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PAGE 4A
BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2016
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~
The election battle
wages on
A marathon election cycle as bruising and
battering as the 2016 presidential campaign was
never going to quietly subside as soon as the votes
were in.
Donald Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton deliv
ered a severe jolt to the political world and the
so-called “establishment,” and many people, par
ticularly Clinton supporters who had been led
to believe by polling and talk in the media their
candidate had it in the bag, have been searching
for ways to process it.
While the initial shockwave has lessened, the
election battle is still waging on — through conspir
acy-fueled recounts and a
series of bizarre tweets from
our president-elect.
The Green party has
become a sore subject for
Democrats still bitter over
2000, when Ralph Nader’s
performance in Florida was
enough to hand the election
to George W. Bush over A1
Gore.
The 2016 Green candidate,
Jill Stein, likely siphoned off
enough votes in Wisconsin
and Michigan — two tradi
tionally reliable Democratic footholds — to tilt
those states to Trump.
His victory in those states plus Pennsylvania,
another chunk of the former “blue wall,” made
the difference.
But Stein is not going away, raising the funds to
pay for a recount of the vote in Wisconsin and
vowing to also challenge the results in Michigan
and Pennsylvania.
This sudden urge is driven by the notion that
the results may have been compromised through
outside interference — the Russians again — with
electronic voting systems. She cites data from
computer scientists showing Clinton performing
much more poorly in counties with electronic
balloting, which has been rationalized by other
data experts who contend that’s driven by the
demographics of those counties.
Still, the Clinton campaign has joined in on the
recount effort. Yes, this is the campaign of the
same candidate who said in October that Trump’s
assertion that the election was rigged was a threat
to democracy.
As I wrote in this space at the time, there are
examples in the past of voter irregularities and
results, even outcomes, being altered through
recounts. But is every result half the people aren’t
satisfied with going to be challenged and called
into question from now on? Is there anyone left
in this country capable of accepting and learning
from failures and defeat?
Trump’s margins of victory in the three afore
mentioned states range from roughly 10,000 votes
in Michigan to upwards of 70,000 in Pennsylvania.
A recount would need to produce a change in
outcome in all three of those states —represent
ing a collective 46 electoral votes — to sway the
election.
It’s not going to happen. Outside of definitive
proof of a grandiose hacking operation, this is an
incredible waste of time and resources, and any
change in winner in the states would likely result
in legal battles that would go right on up to the
U.S. Supreme Court.
Eventually, Democrats are going to have to con
front the reality that they lost the election because
in many ways, they’ve lost the American middle
and working classes — at least a significant portion
of them.
Trump’s exploitative rhetoric may have aided
that, but he didn’t get there alone.
Trump will take office on Jan. 20, and the
Democrats sorely need a change in leadership
and direction and have a long road of soul search
ing ahead of them.
Their current reaction is not going to help mat
ters in the long run.
In an alternate universe, one might expect
Trump to take the high ground here with a sincere
pledge to move forward with the country’s busi
ness and help unite a divided populace.
Not surprisingly, he has not held up his end.
Instead he has taken to Twitter, firing off another
string of erratic statements, including the claim
that he only lost the popular vote because 1-2
million people illegally voted — without any actual
evidence to back it up.
Though Trump was at many times careless on
Twitter throughout the campaign, he used social
media to his direct advantage.
His ability to boil down complex issues into
short slogans, sound bytes and 150-character
tweets may have aided him, but it doesn’t repre
sent a great leader.
He is who we elected, and it’s time for him to
step up, put pettiness aside and put the interests
of the country first. But I can’t find any reason to
believe he’s capable of that.
Such is the nature of our times.
More battles like this are ahead.
The people, as always, come second.
Scott Thompson is editor of the Barrow News-
Journal. He can be reached at sthompson@bar-
rowjournaI.com.
f
scott
thompson
Roscoe Dean from Jesup
Friends and relatives who know I
work at the state capitol often ask
these questions: How can you stand it
there? Don’t you just hate it?
My reply is there’s no other job
that gives you such an opportunity to
watch the zany characters who
comprise so much of Georgia
politics.
For example, there was
Roscoe Emory Dean Jr., one
of the loopiest persons ever to
serve in elective office.
Dean, a state senator from
Jesup during the 1960s and
1970s, was a politician con
vinced of his own importance,
to an unusually high degree.
He was an easy target to
poke fun at, in part because
his round-bottomed physique
made him look like a penguin wad
dling about the capitol.
The jowly, slick-haired Dean was
everybody’s stereotype of an old-time
southern politician, sticking a long
cigar in his mouth as he walked the
floor of the Senate.
Bobby Rowan of Enigma, who
served alongside Dean for 10 years,
can tell many stories about Roscoe.
Dean wanted to give a speech to
the Senate on some agricultural topic,
most likely price supports, but wasn’t
sure he was up to the task.
He enlisted the erudite Rowan, who
had been a school teacher before
entering politics, to help him draft
some remarks.
Rowan and another senator, Frank
Sutton of Norman Park, cobbled
together a speech that consisted large
ly of political gibberish, such as this
immortal phrase: “Nepotism is no
excuse for extemporaneous frivolity.”
They were convinced that Dean
would see through the joke, but Dean
delivered the speech exactly as writ
ten.
Roscoe stuck so closely to the text
that he even read the stage directions
out loud, at one point declaiming,
“Fellow senators - now tell a joke!”
Dean’s political hero was Alabama
Gov. George Wallace, who was such
an inspiration that Dean recorded
“The Ballad of George Wallace” after
the 1972 assassination attempt on the
governor.
You can still find the recording on
YouTube if you look long enough.
It was also in 1972, after George
McGovern chose Sargent Shriver as
his vice presidential running mate,
that some of Dean’s senate colleagues
played another of their many tricks
on him.
The senators left a note on Dean’s
desk saying that Shriver wanted to talk
to him.
Someone pretending to be Shriver
also called Dean’s office and left a
message for Dean to call back.
The word got back to Dean and he
called the McGovern campaign offic
es, demanding that Shriver be put on
the phone.
“I have no idea who you are,” Shriver
tom
crawford
told Dean.
Dean later found himself in deep
trouble when he filed bogus mileage
expense vouchers claiming that he
was making several round trips a day
between Jesup and Atlanta.
A jury acquitted him
on that charge, prompt
ing Dean to double
down in front of the
cameras: “I am innocent
and not guilty.”
If that brush with the
law concerned him, he
never showed it.
Dean had his eye on
higher office and in 1978
decided to make a run
for governor against
George Busbee, a pop
ular incumbent who was
going for a second term.
Dean knew he’d have to raise a
ton of money to take on Busbee, but
wasn’t sure where to get it.
At the same time, that was a period
when the Georgia coast was teeming
with drug dealers trying to bring their
goods into the country.
The inevitable happened: the GBI set
up a sting in which Dean negotiated
with an agent posing as a Colombian
drug lord.
Dean promised he would allow the
smuggling of “funny cigars” into the
U.S. in return for contributions to his
gubernatorial campaign.
Dean lost that Democratic primary
race to Busbee, and was later indict
ed and convicted in federal court on
a charge of conspiracy to smuggle
drugs.
That court case ended Dean’s politi
cal career and ruined his family finan
cially.
He lived out the rest of his life in
Jesup, going into a ’’slow decline,” as
one observer put it.
Last week, at the age of 80, Roscoe
left this world.
He was a person who took several
wrong paths in life, but his passing is a
reminder of a time when politics was
a lot more fun to write about.
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.
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Old manufacturing
jobs are gone
forever
Three decades ago, textile manufac
turing was a major industry in Northeast
Georgia. Dozens of plants dotted the
local area.
Textile jobs were a major part of the
South’s transition from an agrarian econ
omy to one of industrialization and man
ufacturing in the post-Reconstruction era.
Today, few of those textile factories
remain. The com
bination of automa
tion and offshoring
has taken most of
those low-skilled,
commodity textile
jobs to other coun
tries. What remains
in the U.S. are high
tech, heavily auto
mated textile jobs
that require a high
er level of skills
than the textile jobs
of a generation ago.
Therein lies a larger story of how man
ufacturing in the U.S. has declined and
of how difficult it will be to bring back
the “millions” of industrial jobs as was
promised during the recent election.
Moreover, this issue involves the broad
er concepts of Nationalism, Isolationism,
Free Trade and Globalization, all buzz
words that float around our political
culture like wasps waiting to sting.
A large number of Americans see the
nation’s economic linkage with other
countries as a threat. “Globalization” has
become a dirty word. In its most extreme
form, it has become the nexus of nutty
conspiracy theories: That U.S. indepen
dence is being compromised by a “New
World Order” blah, blah, blah.
But globalization isn’t something new,
nor is it a conspiracy. Economic trade
has been the focus of every major nation
state for thousands of years: The Silk
Road, the Tea Route and the Spice Route
were all early aspects of how nations
trade goods with each other. Trade drove
the era of exploration, leading to the dis
covery and settlement of the Americas
by European powers.
And it was trade disputes — specifically
taxes on imported tea — that led to the
dawn of the American Revolution.
All of that was “globalization” in its
early stages. Today, we’re linked with
other countries not just by sea and land,
but also with communications, finance,
culture and other intangible exchanges.
There is a huge amount of goods that
move out of the U.S. to other nations,
and the importing of goods from other
nations.
But as with any economic exchange,
there are always winners and losers
along the way. Locally, the textile industry
was hurt by the offshoring of production
that began in the 1990s. At the same
time, however, the local poultry indus
try has been bolstered by similar trade
agreements that have allowed increased
exports to other nations. One was a
loser, the other a winner.
Following the recent election, there
has been a lot of talk about modifying
or ending much of this trade in a bid
to force companies to re-industrialize
in the U.S. But major re-industrializa-
tion is unlikely to happen on a grand
scale. There are too many multi-national
companies that have invested billions in
plants and facilities around the world.
They aren’t going to walk away from that.
And even if that were possible, the
move would not “bring back” American
industrial jobs as some believe. A
Nationalistic-based economy would, in
fact, probably throw the nation into a
deep economic depression and would
destabilize other nations, much to the
detriment of the U.S.
The decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs
isn’t a simple matter of bad trade deals
as some claim. There are larger forces
at work.
First, the economy here and in other
industrialized nations is shifting from
manufacturing to information. Intellectual
capital has become just as important as
machinery in this new economy.
Second, robotics and other automa
tions are replacing cheap manual labor
jobs. In the example of textiles, those
businesses chased cheap labor in the
1990s as they fled to Mexico, China and
other nations. Forcing them to come
back to the U.S. wouldn’t automatically
create a slew of new jobs. It would,
instead, force high tech automation into
those manufacturing plants because
See Buffington on Page 5A