Did Georgia voters throw out some babies with the bath water?

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, You’ve left us up to our necks in it.

– David Bowie

Somebody sent me an email Wednesday morning that said, “I’m sure you’re happy now that Democrats swept all the top positions in Georgia and took control of the U.S. House and Senate. You just wait; our country is headed to hell.”

Two things: 1) No, I am not particularly overjoyed about the results of the Georgia election, and 2) if you’d take off your blinders, you’d realize the current president and Congress had us about as close to hell as this nation’s ever been.

Now, am I happy about the shakeup in the U.S. Senate and House? I’m ecstatic. We have had a Republican-controlled Congress throughout President Trump’s tenure that has been too afraid of him to even speak out against some of the absurdities he’s perpetuated, most notably the illegal war with Iran that has gas prices sky-high.

And, in truth, I would have reached another level of happy if the only good news Tuesday was that Sen. Jon Ossoff beat Mike Collins, a Trump sycophant who, it turns out, has surrounded himself with white supremacists and racists of a most disgusting nature.

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And it’s great that the American people, tired of having to scrimp and save just to eke out a living because of one mad man’s massive ego and a chicken-sh– Congress that sat back and watched as he laid waste to so many of this country’s established institutions, all the while naming everything for himself and claiming he was going to take over our allies’ lands.

As for the Georgia gubernatorial race, I think I speak for most Georgians who aren’t blinded by partisan politics when I say we had perhaps the worst two candidates seeking the state’s top office that I can remember in my lifetime. Neither established him- or herself as governor material, and I go into this new administration expecting calamity, just as I would have if the election had gone the other way. I keep asking myself: How did we stoop to this level?

As for Democrats taking over the state House, I’m OK with that. I say a sad farewell to Gerald Greene, a good man who served 44 years in that body, but I am overjoyed that Harry James, one of the really good people in local politics, is finally getting his chance.

But this idea that we have nine new people, none of whom has experience that amounts to a hill of beans, as we used to say, stepping in to take over agencies that are vital to the future of our state, and we expect things to just run smoothly along because of campaign promises they made? Sorry, I’m not buying it.

What this new Georgia world order comes down to, essentially, is that fed-up Democratic voters said they wanted change at all costs, and equally fed-up Republican voters who put all their faith in one man were betrayed so badly they either voted against him or didn’t vote at all, flipped the state’s political picture on its ear.

Certainly I hope these new commissioners and heads of state agencies succeed. We’ve seen enough hardship and struggle because of poor, partisan politics. If it continues, only in the opposite direction, though, have we really changed things for the better? When experienced or mostly successful leaders like our own Barbara Rivera Holmes, Tyler Harper and Richard Woods get caught up in the blue tsunami that crushed Republicans at virtually every level, are we tossing out some babies with this political bath water?

It goes back to that thing that irks me most about our system of government: The unblinkingly partisan nature of politics in which voters are encouraged to vote for a political party, not the person who is seeking office.

Oh, and you can bet the farm that, if these new leaders don’t step in and establish themselves as competent officials pretty quickly, we’ll see an equally stunning reversal in elections two years from now.

I did get a chuckle while watching election returns Tuesday when Trump posted that Republicans were losing at an amazing pace because he wasn’t on the ballot. He said, “If I had been, we would have won.” This from the man who told voters at rallies to “vote as if I was on the ballot.”

Hate to bust your bubble, dude, but that’s exactly what happened.