NEW ORLEANS — Rep. Mike Pence was on his way out of the Southern
Republican Leadership Conference when he stopped near the front
door of the Riverside Hilton to speak for a few moments to a man
in a blue suit. Business cards were exchanged between aides, a
few photos were snapped, and then the chairman of the House
Republican Conference continued on his way.
News had just happened, but this brief meeting did not
result in a headline on the Drudge Report, nor was it reported by
any of the network correspondents attending the conference, none
of whom would have recognized the man in the blue suit. The big
headlines from the four-day GOP gathering included Mitt
Romney’s narrow win in the 2012 presidential straw poll, a
controversial
quote from Ron Paul and the umpteenth reiteration of the
major media’s favorite political question: Whither Sarah
Palin?
Far from the main stage, away from the television cameras
and unnoticed by reporters covering the speeches by famous names,
other stories were developing, stories of potentially greater
importance — and certainly more urgent than the question of who
will carry the Republican banner in a presidential election more
than two years in the future.
For hundreds of GOP congressional candidates, the only date
that matters is not 2012, but Nov. 2 — now less than seven
months away — and for many of those candidates, their campaigns
will end sooner, as multi-candidate primaries have become the
rule rather than the exception in a mid-term free-for-all perhaps
destined to be known as the Year of Republican Hope.
Whether that Hope will result in Change Conservatives Can
Believe In is the big question of 2010, a mathematical
calculation that may involve the man in the blue suit, Ray
McKinney, who had never met Mike Pence before their Saturday
afternoon conversation near the front door of the Hilton.
In the few minutes of their impromptu meeting, however,
McKinney conveyed to Pence the necessary information: He is a
candidate in Georgia’s 12th District, seeking the Republican
nomination to take on Rep. John Barrow, a “Blue Dog” Democrat
whose peculiar vulnerability is one factor in the calculations
for Nov. 2. If the GOP can make a net gain of 40 seats in this
fall’s mid-terms, Nancy Pelosi will become the former Speaker of
the House, and Republicans cannot afford to miss any opportunity
for a pickup — especially when liberals seem determined to lend
a helping hand. The story of Barrow and GA12 is the tale of a
building electoral storm with enough political power to evoke
memories of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on New Orleans
in August 2005 — a year before Pelosi and the Democrats broke
Republicans’ 12-year control of the House.
The 12th District was one of two new congressional seats
Georgia gained after the 2000 Census, when Democrats still
controlled the Georgia General Assembly and sought to carve out a
stronghold for their party. Yet GA12 has proven to be more
conservative than its designers anticipated,
rated only a “plus one” for Democrats by respected national
analyst Charlie Cook, and has a see-saw history. Republican Max
Burns was elected to Congress by a surprising 10-point margin in
the 2002 mid-terms, but lost his 2004 re-election bid to Barrow
by four points. In 2006, otherwise a disastrous wipeout for the
GOP, Burns came back to challenge Barrow and lost by fewer than
900 votes out of some 140,000 ballots cast. And then came 2008,
when Obama’s promise of Hope and Change proved the electoral tide
that lifted all Democratic boats.
With a surge of black turnout in a district where more than
40 percent of the residents are black, GA12 re-elected Barrow —
a white moderate — by a whopping 2-to-1 majority over a former
GOP congressional aide, John Stone. Here, however, the story took
a strange twist. In 2008, Barrow first had to overcome a
Democratic primary challenge from state Sen. Regina Thomas, a
black legislator with a far more liberal record and message.
After winning that primary with 76 percent of the vote, Barrow
then got a general-election boost from Barack Obama. However,
Barrow has since voted against key items in the Obama agenda —
including two votes against the recently-passed health-care
law.
Thomas has returned this year to challenge Barrow again in
the July 20 Democratic primary, only now she has the enthusiastic
backing of liberal groups like MoveOn.org and
Blue America PAC, and the powerful
DailyKos blog site, which seem as eager as any Republican to
make Blue Dog Democrats an extinct species. Enter McKinney, a
nuclear power project manager who two years ago ran a grassroots
campaign for the GOP nomination and scored a surprising 32
percent of the primary vote. “We weren’t expected to get 10
percent of the vote,” says McKinney, who describes the style of
his first campaign as “Joe the Candidate.”
Now a state party committeeman, McKinney had been
supporting a promising Republican candidate, Vidalia physician
Dr. Wayne Mosely, who subsequently decided not to seek the GA12
seat. Other candidates — including Savannah Tea Party founder
Jeanne Seaver and Carl Smith, fire chief in the town of
Thunderbolt near Savannah — have declared their candidacies for
the July 20 primary. On friendly terms with the other Republican
candidates, McKinney says he hopes the GOP primary campaign won’t
“go negative,” which would weaken the winner against Barrow, who
he expects to emerge “bruised and battered” from the Democratic
primary — assuming, of course, that the incumbent is not upset
by the liberal insurgency of Thomas, who has denounced Barrow for
“six
years of lies.”
None of McKinney’s Republican rivals have lined up the
level of financial support that he expects to bring into the
race.
Declaring his candidacy at the end of March, he says he now
has more than $100,000 campaign cash on hand and has pledges of
more than $80,000 in contributions.
That was a key part of the message he came to New Orleans
to convey to Republican leaders like Pence. GA12 “hasn’t really
been on the radar” for the national GOP level this election
cycle. After talking to staff of the National Republican
Congressional Committee at the conference, McKinney says the NRCC
now plans to put the district on its “watch list” — not yet a
“target” race, but worth keeping an eye on as the GOP looks for
opportunities to exploit in a mid-term campaign where Democratic
incumbents in more liberal regions than rural Georgia are already
beginning to glance nervously at the polling forecasts.
“The Road to Victory Begins in New Orleans,” the cover of
this weekend’s conference program declared. Exactly where that
road will leads between now and November is a path as
unpredictable as a tropical storm, but if the Republican wave
surges through Georgia’s 12th District, that little-noticed
encounter Saturday in the Hilton lobby could be part of a very
big story on Nov. 2.
