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Sunday, June 1, 2008
A possible degree of change in the 2010 race for governor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The 2010 race for governor will begin sorting itself out this summer. And it could have a feature rare to politics, even in Georgia.
Three of the candidates mentioned most often as possible successors to Gov. Sonny Perdue are Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, Secretary of State Karen Handel, and U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland.
Aside from their status as Republicans, they all have something important in common. Not one has a college degree. Each is bright, each is talented. All are certainly ambitious. But officially, as measured by diplomas, their education stopped with high school.
Americans have a love-hate relationship with the people we choose to rule over us. We require that they be our equals in person, but our betters on paper. Even in Georgia, we prefer our political elite educated, so long as that education is covered up with blue jeans and a John Deere cap.
Among our governors, two college degrees — the second usually in law — are more common than one. The last Georgia governor to go no further than high school was Lester Maddox, elected in 1966.
Before that, it was Hoke Smith, publisher of the Atlanta Journal, in 1907. But Smith hardly counts. He was home-schooled by his law professor father.
So what does the possibility of a degreeless governor in the 21st century say about us — and about these three candidates? Two clues are biography and business.
Westmoreland, at 58, is the oldest of the three. He grew up on Atlanta’s blue-collar south side. In his neighborhood, college was outside the norm.
Handel, 46, was a straight-A student in Maryland. But an unstable family led her to strike out on her own at age 17. Cagle, 42, who has told you time and time again that he was raised by a single mom, had a football scholarship to Georgia Southern — but tore his Achilles tendon.
All three had a smattering of college courses, but ultimately used business as a substitute for a degree. Westmoreland started a construction firm. Cagle purchased a tuxedo store. Handel began at the bottom of the corporate ladder and started climbing.
Why haven’t their political careers been circumscribed by a lack of formal education? Here’s a hypothesis: Over the last 25 years, Georgia has lived through two quiet revolutions.
One has been economic — for years, the state has been among the fastest-growing in the Union. The other is the political revolution, from Democratic to Republican rule.
Any historian will tell you that in the chaos of change, resumes matter less than performance. Social mandates are ignored, and social mobility increases.
Ask Alexander Hamilton. Ask Napoleon. Ask Bill Gates. Ask Ralph Reed, who flashed a doctorate in history and innumerable GOP credentials when he ran for lieutenant governor two years ago.
Unimpressed Republicans preferred Cagle, the high school graduate.
In any race for governor, the attitude of these three candidates toward education could become important. None can be described as anti-intellectual, though they all express a certain wariness when it comes to educated idiots.
The offspring of Westmoreland and Cagle are all college graduates, or headed in that direction.
Yet Westmoreland has developed a soft-spot for the home-schooling movement. Cagle has pushed the marriage of high schools with technical institutions, to produce skilled graduates who can thrive without college.
And Handel, who can still type 100 words a minute, says she would insist on “making sure a high school diploma means something for young people.
“Because life intervenes.”
