Dear readers,
This will be the last of my dispatches from my Georgia politics road trip for now. The summer’s really over and 3rd-grade carpools don’t drive themselves.
But before I wipe the last of the dead bugs off my windshield, I want to tell you just a little of what I learned about Georgia and our politics over three months, eight trips, 2,400 miles, and enough fried food to kill a person.
My only rule for the open road was to have an open mind. I wanted to leave the talking points and assumptions behind me and meet Georgia leaders — and voters — where they live, where they sit with their problems, and where they dream of better days.
I met mayors and members of Congress, senators and the First Lady of the United States. I talked to bold-faced names and lesser-known locals.
Along with an open mind, I planned to have an open tummy. Knowing that food is a huge piece of Georgia hospitality and culture, I resolved to eat anything put in front of me. This plan quickly went off the rails on my trip to Columbus, but that’s a story for another column.
After driving from the mountains to the coast and lots of places in between, my biggest lesson learned is also my most disappointing, which is that politics doesn’t seem to be a path to solve problems right now. In too many cases, politics is the problem.
It pains me to say it, as a political journalist, but the further away from state and national politics a place was, the more functional it seemed to be.
This struck me immediately on my visit to Macon, where I met with newly elected Mayor Lester Miller.
“I can only control what I can in Macon-Bibb County as the mayor and we’re going to do right by people regardless of partisan politics,” he said.
In fact, every mayor I spoke with, from Miller in Macon to Kelly Girtz in Athens to Janibeth Outlaw in Herschel Walker’s hometown of Wrightsville, said they were grateful to have been elected in nonpartisan elections without the pressure of party politics.
“You just have to constantly engage and be willing to have a difficult conversation, but come back to the table again, and again, and again,” said Girtz.
Girtz is a liberal’s liberal, but he said he works well with Republicans, including Athens native Gov. Brian Kemp, when it comes to the city’s needs.
The incredibly different reality faced by Georgia’s towns and cities was my second takeaway from my travels. Portions of Georgia are booming and crumbling , depending on where you look.
Atlanta and its suburbs are the obvious growth story in Georgia.
But I saw another one further south in Chatham County and the Georgia Ports Authority.
It’s a city-sized marvel of logistics, and I almost forgot how terrified I was, dangling in a crane over a shipping container high above the Savannah River, when I saw the interstates and rail lines ribbon away from the port beneath me.
The Savannah and Brunswick ports send and receive anything anyone can think to buy or sell around the world, which means businesses with jobs are moving to places like Dalton and Commerce and West Point Georgia just to be close by.
But between the port on the coast and the hum of Atlanta are dozens, or hundreds, of small towns and communities losing people faster than they can replace them.
I’ll never forget meeting Tony Lamar, the mayor of tiny Talbotton. I went to Talbotton because I wanted to see a town that was shrinking and understand what they needed to survive.
The mayor’s answer was so simple it shocked me. What Talbotton needs, he said, is a grocery store again.
The Piggly Wiggly closed about 10 years ago and took its jobs, sales taxes, fresh food and basic medicine with it. “We feel if we could solve that problem, we could attract more people,” he said.
It turns out that the Piggly Wiggly problem was not unique to Talbotton.
In Macon, I’d heard from Mayor Miller that the loss of a grocery store in one Macon neighborhood flipped it almost overnight from a place with a healthy marketplace and shopping center to one with blight, drugs and crime.
And that led me to my third and final takeaway from this summer: The places in Georgia may be different and have wildly different politics, but many of their problems are the same. Crime, in particular, is a riddle that’s more and more difficult to solve.
When I headed north to Blue Ridge, I met law enforcement officials whose criminal justice system is overwhelmed with people who really need to be in mental health treatment, not jail.
I’d heard about the exact same overlay of law enforcement and mental health care needs in Macon and Athens.
While Blue Ridge officials have created mental health courts, Macon leaders opened no-cost mental health clinics in crime-heavy neighborhoods. Athens started sending a mental health crisis counselor out with officers on calls that seem to be mental health-related.
The judge in Blue Ridge said she’d heard about Athens’ ride-along program. Maybe they should try it in Blue Ridge too?
That Blue Ridge is the conservative home of Republican state House Speaker David Ralston, or that Kelly Girtz calls his city of Athens “a progressive hotbed,” never came up. They were talking about problems and solutions, not politics, and that’s why it was working.
I can’t wrap up a trip exploring Georgia politics only to decide that politics is the problem, the end.
Instead, I can say that I will use what I’ve learned to continue to write about politics in this wonderful state in a way that demands more of our leaders, both current and aspiring, than partisan talking points, political slogans, and, I hate to say it, occasional lies.
Politics is the path leaders have to follow to get elected. But it will take more than politics to find solutions to the problems we’re electing them to help solve.
Before I wrap up, I want to thank all of the readers who sent in your tips and road trip ideas, and the people I’ve met along the way who were so generous with their time.
I’m already planning ahead for my next politics road trip. And I’ll see you all soon back out on the road.
About the Author
