At PJM: David Scott (D-Jerk)

My latest column for Pajamas Media is up today, here's a preview:

My local congresscritter is a Democrat by the name of David Scott. Scott’s 13th District is one of the more creatively gerrymandered in Georgia (and that’s saying something). It was engineered to ensure a heavily Democratic majority (polling 62%-37% for John Kerry in 2004, when Georgia as a whole went for George W. Bush 58%-41%), with most of the district’s population centered in Clayton County, which is just south of the city of Atlanta. The rest of the district stretches around the I-285 Perimeter’s west side, finally tapering off up here in Smyrna. To continue the 2004 comparison, Smyrna precincts registered 21,972 votes for Bush to 7,834 for Kerry.

Congressman Scott is rarely seen in these parts; if it weren’t for a billboard he puts up next to the Chick-Fil-A every couple of years, I probably wouldn’t even know what he looks like. The best I can tell, Scott hasn’t held a public meeting here in Cobb County since 2008 — at least that’s what Scott staffer Michael Andel indicated when I emailed Scott’s office last summer asking when he planned to hold a recess town hall. After making a jerk of himself at a meeting in Douglas County, Scott scheduled exactly one “health care” event that summer, which was held in his home base of Clayton County and heavily attended by supportive AFSCME and SEIU members.

A few days after my emails with Andel, Scott turned up in the news thanks to a spray-painted swastika on his Smyrna branch office (about a mile from my house), which generated several Scott-friendly column-inches in the Democratic-friendly media, particularly the local Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC apparently didn’t have the time to ask how Scott managed to have the defaced sign professionally replaced in a matter of hours, almost as if he’d had one ready in case of just such an emergency. Since then he’s scarcely been heard of at all — with the exception of numerous taxpayer-funded franked mailings, of course.

That is, until a couple of weeks ago...