I don’t know if I ever plugged Grayson’s Georgia Political Digest column or not, so I’m going to knock out two birds with one stone here. First, read the aforementioned column from Grayson about the telecos that picks up where my Bellsouth column left off. She did some actual journal-ma-lism and got quotes.
Second, there’s a new columnist whose first opinion piece came out today. He calls himself the Georgia Oracle, and (according to his bio and an e-mail I exchanged with management) is an executive for a large Georgia corporation who occasionally must appear in the public eye, and therefore writes anonymously.
I’ve got what I consider to be an educated guess as to who he might be, but even if I knew who he is (management was mum), I wouldn’t be allowed to share.
In his column about the lt. governor and governor races, he writes:
It comes down to this. Does Casey Cagle stand by his accusation of Mark Taylor? Did Mark Taylor extort money from him in exchange for protecting Republican senators and their legislation? Or, was his press release an exaggeration? Either Mark Taylor is unfit to be Governor, or Casey Cagle is lying.
Which is it?
I think leaving state Sen. Eric Johnson and Ralph Reed out of the equation is oversimplifying the situation. In 1998, Reed was running the Mitch Skandalakis campaign for Lt. Governor that briefly aired an advertisement about Taylor portraying him (falsely, at least as convictions go) as a cocaine addict. The alleged extortion was alleged to be in retaliation for that ad, which Reed was at least indirectly responsible for (he is smart enough to leave himself plausible deniability room in nearly everything he does, which is the only reason he’s not in jail already).
So, Taylor (possibly) extorts money from Cagle and Johnson in retaliation for something Reed had a hand in. The complication here is Cagle implicated both he and Johnson were victims of extortion, and Johnson said he has no recollection of Taylor threatening him. Cagle comes off as either:
1) Lying about the extortion, or
2) Weak for caving to Taylor’s demands
It makes Cagle (and in one scenario Taylor) look bad, but just keep in mind this all goes back to Ralph Reed at the end of the day. Democrats still had the majority in all branches at the time. Taylor couldn’t threaten Reed because he wasn’t an elected official. There were no committee assignments to take away from him or legislation of his to block. To retaliate, Taylor would have to go after elected Republicans like Cagle and Johnson whom he had leverage over. The jury is still out on whether that happened or not, but the fact is Cagle and Johnson gave money to Taylor’s campaign as a result of actions from a campaign Ralph Reed was running.
I wonder if Georgia Oracle is a Reed supporter, or if he just wasn’t aware of this back story.
