That’s a Point in His Favor
I want to say right here up front: Don’t know much about Georgia politics, don’t know much about Pillowtex Corp.*, don’t know much about GOP Senate candidate David Perdue. Perdue might be running on a pro-cannibalism and anti-kitten platform for all I know. But I have to say, I kind of admire the guy for this:
Georgia Republican Senate candidate and ex-CEO David Perdue isn’t shrinking from any part of his business record, even when it comes to outsourcing. During a stop on Monday Perdue said he was “proud of” his record on outsourcing…
“Defend it? I’m proud of it,” Perdue said during a press stop in Buckhead, Georgia on Monday according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is a part of American business, part of any business. Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day.”
(That’s from TPM, btw.)
And to be clear, I’m not saying this because I’m, a “Yay outsourcing!” guy. I neither love nor hate the concept, in the same way I neither love nor hate corporate donations to the United Way. A little bit is probably good for everyone in the long run; too much is probably bad for everyone over the long run. Where those lines cross on the graph of life is a question better answered by smarter folk than I.
But I have to say, I do like the fact that the guy’s owning up to it. It’s a nice change of pace from the near-universal practice of Rs and Ds living their professional lives one way, and then running for office and issuing oblique, meandering, and purposefully obfuscating babble designed mislead voters into thinking that they have always believed strongly in some politically advantageous notion that they don’t even really believe in now.
Like I said, don’t know the guy, and being as he’s GA GOP dude I’m guessing it’s doubtful his platform is one I’d vote for. But I still find this totally refreshing.
* I will be disappointed if it isn’t a company that manufactures pillows for oil barons and death row inmates.
I’d also note it’s kind of unfair in particular to critique a US textile manufacturer for outsourcing. It’s not really an industry we are close to competitive in except for very specific niches. There is something like a 60-year history of textile outsourcing. If he managed to keep the company afloat, that’s a miracle in and of itself regardless of the means by which he did it. The median performance of a textile manufacturer in the US has been bankruptcy.Report
For a few moments, as I read, I filled in ‘chickens’ instead of ‘textiles’ and pondered out-sourced chicken farming and poultry processing.
And then I got my industries/brands unkinked.
I particularly like and agree with this sentiment:
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Keep in mind he’s reportedly been bragging through the campaign about his record in the private sector as a job creator.
To what extent has Perdue really avoided “issuing oblique, meandering, and purposefully obfuscating babble designed mislead voters into thinking that they have always believed strongly in some politically advantageous notion that they don’t even really believe in now.”?
Look at the campaign manager’s followup (Politico):
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/david-perdue-georgia-senate-race-2014-111589.htmlReport
he’s reportedly been bragging through the campaign about his record in the private sector as a job creator
That’s not actually incompatible with outsourcing. But the campaign trail isn’t where I’d want to try to explain that.Report
He is creating jobs in the private sector, its just that the private sector isn’t located where anybody who could vote for him lives.Report
Sure, but Georgia isn’t the whole of the U.S. 😉Report
I’m trying to sing your opening paragraph like Sam Cooke but it just is not working.
I suppose it is good that he is being honest and not running from the record. It probably does not matter because Georgia is now among as red as it gets and he would probably win even if he acted like a coward and back-tracked and tried to hand-wave away.
According to all the research I’ve seen the economy has been doing well under Obama and we just had some of our best job growth ever in 2014. Or 2014 is the best year for job growth in the 21st century so far.
Yet unlike previous times, the Democratic Party is probably going to be handed some smashing defeats in 2014 unless they do a great GOTV campaign in the next month.
There are a few reasons for this. One is that the Democratic Party has seats up for reelection in very Republican friendly places and we are big sorting more. The second is that people are still not perceiving the economy as being good because they are reeling from the scars of the great Recession and their savings have been destroyed and yet to recover. The third could be that partisanship is just getting more solid (this is sort of related to point one).Report
I’m trying to sing your opening paragraph like Sam Cooke but it just is not working.
You just ain’t got soul, Saul!Report
It’s not particularly unusual that the president’s party tends to lose during the elections into the first half of his second term.
Also, it’s difficult to know if the economy is doing well because of Obama, in spite of him, or some combination of both, or other reasons entirely.Report
Oddly, though, when the economy is doing bad it’s indeniably Obama’s fault.Report
Actually, Georgia is getting little bits o’ blue- Perdue is in a competitive race with Michelle Nunn (Sam’s kid), and the Governor (Nathan Deal) is neck-and-neck with Jason Carter (Jimmy’s grandson). Georgia law doesn’t allow a plurality win, and right now it looks like both races are very likely going to go to a run-off.
In both cases, the main spoilers are to the right of both major party candidates, so run-offs favor the Republicans. But as run-offs in GA are typically low-turnout events, a really good GOTV effort could win it for either candidate.
I do find the dynasty aspect frustrating, but I like the politics of Nunn and Carter so much better than their opponents that it’s not worth making a huge fuss over, and it’s not like politics is the only career that has people following their parents into it. But hopefully in the future GA Dems can recruit a more diverse candidate field than “direct descendents of people who’ve already won statewide elections”.Report
My treatment of the standard red/blue cartogram stuff for Georgia from the 2012 Presidential election here. Top map is an outline for the counties, colored red/blue for Romney/Obama. Second map is a cartogram with the county sizes reflecting population (metro Atlanta sticks out). Third map is the same cartogram, but with shades of purple to reflect how extreme the vote was.
There are a whole lot of states with the red/blue split along rural/urban lines.Report
What’s notable to me is that many of the suburban counties surrounding Atlanta are red. If you look at Philadelphia, they’re blue. Houston red, Seattle blue.
And that, as far as I am concerned, is the defining distinction between red state and blue, most of the time.Report
@will-truman
Yep. Colorado’s swing from red to blue over the last decade has been decided largely by the Denver suburbs. All of the paperwork subsequent to yesterday’s Supreme Court action (non-action?) on SSM has been done, the Colorado county clerks are required to issue SSM licenses, and there’s been very little screaming. I don’t expect much screaming — there are three important races this year that if the Republicans want to win or hold, they need to do much better in the Denver suburbs than they did two years ago.Report
Down here in Colorado Springs, there was a lot of demoralized Republican types following the Bush implosion. An attitude that said that Focus on the Family did better work when they talked about the Family than when they talked about the government. That sort of thing. The day after the 2012 elections, a *HUGE* number of really conservative female co-workers were *LIVID* at Akin and his ilk. They blamed Colorado’s bluing on the socons.
Current batch of conservative co-workers talk about the wars overseas, spending, and “law and order”. I never hear anybody complain about gay marriage anymore.Report
And to be fair, Deal’s struggle is due more to some specific corruption-related issues than a general dissatisfaction with Republican policies. I think he’s just a classic case of the sort of crappy-quality politician you get when one party goes too long with no competition.Report
@jaybird
I don’t disagree with the conservative female coworkers. My own perception of the last decade in Colorado (three years of which working for the state legislature) are: 2006 and 2008 were the Bush backlash; 2010 was the state Republicans shooting themselves in the foot (geez, Maes almost cost the Republicans their status as a major party); and 2012 was McNulty and the state Republicans saying, “We’ll do anything it takes to keep a civil-union bill we can’t win from coming to the floor, no matter how bad it looks,” seriously pissing off the Denver suburban female vote in the process. This year, the Republicans have Gardner and Coffman trying desperately to run away from their previous record on personhood-from-conception and shred the social safety net, with Beauprez trying to run on “I’m a generic Republican in an anti-Dem year.”
I’ve offered my tactics to the Mountain West Republicans in the past, in no particular order: (1) ignore Montana and Idaho, they don’t produce enough electoral votes to matter; (2) be the party for local determination on public lands, even though this means that within a decade, outside of Montana and Idaho, wilderness and tourism win over resource extraction and ranching; (3) renewable electricity supplies and whatever it takes to make that successful; (4) light rail and generous federal matching funds for same; (5) inner-ring suburban women on social values, and (6) don’t go out of your way to piss off Hispanic citizens (more specifically, be the party that actively wants Mexico to succeed). Ignore these, and you get to watch the whole region steadily turn blue.Report
I guess I neglected to mention: I’m willing to bet a pint on the major election results in Colorado this year being: Hick (D) holds the Governor’s Office, Udall (D) holds his US Senate seat, and Coffman (R) loses his US House seat.Report
I don’t know about Hick. He’s done a pretty good job of putting his foot in it, recently…
So, I might be willing to take that bet.Report
@Michael Cain – as a recovering ex-libertarian and borderline liberal, I like your policy suggestions… But doesn’t that in and of itself kind of imply that by accepting them, the GOP would defeat the blue wave by sorta kinda becoming blue themselves? I mean, you take trumps on immigration and global warming, and the socons will think you’re one step away from nailing feces to the church door or something of the sort.
Now, that might have worked a treat up until, say, B. Clinton’s first term, but wouldn’t that make even winners pariahs within their own party?Report
@jaybird
We live close enough to each other to make paying off the bet practical. Just say the word :^)
@el-muneco
Well, it would certainly make them look less like Deep South Republicans. At least to my thinking, (2) and (6) are different than either party’s position right now. Outside of the West, Republicans are trying to push some of the obligations of (2) onto the states without similar grants of authority. This past legislative session, Colorado set aside money to begin building its own aerial fire-fighting fleet (a la California) after the non-western Republicans indicated that given a chance, they’ll whack fire fighting and mitigation funding for the national forests in the interests of cutting spending. (3) and (4) are simply an acknowledgement that those issues are increasingly settled in the West, except for some of the shouting. And (5) is just a recognition of facts — in a heavily suburban West, you’d better be on the proper side of those women on social issues.Report
I’m going the other way. Hick wins (HICK WINS!), but Udall goes down in a dispirited soggy splat. (Spoiling the shine on his shark-skin cowboy boots.)Report
Saul:
“According to all the research I’ve seen the economy has been doing well under Obama and we just had some of our best job growth ever in 2014.”
Are you sure that you are talking about the US economy?
Food Stamp Recipients Top 46 Million for 35th Straight Month
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/food-stamp-recipients-top-46-million-35th-straight-month
And this gem about why the unemployment rate fell to 5.9%. It’s not because of the job creation in the Obama economy. No, it the record 92 million Americans who aren’t in the labor force.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-03/labor-participation-rate-drops-36-year-low-record-926-million-americans-not-labor-foReport
Saul:
Here is another interesting note about the turn for the worse the US economy is taking.
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-overtakes-us-as-worlds-largest-economy-2014-10Report
I think outsourcing is neither something to be proud or ashamed of, but I agree that it’s nice to start seeing outsourcing as a legal and ethical moneymaking tool. We don’t don’t shame business-owners that don’t send all proceeds to charity, and we shouldn’t shame those that choose to find profits overseas. But as Ceon Critic points out, you can’t have your cake and eat it to. If a candidate talks about their role as a domestic job-creator, or how private sector experience will make them a good executive, then the choices they made come into play. To return to the charity example, a businesses-owner with a history of charitable giving is going to have more credibility claiming he puts the local community over profits than one without that history.Report
Hope you don’t mind, I cleaned up a couple of typos.
If Perdue calls himself a “job creator” now, he’s feeding rope to his opponent (Michelle Nunn, who is trying as hard as she can to avoid taking any policy positions at all). For all the good it’ll do.Report
I am getting tired of Democratic politicians trying to take policy positions.Report
The forecast is Perdue wins seven times out of every ten. Frankly, I’m surprised Nunn is doing as well as she is — but I know from personal experience that in parts of this great nation of ours, it matters who your daddy is.Report
I know. I wrote about that above. Georgia is a very red state and the South seems to be getting more and more partisan Republican.
The highlights for the Democratic Party this year are potentially winning control of the governorships of Kansas and Maine and Pennsylvania. The Senate looks like it will go GOP.Report
I agree. They should take no policy positions at all. 🙂
More seriously, Georgia is closer to North Carolina than it is to Alabama. Politically speaking. It’s not as far out of reach as a lot of the South is.Report
Saul,
ain’t no potentially about PA’s guvnorship. Unless you think Bernie’s actually got a chance of losing.Report
So when do we get to outsource the Senate? I see some major cost savings there.Report
Outsource the IRS! Or, at least, their email backup solution.Report
I sometimes think that we could have a runaway popular politician who just told the bald-faced truth about how s/he felt. People would be so relieved & amused that even if they didn’t agree with them, they’d still like them.Report
I agree with this, but only within certain boundaries. After all, I think you can make an argument that Todd Aiken cost the GOP the Senate in 2012 by being exactly that guy.Report
The best headline from the day after:
“Claire McCaskill legitimately shuts down Todd Akin in Missouri Senate race”
I also enjoyed the insight that said something to the effect of “when you talk about whether the guy who talked about rape cost the republicans the election and the person you’re talking to says “which one?”, you’ve got a problem.”Report
True, but I figure it worked out for the best, in that such an honest opinion is so offensive to so many that it’s a good thing he got handed his ass.Report
So, like Crazy People but a politician instead?Report
During the primary, the current Republican candidate for the GA-1 said that he’d “rather see another terrorist attack…than to give up [his] liberty as an American citizen”, referring to the TSA. He got a lotta crap for that, and his opponents jumped all over his rather poor phrasing, but I found myself agreeing with him on it (and virtually nothing else; I’m really peeved at the new districts they drew.)Report