Cover Story: The King and why

At the Georgia Press Association’s Cracker Crumble party in March 2000, Gov. Roy Barnes playfully addressed the crowd wearing a crown, draped in a princely robe and holding a golden scepter. It was a suitable joke at the time. The annual event features campy comedy skits starring reporters, editors and politicians. Barnes got into the spirit of things.

One of his aides said it was “self-deprecating humor at its finest,” which may be true, but it also served another purpose. It sent a message to critics who, behind his back, called him King Roy and griped about the heavy-handed way he wielded power during his first two legislative sessions as governor: He’s heard the nickname and will go right on ruling as he sees fit.

No doubt: Many Georgians ranted at Barnes after he force-fed the state a new flag 10 months ago. No doubt: Politicians groaned when he shoved new political districts down the throats of the General Assembly and Georgia’s congressional delegation.

But despite the flak, Barnes would flex his muscle again if given the opportunity. He sees decisively acting on controversial decisions as simply part of his job. That it suits his personality is a bonus.

“Do I apologize for saying that there are certain things that we need to do and we have to get about doing them and you need to make these decisions? I don’t apologize for that,” the 53-year-old, first-term governor says.

Barnes is more than unapologetic about the way he wields his power; he’s comfortably immersed in it. He is the personification of a relaxed ruler when he reclines in his leather chair (throne-size, of course) behind the immense wood desk in his office on the second floor of the Capitol.

In front of Barnes is a slim, silver Toshiba laptop, a legal pad and a glass pipe tray half full of ash. The rich smell of pipe tobacco lingers. Behind him is a desk covered in paperwork, books containing the laws of Georgia and a studio photograph of his wife, Marie.

Many corporate offices are more regal than the governor’s. And Barnes is practiced at being down-home, not imperial, in his demeanor. But it’s clear that all the state’s strings of power run through this room.

Guided by the belief that his decisions are the right ones, his actions — even the most controversial ones — are made confidently. It seems Barnes boldly takes on the state’s most pressing problems head on — education, air quality, water and transportation. And when it comes to getting his way in politics, Barnes almost always wins. Twice this year, he led a political tour de force that solidified his place as one of the state’s shrewdest political operators.

“Well, I like everybody,” he says, pounding the polished wood and inlay on his desk. “But at the same time, it is the duty and responsibility of those who hold public policy positions to do something, to actually make difficult and tough decisions.”

But those tough decisions come with a price.

Because of the stealthy way he changed the flag, his take-no-prisoners approach to the redistricting session and his dictatorial style in general, Barnes’ opponents in next year’s gubernatorial race are hoping to make the King Roy persona his Achilles Heel.

“Stylistically, his vulnerability is his arrogance of power — the way he and his administration knows better than everyone else,” says Georgia Republican Party Executive Director Ralph Gonzalez.

Republicans, and even a few Democrats, call Barnes KGB, for King Gov. Barnes; there’s also SOB, which, besides the obvious, stands for Supreme Omnipotent Being. Those, plus more colorful nicknames for Barnes, will be bandied about by his opponents from Valdosta to Dalton during campaign season.

Former state Republican Party chairman Chuck Clay says, “You can go from being strong leader to arrogant leader and if you’re seen as arrogant leader, you will lose. There’s no question voters will reject arrogances every time,” he says.

There are some signs that Barnes is risking rejection.

Three polls conducted within the last six months put Barnes up against two of his opponents in the 2002 gubernatorial race. He garnered less than 50 percent of the respondents twice and just above 50 percent once.

Those numbers should be higher for an incumbent. “Any time you get below 45 percent, a candidate is in trouble,” says Pat Sibley, president of a media buying company whose political clients usually are Republicans.

In a poll of 631 statewide registered voters conducted between June 30 and July 3 by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc., a non-partisan polling firm, Barnes led GOP gubernatorial candidate and state school Superintendent Linda Schrenko 47 percent to 36 percent, and Cobb County Commission Chairman Bill Byrne, another Republican candidate for governor, 53 percent to 28 percent.

An earlier poll of 500 registered voters, conducted by the GOP consulting firm of Ayres McHenry & Associates Inc. had a candidate meeting Byrne’s profile beating a candidate meeting Barnes’ profile 49 percent to 33 percent.

Both polls were done before state Sen. Sonny Perdue, R-Bonaire, entered the governor’s race. Unlike Schrenko and Byrne, both of whom have burned bridges and acquired quirky reputations, Perdue is viewed by political leaders in both parties as a more-than-competent lawmaker and a potentially formidable opponent.

Perdue may have a better chance of attracting Georgia’s swing voters — the ones who look at issues more than party affiliations. And because the two major parties are so evenly matched in Georgia, swing voters are the ones who decide statewide elections.

“What makes Georgia politics so interesting is the state is 40 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat and 20 percent independents,” Sibley says.

Barnes plans to counter his opponents with one of the biggest campaign war chests any Georgia governor has ever amassed. He already has raised $6.8 million, while not a one of his competitors has yet tallied $1 million.

His strategy so far has been mostly to court executives, developers, lawyers, and all their thick wallets, enabling him to gain an aura of invincibility and to win the TV air war before the campaign begins in earnest.

“I talk about issues, not personalities,” he says. “The way I always do this is ask, ‘Where do you disagree with me on reducing class sizes and raising standards in education? Quit talking, calling me names and talk about issues.’ And I’m going to continue to do what I think is right until the day the people tell me that I shouldn’t sit here.”

Despite a thick coating of Southern kitsch, Barnes occasionally speaks with his own version of a royal pronoun — substituting “I” for “Georgia” when talking about how the state is managing recession, for example.

Such key advisors as Georgia Democratic Party Executive Director John Kirincich and former party chairman David Worley say it’s his opponents, not voters, who bring up King Roy.

“Voters like a strong, effective governor who gets things done,” Worley says. “Other than a tiny minority of Republicans in the Legislature, there’s no feeling among voters” that Barnes acts as King Roy.

Barnes undoubtedly is one of the bolder and more progressive governors in Georgia history. Just take a look at that blue carpet flying over the Gold Dome, every city hall in the state and every county building. It may be ugly, but it’s certainly an improvement over the huge Confederate battle emblem on the previous state flag in terms of race relations and shedding Georgia’s redneck image. Barnes, more than anyone else, deserves credit for that.

The problem though, is that so many people didn’t like the way he got the flag changed — teaming up with a handful of insider lawmakers to slam dunk the new design in less than a week.

If the flag coup was the ultimate flex of political muscle, then Barnes’ political bicep is his chief of staff, Bobby Kahn. To get to Barnes, you have to go through Kahn first, and if the governor is involved with a bill, so is Kahn. He’s the one who reminds reluctant lawmakers of the favors the governor has done for them, and he’s the one who reminds lawmakers of the consequences of snubbing Barnes’ agenda.

“I think Bobby can be heavy-handed. Barnes allows Bobby to do that, but that’s Bobby’s job,” says Rep. Mike Snow, D-Chickamauga. “I like Bobby; he’s been good to me. He can sic the dogs on you, and Kahn has taken to a whole new level of heavy-handedness.”

With Kahn serving as his bad cop, Barnes is free to play the good cop. He’s the type of politician who can come across as if he’s talking to a group of buddies when he’s giving a speech to an audience.

He’s got the kind of drawl that belongs to a true Southern gentleman, and he’s darn proud of it. He says about his decision to change the state flag, “You can’t hear me talk and not think that I’m a Southerner. Don’t tell me I’m not Southern.”

He gives a slight chuckle and then adds, “So, I did it.”

He likes to use “now” in the personable way some people use “well.” As in, “Now, as vital as this new construction is to our economy, we had to take steps to preserve part of our undeveloped lands,” from his State of the State address Feb. 8.

He also throws at least one “now, let me tell you” into almost every speech.

Most the “now’s” and the “let me tell you’s” aren’t written into the speeches. He just injects them whenever he feels the need to make it sound like it’s just you and the governor of Georgia sitting at a bar, or standing around the bed of a pickup looking at a deer bagged a little while ago.

Part of him genuinely longs to be one of the old-style Southern politicians who was able to do as much schmoozing and glad-handing with his buddies as real work.

“I mean, I wish I had come to the office of governor when everything was on an even keel, when you don’t have to worry about everything, our future was secure and I could have gone bird hunting and fishing all the time — I haven’t picked up a shotgun in four years — but that’s just not the way it was.”

Everything about Barnes is vintage Georgian. He grew up in the west Cobb town of Mableton. He got his law degree from the University of Georgia. At age 24, Barnes was a prosecutor for Cobb County. In 1974, at the age of 26, he was elected state senator.

In 1983, then-Gov. Joe Frank Harris chose him to be his Senate floor leader, an experience Barnes says taught him much of what he knows now about governing.

“I learned you have to talk to folks and you have to listen. You have to try to persuade. You need to have your facts straight,” he says. “As Gov. Harris’ floor leader in the 1980s, I was looking for 29 votes to pass what the administration’s package was that day. He always was teaching me things, about, you know, you have to control your personnel — the way you control people is to control budgets — the hiring of people not the individual. So all of that helped, hopefully, in being a better governor.”

He ran for governor unsuccessfully in 1990 but got back into the political game as a state representative by 1993. In 1997, he stepped out of the governor’s race to give his friend Pierre Howard a shot at the title and declared his candidacy for lieutenant governor. But when Howard dropped out, he jumped back in the gubernatorial race. After winning the Democratic nomination, Barnes defeated businessman Guy Millner with 52 percent of the vote.

Along the way, he practiced law and was involved in two family businesses — a bank and a hardware store. Barnes’ financial acumen is just one more reflection of his smarts. By the time he took office in 1999, his net worth was more than $8 million.

Barnes made his own noise as soon as the gavel banged in his first legislative session. Atlanta’s sprawl and air pollution had become a hot issue toward the end of Zell Miller’s second term. Barnes was elected partly on the promise that he’d do something about it.

He pushed through the General Assembly legislation creating the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, an agency that appeared as a savior to environmentalists, neighborhood activists and even business leaders.

In reality though, GRTA had little to do with the federally imposed ban on new road construction. The new agency merely approved a transportation plan the Atlanta Regional Commission and other agencies had been working on for close to a decade.

One lobbyist who didn’t want to be named says, “GRTA was a huge power grab, in the same breadth though it’s a do-nothing agency that hasn’t done anything.”

Together with the creation of the Consumers Insurance Advocate Office, GRTA prompted criticism that Barnes forms new, redundant agencies not to tackle pressing issues, but to surround himself with yes men so he can be sure that whatever progress is made happens the way he wants it.

“In all fairness, you can’t blame the governor,” says former GOP chief Clay. “But I do think in his zeal to take control of an issue, that the perception is that Barnes says, ‘Let me create a board, let me make all the appointments to it and control the outcome before we start dealing with the policy, whether it’s water, the environment or traffic.’”

The first reported reference to King Roy came in February 2000 when Sen. Don Balfour, R-Snelling, blasted Barnes’ first round at education reform: “We call him King Roy. He thinks he’s a god.”

It was during the 2000 legislative session that Barnes, as part of his education reform legislation, created the Office of Education Accountability and appointed Davis Nelson executive director.

That move, more than any other, turned Schrenko from an occasional combatant into Barnes’ full-fledged archenemy.

“The Office of Education Accountability, like the other redundant bureaucracies Barnes created, the Consumer’s Insurance Advocate Office and GRTA, is a waste because there’s no need to have a separate office,” says Schrenko. “It’s raw abuse of power, of centralizing power under one office and under one man. That’s never been done before in Georgia because it’s a dangerous thing — it’s not ever been good for a state or country.”

Barnes also named longtime friend and supporter Otis Brumby chairman of the state Board of Education. Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Brumby announced that he’d step down at the end of this year. But Brumby and the Office of Education Accountability still manage to counter Schrenko at every opportunity.

The second wave of his education reform legislation, passed early this year, stripped teachers of their job protection. Barnes said in his State of the State address in February 2001 that “bad teachers don’t deserve the right to stain the honor of good teachers everywhere. They don’t deserve the chance to keep our children from receiving a good education. They don’t deserve unconditional job protection.”

But it wasn’t just the “bad” teachers Barnes offended. Now, Georgia’s teachers are probably the largest segment of the state’s population that wants to see Barnes get the boot.

“I’d have to say most teachers are still upset with Barnes. A better word is agitated, frustrated and agitated,” says Barbara Christmas, a current candidate for state school superintendent and executive vice president of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents 51,000 teachers. “It’s a general frustration that they feel that the administration, politicians and the public have little understanding of the challenges they face every day.”

Kirincich, the Democratic Party leader, downplays the amount of contempt teachers have for Barnes. He even goes so far as to say, “Teachers support the governor because of his education reform plan. They want to see education improve too.”

If Democratic leaders stubbornly, or naively, continue to go with this “Everybody Loves Barnes” routine, they’ll make it easier for Barnes’ opponents to exploit an issue that’s already a liability. So far, Barnes’ attempt to transform the state’s sorry educational system has cost the state about $1 billion and it’s yet to prove itself, something Republicans will hammer on until Election Day.

“The governor’s education platform provided no immediate relief for students,” says the Republican Party’s Gonzalez. “Georgia ranks 49th in SAT scores and first in high school dropout rates. There are governors out there trying new things and getting results. Not here.”

Barnes has said repeatedly that it could take a decade before his legislation improves student performance.

“We’re seeing early results from education reform,” he says, “and you’ll see more and more results from that.”

The reaction was even more heated after the 2001 legislative session, when Barnes abruptly changed the state flag.

“I just got back from traveling through 60 miles of rural South Georgia in my district,” says Rep. Austin Scott, an early Republican supporter of the flag change, “and I probably saw six of the older Georgia flags and those yard signs that say ‘Let Us Vote’ on the flag change.”

“Right after the flag change, I probably saw 50 of the old Georgia flags flying at people’s homes,” says Scott, R-Tifton. “That there are still a bunch of those ‘Let Us Vote’ yard signs and old flags says there are a lot of people who did not like the way it was done.”

But shrinking the Confederate battle emblem to just a footnote on the new state flag pleased African-Americans, whose turnout is crucial for Democrats to win statewide races. Just as significantly, the flag change enabled Barnes to secure support from the state’s most powerful interest group: big business. When asked about the flag change, Barnes says one of his major motivations was to protect Georgia companies from the bad publicity he saw plaguing South Carolina when its lawmakers wrestled with the Confederate flag issue.

“I came to the conclusion the same thing is going to happen in Georgia. If we don’t move past this, this is going to create all kinds of problems, and we have 15 Fortune 500 companies. We generally have the reputation as a progressive state that moves forward — pro business. So I came to the conclusion: I can’t put this off anymore and I did it and I pushed.”

Says Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce President Sam Williams: “Business was out in front of the flag change even before the governor decided what to do. When the governor did decide to change it, he called us up and said, ‘OK, I’m going to need every ounce of your political energy to do this.’ And we did it.

“The Chamber does not officially support candidates,” Williams adds. “Our members decide what they are going to do. A lot of the members of the business community appreciate his leadership.”

The flag change burned up a lot of Barnes’ political capital, and he knows it.

“It cost,” he says. “There’s no question about it.”

But Atlanta’s top CEOs are now solidly behind him, which may have been what Barnes was after all along. Democrats and Republicans alike say Barnes has all but been handed a blank check from the Atlanta business community. Now, he has more than six times the campaign money as his closest competitor. That means his war chest will remain stuffed for the duration of the campaign. More importantly, it means the state’s big money bags won’t be open for bankrolling Perdue’s, Byrne’s or Schrenko’s campaigns.

Nothing — not the flag change, education reform or power mongering — comes close to infuriating Republicans as much as the way Barnes and Democratic lawmakers ruled over the redistricting process in August and September of this year. As if his flag change in February wasn’t brazen enough, he and his Democratic operatives pushed through the General Assembly legislative and congressional maps that disregard nearly all county lines and existing districts in the interest of manipulating demographics to maximize Democratic seats.

Over the next year, Republican lawmakers are taking the redistricting maps Barnes and the Democrats came up with on a tour of the state.

“Until you stand there and actually look at it, you can’t see what they did to this state,” says House Minority Leader Lynn Westmoreland. “Regardless of what the court says and law says, citizens of Georgia will ultimately decide if the maps are fair or unfair.”

Republicans have a reason to be miffed. Of the 180 state House districts, 102 are predicted to elect Democrats and seven of the 13 Congressional districts are expected to elect Democrats.

Republicans again whined about King Roy.

“What we’ve got is a governor who has tried to elect for every citizen of Georgia the person who’s going to represent them in Congress, the state Senate and state House,” Westmoreland says. “That’s not what people of this country have in mind for a democracy. They don’t want somebody choosing their elected officials for them. That’s Barnes’ big weakness — strong arm politics.”

Scott, a young South Georgia Republican, became a symbol for the ruthlessness of the session. He’d placed his political career on the line by backing Barnes’ flag change. In return, he was royally screwed when his district was snatched from under him.

“I think the redistricting session hurt the Democratic Party just because what was done is easily seen as unethical,” he says. “Ethics in government is important to people, conservative or liberal. People want their governor to do what’s good for the people, not what’s good for politics.”

Does Machiavellian politics lead to great progress for the state? At first glance, Barnes’ accomplishments seem substantial. But when it comes to passing legislation that actually does some good, for things like transportation, air quality and water quality, Barnes tends to dance around the problem. The end result is that he’s generated a lot of publicity with limited progress — so far. Nowadays, with a recession forcing budget cuts in state government, dramatic advances will be even more difficult.

Though he’s denounced bad teachers and come up with new incentives for teachers to get more training — both to well-publicized fanfare — his office recently proposed to cut $14 million from the state Department of Education’s Professional/ Staff Development budget.

“Of all the things that you could cut that would not directly affect students or teachers, there are so many more areas that should have been cut besides this one,” Schrenko says.

Christmas, the candidate for superintendent, agrees. “Any time we’re implementing new school improvement and test score programs, staff development is a component of that,” she says. “The heart of improving a school is professional development and learning how to meet the needs of low-achieving students, those that are hard to teach to read.”

In defense of the proposed budget cut, Barnes says he’s only taking away a half- percent increase that he added to the professional/staff development budget two years ago.

“It doesn’t affect the number of teachers in the classroom, the size of the classroom or direct instruction,” he says, adding a quick jab at Schrenko, “If you can’t absorb a change like that, then you’re not a very good manager.”

It’s another case of Barnes going for a touchdown with a big play. But because of a bad block, or maybe a late snap, he only picks up a few yards.

The $2 billion Northern Arc is a prime example of Barnes’ willingness to compromise on key issues. He was elected as the guy who would solve sprawl. But now he’s fast-tracked the proposed 59-mile highway from Cartersville to Lawrenceville — even though the Atlanta Regional Commission’s own studies say the road would encourage over-development and increase the amount of miles people drive.

“The Northern Arc was initially put on a list of developmental highways because of the fact that it will encourage growth in those areas,” says Georgia Conservancy Policy Director Michael Halicki. “There’ve been different efforts to put it in different trappings, but for all intents and purposes, it remains a developmental highway. The question we’d like to see raised of this gubernatorial candidate is, ‘Does the Northern Arc fit in with the credentials of a controlled-growth governor who got national acclaim for creating GRTA?’”

At the same time he’s fast-tracked the Northern Arc, Barnes has almost completely overlooked traffic problems inside I-285, as well as MARTA, the backbone of Atlanta’s faltering public transit system. In June, he announced plans to spend $8.3 billion on transportation projects like new carpool lanes, express buses for suburban counties and a light-rail line for his native Cobb County, but not a dime for MARTA.

The slight against the troubled rail and bus system was apparent when Barnes skipped MARTA’s annual luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Nov. 2. About 500 elected officials and transportation policymakers ate chicken and listened to Federal Transit Authority Administrator Jennifer Dorn and DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones say that more cooperation between state and local governments was needed to get a regional transportation system to work in the Atlanta area.

Barnes was 55 miles away cutting ribbons at the grand opening of the Discover Mills mall. He praised the development for all the jobs it will create, and for all the sales and taxes it will generate. “It seems only appropriate that a first-class mall like Discover Mills has located in a first-class state like Georgia,” he said.

In the midst of all the gawking and backslapping, Barnes didn’t bother to mention that Discover Mills will generate more than 60,000 vehicle trips each weekday, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission.

The irony is what Barnes said as a candidate: “We have to be more inventive to find ways to be less dependent on cars. The state has to be more involved in commuter rail and mass transit, including paying for it. The idea that we can just have cowboy growth as we’ve had just won’t work in the future.”

Constructing the Northern Arc is far from an inventive way to get folks out of their cars. But it’ll go a long way toward helping Barnes raise the cash for his re-election bid.

And that fact cuts to the heart of Barnes’ first term. Even his foes admit he’s a brilliant and formidable politician. He’s pushed for — and, to some extent, achieved — progressive policies aimed at addressing tough issues like race, education and environmental degradation.

But Georgia ultimately remains a state dominated by special interests. More than ever before, among the most powerful are land speculators, construction companies, banks — all the components of a money machine fueled by unfettered development. A governor who takes risks by changing the flag or stripping teachers of their job protection must watch his back — and make sure the campaign war chest is full.

Before Barnes heads full tilt into the gubernatorial race, he’s got to deal with the 2002 legislative session, which opens next month.

We now know that the country was in a recession before Sept. 11, but the terrorist attacks hit Georgia’s tourism, convention and hospitality industries especially hard. About 39,000 Georgians have lost their jobs so far this year. State revenue slumped more than 6 percent the quarter that ended Sept. 30 and seems sure to drop again in the current quarter.

To his credit, Barnes has a knack for looking out over the horizon. Nothing illustrates that as much as the planning he’s done with the state’s budget. Since taking office, he’s upped the state reserve from 3 percent of the state’s revenue to 5 percent. He initiated a hiring freeze — except in law enforcement and education — in July when he saw the economy slowing.

“The reason I could do those fiscal changes is about some of those same criticisms that folks make about the way I do things,” Barnes says. “I like detail, I like policy and so I watch things close and I do try to control the details financially a little closer so the state is at an even keel and I think that’s important.”

The result is that while Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee are thrashing about in budgetary crises and calling special sessions, Georgia is looking pretty good. Some cuts are being made and more are on the way, but the state isn’t facing draconian measures.

The crunch will mean Barnes and the rest of the General Assembly will go to war over which state programs get cut. But Georgia’s relatively strong fiscal position puts Barnes ahead of the game. King Roy will be ready for the lawmakers who’ll fight against whatever he wants to do.

“Like I say, I like folks and I like being around folks and I’m generally a pretty gregarious guy,” Barnes says. “But at the same time, there comes a responsibility with this office.”

michael.wall@creativeloafing.com??