Mission improbable

Bob Irvin may be the best thing to ever happen to Saxby Chambliss — if, that is, Chambliss can beat him.

In August, Irvin, the 14-year state House representative, and Chambliss, the downstate U.S. congressman, will meet in a primary contest that most people think has already been decided. That’s because Republican luminaries like President Bush and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have been trekking regularly to Georgia in support of Chambliss.

Breaking from tradition, Bush and the national party have picked one Republican over another in a primary because they think they know who has the best chance of beating incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Max Cleland come November.

The unusual ordination of Chambliss has prompted some indignant Georgia GOP party members to tell the president to butt out of their primary, and Bush backers to suggest that Irvin needs to step down so Chambliss doesn’t waste money in the primary.

But the truth is that Chambliss needs Irvin. He needs a primary challenge — especially a weak one — if he wants to have any chance at beating Cleland come November. The primary prompts his campaign to do a number of things:

One, Chambliss and Irvin both lack name recognition. The only way to get it is to campaign and get on television. A primary makes you do that. Sure, it also means spending money — most estimate an effective primary campaign will cost $2 million — but to get his name recognition up, Chambliss would have to spend money early anyway.

Two, it gives him fund-raising leverage. He can go to donors now and put pressure on them.

Three, it mobilizes Chambliss’ political base and energizes the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats will be sleeping through what amounts to only a handful of interesting first-round contests. None are statewide.

“The attention will be on the senate race and the governor’s race,” says Eric Tanenblatt, who headed up Bush’s Georgia campaign in 2000 and is the current chief of the state GOP’s large donor program, the Republican Foundation.

In Chambliss’ case, “as long as he keeps running against Max Cleland, as he is, I think [that] assessment is accurate.”

Tanenblatt adds that as the primary draws closer, “the media coverage will make both of their names household names in the metro area.”

Certainly, local media outlets have already seemed more than willing to embrace Chambliss’ candidacy, thereby endorsing the seriousness of the challenge he poses to Cleland.

The man who in 2000 supplanted Irvin as GOP leader in the House, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Sharpsburg, seconds Tanenblatt.

“I definitely think it helps running against an incumbent like Cleland to have a weak challenger in the primary,” Westmoreland says. “You get the free publicity from the media, and you can use it as something to raise money.”

Of course, all this supposes that Chambliss can do what he’s expected to do — not just beat Irvin but beat him badly. If Chambliss can’t, it will sap momentum from his campaign. And the mild-mannered Irvin, who was drawn out of his state House fiefdom during redistricting, has no intention of rolling over. He thinks Georgia Republicans are angry that Bush is meddling in the race.

“The history of anointments is that they often don’t work,” Irvin says. “The decision as to who is going to be senator should be made by voters. It should not be some back room deal.”

He, like plenty of Democrats who’d love to see Bush’s ordination backfire, cites the recent contest in California in which the president’s team selected former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan as their gubernatorial candidate. Riordan then promptly went down to a 20-point defeat. Of course, Riordan had alienated conservative California Republicans — the core of primary voters — and it will be much more difficult for Irvin to draw a similar ideological contrast, though, he thinks he can.

It’s why he says he’s running. Irvin believes he is the true fiscal conservative in the race. Irvin says Chambliss is a failed ideologue who has lost his way. As evidence, Irvin cites the anti-tax group National Taxpayers Union, which has given Chambliss only average grades during his six years in office. Irvin also faults Chambliss for voting for 2002 federal appropriations bills — 13 bills with an estimated $20.1 billion of pork in them. That is the sort of thing that “matters to Republican primary voters,” Irvin insists.

Of course, it’s going to cost money to broadcast Irvin’s message — a statewide mailer alone can cost as much as $250,000. So far, he’s accumulated about $550,000, while Cleland has raised $6.5 million and Chambliss $2.8 million. Irvin says he won’t need $2 million to defeat the Congressman, and he won’t publicly say what his goal is.

“I will have enough money to run a real media campaign,” he says. Irvin says he is counting on metro Atlanta voters — the home to 60 percent of Georgia’s Republicans — people he says are familiar with his name and his record.

But in Irvin’s last election in 2000, 12,833 votes were enough to win him 75 percent of the vote. Republicans expect 400,000-500,000 people to show up for the Aug. 20 primary. Irvin admits that defeating Chambliss will be an extremely difficult challenge.

It’s something Cleland, too, soon may find out. Some Democrats expect the Georgia senator to walk all over whoever winds up coming out of the Republican primary even though Georgia is nearly evenly split between Dems and Republicans. They say Cleland is too popular — leading Chambliss by more than 20 points in their latest poll. The senator also is well financed and carries 98 percent name recognition. What’s more, neither Chambliss nor Irvin have experience with the level of media attention this campaign will attract. Chambliss has already shown himself to have the sort of propensity for verbal gaffes that make W look like H.L. Mencken, such as this less-than-21st century gem during impromptu remarks to Savannah Area Republican Women: “I know — your husbands are the ones who write all the checks, and y’all do all the work.”

But Tanenblatt was the political director for the late Sen. Paul Coverdell in 1992, and he thinks there are a lot of similarities between this race and that one. Irvin and Chambliss like to say that Cleland has lost touch with regular Georgians, and they’ll try to keep the focus on that issue throughout the campaign. And Republicans will certainly contrast Cleland’s voting record — something he didn’t have in 1996 — with Georgia’s conservative Democratic Sen. Zell Miller.

“I think Max is in trouble,” says a prominent state Democrat with close ties to the governor. “My sense is that Saxby brings a lot to the table. He has a base. He has policy experience and personal skills. Saxby is someone that I have always taken very seriously.”

And as of yet, there isn’t anyone on the Republican ticket who is going to really motivate Georgia Democrats to get to the polls. In 1996 and 1998, there were candidates Dems loved to hate — Guy Millner and Mitch Skandalakis. This year, with the bitter taste of redistricting fresh in their mouths, Republicans are the ones with something to be mad about. Westmoreland says he plans to try to exploit that anger.

“We’re going to go on the road with a map presentation,” Westmoreland says of the redistricting maps. “I spoke to a group of 100 people in Henry County, not Republicans, just Henry County citizens, and I promise you, that when they left that room, they wanted to fight. They felt like they were incapable — and they are — of electing the type of representation they wanted to have at the state Capitol.”

Westmoreland points to a number of districts designed to elect Democrats that now run through four or five or more counties.

“Candler County has 9,500 people, and they’ve got five representatives, and that’s inexcusable,” Westmoreland says.

The question is whether Republicans will ride that wave of indignation to the polls.??