Karen Handel’s loss to Nathan Deal in the Republican runoff for governor has a couple of major ramifications. One of them is the de-mystification of Sarah Palin as some kind of supreme she-god mama grizzly who can anoint a political winner by a simple laying-on of the hands, you betcha. It turns out she can’t
Handel’s defeat also puts an end to any talk about a third term for Sonny Perdue. Now, Perdue has been careful to say that he didn’t take sides in the Republican primary and that Handel wasn’t his gal, no matter what people may think.
“I didn’t weigh in on this campaign,” Perdue said two days after the runoff. “The people of Georgia can speak for themselves . . . I’m not an endorser, I trust the electorate.”
Okay, governor, you’ve established your alibi. But regardless of what Perdue might say, his fingerprints and his people were all over the Handel campaign. Although Perdue will deny it, I’m convinced he was looking to Handel to provide vindication for his lackluster administration by winning, in effect, a third term for Sonny Perdue. But it didn’t happen.
In the months leading up to the primary and runoff elections, I was struck by something that always came up in casual conversations about politics outside the workplace. Whenever Karen Handel’s name was mentioned as a contender for the GOP nomination, the word people invariably used to describe her was “mean.”
Handel obviously wanted voters to think that she was tough enough to run against male candidates in a male-dominated political process – thus her repeated use of the George W. Bush taunt, “Bring it on!” But for Handel, what she thought was toughness came across to the outside world as mean-spirited. I think that attitude of sourness and hostility eventually caught up with her in the runoff.
If there was a defining moment to the runoff campaign, it was that moment in a debate with Deal when Handel snarled: “Facts are facts, and this is a campaign for governor. Things are tough, campaigns are tough, and it’s frankly time to put the big boy pants on because, candidly, if you can’t handle this, how are you going to handle Roy Barnes?”
That was a one-liner that could well have been crafted in advance by Handel’s media spokesman, Dan McLagan. It is the kind of smart-assed retort for which McLagan has always been lauded by reporters who love a snappy quote that adds zest to a news article.
Unfortunately for Handel, this was a comment that came back to bite her in the butt – a remark that reinforced the mean, hard-edged image she already had with many voters.
As one of my reporter friends observed, “Down here in the South, you’re not supposed to sass your elders.” Handel, in her channeling of McLagan, was not only sassing Deal (who is 20 years older than her) but was mocking his very manhood. In a party heavily influenced by angry, middle-aged white males, that was a very dangerous thing to be doing.
Another interesting aspect of the Handel campaign was the lengths she went to – even to the extent of having her campaign people tell lies for her – to try to back away from her efforts seven and eight years ago to solicit gay votes when she ran for Fulton County commissioner. Handel went to extraordinary lengths to make sure people knew that now she was opposed to gay marriage and gay adoptions, but it still didn’t work for her.
I couldn’t help but think of George Wallace, who had been something of a racial moderate (by Southern standards, anyway) when he ran for governor of Alabama in 1958 and lost to a segregationist, John Patterson, who was supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace famously said after that loss that no one “will ever out-nigger me again.” And no one ever did.
It makes one wonder if Handel will similarly vow that “no one will ever out-faggot me again” as she prepares for some future political campaign.
