TIFTON — Approximately 100 people listened Saturday afternoon at the UGA Tifton Campus Conference Center as four of the seven Republican candidates for governor addressed issues and answered questions. The event was sponsored by the local Tea Party Patriots and Georgia Conservatives in Action.

Darrell Osborne, a founding member of the local Tea Party Patriots organization, said he wished people would understand the group is not oriented toward any political party.

“We are not affiliated with any political organization,” Osborne said. “We’re just like other Tea Parties around the nation.”

Osborne said the organization invited Democratic gubernatorial candidates to a similar forum earlier “but they didn’t respond.”

Those Republican gubernatorial candidates who participated in Saturday’s “round robin” included Eric Johnson, the president pro tempore of the state senate and a Savannah architect; Ray McBerry, president of Ray McBerry Enterprises, Inc., a company that produces radio and television commercials, primarily in the Atlanta area; John Oxendine, state insurance commissioner; and Austin Scott, state sepresentative from Tifton, also an independent insurance broker.

Johnson said he is pro-business, pro-family, pro-life and pro-guns and he believes the campaign for governor is about trust. He said that he believes in small government and free enterprise and that the state needs to comprehensively reform Georgia’s tax code. He also said he believes parents should have more control over their children’s education.

“Parents should have the right to chose where and how to educate their children,” Johnson said.

Johnson said he was a graduate of a public school and that he and his children, one now a lawyer and another a preacher, were also. He said he wants to be “the Zell Miller of education in Georgia.”

“I will be as controversial as he was with the HOPE scholarship,” Johnson said and he believes education could be improved by making it run like free enterprise.

McBerry said he believed there needed to be less federal government in people’s lives and stronger state’s rights. He said he believed in the 10th Amendment and in “reigning in an out-of-control government.” He described himself as a traditional conservative and a Christian with “appreciation for the Bible and the Constitution.” He said all of the nation’s problems didn’t begin with the election of President Barack Obama and Republicans as well as Democrats were to blame.

On taxes, McBerry said, “There’s no reason any American citizen should worry about losing their own home at the end of the year because they didn’t pay rent to the government.”

McBerry said if elected governor he would close all abortion clinics according to Georgia law. He said he was pro-gun and that he believed people had a right to bear arms. He said agents with the Federal Emergency Management Agency were wrong in trying to take guns away from law-abiding citizens in New Orleans after the storm.

“The first time a federal agent is caught doing that in my state, he’ll find himself in a Georgia jail waiting for someone to come and bail him out,” McBerry said.

Oxendine said he believed politicians have forgotten that they work for the people.

“Public service is just that, serving the people,” Oxendine said.

Oxendine said the creation of more jobs in the state was crucial and transportation and other issues also affected how well-equipped the state is to attract business. He said he wouldn’t support an “interbasin transfer” that would be “stealing water from South Georgia.”

Oxendine said he liked the idea of a fair tax and believes that taxing income was like taxing productivity.

“Georgia needs to be showing Washington how to do it,” Oxendine said.

Oxendine said he was the candidate who had been successful at winning elections, winning 154 out of 159 counties last time, and he was the strongest Republican candidate and best equipped to beat Democratic candidate Roy Barnes.

Scott said he believed Georgians would vote for a candidate with integrity and determination and he has both. He said he was the only gubernatorial candidate who was charged with balancing the state’s budget. He said he wasn’t presently pleased with some of the actions of his own party.

“I think my party today looks like the party I wanted to replace years ago,” Scott said.

Scott said he doesn’t believe a “fair tax” rather than the current income tax system would work because sales tax would increase to up to 14 percent and it would take a 6 percent increase in sales tax to offset the revenue generated by income taxes. Scott said he also believes in the right to bear arms.

Scott said he realizes people have no confidence elected officials are spending their tax dollars wisely and the failure of several recent Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax referendums in the state to pass is an indication of that lack of confidence.

“There’s a clear and very present message to me that people are telling government ‘you had better do the best you can with what you’ve got because we aren’t going to give you anymore,’” Scott said.



To contact senior reporter Angie Thompson, call 382-4321.