chrisishardcore.com

Dye

This question is brought up by the Iraqi elections, but it is something I've noticed in other elections too. Namely, why don't American elections use a finger-dye type system to prevent vote fraud? Even though some right-wingers believe vote fraud is rampant in minority precincts, it's a relatively small problem. By that I mean vote count innaccuracies probably account for more elections where the wrong guy wins than vote fraud. Specifically, fraud on the elections official level, like what happened in Alabama's governor's race in 2002 definitely affects more elections adversely than say a few hundred people voting twice in a Presidential election.

Anyway, the thing about dye is that in the United States it probably wouldn't do much to verify the validity of elections, but it could potentially open the door for a number of reforms that Democrats and like-minded groups would prefer, such as same day registration and an ability to vote at any precinct or at a shopping mall regardless of where you live.

I'm just curious why we don't use a similar system here to denote who's voted. My guess is that a bipartisan coalition forms in opposition whenever the idea comes up. Democrats oppose it out of civil liberty concerns (it's insulting to voters etc) and Republicans oppose it because they know it could open up more opportunities (like same day registration) for Democratic leaning voters to vote. That's a shame.

Payola

With the news that Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher got paid to promote, among other things, marriage, I have figured out a way to save Uncle Sam some serious money. Berkmar student L'Anita Walker will gay bash for free, and she'll even throw in equating gay sexual "preference" to the "preference" of being a prostitute.

After reading her column, I wonder if school authorities pulled the whole editorial section out of their school newspaper solely because of Walker's hurtful and wrongheaded bile. As much derision as I want to send in her direction, the real punishment will be the shame with which she'll view her own diatribe in the near future.

GOP woos blacks

Now, I'm not saying that Democrats come up with the greatest ideas when it comes to going after the votes of large constituencies that currently don't vote for us. But the way the GOP goes after black votes sometimes is so...actuarial.

Black Americans have lower life expectancies than whites. Republicans hope to get their votes by promising them slightly higher social security returns and/or some sort of inheritance rights on deceased loved ones' social security assets. Of course! I know the first thing I think of when I see FICA taxes taken out of my paycheck is "I wonder if I'm going to live long enough to get a decent rate of return on that money."

Maybe that's what Republicans mean when they talk about the millions of people paying the "death tax."

Smarter Sun

I thought that the New York Sun aspired to be a better newspaper than the New York Times, not just a conservative version of the caricature the Sun's editors perceive the Times to be. Today they are hyping the right's Michael Moore. Now, I have a couple of problems with this from a cultural standpoint, mostly that it shows just how little the right understands modern popular culture that they are trying to frame someone they hope will be a popular documentarian as either their version or response (or both) to Michael Moore.

This is a bit of a leap, but think of American and British bands of the 1960's. The British had the Beatles (think of them crudely as the equivalent Michael Moores of pop-documentary filmmaking) and the American response was the Monkees -- who despite having some good songs and in Peter Nesmith a pretty talented songwriter, are seen today (and then) as a poor imitation. Much better were groups like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield -- groups who did their own thing. Were I a conservative documentary maker, I would aspire to the same levels of success as a Michael Moore but not just a paralel of his success. I would hope to do it my own way.

Something else that is just dumb (here's the article, btw) is that conservative outlets, like the NY Sun, have spent years demonizing Moore as basically a liar who dishonestly gives liberalism and liberal ideas a good shine. Is that really what they want their own superstar perceived as? A liar who dishonestly advances the case of conservativism? Maybe it is -- that sentence is an accurate description of our President, afterall.

No, but what really bothers me is the actual article. Here are two examples of the wonderful objective reporting that the Sun has injected into New York that the Times allegedly lacks (remember, these are the people that formerly critiqued the Times daily with Smarter Times).

Mr. Maloney's film was hailed as the "most anticipated" documentary in 2005 by the American Film Renaissance, an upstart film institute based in Dallas.

Hmmm, would that be this AFR, whose website describes itself as "the First Conservative Film Festival in the Country"?No wonder they are so eagerly anticipating this guy's new documentary, but no mention in the Sun article anywhere that the film festival is explicitly ideological and partisan, even when they interview the organization's head. And then the very next sentence:

People attending October's Liberty Festival in Los Angeles apparently gave a preview version of it a standing ovation - though not of the duration of Michael Moore's 20 minutes at Cannes

Again, would that be the same film festival that describes itself as "American's first conservative film festival...and there's nothing Michael Moore can do about it!" I think so. It's possible that the Sun's low circulation has reinforced a view among it's editors that only die hard partisan conservatives who hate the NY Times bother to read it, and citing those same low circulation numbers, that's certainly possible -- so why bother being objective or calling a conservative organization for what it is.

Whatever your quibbles with Michael Moore, I believe that he considers himself a filmaker before a liberal. It's obvious that Evan Coyne Maloney and his backers at the New York Sun consider him a conservative first and a filmaker secondary. Maloney will probably never even get a bad review. He and the Sun will think that validates his films, in reality it means no one outside of the rightwing will ever take him seriously enough to even consider his movies critically, and Michael Moore will still go unrefuted in the world at large.

In summary

I put together this handy graphic so you can see where everybody stands on this spectrum. Came across a few interesting things. Dean and Kerry fall at the same spot. Edwards is considered more liberal. Makes sense to me -- Edwards was running more of an old timey populist campaign and I always thought Kerry was more deserving of the "classic liberal" support as he'd devoted a lifetime to that ethic instead of just one campaign. The more I knew about Kerry, the more I liked him, while the reverse was kind of true about Dean (although it was more the campaign that turned me off, not the person).

One very interesting thing that I happened upon on the Issues 2000 site was John McCain's profile. Many Democrats want nothing more than for John McCain to switch parties and become a Democrat. They feel that McCain would either be right at home with the modern Democratic Party or that he would be just what we need (sometimes both). They also feel that there is little room in the Republican party for McCain, and being fans, feel he could accomplish much more as a Democrat. Where does McCain fall on the chart? At the exact same place as Tim Roemer, someone that was the #1 object of contempt for many of these Democratic McCainiacs until Martin Frost replaced him today.

So basically, the message is that there is room for a high profile transplant such as McCain in the Democratic Party, and I don't doubt that if he were to switch he would instantly be a top contender for the nomination in '08. But someone who is more or less his ideological soulmate is completely unqualified to run the same party. Additionally, someone considerably to the left of McCain is way too Republican-light for the job. Odd how that works.

Non partisan analysis

One of these images is what Issues 2000 assigned to Howard Dean, the other they assigned to Martin Frost. If you care enough, you can do a google search and find out which one is which. But if either of these profiles is being demonized and is "ineligible" to be head of the Democratic Party, then we are seriously toast.

By the way, here is Bill Clinton:


And here is Tim Roemer:


And finally, this is where I stand:

In defense of Martin Frost

Via Atrios, I see that all the cool kids are going after Martin Frost, and that they are led by one Annatopia.

Now, first of all, the television segment that Atrios and Annatopia link to describes the district that Frost ran in as "drawn to favor a Republican." Not quite. The state of Texas is about 58% Republican, on average. When thinking about Texas, would you say it slightly "favors" a Republican, or that it almosts guarantees that a Republican will get elected on either the state or federal level? I would go with the latter.

Frost's district 32 was drawn to be about 65% Republican, on average. That's about 7 points more Republican than the state of Texas, which is considered to be one of the safer Republican states. In addition, Frost's district was located in urban and suburban Dallas County. I'm quite sure that there are some rural counties in Texas (as there are in Georgia) that give 65% or more of their vote to Republican presidential candidates while remaining competitive on a local level for Democrats, but suburban districts generally aren't some of them.

Now, Frost held his Republican opponent to 54%, and a third party candidate got about 2%. In other words, Frost managed to do about 9% better than the average candidate, and in the mean time helped Democratic candidates on the local level -- most prominently in electing a Hispanic lesbian sheriff of Dallas county.

In the process of coming closer than probably anyone else ever will to winning that district, Frost offended some on the left with the advertisements he ran. Remember though, advertisments and campaigns are not produced to satisfy ideological donors/activists but to win the votes of the people that live in a district. Obviously, Frost was onto something, and instead of taking cheap shots at him (you try running in a 65% Republican district -- I have some experience at this and did not do nearly as well as Frost) just maybe more bloggers should give Frost at least an open mind to hear about his proposals to make it easier for Democrats to run in districts we've been losing by 15 or more points.

The thing that many people seem to forget is that a congressional candidate gets at most 2 years to run for Congress in a district and generally only has the money to actually be up on the air presenting him or herself as a choice to the voters for about 2 or 3 months. Frost first saw his district about a year before the election and in that time, I'm sorry, but one just does not have time to reinvent the Democratic party. He had to run the campaign (like it or not) that had the best chance of returning him to Congress, and I'm positive that with the exception of very minor tweaks he did that. It didn't work -- but he had only about a 10% chance of it working anyway. Probably less.

Now, as DNC chair and given more than just 2 or 3 months, someone like Frost would at least have the opportunity to reshape what the Democratic Party means to the general population. I think the response of the left/Democratic blogosphere to the Roemers and Frosts of the world kind of highlights those of us that get the whole Southern/rural problem thing and those that either have to have it explained to them or are shocked to see it in action.

Some people see the kind of campaign Frost ran and say that's the reason we keep losing, if only he'd "stand up" for his Democratic values or run a real Democrat instead, we'd win. I know someone like Frost would rather not have to run that kind of a campaign (after all, he's still a Democrat), but he personally hasn't been in charge, and neither has someone like him (he supported Hoyer instead of Pelosi, so he tried). So he doesn't have much of a choice.

So given the the chance to take the reins of the national party, I think a Roemer or a Frost's main goal would be to find ways for other guys like them to run more of a "Democratic" campaign and less of a "Republican-light" campaign. In other words, the reason Roemer and Frost have had to be "Republican-light" in the past is that where they're from, the Democratic brand is very tarnished.

They've lived it. I think others, specifically Rosenberg get it. Dean pays a lot of lip service to it, but I don't think he's the right guy to combat it (he certainly hasn't lived it, and I'm not sure he really understands what it's like to automatically have the biggest negative against you be your party id, while simultaneously your opponent's biggest positive is his).

I hope I've been able to get my point across. If you look at where these guys are from, and if you've been there through involvement with campaigns, you know they are being "Republican-light" to survive, not because they want to. They want an active role in the party in order to create the atmosphere where a Democrat can run a "Democrat" campaign regardless of where they're running. And like it or not, Roemer is right about one thing -- the perception is that the Republican tent is bigger. They're partisan ID is growing, ours is shrinking (that's a zero sum game). It doesn't matter that in the actual leadership, there is little room for differences in ideology -- the man on the street thinks there is room for him in the Republican tent and doesn't see a place for himself in ours. That's who the party chairmanship is about, not us. My goal is not to sit around enforcing some sort of purity.

You've got to find common ground with more than 50% of the country. If you find yourself to the left of the spectrum, the only way you'll ever advance the ideas that are important to you are by gaining trust on issues and values that you already have in common with 50%+ of the population. Only then, when that trust is gained, can you even begin to hope that a greater share of the population will give ideas you hold dear a closer or second look. Frost and Roemer get it -- that's why they aren't Republicans.

A Strong Office

No doubt you've read about the rules abuses of the incoming Republicans in the state House (and to a lesser extent, the Senate) and I don't really need to rehash them here. One thing I haven't really seen anyone comment on is the differences between a strong office and a strong man/woman/individual.

Since Georgia has only had males as speakers, I'll stick to the masculine. What I meant to shed light on is the fact that, due to the way Richardson and the Republicans have strengthened the office of the speaker, it points to the deficiencies in the man that Richardson is.

Perhaps nothing signifies this as well as Richardson's own admission that previous Speakers have wielded a heavy hand behind the scene, and he's just trying to make it more open. I disagree. Previous speakers, and make no mistake we are mostly talking about the great Tom Murphy (D - Bremen), may have wielded a heavy hand behind the scenes, but the overwhelming majority of their power came from a commodity that Richardson doesn't seem to believe he can earn himself - respect.

Tom Murphy didn't rig the rules of the House so that he would never lose a fight over legislation or the floor, and because of this every additional fight he (fairly) won strengthened his hand while maintaining the integrity of the body he oversaw. When Glenn Richardson bats 1.000 this year, everyone else will know that the ball was just sitting on a tee every time, waiting for him to take a swing. Will Glenn?

South Dakota?

According to the WSJ it is some sort of big deal that the Dean campaign paid DailyKos and MyDD consulting fees during the campaign. Here is the link. I seem to clearly remember both sites reminding their readership on a daily basis that they were doing this, and anyway it was during a primary and Democratic sites certainly have the right to advocate for the candidate of their choice in a Democratic primary.

What is much worse is what the Thune campaign did. Two South Dakota "independent" bloggers, one with a site even deceptively named Daschle v Thune, took over $34,000 in 2004 to write "objectively" about the race. Read about it here.

IE question

As you can see, I've added advertisements. I looked at the site in IE today and noticed that there is a lot of wasted space on the right hand side of the screen, and it would be nice if the blog entries could push the ads into the blank space and have more space for themselves.

I use the Mozilla browser (not the Firefox variant though -- no google address bar searches in the Firefox version) and this site fills up the whole page and looks fine. So if anyone wants to email me with tips as to why the page isn't filling up the whole screen in IE then I'm open to suggestions. In the meantime, I'll try to figure out the problem myself.

For your comparison (Mozilla on top, IE on the bottom):



I recommend checking out the Mozilla browser suite if you've never tried anything but Explorer. It has a nice email client and a pretty decent one-click HTML editor built.

Relatively scandalous

Two kind of big things happened this week. The CBS report came out, and according to Instapundit and others liberal bloggers were scandalously silent in response, which proves that the liberal media is under attack.

The other thing that came out was that the US has determined that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This is not only the basis for the war we are currently still fighting, but also a core belief of Bush voters (that the WMD are out there). Haven't heard Andrew Sullivan or Instapundit or any other right wing blogger acknowledge this.

Some liberal media we've got.

Selling Out?

Some people think the best album that the Replacements ever made was Tim. Others never forgave them for selling out to a major label. Personally, I like that album and can see the merit both in "selling out" as well as sticking with an indie.

Hosting this site currently costs me about $20 a month, plus a small annual registration fee. $20 is not much, and I get a lot from it, including CGI and MySQL, and it's allowed me to start to branch out and do some other projects, like the Georgia District Explorer, which is overdue for an update sometime soon.

Anyway, in a few days I hope to start defraying the cost (a little) of the site by adding Google AdSense Adwords to the site. Readers are under no obligation to click through to any of the sites advertised -- in fact Google forbids me from encouraging you to support a sponsor.

It is my hope that the ads will integrate into the site without bringing down the level of enjoyment that myself and readers get from the site already. Because of the nature of the Google service, hopefully we'll begin to see targeted links that actually ad to the content of the site so that everybody benefits.

If it wasn't for the cost of the site, I don't think I'd be doing this. If the ads interfere with the usage of the site, I'll pull them down. Who knows though? Maybe the prospect of making an extra few cents will propell me to blog more often than I already do!

UPDATE: Per the comment, Tim has the best individual songs ("Left of the Dial," "Kiss Me On the Bus," "Bastards of Young," etc) but also two stinkers, "Lay It Down Clown" and to a lesser degree "Dose of Thunder." Let It Be, not to be confused with the Beatles album of the same name, is more consistent. Get them both.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

You may have seen state Sen. David Adelman (D - DeKalb Co) on Fox 5 last night talking about his gift card integrity act. It was introduced last session, and basically takes aim at gift cards that fleece the consumers who purchase them. Many cards actually charge you money simply to check the balance, or lose $2 a month to inactivity fees, or in the case of one egregious offender, require a $7.50 reactivation fee if you don't the use card within a certain period of time.

Basically, Adelman believes that the cards should be just like giving a gift of cash, and sought to ban all dormancy fees. After all, when you purchase the gift card, you are making an interest free loan to the store and the money that the store makes on what is called the "float" should be more than enough to pay for the convenience that comes with the gift card.

Last session, Adelman introduced the Gift Card Integrity Act; unfair consumer transactions of gift cards bill. It did the following:

prohibit the imposition of nonuse, handling, dormancy, or maintenance fee on gift cards and gift certificates issued by merchants or persons acting on behalf of merchants

This year, Adelman's co-sponsor from last year, Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R - Big Business) has teamed up with Sen. Chip Rogers (R - Banking Industry Shill) and sponsored their own bill, with the exact same title. So, did they steal Adelman's bill?

Not exactly. Instead of banning outrageous dormancy fees -- which sometimes eat up the entire value of the card -- Seabaugh and Rogers aim to

provide that the terms of gift certificates, store gift cards, and general use prepaid cards shall be disclosed at the time of purchase and through certain notifications

So that's the difference. Let gift card issuers continue to rip off consumers, but just make sure they are a little more upfront about it. I guess Georgia Republicans idea of consumer protection is protecting big business from consumers. They should be ashamed of themselves for pulling stunts like this.

Meet your new legislator

Steve Davis (109 R - Stockbridge) has just been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, and is representative of the new Republican majority and the many freshman legislators in the body. What issue is so important to Rep. Davis and the residents of his district that he prefiled a resolution urging immediate action?

Unless you are Steve Davis, then I assure you, whatever guess you ventured is incorrect. The answer is Division I-A NCAA football playoffs. My guess is that Steve will "tackle" education funding, tort reform and numerous other issues as soon as he can sleep comfortably at night knowing exactly who the best college football team is.

The Phrase that Pays

I see that Arnold (R - CA) is the latest Republican governor to associate himself with the phrase "[Our state] doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem." Uttering this instantly makes you a hero of right wing pundits everywhere.

Unfortunately for Arnold, it's a little disingenuous to say this after you champion a number of ballot initiatives that further took spending decisions out of the hands of the legislature and turned them into constitutional mandates. Of course, the great thing about being a Republican is that no one will ever point out this glaring hypocrisy and, if they do, they'll be greeted by a chorus of sore losers and girlie man taunts.

Amazingly, in the context of social security, Republican allies of the President think we should keep spending about where it is but drastically reduce revenues.

That Surplus

I was looking at some Georgia exit polls from '98, 2000 and 2004 and came across something interesting. In 2000, the US had a pretty big surplus and it was a campaign issue in the Presidential election, namely what to do with it. Haha -- surplus! Those were the days.

Anyway, the exit pollsters offered 4 choices for respondents. One was to use it for a tax cut and most of those voters obviously preferred Bush over Gore. Interestingly, in Georgia more voters preferred using it for "social security." And those voters favored Bush nearly 2:1.

So either those voters thought that Bush should use that surplus money to fund privitization (not likely!) or a lot of people that like social security just fine supported Bush in 2000 and probably this past year too.

It's nice to see some evidence that protecting social security can be a killer issue for Democrats, and that exit poll evidence seems to be pretty solid. Now if I could only get TivoToGo...

Republican / Conservative - Not the same thing

An almost good post from Pandagon. One thing that consistently bothers me is this idea that the country wasn't conservative in 1964 when Goldwater got creamed but then because of Goldwater's principles, plus Reagan's personal appeal, the county became conservative by 1980 and it is still paying dividends for the Republicans.

Not exactly how I see things. Ideologically, I would say that the national electorate is more favorable to the modern Democratic party now than it was in the glory years of 1964, 1960 and 1932 - 1948. Republicans made most of their great gains since then because of race. They identified (through Goldwater's loss) large blocks of already conservative voters and then used race-based appeals to convert these voters from Democrats or independents to Republicans. As long as you could combine these mostly rural and mostly Southern voters with moderates (who fled to Johnson) in the future it would be relatively easy to win national elections.

On a federal level, they don't use race as a tool to win votes as much as they used to because they don't need to -- most of the conservative Democrats have by now realigned and it isn't necessary. On the state level, however, Republicans have had mixed success. South Carolina was probably the first state to become Republicanized in the South, along with Virginia. North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky were vulnerable as early as the 60's. South Carolina seems to be gone for good, although Democrats have largely readjusted and regained their footing in the other states -- even though Republicans would probably be favored in an open governor's race in each of these states.

In Georgia, Republicans had a hell of a time from 1865-2001 cracking the Democrats' hold on power. As recently as 1998, Roy Barnes was getting over 40% of the white vote in Georgia (and probably close to 45%). Then came the flag change and Perdue's subtle and not-so-subtle usage of it to woo conservative white Democrats to switch loyalties. He wasn't exactly subtle with the conservative whites, but he was able to largely fly below the radar with moderate suburban Republicans who surely would have deserted him had they truly known how racist of a campaign he was running.

Ironically, Republicans seem to have less success in Alabama and Mississippi, mostly because Alabama lacks a suburban base for a Republican party to grow from and Mississippi is nearly 50% more African-American than Georgia is.

If you can point to a similar demographic scenario today that is ripe for conversion then I will be glad to endorse a more liberal course for the party. It seems to me though that the people worth taking are moderates. If you look at exit poll numbers, where voters self-id by party and by ideology, you see that nearly every state has more "conservatives" than "liberals", although in most states "moderates" are the largest group.

I tried to reconcile by using educated guesses and referencing private opinion surveys that I've seen how Georgians break down, not just by ideology or party but by a combination of the two. This is my guess:

29% Conservative Republican
19% Moderate Democrat
14% Moderate Independant
12% Moderate Republican
10% Liberal Democrat
7% Conservative Independent
6% Conservative Democrat
3% Liberal Independent
1% Liberal Republican

In other words, Republicans + Conservative Independents = 49% of the state's voting age population. Democrats + Moderate and Liberal Independents = 51%. Embracing the liberal label in Georgia might get us the 1.4% of the population that are liberal Republicans but in the process could lose us the 5.8% of the population that are conservative Democrats.

My own guess would be that the groups ripest for conversion are moderate independents (naturally) and to a slightly lesser degree moderate Republicans and (lesser still) independent conservates. Together, this group makes up 32.4% of the state's voting population, and John Kerry probably only got about 20% of their votes, which translates into about 6% of the overall statewide vote.

The road to victory lies in winning and converting the moderate independents by a healthy margin, not getting clobbered by conservative independents, and making some inroads among moderate Republicans. Thankfully it's not incompatible with liberalism, but it takes some skillful marketing to get it done.

Anger Points

One of the most fascinating things about the Bush campaign's data usage is the concept of "anger points." Figuring out what it is that ticks off an individual and drives him to vote for George W. Bush. According to press reports these include abortion and tort reform. My guess is that things like gun control/rights are also included and taking a (web)page from Lee Atwater, probably stuff like affirmative action that the Bush campaign isn't comfortable talking about with the press but no doubt stirs passions and was probably effectively used to get votes for W.

It's interesting, this concept. And the more I think about it, the more I think this was the central factor in Bush's re-election. Sure, he ran against a candidate who was similarly polarizing, but being polarizing didn't hurt Clinton, Reagan or Nixon when they challenged either incumbents or the status quo.

The post election polls show that Bush is deeply unpopular, with negatives rising into the 50's less than two months after he was re-elected. And I don't believe it is because Americans "know where he stands", even when they disagree with him. On overall approval Bush was never popular enough to win re-election under historical standards, and on certain issues his disapprove greatly outweighed his approval.

Yet, voters who in years past would have abandoned him stuck with him. And I think the answer is the anger points. Whether it is a Catholic who is disgusted with all of his policies but disgusted more by abortion or an underemployed rural person nonetheless worried about losing his or her gun or a socially liberal upscale pro-choice white woman who's daughter did not get into a state college because of what they perceive as reverse discrimination due to affirmative action, the Bush campaign found ways to antagonize these people into voting for a man they otherwise do not like.

I'm not saying that they had great across the board success, but all they ended up needing to know was what made 50,000 Ohioans tick and they succeeded in that. If you accept my premise, then the endless spotlight given to issues that a majority of Americans do not care about (such as tort reform, partial birth abortion, judicial nominations) makes sense. I might dismiss it as pandering to the base, but for Bush pandering to specific bases got him re-elected.

So -- anger points. Clearly they work. But what are the Democratic ones? I can think of a few, potentially, though I'm not sure they'd have the same punch applied the way the Bush campaign did them. Republican ideology, on an anger level, appeals to the individualistic urge to take on liberal/goverment interests that are attempting to personally harm his or her way of living. Generally, Democratic anger favors more government regulation to improve someone's own quality of life, for sure, but also the quality of life of others.

It's in this context that grassroots politics will be less about getting out the vote and more about getting out the message and helping organized campaigns figure out what the message to get out is. I'm not saying I can figure it out, but I will definitely be giving it a lot of thought. Obviously, most winnings campaigns simply are in the right place at the right time. The events are favorable, the candidate is personally appealing, the other party makes a mistake. The Bush campaign has furthered our understanding of politics by rejecting the notion, from the start, that the best man will win, and going all out even when the odds and history are against you. They made their victory happen, it didn't just come to them.

Anachronisms

Some people seem to think that the office of sheriff is so 20th century and should be done away with in the state of Georgia -- or at least in the metro counties. Personally, I'm not sure if they are right or not. I know that we'd never be able to eliminate rural sheriffs and I'm not sure if you should have a double standard for metro counties -- what exactly would the definition of metro be, anyway?

Regardless of how you come down on the issue, Victor Hill did a whole lot in one day to bolster the case of those who'd get rid of the elected sheriff.