Rest in peace

Tom Mishou, who came as close as anyone I know to being a “happy warrior” of politics, passed away Monday morning in hospice care after a brief struggle with cancer. They will announce a date later for a memorial service, which will probably be held in late September or October.

I knew Tom as both a professional associate and a friend. As a key political aide to secretaries of state Max Cleland and Cathy Cox, he was the person to see if you needed to get copies of public records involving the agency. He also had an amazing memory of politicians and election campaigns, both here and in his home state of Minnesota (where he was a high school classmate of one Jim Janos, a hard-assed Navy Seal who later became better known as professional wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura). I spent many hours in Mishou’s tiny capitol office discussing the latest gossip or laughing over the remembered antics of some politico.

He also took on the tasks of serving as state boxing commissioner and executive director of the Georgia Athletic and Entertainment Commission, the agency established by the General Assembly to regulate ticket brokering firms after ticket scalping was legalized.

“He was one of the most dedicated state employees I ever knew — gave his all to his many jobs at the Secretary of State’s office,” Cox said. “No one in the history of state government ever did more to nurture and professionalize the state’s Boxing Commission — one of those misfit state functions that no one really wanted to deal with.”

“When they gave it to me right after my election as secretary of state, Tom willingly took it over and put processes in place to actually carry out the regulatory function it was created to perform,” Cox added.

After Cox lost the Democratic primary for governor and stepped down as secretary of state in December 2006, Mishou, a military veteran, retired from state government and signed on as a civilian defense contractor in Iraq.

“I never thought I’d end up in Iraq, but here I sit — sometimes in a bunker, but mostly in my new office,” he told me in a February 2007 email. “The decision to come here appears, at this point anyway, to have been a good one. The work schedule is grinding — we work 12 hours a day, seven days a week . . . I’m in the northern Iraq area, just on the outskirts of Mosul. Clearly this is an active combat zone, but not nearly as active as the Baghdad area. We catch some mortar rounds almost nightly, but they seem to just be harassing fire and nothing intended to signal any major escalation in the action.”

While on assignment in Iraq, Mishou suffered a heart attack and had to return to the United States for heart surgery. The last time I saw him on a capitol visit a few months ago, I almost didn’t recognize him. He had dropped a lot of weight after the surgery and was sporting a buzz cut instead of his flowing grey hair. But he still had that wicked sense of humor and love of politics that had made him part of the community.

In recent months Mishou had enrolled in a cooking school and had plans to attend cooking schools around the world. Those plans were set aside, alas, because of his rapidly worsening medical problems.

Goodbye, Tom, and rest in peace. It’s people like you who make politics fun.