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Monday, September 11, 2006
Politicians can still be honest, effective
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The first order of business in a political campaign, it now seems patently clear, is to convince the public that the other guy’s a crook. It feeds the cynicism of the times.
Barring some dramatic shift in public perception, Gov. Sonny Perdue will be re-elected. People like him and believe, for good reason, that he’s done a good job. His efforts are modernizing the state’s day-to-day business affairs, the humdrum stuff that has no political benefit whatsoever but is absolutely vital to a state that has grown the way country houses used to — one tacked-on addition at a time.
The state has long needed somebody to tend to the dull stuff: counting the cars, locating property, consolidating the leases, managing properties to lower costs, planning for the transition of a state work force that will lose to retirement 25 percent of its experienced employees over the next five years. If it’s done really well, nobody notices.
Though Perdue is Georgia’s first Republican governor, there’s been no upheaval. As James R. Lientz Jr., his chief operating officer, noted recently, 90 percent of the governor’s top staff has been recruited from the private sector and from other governments on the basis of national searches. “We have done this without fanfare, and there has been no bloodletting.” It is a diverse group, he said; “but we hired the best individual talent without regard to race and gender.”
The point is that Georgians never bounce elected officials they like and perceive to be doing a good job. Perdue comes across as competent and likable, a grandfatherly figure who projects warmth. Politicians like that don’t lose.
Ah, but corrupt politicians do.
This is the year when the Democratic master plan nationally was to run against a “culture of corruption” as exemplified by corporate scandal, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham and the general smear that Big Oil and Halliburton had undue influence in the Bush administration. But that strategy fell on hard times when U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) was caught on videotape accepting $100,000 from an FBI informant, cash later found hidden in the freezer of his New Orleans home.
So how do you defeat a grandfatherly figure people like? By throwing him into the “culture of corruption” mix.
It’s the strategy that, I’m convinced, was employed against President Bush after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is always slow in its response to disasters. Moving substantial quantities of relief supplies quickly through devastation is slow business.
Bush’s strength, like Perdue’s, is that people like him and think his administration is competent. How to beat him? Convince the public that his administration’s not competent. So the usual slowness, combined with the utter failing of state and local officials, set the stage for the avalanche of criticism targeting Bush.
Perdue is not vulnerable there. In fact, though Katrina was not his disaster, he responded admirably, demonstrating both compassion and competence in dealing with evacuees.
The only opening opponents have, therefore, is to somehow convince voters that Perdue’s corrupt. The problem, however, is that he hasn’t been shown to have done anything scandalous. He sold inherited land and invested the proceeds out of state. That was done, he said, to avoid the charge that a decision he made or influenced as governor could affect a personal investment.
He deferred federal taxes by taking advantage of a provision of federal tax law that goes back 20 years. Democrats believe, but have not yet nailed the case, that he deferred state capital gains taxes improperly through routine state tax legislation altered in legislative committee for Perdue’s benefit.
The problem with Perdue’s transaction, and with Republican charges that Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor’s family has improperly benefited from property leases with the state, is that they don’t yet smell. In Taylor’s case, leases are competitively priced, and there’s no evidence that they were awarded on the basis of insider dealing or favoritism.
Like Perdue’s land transactions, they’re fair game for reporting and most assuredly ought to be brought into the open. But the case is not yet made that there’s anything improper about either.
One’s launched in desperation. The other’s tit-for-tat. Both feed the cynicism of the times.
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How does angry conversation end?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Five year ago this morning, I was at a Metro Atlanta Red Cross planning conference, seated near the front, ready to make a presentation that was minutes away. The giant screen before us went to CNN. We sat there, with the rest of America, and watched in horror as the plane hit the Twin Tower.
A few people left the room. I continued to watch the screen. Minutes passed. The scene of destruction, and the second plane, marked this moment, just as the JFK assassination had decades earlier, as one America would never forget. The planning conference halted. I rose and saw a nearly empty room behind me.
Another image, days later, from a blood-donation center where Metro Atlantans had gathered by the hundreds to do one of the few things they could think of that might help the suffering. In particular, I remember a young college-age woman whose thin, frail, underweight body struck me as having no blood to spare, standing in line to offer her blood.
That feeling lingered for weeks. Everybody wanted to do good. For weeks and maybe for as long as four or five months, partisanship stood aside. But then something happened. The sniping returned, and with it the finger-pointing and the bitterness of the 2000 presidential election. It returned and now has grown to the point where everybody talks and nobody listens.
I’ll admit it. Often I read other commentators whose views I know well and say dismissively: “Yea, yea, Bush bad. No WMD. So get out of Iraq and elect Democrats.” For me, the test is whether they ever supported the war on terror or whether they saw it as 9/11 police action that diverted attention and resources from efforts to build the welfare state.
For the left and the right, these questions on the 5th anniversary: How does this angry conversation end? How does the debate move beyond the Bush-lied vs. stay-the-course exchange? And what have we learned about ourselves and our nation in the five years since that awful morning? By the way, where were you then?
