I am not very good when it comes to making predictions, but as I speculated the other day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is continuing to dig into the history of political contributions to Insurance Commissioner John “The Ox” Oxendine. The latest manifestation is an article in the Sunday AJC by Cam McWhirter that looks at an insurance industry committee whose members are appointed by Oxendine, most particularly his money-man Dee Yancey III.
This is not good news for the Oxendine campaign. Every AJC article that appears — and I am confident there will be more — adds to the drip, drip, drip of accusations that he’s been shaking down the people he regulates for campaign money. I expect another outraged statement to be issued by the Oxendine campaign accusing the AJC of conspiring with Karen Handel to destroy him.
Handel, of course, will have her own issues to deal with in her campaign, including the fact that she doesn’t have a college degree.
It is interesting to me that in the campaign video Handel released a few weeks ago, the traditional media concentrated on the fact that it poked fun at Oxendine by including b-roll of a giant ox being led around by its nose ring. This was seen as a ballsy, all-out attack by a candidate who was really serious about winning.
No one really took a look at some of the claims Handel was making in the video about her political career — claims that aren’t supported by the facts. (Interested readers can view the video on YouTube.)
As the video displays a photo of former Fulton County sheriff Jackie Barrett, the narrator intones: “When conventional wisdom said the corrupt sheriff of Fulton County couldn’t be touched, Karen Handel said ‘Bring it on’ and the sheriff was removed from office.”
Those words imply that Handel was responsible for removing Barrett from office, but in fact she had nothing to do with the sheriff’s fate. Barrett was already under investigation for her handling of sheriff’s department funds when Handel took office as Fulton County commission chair in December 2003.
Although Handel was an outspoken critic of the controversial sheriff, she had no authority as commission chair over the sheriff’s tenure in office. Gov. Sonny Perdue did have that authority and suspended Barrett for a period of time in 2004.
When Barrett returned to office after her suspension, the Journal-Constitution of Oct. 21, 2004 reported: Handel acknowledged there was nothing she could do about Barrett’s return, calling it “a horrible dilemma and frustrating position to be in.”
Handel’s “Ox” video also makes this claim: “Elected chairman of the Fulton County Commission, she was presented with a huge tax increase. She threw that budget out and wrote a new one. With rational cuts she balanced it, and saved Georgians a hundred million dollars.”
That statement is partly accurate and partly unsupported by the facts.
When Handel took office in December 2003, replacing former chairman Mike Kenn, the county commission was considering a $755 million budget for 2004 that would have included a $77 million property tax increase.
Handel proposed a new budget that would not have required a property tax increase, but she was only one of seven votes on a county commission with a Democratic majority. Although she did indeed “write a new budget,” it was disregarded by the other commissioners and an entirely different budget was eventually adopted.
To Handel’s credit, the budget adopted in January 2004 did not include a property tax increase and did cut the spending level from $755 million to $712 million – that amounts to $43 million in reductions, which is still a long way from the $100 million claimed in her video. In addition, the reduced budget was $34 million bigger than the final county expenditures for 2003.
The Handel video also makes the bold claim that she “cut spending” in the secretary of state’s office by 15 percent. Big freaking deal. EVERY state agency has had to cut spending by 15 percent or more over the past year because of the budget crisis caused by the recession. Handel’s actions were hardly novel — they were in line with what every other state department was doing.
Handel is lucky that the AJC has decided, for whatever reason, not to do any close fact-checking on her campaign video. For now, the Atlanta newspapers have their guns pointed at the Ox.
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