Category: Tom Baxter

Every year, harried editors, hungry from the holiday drought, get a gift from the U.S. Census Bureau: the annual report on how and where the nation’s population is growing.The report’s always good for local breakouts on how your state stacks up against the rest. But this year, the big news from the report was how little news it made.

Newspapers in Florida were all teed up to report that state had pulled past New York to become the nation’s third-largest state. Eventually it will, but not this year. It was the same non-story in North Carolina, which was poised to move ahead of Michigan into the ninth-largest position. The Tar Heel State pulled closer, but Michigan grew enough to stay ahead.

For Georgia, there’s even less of a headline.

The upcoming election year is shaping up to begin in a very interesting, not to say painful, way. The question is how interesting what’s going to happen in January will seem in November.

The federal grand jury investigating the commission formerly known as the State Ethics Commission is scheduled to meet Jan. 14 to receive documents related to its investigation of complaints against Gov. Nathan Deal going back to his 2010 race for governor. Deal and his attorney, Randy Evans, have so far taken a “who, me?” position to the news that three current or former ethics commission employees have been subpoenaed by the federal panel, speculating that the grand jury probe must be about the mishandling of documents at the commission, even though the documents are about Deal’s 2010 campaign.

A federal grand jury investigation is not something to pass too lightly over, particularly in an election year when you have primary and general election opponents waiting.

Want to know the biggest issue currently looming over state and local government? It’s a secret. Or to be more precise, it’s secrecy itself.

Secrecy has assumed a higher profile recently because of the important role it played in the deal to move the Braves to Cobb County. But secrecy is also at the root of the biggest story one county over, in Paulding. In a lot of ways, the plan approved by the airport authority a year ago last week to bring commercial airline service to the Paulding Airport is the first cousin to the Braves stadium deal. Except that in Paulding there’s no ball team in the mix and the reaction now that the deal has been disclosed has been considerably less celebratory.

The same set of attitudes that caused the Paulding airport authority to hold an executive session the day before Thanksgiving, then approve a lease agreement that in fact amounted to a major expansion in a brief public meeting, reach up into state government as well, beginning with the vast network of development authorities created by the state, and obliged by state law only to disclose their private dealings essentially to themselves.

Imagine how it would be if we chose the best college football team the same way business rankings size up the states.

Suddenly the Crimson Tide would have a lot of company. One football ranking might give the greatest weight to the team which has scored the most points. Baylor might be No. 1 in that one, despite its loss to Oklahoma State over the weekend. Another might pay more attention to ranking the worst teams than the best ones, with Florida an upset possibility this year.

This alternate reality is worth keeping in mind when sizing up Nathan Deal’s campaign ad  touting the state’s No. 1 rating for its business climate.

“Now, for the first time in history, Georgia is the No. 1 place to do business,” the ad says.
Not to take anything away from the historical significance, but the ranking,  in Site Selection magazine, is designed to reflect the specialized point of view of its readers, those on one side or another of the corporate-state site selection game.

A few weeks ago I offered an idea for what to do with Tom Watson’s statue: move it down to Marietta Street where it could stand in eternal debate with Watson’s old nemesis, Henry Grady. Circumstances having changed, here’s an improvement on that idea.

Let’s move Hank Aaron’s statue from the Ted to Marietta Street as well, and arrange the three of them in a permanent tableau to represent a huge swath of Atlanta’s history. Grady could be following the arc of the home run ball Aaron just hit, while Watson could be gesturing northwesterly toward the new home of the Atlanta Braves, which some city wags have already unkindly dubbed Mary Phagan Stadium.

All three statues have been jilted, in their separate ways. Watson’s been banished from the Capitol steps by the governor, Grady was left in 2010 by the AJC, which made the move from Marietta Street to Dunwoody (with considerably less analysis than has been afforded the Braves’ move in the past week), and now the Braves are leaving the scene of Aaron’s greatest triumph.

When Jason Carter’s grandfather announced he was running for president, the news was such a surprise that it generated that famous “Jimmy Who?” headline. It was a different story last week when the young state senator from DeKalb County announced that he’s running for governor.

Gov. Nathan Deal’s campaign claimed it was only a coincidence, but by the end of the week it had placed its first campaign ad, an upbeat spot touting Georgia’s ranking by Site Selection magazine as the nation’s No. 1 state in which to do business. The speed with which former state senator and DeKalb County commissioner Connie Stokes announced she was changing gears and running for lieutenant governor was a sign Carter’s decision was no surprise on the Democratic side, either.

Often the biggest news stays buried longest. This fall we’ve witnessed another government shutdown, the chaotic roll out of the health care networks and the reemergence of polio, long forgotten, in war-torn Syria. But there’s a good chance that in the future, the announcement of what’s been unearthed in that other Georgia on the other side of the globe will be looked on as this season’s biggest development.

For a long time, the people who study these kinds of things thought of human evolution as a family tree. Over the past few decades, as a wide variety of human-like, or hominin, specimens were discovered, that concept was replaced by the idea of a family bush. Many related species evolved over time, researchers concluded. Each new discovery generated a new species name — homo habilis, homo ergaster, and so forth — making the bush progressively thicker. Only one of these species survived — but which? — and evolved into homo sapiens, which is us.

These assumptions have been challenged in a dramatic way by a study published this month in Science magazine.

“Sometimes history is not pretty.  But at the same time, it is the history.  Good or bad,” Rep. Tommy Benton (R-Jefferson) said last week after Gov. Nathan Deal ordered Tom Watson’s statue removed from the west side of the State Capitol.

Benton is right about history, and it’s very fair-minded for a conservative Republican to protest the removal of the statue of a Georgian who advocated the nationalization of the railroads and embraced the Bolsheviks.

When he was pressed on the matter, Deal said the removal of Watson’s statue from the Capitol grounds was a “safety issue,” which would have brought a hearty laugh from Watson if he were still around. The one thing his contemporaries seem to have agreed on was that Tom Watson was a dangerous man.

Over the past couple of years, three grand-scale computer crashes have made their way into the news: Facebook’s chaotic IPO, the election-day collapse of Orca, the Romney campaign’s “killer app” for turning out Republican voters, and the problem-plagued launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange portal, which prompted the first-ever Rose Garden speech to deal with a computer crash.

The first big lesson that can be derived from these three disasters is that when a lot is on the line, run a beta test. Team Romney failed to do that before the last election and ended up looking like amateurs compared to the smoothly running Democratic technical operation. That makes the launch failure of HealthCare.gov even more embarrassing for a president who was being lauded only days before for his flinty-eyed resolve in the budget crisis.

Want to know how screwed up politics in Georgia has become? A story in a column by my old AJC colleague Jim Galloway kind of says it all.

Gov. Nathan Deal, whose nagging ethics problems have become the stuff of regular headlines, invited Sen. Johnny Isakson, who has tried to be a voice of reason in an increasingly unreasonable Washington, to tailgate with him at the Georgia-Missouri game. There were a lot of protests on Facebook, but they didn’t come from voters criticizing Isakson for associating with an administration which is beginning to attract fruit flies, not to mention the FBI.

Instead, they came from voters livid over Deal inviting Isakson, who had the nerve to say the Republican strategy of holding up the rest over the budget, to stop a program that is separately funded, was a dumb idea. Deal’s invitation was, in fact, an act of some political courage in the current climate, and in the end, Isakson had to cancel because of the ongoing negotiations in Washington.

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.