Fresh Loaf

Jim Maddox, caught between naps

The Atlanta City Council voted today to raise property taxes by 3 mills, an outcome we’d been predicting for weeks. But the actual vote count — 8 to 7 — was closer than anyone expected it to be. Not because Council members believed the tax hike was a bad idea. Hell, with only one or two possible exceptions, even those who voted against it were privately praying it would pass.

No, the vote was so close because several of our Council members possess, as Teddy Roosevelt once said, “the backbone of a chocolate eclair.”

Exhibit A is Jim “40 Winks” Maddox, the self-proclaimed “Dean of the Council” because he’s warmed a chair in City Hall for more than three long decades. Today, Maddox shocked his colleagues by voting against the tax hike and the $541 million budget. This is a guy who, two months ago, said publicaly that he didn’t think Mayor Franklin’s proposed 3-mill increase was big enough!

“I’m prepared to approve a tax increase to end the furloughs for all employees,” he announced at a budget hearing at the end of April.

But that was before he picked up three challengers for his beloved Council seat. So, today, without giving anyone a heads up, the lily-livered Maddox cravenly hung his colleagues out to dry.

Here’s guessing the next Council retreat is going to be awwwkward.

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Even worse than losing an election, the national Republican Party has lost its way. The party that worked so hard at dividing America with one cultural wedge issue after another now finds itself divided, split into two camps: those who realize they need to reform the party and those who don’t.

At this point, I’m hoping only the most blinkered partisan would deny in his or her heart that the GOP somehow ended up being the party of ignorance, fear and intolerance. At least, those have tended to be the tools that party strategists have used to rally the troops.

By ignorance, I mean the systematic attacks on book-learnin’, evolution and competence reflected in the personality cults surrounding Pres. Bush and Gov. Palin, and in the ridiculous war on “elites,” whatever that means. Fear-mongering – over terrorist attacks, Iran, etc. – was, of course, the Bush administration’s default position. And the intolerance shown against gays and immigrants is hardly in keeping with real American values.

In the waning days of the presidential race, David Frum and other Republican leaders and strategists acknowledged that their party was floundering and that the Rovian tactics of smear and knee-jerk social conservatism won’t work anymore.

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