Check out the website https://lenspoliticalnotes.com Political Note #332 The Campaign for the Senate, Political Note #334 Biden Transition Team, Political Note #269 Raphael Warnock, Political Note #283, #2 Jon Ossoff
Democracy in action. OR as Senator Jon Tester says: Run through the f—-ing tape.
The Senate is 48-48. Don’t expect anything from North Carolina. Don’t expect anything from Alaska. I don’t mean to suggest that either state is hopeless. They are counting votes in both North Carolina and Alaska. It is not impossible the Democratic candidates could catch their opponents with absentee ballots. It is unlikely.
We need to look at the two Georgia Senate races – the regular election (Georgia A) and the special election because of a filled vacancy (Georgia B). Each of the Democrats (Jon Ossoff https://electjon.com and Raphael Warnock https://warnockforgeorgia.com) in theses races must win their Senate run-off election on January 5, 2021 if Democrats are to have a 50-50 split in the Senate. A 50-50 split, with Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate as Vice President, would give Democrats control of the Senate. You can’t do anything more about North Carolina or Alaska. You and I can do something about Georgia.
First, though, the results of this election have forced me to think about my political views and how they fit in the country. What am I for and what do I mean by that? Here is a brief answer: Democracy, social justice, and the rule of law.
Democracy: Every adult gets a chance to vote and to otherwise participate in elections and in the conversation about what our policies should be. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are essential to democracy. American failures to achieve democracy include the lack of proportionate representation offered by the US Senate and Electoral College as well as House and state and local election districts distorted by partisan gerrymandering.
Social Justice: Everyone gets a decent chance to succeed. Everyone is treated with respect and gets more than a single chance to succeed. Everyone is eligible for “privilege.” If, as you’ll see below, the Air Force Academy doesn’t work out, there is a chance to do something else. Kids can graduate from technical training or college and graduate school with little or no debt. Adults can find work and make a life from that work.
The Rule of Law: Everyone gets similar treatment. We are Protected from corruption, from violence. We are able to solve our problems peacefully, through fair and normal and accessible legal processes.
David Brooks tells us “What the Voters are Trying to tell us”.
- Republicans should do without Donald Trump and his ilk and build a diverse working-class party.
- Republicans should separate church and state and end their religious war.
- Democrats should minimize their cultural concerns and stop being so cosmopolitan. (Meaning less elitist?)
- Democrats need to understand that the culture war about diversity and the like belongs in books and sermons, not in mandates.
We have an important election coming up on January 5, 2021. One state, two elections. Both for the United States Senate. If we follow the narrative that David Brooks outlined and, to be fair, also criticized, the run-off elections for the US Senate might not look encouraging. Nor are the numbers encouraging. In Georgia A – the Incumbent Republican, David Perdue, got more votes than the Democrat, Jon Ossoff (49.8-47.9). Perdue did not, however, get over 50%, which Georgia requires. In Georgia B, a special election which is a non-partisan primary with multiple candidates from both parties, Democrat Raphael Warnock got more votes than the incumbent, appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. Republicans as a group, however, got one percent more votes than Democrats.
Look at Georgia A.
Jon Ossoff https://electjon.com is a young man who is pretty cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan in the ordinary way – with international family connections and in his work. Jon Ossoff is also “cosmopolitan” in another way the word is used. He is Jewish. His dad went to Harvard Business School and built a successful business providing professional development training to lawyers and accountants. His mother, daughter of Russian-Lithuanian emigrants to Australia, moved to the US. She founded a PAC to support more women in politics. His wife, Alisha Kramer, is a graduate of the Emory School of Medicine.
After graduating from the private Paideia school in Atlanta (a school that describes itself as being about the written word and the spoken word) Jon Ossoff went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. More cosmopolitanism – he went on to get a Master’s Degree from the London School in Economics. Even more cosmopolitan, his work was based in the United Kingdom. As CEO and managing director of a London-based television production company, he made documentary films. His films were about international political corruption – about the crimes of ISIS, about East African death squads.
Jon Ossoff has had experience in American politics. He worked with two African American Members of Congress. He interned with Congressman John Lewis and served as a national security staffer for Congressman Hank Johnson.
None of this makes Jon Ossoff a radical in the culture wars that David Brooks deplores. As we should all understand by now, the preferred presidential candidate of most African Americans and, perhaps, the only Democrat who could have won in 2020, was moderate Joe Biden. Jon Ossoff’s principal issue has been the importance of holding people guilty of political corruption to account. He got an important taste of election politics rather than legislative politics in his 2017 enormously expensive special election loss to Karen Handel. In 2018, Handel lost that suburban Atlanta seat to African American gun safety advocate Lucy McBath. McBath won again in 2020.
In David Perdue, Jon Ossoff has an opponent who he would want to be brought to account. In the extraordinary world that American has become, Jon Ossoff, perhaps because his work concerned words and pictures or perhaps because his father created a thriving business, is considered a member of the elite while David Perdue is not.
David Perdue’s parents were schoolteachers. David’s father, also named David, extended that career to become a school superintendent, serving in that role in one district for twenty years. As Superintendent of Schools for Houston County, Georgia, he oversaw the desegregation of the school district. I know personally what it means to serve as school superintendent in one community for a long period of time. There are no easy superintendencies. Spending twenty years integrating the schools of a county in Georgia has to be one of the very hard superintendencies.
Young David considered a career in the Air Force, but left the Air Force Academy for Georgia Tech and a career in business. Now one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, David Perdue was, in succession, CEO of Reebock (more precisely the Reebock Brand), PillowTex, and Dollar General. In each case, he did an extraordinary job of getting the company’s finances into shape. In 2014, after a time as a very high-level consultant, he turned to politics and ran successfully for the US Senate.
Attacked for outsourcing work away from the US, he explained that he was proud of finding lower cost labor for his company. He was attacked for having a conflict of interest in his role as Director of the Georgia Port Authority and the role in a partnership which acquired a logistics firm which unloaded and onloaded materials at the Port. Perdue was one of the Senators who profited from a private briefing about the spread of the coronavirus. After the briefing he bought more than $60,000 in stock in DuPont with a consciousness that the company makes personal protective equipment. Further scrutiny of his portfolio found that he bought and sold more than $5.5 million dollars in stocks during the pandemic.
As a Senator, during Barack Obama’s campaign for a second term, he earned national attention and had to explain he wished no harm to the President when he said “We should pray for Barack Obama. But I think we need to be very specific about how we pray. We should pray like Psalms 109.8 says – Let his days be few, and let another have his office.” During the current campaign for the Senate, Perdue was criticized for an advertisement which pictured Jon Ossoff with an enlarged nose – presumably emphasizing his Jewishness. The question of antisemitism was raised again when he ran an advertisement showing Jon Ossoff together with Chuck Schumer as he claimed the Democrats were trying to buy Georgia. He further demonstrated that he is not a member of the elite and gained national attention for mocking Kamala Harris’ first name.
As I think about this campaign and my support for Jon Ossoff, I wonder: Is the younger, wealthier David Perdue capable of understanding, let alone achieving something that resembles what his father achieved – spending twenty-years integrating the schools of a Georgia County.
Now look at Georgia B.
You decide. Could someone describe the Reverend Doctor Raphael Warnock https://warnockforgeorgia.com as a member of the elite? He was the eleventh of twelve children – all living with their parents in the Kayton Homes, public housing in Savannah Georgia. His parents were Pentecostal preachers, members of an evangelical movement distinguished for, among other things, having women preachers. Not that you could make a living being a Pentecostal preacher. His father sold old and abandoned cars for scrap during the week. He preached on Sundays. His mother, who grew up in the tiny city of Waycross, picked tobacco and cotton in season. She preached when she wasn’t in the fields or taking care of her children. She preached to her children, too. Grow up to be what you want to be.
Raphael Warnock wanted to be a preacher. He credits Savannah State’s Upward Bound program for encouraging him (A success for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society) . His school nickname was “Rev” and he learned Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons and followed King’s activism. He took the route you might plan for an ambitious and capable young Black man in Georgia to take. Pell Grants and student loans allowed him to attend Atlanta’s Morehouse College, one of the leading Historically Black Colleges. His professional life was as you might plan for an ambitious and capable young Black man. He earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Philosophy at the nondenominational Union Seminary, a school in Morningside Heights in New York City, affiliated with its neighbor, Columbia University. He earned a PhD at the school as well. (His family life did not go as you might have planned. He married a talented and capable woman, but they fell out. She claims and he denies that he drove over her foot during an argument.)
Raphael Warnock was ordained at and stayed for six years at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama – ten blocks from where the four girls were killed by a bomber. Raphael Warnockspent four years as youth pastor and assistant pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. This was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s church, a place where you could learn how a pastor combines a black church and politics. He became Senior Pastor at the Douglas Memorial Church in Baltimore and stayed for four years before his appointment as Senior Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church — Martin Luther King Sr.’s Church, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Church.
The Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock’s book — The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety & Public Witness — is widely used in Black Churches. It addresses the tension between both purposes of the Black church — spiritual nurturance and activism. In Atlanta, his church was activist seeking to achieve a better life and social justice for poor, Black people. The Church, under Raphael Warnock’s leaderhip brought refugees from Hurricane Katrina back to New Orleans to vote at election time. The Church, under Raphael Warnock’s leadership, assisted members of the Church in financial literacy. Raphael Warnock chose activism; he chose being on the side of the poor; he chose to find ways to help the poor thrive – helping them personally and making the social structure in which they live more welcoming to them.
Raphael Warnock is running for the US Senate. Hee, Jon Ossoff and Georgia can make an enormous difference in how successful Joe Biden’s presidency will be.
Raphael Warnock will have to defeat, in the run-off, Senator Kelly Loeffler. Kelly Loeffler was a farm girl. Not an ordinary farm girl. She inherited enough farmland from her grandparents to pay for graduate school by mortgaging the land. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s business school then worked as a district account manager for Toyota before going to DePaul for her MBA. She worked for a series of corporations and, in 2002, joined Intercontinental Exchange. There she gained a husband, Jeffrey Sprecher — the President of Intercontinental Exchange and Chair of the NY Stock Exchange which Intercontinental owns. She gained a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange of which she became CEO – BAKKT, which leverages Microsoft services to manage digital assets. And she gained a basketball team, the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA, whose players are markedly opposed to their team–owner’s candidacy. With a net worth more than 20 times David Perdue’s net worth, she (including her husband’s assets) is the wealthiest member of the US Senate.
Georgia’s governor Kemp appointed Loeffler to fill a Senate vacancy rather that Congressman Doug Collins who was President Trump’s preference. Kemp hoped Loeffler would be a more moderate Republican Senator which would help her win the special election coming up in 2020. Loeffler turned out to be no moderate. She made herself into a Donald Trump acolyte – proud of her 100% Trump voting record in the Senate. When Melania Trump caught Covid-19, Loeffler urged that China be held accountable for infecting Melania Trump with the disease. In the non-partisan special election primary, Loeffler came in second to Raphael Warnock, beating out Congressman Doug Collins who came in third.
Kelly Loeffler did share one disease with David Perdue. She also attended the private briefing about the coronavirus. The same day as the briefing, she sold several millions of dollars worth of stock in firms that were vulnerable to a pandemic. Not my doing, she explained. The trades were made by an outside advisor. She learned about the trades only after they were made.
Do you suppose this former farm girl believes that Georgians are rubes? No longer a farm girl, Kelly Loeffler harvests money and votes instead of crops.
My Plea
Now is the time to make a difference. Help Jon Ossoff https://electjon.com defeat David Perdue. Help Raphael Warnock https://warnockforgeorgia.com defeat Kelly Loeffler. Typically, fewer people vote in the run-offs than on the November election day. Make it your business to get supporters of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock out to the polls. Give money. Write postcards. Make phone calls. Send texts. Whatever you can do.
Georgia, especially Atlanta, has long been seen the vanguard of the New South. Help create a genuinely new Georgia and a genuinely new South.
