George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue III will go down in history as Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, the biggest wave of a GOP tide that’s still rising.
He will be remembered as a manager and as a governor with few publicly proclaimed bold ideas, the coffers to fund them or much desire to pursue them.
He kept a lid on the budget during two economic downturns, and he tinkered with state government. When he was done, the sum of small changes had overhauled several major departments, and many people say state government runs more efficiently because of it.
He cut spending, though some would argue he did not address deeper revenue issues. He has remained popular throughout his administration, despite a lack of signature programs.
“Gov. Perdue is going to be kind of like Harry Truman,” said Larry Walker, a former state representative in Perdue’s native Houston County. “As time goes by, he’s going to get more popular.”
Face of a Republican revolution
Many moving parts swept Georgia politics into a new era of Republican dominance, but it was Perdue’s 2002 defeat of Gov. Roy Barnes that announced it to the nation.
Perdue was once the highest-ranking Democrat in the state Senate, but he switched parties in 1998. In 2002, he ran for governor, ignoring the pollsters and pundits who said he didn’t have a chance to beat Barnes.
But Perdue believed, because he saw anger toward Barnes as he flew from town to town, piloting himself and those brave enough to join him in Perdue’s own tiny, wooden-winged plane.
Much of that win was circumstance, University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock said. But much of it also was smart campaigning. Perdue chipped away at a critical part of the Democratic Party’s political base: rural white Democrats, people a lot like himself. There aren’t many of those left these days in Georgia, because they call themselves Republicans now.
After Perdue won the governor’s office in November 2002, he helped convince enough state senators to switch parties to give the GOP control of that body. Two years later, Republicans won a majority in the state House of Representatives. Again, Perdue had been traveling across the state to help make it happen.
This year, Republicans swept all the state’s constitutional offices, and several more legislative Democrats have changed parties.
Through all of this, Perdue has been “if not the major player, a major player,” Bullock said.
He’s also one of a few of those players unscathed by scandals that eventually followed the power shift.
The GOP’s first Georgia speaker of the house, Glenn Richardson, is gone from public life, having cheated on his wife and attempted suicide. Richardson’s partners in the House, Jerry Keen of St. Simons Island and Atlanta’s Mark Burkhalter, both retired from the House soon after. Casey Cagle, the first GOP lieutenant governor in Georgia history, has had a “power-sharing” agreement forced upon him by fellow Republicans in the Senate.
And Perdue is walking away from the Gold Dome with approval ratings above 50 percent. They have been above the halfway mark for nearly all his tenure, said Matt Towery, CEO of Insider Advantage, a news and polling firm. In spite of questionable land deals, a retroactive tax break Perdue received from the state Legislature and concerns that the governor has grown wealthy by leveraging his office, Perdue has been, Towery said, something of a “Teflon” governor.
His legacy is one of steady leadership. It’s not a popular subject with Democrats, who until recently still had some statewide power.
DuBose Porter, the former House minority leader from Dublin and gubernatorial candidate earlier this year, did not return phone calls for this article. Barnes, the Democratic nominee for governor this year, declined an interview request, as did former President Jimmy Carter and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. Attempts to reach outgoing Department of Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, who ran against U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson earlier this year, also were unsuccessful.
Jane Kidd, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party until she leaves that post in about a month, agreed to release a statement.
“Perdue’s only real accomplishment was to become rich during his eight years in office,” it said in part. “He was a status quo governor with no legacy achievements.”
Perdue the manager
Near the end of Perdue’s first year in office, the governor and his entourage stopped at one of the state’s driver’s license bureaus.
Perdue popped in, then-communications director Dan McLagan remembered, and talked to people in line.
By summer 2005, the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles had been broken up, and a new Department of Driver Services was responsible for issuing licenses and renewals were available online.
“Government doesn’t touch everyone every day,” Mc-Lagan said this month. “But there is one thing -- driver’s licenses. The wait time went from hours to minutes.”
That is likely the most visible change Georgians will see from Perdue’s administration. He has seldom been about sweeping new programs, but instead more about reorganization of existing ones.
Perdue himself embraced this role. During the inauguration speech for his second term -- with four years to go and no re-election to worry about -- Perdue focused on his desire to “hand off a well-run state” in four years. The verdict on that, from state insiders, ranges between he did it to he did fine, but it runs about the same.
He has certainly shifted power, particularly at the Georgia Department of Transportation, where a new planning director answers to the governor and not the State Transportation Board. He ripped up the Department of Human Resources in 2009, creating a new agency to focus on public mental health treatment, while the old DHR concentrates on child and family welfare.
Many of those changes came after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposé and subsequent U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the state’s mental hospitals, but it was more than other recent governors had done, said Nora Haynes, a recent past president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Georgia chapter.
“He could have done nothing,” Haynes said.
Perdue also privatized the state’s computer and telephone systems, generating a lucrative contract for AT&T and IBM that his administration says will eventually save the state money. His administration built the first database of state properties, coalesced state aircraft under one authority and did an audit to determine how many vehicles the state owned.
The state sold off excess property, and Perdue protected the state’s AAA bond rating to save money on interest costs.
Several people interviewed said they think Perdue hired good people to run state departments and that he backed good reforms. Alan Essig, head of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, praised Perdue’s Commission for a New Georgia, which brought in executives to examine state government. Essig said the effort identified several hundred million dollars in potential savings.
“It’s nothing sexy,” Essig said. “But it’s the mundane kind of stuff that’s helpful.”
Economic development
Perdue was a business-friendly governor, said George Israel, a former Macon mayor who until October was the head of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.
There was “some pain” born of budget cuts during his tenure -- teacher furloughs, cuts to Medicaid funding and a new tax for hospitals -- but the governor kept taxes low and recruited large, new companies to Georgia, Israel said.
Kia built a large plant in West Point, north of Columbus. NCR, which manufactures bank ATMs, agreed to move much of its operation from Ohio to metro Atlanta, in large part because of the tax rates, Israel said.
Perdue was good for growth in Bibb County, too. Among other things, he supported state grants that helped lure Nichiha and Kumho Tire to Bibb, although Kumho has delayed opening a plant in the midstate, Macon Mayor Robert Reichert said.
Reichert said he “can’t say enough good things” about Perdue when it comes to economic development.
Reichert remains “miffed” though, by a lack of support for the Georgia sports and music halls of fame, which could be moved and could receive far less state funding now than when Perdue took office. But much of the tone in Reichert’s voice as he discussed Perdue’s legacy stems from the fact there are no passenger trains running from Atlanta to Macon, nor much evidence of them coming anytime soon. That’s despite the city of Macon’s support for the project, investment in a downtown train station and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money for rail projects in North Carolina and Florida, where the governments are more open to the idea.
“He did not do enough for mass transit, ... which is the future of this country,” Reichert said.
Former Macon Mayor Jack Ellis agreed.
“Eight years,” Ellis said. “He blew an opportunity.”
Taxes
State Rep. David Lucas, D-Macon, said Perdue gave too much to big business during his administration. He points to a plethora of tax incentives used to recruit businesses, general tax policy and major spending cuts used to balance the budget during the past couple of years.
“During his administration, corporations got the best of all worlds instead of suffering to the same extent as regular taxpayers,” Lucas said.
But Essig, a budget analyst who generally has a liberal mind on taxes, disagreed. He said Perdue enacted several tax policies that were major priorities for large businesses, such as reduction in energy taxes, but he also closed corporate tax loopholes.
And Perdue vetoed several tax cuts, angering Republican legislators, as a way to keep the budget in shape. One of the first things he did in office was spring a cigarette tax increase on the Legislature to deal with the first economic slump of his eight years in office.
He was willing, Essig said, to “disappoint a lot of his friends.”
But Perdue’s biggest legacy on taxes is likely to be two-fold: He’s serving on a committee now that will propose an overhaul of the tax system next year, and he signed major changes in the state’s tax code this year.
Retirees 65 and older, regardless of how much money they make, will pay zero state income taxes after a five-year phase in. That was a campaign priority for Perdue in 2006, and it was paired this year with a new tax on hospitals and millions in state fee increases to prop up the current budget while promising future tax cuts.
Education
Early in his administration, Perdue and the Legislature peeled back some of Barnes’ “A+ Education” reforms, which had angered teachers and helped Perdue first get elected.
And if there was an exception to Perdue’s plan to tinker with the management of state government, it may be in education, where he tried for radical reforms that didn’t fly with teachers or legislators. He pushed for an overhaul of the state’s complicated education funding formula with little success, though some reforms did come out of that effort, known as IE2.
In his last year in office, Perdue tried to change how teachers are paid, tying salaries to student performance. There was a backlash, and legislators quietly dropped the idea. But Perdue’s efforts did help the state win $400 million in federal Race to the Top money for education.
Perdue critics point to teacher furloughs and increased class sizes and decry his record on education. They point to austerity cuts, which meant billions less in funding for local systems than the state’s formula calls for. But Perdue argues he protected education as best he could during difficult budget years. Graduation rates are up, one of his focuses. Teachers will remember the $100 gift cards they got to buy supplies for poorer students during some of Perdue’s tenure.
“Education is one of those things that is very difficult,” the governor said.
Sonny on Sonny
Perdue sees validation in November’s election results. Former U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal beat Barnes with 53 percent of the vote in an election Perdue called “a big customer service survey.”
Perdue said his administration may not have “big mileposts” people can remember, but “we went to work incrementally.”
He is proud that high school graduation rates climbed from 63 percent to nearly 81 percent during his tenure. He’s disappointed that he wasn’t able to get a water-sharing agreement signed with Florida and Alabama.
But Perdue said he expects a water agreement early in Deal’s administration. And by and large, he said, “my memory does not allow me to accumulate regrets.”
Perdue sees himself as “a good people picker” and a hard worker.
“We rolled up our sleeves,” he said. “Hard work covers a multitude of sins.”
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