s
His decision to run again, he
said, was made after months of talking to the people in
Georgia in an extended tour in far ranging counties. He
said he found people worried that they were losing the
Georgia in which they had grown up.
He talked of vision rather than
policy and said that defeat seven years ago taught him
lessons of leadership. He said he tried to do too much,
too quickly and didn’t explain himself enough. He
pointed specifically to his changing of the state flag
and his hard-driving education improvement program.
“Listening is something I didn’t
do enough of when I was governor. I tried to do too
much, too fast. My heart was in the right place but I
was impatient and didn’t consult enough different people
outside the Capitol.”
Much of his criticism was aimed
at special interests that won too many battles in
Atlanta at the expense of working people, families, and
children. “The lobbyists in their tassel loafers with
their eel skin briefcases have too much influence on our
lives, how much we pay for electricity and how well our
children are educated in the public schools.”
“The special interests get the
bailouts and our people get higher taxes and the crumbs
that fall from their banquet table. Georgia needs
somebody to balance the scales, to stand up for them,”
the former governor said.
He said there was plenty of
blame to go around and referred to Democrats,
Republicans, and again, the lobbyists who have too much
power.
In a low key press conference,
flanked by his wife Marie and his family, he referred
several times to his grown children and grandchildren.
Barnes has two daughters, a son and five grandchildren.
One of his daughters is a special education teacher,
another an attorney in his law firm, and his son is in
the computer industry.
The Barnes
announcement recently was not his official campaign
launch, which will come in July, but only an
announcement of his intentions to run. He said he needed
the time before becoming an official candidate to make
arrangements in his law firm and to finish his
obligations as Chairman of the National Board of
Professional Teaching Standards and his work in the
Institution of Educational Leadership.
He said that Georgia needed
industry and jobs, improved teacher pay, and to “tear
government out of the hands of the lobbyists.”
Barnes was first elected to the
Georgia State Senate when he was 26 and served eight
terms. He served as a floor leader for Governor Joe
Frank Harris. After being defeated by Zell Miller in a
1990 governor’s race, he was elected to the State House
of Representatives, where he served for six years before
he was elected governor. Part of his efforts as governor
included education reform, health care reform, and
efforts to control urban growth and sprawl.
He instituted tough ethics
reform and cracked down on lobbyists. Barnes created the
Georgia Cancer Coalition and served as Chair of the
Southern Regional Education Board and the Education
Commission of the States. He appointed former Governor
Zell Miller to the U. S. Senate at the death of Senator
Paul Coverdell. He left office leaving the state a
budget surplus.
In 2003 he was honored with the
John F. Kennedy Library Profile in Courage Award.
We all have an obligation and
duty to help our state, he said, and this is his way of
making
a contribution to restoring the Georgia “we grew
up in.”
