Bill Shipp interviewed by Bob Short
2006 September 28
Young Harris, GA
Reflections on Georgia Politics
ROGP-004
Original: video, 94 minutes

sponsored by:

Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
University of Georgia Libraries
and
Young Harris College

Date of Transcription: June 22, 2009


[Indiscernible notations due to poor audio quality]

BOB SHORT: Good afternoon and thank you for being here today. We are about to embark on yet another controversial subject in politics, and that is the role of the media in American politics. And it's a very controversial topic and it's one that has a very serious effect on how we are governed and by whom. I told Louisa I would remind you that the opinions expressed here today are not necessarily those of Young Harris College from ICF. So whatever is said is the opinions of those speaking, including myself.
As usual, I encourage you to ask questions at any time. If you have a question, please raise your hand. We will recognize you and try to answer your question as soon as we can. The reason we like to do it that way is to keep everybody asking questions at the same time. How many of you tuned into Fox Television on Sunday night and saw the interview of President Clinton by Wallace -- Chris Wallace?

AUDIENCE: *Loud murmuring*

SHORT: Well, I'm glad to see you're a very observant audience. That interview was billed as a discussion on global warming. It turned out to be a shouting match with Clinton doing most of the shouting.

MALE SPEAKERS: Amen. Amen.


SHORT: Seems Wallace got in with former President Bill's house by insinuating that he failed to eliminate Bin Laden, and as a result the war on terror suffered and resulted in the attack on 9/11.
My observation was that Clinton obviously didn't know how to change Carville around because if he did, Carville would never have allowed him to go on that program. Carville knows, as Clinton should have known, that Fox News is about as likely to ask Clinton a softball question as Wolf Blitzer and CNN are in praising President Bush. But I did this as a part of my research that I keep ongoing in newspapers and television and radio, to determine, if I can, what effect their news might have on the American public. And Sunday night, I got what I was looking for right quick because in the middle of that interview, as you'll recall, Wallace took time out for a commercial break. You remember that? And the commercial was sponsored by a group known as Progress for America, which is an organization that promotes patriotism, which we all appreciate. We all are patriots. We all want our country to win. We all want us to be united in all of our efforts.
The feature was a General by the name of Enuel Beckard who is a retired three-star General who was stationed at the Pentagon during 9/11 and in his remarks on that commercial, he outlined all of the previous terrorist attacks on American interests around the world. And insinuating that Clinton did nothing to stop them. Now, my question was, was that commercial interruption a coincidence or a planned attempt to assist Chris Wallace in his criticism of Clinton?

MALE SPEAKER: But you've got to remember the background of Fox News to begin with.

SHORT: We're getting to that. We're getting to that. I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a defender of Clinton or that I am a defender of Fox News. What I want to say to you is that the media, without a doubt, can most assuredly manipulate the news, and does so without fear or conscience, and that's what we want to talk about today. Hopefully, we can answer these questions -- do the media manipulate politics? Question two -- do politicians manipulate the media?
To help us answer those questions, we will have as our guest the Dean of Georgia's Political Reporters and Observers, Mr. Bill Shipp, of whom I'm sure many of you have heard. Bill writes an award-winning column for 60 Georgia newspapers twice weekly, and he appears on a weekly television program in Atlanta called The Georgia Gang. And he'll be with us here after our break.
Sometimes I shudder when I think of the powerful hold the mass media has on you and me and our fellow Americans. They have changed the way we think. They've changed we vote and they've changed we're governed. One analyst that I was reading the other night went so far as to say that the media are responsible for declining voter turnout, growing disenchantment with government, and weakening of political parties. Yet, they are an intricate part, as you know, of our daily lives.
The news and opinions that are expressed by the media certainly influences the outcome of elections, as well as the public's attitude toward the government. And I can tell you, after having spent many years in government and corporate life that I have never seen such a low opinion that people have about their government. Whether or not it's deserved is a matter of individual judgment. I was talking with a friend of mine who worked with me at the Atlanta Journal years ago and I was telling him what we wanted to do here today, and he told me this, and I wrote it down, and I want to read it to you because I think it's important. He says that American media may not always be successful telling their readers and listeners what to think, but they're absolutely stunningly successful in telling what to think about. And I think that's very true.
When we think of the media, we think of a big mass out there, a conglomerate of news outlets that we must depend on for news, and sometimes for opinions and for other things. But we fail sometimes to realize that the media is divided into several groups. First of all, you have the print. That's your newspapers, magazines, the scandal sheets in the grocery store and that sort of thing, and then there's the broadcast medium, which is the television, and radio, and, of late, movies. We have see a number of movies that have been produced with political themes. We have seen more and more movie stars get involved in politics, and we are now, I think, at the point where we must pay attention to the World Wide Web, and to the Internet, because the blogs, as you can find there nowadays are basically political. They are either pro or con government and pro or con politician. They're pro or con just about everything that they -- that you can imagine.
I do want to make -- before we get into the meat of this -- one observation that I think is important, and that is that, unlike the broadcast medium, the press is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The government has no regulatory power over a newspaper's ability to write news, issue their opinions, or make recommendations. No relevant regulatory power at all. But it does have regulatory power over the television, and I think soon the Internet, but based on the theory that air belongs to the people, and what happens in that air is of interest to the government and the Federal Communications Commission.
I was thinking the other day about World War II, when we sat by the radio in Clayton, Georgia listening to the reports of Edward R. Murrow, a very distinguished broadcaster who was on the front lines and sent all the news back home. But the news is not always good, but we had confidence in his integrity, and we believed what he said -- even though we didn't want to hear it. So having had that experience, I can truthfully say to you that I do not get a warm and fuzzy feeling today when I sit down before the television in the evenings and watch the television news. Murrow, for example, he simply told you what was going on in the war, and what our soldiers were doing, and we believed him. And unlike most of today's commentators, he offered no editorial comment. He didn't question our government's role in the war, or nor did he praise or criticize the Generals who were in charge of fighting the war.
And then I thought of good old Walter Cronkite. Remember Walter Cronkite? Walter Cronkite told us twice every day in a very calm and persuasive way, that's the way it is, with unbiased and factual news, and his signature sign-off. And then I remembered seeing for the first time the violence and the death of the Vietnam War on television. It was shocking -- period -- to me. We had never seen that before. We had never had a medium that could bring that kind of news right into our living rooms. And later, we and all our children were shocked by violence in the streets, bloodshed from demonstrators who opposed the war, even the street fights at our political conventions, all bared in our living rooms by television.
We were also told that some of these violent maneuvers were staged for filming, for television stations so they could improve their national ratings, and if thats true, and, really, I have no reason to believe it wasn't, then that is clearly sensationalizing news, and that is not the purpose of the print media or the broadcast media. News is news. It's what you see. It's what you hear, and you report that. You don't stage it and you shouldn't stage it. And we were told by a media expert that bias in the media is unavoidable. They say that deadline pressures, limited print space, the difficulty making a good story in a short period of time, inaccuracies in the reporting, unidentified sources that tell the truth -- all of these things, they say, are the reason for distortions and inaccuracies in the news. Should we buy that, should we believe that, or should we cling to the belief that the main function of the media is to inform and analyze the news by being accountable, by being fair, by being unprejudiced, and by being truthful?
I was always taught that the cannons of good journalism demand that the media research both sides of an issue. Unfortunately, we don't see too much of that today. The mass media has many opportunities to slant or to foster balanced news. One example is what is known as framing. Let's talk -- I have some examples here -- let's talk for a moment about framing. Framing means the way news is packaged, where it's placed, the size of the headlines, the use of photographs, and in the case of the television medium, the background material and pictures they use, the auditory and visual effects.
Now, I have here two examples of what can be defined as framing. The first is a story about a local politician who was running for reelection, which appeared on the front page of his weekly magazine, weekly newspaper, lauding him and claiming him a great person because he introduced a bill last January. Now, that is not timely news, but it's not the only example. I hold here yet another from a newspaper from Barrow County written by a state Senator who is up for reelection, which states her position on about every matter under the sun. It was given big billing in this newspaper, yet it never mentions her opponent. So what we have here is a case of newspapers deciding that they're going to run campaigns in their counties for their local candidates without giving people an opportunity to view their opponents. That is -- of course, politicians love that. Keeps their names on the front page and the best of all is, it's free. But it's unfair.
Another example of framing is -- and I saw this yesterday -- this is yesterday's Journal-Constitution. It has a front page story on the Iraq War and when you turn the page, you will see the upper right-hand portion of the newspaper, which is what the eye sees first. That story is about Senator Clinton taking on her husband's opponents and raising sand with just about everybody in the interview he had. Now, it's obvious that the newspaper wanted you to see that and wanted you to read that, so they placed it in a position where you can't miss it. Now, if it were on the other side of the page or if it were at the bottom of the page next to this buy stuff ad here, you probably would pass it by. That is known as framing and it's a technique that newspapers use in order to plug their favorite candidates. It's quite common. It's not fair and I don't think it measures up to the standard of good, fair political coverage.
Now, another form of manipulating you is what we call labeling, which you've all heard, I'm sure, and which both mediums use constantly. You can put a positive label or you can put a negative label on a candidate. Some examples of positive labels -- a leading candidate, without explanation why he or she is leading; strong on terrorism, which implies that the opponent is not; the man or the woman to beat, without telling why, without giving poll results or some reason why that individual is the candidate to beat; negative labels, they're also very common; tax-and-spend is what Republicans like to say about Democrats; right-wing conspirators, that's what Democrats like to say about Republicans; weak on defense, which was a label President Bush used in his campaign against John Kerry, and so on.
Also a very widely used label is the word reform. How many times have you heard the word reform? The media uses that word to suggest that somebody is making improvements in programs and governmental efforts when it's not true at all. Reform might result in loss of funding, cutting services, a lot of things that shouldn't happen, but they truly fit the label of reform because that's what the media makes it look like. Tax reform -- how many times over the years of your lifetime have you heard the word tax reform, which allegedly reduces taxes, but in truth about all it does is to shift the burden depending on the attitude of the Congress at the time. Welfare reform, tax reform, when you see the word reform -- investigate.
Now, there's also a practice that we all go through called front-loading. Front-loading means compressing too many primaries -- come in, George.

MALE SPEAKER: Hey, Bob.

SHORT: We're not ready for you, George.

MALE SPEAKER: Okay. I see a lot of familiar faces in here. *Laughter*

AUDIENCE: *Laughter*

SHORT: Have you've got the main man, George?

MALE SPEAKER: A lot of gray hair.

SHORT: Yeah. We are talking, George, now, about front-loading in elections. I know you're very much aware of that. You are a great public servant. But when you look at our Presidential primaries, reports nowadays will tell you who's winning and who's losing two years in advance and they dont know any more about it then you do. In fact, you probably know a lot more about it than I do, but they insist on telling you who the frontrunners are and who's going to be elected two years in advance. And that kind of coverage, at best, is a farce unless every candidate in the race is a multimillionaire or has the ability to raise a lot of money in a short period of time.
James Carville one time told me a successful Presidential contender must go into New Hampshire with at least $30 million or lose in the mega states where you have to spend money to compete for more delegates. And as you can well imagine, this process is slowly cutting out the average American because a handful of people can create candidates almost overnight, and they do it with fundraising, and local support groups that insist on them having the best shot at the election. So candidates that we all might have preferred in the beginning, but who trail in the pre-season money primaries have very little chance to win the election. Of course, the media denies their roles. They seem to overlook the fact that coverage of the Iowa caucuses and early primaries way back in 1970 has created this condition. I know of very few candidates who have taken on the establishment and won without some large sums of money.
Now, here's what we need to do. I have a special guest here today and I don't want to take up any of his time. So what I suggest we do is take about a five minute break and we'll be back with the honorable William Shipley.

BREAK

SHORT: We are delighted this afternoon to have with us Bill Shipp who is a prizewinning reporter and editor who's covered Southern politics and government for more than four decades. That's a long time. He writes a twice weekly column that appears in more than 60 newspapers, and he's director and panelist on The Georgia Gang, which is a weekly commentary show on news and politics on Channel 5 in Atlanta.
Bill has authored two books, The Ape-Slayer and other Snapshots, published in 1997, and a very popular and widely read book, which was a non-fiction piece on the 1964 murder of Atlanta army reservist, Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn by the Klan in Northeast Georgia. I think it's one of the - -

BILL SHIPP: Madison.

SHORT: Madison. Madison County, Georgia. He also is the director of Longstreet Press, which is an Atlanta based book publisher. He is the founding editor of Bill Shipp's Georgia, a weekly newsletter on Georgia politics and government, which appears both in print and on the net. He also is the associate editor of the magazine, Georgia Trend, and wrote a weekly column for that magazine, and he's been a contributing editor of the Atlanta magazine. He's won many awards and in 1998 the Atlanta Press Club presented him with the prestigious Whittier Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. Georgia Magazine named him the Best Serious Columnist for his essays in Time Magazine and his work with Georgia Trend. In 2003, the University of Georgia's Russell Library presented Bill and his former colleagues of the Red & Black Student Newspaper with the 50th Anniversary Social Justice award for their editorial opposition to segregation in 1963.
Bill spent three and a half decades on the staff of the Atlanta Journal Constitution where he was associate editor, editor, and senior editor, and political editor. He joined the Constitution as a reporter in 1956 -- the year I went to work. That's a long time ago. And he's carried out assignments overseas and with great --

SHIPP: That's enough, unless you want to write me my funeral arrangements!

*Laughter*

SHORT: We're delighted to have you Bill, and, as I mentioned, your journalistic career began in a bind, when you got national attention for fighting for the right of free speech and free press at the University of Georgia. Please tell us about that.

SHIPP: Well, we -- on The Red & Black at the time this was a crusading student newspaper that carried on a number of crusades, including trying to clean up student housing at the University of Georgia, and trying to clean up vice in Athens -- which was hopeless. So, Horace Ward, who was a graduate -- an honor graduate of Morehouse College attempted to enroll in the University of Georgia Law School. Since he had such good grades, we didn't see why not, and the Red & Black went to war on Horace Ward's behalf to integrate the University of Georgia Law School. That began my military career.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: The Governor objected. The chairman of the Board of Regents, who was named Roy Harris at the time --

AUDIENCE: I remember him.

SHIPP: You remember him? He said -- he gave an interview to Time Magazine about this, in which he said he didnt understand why I had not committed to playing football for Wally Butts. And anyway, the whole thing unfolded and the Red & Black was essentially fired, and I did join the army, and Horace Ward was never admitted to the University of Georgia Law School, although the University paid for the scholarship for him to go to Northwestern.

*Laughter*

And he later was elected to the Georgia Senate and immediately became Chairman of the University system.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: And he also became a judge. So anyway, that's how my career was begun.

SHORT: Now, did you have much contact with Roy Harris after that?

SHIPP: More than I wanted.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: Harris had chased -- as many of you all know, or probably most of you do -- he was a major figure in Georgia politics. He was a king maker. He had been Speaker of the House. He had come out of the liberal Ed Rivers administration and he was really the power behind the power behind the throne -- or one of the powers behind the throne -- in the section of -- of Herman Talmadge. He was an astute politician, and later I interviewed him and learned a good bit from him later on. The time I wrote about him, I think I knew more than when I talked to him.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Bill, I once heard that Roy Harris once remarked that he could change the outcome of the election in 39 Georgia counties after the polls closed.

* Laughter*

SHIPP: Which reminds me of another story of about a guy who lived up here, and Marvin Griffin losing the election. I will mention the guy's name. His name was Bob L. Baker. Marvin Griffin called Bob L., who was his neighbor in Bainbridge, and said, "Bob L., how many votes we got?" And Bob L. said, "How many do we need?"

SHORT: Bill, a lot of media has come along since you first became a journalist. How do you think the inclusion of talk shows, television talk shows, and radio talk shows, and the internet has impacted the medium of print?

SHIPP: Well, it's impacted more than the work of print, it's impacted the entire print news and magazine industry. You're seeing a rapid decline in the newspaper industry and if this audience here were about 35 years younger and I asked you to raise your hands about how many were newspaper subscribers, I doubt many more than two or three hands would be raised. You're seeing a major shift, first beginning with the 24-hour news channels and CNN and Fox, and then you see AM radio in its last throes, trying to survive and putting in a lot of talk show people. So you see the whole nature of the business change, whereas newspapers, who once set the agenda for news and opinion and government, we now have the entertainment industry setting the news, agenda, and I'm afraid sometimes the news and information becomes secondary to entertainment, and I'm not sure that's good for us.

SHORT: Now, here's the $64,000 question. Do you think the media can manipulate you about politics and government?

SHIPP: Do I think the media? --

*Laughter*

SHIPP: Absolutely, and by the same token, there's a symbiotic relationship between politics and the media. The media manipulates the politicians and the politicians manipulate the media. You watch -- watch Fox Television on end one of the spectrum and then watch MSNBC on the other end and you will see two different -- you'll see the same news event, which sounds like two total different events by the way they cover it, with Fox definitely taking the side of the Bush administration and the Republicans, and MSNBC taking the opposite tact. And it's really interesting to see how they take the same incidents, the same set of facts and see how they say -- Fox would say, this is the greatest thing Bush has ever done and MSNBC will say, he's leading us down the road to -- road to perdition.
But of course, that's also in the fine tradition of newspapers, but they do it with a little more flair and a little more skill.

SHORT: Well, since you mentioned it, there's some concern about large corporations and how they control the main networks. I ran a statistic that says that 30 years ago there were independent networks that were owned by 50 businesses. Today it's only five. So I'm concerned that that compression is going to affect news and, maybe, could be the end to the future news industry.

SHIPP: Well, I'm not sure about that because if you look at the major news networks, while the ownership has declined, so have the viewers of the major TV networks. That has steadily declined, and that decline is almost at the same ratio as the increase in popularity of the Internet, where every man can be a publisher, every man can have his own newspaper, and every man can have as great a circulation as any drawn-up, or as good as he is. So I'm not sure. I think in a sense, rather than restricting information, you have the profession, which under the big corporations is declining and information just running wild. More information than you can possibly generate, or more information -- a lot of information is not good. But there is so much information now that nobody can spot it all online.

SHORT: Bill, I've known you for a long time and I know how you feel about freedom of the press, but I'll ask this question. Do you think you should go to jail for failing to reveal an anonymous source?

SHIPP: I hate to tell you, Bob, I don't think I ought to go to jail!

*Laughter*

SHORT: Question here?

AUDIENCE: I came to Georgia in 1950 and the entire state was run as a single-party, entirely Democrat -- you were a democrat or you were nothing. Today, we have another ballgame. What brought it about? What was it that turned the tide to allow us to have -- ?

SHIPP: Well, I want to tell you something -- we don't have another ballgame. We've got the same ballgame you saw then, except you're seeing this rapidly involving to, if you're not a Republican you're not anything. But the whole thing is built -- if you look back then, you look now, the whole thing is built essentially on race, that the Republican party is the white party and the Democratic party is the black party. In 1950, exactly the opposite was true, the Republican party was considered the black party with a few white and Puerto Rico post office Republicans, who were white guys who hung around waiting for a Republican President to be elected so they could get a post office box.
You're seeing this rapidly -- if this Governor race does not turn out to be a real contest, the next Governor's race you're going to see, the real race is going to be in the Republican primary, just as in the fifties, the real races were in the Democratic primaries. The general elections were laughable.

AUDIENCE: Our first Republican representative was a Senator from Savannah, as I remember, and that broke the ice, apparently, and changed the attitude in the state.

SHIPP: Mack Mattingly, who you're speaking of, he beat Talmadge in 1980 in one of the great upsets and Talmadge had thought he already had his big contest in the Democratic primary that year when he defeated Zell Miller, but as it turned out Zell Miller only softened him up for the general election. Talmadge had a number of personal problems. Mattingly beat him, and that was the beginning of genuine two-party politics, but it was also the beginning of the revolution back to one-party politics. You can really trace the rise of the Republican party to back when Lyndon Johnson was signing the Civil Rights legislation, and the rise of Barry Goldwater. A lot of Southerners said the Democratic party no longer represents what I think -- no longer represents my views or my interests.
And so -- and now, Republicans, first enunciated in 1980 by Goldwater and all of those, seemed to represent the views of more white people -- particularly white males. Democrats had already lost nearly all the white males -- or a huge percentage of them.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

SHIPP: Well, I hope it answered your question.

AUDIENCE: I was just going to say, Lyndon Johnson acknowledged that he was doing that.

SHIPP: He did. The the day he signed the Civil Rights Act he turned to somebody and said that that means the South will go Republican for years to come.

AUDIENCE: Right, absolutely correct.

SHORT: Well, getting back to Georgia politics and turning the clock back to 1960, which I always felt was really the turning point in the establishment. We saw the integration of the schools, we saw the demise of the county unit system, we had an election during '60s where nobody won and it went to the Supreme Court, and it was a very traumatic experience. How did we survive?

SHIPP: Are you still talking about the -- we had a series of very enlightened Governors, in my judgment. In 19 -- 1962, I guess, we had something in the state called the county unity system, and it was tossed out. I won't go into the complexity about it, but it generally mentioned that the rural Democrats controlled the Senate government. It was tossed out that year and Carl Sanders became the first popularly-elected Governor, and he was elected by a coalition of whites and blacks, and that coalition held together and kept Democrats in office most of the time up until Roy Barnes was defeated four years ago. And Roy Barnes' defeat -- by a lot of things, in my judgement anyway -- was caused in large part by the black part of that coalition demanding a change in the flag, which broke up the coalition, and probably for the foreseeable future.

SHORT: Well, let me mention to you -- I'm prepared to issue to you a series of the names of Governors to get your opinion, beginning with Ernest Vandiver.

SHIPP: He was probably the most courageous Governor in Atlanta, in my view. Ernest Vandiver ran on a platform with "No Not One," meaning he would not integrate the public schools, and as I recall either implied somewhat or said, "We will close the public schools before we integrate them." I think he did not think the crisis was going to occur on his watch, but the whole thing did blow up on his watch and he -- seems to be the magnanimous one. He staged hearings around the state on whether to close the public schools, came to the conclusion that the public did not want to close, and Ernest Vandiver stepped up to the bat and said, "I've changed my mind, we will not close public schools." And one of his aides at the time said -- to paraphrase -- he said there will be peace in our time.
And sure enough, Georgia -- if you look back at the turbulence of the civil rights area -- although there was a lot of trouble here and some violence, Georgia led the way and was easily one of the most progressive states in the Southeast in my opinion. And you can say, "That's because we've got big hearts in our towns." Well, that's because Coca-Cola and Delta and a lot of the little multinational corporations were headquartered in Atlanta, and they fully recognized that having a big fight over racial matters was not good for business.

SHORT: As I recall, Governor Vandiver was eventually charged to repeal '77 Jim Crowe laws, which he pushed through the legislature without very many of his friends. I remember that there were three people who actually backed him originally in that position. One was Carl Sanders, who was his Senate leader. One was Frank Twitty.

SHIPP: Right.

SHORT: One was Zell Miller.

SHIPP: That is correct.

SHORT: They stood up on policy and said that nothing is bad enough to close the public schools. Carl Sanders.

SHIPP: Well, probably when you talk about -- Jimmy Carter made the cover of Time Magazine. It was the first of the "New South" Governors. But Carl Sanders was really the first of the New South Governors, in which he put together a coalition of blacks and whites and took the urban folk into the big tent of government, and in four years he did what we, who have had a number of Governors, could not even approach doing in 80 years. Among his several achievements -- overhauling the university system in Georgia and trying to bring it into the 20th century, and also he established a series of airports throughout the state, and he made economic development his number one priority. And he also projected the right image for the state, which in my opinion is very important.

AUDIENCE: What year was this?

SHIPP: This was in '62 --

SHORT: To '66.

SHIPP: -- Through '66. He was succeeded by Lester Maddox.

SHORT: Who is next on the list!

*Laughter*

SHORT: Lester Maddox.

SHIPP: Well, Maddox was probably the most interesting a Governor as we've ever had. He was an unapologetic segregationist. He ran a restaurant in Atlanta and he ran a very strong campaign for Governor, although he was not elected. If we had a plurality of the vote, Bo Callaway would have been the first Republican Governor in the state. But because no one won a plurality, because someone else had had a right-in vote, the -- Maddox was thrown -- he went to the legislature, and the legislature elected Lester Maddox almost solely because he was a Democrat, and partly because he was also a vouched-for candidate.

SHORT: Jimmy Carter.

SHIPP: Jimmy Carter was -- Jimmy Carter ran as a segregationist, and I remember seeing that he had almost every seg. in the city. He ran against Carl Sanders, who was trying to make a come back, and all the segregationists were sitting out in the audience when Carter gave his inaugural address. And I remember seeing them out there, waiting out on the street, and Carter said, "The time has come for us to put aside racial differences." And he made this integrationist address, and he looked down at these people, and their faces just fell. But it established him -- that speech established him as a national figure and he made the cover of Time magazine and, of course, went on to become President.

SHORT: George Busbee.

SHIPP: A very good Governor, a low-key Governor who was the first of the modern eight-year term Governors. He served two successive terms. He also made economic development the key to his administration and he loved Japanese cameras.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Joe Frank Harris.

SHIPP: Joe Frank Harris was the second one of the eight-year Governors, and he appointed my friend George Barry over there, who was the Economic Development Commissioner. And he kept the boat very steady and the economy did well, and he was admirable by history's standards.

SHORT: I'm going to save the next one for later.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Bill, you worked for years with Tom Murphy who was Speaker of the House for many, many years. Was he the big bear that most people were led to believe?

SHIPP: Yes, he was. He was really -- Tom Murphy was the caricature, in many ways, of the political boss -- the guys that made things work, the guys that kept discipline in the House, and he and I were at odds a lot of times when I was really writing columns, but I later came to appreciate a lot of things he did, which I think were -- helped the state be what it is. We might not have had major-league sports, certainly not a professional football team had it not been for Tom Murphy. But he was rude and crude and tough.

SHORT: But liked.

SHIPP: Well, he was mostly liked.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Now, we'll get into some others here, operators who were around the Capitol for years and who deserve a place in history -- people like Denmark Gruff.

SHIPP: Denmark Gruff was from Macon. He was one of the great parliamentarians of the Georgia legislature and one of the few legislators I ever knew who read all the bills. He was an exemplary legislator. Too bad we don't have any like him today!

SHORT: He is the reason for the term they call "Grufferizing," which meant if your bill had been "Grufferized," then it was all right.

SHIPP: That's right. It was cleaned up.

SHORT: Culver Kidd.

SHIPP: Culver Kidd was known as the Silver Fox. He had, as you can imagine, silver hair, and he wore sport coats that were made out of the wrappers of -- where?

SHORT: Crown Royale.

SHIPP: Crown Royale. He was one of the great clowns of the Senate. He showed up once for the opening of the Senate wearing a Roman toga with two ladies of the evening on either side. And once he brought one of his ladies into the House chamber, and she -- Celestine Sibley, the columnist at the paper, saw her and went over to her and started whispering, and started looking around the House chamber and pointing to various people. And the Speaker, who was George L. Smith, had her arrested and taken into chambers, before she identified too many folks.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Walter Brooks.

SHIPP: Walter Brooks was the brains behind Vandiver, in my opinion, and the man who saw -- he was the one who saw that the state could not go down a path that outlined the Mississippi going down, and we needed to preserve our public education and keep the peace as much as possible. And he was the behind-the-scenes architect -- George knows this better than I -- he was the behind-the-scenes architect of let's get out and save the public schools. He also was the brains behind Herman Talmadge, who put out that scurrilous newspaper called The Statesman.

SHORT: He did. He sure did. He was a great guy. I really loved the guy. He was a great man. Now, let's talk a little bit about Republicans. Many people are not familiar with the stars of the Republican party. Who are some of them?

SHIPP: Well, the modern Republican party, of course, you've got Sonny Perdue, who came out of nowhere in the Governor's race to become one of the all time upsetters. But you've got a lot of Republicans who came before the general transfer of the House, like Bob Bevill, who was a DeKalb County guy. He was the Chairman of the party for many years. And at that time, the Republicans represented a more urban bend, and they were the party of reform, and they were very often the party -- the more progressive party. But they -- but they could afford to be progressive because they were the minority, and enjoyed being the minority for as long as anybody can see.

SHORT: What do you think caused Georgia voters to switch from years of Democratic control over to Republican?

SHIPP: Well, I think the -- the public catalyst -- what we saw was Barnes -- was that Governor Roy Barnes said he wanted to change the flag and that flew in the face of what a lot of people thought. Zell Miller, just eight years earlier had almost been beaten on the same issue. And then Barnes -- somehow, there was a feeling that he'd gone too far in trying to please the minority, but that was only one facet. The polls showed that Georgians wanted massive reform in their public schools. The polls showed that. But election day showed that is not what they wanted, because Barnes set out to reform the public schools, and public school teachers and school administrators overwhelmingly voted against him. Although he had given sizeable raises to teachers and educators, he had also imposed restrictions and started to demand accountability. And I think that was also a major factor -- his teacher's union just collapsed.

AUDIENCE: Question. Why do you think there has been such a -- there is such a contrast between the local Democratic philosophy, the Senate philosophy, and the national -- seems to get more liberal as you go up the steps. And why is that happening, and why did it happen?

SHIPP: You know, we talk about liberal and conservative. Let me ask you if you could define liberal, and in my view a liberal is one who spends an awful lot of money, who engages in national adventures, who borrows a lot of money, who creates new layers of government. And who did I just describe?

AUDIENCE: George W. Bush.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: George W. Bush! But you see this happening at the state level. Look at all these new towns springing up in Georgia, new layers of government. We also have an Iraqi budget. So when you see words like conservative and liberal, they become -- they become propaganda words. If you're my buddy, you're a conservative, but if you're not my buddy, you must be a liberal. So, I mean, those words have become almost meaningless, except in the South. When somebody says he's conservative, that is pretty code in many -- in many circles for being pro-white. And if he says you're a liberal, that means you're too far the other way. You're too lit up, too racially oriented. In fact, in some parts of Georgia, blacks are referred to as Democrats. That answers your question, right?

AUDIENCE: Well, you can't just lay it all on a racial basis.

SHIPP: No, you can't lay it all on race, but that is an underlying -- I've looked at this for 50 years and I can tell you that is an underlying theme of everything. You can talk about changing the street name, you can talk about installing a new water main in Atlanta, or building a new highway through Blairsville. You dig deep enough into that issue and, if it's in the South, race will have something to do with it somewhere in there.

AUDIENCE: Amen. Amen.

SHORT: Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: I want to raise a question about the possibilities for financial reform in the election. We live in a time when the constitution mandates elections, both the state and national constitution, and the only way the candidates can be known is through the media. It seems to me that the media -- and they serve their purpose -- a mutual purpose -- but the media has a vested interest in elections because the cost of advertising is a big support of the media. And -- is there not a controversy there when the media is able to -- in running stories about candidates, if things are too calm they can run stories that fire it up and then the candidates have to answer by buying more ads. I mean, there's a place where the media has a part in -- what are the issues. And in order to answer the issues, the candidate has to buy advertising in order to promote his campaign.
Is there any way -- and then too, in order to protect the income for elections, we have a cozy arrangement between the administrations and corporations so that, for example, gas can be sold at $3 a gallon and get a nice cushion to be able to buy the next election, and then the gas prices fall three or four days before the election, probably to go up before Christmas. And you have this arrangement with business administrations to get the enormous amount of income you have to run a campaign. Is there any way we could come to a place where you could have campaign finance reform so you could allocate a certain amount of money for -- is there any way we could do that and not take away freedom of press and inquiry?

SHIPP: Well, I tell you, you'd need somebody much higher than my pedigree to answer those questions. But you raise an interesting point. The point that you raised about news coverage firing up campaigns, I think that was once true. I'm not sure it does now. What fires up campaigns is Candidate A will have $20 million. He will buy a television spot saying Candidate B is a no good bum. Candidate B doesn't have $20 million to answer him, and the chance of Candidate B winning diminishes appreciably. There are exceptions to that rule, but most elections now are fought out -- not in the unpaid media -- but as you suggest, the paid media, and who has the most money to buy the most TV.

AUDIENCE: Well, that's why a lot of people become so cynical about it. I mean, what --

SHIPP: I don't know what the answer is. One answer that has been suggested to me is take all of these commercials off the national. Just make it very public about where everybody is getting their money, but I don't think that's the answer either. I think -- as you suggest -- the big corporations can buy the correct ads and manipulate policy -- as in the case of gas and other things -- to change the outcome of the election. I think you're going to see that return in a lot of ways. Democrats say, "Oh yeah, we're going to win." Those kinds of things. I think the Republicans are going to complain because some of these wins are going to seem to be seen as going in the right direction on the price of oil, on whatever's happening.

AUDIENCE: Do you have the answer?

*Laughter*

SHIPP: I'm sorry, I don't.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Yes?

AUDIENCE: How much did Newt Gingrich in the Republican revolution in '94 influence Georgia, you think, in politics?

SHIPP: I'm sorry, I didn't hear the end of the question.

AUDIENCE: How much did Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution in '94 influence Georgia politics? Was it related --

SHIPP: Well, a great deal. Newt Gingrich became the star of Georgia's political spectrum for a very short time, but also, that entire revolution kind of showed what could happen if a guy showed up on a white horse with a charter in his hand, and says follow me. And they did follow him for a while, and the Republicans have -- after a long drought -- took over the Congress. And this affected Georgia a great deal. Reapportionment, gerrymander -- when I say Republicans gerrymandered, I'm not saying that was just Republicans did that. I think they learned how to do it from the Democrats before them.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: Newt Gingrich had a great impact. Gingrich is now trying to make a come back and run for President. And three wives later, I don't think he's going to.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Bill, I take it that you were surprised that Purdue defeated Roy Barnes.

SHIPP: I was very surprised, which brings up another problem in polling. You see all these polls all the time -- this is going to happen and this is going to happen. All the polls -- even the good ones -- said that Roy Barnes was going to win and win by a wide margin, and that turned out not to be the case. It turned out not to be the case because there was a huge turnout in Southeast Georgia of rural voters -- who had no hope of participating in government -- voting en masse against Barnes. And there were some people who said earlier that Barnes -- without naming Perdue -- that Barnes had suffered a defeat because he had made too many various segments of the electorate angry with him. Not only the teachers, not only the Southern heritage group, or the law enforcement was mad at him. Here was a guy who was trying to do -- it seems to me -- trying to do too much without ever thinking about the politics of what he was trying to do.

SHORT: Shirley Miller analyzed it this way. Roy Barnes lost because he made everybody mad at the same time.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Getting back to our list of Governors, Sonny Perdue.

SHIPP: I think Sonny Perdue has not done a great deal in his first --

AUDIENCE: Amen.

SHIPP: And I think he tried not to do -- I think he made a conscious effort not to do a great deal because he saw the errors of Roy Barnes and he was determined not to be Roy Barnes. If he is elected to the second term, I hope he does not maintain that course of not looking out for the state. This state is crying out for some activist leadership in education, in environmental protection, in the higher education, in traffic congestion. You name it, we need some help in it.

AUDIENCE: Is he a shoo-in for a second term?

SHIPP: I wouldn't say he's a shoo-in, but if I were a betting man, I sure would bet on it. He has got the $20 million I mentioned. He's got the $20 million. He's spending it on -- he's spending it pretty wisely on advertising on the "Sonny Do" -- promising all kinds of things, and for Mark Taylor -- to answer him effectively, if you let that kind of campaign go on, by the time you decide your answers it's too late because Sonny Perdue has already established his own identity. Mark Taylor -- who seems to be opening an attack -- he should establish Sonny Perdue's identity -- but he won't.

AUDIENCE: May I please ask a question out of sheer ignorance? Is there any political or background substance to Mark Taylor? To me, he's just a big fat guy in a newspaper photo.

SHIPP: See, you just pointed out why I was telling on the other guy. I think that is the image he projects. You see these things in the paper about his father paid his way and did all these things for him. And then afterward, the image you see is whether he's attractive or not, not his leadership capabilities.

SHORT: Do you see in the Democratic party the leadership that you just defined?

SHIPP: No, I don't see any advantage in the Democratic party unless you go down to Jim Marshall, who's a Congressman, fighting for his life now for reelection against Mac Collins, who is the Republican primary turn-back. Marshall -- I hate to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway -- he's very much overcome himself, because for some reason he's a Democrat running to the right. If you do that, you can get Republicans. And he's a war hero. He's just everything, it seems to me. He's also a former university professor, a former Mayor of Macon. Seems to me the Democrats are going to have to come up with that kind of candidate to -- but if I were looking into the future, I would lodge a bet for the Republicans, because that's that's going to be where the leaders of the future are coming from.

SHORT: Yes ma'am?

AUDIENCE: Shouldn't we note that Sonny Perdue was a Democrat to begin with and turned Republican?

SHIPP: Shouldn't we note that most of the Republicans were Democrats to begin with and turned into Republicans. They will tell you they didn't turn Republican -- that the Democratic party left them.

AUDIENCE: You sound like Zell Miller's book. But I imagine you probably know more.

SHIPP: Don't say that.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: Now, we've looking at the macro picture. Let's look at a micro picture of the media. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a cartoon, did you see that? A picture of George Allen -- now, what the hell has he got to do with Georgia politics being portrayed as a clown waving a flag? This is the first time anybody has attacked George Allen in an integration type of attack in the Senate before this, and going back to the analogy that this is -- oh, we're trying to be equal in any way -- but still, they're trying to zero in on him now as a racist -- all of a sudden. Why?

SHIPP: I don't make policy at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but the national press has zeroed in on George Allen probably because in the wake of Republican Presidential hopefuls, he suddenly began to falter and started making mistakes. A lot of mistakes which he made in the past are now being uncovered, and he's being chipped away as a potential Presidential candidate. And I also think there's a reasonable chance he could be leaving the Senate race.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, but I asked you why --

SHIPP: Cox newspapers in Atlanta chose to do that. If you had asked me that in 1987, I could have told you, but I don't have any idea.

SHORT: Bill, you and I and Zell Miller and our friends have had different points of view from time to time.

SHIPP: We have.

SHORT: Over the years, you had what I observed to be some of the love-hate relationship with the Senator. Are you boys speaking nowadays?

SHIPP: I'm not sure.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: I haven't spoken to him in a long time, but let me say that his tenure as Governor was a very good one in the state. He did a lot of good things. The Hope Scholarship was more than just a lottery-paid tuition. That reached -- reinvigorated in-state colleges and in-state higher education, so that Georgia -- at least for a short time -- shot way ahead of most of the other states with the exception probably being North Carolina. The enrollment went up. The schools suddenly had more money to do things with, they employed better faculty. Miller did a lot. Miller was doing a really good job. Too bad he lost his mind when he went to the Senate.

*Laughter*

SHORT: I take it that you did not like his speech to the Republican convention.

SHIPP: I did not, but I watched it with disbelief.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Question? Richard?

AUDIENCE: Bill -- I had read in the last several years -- the time that I've been now in retirement, particularly retirement out of politics -- that if you go back in history it would seem to me that the only difference today in the way politics is carried out -- in an election year -- that it's carried out, is that the electronic media, particularly, gets in everybody's face 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but very little has changed in the core way that politics is carried out. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

SHIPP: No, I agree with that. I think if you look back to the turn of the century, you can see that politics was carried out in much the same way. Politicians today manipulate television. Politicians in that time manipulated newspapers. There were the same issues stated in different ways. Taxes were still a major issue. One set of politicians' incumbents are always sent out to scare the hell out of the elected, but if you don't want to change horses, no telling what might have happened broke into those. All that is still the same. So really -- the techniques of -- the electronic media changed the techniques, but you'll see those techniques change further as the Internet becomes more and more important.
In fact, you can see -- you can see fundraising already changed. Instead of the direct way of the telephones, you can see that the Internet is going to be the big media of use -- to raise money, because it works, and it works pretty well, better than other things.

SHORT: It worked very well for Howard Dean. He raised a lot of money.

SHIPP: He raised a lot of money and he got certain patterns in line, and you're seeing people in state and local races, you know, raising money like that.

SHORT: He made a mistake when he made his "I Have a Scream" speech, but he did really -- he was very able to -- Joe Trippi and those people did a wonderful job of using the Internet, and I'm sure that that's going to be a great campaign technique in the future.

AUDIENCE: How much influence does the New York Times have on our country?

SHIPP: I'm sorry, about the New York Times?

AUDIENCE: How much influence does it have on our country?

SHIPP: The New York Times has a great deal of influence. Back in my daily newspaper days, we would pull the front page budget of the New York Times off the wire every time it came in, and make certain that every story -- national and international story represented on page one of the New York Times was in the A section of the Atlanta papers. They still do that and I'm not sure that's a good thing, but they set the agenda. They set the agenda for television. You can bet television does it. But the New York Times, in my view -- I tend to agree with them more than I disagree with them, but they have become so partisan I don't think they're the great newspaper that they're supposed to be.

AUDIENCE: Don't lose track of the fact of what the New York Times owns. They own the St. Petersburg Times, they own another -- the Sarasota Herald Tribune. They own the Boston Globe, which used to be the Taylor family situation, and which was, in its day, much more conservative. And I'm sure that their reach goes -- and I don't know this for a fact -- but their reach would, I suppose, goes into some of the Midwest newspapers.

SHIPP: And they were formerly in Georgia, and I worked for them awhile. They bought the Gwinnett Daily News --

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

SHIPP: And turned it into a first class newspaper and then they had to retrench in Minnesota and fall back. You're also seeing newspapers all over the country, not the Times so far, but other big newspapers retrench -- like Reuters which owns a lot of newspapers, including the one in Philadelphia, they own the Maine paper and the Columbus paper, they're selling out. They're selling the newspaper interest to the McClatchy family. The Tribune is selling the Los Angeles Times and I think you're going to see the New York Times retrenched too. Now, as the newspapers retrench, I think you'll see their influence diminish.

AUDIENCE: Well, as you -- as you indicated earlier, people are reading less and less and less as us old timers fade out of the picture. The young people that turn 18 and 34 probably don't look at the newspaper once a week.

AUDIENCE: I was going to say, I'm 34. I don't read a newspaper except this.

SHIPP: But I wonder about that though, when I see my own habits and the habits of my kids and grandkids. They do look at the news, and sometimes they look at newspaper sites if those sites are on the Internet.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah.

SHIPP: I mean one of the -- among the most visited sites on the Internet is the New York Times site. And, now, those big news organizations, as they maintain their professionalism, they've got to find out a way that they can make as much money off the Internet as they're making off dead trees.

AUDIENCE: Off the printed page.

SHIPP: Yes.

AUDIENCE: In defense of the Internet, it has opened up opportunity for small contributors to make a difference in opposition to the corporate donations. I mean, you get $2,500, $1,500 contributors from a lot of people on the Internet -- they mount up and give another voice -- don't they, to the -- instead of all the big money coming from the --

SHIPP: Oh, absolutely. I think the Internet is a great thing. After I left the Atlanta newspapers, I started a paper newsletter, which did all right, but when the Internet began to open up in the 1990s, we went up with the Internet edition, which looked like -- what's it called? -- blogs today, and then we began to make some money. And, you know, we started from nothing. And then finally I sold -- I sold the operation, but you're absolutely right, that opens up a greater diversity of information and opinion, although a lot of it is hot air. Some of it I generated!

*Laughter*

SHORT: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Does the Washington Post sort of balance the New York Times?

SHIPP: You know -- you know, everybody always talks about the Post and the New York Times. The Post is in a different category. It is a company newspaper. It's a company town newspaper. It is a newspaper put out -- if it were -- if the Washington Post would put out in a mill town, it would do writing about the products put out at that mill. The Washington Post is the house organ for the federal government. The longer you view that -- it's not going to rival the Times. The real rival to the Times is the Wall Street Journal, which does a magnificent job of news coverage and an absolutely abominable job on the other end.

*Laughter*

AUDIENCE: And no funny business!

SHIPP: That's right.

SHORT: We still have time for -- yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: Were you prognosticating on this coming election as to whether the Democrats, who think they are going to pull the House away, will in fact do that?

SHIPP: No, I believe -- no, I hope -- no, I do not think they will take the House. I think that's because a lot of this polling -- these polls are being done as national polls. These House elections and Senate elections, they are the local races and if you look at the Congressional report and if you pick them apart district by district, it's a far different picture than what you hear on the national. The polls nationally, they say, "Well, we hate the Iraq War and we hate the Bush policies that are in Iraq, and therefore, we are going to elect at least six Democratic Senators." People are not thinking in national terms. You say, "Look, the dirty rats and Congressmen, the old dirty rats in Congress, they are corrupt and I hate them, but not that guy. Not our Congressman. He's not like the rest of them."
So I don't think that the majority is going to change.

SHORT: By reducing that to Georgia, do you think that Perdue is going to win the election?

SHIPP: Yes.

SHORT: Do you think his coattail will be long enough to take the whole slate and constitutional offices in the office?

SHIPP: No. In fact, I don't know how much coattails he has. I do think that Casey Cagle is probably the one we have, on the basis of the -- the thrust he had in defeating him on the ballot. But I think from now on the ballot you will see Democrats continuing to be on -- maybe because I don't think the Republicans are really focused on that closed ballot and the races.

AUDIENCE: Do you think Ralph Reed has any future left in Georgia?

SHIPP: If you talk to Ralph Reed into running -- Ralph Reed seems to be making a strategic error, and as Carl Sanders once said to Bob Short, "A brain surgeon should never try and operate on his own brain."

*Laughter*

SHIPP: He was a successful political consultant and his staff decided not to run for elected office, and I think that was basically to save Reed there, but I would basically say he maybe was hanging around too much on K street, and those sorts of development.

*Laughter*

AUDIENCE: I just wanted to ask, what do you see today in the picture that would encourage anyone to enter politics?

SHIPP: You know, you may have had a wild class of politicians to forget about. I'd like to think in the old days that people had guts and people like that ran for public office to do a public service, to give something back to their community, to contribute something to the common wheel. I'm not sure you have that motivation now and most of these people are just running to represent some special interest or they see a national opportunity, and that's at almost every level. Look at some of these corruption cases in Congress now --absolutely shocking to me. This guy on the West Coast, what was his name? Yeah. I mean, that kind of politics just baffles me.

AUDIENCE: It's a very well-paying job.

SHIPP: That's right.

AUDIENCE: Let me follow-up that question. Do you suppose that good people are not running for public office because they do not want to be savaged by the press?

*Laughter* -- Indiscernible

SHORT: You had a question for Mr. Shipp? Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: Carl Sanders -- we came to Georgia in 1966 -- he was a shining light, but his flame has gone down ever since he lost the --

SHIPP: Who?

AUDIENCE: Carl Sanders. Now, why is he so well thought of by the academia, and the smart people, but he never could be elected to anything in Georgia again?

SHIPP: Well, Sanders of course, he's gone on -- he's gone on to become a very wealthy lawyer, but when he ran his second term for Governor, it was handled poorly. His handlers did not do him well and he ran a campaign with the motto "Carl Sanders Ought to be Governor Again." And it was Carter that killed him.

SHORT: But you know, Bill, I will say this, that maybe Carl Sanders ought to have been Governor again because maybe Jimmy Carter ought to have been Governor in 1966.

SHIPP: Oh, by that reasoning the whole history of the world would change. If Jimmy Carter had been elected in 1966, then everything would have changed. Jimmy Carter would never have run for the Presidency. Carl Sanders might have gone on to seek national office as a U.S. Senator. You could write a novel about that. Carter would not have gone on to be one of the most despised people in the state.

*Laughter*

AUDIENCE: In response to Wally's comment about Carl Sanders, Carl Sanders had Lyndon Johnson tied around his neck as his campaign manager in 1964. So, that's the answer, largely, I think, to that question.

SHIPP: Well, at one point Lyndon Johnson had dangled in front of Carl Sanders, this is world circulation report, that he might tap Sanders to become his running mate. Of course, he dangled that prize before Ivan Allen and before every other Southerner that you could speak of. The Sanders' thought he had a real national future. A lot of other people thought he had a national future. And then he looked at the polls, and -- at one point -- thought of challenging Senator Russell, and looked at the polls and said god told him not to run.

*Laughter*

SHORT: Next question.

AUDIENCE: I was going to ask you, if you had a -- not a weekly, but an overall winner or loser? You can tell them about your program on Sundays.

SHIPP: Well, an overall?

SHORT: Winners or losers.

AUDIENCE: Winners or losers.

SHORT: Who's your winner this week?

AUDIENCE: No, not a weekly, but an overall in the history -- in Georgia political history.

SHIPP: Oh, in Georgia political history? I would say that Carl Sanders becomes close to being the winner, because he set the stage. He established a different tone of the state government. He took the state away from the rural hats -- the rural hats being the traditional, racist, white citizen people. He put that away from everything and he made the state -- he set the state out on an economic development basis to increase the literacy in the state and make the quality of our life better. That's my winner. There are too many losers!

*Laughter*

SHORT: Those of us who worked with Sanders had this -- had our own hats. Our own rural hats, and we wore stout brims. Just a little reckless there! Any more questions?

AUDIENCE: If things continue as they are now, do you foresee -- if things continue as they are now, do you foresee a possibility of a third party in 2008 making a significant difference?

SHIPP: Yeah, I think a third party could make a big difference. You could make a case that Bill Clinton would never had been President had there not been a substantial third-party candidate. You find -- and again, I knock the polls, but the polls showing more and more that Americans and Georgians are disenchanted with both parties, that neither party, quite frankly, is routed for.

AUDIENCE: That's why I asked the question.

SHIPP: So if a third-party candidate rises, that third-party candidate probably can't be elected, but it could swing the election one way or the other.

SHORT: Other questions of Mr. Shipp?

AUDIENCE: Alright, I want to raise one other related to Barnes' defeat, and bringing it back to the power of the media. And I appreciate what you have to say about the reasons we think he was defeated. I also have the impression, though, that those political ads really turned a lot of people off.

AUDIENCE: They did.

AUDIENCE: It seemed to me that if he had had better people creating those ads -- it came across to so many people as being a little bit on the arrogant side in the way that he was boasting about his accomplishments.

SHIPP: Oh, I agree with that. He had substantial amounts of money. If you go back and look at those ads, it was Roy Barnes in front of Barnes's Store and Roy Barnes -- what a wonderful history he had. That kind of ad was money like he wasn't threatened at all. He ran as if he had no threat. As it turned out, he had one that took him out. You need to view -- you need to scare the voters. You need to let the voters know -- I can save you. If you're going to leave, you're not going to get saved. And he didn't do that.

SHORT: Bill, one final question. What happened to Cathy Cox?

AUDIENCE: To who?

SHORT: Cathy Cox.

SHIPP: See, see?

*Laughter*

SHIPP: Cathy Cox was going to be the great white hope in Georgia. She was a breath of fresh air. She was going to run a general kind of campaign. At last, Georgia was ready to elect an aggressive woman as Governor and her campaign fell apart, and she had terrible ads. Her timing was awful. She wandered into one minor scandal after another. Turned out just to be not -- such a poor candidate that at least I had the impression that then, she didn't want to win, that she was happy she had run. I must say I'm surprised.

AUDIENCE: I hope you noticed nobody asked you a question about Hillary Clinton this afternoon.

*Laughter*

SHIPP: If you had asked me about her, I would have told you, I think she's going to be the Democratic nominee. But I won't say she's going to win the election.

*Laughter*

SHORT: We're going to have to cut it off now. Can we take another question?

AUDIENCE: I would like to go to -- Cathy Cox was the great woman hope of the Democratic party. What about Handel from DeKalb County? Is she going to be the next Republican nominee for Governor? The Secretary of State -- Handel.

SHIPP: You say Handel?

AUDIENCE: Handel.

AUDIENCE: The Secretary of State here.

SHIPP: She's got a good chance. She's going to be Secretary of State. I think she's going to win that race, but that's going to be a pretty tight race, and she is -- she's a Republican and she's quite conservative. I will tell you though, I'm not even comparing her to Linda Schrenko because I once thought that Linda Schrenko was going to be the great white hope.

*Laughter*

AUDIENCE: Was that before or after the facelift?

*Laughter*

SHIPP: It was before!

*Laughter*

SHORT: Positively the last question.

AUDIENCE: One mystery man that was left out, and he's tied in with Barnes somehow. What happened to Lieutenant Governor Pierre Howard?

SHIPP: *Laughter* He dropped off the face of the earth! No, as a matter of fact he's working in Mactorie in a public relations polling firm called Insider Advantage, and I get an email from him occasionally. But he's out of the public eye and he's very bitter about a lot of things that happened in his career that he thinks were not of his doing.

AUDIENCE: It happened in a week's time. I mean it was --

SHIPP: WelI, it really happened in four years time. He thought he was going to be elected to Lieutenant Governor and he misheard someone say that he thought they were going to retire after four years and that he was going to run. It didn't work out that way and a lot of other things. He was prepared to run for Governor. In some opposition research people dug up some things in his past that caused him to leave the scene. He was really a good candidate and a good public servant, and I think it's a real loss that he dropped out.

SHORT: Bill, thank you very much.


[END]