The loss of another State House race that Republicans should have won (the 22nd July special election in Walker County, in Northwest Georgia) demonstrates yet again that just being conservative is not enough to win elections. Rep. Mike Snow, the Democratic incumbent, lost narrowly last November, when Roy Barnes was the issue. But in two re-runs since, with Barnes gone, he has won narrowly. According to the Atlanta newspapers, even Snow thought he was going to lose this third time, but he won. His strategy was classic Good Ole Boy: claim to be a conservative just like the Republican, fuzz up all the issues, and win on long-standing local connections.

Snow’s victory is a bad omen for us, because it is a model for how the Democrats can win in 2004. The Democrats were united. We were divided. Our candidate would not call on Gov. Perdue for help, because of disagreement over raising the tobacco tax. And our side had nothing to talk about, except Snow’s supposed support for raising taxes. Every time our candidate scored points against Snow on the tax issue, he was scoring points against Perdue, too, and against the notion that Republican control of the state government is a good thing – and therefore in the end against his own candidacy! If we don’t get ourselves out of this ditch, we can expect to see this little drama performed all over the state next year.

We got ourselves into this particular ditch because as a party we had no positive issues (i.e., things we proposed to do if we won) in 2002 and no legislative program in 2003. As it turned out, we didn’t need positive issues to beat Roy Barnes, we just needed to be against what he was for – King Roy, reapportionment, education reform, the new flag. But having won the right to govern, our legislative leadership and our new administration totally failed to dominate the debate in 2003 with the kind of bold proposals we had been incubating for a decade. Worse, our Republican State House Leader, Lynn Westmoreland, became the most visible public opponent of our Republican Governor both on strengthening ethics laws and on fiscal policy. Many thought, and think, that this was just posturing – an attempt to position himself to run for Congress – but whatever the reason, it created a strong public impression that as a party we were incurably divided and not up to the task of governing.

In a way, this is all very odd, because we regularly proposed positive programs while we were in the minority. Every year while I was the House Minority Leader (and in some years before that, under Steve Stancil in the House and Skin Edge in the Senate), the House and Senate Republican caucuses held a joint press conference at the beginning of the legislative session to announce what we would push for. Despite our minority status, we actually enacted some big ideas: welfare reform; cuts in income, sales, payroll, and property taxes; charter schools; keeping violent criminals in prison for at least 90% of their sentences. The things we didn’t pass, we campaigned on the next time around. We didn’t just say, “We’re conservative.” We said, “Here are the big ideas we’ll push for if you elect us.”

Gov. Perdue has the opportunity to do this now, to seize the initiative between sessions. The legislature is at home, and the Governor’s proposals, appointments, and actions are the only game in town, and will be until winter. The office of Governor is institutionally very strong in Georgia. Moreover, he has the bully pulpit. He can rally public enthusiasm for a lower-cost, more customer-friendly, more effective, much more honest state government, and he can make hundreds of appointments and policy decisions to effect it, without a single change in a single statute.

But he is moving with glacial slowness. To be sure, he vetoed a number of pork-barrel projects in the budget and ended the long-standing political abuse of the Governor’s Emergency Fund, he has made a small number of high-quality appointments, and he has created a serious-looking blue-ribbon commission to study state government. But he has yet to connect even these few dots into an appealing picture of what the “New Georgia” will be like. And dozens of key positions remain unfilled, and key decisions remain unmade.

And, of course, it is an additional burden that the Republican legislative leadership is, by and large, of no help. They undercut any message of fiscal conservatism by stuffing the budget full of their own pork at the midnight hour – something the Democrats had always done, but that we had led the people to believe that we would not do. And Westmoreland, the House Leader, who isn’t even doing the job any more – he’s running for Congress, though he refuses to step down as Leader – gets most of his media attention by pounding the Governor, just this past weekend leading the carping about how Perdue has appointed too many former Democratic officials to state boards. (This from someone who himself has been a leading cheerleader for former Democrats running for higher office as Republicans!)

Among the public, Governor Perdue got sort of a “bye” during the last legislative session, because he won an unexpected election victory and had not had much time to lay out a program or impact the budget, and because he inherited a fiscal crisis whose seriousness had been concealed by the previous administration. He is the antithesis of the high-handed Roy Barnes. He is likeable, and most people believe he is a good man who wants to do good things. Most Georgians, and nearly all Republicans, want him to succeed. But all of this will only carry him, and us, so far – not even through the next legislative session, certainly not through the next election.

Very soon, Governor Perdue must begin painting an appealing, imaginative, and forward-looking picture of what he wants the state to become, and he must be seen taking vigorous actions to make it happen. If the Democrats resist, we can fight the next election on those issues. If they go along, even better – we can fight the next election on extending real accomplishments. Without a positive program, though, we’ll lose, and – sad to say -- we should lose, because we’ll have offered the people nothing more than the Anti-Barnes. That will be old news by 2004.

This should not even need saying, because it is what we Republicans have fought for two generations to have the chance to do. Maybe it’s in the planning stage, maybe it will happen soon, but so far it is not happening, and it must, if 2002 is not to be our high-water-mark for another generation.