TLANTA, Nov. 6 — It was a hidden grudge, so private, apparently, that no polls picked it up.Posted on 11/06/2002 10:23:23 PM PST by JohnHuang2
TLANTA, Nov. 6 — It was a hidden grudge, so private, apparently, that no polls picked it up.
Last year Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, led a successful effort to change Georgia's state flag, which then prominently featured the Confederate battle cross.
This Tuesday, he paid the price.
In their first chance to vent their anger, white voters in rural areas turned out in record numbers to vote out Mr. Barnes in one of the most stunning upsets this year. The governor had been considered one of the brightest lights in the Democratic Party, a gifted speaker, moderate, strong on education and a possible contender for vice president or even president.
Much of the state's Democratic leadership was swept out on Tuesday, after a campaign that featured frequent visits for Republican candidates by President Bush and harsh advertisements against Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat seeking a second term.
But the governor's defeat was the biggest surprise of the night here, and in the morning-after search for answers, the flag issue surfaced as a leading explanation.
"There was this huge undercurrent of resentment and anger about the flag, but I think we all missed it because it's not something people discuss in the open," said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "The Confederate flag is still a very powerful symbol. A lot of white voters felt Barnes was not on their side when he pushed to change it."
The rural white voting base was mobilized this year as never before, but it did not simply follow Republican marching orders. What happened was more personal than that. While the governor lost badly in rural counties like Floyd and Colquitt, his Democratic partner, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, won there, showing that voters were angry not at all Democrats but certainly at Mr. Barnes.
"The flag was definitely part of the equation," said another Georgia Democrat, Senator Zell Miller. "I could spend all day and all evening trying to explain why this is such an emotional issue. It just is."
Though the state banner is not the only reason Democrats were routed in Georgia, it is part of a basket of problems the party faces here. Democrats are seen as out of touch with the state's conservative values. Georgia, with its 11 major military bases, its large rural areas and its Deep South traditions, proved in 2000 that it was solid Bush country. Once again on Tuesday, it went heavily Republican.
Another upset was the defeat of Senator Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran, to his Republican challenger, Representative Saxby Chambliss. The Democratic speaker of the Georgia House, Tom Murphy, who had held his seat for 41 years, also lost, as did a Democratic candidate in a new Congressional district that had been gerrymandered by the Democratic-controlled legislature to produce a Democratic representative.
"This was a train that has been coming down the track for the past 10 years," Senator Miller said. "Georgia is not the solid Democratic state it was in the past. It's very competitive. The Republicans did a masterful job of energizing their base."
One of Mr. Perdue's campaign promises was to have a referendum on the state flag, resurrecting a matter that dated from January 2001, when Governor Barnes, intervening in a longtime battle, pushed for a new flag design.
Georgia had remained one of the last Southern states to feature the Confederate battle cross on their flags. Blacks said the flag was racist, but many whites said it spoke to their heritage. Mr. Barnes stepped into the middle of the controversy with a proposal to shrink the symbol to a small box at the bottom of the flag.
The legislature quickly approved the compromise, but the move infuriated many white voters across the state, who turned against the governor on Tuesday. In rural Worth County, Mr. Barnes won 57 percent of the vote when he ran for governor in 1998; this year he scored 45 percent. In another rural county, Laurens, he won 60 percent four years ago; this year it was 39 percent. In all, Mr. Barnes won just 46 percent of the statewide vote, against 52 percent for Mr. Perdue.
Asked whether it could have been the governor's progressive education plans, or perhaps his close ties to the black leadership of Atlanta, William Boone, a political science professor at Clark Atlanta University, said he did not think so. "The flag dragged Barnes down," Dr. Boone said. "He was one of the most progressive governors in the South. Now he's gone."
ATLANTA - Sonny Perdue of Bonaire promised Georgians a referendum on the state flag during a Friday night debate among the three Republican gubernatorial candidates, while Linda Schrenko repeatedly was forced to defend her record of missed meetings as state school superintendent.
Perdue said that while he didn't favor an amendment to restore the old flag, if elected governor he would let Georgians vote on keeping the current flag or adopting a new one.
"I would restore the people's choice and allow us to choose and make the decision ourselves," Perdue said in the debate, which aired on Georgia Public Television.
While there is a great deal of lingering anger in parts of Georgia about the flag - both that the Confederate battle flag was reduced to the size of a pinpoint and how the flag was changed - many political observers don't expect the issue to be a decisive factor in this year's elections.
unquote
Restoring the flag will fail in a referendum and that will be the end of it, IMHO.
This gentleman, H.K. Edgerton, may have helped fire up the voters in GA, to give Barnes the boot.
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