Posted on 05/20/2003 6:28:52 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Flag wasn't the root of Barnes' fall Jay Bookman
E-mail: jbookman@ajc.com
It's fun to see a myth take shape, to watch as it emerges unformed from the early fog of facts and then be polished and sanded and finally cast in bronze, so that in time it seems as real and solid as a statue.
Consider, for example, the myth of Roy Barnes and the Georgia flag.
Make no mistake, the former governor fully deserved the Kennedy Profile in Courage Award he recently accepted at Harvard. His decision to engineer a change in the Georgia flag, despite the risk it posed, was a true act of leadership. And the fact that it probably cost Barnes his political career makes the story all the better.
"I don't think my decision required extraordinary courage," Barnes said in accepting the award. "There simply comes a time in the life of every politician when he must choose between a course that is popular . . . or one that is right, but could lead to defeat."
It's only natural that Barnes would embrace the storyline of himself as victim/hero. It gives his defeat a glow in the Georgia history books that it would not otherwise have. His antagonists in the story, the flaggers, have an equally large interest in seeing the story told that way, because it gives them a political credibility they would otherwise lack.
Before the myth is allowed to harden into history, though, a little reality check seems in order. Because the truth is, Barnes should never have been in a situation that allowed the flaggers to beat him.
And for that, he has only himself to blame.
Going into the race, Barnes had every advantage. He had served a very productive first term in office and had raised $20 million. He knew the politics of this state as well as anyone. And in Sonny Perdue, he had drawn an opponent with no statewide experience, no real platform, no name recognition and very little money to overcome those obstacles.
But during his term in office, Barnes also had acquired a nickname, "King Roy," a title that he earned just as surely as he earned that Kennedy award. He and his staff, most notably chief of staff Bobby Kahn and staff counsel Joe Young, enjoyed wielding power. They enjoyed it too much. Given a choice between winning nice and winning in a way that would remind people who was top dog, they always chose the second course.
The stories of their arm-twisting are legion and are told by Democrats and Republicans, businesspeople and environmentalists, politicians, teachers and legislators. Why use flattery when a threat would do? Why merely ask for help if you could demand it? Why let someone swallow something distasteful if you could shove it down their throat?
Repeated enough times, in enough places, with enough people, that style builds a broad-based resentment that $20 million can't obliterate. It also fed perfectly into the flaggers' complaint -- when they charged that King Roy had rammed the flag change through unfairly, the claim rang a bell with too many other people around the state who had seen similar behavior on other issues.
In that kind of political environment, the placid, genial and unassuming Perdue turned out to be the perfect arrow to strike Barnes in his weak spot.
The contrast between Barnes and Perdue has become even more striking now that Perdue has been in office for a few months. While Barnes and Kahn took their approach from Machiavelli, who argued that it is better for a leader to be feared than loved, Perdue has come into office touting the much softer approach of motivational author Stephen Covey.
"To value oneself and, at the same time, subordinate oneself to higher purposes and principles is the paradoxical essence of highest humanity and the foundation of effective leadership," Covey wrote in "Principle Centered Leadership," the book that Perdue required all of his department heads to read.
To a political hard-baller like Barnes, the knowledge that he lost to a Covey acolyte preaching stuff like that is probably grating. 'Tis a far, far better thing to blame it on the flag.
Sort of like the Nobel Peace Prize and the various Pulitzer awards. They have become the left's carrots.
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