Monday in Raleigh for the past couple of months hasn’t received nearly as much attention, outside North Carolina, as the 2011 demonstrations at Wisconsin’s capitol in Madison. But North Carolina’s Moral Mondays, as they’re called, bear watching.

Politics in North Carolina never was as smooth-edged as it might have appeared during the Mayberry era, and in recent years it has cycled into a particularly bitter period. After voting for Barack Obama and elected a Democratic woman, Bev Perdue, governor in 2008, the state swung dramatically to the right in 2010, putting Republicans in control of the legislature and the redistricting process. The GOP tightened its lock in 2012, electing Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, governor and strengthening its hold on the legislature.

Just as meaningful as the change from Democrats to Republicans has been the shift within the Republican Party to a more confrontational brand of conservatism.

Georgia’s a big state with a lot of counties, so don’t feel bad if you can’t locate Chattahoochee and Long counties on a map. On the other hand it might be time to brush up on your geography: Chattahoochee and Long are the third and fifth-fastest growing  counties, respectively, in the United States, according to the latest report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Over the years we’ve grown accustomed to seeing one Metro Atlanta county or another near the top of the Census Bureau’s list of the 100 fastest-growing counties, as the boom spread outwards. But this year the fastest growing metro county was Forsyth, No. 29 in the country with a growth rate of 7.1 percent between 2010 and 2012. Fulton (No. 43 with 6.2 percent growth) and Gwinnett (No. 83 with 4.3 percent growth), were the only other metro counties on the top 100 list.

Chattahoochee  (15.7 percent growth rate) and Long (11.1 percent) counties are on opposite sides of the state from each other, and neither is close to Atlanta.

Later this month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to add to the evolving case law dealing with how states share their increasingly precious water resources.

This time it’s not our water war that the court is concerned with. But how it rules in a long-running dispute between Texas and Oklahoma could affect how ours turns out.

There have been 38 interstate water compacts,  two of which were involved in the water war involving Georgia, Florida and Alabama over how much water Metro Atlanta can draw from Lake Lanier. Both those compacts were allowed to expire, although the issues they sought to address continue. Another is the Red River Compact, agreed to by the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana in 1980 for the “equitable apportionment among them of the waters of the Red River and its tributaries.”

My colleague, Maria Saporta, recently visited Houston with a group of civic leaders and reported on that sprawling megalopolis beside which we often measure ourselves. Today we'll take a less formal look at another Texas city to which we need to pay attention.

If Houston is your uncle who got rich developing shopping centers back in the '80s, Austin is your nephew who just made a fortune on an Internet startup.

Until recently, the Texas capital's explosive growth has been overshadowed by its neighbors, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. But in this year's Forbes listing of the fastest growing cities in the country, it elbowed past its Texas rivals to take the No. 1 spot. And it's quality growth: Austin was the only U.S. city to make a 2010 ranking of the world's most dynamic cities, based on growth in employment and income.

Austin may still cultivate a small-town image, but the metro area passed a fateful milestone over the weekend, when its telephone service was shifted to a 10-digit dialing system.

One of the significant cultural dividing lines these days is that between those who think of Mark Zuckerberg as a bright young guy and those who look upon him as a rich old dude.

This was born out recently by a Pew Research Center study which showed that teenagers are increasingly turning from Facebook toward Twitter and other sites with “fewer adults, fewer parents and just simply less complexity,” according to Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the study.

“Facebook just really seems to have more drama,” said Jaime Esquivel, a Virginia teen quoted in an AP story about the survey.

I may not think of “drama” in quite the same way as this high school junior, but I can certainly relate. As a journalist, a lot of people friend me on Facebook just to read me, and I de-friend only in the most extreme circumstances, so I see a wide slice of Facebook life. Believe me, it gets pretty wild out there at times.