We don’t have Lynn Westmoreland to kick around any more. The former Republican congressman announced on Wednesday that he would not join the crowded primary for governor of Georgia. When Westmoreland announced one year ago that he would not run for re-election to the House it looked like he was preparing for a bid to succeed termed-out Gov. Nathan Deal, and Westmoreland launched a statewide “reconnect tour” at the end of 2016. However, Westmoreland sounded reluctant to run after all over the last few months, so his decision to stay out wasn’t a massive surprise.
If this is the end of Westmoreland’s political career, we won’t shed many tears. In 2006, Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in Congress, but was unable to name all 10 commandments on the Colbert Report. Two years later, Westmoreland described Barack and Michelle Obama as “part of an “elitist-class…that thinks that they’re uppity,” then claimed he didn’t know the word uppity had any racial connotations.
Westmoreland didn’t get much better with time. In 2015, he defended the presence of Confederate flags in federal cemeteries, declaring, “You can’t make an excuse for the things that happened. But a majority of people that actually died in the Civil War on the Confederate side did not own slaves. These were people who were fighting for their states. I don’t think they even had thoughts about slavery.”