When you apply for a job, you usually try to give the person hiring you your undivided attention. Democrat Steven Disbrow prefers a higher-risk method.
Disbrow is running for Georgia House District 1 against Republican incumbent Mike Cameron. To convince local voters he belongs in the state legislature, he recently put out a two-minute campaign video on social media recorded entirely from the driver’s seat of a moving car. The camera sits mounted down near steering wheel height. As he navigates local roads, Disbrow constantly drops his gaze from the windshield to the camera lens, locking eyes for seconds at a time while the pavement rolls by and he delivers his animated pitch to voters with confidence and charisma.
This campaign ad turned dashboard confessional displayed a stunning recklessness from a person asking for public trust. We have a severe problem in Georgia with folks treating their vehicles like mobile television studios. Between 2020 and 2024, Georgia logged more than 2,000 deaths in crashes involving suspected or confirmed distracted driving. That is not just some distant Atlanta problem either. Right here in Walker and Dade counties, 2,726 crashes occurred where distracted driving was suspected or confirmed during the same period. People died in 15 of those crashes. In 100 more, people sustained serious injury. Yet the Democrat running for house district one treats oncoming traffic as a minor inconvenience to his personal political ambitions.
You do not have to know Rep. Mike Cameron. You do not have to like him. Plenty of folks do, and plenty of folks do not. You can agree or disagree with his policies all day long. But I can promise you this. Never in a million years would Mike Cameron film a campaign advertisement while steering a two ton car through local traffic or anywhere else for that matter.
Which brings us to the actual message Disbrow was trying to deliver while playing peekaboo with oncoming traffic. He tells the viewer that campaign donors trusted him with their money to beat Cameron. He must use the money carefully to deliver. He reasons that a state legislator is entrusted with tax dollars in the same way. This is wrong. A campaign contribution is a choice, a tax most certainly is not a choice, but he has bigger whopper coming. Looking down into the camera, he states plainly that the government’s job is to give you a better life. Send him to Atlanta, he says, and he will deliver.
Because it is National Constitution Week, we ought to be crystal clear on what the state actually is. Government exists to secure your rights so you have the freedom to pursue your own happiness. It was never designed to deliver happiness on a silver platter. The idea that a politician can decree a better life for you or your household is pure arrogance. Any man who thinks government is capable of engineering personal fulfillment is completely confused about the limits of state power. The state might pave a road and it should run a courthouse. It cannot fix your life or deliver happiness.
That points to another thing Mike Cameron would never do or say in a million years. He would never tell you that the government’s job is to improve your life materially or make you happy. This is precisely why so many voters write Democrats off without giving their messages or ideas a second thought.
Disbrow and Democrats in general echo a script written a century ago. Ever since Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the progressive left has systematically rejected the bedrock principles of the American Revolution and Founding. The men who wrote our founding documents understood that human nature is permanent and flawed. They designed a limited government with enumerated powers for the strict purpose of securing our pre-existing natural rights. They knew the state is a blunt instrument. It was never meant to manufacture your personal fulfillment. Wilson dismissed the foundational ideas as outdated. Roosevelt later declared that the government had a final responsibility for your material well-being. Politicians have been trying to play Santa Claus ever since.
If a candidate gets that basic, fundamental truth wrong, everything after that does not matter. When a politician misinterprets the primary purpose of government, every promise he makes afterward is built on sand. Republicans, for all their many flaws, at least sometimes try to follow the founding principles.
Disbrow is asking for the public trust. That is what elected office is about. But he makes his request while proving he cannot even be trusted to look at the road right in front of him. He is fundamentally wrong about the job he is seeking. And he is staggeringly careless in how he asks for it.