April 25, 2009 11:39 pm
—
The first candidate for statewide office made it to my office this week. Brian Kemp of Athens wants to be Georgia’s next Secretary of State.
You might remember that Mr. Kemp was unsuccessful in taking the agriculture seat from long-time commissioner Tommy Irvin in the last election. He carried the banner for the Republican Party.
He and I share some common friends and from them I hear he is the type of person we need representing us in Atlanta. He told me one of the first people he visited upon arriving in Valdosta was Deb Cox, our election superintendent.
“I wanted to know about her needs in the local office. I also asked her about early voting,” he said. This visit shows him to be an astute politician. He recognizes the need to learn from the people on the front lines.
The popularity of early voting is going to change how we run campaigns, he said. Where candidates spend their money will no longer be dictated by the Election Day vote. He explained that early voting is a part of his campaign strategy.
The secretary of state office is not just about elections but is responsible for managing corporation registrations, the licensing of some professions, regulating the sales of securities and maintaining the state’s archives. Brian Kemp is a small-business owner and a former state senator so he has a good understanding of the workings of the office.
While we talked, I shared with him that a now-deceased aunt had been the personal secretary to one of Georgia’s most renowned secretary’s of state, Ben W. Fortson. He was in that job for 37 years dying in office in 1979 without ever facing opposition in seven elections.
My aunt was there in 1947, his second year in office, when he became involved in the “three governors controversy.” He and the wheelchair he was confined to since an accident in 1927 took center stage in this unbelievable page of Georgia history.
In a 1963 series, “Men in Power,” published in the Atlanta Constitution, Celestine Sibley wrote: “Fortson has done more to dramatize for school children and many grownup voters one artifact of state government than any history teacher could hope to do. The great seal of Georgia, which is kept in his office safe, didn’t mean much to anybody until 1947, when Eugene Talmadge died before he could take office as governor and his son, Herman, now U.S. Sen. Talmadge, and the lieutenant governor M. E. Thompson, both claimed the office. Without the great seal, neither man’s official actions could be properly attested. And until the courts acted, nobody could find the great seal. Fortson had it hidden under the cushion of his wheelchair — ‘sitting on it like a setting of duck eggs,’ he says.”
Lieutenant Governor Thompson from Valdosta won the governor’s office through a 5-2 Georgia Supreme Court decision but lost the job in a 1948 special election to Herman Talmadge.
Brian Kemp is on his way to the state capitol and from our visit and from what I hear from his friends, I am sure he would get my aunt’s vote.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.