Sen. David Perdue still touts his original “outsider” status after almost six years in the U.S. Senate and now asserts accomplishments for Georgia and the nation.
But now the senior of Georgia’s two Republican senators, Perdue, 70, talks in anything but positive terms about the intentions of his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff. The two are locked in a hotly contested race in which they accuse each other of lying and fact-checkers sometimes agree.
In 2014, Perdue ran for the then-open Senate seat after four decades in business, including tenures as CEO of Reebok and Dollar General. He and his cousin, former Georgia governor and current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, were riding in the senator’s “Original Outsider” campaign bus Saturday morning when they stopped at Anderson’s General Store and spoke briefly to a crowd of about 100 people.
But he had called the Statesboro Herald for an interview earlier in the week.
“Well, first of all, I was an outsider to this whole process and I got involved because I believed that we needed to change the direction of the country,” Perdue said in the Oct. 14 interview. “Under President Obama we had eight years of the worst economic output in U.S. history, and I could see that coming, so I got involved because of the debt crisis and the global security crisis.”
In fact, after the 2008 recession, growth in the U.S. gross domestic product resumed in the latter half of 2009 – Obama’s first year in office – and continued into the early months of 2020, as seen in a Forbes magazine article from Feb. 17, 2020, and other sources. But growth remained sluggish for several years.
Perdue credits the tax reform plan President Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 and other measures taken by Republican lawmakers for leading to a boom.
“We have the greatest economic turnaround going in U.S. history,” Perdue said. “We created seven and a half million new jobs and allowed six and a half million people to pull themselves
out of poverty. I was an architect of what we worked on there: regulation, energy, taxes and Dodd-Frank.”
By “Dodd-Frank” he means the 2018 rolling back of banking regulations that had been established under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, enacted in July 2010.
Of course, the economy hit a major setback before mid-2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Georgia concerns
“I went to Washington and I’ve done exactly what I said I would do and that is to fight for the people of Georgia,” Perdue said. “We’ve got the Port of Savannah deepened down there in your area. I fought like crazy and got that funded, and President Trump broke through the regulations that were holding it up and we will now finish that port next year. That is so huge for our state.”
Perdue worked with Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, to establish opportunity zones, with tax incentives for private investment in communities designated as economically-distressed. The program was included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In Georgia alone, 260 census tracts in 83 counties were designated as opportunity zones in 2018.
He also worked with U.S. Rep. David Scott, the Democrat representing Georgia’s 13th District in the House, to secure permanent funding for historically black colleges and universities, Perdue said.
Blaming former Vice President Joe Biden, then a senator, for mandatory minimum-sentencing legislation passed in 1994, Perdue said the Republican leadership did “something the Democrats have failed to do” since then, enact criminal justice reform. The 1994 legislation had caught up many nonviolent, first-time drug offenders in the criminal justice system, he said.
“We changed that, and thousands of young, mostly African American men now have been released back into work programs and rehabilitation programs,” Perdue said. “That’s a big deal.”
Republicans “broke through the gridlock and got disaster relief for our farmers” after “Democrats absolutely held us up on that for over a year,” he said.
“And then when COVID hit, we got really busy,” Perdue said. “We brought $47 billion to Georgia, put through the PPP, a Paycheck Protection Program, that saved a million and a half jobs, and hopefully saved about 140,000 small businesses in Georgia.”
The assistance to small businesses and aid to hospitals, schools, farmers and state and local governments were in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which Perdue voted for.
Claims about Ossoff
A mention of the first debate involving the three candidates for the Senate seat – Perdue, Ossoff and Libertarian Party nominee Shane Hazel – set off Perdue’s comments about Ossoff. The Atlanta Press Club hosted that debate, aired by Georgia Public Broadcasting, Oct. 12.
“I think the debate the other night was a perfect example of where Jon Ossoff will say anything to hide his radical socialist agenda from the people of Georgia, because frankly what he wants to do is so alien to what most people in Georgia want,” Perdue said.
Ossoff “wants to defund the police,” Perdue claimed. “He wants open borders and sanctuary cities. He wants to close two military bases in Georgia, take away private health insurance and
force everybody onto a Medicare system that would totally bankrupt the current Medicare system, and he supports the Green New Deal.”
But in a Oct. 12 news release, Ossoff’s campaign called a similar statement Perdue made during the debate that day “four lies in one sentence,” and Perdue’s assertions do not match Ossoff’s proposals as he has described them to news organizations.
His answer to police brutality was “not to defund the police” but to “reform” and “demilitarize” policing, the Ossoff campaign noted, citing a June 16, 2020, Atlanta Journal-Constitution story. His health care proprosal, as he summarized it to the Statesboro Herald for a Sept. 17 story, involves expanding Medicaid – the needs-based program, not Medicare – and creating a nonprofit public option to compete with private insurers on the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, exchanges.
Ossoff does not endorse the Green New Deal as such, but he has called for investment in clean energy as part of a major infrastructure program.
Claims back at him
On the other hand, Ossoff ads and Democratic Party statements quoting Perdue as saying in March, “The risk (of COVID-19) to the American people remains very low” take part of a sentence out of context, he noted.
“The back half of that said, though, ‘but we should not take this lightly. We’re going take this very seriously,’” Perdue said last week.
Ossoff also continues to lob allegations that Perdue profited from knowledge of the emerging pandemic through stock trades last spring.
But the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee investigated and found no evidence that Perdue violated federal law or Senate rules or standards. Perdue states that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission also cleared him.
Pre-existing conditions
Despite Ossoff’s claims that Perdue is lying when he says he wants to protect people with pre-existing conditions, he is a co-sponsor of a long-introduced but unpassed bill entitled the Protect Act, which includes provisions to prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions or charging higher premiums because of someone’s health status. He also supported a recent effort to add pre-existing conditions protection to a further COVID-19 relief bill.
Ossoff’s allegation is based on the fact that Perdue voted for the unsuccessful effort to repeal the ACA in 2017 and has since supported a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to have the ACA overturned.
“If the Supreme Court rules the ACA is not constitutional, we’ve got a problem, and so I co-sponsored a bill in the Senate just two weeks ago that would protect us all from pre-existing conditions,” Perdue said.
Red scare
Lately, Perdue has been accusing Ossoff, who is CEO of Insight TWI, a production company that makes documentary films and TV programs, of Communist ties. Perdue asserts that Ossoff “took money from a company that’s owned by the Chinese communist government and tried to hide it from the federal government.”
This is based on his filing an amended financial disclosure about having done business with a Hong Kong-based media company partly owned by the Chinese government.
“And he’s actually been supported in 2017 and it continues on today by the Communist Party USA,” Perdue said.
But the Associated Press, in an Oct. 7 fact checking story, called this claim “fictitious” and “flatly false.”
The Communist Party USA did post an item on its Facebook page in 2017 about Ossoff’s candidacy that year, referring to him as a “progressive” seeking the seat in Congress previously held by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But the Communist Party did not endorse him, then or now, the AP reported.
Perdue said this evaluation hinged on the use of the word “endorsed” when he said “supported.” But the Perdue ad that the AP fact-checked referred to “endorsement by the Communist Party.”