Georgia Tipsheet

U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey on Thursday forcefully defended the virtue of a no-taxes pledge that some fellow Republican, including at least one Georgia GOP lawmaker, believe is obstructing substantive progress in solving the nation’s fiscal crisis.

“In 2002, I was running in a tough primary and those folks back in Marietta, Georgia said, ‘Phil, are you the pledge, the Grover Norquist-Americans for Tax Reform pledge?’,” Gingrey said on CNN. “And I said, ‘Yes, I will take that pledge.’ Many of them would have voted for my opponent, he or she, so that pledge, I honor that because it’s a pledge to my constituents, absolutely.”

In recent days, a handful of prominent Republicans have criticized the negotiating constraints of a pledge pushed by Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform to not raise taxes.

Asked by host Christine Roman if he could accept a compromise in which the Bush tax cuts on the country’s top earners would expire in exchange for entitlement reform, Gingrey conceded the “optics” of such a deal might “look good” but Republicans were so convicted that they would not waver.

“From a political perspective, the optics of that might, you know, look good and maybe the Democrats feel that they have an advantage politically,” Gingrey said. “But we Republicans, we conservative Republicans, fiscal conservative Republicans, feel that we are right on this, that we can’t allow because of politics, to waffle or waver on something that we know will get this country back on the right track.”

- James Richardson

Popular conservative blogger and radio personality Erick Erickson said Tuesday he was considering a primary challenge to Sen. Saxby Chambliss after a host of political bigs had approached him about staging a bid of his own in the days since the incumbent broke with a vaulted no-taxes pledge.

“For a week now, I’ve been getting calls to see if I would challenge Saxby Chambliss, once he really got into the whole ‘raising taxes issue,’” Erickson said in the opening segment of his radio show Tuesday. “Well, the pace quickened. I got a lot of people pledging a lot of money in the last couple of days if I did something like this. And I’ve been very adamant, I wasn’t going to do it, but after a few conversations today with a few heavy hitters in Washington, D.C. and some here in Georgia, I should at least consider it.”

Erickson, a CNN political contributor and editor-in-chief of conservative haunt RedState, added he was “very flattered” and was in “prayerful consideration” about waging a possible challenge to the two-term Chambliss.

Erickson was a one-term city councilman in Macon, Georgia, but resigned when his work–a radio show, television gig and editorship of highly-trafficked blog–became too great to shoulder in tandem with his public service.

Like other possible Chambliss challengers, Erickson has not run for statewide office. But he maintains a diverse network of monied, influential conservatives in the Beltway and throughout the state thanks largely to the celebrity he’s developed over the last six years.

[Full Disclosure: I was previously a contributor to RedState, the site for which Erickson serves as editor-in-chief.]

- James Richardson

For a southern Republican supremely self-aware that his reelection effort is virtually assured primary opposition, Sen. Saxby Chambliss did the unthinkable this week: he thumbed his nose at an anti-tax pledge considered sacrosanct among many of the same conservative activists with whom he has been tediously mending relations.

Chambliss told a Georgia television station that resolving the year-end budget crisis trumped both no-taxes vow he made two decades earlier and his own political fortunes.

“I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge,” Chambliss told Macon CBS affiliate WMAZ on Wednesday. “If we do it [Grover Norquist's] way, then we’ll continue in debt and I just have a disagreement with him about that.”

Thirty-eight of the Senate’s 47 Republican members have signed the pledge pushed by Americans for Tax Reform, the powerful anti-tax lobby steered by Norquist.

But Chambliss, a member of the bipartisan “gang of eight” seeking a compromise to the impending fiscal cliff, said the pledge’s caucus was impeding any meaningful progress.

“Norquist has no plan to pay this debt down,” he said. His play says you continue to add to the debt, and I just have a fundamental disagreement about that and I’m willing to do the right thing and let the political consequences take care of themselves.”

In a statement provided to Tipsheet through a spokesman, Norquist said his position was being misrepresented and that Chambliss made the no-new-taxes vow to his constituencies, not any special interest.

“If he plans to vote for higher taxes to pay for Obama-sized government he should address the people and Georgia and let them know that he plans to break this promise to them,” Norquist said. “The senator’s reference to me is odd. His promise is to the people of Georgia.”

He pointed to a 2011 letter from Chambliss in which the Peach State pol said new federal revenue should be the result of conservative tax policies.

“[W]e look forward to again working with you and all interested parties to support a proposal where any increases in revenue generation will be the result of the pro-growth effects of lower individual and corporate tax rates for all Americans,” Chambliss’ letter reads.

Norquist said the only plan he has endorsed is the Ryan plan, the same proposal for which Chambliss voted.

The question of Norquist’s solution to the budget crunch notwithstanding, the senator’s decidedly confrontational comments took some Georgia Republicans aback.

“Saxby watched Lugar fall and knows his right flank is nothing to ignore,” one prominent Republican told Tipsheet. “That’s why he has been reaching out to tea party activists back home. But whatever good will he may have earned through that reconciliation was just shot to hell.”

Norquist’s entire statement is posted in full below.

- James Richardson (more…)

Georgia Senate Republicans found themselves on Monday the punchline for late night jokester David Letterman, who ribbed the bunch for a recent closed-door caucus briefing in which the president was accused of orchestrating a mind control plot to push the country into socialism.

“If you’ve been alive, for any length of time at all, you begin to realize a lot of people are different than you are … and then a lot of people are just flat-out nuts,” Letterman said Monday night on the “Late Show” to laughs. “What I’m talking about is, there are some people in Georgia who believe that President Barack Obama is using mind control, mind control, to get his way. And by God, things really do seem to go his way, don’t they?”

Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, whose post atop the caucus was ceded in last week’s intraparty elections, convened a four-hour meeting in October to brief GOP lawmakers on a plot by the United Nations to curb Americans’ freedoms.

The briefing has risen to national prominence thanks in large measure to the work of the local progressive advocacy outfit Better Georgia, a band of tech-savvy resistance fighters tilting at the state’s most powerful Republicans.

One of the group’s political bushfighter’s managed to record nearly an hour of the seminar before he was escorted from the meeting. (See it here.) It has since circulated the footage to the farthest corners of the liberal media ecosystem, sewing the seeds for GOP mockery.

There was no mention in the footage of the non-contributing 47 percent. Instead, the way in which the president and a conglomerate of progressives were employing a Cold War-era mind control technique to “transform America from the land of the free to the land of the collective.”

Footage of the Letterman monologue, courtesy of Better Georgia:

- James Richardson

Rep. Tom Price argued on a Sunday morning political program that raising tax rates on the country’s top earners would not avert the fiscal cliff, saying the only responsible path to a deficit-reduction deal lies through the elimination of loopholes and credits.

“We need to look at increasing revenue through pro-growth policies as well as tax revenue,” the Georgian, who days earlier had just lost his bid to steer the House Republican conference, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

When pressed by host Candy Crowley how he squared new tax revenue with a pledge by his party not to raise taxes, Price said increasing tax revenue was possible through “broadening the base” and tightening credits.

“Tax revenue, which means broadening base, lowering the rates, closing the loopholes, limiting the deductions, limiting the credits, and making certain that we identify the appropriate spending reductions so that we have, indeed, a balanced approach,” the congressman said.

- James Richardson

An evening anchor at Atlanta Fox News affiliate WAGA has been charged with driving under the influence and reckless driving after she collided head-on with another vehicle.

Amanda Davis, a 26-year veteran of the station, was arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning when a police officer smelled alcohol on her breath after responding to the midtown crash. She admitted to consuming alcohol but refused a field sobriety test.

Her jump from broadcast to blotter was first reported by WAGA’s competing networks, WXIA and WSB, though the station has since acknowledged the arrest on air and its website.

Davis, whose time behind the anchor desk has netted her multiple Emmys and the Edward R. Murrow Award, was bonded out of jail later Sunday. A WAGA executive said in a statement the station was “aware of the incident and … are currently investigating.”

- James Richardson

House Republicans are outspending their cross-party counterparts by a three-to-one margin on television advertising in the final week of the race for Georgia’s twelfth congressional district.

The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee put a quarter-million dollars behind its latest advertisement in which Rep. John Barrow is assailed for holding allegiance to the president before the interests of the state.

The ad, identical in sentiment to an earlier NRCC offering, closes by saying Barrow’s “loyalty to Barack Obama is hurting Georgia.” (The previous loyalty-questioning ad said that Barrow’s political allegiances were hurting “America.”)

Meanwhile, new independent expenditure disclosures show the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invested just north of $72,000 to air its final ad attacking Barrow’s GOP challenger, Lee Anderson, as a Medicare-spiking radical.

The ad opens by chiding unnamed persons for treating Medicare like a “political football or campaign buzzword,” quickly noting that Anderson supports redesigning the system into a premium support, or voucher, model.

“For about a million Georgia seniors, it’s the medical care they need. But Lee Anderson supports a plan to end traditional Medicare, making seniors negotiate with insurance companies and pay thousands more every year,” the ad’s narrator says. It closes as a cartoon football bounces across the screen: “Maybe it’s just politics to Lee Anderson, but for the rest of us, ending Medicare hits too close to home.”

As of the latest totals, the NRCC has spent $1.7 million on the contest while the DCCC has dropped only $500,000.

- James Richardson

The advertising onslaught in Georgia’s twelfth congressional district has been unrelenting, and that pace shows no signs of abatement as the dead heat contest enters its final days.

Outside groups have had a profound impact on the state of the race, vaulting underfunded Lee Anderson into virtual spending parity with Democratic Rep. John Barrow. It was already amount the most heavily-staked in the country, but on Monday three groups made separate ad buys totaling nearly $800,000 in the inexpensive Savannah and Augusta media markets.

Here, an accounting of each:

The Congressional Leadership Fund: The GOP super PAC has begun airing a new television spot in which Barack Obama’s old radio endorsement of Barrow is resurrected and interlaced with health care and stimulus vignettes. The ad, backed by a $200,000 buy spread between the district’s two media centers, follows a familiar formula: Barrow is beholden to the interests of his party, not his district. Its kicker: “John Barrow. Obama’s congressman, not ours.”

The House Majority PAC: The Democratic-aligned group attacks Anderson, a state GOP lawmaker, as a puppet of well-heeled Atlanta lobbyists. “In the state legislature, Lee Anderson loved being wined and dined by lobbyists for special interests while times were tough for Georgia families,” the ad opens. It’s the second spot in which the group has attacked the Republican as aloof to the pocketbook concerns of middle class voters, its earlier television offering rapping Anderson for his views on education. And identical to its previous advertisement, the group closes by saying Anderson “couldn’t care less.” The spot will run through the election on a $180,000 buy.

Americans for Tax Reform: The conservative anti-tax lobby made on Monday its greatest investment to-date in the race, a $403,562 broadcast and cable buy. The spot was not yet available online and a spokesman did not respond to an immediate inquiry by Tipsheet. ATR is the second-most invested outside interest in the race, trailing only the National Republican Congressional Committee as of the latest independent expenditure disclosures. Its total investment in the race has topped $1.2 million.

- James Richardson

A plurality of likely Georgia voters support the contentious November ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to create a new commission to authorize and fund charter schools.

A WSB-Landmark Rosetta Stone survey released Friday evening found the referendum winning by ten points, 47 percent of 37 percent, but one in six likely voters remained undecided as of the poll’s fielding the day prior.

The poll found generally-cohesive blocs of race and partisan affiliation fractured among the two coalitions, the only instructive demographic being age.

One of the pollsters, Mark Rountree, wrote Saturday that “younger voters are strongly supportive of the amendment … while older voters slightly oppose” it.

Among those respondents aged 18 to 35, 57 percent were in favor of the new commission with just 32 percent against it. Their seniors were more evenly divided, both teetering around 40 percent.

The survey also measured local support in the presidential contest, finding Republican Mitt Romney cruising to victory in the Peach State by an 11-point margin.

That spread, at 53 percent to 42 percent, tracks with earlier snapshots of the race. But the survey revealed Romney outstripping traditional Republican ceilings with African Americans.

More than a fifth of black voters, at 22 percent, expressed support for Romney, according to Rountree. That’s a rate more than five times John McCain’s showing in 2008 and double what George W. Bush took in 2004.

- James Richardson

As the contest for Georgia’s twelfth district enters the final stretch, the local television markets are bowing under the pressure of outsized advertisement spending by third party groups.

Four new outside ads have gone on air in as many days. Here, a review of each:

Americans for Tax Reform, the conservative anti-tax lobby with which U.S. Rep. John Barrow’s campaign fiercely tangled earlier this month, unveiled an alliteration-heavy television advertisement this week that raps the incumbent for the bailouts of the banking and automotive industries.

The 30-second spot, entitled “B,” dovetails with the recent political saturation of Sesame Street and Big Bird. “B. B is for Barrow. B is for bailout. B is for bill,” a narration, complete with children’s block letters, says. “John Barrow voted to bailout big auto makers and gave the taxpayers the $14 billion bill. Barrow voted to bailout big mortgage buyers and gave taxpayers a bill for billions. But ‘B’ is also for bye.”

The group’s latest independent expenditure disclosures show it put north of $130,000 to air the ad and dropped an equal amount for voter contact.

The House Majority PAC, a monied Democratic super PAC, assails Republican Lee Anderson in a new television advertisement as a radical whose austere budgeting would dismantle wholesale the nation’s education system.

“Everyone in America knows the path to freedom and opportunity is education,” the ad opens as footage of doe-eyed school children flash across screen. “Everyone, except Lee Anderson. Anderson said he would, quote, ‘cut the education department completely out’ ending tens of billions in dollars in education funding.” The ad’s kicker is especially rough: “Lee Anderson: when it comes to opportunity for America, he couldn’t care less.”

The ad will run for one week in the Savannah and Augusta markets on a $138,000* buy.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, whose spending in the race has eclipsed the competing investments of all other outside actors, unveiled on Sunday a series of television and radio advertisements in which Barrow’s political proximity to President Barack Obama is put front and center.

85 percent, expect to hear it on a loop until November 6. That’s the percent that Barrow’s votes conformed with the president’s agenda in 2009. The metric factors prominently in all three spots, which a NRCC spokeswoman told Tipsheet was running on roughly $200,000.

“Obama backed Barrow. And Barrow backed Obama, 85 percent of the time,” a female narrator says in one before transitioning to a Medicaid attack. The second is even more severe: “It’s no surprise Barrow backed Obama’s tax-and-spend agenda since he voted with Obama 85 percent of the time. John Barrow – he’s not independent, he’s a tax-raising rubberstamp for Barack Obama.”

The NRCC’s radio offering is identical to the latter television ad, though the narrator’s gender was swapped.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the scope of the House Majority PAC’s buy.

- James Richardson

U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta urges young voters to the polls in a brief but memorable dance cameo in which the civil rights icon parodies a popular South Korean rap.

A 72-year-old Lewis, who was among the original Freedom Riders in 1961, performs the horse-riding dance and prods viewers to “vote, vote, vote Gangnam Style,” a nod to the online sensation that popularized the curious shuffle move.

The video, much of which was filmed outside the Georgia capitol building, was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday, October 17 and had amassed nearly 45,000 views in the five days since.

- James Richardson

Promotional material by a suburban Atlanta Chick-fil-A franchise has reopened still-healing wounds from the quick service chain’s confrontation earlier this year with gay rights activists over marriage equality.

The offending flyer reads: “Only a fruitcake wouldn’t love our party trays!”

LGBT activists immediately condemned it as spiteful, a provocation by way of a subtle slur. But a corporate spokesperson said the handbill was the production of a local operator who has for five years used the print piece to advertise the restaurant’s holiday catering services.

“It was simply a play on words referring to the traditional holiday food, and the restaurant had no intention of offending anyone whatsoever,” the company’s statement read. “We regret the flyer may haven been taken out of context.”

- James Richardson

Democratic Rep. John Barrow has a message to gun control advocates of his own party, a message he foremost hopes conservatives in his southeast Georgia district will hear: “These are my guns … and ain’t nobody going to take ‘em away.”

Barrow, in a potent new television advertisement that began airing throughout the twelfth on Tuesday, extolls the virtues of firearms as he clutches two guns of his own.

“Long before I was born, my grandfather used this little Smith & Wesson here to help stop a lynching,” Barrow, sitting in a prototypical southern living room through which rocking chairs are seen on a front porch, says in a dual appeal to African Americans and gun-toting whites. “And for as long as I can remember, my father always had this rifle real handy – just to keep us safe.”

The 30-second spot, which a Barrow aide told Tipsheet would immediately fall into the campaign’s existing advertising rotation, comes two weeks after the National Rifle Association endorsed the vulnerable blue dog.

- James Richardson

The Archdiocese of Atlanta has instructed church institutions and parishioners to withhold support for breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

October is internationally designated breast cancer awareness month, but church leaders directed local faithful in a memorandum this week to end their participation in all Komen-sponsored events, citing grants the nonprofit awards annually to Planned Parenthood.

Komen resolved earlier this year to eliminate funding for the controversial reproductive health services, but soft-pedaled days later when women’s groups launched what former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, then an executive at the charity, described as a “vicious, mafia-style attack.”

While local chapters had no formal role in the controversy, the church’s memo said it believed the Atlanta affiliate was “working behind the scenes to encourage the national Komen office to resume funding.” It cited a Facebook posting by the local Komen outfit in which it said it hoped funding freeze for Planned Parenthood would be “promptly” restored.

A church spokeswoman acknowledged the charity’s “good work” to raise awareness about breast cancer and treatment, but said Komen’s continued support of Planned Parenthood was fundamentally at odds with church doctrine.

“That’s an organization that is the largest supporter and promoter of abortions in the United States. Their activities are in direct opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church about the sanctity of human life,” Pat Chivers told Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB. “We see any support of an abortion is an intrinsic evil.”

- James Richardson

Republican congressional hopeful Lee Anderson unveiled on Monday his campaign’s first general election advertisement, a warm biographical spot that emphasizes the candidate’s faith and farming.

“You don’t sit around to see who’s going to take care of the duties and the jobs on the farm,” Anderson says in the direct-to-camera commercial, “you just get up and you go do it.”

In an accompanying release, Anderson explained the distillation of farm-heavy anecdotes.

“Growing up on the farm, I learned at a young age the value of hard work, integrity, and ingenuity,” he said. “My parents taught me that public service is the highest calling and the people you serve should always come first.”

Anderson’s buy comes as his Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. John Barrow, unveiled the same day a new television advertisement of his own.

But the two campaign’s are not pitching voters in a media vacuum.

Outside groups, like the blue dog-boosting Center Forward and conservative YG Action, and the two House campaign committees have unleashed a torrent of television spending in the last month.

The National Republican Congressional Committee was the latest to make an investment in the race.

It began airing on Friday a rough contrast spot that a spokeswoman told Tipsheet was backed by a $126,000 buy in the Savannah and Augusta markets.

- James Richardson