John Lewis was so widely regarded as a saint during his life that it might seem a sacrilege to remember him as a politician now that he’s gone. But not to do so would miss something about this great man. He was a saint by calling, but he was a politician when he had to be, and a good one, too.
Category: Tom Baxter
Posted inColumns
Where the faithful gather, new trials call for new innovations
Since 1828, generations of Georgians have gathered every summer at the Salem Camp Ground in Newton County for a week-long immersion in their faith. Families stay in small cabins, called tents in homage to the old days, and fill summer days with sermons, Bible study and fellowship. Until this summer, the only time the annual Salem Campmeeting wasn’t held was during the Civil War.
Posted inColumns
Can an election be too small to foul up? August runoff will tell us
The primary runoffs next month will be an easy-peasy test of how challenged the state’s new voting machine system really is. It didn’t fare well in the June 9 primary, and everybody expects the November election to be difficult. There shouldn’t be any problems in an election as small as the runoff, with four congressional races and a scattering of local races being decided around the state. But if there are, we’ll have a forewarning of just how bad November is going to be.
Posted inTom Baxter
With summer, the realization the pandemic will be with us for a while
The big news in the week before the Fourth of July is, depressingly, the same as the big news the week before St. Patrick’s Day. Some Americans have decided it’s time to move on from the coronavirus, but the coronavirus has not moved on from us.
Posted inColumns
Torn in two by COVID-19, General Assembly session enters its final days
By midnight Friday, the greatly reduced denizens of the General Assembly will have thrown whatever there is to throw in the air at the end of a session as contracted as this one, and departed.
They’ll be going home in an election year to a state beginning to feel the effects of budget cuts so sweeping the legislators even cut their own pay.
Posted inColumns
Georgia’s new voting machines, ‘fragile and error prone,’ get their first test
The good news last week was that in spite of an election system that failed them miserably, with a pandemic lurking and unrest in the streets, large numbers of Georgians came out to vote. Equipped sometimes with lawn chairs and umbrellas, they were determined, no matter the inconvenience, to make their voices heard. The bad news is they may have to make the same effort and more this fall.
Posted inTom Baxter
Early voting totals reflect the pent-up energies of this pandemic year
ver the past couple of elections, data miner Ryan Anderson has churned up lots of interesting information from early voting returns in his blog GeorgiaVotes. This year, like a geologist making the lucky tap that reveals a new rock face, he’s found as clear and clean a line as you’re likely to find in politics.
Posted inColumns
Whatever it is we’re going through, it isn’t ‘just like the ’60s.” We’re far past that
What’s happened these last few days was not “just like the ‘60s,” or anything which has come along since. There are many elements of the past, but this is something new. We don’t really know yet what it is.
Posted inColumns
A crowded summer calendar, as the nation struggles to get back to business
No summer in our lifetimes has been awaited so eagerly as this one. But their expectations for relief this summer don’t hang on much.
Posted inColumns
Kemp’s numbers lag, even as the coronovirus curve flattens
The curve has begun to flatten, the public responded enthusiastically to his lifting of stay-at-home orders — judging by the crowds who came outside, at least — and everybody digs Sign Language Santa. So far, however, none of that has given Gov. Brian Kemp the big bump other governors have enjoyed during the pandemic.
Posted inColumns
What we didn’t know about the economy was bound to hurt us
By Tom Baxter What kind of economy is it, exactly, that we’ll be trying to jumpstart back to life in the coming months? The pandemic has churned up some surprising answers to that question. The Commerce Department reported last month that the nation’s Gross Domestic Product declined by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of […]
Posted inColumns
Socially distanced candidates stuggle to control their messages, and their laptops
You could see the very picture of a politician’s frustration in this socially distant campaign season about eight minutes into the Atlanta Press Club’s first-ever Hollywood Squares-style debate, broadcast Sunday morning on Georgia Public Television.
Posted inColumns
Mail-in voting combines with Postal Service woes to form a new political divide
In the past, both parties have accused the other of rigging elections, sometimes with good reason. What’s new is the rapid increase in mail-in, absentee and early voting, and the rising Republican mistrust of all of these.
Posted inColumns
From the chaos of pandemic policy, regional alliances emerge
Last week marked the first, still sketchy, indications that the COVID-19 pandemic may have begun to recede in the United States. We may also one day look back on last week as a fateful pivot in the way the states of our United States relate to each other.
Posted inColumns
2020 Census lurches forward under the cloud of the pandemic
*expand featured image to view full graphic By Tom Baxter Americans had already grown wearily accustomed to the rituals of counting by the time April 1 — Census Day — rolled around last week. Every day since Leap Day, when the first U.S. coronavirus death was announced, has been filled with tallies of deaths, infections […]
Posted inColumns
As virus advances, the vestiges of Hill-Burton form a tattered line of defense
Lister Hill was an Alabama Democrat, the son of the first American physician to suture a human heart. Harold Burton, an Ohio Republican, was a former Cleveland mayor who was already serving on the U.S. Supreme Court when the legislation he’d co-sponsored with Hill was signed in 1946. The health care system which today faces its greatest crisis is in large part the creature of the law which bears these senator’s names, the Hill-Burton Act.
Posted inColumns
Political calendar coinciding with pandemic’s grim timeline
In hindsight, knowing just what we knew then, we could have predicted by the end of January that the COVID-19 epidemic was going to plow into this election year like a drunk driving a truck into a storefront.
Posted inColumns
FDA letter to Kemp a preview of the hard choices that will come with the pandemic
Last Wednesday, Cobb County Manager Rob Hosack met with representatives of the Federal Drug Administration, and the following day FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn sent a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp. That letter is a good example of the hard choices that await the country in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Posted inColumns
Democracy, interrupted: Election delay complicates local ballot questions
Moving the date of the Georgia Democratic Presidential Primary from March 24 to May 19 may prolong the endgame battle between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but it isn’t likely to change the final result. That may not be the case with a couple of Metro Atlanta elections which were also scheduled for next week.
Posted inColumns
In the span of a weekend, Georgia feels the impact of the coronavirus
There may be no better example of the dizzying speed with which the coronavirus epidemic is affecting politics than this. On Friday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins went to a good deal of trouble to make it into the entourage accompanying President Trump on his visit to the CDC Friday afternoon. On Monday afternoon, Collins announced he, like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep Paul Gosar, was self-quarantining after coming in contact with someone at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference who later came down with the virus.
