Author Archives: Tom Baxter

It’s that time of year when we feel compelled to enumerate things. The annual tallies of the biggest stories and the best movies and books have grown into a jungle of lists – everything from the most annoying words (“Whatever” won for the second year in a row this year) to the biggest media stories (Rush Limbaugh’s tiff with Sandra Fluke took the top spot in a Politico Top Ten story).

Arguing with the selections is a big part of this New Year’s fun. (Why isn’t “proactive” ever singled out, and how could a Rush tantrum top Karl Rove’s election night performance?) We don’t really expect these year-end reckonings to bear up to historical scrutiny.

When the horror film “The Exorcist” came out in 1973, the Boston Phoenix interviewed several experts of different sorts on the film’s significance as a pop culture examination of the great struggle between good and evil. One of them was a drug councilor familiar with the worst ravages of inner-city street life, who thought the movie got it all wrong in portraying such a sharp conflict between the demon and its exorcist. In reality, he said, “Good and evil roll around together like puppies at play.”

It’s funny how a line will stick with you, long after the original subject fades into obscurity. That one comes back to me every time the concept of “pure evil” is invoked, as it was last week after the shooting. Not the two cops in Topeka who were shot Sunday night, or the mother whose boyfriend shot her in front of her children the Sunday before in Columbus, but the big shooting, the one everybody’s talking about.

Even before they quit their jobs last week, Jim DeMint and Chip Rogers had a lot in common.

Both DeMint, the South Carolina conservative who raised money to defeat some of his Republican U.S. Senate colleagues, and Rogers, the Georgia legislator who was a leader in the coup which made Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle a spectator in the state Senate for a couple of years, cultivated the reputation of right-wing firebrands, unafraid of roiling the clubby sensibilities of their respective august chambers.

Like a number of the politicians who have positioned themselves on the Republican Party’s right-most post, both DeMint and Rogers came to politics from a background in the media, with just a wink at showbiz.

Terminology matters immensely in the framing of a political debate, but sometimes it falls a little short.

The American people were not convinced in the last election that every cutthroat CEO, coldhearted skinflint and profligate heir deserved to be called a “jobs creator.” Nor does it appear, as plasmas move briskly out of box stores and power-intensive holiday decorations brighten the landscape, that they believe they are headed for a “fiscal cliff.”

To understand what it took for U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss to renounce the Grover Norquist no-tax pledge last week, let us revisit a happier day for Republicans, the 2001 presidential inauguration of George W. Bush.

By the luck of the media seat lottery, I was on the first row facing the Capitol steps. The two Clinton inaugurations had been noisy, Jacksonian affairs, but it was bitter cold when Bush took office and when he began to speak, about the need to restore civility to public life, to reform the schools and refit Medicare and Medicaid for the long term, the response from the Republican throng was the muted thud of heavily-gloved hands.

To appreciate how upside down our left-right politics has become, consider the current dust-up over health insurance exchanges.

They started out as a hot topic on the Republican neo-conservative salon circuit, promoted as an innovative way to involve free-market concepts in solving the problems of medical insurance costs. Since getting incorporated into ObamaCare, however, the term “health insurance exchanges” has come to connote something as iniquitous as “wife-swapping” on the Republican stump.

For all the ballyhoo leading up to it, the circus leaves town quickly after a presidential election. The Romney campaign staffers’ credit cards were cut off promptly after Ohio was called, and by the weekend the media had moved on to Gen. Petraeus and the fiscal cliff. But there’s one angle to this story which deserves more attention than it received in the wave of reaction to last week’s result, and one person who deserves a lot more recognition.

Joe Biden, ridiculed by the Republicans and dismissed even within his own party, owned this election. He did more to help his ticket than any vice presidential candidate in memory, and the manner in which he did it best illustrates the Democrats’ winning strategy this year.

“ARITHmetic.”

Republicans will have a lot to sort out over the coming weeks and months, but as they mull over their loss in the Presidential and U.S. Senate races and ponder where they go from here, Bill Clinton’s derisive retort in his virtuoso performance at the Democratic National Convention last September should echo loudly in their minds. A failure to grapple with arithmetic was, at so many levels, the key to the problems which came down on the GOP Tuesday night.

Partisans hold out hope for their candidates until the bitter end, but in politics you seldom see an election in which so many of the pros ignored the math for as long as they did in this one. Karl Rove’s Tuesday night “meltdown” on Fox was only the last and most public manifestation. (And by the way, it probably wouldn’t have happened if Fox, perhaps attempting to salvage something from a miserable night, hadn’t put itself out there to be first to call Ohio.)

Old Walt Whitman got it right. As messy as this one is likely to be, as many as have already voted before the polls open Tuesday, Election Day remains our “powerfulest scene and show,” more majestic in its way than our greatest natural wonders.

The heart of it, he thought, was not in the chosen but the choosing, and that’s a good way to look at things when you’re writing about an election this close, the day before it’s over.

First about close. Not only is the presidential election close enough for it to be conceivable the next winter storm could hit the East Coast before the winner is known, but there are some nail-biters in this comfortably red state as well.

Gloria Bromell Tinubu cut a pretty wide swath during her years in Atlanta, though she never stayed in one place very long.

The former chair of the Spelman College economics department served as a member of the Atlanta City Council and the state Board of Education and ran for mayor twice before moving to North Carolina. Then she moved back, got elected to the state legislature and served for a year before moving yet again, back to her home state of South Carolina.

With her race against a better-funded Republican opponent entering its final week, Tinubu is once again a long shot, as she was when she challnged the city’s power structure. But her upstart campaign has already been a surprise.

Like a worn-out accordion, the process by which Americans decide who their next president is going to be has been squeezed and pulled to suit the strategic objectives of each party so much that it’s in need of a thorough refurbishing. That this is unlikely to happen any time soon is no reason not to bring it up.

This is one of the shortest General Election campaigns on record, as measured by the span between the conventions, the debates and Election Day. If elections were held the way they used to be, this would be no great concern. But they aren’t. Early voting dramatically shortened the election calendar, and squeezed the end of the campaign season much more than the traditional Election Day calendar indicates.

I had the honor of being among the last people to call Dick Pettys a colleague. He’d left the Associated Press to become editor of InsiderAdvantage Georgia a couple of years before I left the AJC to become editor of its sister site, the Southern Political Report. We were two old print guys who had found our way to the other side of the digital divide.

When Dick finally made good on his promise to move up to his dream place in the mountains a few years later, I took over InsiderAdvantage Georgia for a while. Even in his self-designated retirement, Dick – who had settled with his wife Stephanie in a small apartment in Habersham County waiting for that dream place to get built – would monitor the streaming video of the legislative session and cover what I couldn’t get to. From a distance of a hundred miles or more, he was still the sharpest observer of what was going on.

How inconvenient, for the power company to change its tune on solar energy in the middle of an election year.

As recently as last week, Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers was predicting to the Athens Banner-Herald that renewable energy will still be only a “sliver,” maybe two to four percent, of total electrical generation, a half century from now. Georgia Power and its parent, the Southern Co., have long resisted any government efforts to mandate renewable energy efforts, and stoutly opposed any efforts to establish solar energy operations even distantly in competition with their monopoly.

Last week two lockouts came to an end. While there was a sense of relief in both cases, the two episodes ended very differently.

The National Football League officials’ lockout concluded with what must be the first standing ovation in the history of professional sports saluting not the players but the refs, as the completely vindicated regular NFL officials took the field for last Thursday night’s Cleveland Browns-Baltimore Ravens game.

The lovefest continued through the weekend, with the television announcers in the Atlanta Falcons-Carolina Panthers game remarking on every good call as if it were a Matt Ryan pass. Not even an eerie repeat of fortunes for the Green Bay Packers, victims of the botched call which was the last straw in the league’s attempt to stiff the regular officials, could dampen the national sense of relief that adults were again in charge of the playing field. This time the Packers won anyway, despite the bad call.

With all the exciting politics going on these days, it’s small wonder that a vote last week on a referendum to change the Alabama Constitution received scant attention outside our neighboring state. But obscure votes like this one can sometimes tell us more about the changing political winds than polls or headlines.

To put this in a national context, we should note that Alabama lies in the heartland of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent – certainly not the 47 percent that will always vote for Barack Obama, but the 47 percent that doesn’t pay federal income taxes. It ranks fifth in the country in non-payers, and sits between Mississippi and Georgia, the states which rank first and second in this category.

Ethics, a subject long unattended in Georgia, is suddenly all the buzz.

The idea of a total gift ban on lobbyists, once dismissed by the legislative brass as unnecessary, is now on the front burner, with an endorsement by House Speaker David Ralston and a bill expected to pop early in the upcoming session.

Senate Rules Chairman Don Balfour, who appeared last month to be getting off with a $5,000 handslap for filing inaccurate travel expense reports, is now said to be the subject of a GBI criminal investigation.
Lots of talk about it, everywhere you turn. But without someone to lead the charge, all the buzz comes to little.

Atlanta’s greatest cultural edifice is nothing made of marble, steel or glass. But it is monumental, as anyone should understand who has heard the combined Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus do a big piece like the Verdi Requiem.

That great alliance of professionals and volunteers is scheduled to perform the Verdi work, an ASO standard since the days of Robert Shaw, next month at an event sponsored by the Atlanta Anti-Defamation League honoring the Jewish prisoners who learned and performed it in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II.

But like Midori’s performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the world premier of Michael Gandolfi’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings and dozens more potentially memorable performances, the Requiem may not be heard. The symphony musicians have been subjected to what sounds like a classic union lockout.

As the Democrats gather for the second of the nation’s quadrennial tribal gatherings, students of politics might want to ponder some recent developments in the field of linguistics.

A few decades ago, experts in the language noticed a change in the way white English-speakers in the U.S. cities along the Great Lakes were pronouncing a cluster of short vowels: “bus” was beginning to sound more like “boss” and “top” like “tap.” In everyday practice the differences are often quite subtle, but for linguists this clockwise rotation of the short-vowel sounds is a very big deal, enough for it to have its own acronym, the NCS, or North Cities (vowel) shift.

You will be more likely to hear the NCS in Charlotte this week than you would have in Tampa last week. William Labov, the foremost expert on the NCS, has noted both a sharp boundary between NCS speakers and their downstate neighbors across the East and Midwest, and a close correlation between these speech patterns and voting patterns in the last three presidential elections. This isn’t all that much of a surprise — the same boundaries also demarcate the regions settled by pioneers from New England and Appalachia, respectively. But it is a reminder that cultural patterns in American politics still run deep.

The larger political lesson may lie in the way such a dramatic divergence is occuring in a time of seeming homogenization. So it is, also, with the conventions.

In the courtroom sketches, they look like they could be aging character actors, grinding out one last movie about a couple of loveable old curmudgeons who get themselves into a mess of trouble, before everything gets straightened out in the hilarious climax.

Except this movie isn’t funny at all.

Frederick Thomas, 73, and Dan Roberts, 68, were sentenced to five years in prison last week in a federal court in Gainesville for conspiring to obtain an illegal explosive device and a silencer. In recordings made by an FBI informant, they had talked of blowing up federal office buildings in downtown Atlanta and stalking and killing federal officials when the time came to do so.

Their attorneys argued they were simply “old soldiers,” blowing off steam about the government and egged on toward violence by the informant. In the tapes, Thomas seems almost grandfatherly in his condemnation of Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

“He killed kids. We don’t want to do anything to harm children,” Thomas said in the recording.

This is the face of terrorism that isn’t so easy to talk about, the one that isn’t so foreign or so far away.

Very shortly, two Southern cities, neither of which is Atlanta, will be in the national spotlight as they host the two national party conventions over the next couple of weeks. And maybe that’s a good thing.

As long ago as 1988, when Atlanta hosted the Democratic National Convention, pundits were predicting the demise of the quadrennial events as anything more than expensive pep rallies. This has never come true, which has enabled the prediction to be repeated every four years. Conventions remain an important part of presidential races, and a big deal for the cities which host them.

“This is by every measure the largest undertaking this city has ever taken on… This is our chance to tell Tampa’s story to the world and even though it’s going to be inconvenient, it will pay dividends for decades to come,” Bob Buckhorn, Tampa’s Democratic mayor, told a group of citizens concerned about the impact of the Republican National Convention which will be held in their city next week.
But for Atlanta, the thrill is gone.