About The Braselton news. (Jefferson, Ga) 2006-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 16, 2022)
Page 4A The Braselton News Wednesday, November 16, 2022 Opinion Notes of moderation in midterm elections Did America return to politi cal “moderation” during the mid term elections? That question seems relevant given the mixed results of the var ious races around the country. In the big pic ture, it appears that Republicans will retake the House, no small thing. But there wasn’t a “Red Wave” of GOP winners as some pun dits (and Republicans) ex pected. On the other side, the Senate will remain in Dem ocratic hands: The runoff here in Georgia between Democratic incumbent Ra- pheal Warnock and GOP challenger and celebrity Herschel Walker won’t de termine the balance of pow er as some thought it might. Perhaps even bigger, however, is that a lot of 2020 “election deniers” supported by former pres ident Donald Trump lost their races. • •• So is the Trump Effect waning? Perhaps. Some in the GOP are hoping Trump will stay out of the Walker contest and that he will not soon announce plans to run for president again in 2024. From kingmak er, Trump is now seen by many in the Republican Party as a drag on GOP candidates. While he still has diehard sup porters who are caught up in cult of person ality around Trump, a lot of mainline conservatives ap pear to want new blood on the ballot — and to avoid the chaos and egomaniac that surrounds Trump. Florida Gov. Ron De Santis is seen by many as the heir to Trump, a younger, smarter version of Trumpism without the baggage of the real thing. Trump obviously sees DeSantis as a threat and has spewed anti-DeSan tis rhetoric over the past week. Despite Trump’s bluster, many of his former allies have turned on him follow ing last week’s weak GOP election results. • •• And there are other clues that seem to suggest the nation’s extreme polar ization in politics may be moderating, at least a little. For one thing, there hasn’t been widespread questioning of the elec tion’s outcome as many (including this writer) ex pected. While there are still some key races being counted, it doesn’t look like election-deniers are going to tilt at windmills very much this season. Most candidates who lost their races have con ceded, maybe not with much grace, but at least there're not looking to tear the nation apart by claim ing widespread fraud as happened in 2020. The public seems tired of the bogus claims of fraud. In addition, the WSJ re ported that a survey of lo cal school board elections across the country didn’t sweep in a large number of angry parents who sought to overturn curriculums on race and FGBTQ issues. Racial and gender issues don’t seem to be at the top of most voters’ priority list despite all the heated rhet oric over the past year. And last, a lot of moder ates won in big races prov ing that extremism isn’t necessary to win at the ballot box. Here in Georgia, mod erate Gov. Brian Kemp easily won over rival Sta cey Abrams. While some Trumpites hated Kemp for not bowing to Trump’s de mands in 2020 to cheat in the state’s ballot counting, that venom wasn’t enough to keep moderate Kemp from getting re-elected. In addition, Kemp gets to take a victory lap over the state’s new voting rules put in place after 2020. Those new rules seemingly had no real impact on who vot ed in the midterms despite cries from the left that they would keep large groups of people from voting. In the end, people who wanted to vote did get to vote. • •• The only non-moderate Republican in Georgia who didn’t win was Walker. The celebrity football player greatly under-performed at the polls compared to Kemp among GOP voters. Walker’s flaky comments and hypocrisy was just too much for some GOP voters to stomach. The upcoming runoff of Walker vs. Warnock is still up in the air and the out come will turn on, well, turnout. If the race were for con trol of the Senate, a lot of Democrats would be mo tivated to get out and vote for Warnock. But since the race’s outcome won’t make that difference, some Dem ocrats may stay home, giv ing Walker an edge. On the other hand, if Trump inserts himself into Walker’s race. Democrats could be motivated to show up on election day while some Republicans might stay home. How all that shakes out could be a test of Trump’s influence in Georgia; and staying quiet isn’t Trump’s strong card. • •• And then there was the abortion issue. It seems as if the Supreme Court ruling that took down Roe motivat ed a lot of younger Demo crats to go to the polls. Even in more conservative states where the abortion issue was directly on the ballot, majorities voted to adopt laws that were more moder ate than many anti-abortion advocates had wanted. Candidates who say they’re against all abortions in all circumstances (as does Walker) will need to rethink their position if they want to win in the future. The nation isn’t as anti-abortion as the far-right imagines. • •• Taken all together, it seems as if many citizens voted last week to move away from political extrem ism and toward more mod erately-toned candidates. That’s true for Democrats as well as Republicans. Democrat Abrams did poorly in her second race against Kemp because of her intemperate comments that torpedoed her appeal among moderate indepen dents. Swing voters didn’t like her and her “progres sive” agenda. • •• Hopefully, the nation will continue to move away from the kind of extremism that came to a head on Jan. 6, 2021. That day, the nation saw what happens when a diet of lies and propaganda get fed to people by their top elected leaders, mainly their president. Maybe the results of this election cycle will embold en the moderate wing of the GOP to dump Trump and put forward candidates who have substance and charac ter rather than depending on celebrity and vile rhetoric to get elected. Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@main- streetnews.com. With Thanks giving coming up, most of us will enjoy turkey in some fashion or other during this wonderful holiday when we stop and say thanks for the good things we enjoy. An enduring high five is in or der for the many organiza tions and individuals who go the extra mile to see that families in need enjoy a nice meal at Thanksgiv ing. Americans are gener ous at Thanksgiving, and Americans are also so cial on the last Thursday in November. Each year approximately 46 million turkeys are killed for the holiday. That translates into 1.4 billion pounds of turkey, according to the Internet which further informs that is about one turkey for every person in Spain — for whatever that’s worth. Turkey has become more and more popu lar for those who are avoiding red meat. With a modi cum of research, you can learn some very interesting facts about turkeys. Only the male turkey can gobble which comes about during the mating season. If you are a turkey hunter, you know what it is like to be sitting in a blind in some remote area before daybreak and hear that distinct sound. There is nothing quite like hear ing an expert coaxing a gobbler into range of your shotgun as he is attracted to the sounds of a hen with which he wants to mate. Turkeys Wild turkeys can fly, and in short bursts, they can reach 55 miles per hour. While wild turkeys can see better than hu mans, according to the experts three times better, they sleep in trees because they can’t see as well at night. By flying up into the trees to roost keeps them from becoming easy prey for predators. They roost at dusk and fly down at dawn. An advocate of the tur key was founder Benja min Franklin who consid ered the bald eagle, which became our national bird, “a bird of bad moral char acter,” because of the eagle’s habit of stealing from other birds. Franklin called the turkey a “much more respectable bird, a bird of courage and a true original native of Ameri ca.” Like the Bison, the tur key almost became ex tinct. When the European colonists arrived here, it is estimated that there were more than 10 million wild turkeys in the country. They were a popular food item for the early settlers and with no lim its and no hunting restric tions, they were hunted with abandon to the extent that by 1910-20 the turkey population was down to a couple hundred thousand. One thing that helped the wild turkey to make a comeback was the Great Depression. A lot of peo ple, to survive, left the farms and moved to the cities to find work. This caused the native habit for turkeys to return, and the turkeys gained a footing for survival. Conservationists were important too for the tur key’s survival. Since some states had a total loss of turkeys, there was an ef fort to try to catch turkeys in the more populous ar eas and move them to the states which had lost its turkey population. Do you have any idea of how tough it is to capture a wild turkey? The suc cess rate was almost nil. With the introduction of the net cannon, however, the game changed dra matically. The net cannon enabled conservationists to capture turkeys easily and then transfer them to states which had lost their turkey population. Today there are over 7 million wild turkeys roam ing about which brings up the question: “Where do we get those 10 million turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner?” There are turkey farms everywhere with turkeys being raised do mestically to be killed and processed for the Thanks giving season. The bison escaped ex tinction and so did the turkey, fortunately. There’s little hunting of bison anymore, but tur key hunting is one of the most rewarding of out door experiences. Before daybreak, the pre-dawn stillness is enrapturing. The distinct sound of the gobbler resonates as a hen flies in to investigate the decoys. As daylight begins to emerge the gobblers ap pear for dialogue with the hen. A well-timed shot gives you a memo rable experience, as one only gets from an emer gence into nature in early morning. On Thanksgiving Day, I will be thankful for the turkey comeback and thankful, too, for the op portunity to stalk a wily, wild turkey. Loran Smith is a syn dicated columnist and longtime UGA football radio personality. Whenever I meet someone, inevitably, their first comment is, “You must be a Georgia football fan.” Truthfully, I re ply. “I’m an SEC fan. I love to see all the teams do well and cele brate when one wins the National Championship.” In this column, I strive to sidestep controversy. Life has enough without me adding to it. But I’m a Southerner. I’m the first female sports reporter to cover SEC football, full time. Until I, at the tender age of 21. began covering the Georgia Bulldogs at home, on the road, and Tuesday practice (fol lowed by a press confer ence), it had been all men. Occasionally, another fe male showed up. I was regular. I covered the historic Texas-Georgia game in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas (Georgia pulled out an incredible upset over the number two- ranked Longhorns. 10-9). I was the only woman in the press box; or. in my case, “girl.” In the seasons that I covered Georgia, only once did I see an other female in a press box. It was Georgia at Geor gia Tech and she was there to write a sidebar (an in teresting story boxed off to the side of the game story). This, I explain, to give a bit of authority to what I have to say now. The only stadium in which I haven’t covered an SEC football game is Mississippi State and that’s because they either played in Sanford Stadium or weren’t on the schedule. This, too, I must say: I am an old-fashioned SEC enthusiast. I will never root for any new team west of Arkansas. In the last 15 or 20 years, the SEC has done what was once considered impossible: it became THE premier conference in the United States. The con ferences with USC, Tex as, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Ohio, and Michigan ruled for so long — but the SEC football fans SEC flew under the radar. Then, they soared with the equivalent of an F-16. Today’s success is root ed deep because of some of the best head coaches ever to run college football programs: Georgia’s Vince Dooley (I’m unabashed ly partial to my beloved Dooley), Alabama’s Bear Bryant, Auburn’s Shug Jordan, Arkansas’s Frank Broyles (I adored him, too, and have framed photos of me with him and another with Dooley), Ole Miss’s Johnny Vaught, Tennes see’s Robert Neyland and Florida’s Steve Spurrier. This is why the moun tains in me emerges when I proclaim that I’m “agin” the SEC accepting teams west of Arkansas. These rivalries among SEC teams stretch long and serious. The Alabama-Auburn ri valry is so filled with fire and emotion that it in spired an entertaining, eye-opening book called “War In Dixie: Alabama vs. Auburn.” Half of the book is Alabama’s side of the story, the other is Auburn’s. One side of the book is done in Alabama colors, the other side in Auburn’s. It is written by two Northern reporters who had never seen the likes of such a rivalry until they came South to cover the game. The Georgia-Auburn ri valry is the oldest in col lege football history: 100 years. It troubles me for outsid ers to push in because the SEC TV money is so good and because they want to play in the best confer ence. The core teams spent a hundred years building it and creating their rival ries. No new “friends” are needed. That, though, is not the point I want to make. I am saddened at how unkind and downright mean that SEC fans can be to each other. I wish people fought for Jesus like they do their home team. I read an enormously mean comment against Tennessee from an Ala bama fan. When I discov ered that the woman was the mother of a much-be loved pastor, my heart sank. Tennessee is known as the Volunteer State be cause, in every American war, they sent the most volunteers of any state. If only for that, they deserve admiration. Please. Let’s celebrate our comrades and not mean-mouth them. Partic ularly over a college foot ball game. Including the outsiders, uh. newcomers. Ronda Rich is the best selling author of What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should.) Visit www.rond- arich.com to sign up for her free weekly newslet ter. The Braselton News Mike Buffington Co-Publisher Scott Buffington Co-Publisher & Advertising Manager Ben Munro Editor Taylor Hearn Sports Editor Wesleigh Sagon Photographer/Features MEMBER • Georgia Press Association • National Newspaper Association • International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors Postmaster: Send Address Changes To: MainStreet Newspapers, Inc. PO Box 908 Jefferson, Georgia 30549-0908 Web Site: www.BraseltonNewsToday.com Email: ben@mainstreetnews.com Voice: 706.367.5233 Published weekly by The Braselton News 33 Lee St. Jefferson, GA 30549 Periodical Postage Paid at Jefferson, GA 30549 (SCED 23390) Yearly Subscriptions: $35
