“I’ll send you a dictionary so you can learn how to spell valedictorian.”
Gov. Nathan Deal greeted us with those words Tuesday, and it wasn't because of a typo. He was taking umbrage with the coverage of his decision to skip this month's Georgia GOP convention.
The governor sent word about a week before the convention that he wouldn't attend because he was hosting more than 1,000 high school valedictorians at the Governor's Mansion. But his decision also came as GOP activists threatened a sharp rebuke of the Republican for his controversial vetoes.
Said the governor:
"You did a disservice to me. You did a disservice to those graduates. This was the 23rd consecutive year that governors have hosted valedictorians' day at the governor's mansion. Not a word was put in the print media about that being the reason I was in Augusta. That was not fair, that was not balanced reporting."
(The governor is right that we didn't use the word "valedictorians," though we did note that he was hosting "high school elite" at an event planned a year earlier in our story on the event. We also included a lengthy statement from his spokeswoman elaborating on his decision.)
Then he aimed his fire at the Republican leaders who criticized him for skipping the conclave.
"To the GOP leadership, they should have looked at the governor's schedule when they changed the date of the state Republican convention. They apparently did not bother to find out this was a 23-year tradition."
In the end, he didn't miss much: The convention approved a resolution that was only mildly critical of Deal's vetoes of the "religious liberty" and "campus carry" legislation.
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