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Sunday, June 22, 2008
Running mate or not, Sam Nunn’s made his way back to the spotlight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One afternoon last week, Barack Obama gathered his new circle of national security experts into a conference room at The Liasion — an apt name for a Washington hotel if ever there was one.
In characteristic, low-key fashion, former senator Sam Nunn of Georgia avoided the TV lights and journalistic nagging. He participated by telephone.
Much has been made of 69-year-old Nunn’s presence on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s list of running mates — a fact confirmed by the Obama campaign. The prospect has roiled the blogosphere more than any other possibility save Hillary Clinton.
The odds are against an Obama/Nunn ticket. But any debate misses the point. What’s certain is that we’re witnessing the return of a formidable Southern presence to the inner circles of public policy-making — after a decade of, if not exile, then a self-imposed withdrawal from the spotlight.
Nunn retired in 1996 as one of the most influential voices in Washington on the topic of national defense. “When he left the Senate, he wanted to do other things,” said Arnold Punaro, who was Nunn’s chief of staff on the Armed Services Committee.
Nunn didn’t slow down, but his focus narrowed. He began, with Ted Turner, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group that tackles the important problem of “loose nukes” and other mass threats. He remains chairman of a prestigious think-tank on strategic affairs. The former senator still hobnobs with the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.
But Nunn dropped out of the average Georgian’s daily frame of reference. And his deep differences with the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq forced his profile even lower.
The ex-senator’s re-emergence began in early 2007, with an op-ed piece in Wall Street Journal that carried the bylines of Democrats Nunn and former defense secretary William Perry, and Republican secretaries of state Kissinger and Shultz. The bipartisan quartet called for “a world free of nuclear weapons.’’
The next month, an article in the New York Times Magazine detailed Nunn’s private efforts to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists in a post-9/11 world.
The article, entitled “The Stuff Sam Nunn’s Nightmares Are Made Of,” earned Obama’s attention. The Democratic candidate mentioned it a few weeks later, at a D.C. fund-raiser.
“Sam Nunn is to the nuclear proliferation issue what Al Gore is to the global climate change issue,” Ed Kilgore, another former Nunn staffer and a prominent Democratic blogger, wrote last week.
The objections to Nunn as a vice presidential candidate are several. The Democratic left, and gays in particular, remember him as one of the authors of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prevents homosexuals from openly serving in the military. (Nunn recently said the policy deserves to be revisited.) More cold-blooded strategists say Nunn’s age could muddy a generational contrast between Obama and Republican John McCain.
But Kilgore, in an interview, said he’s noticed a consistent theme in the on-line discussions of Democrats: “I’m just stunned that people who hate the idea of [Nunn] on the ticket also say he ought to play a role in the Obama Administration.”
Photo credit: Bloomberg News
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Because what you don’t know about a politician can’t hurt you
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Savannah — The first thing to remember is that Bob Holmes is a thin fellow, bald and bespectacled.
The state House member from Atlanta has a doctorate in political science, and taught college for 30 years or so. He’s the epitome of a quiet, tweed-jacketed academic — mid-sixties, and newly retired.
In other words, sweet and harmless and boring.
Holmes was was one of three African-American lawmakers honored for their 34 years of service on Saturday.
This has been mentioned before. The other two were Calvin Smyre of Columbus and David Lucas of Macon. The presenter of the award on Saturday was Tyrone Brooks, the long-time head of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials.
The occasion was naturally biographical, and encouraged a review of how one came to arrive from a distant There to a close-on Here, all in the nanosecond of four or five decades.
Holmes told of his birth on the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and a youth spent learning the ways of Harlem and its gangland politics. A brother who manufactured zip guns. A best friend who OD’d on heroin.
And the time a rival grabbed Holmes from behind in high school. Holmes gave him his right elbow in the belly, crooked an arm around the miscreant’s head when he doubled over, and rammed him through the principal’s glass door.
Holmes’ education was suspended by two months.
Perhaps, Holmes theorized, this is why he never joined the Freedom Riders on their non-violent tour of the segregated South in the ‘60s. He didn’t have the temperament.
Such are the confessions of a man who no longer intends to run for office.
There was, of course, the question of how Holmes evolved from a gang-banger to a Phd. But he had little time to explain things.
Evening was approaching. He had a plane to catch. The former denizen of rough-edged Harlem, you see, had promised to accompany his wife to an AARP gala in downtown Atlanta.
Photo credit: Associated Press
