CARLTON FLETCHER: Cagle, Kemp trying to ‘out-conservative’ each other

Hey, mama, weer all crazee now.

— Slade

I know they’re both politicians, but after having met both Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp in person prior to their ongoing gubernatorial campaigns, I had a considerable amount of respect for both.

Indeed, Cagle has been a friend to southwest Georgia, particularly in the development of what would become the Commodore Conyers College and Career Academy in Albany, and Kemp’s visits to the area and subsequent conversations with this newspaper’s Editorial Board left the impression of a true public servant whose primary concern was Georgia’s citizens.

All that’s out the window.

Cagle and Kemp are now engaged in a high-dollar runoff campaign with televised ads that, while entertaining in a so-bad-you-can’t-not-watch kind of way, have helped reinforce that commonly held outsider stereotype of the South being filled with ignorant hillbillies whose intelligence level hovers somewhere close to single digits. And while I’m certain some wrong-headed PR types are the ones who came up with the current embarrassing ads, it’s Cagle’s and Kemp’s names that are attached to those campaigns.

It started when Kemp, the underdog in the race simply because Cagle sat in a more high-profile office and used that position to ramp up his visibility, was convinced that the only way to out-conservative Cagle was to go waaaaaay to the right to try and nab a portion of that Donald Trump base that’s still fighting the Civil War.

His team came up with what was, frankly, a brilliant solution. They produced the infamous candidate-pointing-a-gun kinda at some young dude who was there to date Kemp’s daughter. While the ad scored a 10-plus on the comedy scale, most Georgians either a) laughed it off as the best last-gasp of a desperate politician or b) thought “damned right I’m voting for a man who sits on the porch with his shootin’ iron and ain’t afeared to show some whippersnapper that he’ll use it if he has to.”

The ad was brilliant for one reason only: It drew attention to Kemp’s flagging primary campaign. Most political followers in the state had already conceded the primary — and, as well, the governor’s seat — to Cagle. But the ridiculous ad lit a spark in just the right people, and suddenly the facade of Cagle’s invincibility started to crumble a bit.

When returns came in on May 22, Kemp had a strong enough showing to claim a second-place finish in the six-person race and force Cagle into a runoff.

Well, the Cagle campaign certainly took notice. If their man had to make his own assinine video ad to counter Kemp’s inroads into the Trump base, well, by god, their man would do just that. And thus came the even more ludicrous ad of the Kemp “lookalike” sitting on the porch and being dressed down by an old dude sitting in a rocker with his own gun. (He did, sharp observers noted, at least have the gun pointing away from the would-be Kemp.)

When the old man snaps his gun intact and tells the ineffective Kemp to “git,” it’s one of those defining moments: as in the moment that this campaign ran off the rails of common sense and common decency and the embarrassment quotient blew up the meter.

Now Georgians are left to wonder just who is the most conservativist and if the next ad won’t have some actual gunplay, maybe just a shoot-to-wound scene or two, and then an answer ad that escalates to full-on Gunfight at the OK Corral bloodshed.

That two heretofore respected politicians would stoop to this level is, frankly, surprising, even in the era of Trump. I can’t imagine an electorate or a Congress that could take either of them seriously after their least-common-denominator campaigns. But, of course, if Democrat Stacy Abrams — who has garnered an outpouring of support since her primary win and has to be loving every minute of the Cagle-Kemp fiasco — continues to build the momentum she has going, both Republicans may be sittin’ on their porches with their weapons come November, wondering just where it was that the wheels came off.

Hint, guys: Watch your campaign ads.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.