If Young runs, he gets 98% of the black vote. And loses.
Young May Try to Add 'Senator' to Résumé
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER - NEW YORK TIMES
ATLANTA, Aug. 17 - Thirteen years after he last held elective office, Andrew J. Young Jr., the former pastor, civil rights leader, congressman, mayor and ambassador, to pick a few lines from his résumé, is eyeing a new title: United States senator.
He is 71 now, overweight, and hobbles on two bad knees. But because the Democratic incumbent, Senator Zell Miller, is stepping down next year and the Democratic Party can find no one more capable of trying to retain his seat, and because Mr. Young, ever the internationalist, is increasingly concerned about America's place in the world and eager to do something about it, he is considering ending his political retirement.
"My children are secure financially, but my grandchildren, the kind of debt we're building up, the kind of confusion we're creating in the global order, is a threat to my grandchildren's security," Mr. Young said in an interview today. "I have a feeling that we really don't know what we're doing."
The political terrain he appears set upon re-entering has changed sharply since 1990, when Mr. Young was swamped in a primary runoff for governor by Mr. Miller, who went on to win two terms before heading to Washington. Like much of the South, Georgia has become only more conservative: last fall, Gov. Roy Barnes and Senator Max Cleland, both Democrats, were ousted by lesser-known, conservative Republicans. And two popular conservative representatives, Johnny Isakson and Mac Collins, are already running and raising money for the Republican primary for the Senate.
But Mr. Young, and many Democrats both here and in Washington, say that if any Democrat can win this election, it is he.
"I think he'll be the cause célèbre of the entire Democratic Party around the country," said Ronald Lester, a Democratic pollster who said Mr. Young was the most popular Democrat in Georgia, black or white. "He's on this rarefied ground with white voters that most black candidates rarely ever get to."
In the interview at his home here, Mr. Young noted that in 1990, when he was trounced in the primary for governor, no black had yet been elected statewide in Georgia. Today, the state attorney general and the labor commissioner are black.
Though he concedes that Democrats have more of an uphill battle in Georgia today, Mr. Young said that Mr. Barnes and Mr. Cleland each ran poor campaigns, relying too heavily on advertising and too little on grass-roots organizing, and that he would not make the same mistakes.
Sitting in the living room of his shady ranch house, surrounded by paintings, sculptures and mementos collected over countless trips around the world, Mr. Young said he had had no interest in re-entering politics when Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, first approached him two years ago. He was too busy, he said, trying to promote trade and build airports, seaports and power plants in Africa.
In two terms as mayor of Atlanta, and then as co-chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, Mr. Young forged ties with dozens of countries, reaped billions of dollars in construction and investment for Atlanta and the state, ran the Olympics in the black without government subsidies and left a legacy of sports facilities across Georgia.
Since 1996, when he formed GoodWorks International, a consulting firm, Mr. Young has spent about 10 days a month in Africa ? the exceptions being after prostate surgery in 2000 and knee surgery in 2001.
Yet Mr. Young, who was ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979, said he had come to some unpleasant conclusions recently. One is that the Bush administration is not ready to involve itself in Africa.
"The things I'm trying to do are in America's strategic interest," he said. "Unfortunately, neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice has had much on-the-ground experience in Africa, and the Rumsfeld group has no interest."
Another is that global instability has made it hard to get things done.
"As soon as we get something put together, something falls apart," Mr. Young said. "And the mood of expansion, and optimism from the 1980's that we profited by, when everybody had surplus capital, has now shifted ? and everybody's scared."
"We talk globalism," he added, "but we're pulling back."
His decision to run for the Senate first gelled last month, Mr. Young said, when he was flying home after leading a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, that was attended by 2,000 people. On the plane, a few former congressmen, all of them white Democrats, urged him to run, saying his stature would make him unique among freshmen senators. He could also become the first black senator since Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois was defeated in 1998.
He said he would work on far more than African issues as a senator and would pay special attention to small-town Georgia during the campaign. "As the mayor in Atlanta, I was always in tension with rural areas," he said. "But I won't have been mayor now for 14 years."
Republicans here see Mr. Young quite differently. "Andy Young's asking you to elect him a U.S. senator so he can go to Washington and be an obstructionist to things that Georgians want," said Alec Poitevint, the state Republican chairman. "The problem with Democrats is they're not in the mainstream of what average Georgians feel and expect from their elected representatives."
To win, political experts say Mr. Young would have to get nearly 40 percent of the white vote, in addition to an overwhelming black turnout. But from his days in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to his tenure at the United Nations, and then as mayor, Mr. Young was always been seen as a peacemaker and a bridge-builder across racial, factional and national lines.
"Almost everything I tried to do in Congress I was able to do," he said, "because I worked on both sides of the aisle. Conservatives were always in the prayer groups, and I attended. Every Wednesday morning, we had Bible study. Almost everybody there but me was an extreme conservative. But they saw me as sincere, and I could also share their religious convictions ? but give it a little different twist."
Though he plans to announce formally in late September, he remains a bit conflicted. "I almost wish I could run a really good campaign, and lose," he said.
But he clearly would much prefer to run a good campaign and win.
"It's not an easy race," he said. "But one of the things that compel me to do it is, I have so much more experience, in almost everything. Put it this way: I'm offering myself to the people of Georgia, as a representative who understands their state, and the world in which we live."
Anyway, the alternative to re-entering the ring, he said, is really not so appetizing: "Sitting around, getting old, and complaining about what other people are not doing."
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