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| | Issue #19.48 :: 06/25/2008 - 07/01/2008 | Fleming grows more shrill, Broun gains steam
| BY MURFEE FAULK
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Barry Fleming, candidate for Congress.
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AUGUSTA, GA - Awash with cash and facing an anti-establishment candidate, Barry Fleming should be skating along smiling. The Republican challenger for the 10th District congressional seat, however, seems to become more shrill by the week.
At last weekend’s debate with incumbent Congressman Paul Broun, Fleming came across as desperate, nothing like the confident and cheerful visage posted on his campaign Web site.
Republican party insiders say the incumbent has continued to win even more of the Joe Sixpack Republican support that he picked up in the final days of the campaign to replace the late Charlie Norwood.
Those are the Republicans without the ‘W’ bumper stickers and ostentatious lapel pins. They might watch NASCAR and drive pickup trucks, but they’ve got to fill those trucks with $4-a-gallon gasoline. Loyalty to the party faithful who got them into that predicament is being sorely tested, and they are not about to let some suit tell them how to vote.
This would tend to go against an incumbent. But Broun has managed to maintain the image of a Ron Paul-like outsider who votes by principle rather than party direction.
But perhaps nowhere was this difference more evident than in the candidates’ answers to a question by Augusta Chronicle editor Mike Ryan. Ryan asked the candidates who killed the Republican revolution of the 1990s.
Fleming said the party went into decline after Gingrich’s retirement. (The record shows that Gingrich was already toast within his own party by 1996, the year before he was removed from the post of speaker by a party coup.)
Broun received more spectator approval when he said the party went into decline when it ignored fiscal responsibility and began spending irresponsibly.
Still, observers say the final stretch will be fierce. With three weeks to go to the election, Broun’s signs dot the Columbia County landscape like an invasive species. That big Fleming war chest is about to get tapped for television commercials, and he has enough to flood the airwaves in a final Hail Mary bid. | |
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