Category: Tom Baxter

The shutdown, which entered its 31st day Monday, overshadows every other news story in the United States right now. As the decades roll on, however, this month will be much more likely to be remembered for a spectacular scientific and technical milestone: the landing, on the far side of the moon, of a lunar lander and rover named after a Chinese moon goddess and her pet rabbit.

The Georgia governors of another day would have been confounded if told that in the future, people would watch an inauguration speech on their phones. The technology would puzzle them, of course, but also the idea that many people would be interested enough to do such a thing. Streaming has become commonplace, however, and after the closest and most divisive governor’s race of modern times, Brian Kemp’s first speech as governor Monday at Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion was watched more closely than most.

If and when the government’s 25-percent shutdown reaches a pain level high enough to spur real action to end it, Georgia, starting at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and radiating outward, will be one of the states feeling it most.

Candidates still are making the trek to Iowa and New Hampshire to make their presidential intentions known. But early voting and a supercharged calendar with California and Texas near the front will change the presidential primaries in 2020.

On this bubblicious morning in Georgia, as we wait for the polls to open again, we might want to brush up on the famous “three governors controversy,“ which the New Georgia Encyclopedia has described as “one of the more bizarre political spectacles in the annals of American politics.” We could be on the verge of something similar.

What Ralph McGill so clearly described 60 years ago as “the crop of things sown” is coming in again right before a big election, so the human tendency is to focus on how the mayhem of the last week will affect the upcoming vote. That, sadly, is the least of it.

Candidates used to vote on Election Day in front of television camera crews. This year, both Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp voted early and posted about it on social media. For some first time voters, voting early may be the only way of voting they’ll ever know.

t’s extremely rare for a politician to take a shot at a candidate in a race farther down the ballot, much less call on one to resign. But this is a year of lateral moves and unconventional parries.

The analysis of how decorum has broken down in the U.S. Supreme Court nominating process usually begins with Robert Bork and moves through Clarence Thomas to the present, sorry state of events. A 1994 Alabama race run by Karl Rove deserves more attention, because the venom which has been injected into judicial politics starts at the state level.