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Roy Barnes
is on the square
I was
walking along the square in Marietta, thinking the law office of Roy
Barnes must be just a few doors down. But then, through the window of
an old white-marble bank, there he was, the former governor himself,
peering into a computer screen.
People wave at him through that window all the time, he told me
when I went inside for our appointment. Sometimes, he said with a
smile, "they wave with their whole hand."
It's tough losing an election. After Sonny Perdue beat him a year
ago, Barnes spent six months working for Legal Aid. Then he set up a
family law firm with his daughter and her husband. Barnes said he
didn't want to work for a big Atlanta law firm, and he didn't want to
sit on corporate boards, either. (Luckily, he's already rich.)
He put his feet up on the desk. His suit was sort of rumpled and
shapeless. His hair stuck out the way it did before he became
governor. He seemed pretty relaxed.
We crossed the square, Barnes greeting people wherever he went, and
went into Shillings for lunch. Barnes recalled visiting the old
building as a boy, when it was a hardware store.
He ordered onion soup, a chef salad and unsweet tea. He talked
about books and the Leo Frank case and President George W. Bush.
Will he run for office again? No, he said. He had run 14 times,
winning and losing, and that was enough. "I'm cured," Barnes said.
He's 55 and looks older.
What if a Democrat became president and asked him to go to work in
Washington? Barnes didn't want that, either. He said he dislikes
Washington. He likes to go home at night and read.
Some say his support for a de-Confederatized state flag cost him
last year's election, pure and simple. Others feel the flag weighed
heavily, but that Barnes also had made enemies on other fronts. What
does he think?
He didn't say it was just the flag, and he
agreed that the flag stood for more than race. But others who
voted against him -- such as the teachers, whom he'd irritated as
governor -- also had voted against him four years earlier. Meanwhile
flag-conscious conservatives poured out to vote against him.
And he lost, he said, just as governors in Alabama and South Carolina
have lost over the flag.
The South, he said more than once, has changed and not changed.
I wanted him to talk about Gov. Sonny Perdue, who was in Japan, and
former Gov. Zell Miller (Sean Hannity's friend). But Barnes mentioned
an unwritten code that urges former governors not to discuss each
other in public.
He said he thought a Democrat could still get elected senator
(though it's late) and that Bush could lose in Georgia. The state
resembles the country, he said. It's pretty evenly divided.
Barnes said he went to a dinner in Atlanta with Bill Clinton last
spring just as the war with Iraq was about to start. He said Clinton
said something really interesting.
Clinton said the U.S. might get away with being the world's only
superpower for a few years, and we can go it alone if necessary and
work our preemptive will. But in 30 years the economy of China will be
bigger than ours. The economy of Europe already is bigger. Will the
world's memories of American arrogance still rankle after 30 years? Or
will we have made friends and helped order the world for the long
haul?
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/1003/28colin.html |
