It’s truly vital that we keep Chambliss

We fiscal conservatives may indeed find ourselves in the wilderness after Tuesday. If so, the first duel will be why we were uncompromising when the consequences were so severe.

A filibuster-proof Senate, if combined with a Barack Obama presidency and a Nancy Pelosi-led majority in the House, will lurch this nation to the left with consequences that may take decades, if not generations, to undo.

Some conservatives part ways with U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss because they believe him insufficiently pure on spending, on offshore drilling and on immigration, areas where he’s inclined to find compromise with Democrats.

Admittedly, he’s not Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the Senate’s Dr. No on earmarks. Nor is he South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, ranked by the National Journal as the most conservative senator. But neither is he in the company of Republicans Gordon Smith of Oregon and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, all of whom are dead-center. With announced and expected departures, the Senate moves even further leftward —- how far depends on Tuesday.

By Wednesday morning, we could have a mystery man elected president, one with a history of associating with radicals without seeing or hearing their extremism; an untested mystery man who declares he was always right yesterday but never seems to make a decision when it matters. He’s a mystery man with a running mate, Joe Biden, who is fully knowledgeable about foreign policy, but, as John McCain noted, doesn’t necessarily reach sound conclusions. “In Iraq,” said McCain of Biden, “he had this cockamamie idea about dividing Iraq into three countries” and on national security issues, “he’s been wrong on a number of the major ones.”

Given the possibility that we’ll elect a president who can’t judge character and a vice president who, with knowledge and experience, can’t get it right, the Senate race in Georgia is enormously important.

We will come to know Barack Obama only after he is in the White House. We’ll know whether he’s able to resist pressure from interest groups and liberals who believe they should go for broke quickly.

In that milieu, Chambliss’ contest is huge. Give the left a filibuster-proof Senate, and in addition to a legislative tsunami, there will be a concerted effort to pack the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, with activist judges who’ll carry out the left’s agenda long after liberals again lose political power.

“The Democrats have not been letting us get either district or circuit court judges approved over the last seven to nine months, as promised,” said Chambliss from his road tour of Georgia last week. “If there’s a filibuster-proof Senate, from the Supreme Court on down, he would be able to appoint very, very liberal judges, and there would be nothing [Republicans in] the Senate could do to stop that.” He continued:

“The biggest fear that you have is that they get that filibuster-proof Senate, even though it is a long shot. If they do, Barney Frank has said the first thing they’ll do is slash defense by 25 percent. They’ll pass the Employee Free Choice Act and write a secret ballot away from everybody” in the workplace.

He spells out the consequences. In addition to increasing taxes, Democrats will “increase spending on social domestic programs like we have never seen before.” He is not exaggerating. Our grandchildren and theirs could be paying for the excesses of an unchecked Obama administration pushed by the Angry Left.

Purists among conservatives find themselves drawn to the Libertarian message that urges us to be adult, be responsible, pay the bills. The reality is, however, that about half the country has become vested in Big Government. They’re addicted. The task now is to find a way to wean them and to nurture them back to self-reliance.

There’s too much ground to cover to play petty games now. A Libertarian vote in the U.S. Senate race is a vote for the Obama agenda. No question.

“A vote in protest is really a vote for the Democrats,” Chambliss said, stating the obvious. “I have never cast a vote to raise taxes. I have made sure our defense community is strong and robust.” When you look at the positive things out there, the things all conservatives agree on, Chambliss notes that he’s with the purists 80 percent to 90 percent of the time.

A protest vote in 1992 got us Bill Clinton. A protest vote now could get us a filibuster-proof Senate.

> Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His Thinking Right blog appears daily on ajc.com.

jwooten@ajc.com