One Good Deed Deserves Another -- Cynthia Tucker's turn at the plate on Manuel Maloof

Below is an 8-7-04 post entitled: "Lower the flag to half-mast -- A Great American has left this life," Ben Smith and Tom Bennett pen a keeper: "Manuel Maloof dies at age 80"

Today it's Cynthia Tucker turn to bat, and she produces yet another keeper. Some quotes from her column:

-- It was vintage Maloof -- opinionated, abrupt, unfiltered. Of course, that was what was so endearing: In an age of blow-dried, packaged politicians whose every utterance has been pretested and polled, Manuel was among the last of the old-fashioned, instinctive political leaders. He said what he believed, and he believed what he said. He tried to do the right thing for his constituents, but he didn't care for sugar-coating the truth.

Manuel was a political leader for grown-ups -- constituents who understood that sometimes their taxes would go up, that sometimes a beloved old building would come down, that government wasn't the enemy but that it couldn't solve every problem.

He pushed controversial proposals if he believed they were for the greater good of DeKalb County. And he didn't back down from a fight, even if he thought he might lose.

As chairman of the County Commission during the deep recession of 1982, he was the target of an unsuccessful recall after he refused to scale back a budget supported by higher property tax reassessments. He believed there was a more acute need for government services when times were bad.

"People out of work use county health centers," he told a reporter at the time. "Crime goes up, jails fill. . . .

"I knew the attitude of the Reagan administration would put a tremendous burden on local government. Anything that produces unemployment and more poverty, which Reagan's policies apparently are, impacts on the cost of local government tremendously."

A Roosevelt Democrat, Manuel believed deeply in the power of government to work for the common good.

Not that he was ever anything but frugal. He ruled the county as a working man -- without bodyguards, limousines or any of the trappings of power. He never lost the common man's skepticism of the pampered and well-heeled. If Democrats were supposed to be profligate, nobody ever told Manuel.

There was nothing about Manuel that suggested he ought to be a central figure in DeKalb County politics for nearly two decades. In the conspicuously WASPish South, he was the descendant of Lebanese Catholics. In the buckle of the Bible Belt, he was a barkeep. In an era of white flight to the suburbs, he kept his primary bar -- the "store," he always called it -- in the city of Atlanta.

He was an original. And I miss him already.

-- Thanks Ms. Tucker, we needed that. And we also miss your friend.