It’s primary time in North Georgia where I visited last week. The signs are everywhere, in store windows, on lawns, on the side of the road, and most prominently, in my hometown of Summerville, on the sides of vintage pickup trucks that have been dispatched in the service of the incumbent tax commissioner.

There are also races for sheriff, county commissioner and state legislators. As in many locales these days, none of the signs designates the party of the candidate advertised. You can’t even find the party affiliation of the candidates in the local newspaper, although I assume that it will appear on the ballot.

So it was interesting when I paid a visit to my brother’s drug store across from the Chattooga County courthouse to hear a man delivering packages raving loudly that he didn’t think much of a community that would let liberals park on its streets.

Follow up:

His rant ran something like this: the cherry red pick-truck at the curb is the property of a liberal who could only have financed it with inherited family wealth and is an obviously a member of the Democratic party and therefore unfit for public office. As a matter of fact, the truck shouldn’t even be allowed to park downtown.

I had heard about this fellow, a military retiree who dispenses his political opinions as he trucks around the county. No one seemed to know much about him besides his first name, John, but the presiding drug store clerk, the niece of the local Democratic party chair, tried to enlighten him. “I happen to know,” she said emphatically, “that she and her family live from paycheck to paycheck just like the rest of us. A relative loaned her those trucks for her campaign, and I think they’re nice.”

This did nothing to stop his tirade against inherited liberal wealth, but, the clerk said it was the first time she’d heard him use “the D word.”

Nevermind that Republicans have mislabeled the inheritance tax as the “death tax” in an effort to kill it once and for all. Nevermind that the incumbent Republican president is advantaged many times over by his grandfather’s enormous fortune. Nevermind that the presumed Republican presidential candidate is a major beneficiary of his wife’s inherited wealth. Those eye-catching pick-up trucks seem to have gotten under someone’s skin.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a right-wing contingent in North Georgia. John Birch, the Baptist missionary often called the first martyr of the Cold War, had relatives in the area, and there were cells of Birchers who tried to label the most mild-mannered Democrats as communist sympathizers. John W. Davis, the congressman for whom I worked in the sixties, was livid to find his photo crudely pasted alongside that of Nikita Khrushchev and labeled The Communist Twins. The flyer was printed on pink paper just in case the reader missed the point. For a long time, Davis pooh-poohed the Birch menace until one day the society’s president, Larry McDonald, took his seat in a close election. McDonald was shot down over Soviet air space in a Korean jet in 1983, becoming (you guessed it) a right wing martyr, and the seat was held briefly by a moderate Democrat until another right-winger, Bob Barr, prevailed and served for eight years. An author of the Defense of Marriage Act and among the first to call for President Clinton’s impeachment, the thrice-married Barr was publicly accused by Hustler’s Larry Flynt with paying for his first wife’s abortion and defeated. www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/01/12/flynt.01/ - 28k - Cached
A Republican while in office, Barr has declared himself a Libertarian, and he’s running again—for president.

John the Deliveryman was only riffing on themes that have worked so well for the right for more than forty years: Democrats are atheist fat cats who want to raise your taxes and take away your hunting gun and make you join a union and encourage your son to be a homosexual and get your feminist daughter an abortion when she gets pregnant and aid and comfort all our enemies. Somehow it doesn’t seem all that clever when I say what Rush Limbaugh is getting paid $440 million to mouth off. The last time I visited the office of The Summerville News, there was a sign over the editor’s door saying “Don’t blame me, I voted for Jeb Davis.” As in Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

And therein lies the connection that no one discusses openly—your inherited fortune is safe as long as you’re onboard with white supremacy. One of the planks in Barr’s self-contradictory presidential platform is his promise to enforce immigration laws. More than communists, it’s dark-skinned people that frighten the establishment. The African American population of Chattooga County is lower than in many Georgia counties, but in recent years, there has been a huge influx of Latino immigrants, not to mention a sizeable population of East Indians. So it must be monumentally threatening to the right that the son of an uppity white woman and a Kenyan is poised to walk into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I no sooner left Georgia, than Obama flew in and held a town hall meeting in the north Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs. Cobb County, in which it is located, was for many years a haven for those fleeing Atlanta’s integration and solidly Republican, so Obama was certainly not playing to his base. His message about our failing economy, the overextended mortgages and the simultaneous tightening of bankruptcy laws seemed to resonate with many of the 3,000 people who turned out to see him. In addition to the African-American vote, Obama needs roughly a third of white voters in Georgia to carry the state.

Maybe it’s time to look for some pick-up trucks.

London’s Financial Times has a more dispassionate view of the Georgia political scene at
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94ff19b2-4ee0-11dd-ba7c-000077b07658.html