Georgia's runoff

The 2008 election campaign will finally conclude tonight, with the runoff election of Saxby Chambliss over Jim Martin in Georgia. (I know the counting continues in Minnesota, but at least nobody is still voting after today.)

The reason that this is the last act of the 2008 election cycle is because Georgia has a ridiculous rule requiring that candidates receive 50% + 1 vote to be the winner. This has got to be one of the greatest wastes of state resources imaginable - holding a whole 'nother election so that the 15% of the people who still give a flying rat's ass can go by the poll and vote for the same guy they voted for last time.

Even more sad than the idea that a state with a growing budget deficit is financing another election round at every single precinct in the state is how the god-awfully this campaign in Georgia has been run.

Neither one of these guys deserves to be elected to anything. Their campaigns have been 100% negative. Saxby Chambliss is the incumbent, but you wouldn't know it from the commercials he has run; there has not been a single ad listing an accomplishment, an initiative or even a truckload of pork that Chambliss has delivered for Georgia. Nope. Every ad simply lists all the reasons why Jim Martin is somewhere between moronic and evil. What has this guy done to justify six more years? No one can say. But at least he isn't Jim Martin.

Martin, who was a state legislator for a while, hasn't been any better. Chambliss' vote in favor of the Wall Street bailout has been fodder for Martin's commercials, when he wasn't saying that another Saxby term would be four more years of George W. Bush. What is this guy for if he gets to Washington? No one really knows. But at least he isn't Ssxby Chambliss.

And so, since the candidates are utter nobodies without a good idea between them, the campaign has become about how nasty, brutish and short life will become if there are 60 Democratic senators. It is simply pathetic that a sitting Senator cannot find any better reason for people to vote for him than that. Or that a Democratic challenger in a runoff after a significant Democratic victory in November cannot point to one way that he will help the incoming President.

And just to push the voters over the edge, their commercials tend to run back to back. You can't watch a football game without regular assaults of kindergarten name-calling - "vote for me, cuz he's a butt-head"

The new voters, black voters and mobilized Obama voters from November 4 are not likely to brave the cold to cast a vote for Jim Martin. The state is still demographically Republican, and so Chambliss will prevail in the runoff. Which is probably how it should be, since he did win more votes in November and would have been re-elected if Georgia didn't have this silly requirement of an absolute majority.

Saxby Chambliss is a non-entity who richly deserves the anonymity that he will soon disappear back into. But the alternative isn't any better. Georgians are faced with the choice of the lesser of two lessers. Incompentence rules either way.

Last and certainly least in this is that some idiots are going to decide that negative campaigning still works. That Chambliss prevailed in a runoff against an opponent whom he should have trounced easily in November is exactly not a recommendation for going negative; that Martin survived to a runoff without once articulating so much as an airy-fairy policy goal is exactly not a recommendation. But it can't be helped.

The real lesson of this runoff is that there is still a crying need for, and absolutely no hope of success for, a third party with ideas. An articulate fifth-grader running on a platform of reduced milk prices in the lunchroom could have won this election. Ge9rgia is getting the Senator it deserves - even if that other polecat should somehow win.