DEL.ICIO.US‘Maverick’ Zell’s cave of confusion
COBB COUNTY
Saturday, November 15, 2008
More observations about the election from a Cobb County perspective:
The big bear is out from hibernation. Georgia’s mountain man, Zell Miller, has got it all wrong. The big Democratic bear — former governor and U.S. senator — hibernated throughout the long presidential and Senate campaign over the summer and fall only to emerge a few weeks before winter to urge Georgians to vote for Republican Saxby Chambliss in the Dec. 2 runoff election for U.S. Senate. Georgia’s “maverick Democrat” shared the stage Thursday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre with defeated Republican presidential nominee John McCain warning that the Democrats want a filibuster-proof Senate to back up the “spend-the-wealth, income-distribution” agenda of President-elect Barack Obama. If “maverick” is meant to define a politician uncomfortable with his own party’s values and agenda, no doubt Zell Miller is a maverick. Then again the same could be said for his friend, John McCain. Both guys should have switched parties years ago.
Cobb is still firmly Republican territory. There’s a reason why Chambliss chose Cobb County as the site to hold his first major event in the Senate runoff against Democrat Jim Martin. The county is definitely trending back toward a more even split between Republicans and Democrats, but the GOP still rules. A cursory analysis of election results from Nov. 4 shows that four of the six cities in the county (Marietta, Smyrna, Austell and Powder Springs) now are Democratic territory. But the cities of Acworth and Kennesaw and unincorporated east Cobb — the most affluent and heavily populated section of the county — remain heavily Republican. The outcome may have been different had the Democrats found viable candidates to put up for local offices and legislative seats there, but they didn’t.
The surge in new voter registrants tacking toward the Democrats is most pronounced in unincorporated south and central Cobb, where the party has had the most success in recent years electing members to the Legislature and Cobb County School Board. On its present trajectory, Cobb is developing on geographic lines more like Fulton and DeKalb counties, which cleave on a similar north-south split between Republicans and Democrats.
Ron, we hardly knew ye. Speaking of the school board, what I thought might happen in one of the school board races indeed played out exactly as predicted. On Sept. 16 in a nonpartisan election to fill a vacancy on the Cobb school board, Ron Younker defeated Allison Bartlett. On Nov. 4, seven weeks later, Democrat Allison Bartlett defeated Republican Ron Younker for the same school board seat. Same candidates. Different outcome. This time the election was partisan. (Both Bartlett and Younker won July primaries before they ran in the special nonpartisan election in September.) This time the turnout was close to 80 percent in the county. In September’s special election, the turnout was less than 10 percent. Younker will have served on the board about three months. Bartlett will start her four-year term in January.
My friends, as John McCain would say, this is wacky. There’s no reason why school board seats should be chosen on a partisan basis. Both candidates, by all accounts, brought solid credentials to the table. They based their campaigns on no special Republican or Democratic platform. Partisan school board races are an anachronism left over from the days Democrats dominated local politics in Georgia and wanted to belly-up at the patronage trough. The county’s Republican-dominated legislative delegation could end partisan school board elections by asking the Legislature to do so. But don’t count on it.
One man. Two stamps. One vote. I didn’t stand in any lines this election, but it took me several weeks to vote. I asked for and received an absentee ballot from the county election office in early October. It sat around on my kitchen counter until the week before the election. I filled it in, signed my name and put two stamps on it — I wasn’t sure about the postage — and sent it off to be counted with the hundreds of thousands of other early votes, provisional votes and regular votes cast on Nov. 4. It was simple and easy.
Because I live in a county where voting is routinely handled without major problems, I was comfortable making that choice. If I lived in Fulton or DeKalb or Gwinnett — each of which encountered glitches in sending out, processing or counting absentees — I’m not sure I would have taken the risk. Thanks for that goes to Cobb County Board of Elections & Registration director Sharon Dunn and her staff. If other Georgia counties want to see how elections ought to be carried out, they should look to Cobb.
• Mike King, a Cobb County resident, is a member of the editorial board.
Services »
