Less-than-fond memories of Barnes’ first-term
Before welcome Barnes as a potential savior, remember how badly he screwed up the first time.
As Thomas “gluten-free” Wheatley and others noted earlier, Democrat Roy Barnes is running for governor.
Barnes held the governorship from 1999 to 2003. His re-election bid was thwarted in 2002 by a then-obscure raindancing fisherman from central Georgia named George Perdue. Please, call him Sonny.
Metro Atlantans have some good reasons to be excited about Barnes.
He’s smart. He’s experienced. He’s won statewide office already.
And perhaps most importantly, he’s more likely than anyone seeking the governorship to break the militant, city-hatin’ Georgia GOP’s chokehold on metro Atlanta.
But before we get our hopes up too much, let’s remember: Barnes four-year governorship wasn’t just bad. It was tragic.
Barnes began his governorship with astonishing promise.
From consumer-friendly healthcare reform, tax cuts, open-government rules, Roy had it goin’ on.
The most impressive of his early accomplishments was the creation of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, a metro-wide agency that promised to at last impose sanity on Georgia’s unsustainable, sprawling growth.
Here’s what the Economist said in July 1999:
No other governor in the country has anything approaching GRTA—but then few cities have built new roads with anything approaching Atlanta’s abandon.
Under the GRTA (widely translated as “Give Roy Total Authority”), Mr Barnes can exercise complete control over transport and development in the 20 counties that make up the Atlanta metropolitan area, as well as in any other part of the state that falls out of compliance with anti-pollution requirements. This bill also contains a political masterstroke: it gives the governor the right to veto actions by the state Department of Transportation, which has been a law unto itself for much of this century.
So what happened?
Like in any good tragedy, it was Barnes’ strength that did him in. He over-reached.