12/12/2005
BALTIMORE (AP)- Gov. Robert Ehrlich has hired a political director for his re-election campaign known for helping unseat a former Georgia senator and crusading war veteran four years ago.
Democrats in Maryland and Georgia criticized the hire of Bo Harmon, who managed Saxby Chambliss' 2002 campaign against then-Sen. Max Cleland. They say he attacked the patriotism of Cleland, an Army veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam.
"Bo Harmon ran one of the most despicable campaigns in the history of Georgia, if not the nation," Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Kahn said in a statement. "Senator Chambliss' campaign was the worst example of the politics of personal destruction, defaming the character of a man who gave up so much for his country in Vietnam."
An ad in the 2002 campaign showing pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then a picture of Cleland, riled Democrats and some Republicans. A narrator said that while America faced terrorists and dictators, Cleland had been voting against Bush's homeland security efforts.
Harmon dismissed questions about the Chambliss campaign.
"I think that the focus now is on Governor Ehrlich and his record of turning a $1.7 billion deficit into an almost $2 billion surplus, and the voters of Maryland are probably more interested in those issues than what happened in Georgia four years ago," Harmon said. The veteran of the National Republican Congressional Committee and other GOP organizations starts work Monday.
The campaign merely contrasted the moderate image Cleland portrayed at home and his votes in Washington, said Georgia GOP Executive Director Paul Bennecke.
"Bo Harmon is a very smart man who knows a lot about politics and how to win elections," Chambliss said in a statement.
It was not the ad, but the fact that Cleland voted with the national Democratic agenda most of the time, that secured victory for Chambliss, said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
"That's how they defeated him," Black said. "He took several conspicuously liberal positions on hot-button issues, and when they were called to the attention of Georgia voters, they went to Chambliss."
Maryland Democratic Party spokesman Derek Walker said he was shocked that the governor would hire Harmon, and compared the political director to Joseph F. Steffen Jr., the former Ehrlich aide fired after admitting spreading rumors about Mayor Martin O'Malley.
