Deal so far has not made the information public, and in fact his campaign has acknowledged that he’s still in the process of completing his 2009 income tax return under an extension granted by the IRS.

Campaign spokesman Brian Robinson has said the tax records will eventually be released but hasn’t set a date for it. “You’ll know when we make the decision,” he told Larry Peterson of the Savannah Morning News.

Deal’s tax records became a pertinent issue earlier this year when the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) released a report alleging that Deal, while a member of the U.S. House, may have exceeded congressional limits on outside income.  The OCE investigation was prompted by media reports last year of a lucrative arrangement involving a Gainesville auto salvage company partly owned by Deal that did a lot of vehicle inspection work for the state revenue department.

The tax returns and the OCE report have all merged into a general criticism of Deal’s “ethics,” which presumably is the kind of issue a candidate wants to avoid when he’s running for statewide office.  You would assume, then, that Deal should disclose his tax records quickly and put the ethics issue behind him.

By the same token, not releasing the tax records would supposedly be a fatal blow to Deal’s campaign for governor and give Democratic nominee Roy Barnes an advantage in the race.  But would it really?  If Deal should make the decision between now and Nov. 2 that he simply is not going to release any of his tax records, would he lose any votes because of that refusal?

Georgia’s recent political history suggests, in fact, that ethical misconduct isn’t really that important an issue to voters.  After all, look what happened in the Republican primary.  Karen Handel built her whole campaign around the issue of cleaning up the ethical mess made by the “good ol’ boys” who run state government.  She ran TV spots narrated by Marilyn Quayle that slammed Deal, Eric Johnson and John Oxendine for their “iffy ethics.”

In her runoff campaign against Deal, Handel stepped up the emphasis on ethics, particularly after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that a federal grand jury was looking into Deal’s business transactions with the state.  Here is what Handel’s campaign spokesman Dan McLagan said about Deal:

“What would truly destroy the party would be to nominate someone like Deal who is under a federal grand jury investigation and could be indicted or, heaven forbid, arrested at any moment.  Republicans would lose everything we have worked so hard to build.”

So who did Republican voters choose?   Deal.  Even with the disclosure that a federal grand jury was looking at him, Deal overcame an 11-point deficit from the GOP primary and upset Handel in the Aug. 10 runoff.  It’s hard to see how the ethics issue hurt him at all with voters.  Indeed, Deal has run ahead of Barnes in the early polls taken after Deal’s runoff victory.

Let’s go back four years to the 2006 race for governor, when incumbent Sonny Perdue was running against Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor.

In the middle of that campaign, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published several explosive articles detailing Perdue’s real estate dealings in Florida with a developer he had appointed to the state Board of Economic Development.  Those articles were followed by the biggest bombshell of all, the disclosure that Perdue had signed legislation that gave himself a $100,000 tax break on one of his property transactions.

It would be hard to find a more glaring example of an elected official enriching himself personally by actions he took in his public position.  Jay Bookman of the Journal-Constitution described Perdue’s signing of the bill as “a serious abuse of public power for private gain.”   It was a textbook case of slippery ethics.

In almost any other state, an ethical transgression of that sort would kill a candidate’s chances for election.  Georgia voters were obviously not the slightest bit interested:  they gave Perdue 58 percent of the vote in the general election and a second term as governor.  Perdue, to this day, has never bothered to explain or justify his actions in signing the legislation that provided the lucrative tax benefit.

I would guess that Roy Barnes will continue to run TV ads criticizing Deal for not disclosing his personal tax information and asking what Deal is “hiding” from the voters.  But if Deal decides he’s not going to release those tax records, will it really make any difference?   After looking at recent election results, it would be difficult not to conclude that voters just don’t consider ethics to be all that important.

That’s what you hear now from the newspaper and cable TV “experts,” and obviously whatever they say has to be true, because otherwise they wouldn’t be on TV, would they?

It’s time for a reality check. Let’s look at the numbers from the national poll conducted for CBS News during the Aug. 20-24 time period:

Ahead of a rally in Washington this weekend that some say will test the strength of the Tea Party, a new CBS News poll finds that 29 percent of Americans say they are supporters of the movement. Fifty-four percent say they do not support the Tea Party.

Now, I’m no math expert, but if the Tea Party has the support of 29 percent of the people who are polled and is opposed by 54 percent of those polled, that would seem to indicate that Americans oppose the Tea Party by nearly a two-to-one margin. Am I missing something here?

The CBS poll is hardly an outlier. A Washington Post poll conducted in June with a similarly sized sample of respondents showed that 50 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of the Tea Party compared to 36 percent with a favorable opinion. The Post data also showed the percentage of “unfavorable” opinions of the Tea Party had been growing, not declining, for several months. A Gallup poll in April showed 37 percent support for the Tea Party at a national level.

Look at those results from three independent polls over time: 37 percent national support of Tea Partiers in April, 36 percent support in June, and 29 percent support in August. There seems to be a trend there.

I guess this is another of those instances, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, where the facts have a liberal bias.

Back to the CBS poll, which also had this finding about a former half-term governor of Alaska:

Palin continues to receive unfavorable ratings from the American public overall. Just 23 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Palin, while 40 percent view her unfavorably.

Democrats (62 percent), moderates (44 percent) and liberals (61 percent) hold decidedly negative views of the former vice presidential nominee.

More than a third of the public (35 percent) is undecided or hasn’t heard enough about Palin to offer an opinion. Fewer Americans now hold a favorable view of Palin than in April, but her ratings are similar to what they were in March and last summer, shortly after she stepped down as governor.

Obviously, those numbers can’t be correct either, because everyone loves Sarah Palin and will elect whoever she endorses in a political race. Just ask Karen Handel.

In primary elections held Tuesday, two of Palin’s picks lost out in Wyoming and Washington.

Palin was supporting Rita Meyer, presumably another “mama grizzly” for the former half-term Alaska governor, in Wyoming’s Republican gubernatorial primary, but Meyer lost a close race to Matt Mead.

A Palin-backed candidate in the U.S. Senate race in Washington, teabagger favorite and former NFL player Clint Didier, finished third and did not make it into the general election race.

Of course, the trend of Palin losses can trace its beginnings to the Georgia Republican primary last week, where Karen Handel lost a close race to Nathan Deal.

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.