Category: Tom Baxter

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.

When neither party picked a Southerner on their tickets in the 2008 presidential election, a string which went back to 1972 was broken. With Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, it’s now two elections in a row without a Southerner on a national ticket.

That’s readily understandable. Ideology mattered more than regional considerations this year, and Ryan will be enthusiastically embraced by the Republicans’ conservative base across the South. But it does set one to thinking about who the next Southerner to make it on a national ticket might be.

At this stage it’s impossible to say which individual will have that combination of ability and luck to be either the nominee or the running mate on the ticket in 2016, 2020 or 2024. But chances are the next Southerner on a national ticket will be a lot different than the last, former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. He or she is much less likely to be a Democrat – or a white Anglo.

Last week, on the same day Metro Atlanta voters were turning down the TSPLOST referendum, the Mississippi Supreme Court denied a motion by Mississippi Power (which like Georgia Power is a Southern Co. subsidiary) to charge its customers interim rates to continue construction on its big coal-gasification plant in Kemper County. These seemingly unrelated stories, the TSPLOST vote and the Kemper coal fight, actually have considerable resonance with each other.

Like the plan for funding new projects which was rejected in nine of Georgia’s 12 transportation districts, the Kemper project has enjoyed the backing of a wide swath of Mississippi’s business and political establishment. Former Gov. Haley Barbour made the plan to mine lignite from a large nearby site, convert it into a gas and burn it a major part of an aggressive state policy to encourage energy-related projects of all kinds. The project, with its new technology, was the beneficiary of some $300 million in federal funds.

Design-wise, the ballot Georgia voters will see when they go to the polls Tuesday is a hot mess. It puts wishful thinking ahead of real choices and doesn’t get to the toughest questions until the end.

The candidates and questions vary by county, but all follow the same ballot order. First come the party primaries for state and local offices. Then come what are labeled Republican or Democratic Party Questions, all of which can be designated as wishful thinking, since votes aren’t actually being cast to enact these measures, but merely to solicit voters’ opinions.

The wishful thinking section is followed – as if to jolt voters out of their fantasies — by the nonpartisan judicial elections. And only then, at the very end, do we come to the issue which has consumed so much energy and money and gas this year: the T-SPLOST question, followed by the local questions, like liquor sales in unincorporated Fulton County and consolidation in Bibb County, which really mean something to the voters.

Another school year will be beginning soon, and Tom Keating will be about the mission which has occupied nearly half his 40-year career as an educator: school toilets.

He has, he says, “been a lot of places, and done a lot of stuff” as a consultant and director of Project CLEAN (Citizens, Learners, and Educators Against Neglect), the organization he launched as the vehicle for his crusade to make school restrooms cleaner, safer and generally more civilized. He and his cause have been the subject of numerous articles, including a front-page Wall Street Journal story. He’s worked in 18 states, and several foreign countries.

Consulting with school systems on how to improve their restrooms has never been a lucrative calling, however, and even more so in these days when music teachers are getting layoff notices and school janitorial services are being outsourced. It’s increasingly harder to get the attention of harried principals and school superintendents, but Keating is nothing if not insistent.

“They can blow me off, but I don’t go away,” he said.

How hot is it? Why, it’s so hot, that last week, a South Carolina Republican who had a 93 rating with the American Conservative Union when he was in Congress announced he’s heading up a campaign to promote conservative solutions to the nation’s “energy and climate challenges.”

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis will head the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a national campaign which will operate out of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Conservatives, he said, “need to stop retreating in denial and start stepping forward in the competition of ideas” over these challenges.

Both Republicans and Democrats have reasons for dismissing this news.

Republicans will point out that Inglis got trounced in the 2010 GOP primary by Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy, who said he didn’t believe in global warming and accused Inglis of being soft on the cap-and-trade issue. No wonder, then, that he’d wind up in this job. Democrats will say the Republicans willing even to talk about climate change are few in number, and late to the party.

In many ways, Georgia has sleepwalked through its housing crisis.

It wasn’t a poster child for the real estate bust in the way Arizona, Florida and other Sunbelt states were, back when the collapse in home values dominated the headlines. Yet the bust started earlier here and has lingered much longer, as attested by the recent news that the state’s foreclosure rate is now the highest in the country. Metro Atlanta ranks second in the list of large metro areas, behind only the Riverside-San Bernadino-Ontario metro – the so-called Inland Empire – in California. Douglas County leads the list of the nation’s counties, with one foreclosure for every 122 properties.

Testifying at a U.S. House committee hearing in 2009, Georgia Tech professor Dan Immergluck, an early prophet of the perils of the sub prime lending market and author of the book “Foreclosed: High Risk Lending, Deregulation and the Undermining of America’s Mortgage Market,” said some south Atlanta neighborhoods had experienced boom-bust cycles worse than those more widely noted in Las Vegas or Phoenix.

Atlanta’s foreclosure map has changed, Immergluck said in a recent interview, reflecting new and troubling developments in the economy.

Later, we called him Dr. Margarita.

He was the admitting doctor at the rehab center where they took my brother after his Medicare days ran out at the hospital. Standing bedside on his one room visit in the few days we were there, he cautioned my sister-in-law that no one could tell how long “this” was going to take.

“So you ought to drive down to the beach, get one of those cabanas, order a margarita, and just kick back,” he told her.

We just stood there. My sister-in-law didn’t speak up and say she wasn’t the kind of woman who would leave her husband in the final stages of COPD and go to the beach. She was already battered from weeks of outrages. One exchange back at the hospital had been so bruising that when the doctor left the room, the old black man in the other bed leaned over and said, “If I could get out of this bed, I would have knocked the s**t out of him.” So the depth of Dr. Margarita’s callousness didn’t really sink in at first.

They don’t have a catchy name yet, like soccer moms or NASCAR dads, but Latino voters have grown large enough in number, particular in several of the key swing states in this year’s presidential election, that a cliche can only be just around the corner.

Nothing bespeaks the rear-view nature, from a political perspective, of Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Arizona immigration law than a recent USA Today/Gallup poll of what issues these voters are concerned over.

The biggest issue on their minds is health care, which the court will rule on later in the week. Among Latino-Americans as a whole immigration ranks high, but among those registered to vote it’s fifth on the list behind healthcare, unemployment, economic growth, and the gap between rich and poor.

It was a very L.A. kind of riot. The sky seemed especially gray the evening I drove up from San Diego in 1992 to join a team covering the outbreak of violence after the acquittal of the police officers who’d been filmed beating a black man named Rodney King. But there was a ballroom dance competition proceeding as scheduled at the LAX Hilton when I got there and the lobby was filled with Latin dance division competitors, as vivid as parrots. Often, in the smoldering aftermath of the violence, there were similar splashes of color amid the gloom.

The manner of Rodney King’s passing, in a swimming pool on a Sunday morning, insures his place as one of history’s quintessentially California characters. But as he was himself all too aware, the violence which bore his name was only incidentally about him.

Up in North Carolina, a state once admired for its relative enlightenment, the legislature has been talking about regulating the sea level.

Alarmed by a science advisory panel’s recommendation that the Tarheel State should plan for a sea-level rise of more than three feet over the next century due to global warming, coastal developers and business interests have advanced a bill limiting who can make such predictions and how they make them. Abashed somewhat by comedy-show ridicule of the measure, a committee toned down some of the language last week, but passed a bill which prohibits any ordinance, rule or official policy based on a sea-level estimate other than one made by the Coastal Resources Commission, using models “consistent with historic trends.” The full Senate is expected to vote on it Monday.

The sea-level bill is the latest, and far from the most egregious, product of the long war between developers who want to build as close to the ocean’s edge as they can and environmentalists who’d rather they weren’t there at all. But it’s also part of a more general, growing debate over science and its role in public life.