14th District Snapshot
Counties in it: Paulding, Harrison, Polk, Floyd, Chattooga, Gordon, Pickens, Dade, Walker, Catoosa, Whitfield, Murray.
Key attraction: The Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park, which draws more than 1 million visitors a year and generates an estimated $54 million in tourism income.
General election results, November, 2012
Tom Graves (R) - 72.97 percent
Daniel “Danny” Grant (D) - 27.03 percent
Percentage of residents with health insurance: 80.3
Percentage with private insurance: 58.2
Percentage with public insurance: 31.7
Percentage uninsured: 19.7
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 American Community Survey
How we got this story
Staff writer Ariel Hart traveled to Dalton, where she interviewed residents at the Social Security office and the Oakwood Cafe. Staff writer Victoria Loe Hicks and photographer Bob Andres traveled to Rome, interviewing people at the Federal Building, the Social Security office and a Rotary meeting. Then they went to Chickamauga, visiting the shuttered Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park.
CHICKAMAUGA — It’s apt that this corner of Georgia, steeped in the lore of resistance, valor and loss, has given rise to the latest GOP champion in Washington’s bloody budget wars, U.S. Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ranger.
But across Graves’ 14th Congressional District Tuesday, with its Civil War battlefield shuttered and many federal offices fully or partly shut down, many residents seemed battle weary and lost in the fog of war.
“When did this happen?” demanded A.B. Williams, outside the Social Security Administration office in Rome. He and his wife, Crystal, had driven from Dallas, only to learn she would not be able to apply for a replacement for her lost Social Security card.
Graves, a congressman in his second full term, certainly won some fans with his last-ditch effort to delay the implementation of the health law nicknamed Obamacare. The measure he authored, which made a one-year delay the condition of funding the government past the end of the 2013 fiscal year, put him in the front ranks of the budget battle.
“That’s pretty gutsy if you ask me,” said Allison White, 29, a lifelong resident of Dalton who voted for Graves in November even though she knew little about him. “It’s admirable of him to stand up.”
Although White herself went 10 years with little or no health insurance, as her children received federally subsidized medical care through Georgia’s PeachCare program, she’s wary of the Affordable Care Act.
Many people supported the law at first, she said, because “they just heard, ‘Oh, it’s free health care.’ Now the cost of health care’s going up. People can’t afford a simple doctor’s visit.”
Williams, too, has doubts about the health care law, based on what he’s heard from co-workers — including the erroneous rumor that people who opt not to buy insurance will be penalized $1,000 in the first year (the actual fine: $95).
But his opinion on the shutdown was unequivocal: “It’s messed up.”
In Washington, Graves spokesman John Donnelly said the response has been positive — if not voluminous.
“Of about a dozen constituent calls, the vast majority have expressed support for the congressman’s efforts to keep the government open and protect Georgians from the harmful effects of Obamacare,” Donnelly said in an email.
Nevertheless, disgust with Washington gamesmanship was a recurring theme Tuesday in Graves’ district, even among executives at a luncheon meeting of Rome’s Seven Hills Rotary club.
“I hate to be cynical, but I think they’re all just playing games,” said Cheryl Huffman, who works in the financial aid office at Rome’s Berry College.
Alan Horne, an executive with OTR Wheel Engineering, said many local employers have legitimate concerns about being able to provide newly mandated coverage for employees. Some, he said, may choose to offset added costs by no longer offering insurance to their employees’ spouses.
But he said such realistic concerns are being swamped by fear and anger born of misinformation and often stoked by the politicians — including Graves. Rather than showing leadership, he said, he suspects the tea party favorite of “taking advantage of the situation to get himself out front.”
If so, it’s a strategy rife with risks, said Kennesaw State University political scientist Kerwin Swint.
While taking up arms against “Obamacare” reflects majority sentiment in the 14th District, Swint said, shutting down the government — amid warnings of potential economic damage — still scares many people.
Graves and his allies should be alert to the lessons of the last shutdown, engineered in 1995-96 by Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who was House Speaker, Swint said. “That one was a gross political miscalculation that came back to hit them in the face,” he said. “This one could be the same thing. Or it might not.”
Indeed, reactions Tuesday in Graves’ district showed the complexity of the issues and the unpredictability of individual responses.
Lois Carter, 55, said she’s a Republican who favors the health law and rues the shutdown.
“I think it’s sad,” Carter said at the Social Security office in Dalton, where she had seen workers turn away a woman who wanted to change the name on her Social Security card. “These days if your license doesn’t match your Social Security it’s a big deal,”she said. “That’s affecting people getting jobs, their livelihoods.”
She doesn’t know much about Graves and was dismissive when told of his role in the situation. Who does she blame for the shutdown? “The president!” Carter said. “He is the chief over us, our president. He ought to be able to say, ‘Do it.’ ”
Over at the Oakwood Cafe in Dalton, Amanda Bradford was picking up lunch. She believes the medical system needs fixing, it just doesn’t need “Obamacare.”
“My mother didn’t have insurance. She wasn’t able to get some dental work. We watched her lose her bottom teeth,” Carter said.
The key is drawing a line between those who use the system and those who abuse it, she said. “I think that’s where the frustration comes from.”
And the shutdown? She wishes it wasn’t necessary, she said, but “extreme measures call for extreme action.”
Mike Junkins, 60, describes himself as a “Dixiecrat” and thinks the shutdown is just fine. But he has no use for Graves. “I can’t think of one single thing Tom Graves has ever done that’s impressed me.”
Farther north, in Walker County, home of the Chickamauga battlefield, Larry Brooks spent the morning figuring out how to keep the county’s transit system for rural seniors running without federal grant money.
Brooks, executive director of the county’s economic development arm, said, “That’s what people don’t understand” about the shutdown, “that it can affect something as benign as rural transit service.”
He’s heard plenty of concerns from local employers about the added costs the health law may entail. He said some may convert full-time employees to part-time to skirt coverage requirements.
He’s afraid that stalemate in Washington will take the wind out of what has been a fairly stout economic recovery in the region. “I am worried about continued job growth,” he said.
Personally, even though he and his wife have coverage through her employer, they’re afraid their choice of insurance plans will be reduced from three to one.
Like many people unsure of what all the changes mean, he said, “we’re trying to run just to keep up.”
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