Reed and Cagle: Peeling the onion

Posted: May 28, 2006 - 8:20pm

Let's start with the assumption that Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle have to argue about something.

The problem is that, if you take their current positions on the issues at face value, there's probably not a dime's worth of difference.

No matter what the question, the responses from the Republican candidates for lieutenant governor are predictably conservative.

Letting government take land for shopping malls? Reed, the former GOP state chairman, and Cagle, a state senator from Chestnut Mountain, are against it.

Restrictions on megabucks personal injury lawsuit verdicts? They're for it.

Amnesty for illegal immigrants? They're against it.

Or, as Yule Brynner said in "The King and I," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But none of this gives voters reason to choose one candidate over the other.

For that and other reasons, neither candidate is willing to take the other's current positions at face value.

Hence Reed is trying to question whether Cagle really means what he says on government land grabs and personal injury awards.

Cagle ultimately voted the way he talks on both questions. But he missed some votes and on the matter of lawsuits - the so-called tort reform issues - he sometimes voted the other way.

Coincidentally - or maybe not - Reed's campaign notes, Cagle's received fat campaign contributions from trial lawyers, who receive a big cut of awards in lawsuits.

Cagle responds that the votes he missed were during excused absences and that the other votes cited by Reed were on minor procedural matters. And Reed, too, has taken campaign money from lawyers, he says.

Reed has the luxury of not having to defend a legislative voting record; he doesn't have one. But he does have a long record of advocacy on issues and Cagle is making the best of that.

Accordingly, Cagle claims Reed in 2004 "called giving legal status to virtually every illegal alien in America today a 'responsible policy.' "

Reed did defend a proposal by President Bush that included amnesty provisions, but didn't quite match Cagle's description.

And Reed has repeatedly claimed that the GOP runs serious political risks if it is too stridently anti-immigrant. But that's not the same as endorsing amnesty.

Luckily for Reed, gambling's not a big campaign issue in Georgia. If it were, his work on the issue - knowingly or otherwise, he helped gambling interests shaft their competitors - would be a bigger albatross than it already is.

Those of you who follow the race can expect to read more on these and other disputes over the next seven weeks or so before the July 18 primary.

Those of you who don't will have a hard time avoiding them unless you shun television and radio.

Trying to sort through the crossfire of claims - and those that are sure to come - is like peeling the layers of an onion.

Roll back one layer, and Reed may make more sense. Peel another and Cagle's case seems more cogent.

But removing even a few layers skins back any pretension either candidate has to unambiguous purity on the issues.

That should shock only those who expect candidates to be a cross between a saint and Peter Pan, never settling for half a loaf, never maturing, never re-evaluating.

But Reed and Cagle say we should be horrified because, in their view, their opponent fails to meet that standard.

Indeed, they both probably do.

Given that politics is the art of the possible, it might be as bad or worse if they didn't.

But, to repeat, they have to argue about something.

We've got to put up with it for seven or so more weeks.

But we don't have to take it 100 percent seriously.

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