COLUMN: Missing two favorites from campaign trail

Even before I was old enough to vote I remember wanting to obtain campaign signs and materials of my own. Once I mailed an empty envelope to the campaign headquarters of a state senate candidate. Since I was not old enough to vote I figured I would be smart and put my father’s name on the return address portion of the envelope.

The day after I mailed it, the candidate himself called our home and asked if the Bridges’ residence had intended to send a campaign contribution but had perhaps forgotten to include it in the envelope.

“No, we didn’t want to send a contribution,” I recall my mother saying into the phone. “Thank you.”

She immediately asked me if I had mailed the blank envelope in question and, of course, I denied it. A childhood friend who happened to be at my house at the time looked at me and said, “That sounds like something you would do.”

As we move closer to the 2010 elections in Georgia, I am disheartened that two long-time candidates who I voted for on many occasions will not be on the ballot this time or any other time in the future. Both have now passed on and while I will always enjoy a new campaign season as much as a new football one, it just doesn’t seem the same in Georgia without Jim Boyd and Mac Barber on the ballot.

Boyd ran for numerous statewide offices through the years from Governor to U.S. Senate to Public Service Commission. His catchy campaign signs, which he would literally post all over the state, always caught my attention. My favorite remains one from the 1994 campaign when he ran against the Democratic incumbent governor: “Jim Boyd as a Democratic Governor Could Not Be Worse Than Zell Miller.” That had to be the ultimate campaign slogan, even for Boyd.

Boyd’s final race came in 2004 when he competed in the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate. Boyd finished a surprising third out of nine candidates with a slogan of “Bush Must Go: Vote Jim Boyd U.S. Senate.” In some ultra conservative corners of the state, his signs were gone within an hour of being put up.

While Boyd was never elected statewide, Barber was a long-time elected official, both at the local level as mayor of Commerce and at the regional level as a state representative and state-wide level as a member of the Public Service Commission. I was fortunate to get to know Mr. Barber during his later years and his death in recent months has left a void in Georgia politics.

As I study potential candidates for 2010, I find myself thinking about Mr. Boyd and Mr. Barber. Both were candidates of the people and that’s something we need more of. Some experts who cover political races (those with their nose always stuck in the air) liked to criticize these two, but I cast my vote for them whenever I could. Today, I only wish I could one more time.

Chris Bridges is an editor with Mainstreet Newspapers. E-mail comments about this column to chris@mainstreetnews.com.