AROUND TOWN: Herschel in south Cobb; Cupid in Texas; Setzler on the Heartbeat Bill

Between the auto shops that dominate Veterans Memorial Highway, people filtered into Full Throttle Roadhouse bar Friday evening to hear from former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate, Republican Georgia football legend Herschel Walker.

“Hopefully, we’re pulling in some of the neighborhood here, too, tonight, (people) that don’t feel like they’re represented enough,” said Randy Snyder, the bar’s co-owner.

Full Throttle is in the 39th District of the Georgia House of Representatives. In the November 2020 general election, Democrat Erica Thomas won reelection there with 82% of the vote. Republican Jim Hickey got 18%.

But district maps have been redrawn. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which analyzes the partisan lean of newly drawn political districts, thinks Republicans’ odds will be unchanged this year: The “estimated Democratic vote share” of Georgia’s 39th House district is 79%, while the “estimated Republican vote share” is a mere 20%.

Those numbers are a lie, to hear Denny Wilson tell it. Wilson, a Mableton-area activist, was appointed the Cobb GOP’s “ambassador to south Cobb” by party Chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs at Friday’s event.

“I’m just glad that Salleigh was able to bring something here to south Cobb, because the previous chairs (of the Cobb GOP) have overlooked south Cobb,” Wilson said. “Because they don’t think they can get votes here. There’s a lot of votes down here in south Cobb. And I think this year is going to prove that.”

How is she so sure?

“I’ve talked to people,” she said. “I think we’re going to be able to turn the tide. We’re going to get Olivia (Angel) elected state rep. to replace Erica Thomas, we’re just waiting for the primary to see who she (Angel) is going to go up against.”

When she took the stage Friday evening, Angel introduced herself as a “legal immigrant” from the Philippines, and said she was running “because the left is insane. And Trump won, by the way.”

Caesar Gonzales, a former area resident and a Republican running for the 13th Congressional District (currently represented by David Scott, estimated Democratic vote share 81%), came up next.

“I’m the antithesis of the left,” he said. The left wants you to believe that if you’ve got a little color to you, if you’re Black and you’re brown, you need government assistance to get anywhere, to achieve anything. And I stick it right in their eye.”

Speaking before the candidates took the stage, Snyder said he was proud of his bar’s politically conservative, yet racially diverse clientele. “A lot of regulars” were there that evening, he said. But so were “a lot of faces I’ve never seen.”

Kennesaw’s Zach Craton, 22, had come with his grandfather, Dave Craton, who worked 32 years at Lockheed Martin’s Marietta plant.

Dave Craton said he’d be voting for Walker, someone “who can get something done and not bullcr*p anybody” — and Herschel is endorsed by Trump.

Zach Craton, summing up the value of the Trump endorsement, said the former president was likely to handpick like-minded candidates. And Trump as president “would do stuff and then talk about it, instead of being like, ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then maybe do it.”

Neither was bothered by Walker’s refusal to debate his primary opponents.

“All the debates, really, it just shows how much of a horse’s a** everybody really is,” Dave Craton said. Watching one of the presidential debates in 2020, “I didn’t personally get anything out of it except just to see there was favoritism on (moderator) Chris Wallace’s side.”

Kellie Barber, of Austell, sat in the front row for Walker’s speech. She was a student at UGA when Walker led the university to its second national championship, and has been a fan of his ever since.

“When I read his book, and that he gives all the glory to God … and he’s so humble, and he works so hard — I mean, he’s the true American,” she said. "When our forefathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, when our country was founded, it was founded for people like Herschel, and me.”

BAT CITY: Lisa Cupid, chair of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, traveled last week with a bevy of metro Atlanta pols on the Atlanta Regional Commission’s LINK trip — an annual junket to another metropolis to trade high-minded ideas on local governance.

“This year we are in Austin, Texas, learning about their best practices, growing pains and opportunities that can help inform us how to make the Atlanta Region including Cobb County a better place where all can succeed,” Cupid said on Facebook.

The Texan capital had no shortage of familiar faces. Among them were Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Fulton County Chair Rob Pitts, Gwinnett Chair Nicole Love Hendrickson, Clayton Chair Jeffrey Turner, and Henry Chair Carlotta Harrell. Also spotted: Council for Quality Growth CEO Michael Paris, patron saint of developers everywhere. 

Harrell said in a social media post that “we continued to explore key topics such as affordable housing, climate resiliency, economic opportunity, and arts & culture” as the group toured Waterloo Greenway, a park that doubles as stormwater management, the Capital Factory tech incubator, and Community First Village, "which provides #housing for 300 previously un-housed people.” 

Housing or lack thereof has been the topic du jour in Cobb County. As Cupid said at her recent State of the County address: "... if you want grocery stores next door to you, if you want schools next door to you, if you want a laundromat next door to you, affordable housing is going to have to go somewhere."

Cupid’s trip was not unnoticed back home, with state Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-west Cobb, remarking “This is exactly what we've been warning folks about for the past 15 months when we say that our commission chair is pursuing a radical zoning transformation of West Cobb. Many will remember her previous failed attempt to bring a tent-city-style homeless community to the county."

(Ehrhart is referring to a trip Cupid, then-County Manager Rob Hosack and Michael Murphy, then-assistant to Chairman Mike Boyce, took in 2018 to visit a homeless camp near Tampa, Fla., in Pinellas County, after receiving glowing reports about it from Cobb Countian John Morgan.)

Ehrhart continued:

“It appears she's at it again, as confirmed by her recent trip to Austin, TX with City of Atlanta Mayor, Andre Dickens, to tour a homeless village of more than 500 tightly-packed "micro homes" situated in a single-family residential area of the city. Cupid said her ‘key takeaway’ from this experience was, ‘if you wait too long to tackle looming issues, the scale of them may become so large that it will be impossible to do anything constructive to fix them.’

(In a Thursday Facebook post, Cupid writes: “Heard from Mayor of Austin Steve Adler bout wins, opportunities and challenges in the city. The key takeaway from his talk was that if you wait too long to tackle the looming issues the scale of them may become so large that it will be impossible to anything constructive to fix it.”)

Says Ehrhart: “Do you hear that, folks? The chair is once again romancing the idea of a homeless camp of micro-homes and according to her, doesn't want to waste any time getting it done here in Cobb. Where exactly might this property-value-destroying camp be located? My best guess would be Cupid's favorite location: ‘Next Door To You.’"

Asked to respond to Ehrhart’s statement, Cupid appeared amazed at the connections being drawn.

“They’re completely unrelated, but I like the creativity of people. That’s very creative,” Cupid said, noting that the notion of adding funding for a similar “homeless camp” to the county budget had come in 2018 not from her, but from Boyce's assistant Murphy.

She later added, “There’s some critical thinking, I think, that's needed to be able to infer some things from others, and there's some unreasonable inferences made from very distinct activity. If people want to utilize that for their own fodder, I'm glad they have the time and the interest to do that.

“My responsibility is to be here to lead the county, and to be able to help us do important things like what we did here today, that are going to help move our county forward.”

HEARTBEAT BILL: With the Supreme Court leak about the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the MDJ ran a story last week reporting on the reactions of local politicos. If the high court leaves abortion up to the states, a law authored by state Rep. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, called the Heartbeat Bill, kicks in, banning abortion at six weeks in the Peach State. Among those to sound off in the MDJ article was Jacquelyn Bettadapur, chair of the Cobb Democratic Committee.

“I’ve had three pregnancies and two children,” Bettadapur told the Journal. “The first pregnancy failed at 10 weeks, miscarriage … so I had to go in and have a D&C (dilation and curettage procedure), which is technically, I guess, an abortion. But my fetus had no heartbeat. So that was all done under a doctor’s supervision. So, six weeks, I mean, most women don’t even know they’re pregnant yet.”

Yet Setzler says Bettadapur is incorrectly interpreting the Heartbeat Bill.

"I'd like to invite our Democratic chairwoman to actually read the bill that she is spending so much time talking about,” Setzler said in an email to the Journal. “In lines 88-94, removing a dead unborn child or an ectopic pregnancy from within a woman, is very clearly NOT an abortion:

"(1) 'Abortion' means the act of using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn child; provided, however, that any such act shall not be considered an abortion if the act is performed with the purpose of:

"(A) Removing a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion; or

"(B) Removing an ectopic pregnancy."