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Sunday, August 17, 2008
On Lisa Borders and her exit from the Atlanta mayor’s race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When politicians depart the arena, sometimes it is not by their own choosing.
Perhaps they have paid too much attention to their neighbor in the next stall. Or have gotten too cozy with the campaign videographer.
An aide then trots out the hoary chestnut about the office-holder’s need to spend more time with his or her family, and the offender melts away.
This is an unfortunate disservice to the chestnut, which is often true.
The hundreds of people who put their names on ballots in Georgia are more like us than we care to admit. They have their bankruptcies and foreclosures. They have unruly teenagers and toilets that back up. But voters demand perfection, and so real life is kept under wraps.
Last week, City Council President Lisa Borders announced she would bow out of the ’09 race for mayor of Atlanta in order to spend more time with her family.
Borders, 50, is attractive and driven. Her family name is a byword in the city’s African-American community. She had raised significant funds for the contest, and had already been dubbed the candidate favored by the business community. Her career trajectory had been compared to that of Shirley Franklin.
Suspicion, therefore, was immediate. She’s speaking in code, they said. “Folks have said to me, ‘What’s the back story?’” Borders said. “There’s not a back story. I made a choice. Every day we make choices.”
And sometimes choices are thrust upon us. Borders, you see, has been drafted into the Sandwich Generation. Having launched a son into grad school, she — and her three siblings — must now manage the downward trajectory of her parents.
“I started out like any child, just managing financial affairs, paying bills, making sure they were okay,” Borders said.
Both parents are 75, divorced and living in separate households. But Gloria T. Borders, an activist who gave her daughter a taste for politics, doesn’t remember things like she used to.
William Holmes Borders Jr., a retired physician, is a brittle diabetic and double amputee. His kidneys have shut down, and he requires eight hours of dialysis, three days a week. The doctor’s oldest daughter calls his disease “Pac-Man,” because of the way it nibbles away at him.
The Border siblings have divvied up the chores. One brother manages parental properties. Another brother handles the father’s personal care. A sister is in charge of logistics — shuttling both parents from one doctor’s appointment to another.
Even so, throw in the consulting firm she’s started up, and a City Hall job that is part-time only in theory, and Lisa Borders found herself down to three or four hours sleep a night. “It’s more than an ocean,” she said.
Borders remains convinced she’s the better candidate, and is what the city needs. But a mayor’s race would have forced her to give up her job or her parents. One choice was fiscally impossible. The other was emotionally unsound.
“It’s a quality of life issue,” she said. “And the time I get to spend with them — it’s not infinite. It’s finite. I can run for mayor again.”
We are in a season in which we demand that our leaders feel our pain. The irony is that once they do, the pain consumes them — just as it consumes us.
Photo credit: Nick Arroyo/AJC
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Nunn and Lewis rate mentions at Saddleback session
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two Georgians were cited Saturday night by Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain as centrist leaders to whom they’d go for advice.
At the Saddleback Church session in California, organizer and pastor Rick Warren asked each presidential candidate to name three sounding-board figures.
Obama didn’t restrict himself. He named his wife Michelle and his maternal grandmother as personal critics.
Then came former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar, an Indiana Republican, for foreign policy purposes. Another bipartisan pair of advisors — presumably domestic — named by Obama: Senators Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
Nunn, of course, has been mentioned as a vice presidential candidate for Obama — though not as much lately, despite the ruckus between Russia and Georgia.
McCain was more succinct. His wife rated no mention, and Republican’s approach was oriented toward politically correct demographics rather than politically correct bipartisanship.
The first advisor named by McCain was Gen. David Petraeus, “who took us from defeat to victory in Iraq.”
Then Georgia congressman John Lewis, a black Democrat.
“John Lewis was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Had his skull fractured. Continues to serve. Continues to have the most optimistic outlook about America. He can teach us all a lot about the meanings of courage and commitment to causes greater than ourselves,” McCain said.
Also, Meg Whitman, the CEO of the eBay empire, a white and female business leader.
McCain has paid homage to Lewis before, by the way. The Republican is quoted in the congressman’s official biography on his web site.
Photo credits: Ben Gray/AJC, Rick McKay/Cox Washington bureau
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