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PAGE 4A BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2016 Opinions “Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ” ~ Henry Ward Beecher ~ Two big ballot questions remain unanswered Did ‘rigged’ comment really hurt Trump? Congratulations. We’re almost to the end. By the incredibly low standards set by the first two presidential debates, last week’s out ing would have to be considered the most productive one between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We saw in the early stages a focused Trump landing punches on his opponent, classifying her experience as “bad experience” not con ducive to being an effective president. We saw Clinton, cool and calm as ever, effec tively playing the “triangle offense.” She again seemed to pick the right times to take a shot at Trump and provoke his lack of self-discipline. For me, it didn’t really move the needle. Many important issues were again barely touched on, and I came away still resolved to not vote for either candidate. The key point was something Trump said toward the end of the night, but I was more taken aback by the gen eral reaction to it, especially among the large media conglomerates. When asked by moderator Chris Wallace whether he would “accept” the results of the Nov. 8 election, win or lose, Trump waffled a bit and then said he would keep us “in sus pense” while suggesting that the election was rigged. It was certainly a puzzling answer and bizarre thing to say at a debate, but was it as cata strophic as people have insinuated? Doubtful. After the debate, I flipped around the various news channels and with the exception of Fox News, Trump’s comments were generating the most buzz. They were characterized as everything from a kiss of death for his campaign to “a threat to the American democratic system.” What? 1 never thought I would do this, but after 16 months, for the first time, I have to partially defend Trump here. First, while I get what Wallace was trying to say, the question was oddly worded. Maybe I’m taking it the wrong way, but how can you “accept” something that hasn’t hap pened yet? That’s not to suggest we’re about to have another 2000 on our hands, when a micro scopic vote margin in Florida triggered an automatic recount that led to a month-long legal battle ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But something wild could indeed happen. Where did Trump go wrong? All he really had to say was, “Barring an unforeseen circumstance, I will accept the vote of the American people.” Still, there seems to be a little bit of amnesia here, particularly on the part of the national media. First, voting irregularities and people in lead ership of both parties questioning the legitima cy of election results are hardly new concepts. In fact, they go back several decades and have been a part of this election cycle previ ously with accusations by the Bernie Sanders campaign against the Democratic National Committee of collusion. Secondly, the apparent consensus that Trump’s comment seemingly sealed his defeat is just flat out ignoring what has happened to this point. After a tangled web of insults and hidden tapes sure to sink any other campaign in histo ry, Trump remains standing. A major part of his support system is people who really believe the system is rigged. And it may very well carry him to victory in 13 days. The polls suggest he has an extremely steep mountain to climb, but the polls also showed a neck-in-neck race late in the cycle four years ago. Barring something far more sinister than we’ve seen to this point, the climate is right for Trump to ride a wave of near-record dissatis faction with the direction of the country into the White House. We’ve seen voter registration numbers way up in several states, which I think suggests a movement toward Trump not being captured in the polling. It may not be enough for him to tilt enough of the battleground states, and his path in the Electoral College remains narrow. But after everything I’ve seen — up close and from a distance — I wouldn’t bet against him. Scott Thompson is the editor of the Barrow News-Journal. He can be reached at sthomp- son@barrowjournal. com. As Georgians ponder how they will cast their ballots in this general elec tion, there are only two issues that really have any suspense to them. Will the state’s electoral votes go to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race? And will voters agree to approve Gov. Nathan Deal’s school takeover plan? The future does not look very bright for the school takeover proposal, known formally as the Opportunity School District. Deal is asking voters to give him the authority to appoint a spe cial superintendent who would take over the administration of low-performing schools, but the voters don’t seem inclined to go along with him. Two polls released last week tell the tale. A survey commissioned by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed 59 percent of Georgia voters opposed the Opportunity School District proposal while only 34 percent supported it. Ironically, the lowest level of sup port for the proposal was among Republicans — only 28 percent of those polled said they supported the consti tutional amendment, even though it is being pushed by a Republican gover nor. Another poll released by WSB-TV last week also showed only 34 percent sup port for the school takeover plan, with 44 percent opposed. Those numbers don’t look good for the constitutional amendment. It appears that voters support the con servative principle that people should decide at the local level how they want to run their schools and how their tax dollars should be spent for this purpose. There are signs that Deal knows his proposal is in trouble. The governor’s chief of staff has already sent emails to local school districts demanding that they provide records of dues that school systems collect for two teachers’ groups, the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) and the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE). The intent of this is very clear. PAGE and GAE have campaigned energeti cally against the passage of the school takeover amendment. Deal very likely will try to punish the teacher groups by asking the Legislature to pass a bill prohibiting school districts from using payroll deductions to collect dues from teachers who join profession al organizations. That would be the governor’s way of lashing back at teachers and adminis trators who worked for the defeat of his Opportunity School District. The question of who wins Georgia’s electoral votes is not quite so clear-cut. The aggregation of recent polls shows Trump to be leading Clinton by two to three points, which seems about right for a Republican-leaning state like Georgia. Statistics guru Nate Silver calculates that Trump at this point has about a 70 percent chance of carrying the state. Write a Letter to the Editor: Let us know your thoughts: Send Letters to Editor, The Barrow News-Journal, 77 E. May Street, Winder, Ga. 30680. Letters can also be emailed to sthompson@main- streetnews.com Please put “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line. Please include the city of the writer. But this has been a presidential cam paign unlike any other we have seen in recent memory. Trump’s numbers nationwide have been falling since he performed poorly in three debates against Clinton. He is also having to deal with the fallout from a videotape that had him bragging to an Access Hollywood host about how celeb rities like him can grab women and have their way with them. Since that videotape went public, at least 12 women have come forward to allege that Trump grabbed them or touched them inap propriately without their consent. Trump has denied all of the alle gations, but it’s possible we could see another embarrassing videotape released in the two weeks remaining before election day. The biggest factor in Georgia’s out- \ come could well be this: over the past \ 12 months, there have been 342,000 blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans registering to vote. Where whites made up 80 percent of the state’s registered voters not so long ago, they now account for less than 57 percent of Georgia’s voters. In this highly polarized era, it’s no big secret that most whites tend to vote Republican while minority voters are more likely to vote Democratic. This increasingly diverse voter pool is the main reason why analysts and pundits keep predicting that Georgia will one day flip from being a red state to a purple state. That may happen in 2016, 2018, or 2020, but if demography is destiny, it will happen one day. Those 342,000 newly registered voters may determine whether that change over happens this year. It all depends on how many of them actually turn out and cast a ballot on Nov. 8. (Tom Crawford is editor of The Georgia Report, an internet news ser vice at gareport.com that reports on state government and politics. He can be reached at tcrawford@gareport. com.) The Barrow News-Journal Winder, Barrow County, Ga. www.BarrowJoumal.com Mike Buffington Scott Buffington Co-Publisher Co-Publisher Scott Thompson Editor Jessica Brown Photographer Susan Treadwell Advertising Sharon Hogan Office & Reporter Also covering beats is Alex Pace. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Barrow News-Journal 77 East May Street Winder, Georgia 30680 Published 52 times per year by Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Winder, Georgia 30680 (USPS 025-132) Email: chris@mainstreetnews.com Phone: 770-867-NEWS (6397) SUBSCRIPTIONS: $25.00/yr. Drug abuse in rural America a growing problem Forget Islamic terrorists. The likelihood of a foreign terrorist killing you is almost nil. You’re far more likely to be killed by lightning, a heart attack, cancer, the flu, Alzheimer’s, an infection, Parkinson’s, or a car crash than by terrorism. Or maybe you’ll die from a self-induced drug overdose, or at the hands of an angry lover, or mad neigh bor. America is gripped in a frenzy of fear right now with a fear of terrorism far out of proportion to reality. But if you want to see what you should really be afraid of, look in the crime and court pages of this newspaper. A rising tide of drug abuse — much of it prescription drugs and meth — is swamping local law enforcement and court officials. Once thought of as the bane of urban cit ies, serious drug abuse has been sweeping suburban and rural communities over the last decade. Meth has been a major part of that, but so has the abuse of opium drugs. On an individual basis, that abuse is bad enough. But it’s larger than the individual. Many of those hooked on drugs can’t get jobs because they can’t pass a drug test. Their lack of resources affects their chil dren, too, who often struggle in school and who are in danger of continuing the cycle of drug abuse as they become adults. And drug abuse is all too often part and parcel to physical abuse within homes and families. Often, those involved in domestic fights have been drinking too much or abusing drugs. In the larger picture, this abuse is also destroying some rural communities across the nation. Rural areas have been struggling for years as its younger generations move to jobs in cities. That leaves behind empty school buildings and decaying downtowns as the population drops. In addition, many areas have seen a decline in manufacturing jobs as our eco nomic system moves away from industrial manufacturing toward an information and technology based economy. That has left many rural areas with shut tered factories and a population that lacks the resources to transition into that new economy. Some cite that economic change and the stress it brings as the underpinning of the drug abuse epidemic in rural areas. Maybe, but there’s more going on than just economic dislocation. The basic idea of “community” that has been so much a part of rural America is itself fraying. That’s apparent in the overall vulgarity of our culture and how that is expressed in everything from music to politics. For too many people, the concept of “community” has gone from one of geog raphy to that of the dark isolationism found in social media. It’s easier to have online “friends” than the real thing. Perhaps all of those things have unmoored rural America from its traditional roots. Personal aimlessness seems to be part and parcel to the drug abuse epidemic. Work is replaced with welfare, accountability replaced with neglect. Back when much of America looked at drug abuse as mostly an inner city problem in the black community, the cry was “law and order.” Many Americans, especially white citizens, just wanted to lock up the city crackheads, most of whom were black. But now that the meth and opium epi demic has spread to rural white America, the focus has changed. The call to “lock them up” has faded as white Americans see drug abuse in their own neighbor hoods and families. The result is that many rural communities have created local drug courts that seek counseling rather than prison for drug abusers. It’s easy to call for prison when the problem is somewhere else, but more difficult when it’s in your own backyard. Still, many rural communities don’t have the resources to deal with the onslaught of drug addiction, family violence, the neglect of children and accidental drug overdoses. In many cases, rural law enforcement, DFACS, schools and courts just can’t keep up. This is a national problem, but the answers won’t come from Washington. See Buffington on Page 6A ‘\Mr scott thompson