For decades, visitors to the state Capitol have been greeted by a statue of the Georgia populist who gave rural America free postal service – a racist, anti-Catholic politician whose anti-Semitic screeds were credited with fueling sentiment for the lynching of Leo Frank.
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A spokesman for Nathan Deal this morning confirmed that the 12-foot statue of Thomas Watson is being permanently relocated across the street, as part of a renovation of the Capitol grounds.
An odd political figure who began as a 19th century liberal, who courted newly empowerment of African-American voters after Reconstruction, Watson evolved an advocate of disenfranchisement of blacks and a fulminating critic of anything the least bit foreign in the New South.
Here’s a line from Steve Oney’s 2003 book, “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank”:
A day after Watson’s broadside appeared, reports began to circulate that a group of 150 Mariettans known as the Knights of Mary Phagan had met at the child’s grave and vowed “to ‘get’ Slaton and Frank, no matter how long it takes.” All three Atlanta papers ignored these rumblings, but The New York Times flatly asserted: “There seems to be little doubt that such a body has been formed.”
For years, whether at the in-state funeral of Corretta Scott King or Kasim Reed’s 2009 announcement that he would run for mayor of Atlanta, the statue has offered a discordant note. On the other side, the statue has occasionally served as a rallying point for states’ rights and Southern heritage enthusiasts.
But it looks like the statue’s greatest sin might be that it takes up too much valuable space on the Capitol’s front apron.
A CNN/ORC International survey is stirring the pot with this today:
Just more than half the public says that it’s bad for the country that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, according to a new national poll conducted after the end of the partial government shutdown.
[The] survey also indicates that more than six in 10 Americans say that Speaker of the House John Boehner should be replaced.
One of those who thinks Boehner should be removed is John Stone, one-half of the Republican field and the 2014 effort to oust U.S. Rep. John Barrow, D-Augusta.
During a stop in Atlanta last week, Stone, a former congressional aide and Augusta TV anchor, said the October confrontation in Washington didn’t turn off Republican voters in the 12th District. Said Stone:
“The folks that were furloughed obviously didn’t like it. We had a fair number of those. But the majority of folks out there, on the shutdown, were behind the shutdown.
In the GOP primary, they believe we need to stand up to what’s going on. There’s a great frustration that the leadership there simply hasn’t been fighting. A lot of people were heartened by the fact that Republicans seemed to be standing up for something.
“The entire four years we’ve been there now, with the House back in Republican hands, they see Republicans having caved in, again and again and again. They’re just not accomplishing anything. And they’re looking for someone who can fight, and fight hard, and win.
“They want a new leadership team. They want a new Republican strategy. We need a new Republican party. We need new ideas that offer something concrete.
“They’re existing strategy seems to be, ‘We’re bad, they’re worse, vote Republican.’”
To that same point, the GOP campaign of Barry Loudermilk, one of several candidates in the 11th District contest to replace U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, this morning is touting an on-air endorsement by Erick Erickson, the evening talk show host on WSB Radio. From the snippet:
“Look, the other people – Tricia Pridemore, Ed Lindsey – they’re wonderful people. Don’t get me wrong. But we need people who are going to fight their own side. And there’s nothing in their careers that show they would be bigger fighters than Barry Loudermilk. Why not send him to Washington? We need people up there who will fight not just the Democrats, but bad Republicans as well.”
U.S Sen. Johnny Isakson, a critic of GOP tactics that led to the shutdown, was greeted by skepticism over the weekend by the party faithful. But he told a Sandy Springs crowd to look at the silver lining: Two key concessions Republicans extracted from Democrats.
The first involved income verification requirements for the new insurance exchange marketplace. The Washington Post has a detailed analysis here, but this was Isakson’s point:
“If you’re going into a health exchange — if it it worked, I might add — and your premium is $12,000 a year, and it’s asking what is your income and showing you that if you’re income is less than $24,000 you get $9,000 of your premium paid by your government, what are you going to do if you know they’re not going to check your income? Most of us would tell the truth, but a lot of people won’t … If we had not done this it would be a runaway cost to the government.”
(It’s worth noting the counterpoint to this argument. The Los Angeles Times opines that “the problem that the new ‘tightening’ is supposed to resolve doesn’t even exist.”)
The second victory Isakson highlighted was the preservation of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which forced the roughly $400 million cuts known as sequestration. Isakson said simply maintaining those automatic spending cuts was worth celebrating:
“We maintained sequestration as the law of the land, which means when January 1 comes, a new round of cuts automatically are coming in discretionary spending … One thing we’ve preserved is what we’ve fought for all these years, and that’s cuts for discretionary spending. We’ve got to get to entitlements as soon as possible, but the cuts are important.”
Over at the New Republic, Nate Cohn wants everyone to take a closer look at two Georgia polls recently released by Public Policy Polling – both showing hope for Democrats here. From the article:
Back in August, I argued that a PPP survey of Georgia was demonstrably too white (71 percent white, 24 percent black). On Twitter, PPP’s director, Tom Jensen, vigorously defended a relatively white electorate, arguing that 1) there was a black candidate on the ballot in 2010, therefore black turnout would be lower; 2) blacks were 24 percent of the electorate in 2006, the last time there wasn’t a black candidate.
But over the last two weeks, PPP released two new surveys of Georgia voters. One, conducted by PPP for Better Georgia, shows Republican Governor Nathan Deal’s lead falling into the single digits. PPP also conducted a post-shutdown survey of Georgia’s Senate race, finding Michelle Nunn locked in a dead-heat with an unnamed Republican challenger.
What’s striking is the abrupt transformation of the racial composition of the electorate. The white share of the electorate plummeted from 71 percent in August to 63 and 62 percent in the two October polls. The black share of the electorate was at 29 percent in the Better Georgia poll—nearly at 2012 levels—although just 25 percent in PPP’s newest public survey.
Just an FYI here: Black turnout in the 2010 general election, which featured Roy Barnes versus Nathan Deal for governor and so may be the most comparable to 2014, was 28.3 percent.
Over on the editorial side, AJCer Kyle Wingfield makes a point we haven’t seen elsewhere, about any suspension of state Sen. Don Balfour, R-Snellville, who has been indicted on charges related to the misuse of his legislative expense account. Writes Wingfield:
[T]he state Constitution would render any suspension meaningless. At issue is this provision:
“If a public official who is suspended from office … is not first tried at the next regular or special term following the indictment, the suspension shall be terminated and the public official shall be reinstated to office.”
Here, “term” refers to the term of the court handling Balfour’s case. And the court terms in Fulton County, where Balfour was charged, last just two months.
Balfour was indicted in September; that court term ends Nov. 1. The next term ends Jan. 3 — so, if Balfour’s case hasn’t been resolved by then, that’s also when any suspension of him would have to end.
The General Assembly will reconvene a few days after that. See the problem?