Category: Tom Baxter

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.

You might say the politics of water is very fluid these days. There seems to be a gathering sense, here and elsewhere, that water policy is no longer as simple a matter as turning on a faucet. But the battle over who exactly controls this increasingly precious resource is still in its early stages.

In this year’s legislative session, that battle has centered around Senate Bill 213, Gov. Nathan Deal’s attempt to gain unprecedented power over the faucet in the Flint River basin. The bill would give the state the power to tell farmers when they could withdraw water from the basin, but what makes it controversial are the provisions which would give the state the additional power to “augment” the river’s flow with a stored supply of water in times of drought to protect endangered wetland species downstream.

It’s in that word “augment” where the real controversy begins.

The Georgia House has a long tradition of upstart bomb-throwers with a burning desire to change the world in a hurry and a knack for getting under the skin of leadership. One of them once so infuriated the late House Speaker Tom Murphy that he pinned him against the wall of the House anteroom. Some have been one-termers, while others — I’m thinking here of Brian Joyce and Bobby Franklin — stuck around long enough to become elder statesmen of a sort.

But it’s hard to remember any rules-waving freshman making a bigger stir than Rep. Sam Moore, who last week provoked a parade of Republicans to denounce Moore’s bill abolishing the state’s loitering law.

Hell No-ism is riding high in state legislatures this year, and nowhere more so than under the Golden Dome.

The Missouri legislature is considering a bill that would require schools to notify parents of any instruction related to the theory of evolution, which the author of the bill described as “indoctrination,” and allow parents to hold their children out of the classes where it would be taught. The Kansas House last week passed a measure which would allow businesses not to serve gays, provided they said they were doing it on religious principle.

Not to be outdone, a legislator in Oklahoma has proposed doing away with marriage altogether — at least, the state’s role in it — to avoid being required to recognize gay marriage.

All this is great fodder for the liberal blogs, and gives the nation’s East and West Coasts another opportunity to opine the backwardness of its middle. But these are all just tantrum bills, destined to die in their state’s senate chambers or their courts.

John Barge had a doctor’s appointment in Rome on the morning of Snow Jam 14, so he was late getting off on his morning commute to Atlanta. His car was already slipping on the ice by the time he got to Cartersville, so he decided to call the state superintendent’s office in Atlanta and tell them to close up shop.

The state superintendent doesn’t make the call on whether to close schools, but Barge at least had his office staff on the way home before the worst of the traffic havoc began.

So give Barge credit for good timing. He’ll need an awful lot of it if he has any hope of overtaking Gov. Nathan Deal in the short sprint to the May 20 Republican gubernatorial primary.

What happened last week was a watershed event in the transportation history of the Atlanta metro region, and very likely in the careers of a couple of politicians as well. But it’s important to remember how small a thing it was that touched it all off — small enough to make us the laughingstock of the country, sure, but small enough also to make us worry about how we’d deal with something worse.

The snow and ice that touched off the debacle was comparatively mild compared to the 2011 ice storm. It was more comparable to the 1982 Snow Jam, and that hysterical incident commenced much later in the working day with, if memory serves, much worse conditions.

The state of the state, Gov. Nathan Deal said last week, is “excellent.” Depends how you size it up.

Last week, as a teaser to tomorrow night’s State of the Union message, Politico  dusted off an idea originated by H.L. Mencken and Charles Angoff back in 1931, and produced a ranking of the states based on 14 different rankings of things like life expectancy, graduation rates, crime rates and so forth.

The bad news: Georgia ranked 42nd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The good news: in 1931, we were 46th.

Perhaps we could quibble. We’re only 36th, after all, in per capita wealth, and we have the 30th best crime rate. But a glance up and down the 14 indicators of a state’s real health makes it seem pointless. It might be a little farther up or down the list, but Georgia falls well within the bottom half of all of them.

There was a time when the governor’s annual State of the State speech drew such a crowd to the Capitol, you could hardly get off the elevator on the third floor. This year the House gallery was filled with invited guests, but the group which gathered under the hall monitors to listen to what Gov. Nathan Deal had to say was significantly smaller than the one which collected to watch Sen. Don Balfour’s post-trial remarks the week before.

The sparse crowd had less to do with the importance of the speech than the digitalization of the lobbying trade. There were perhaps more eyes than ever trained on Deal last week, but many of them were watching him on streaming video.

In his first three State of the State speeches, Deal declared that the state of the state was “strong.” This being an election year, our status was upgraded this time to “excellent.”

The dramatic highlight of the Georgia General Assembly’s first day in session Monday was Sen. Don Balfour’s brief speech to the Senate on the occasion of having been cleared of all charges related to the misuse of his legislative expense account in a jury trial last month.

It was the most bipartisan moment under the Golden Dome in years. The former Rules Committee chair wasted no opportunity to insert the phrase “Republican and Democrat” into the list of those he thanked for their support. He noted that a former Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, and a former Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, had testified for him.

In a pointed reference, he thanked his lawyers Ken Hodges and William Hill, even though “at least one person didn’t appreciate my pick of lawyers.” That was an apparent reference to Attorney General Sam Olens, who defeated the Democrat Hodges to win his position.