You would think that Secretary of State Karen Handel and her campaign spokesman, Dan McLagan, owe a huge debt of gratitude to Gov. Sonny Perdue for the boost he’s given to their political and professional careers. So how do they repay him? By spitting in his face, figuratively speaking.
Handel was aided enormously by Perdue in 2003, shortly after she had been drubbed by Robb Pitts in a countywide race for the Fulton County Commission. Perdue named her one of his deputy chiefs of staff when he first took office as governor. She left that plum post a few months later to run in the special election to replace Mike Kenn as Fulton commission chairman.
Handel not only had the personal backing of Perdue in that commission race, she also benefited from the fact that several of Perdue’s key political operatives worked in her campaign. She won a resounding victory in that special election and used the chairman’s office as a stepping stone to run for secretary of state in 2006 and now for governor.
Perdue also has been somewhat beneficial to McLagan, a political type who earlier had worked for a string of losers that included Ollie North, Lamar Alexander (in the 1996 race for president) and Rick Lazio. McLagan was hired as Perdue’s press spokesman in 2002 and was part of the team involved in Perdue’s upset of Roy Barnes. He worked again in Perdue’s 2006 reelection campaign and was the governor’s communications director for several years.
How has McLagan done when he wasn’t on Perdue’s payroll? Well, he signed on to work in the 2008 reelection campaign of North Carolina Sen. Liddy Dole — who lost embarrassingly to an underdog Democrat named Kay Hagan.
It’s not unfair to say that had it not been for their relationships with Perdue, the political fortunes of Handel and McLagan might have turned out very differently.
That brings us to this week, when Handel received the endorsement of the people who run RedState, a conservative website that’s very popular with Republicans.
In their formal statement of support for Handel, RedState officials noted approvingly the conservative stances she has taken on various issues — then slipped in this little slap to the face of Georgia’s governor:
Georgia is considered one of the reddest of the red states. But it has yet to elect a governor who has always been a Republican. Even Georgia’s present governor, Sonny Perdue, did not become a Republican until a couple of years before running for governor. It shows. His instincts remain largely those of a conservative southern Democrat.
That insulting remark didn’t seem to bother Handel, who said in a news release: “I could not be more excited to receive this endorsement. RedState is the news and information gateway to conservatives all over the nation and a force to be reckoned with in Washington as well as in Georgia.”
Needless to say, the media contact name on that news release that welcomed the RedState endorsement was Dan McLagan.
Politics isn’t beanbag, as the old saying goes, and in the end a candidate doesn’t owe anything to anybody except herself. Sonny Perdue is also a big boy and can fight his own battles. It’s interesting all the same to see somebody so gratefully grasping at an endorsement that includes such a gratuitous slap at the man who was once her benefactor.
That RedState endorsement may also come back to haunt Handel because the leading player in RedState is Macon City Councilman Erick Erickson, who also runs the Peach Pundit website.
It was Erickson who, when Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his retirement, publicly called Souter a “goat f**king child molester.” More recently, Erickson blogged that former president Jimmy Carter was “History’s greatest monster . . . an unrepentant anti-semite and leftist. About the only part of the Bible he likes to take literally is the part about the Jews killing Christ.”
You’re not going to lose any votes among Republicans by taunting Jimmy Carter. But I have to think that another candidate in the GOP primary — maybe Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, to pick a name totally at random — is going to make sure that voters are reminded frequently of Handel’s endorsement by a person who uses the phrase “goat f**king” to describe one of the nation’s most eminent jurists.
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