Southern Discomfort May Be His Shot

By Ellen Barry

March 1, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

WOODBURY, Ga. —

Carl Fishburn is the kind of voter President Bush should be able to count on. The owner of a hardware and lumber store in this farming town of 1,200, Fishburn shakes his head in disgust at the mention of John F. Kerry, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race. Rush Limbaugh’s radio show has a soothing influence on him.

But a funny thing happened to him during the primary season. He began to like a Democratic candidate.

“I like that Edwards guy. He’s my kind of folks,” said Fishburn, 59, a Vietnam veteran who spent 30 years as a railroad worker. “He sounds like somebody from my hometown. He came from nothing.”

As the only contest in the South among the 10 primaries and caucuses on Tuesday, the vote in Georgia carries an urgency for the presidential hopes of Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Kerry is heavily favored to win the day’s two biggest prizes -- the California and New York primaries. Edwards’ strategy for Super Tuesday is to do well enough to keep his campaign alive until March 9, when voters in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas go to the polls. As part of that plan, a victory in Georgia looms as a virtual must.

Edwards hopes to attract support from independents and Republicans, who are allowed to vote in Georgia’s Democratic primary. Such backing propelled him to his second-place finish in Wisconsin’s Feb. 17 primary.

Polls have painted a mixed picture of Edwards’ prospects in Georgia -- at least one put him within range of Kerry, while others have shown him far behind.

Kerry has campaigned little in the state -- a one-day stop in Atlanta last week was his first visit since the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses. Edwards, by contrast, spent five days in Georgia after the caucuses and returned for more campaigning this weekend. But Kerry has racked up endorsements from some of Georgia’s most respected Democratic leaders.

Partly for that reason, Edwards has not focused his energy on the traditional Democratic stronghold of Atlanta. Instead, he has devoted much of his time to the middle and southern parts of the state, where conservative white voters, wracked by job losses, may be willing to abandon Bush.

“They’re voting with their belly,” said former Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat who has campaigned vigorously for Edwards. “In prosperous times, folks become a little more concerned about splitting hairs on social issues.” Now, he said, “they’re visceral. They feel threatened. They feel angry.”

It is a risky strategy for Edwards. The Atlanta region is densely populated with die-hard Democratic loyalists -- liberal whites, Latinos and particularly African Americans, who typically make up 35% to 45% of the Democratic vote, according to Bobby Kahn, chairman of the state Democratic Party.

In many ways, though, Atlanta is a boomtown sealed off from the rest of Georgia -- particularly the area that falls below the “gnat line,” named after a marked increase in flying insects. The biggest sectional difference this year is economic: Atlanta has been an engine of job creation, adding nearly 68,600 jobs in the last year alone, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of Georgia State University’s Economic Forecasting Center.

Buoyed by Atlanta’s new jobs, Georgia’s unemployment rate is 4% -- lower than the national average of 6%.

As Atlanta grows, political battles in the state’s northern part revolve around social issues.

The picture is different south of the gnat line. In recent decades, the region has “moved from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy to a big question-mark economy,” said Beth Schapiro, whose company surveys Georgia voters.

During Bush’s presidency, Georgia has lost 67,400 jobs in the furniture, electronics, textile and other manufacturing industries, according to Bob Baugh, director of the Industrial Council of the AFL-CIO.

“I can’t even say I’m middle class any more. I’m poor, working poor,” said Shirley Grimmett, 47, who left a job in Ohio at a hospital when she moved to Columbus, Ga., last summer to care for her aging parents. Working for a social service agency -- for half the salary she earned at the hospital -- Grimmett can’t afford to rent an apartment of her own.

The loss of white-collar jobs, in particular, has brought gnawing insecurity to the area. This month, Lee Snider, 39, arrived at his job as a technical writer at a credit card processing firm to be greeted with “little office whispers” and anxious clusters among the cubicles. Halfway through the work day, a friend checked the office e-mail directory for their boss’ name -- and discovered it had been deleted.

By the end of the day, 237 jobs had been “eliminated,” including Snider’s.

Snider, who left the Army five years ago and has no college degree, has found that most of the jobs he is qualified for are in the service sector and offer no benefits.

“It’s kind of bleak from my perspective,” he said. “After you work in a professional environment, you don’t feel like asking someone if they want to super-size it. You’re supposed to work your way up the ladder, not down.”

Politically, Snider is an undecided white male. And that, analysts said last week, is what makes the middle and southern sections of Georgia interesting.

Two years ago, swing voters from the region were key to one of the most bitter Democratic defeats in Georgia’s history -- Barnes lost to businessman Sonny Perdue, who became the state’s first Republican governor in 130 years. For many, Barnes’ defeat marked Georgia’s final departure from a Democratic tradition that dated to the Civil War.

But Democrats are betting that, in a swath of Georgia hurt by job losses, voters’ new loyalties to the GOP will turn out to be shallow. There is a population of uncommitted voters who may be swayed by issues like terrorism or the economy, said Merle Black, a professor of government and politics at Emory University in Atlanta.

“We’ve got two minority parties in Georgia. There are places that can be Democratic one year and Republican the next,” Black said. “The white moderates, they go back and forth.”

Edwards hopes they come his way in large numbers. He’s counting on voters such as Bruce Robinson, 57.

Robinson described himself as a “hard-core, middle-of-the-road swing voter with conservative leanings.” But his loyalties this year are being driven by a mounting rage against Bush over high government spending and the war in Iraq.

Robinson came to see Edwards at the Capitol last week as a last-ditch alternative to what he predicted he would do in November: “Hold my nose, squint my eyes and vote for Kerry.”

But other Edwards admirers ruled out voting for Kerry under any circumstances.

At the Fishburn family store in Woodbury, Carl Fishburn and his wife, a teacher, criticized Kerry’s use of his combat history in Vietnam during the campaign.

“I would never recount what I did over there,” Fishburn said.

Penny Fishburn said she was impressed by Bush’s strength in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They fell silent and thoughtful at the prospect of a choice between Edwards and Bush.

“Edwards,” Penny Fishburn said, “is a good enough man.”

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Georgia profile

As the only Southern state voting in Tuesday’s round of

10 Democratic presidential contests, Georgia looms as a virtual must-win for Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

But Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts leads in most polls.

Snapshot

Population

Statewide: 8.2 million

Urban residents: 71.7%

Residents 65 and older: 9.6%

Median household income: $42,433