Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Son of Political Post

It's a fun week to watch politics in Georgia. On top of some sort of bizarre scandal involving an Agriculture Department employee here, Roy Barnes easily won yesterday's Democratic primary to run for Georgia Governor as widely predicted. Over on the other side of the aisle and also as widely predicted, Sarah Palin-backed candidate Karen Handel will have to face a run-off election against Newt Gingrich-backed candidate Nathan Deal to see who will get to lose to Barnes in the general election.

Here's the fun part: when Palin learns that her "mamma grizzly" is actually an abortion-rights proponent and a gay-rights supporter, she'll begin to act like she's never even heard of Handel. Meanwhile, Handel will be proclaiming herself as the true-blood conservative in the race, as opposed to Nathan Deal, who switched to the GOP when the State started to move away from the Democratic Party and it became politically expedient for him to do so. Deal also has skeletons in the closet back in Washington that Handel will be glad to rattle. But Deal and Gingrich, in turn, will continue to paint Handel as some sort of baby-killing, sodomite liberal. The two sides will spar over ideological purity, confusing Georgia's right-wing voters, and whichever candidate emerges to run against Barnes will have been sorely damaged by his or her primary opponent.

I do admit to having strong feeling about some of this, mainly because I think this State can do a lot better than it has for the past eight years.

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