By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 14, 2020 | Spending a year in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I became a regular reader of the region’s most influential newspaper of that day, The Chicago Tribune. It was a rock-ribbed stalwart Republican newspaper of high quality. With gusto, it covered Chicago and the Midwest.
It had one feature I remembered when I came back to Georgia to get into newspapering.
The Tribune each day printed its “List of Continuing Objectives” for Chicagoland. So eventually in the Wayne County Press in South Georgia, we produced a similar list. Today we include such a list in each edition of GwinnettForum.
From time to time, as conditions change, we return to the list for editorial discourse.
The very first of these Objectives is “High-quality candidates for elective office in Gwinnett.” Happily, we report that the many of the candidates qualifying for office for election this year, by and large, have been of high quality. That makes us proud of the county, for if you have good quality people seeking office, the long-term result will probably be better government. That’s why we include this objective in our list.
However, let us add: not every candidate who ran for office this year in the primary (and for November in the General Election) is automatically of high quality. In our conversations with 94 candidates so far this year, we have found several, whose names we will not mention, who did not meet the standard we would call “high quality.” When we perceived that a candidate did not meet the high-quality standard, we did not consider endorsing that candidate. We will add, of course, that there were many candidates of high quality who were not endorsed, only because of better candidates in that race.
One negative for 2020: All along this election year, we anticipate there will be a swing to the Democratic Party in many races in Gwinnett. That means that there may be some candidates with a “D” behind their names who would win office, but not because of their high quality, but it would be the swing to the party that won them victory.
The election year 2020 gratifying is in another aspect: we saw many good minority candidates emerge. In a county that is heavily diverse, it is great to see this swing. Not only that, but with the changing electorate, these minority candidates, no matter the party, now have a chance of winning office. That reflects well on Gwinnett.
In coming issues, you’ll see our Continuing Objectives in each issue. The only change: we’ll always want “High quality candidates” in any election year. But we’ll move that Objective to the bottom of the list.
- Move statewide non-partisan judge election runoffs to the General Election.
- MARTA rail for Gwinnett from Doraville station to Gwinnett Arena.
- Banning of tobacco and vaping products in all Gwinnett parks.
- More diverse candidates for appointment to local boards.
- Creative efforts to support the arts in Gwinnett.
- Advancement and expansion of city and Gwinnett historical societies.
- Require establishments that serve alcoholic beverages to halt sales of such products at 2 a.m., and close by 3 a.m.
- Rewrite the rules to require the Georgia Legislature to meet once every two years.
- 21st century salary for the Gwinnett County Commission members.
- High-quality candidates for elective office in Gwinnett.
CORRECTION: We erred when referring to Lawrenceville as the “Wisteria City.” Indeed, the late Louise Cooper promoted Lawrenceville as the “Crepe Myrtle City.” Thanks to Chuck Warbington for catching this.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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