Back To The Future

originally published June 20, 2007

Well, here we go again. I'm sitting here writing this without any idea how the Congressional election will turn out. You're reading it after the results are in. Smart money says Republican Jim Whitehead is our new Congressman. Gamblers say Whitehead is in a runoff. Optimists say Democrat James Marlow is in that runoff, too. Shrewd observers guess Republican Bill Greene is in that runoff instead of Marlow. Idealists believe that Libertarian Dr. Jim Sendelbach should be in that runoff or should win it outright. You, however, are the realist: you know who won.

If Whitehead is as strong as everybody says he is, even if he's in a runoff, he'll probably crush his opponent. So maybe we're all better off if he wins it without a runoff and puts us out of our misery.

This is life in Georgia's 10th Congressional District for us Athens liberals. We had a couple of years there in a district designed by Democrats, but then the Republicans threw us into this red zone, where no girl child will ever again be named Hillary.

But this was an unusual Congressional race: an open seat with no incumbent. When Augusta-area Republican Congressman Charlie Norwood died in the first month of his new term, this special election popped up, to be run without party primaries. The no-primary setup even allowed Dr. Sendelbach onto the ballot without the usual, daunting third-party signature-gathering ordeal. Indeed, if you ever wanted to run for Congress, this was the time.

So, Dr. Paul Broun, an Athens physician who has for a long time been active in Conservative Republican circles and has run for Congress before, tossed his sphygmomanometer into the race. He did so even in the face of the fact that his party hierarchy had coalesced behind State Senator Jim Whitehead, who apparently had gained the blessing of Norwood while he was still able to give it and had been quietly positioning himself with money and contacts and Norwood's staff and family to run for Norwood's seat when it opened up. Then Dr. Broun even had to endure charges that he himself jumped the gun and campaigned before Norwood was dead. No doubt there were times out there on the campaign trail when the good doctor must have contemplated whether politics could be any worse as a Democrat.

I think I can confidently write this far before the polls close that Dr. Broun will not be in a runoff, but, given who he is, he had to run. So did Lt. Col Nate Pulliam - with no money, no name recognition, no hope of winning. Yet he got into his car each day and set out around the district campaigning and showing up for candidate debates. Why would a guy pay $5,000 to do this to himself? Same reason he volunteered for a year in Iraq after he was already retired and didn't have to go.

Same reason Denise Freeman, the Lincolnton Baptist minister had to run (again) for Congress, and Augusta-area lawyer Evita Paschall, and Loganville Realtor Mark Myers, and Atlanta education administrator Erik Underwood and Braselton conservative activist Bill Greene, who guards our Internet against liberal operatives and moonlights as a Minuteman guarding our southern border against illegal immigrants.

An open Congressional seat is the gold standard of American politics. When one opens, if you don't try to sit in it, you're going to be left standing in the dust.

I supported James Marlow because he's smart and knowledgeable and seems sophisticated enough to hold his own in Washington but small-town enough to relate to the people he would represent. Some of my colleagues in the press found Marlow dull and less than forceful, but maybe I am, too.

So, there probably are enough Republicans in this district to put both Whitehead and Greene into a runoff, but I'm hoping Marlow can squeak in there. I sincerely believe from the bottom of my misguided, liberal heart that the Republican Party has deserted its own traditional values and has been taken over by pirates, who launched a ruinous war and botched it, while dismantling the tattered safety net that government should provide here in America. I want a Democrat out there calling them on it for another month in the runoff, and I hope that Democrat is Marlow.

I guess you're getting a good laugh out of all this, knowing what you know and I don't. But that's okay. A political race forces candidates to talk about issues and forces people to talk about candidates.

Whitehead won't be any worse than Norwood, and most of us won't even know he's our Congressman, or care. With Marlow, at least here in Athens-Clarke County, we would know we had us a Congressman.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com