Taking another look at Sonny Perdue a decade later

In this job, you need a strong digestive system. Chances are that somewhere along the line, you might be eating a little crow for past opinions. Not that it has kept him awake at night, but I haven’t been particularly kind to George Ervin Perdue, aka, Sonny, in the past. But after a decade or so, I have decided to take another look at him before I bite into the bird.

I decimated the equivalent of a Brazilian rain forest during his two terms as governor, starting with his dismantling of a program that encouraged schoolteachers to seek national certification (on their own dime) and then promised a 10 percent salary increase if they did.

My son-in-law, a high school science teacher with a PhD, was one of the first in Georgia to become nationally-certified. He spent a lot of hours on the effort, thinking the state would keep its word. He knows a lot about science. He has a lot to learn about politics. Rescinding the initiative was simply a slap at Perdue’s predecessor Roy Barnes, who had created the program. Not a good start to our relationship.

Then there was Go Fish, Georgia, a $23 million boondoggle disguised as an economic development initiative created in the middle of a recession while schoolteachers were being laid off. The facility was built in the middle of Perdue’s Houston County, one of life’s little political coincidences.

Perdue never saw a photo-op he didn’t like. I remember him riding around the Capitol on a motorcycle in a too-tight black leather jacket, driving a school bus for reasons that escape me and donning a Cat in the Hat – um – hat while reading to some young tykes who seemed more interested in the silly thing on his head than what he was reading to them.

My all-time favorite was when Perdue, a veterinarian by trade, gave an elephant a physical. And in public. I am told that the elephant was greatly embarrassed by the spectacle, even if the governor was not.

There was land he had purchased in Houston County. Through political maneuvering, Perdue’s personal attorney who was also his floor leader in the House pushed through a last-minute change in the tax law that got the governor a significant tax break. The governor said he only learned of this later when the accountant preparing his taxes happened to mention it. Yeah, right.

On the plus side, his handling of the old state flaggers was classic. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century, flaggers claimed credit for Barnes’ reelection defeat on having changed the Georgia state flag, which incorporated the battle flag of the Confederacy. Perdue promised a referendum, allowing citizens to choose. The flaggers thought the battle flag would be one of the choices. They thought wrong.

The choices were either a modified version of the first national flag of the Confederate States of America, with the Georgia state seal displayed inside a circle of 13 stars, or the Barnes flag, uglier than homemade sin. Voters overwhelmingly chose the former and outraged flaggers declared Sonny Perdue a one-term governor.

Perdue won a second term easily and flaggers crawled back in the hole from whence they came, although I did notice some Confederate battle flags at the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. I guess they are RITNOs (Republicans in Trump’s Name Only) now. Not a surprise.

What was a surprise – to me anyway – was Donald Trump selecting Perdue as his secretary of agriculture, a post he held throughout Trump’s first term. My second surprise was when the Board of Regents named him chancellor of the University System of Georgia in 2022, overseeing 26 public colleges and universities with 51,000 faculty and staff, more than 364,000 students and an annual budget of more than $11.5 billion. By all accounts, he has done a laudable job.

Last month, Perdue wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, urging the Trump administration to support designating the Okefenokee Swamp as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Such a designation won’t stop the wrong-headed efforts to drag-mine the location for toothpaste whitener, but it can’t hurt.

Why is the chancellor of the University System of Georgia weighing in on a topic not in his job description? I don’t know. But he does. Something is afoot for him to get involved. Just what that is has yet to be determined. I have too often underestimated George Ervin Perdue and his political savvy in the past. No more. I’m not anxious to eat crow.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.