Saxby Chambliss continues to lie misrepresent the reasons for the Georgia Senate runoff on Tuesday. In the first instance he claims he must have gotten a good portion of the African American vote on Nov. 4th to have been able to have beaten Jim Martin. Exit polling reveals Jim Martin got 93% of that vote, just under what Barack Obama got in the state. Chambliss also claims to have gotten more votes than Obama, which is in fact true, slightly over 23,000 more. However, what he conveniently neglected to mention is that he got 200,000 less than John McCain.
Earlier this month on Hannity and Colmes, Chambliss gave as the reason for this closeness of the result that the Obama people getting out their vote, especially early.
COLMES: Why do you think you’ve been unable…[to] close the deal with the people of Georgia in terms of what happened on Election Day?
CHAMBLISS: Well, listen, we have, for the first time in the history the our state, a 30-day advanced vote period, and let’s give the Obama people credit. They did a good job of getting out their vote early.
There was a high percentage of minority vote, and I am tickled to death that as many Georgians as did examined their right to vote. That’s what make our election process the envy of the whole free world, but we weren’t able to get enough of our folks out on Election Day.
Gee, I wonder who he was talking about? Think Progress has the video. And for the record, Chambliss got about 70% of the "our folks" (white) vote.
The other factor for the surprisingly close result earlier was Chambliss's support of the bailout package in September, despite Chambliss throwing cold water on such recession talk a few months earlier, saying "I don't know if we're in a recession. I don't know what that even means." And that's true, he apparently doesn't, giving the definition as "two consecutive months of negative GDP growth". In fact, it's quarters, not months.
