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Sunday night debates for Georgia’s senate and gubernatorial races were fought on familiar terrain as the candidates repeated the attacks they’ve been using for the past several weeks of their hard-fought campaigns.
In the Senate faceoff at the Georgia Public Broadcasting studios, Republican David Perdue hammered away at Democrat Michelle Nunn for being too closely tied to President Barack Obama while Nunn kept up her attack on Perdue’s record of outsourcing jobs as a corporate executive.
“I want to be a champion of jobs in the United States Senate, not a rubberstamp for Barack Obama,” Perdue said, adding, “Isn’t a vote for you just a vote for Barack Obama?”
Nunn countered that none of the Washington politicians cited by Perdue were on the state’s election ballot. She quoted a recent conversation she had with a farmer, who said that if Perdue “wanted to run against Harry Reid, he should have moved to Nevada. If he wanted to run against Barack Obama, he should have run for president.”
After Nunn ticked off the number of jobs lost at companies that Perdue headed, either because of outsourcing or because the company failed, Perdue said, “Here we go again, misstating the facts.”
“So, David, the facts are very clear,” Nunn said. “In a deposition, under oath, you said you spent most of your career outsourcing.”
Perdue ridiculed Nunn’s ongoing attempt to characterize herself as a candidate who could “work across the aisle” and bring an end to the gridlock in Congress.
“The source of gridlock in Congress is not Republicans, it’s Harry Reid,” Perdue said. “When you have a failed presidency, you have to prosecute it.”
The race between Perdue and Nunn is tight enough that it could very well be pushed into a runoff because of the presence of Libertarian Amanda Swafford on the ballot.
Swafford proudly acknowledged that possibility: “I believe that’s what polling is basically going to tell us, there’s going to be a runoff.”
In the governor’s race debate staged at WSB-TV in Atlanta, Gov. Nathan Deal and state Sen. Jason Carter likewise repeated accusations they’ve been hurling at each other throughout their race, which also could move to the runoff stage because of its closeness.
Deal pressed his record for making Georgia a business-friendly state while Carter hit back with reminders that Georgia has had the highest unemployment rate in the nation for the last two consecutive months.
“We have been one of the leading states in job growth over the last several years,” Deal said. “In fact, last year we created more jobs than 44 other states in this country.”
“The current leadership has taken this state to the bottom,” Carter said. “We are dead last in unemployment; that means that every other governor in the country is doing a better job at creating jobs for their people than Governor Deal.”
In the 12th Congressional District debate, Republican challenger Rick Allen also tried to tie his opponent, Democratic Rep. John Barrow, to the policies of President Obama through Barrow’s voting record in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“He did in fact vote with the president 85 percent of the time,” Allen said. “I can tell you this – I will not be voting with the president.”
“You can cherry-pick the statistics to say most anything,” Barrow said, noting that conservative organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the NRA had endorsed him and not Allen.
“What he’s saying about my record just isn’t true,” Barrow said.
© 2014 by The Georgia Report
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