To understand Thomas Jefferson and his lifelong suspicion of all things British, biographer Jon Meacham writes, you have to stop thinking of the American Revolution as the brief episode that began July 4, 1776, and ended with the Battle of Yorktown five years later.
Shaking off the English was a five-decade effort, Meacham argues, that began in 1764 and didn’t end until Andy Jackson settled their hash once and for all in New Orleans, ending the War of 1812.
Political movements, in other words, are like paper towels. They don’t always tear along the dotted lines. In fact, they seldom do.
Georgia’s most contentious general election in a dozen years will begin at 7:01 p.m. on Tuesday. One way or the other, Georgia Republicans will field a strong U.S. Senate candidate, Jack Kingston or David Perdue. They have a sitting Republican governor, Nathan Deal, and all the advantages that incumbency brings with it.
But for the first time since 2002, Democrats have two capable and well-financed candidates at the top of their ticket. The legacy pair of Michelle Nunn, the U.S. Senate candidate, and Jason Carter, the candidate for governor, received encouraging poll news late last week.
Surveys by Channel 2 Action News put both Carter and Nunn at the top of their respective races.
If they are smart, the two candidates will send that news to every Democrat with a wallet – then closet their staffs and tell them never to mention it again. Taking over the reins of power in a state as large as Georgia won’t be a walk in park.
If it were, we would mark 1980 as the beginning of Republican rule, when the upstart Mack Mattingly ousted Democratic U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge. The real shift was still 22 years away.
In fact, you have to think of the current Democratic uprising as a three-part play. We are in the middle of Act One. Act Three, the climax, is the 2018 race for governor.
The governor who is elected in 2018 (or re-elected, should Carter strike gold this year) will preside over the redrawing of congressional and legislative district lines following the 2020 census. That is where the real power lies. A 2018 shutout could send Georgia Democrats wandering another decade in the desert.
But you’ll notice we’ve left out the middle act, when the laws of stagecraft require the plot to thicken. Following the ragged paper-towel rule, Act Two began last Thursday, with a small gathering of Hillary Clinton fans on the edge of Piedmont Park in Atlanta.
The 2016 presidential contest in Georgia is considered crucial to a Democratic clawback -- an extra infusion of millions dollars that might be spent on voter contact and registration. Unlike eight years ago, the former secretary of state is quickly emerging as the consensus candidate among both black and white Democrats here.
The first Atlanta meeting of “Ready for Hillary,” the stalking-horse movement anticipating Clinton’s candidacy, was a deliberately low-key affair. Organizers wanted to make sure that any fervor for 2016 didn’t overshadow Carter or Nunn, the stars of 2014. Perhaps 100 showed up for the two-hour affair – a mixture of black and white, young and old, gay and straight.
“Under the radar” has been almost a byword of the Clinton group. “It’s just about all social-media driven. The real purpose of the Ready for Hillary movement is to build a donor base of small-donors, and secondly to build an email data base,” said one of its Atlanta organizers, Andy McKinnon, 64, a retired Ford Motor Co. marketer.
Former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin was absent, but she has already signed on as a senior advisor for “Ready for Hillary.” Mayor Kasim Reed, who has his own connections to the Clinton operation, was likewise missing. But he has already laid down a Varsity hotdog bet that Clinton will take Georgia in 2016.
Both Franklin and Reed were serious supporters of Barack Obama in 2008, and helped lead a stampede of African-American leaders – most notably John Lewis – that stripped Hillary Clinton of much of her black support in Georgia.
“I don’t have any hesitation about supporting her this time,” Franklin said by phone on Friday, pointing to Clinton’s recent service as America’s top diplomat as an additional argument in her favor.
John Eaves, the Fulton County Commission chairman, was the ranking public official at the Thursday gathering. He had just had his May 20 re-election victory upheld in court that day, and was circulating through the event, collecting congratulations.
Eaves was an Obama supporter in 2008. He, too, intends to line up behind Clinton this time.
“I think the Democrats in general are solid behind her. Hillary has strong roots here. Bill Clinton is greatly admired,” said Eaves, an African-American. He admits he has no personal connections to his future presidential candidate.
“I don’t but I’m going to develop some. It’s going to behoove me at some point, to develop a relationship,” he said.
It is hard to underestimate the importance that Democrats are assigning to unanimity this time around. Juliana Illari, a Democrat from Cobb County, was a Clinton supporter in 2007.
“It was very difficult, especially for women. We had been waiting for Hillary to run since the ERA and [1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate] Geraldine Ferraro,” Illari said. “It made some sense, but it was not a good campaign. It just wasn’t. And it was hard to engage people at a certain point. And Atlanta was ground-zero.”
Ultimately, Illari adopted her own symbol of neutrality – a 1972 presidential campaign button for Shirley Chilsolm, the black New York congresswoman.
Obama supporters were the newcomers in 2008, and Clinton supporters were the party establishment, Illari said. This time, there’s no such division.
Which establishes the plotline for the all-important Act Two for Democrats in Georgia: It’s Hillary’s turn.
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