Talk of the Town - Uncle Paul July 29 2000

One day last year, after a weekend at his grandparents’ house, my 6-year-old son Crawford came up to me and told me how much fun he’d had at the Barnesville Buggy Days fair. His grandfather had taken him there, and they had met a man my son repeatedly called “Uncle Paul.” “You don’t have an Uncle Paul,” I told Crawford. “Who are you talking about?”

The boy insisted to me that he did indeed have an Uncle Paul, and that he and his grandfather had talked to him at the Buggy Days fair. A quick call to my mother confirmed that Crawford had been introduced to the senior United States senator from Georgia, Paul Coverdell, who’d made an appearance at the event. Coverdell had known my father from his days in city and state government, and their friendly meeting apparently caused my young son to believe that Sen. Coverdell was an uncle he’d never met.

That was the kind of man Paul Coverdell was. He was friendly, engaging, and everyone — even his ideological foes — genuinely liked him. It was apparent even to a child.

To Democrats, Coverdell once represented a benign threat. He was the minority leader in the state Senate, presiding over a once-tiny delegation of only five Republican senators. Still, it was in his nature to know that needless and outright confrontation with the state’s firmly entrenched Democratic power structure was a hopeless and losing proposition.

Ironically, Coverdell, a Buckhead Republican, may well have made more legislative progress on behalf of the city of Atlanta than any other member of the General Assembly, including Democrats. One former city official recently told me that Coverdell was quickly identified as the “go to” person in the Georgia Senate for city lobbyists back in the 1970’s because he understood and knew the people on both sides of the issues.

Over the years the senator became the grand old man of what was eventually a formidable Republican power surge in Georgia. In the late ’80s he moved on to Washington, where his quiet, bipartisan approach served him well as director of the Peace Corps. His reputation as a friendly and highly productive moderate grew by leaps and bounds.

In 1992, Coverdell defeated a host of Senate hopefuls in the GOP primary and went on to win a hotly contested match against incumbent Wyche Fowler. At first, his reputation as moderate held strong.

But Washington is different than Georgia.

I will not pretend that I had no differences with Coverdell on many of the issues he championed in the U.S. Senate. His paradoxical association with the right-wing Republican congressional leadership left me rather baffled. And I was particularly upset when he voted to convict the president in last year’s impeachment battle. For a time, it seemed that the genteel and moderate Buckhead state senator we had come to know and respect had given over to the dark side.

But I never lost respect for his humanity. Unlike so many Republicans, Coverdell had a good heart, and he was a really nice guy. His decency pierced through ideological discrepancies, and one can only hope that his life will serve as example for others, regardless of party affiliation. God knows we could use more gentility among the ideologues who make our laws.

In the mean business of ideological combat, it is easy to lose the forest for the trees. I am certainly guilty of it myself, on a near-constant basis. We often overlook — sometimes on purpose — the possibility that our political enemies just might be decent people.

We’ll miss you, Uncle Paul.