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 recorded entirely from the driver’s seat of a moving car. The camera sits mounted near steering wheel height. As he navigates local roads, Disbrow constantly drops his gaze from the windshield to the phone, locking eyes for seconds at a time while the car rolls on.
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 some distant Atlanta problem either. Right here in Walker and Dade counties, 2,726 crashes involved suspected or confirmed distracted driving 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 1 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. 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 ad 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, so he must spend it carefully. A state legislator is entrusted with tax dollars the same way, he reasons. This is wrong. A campaign contribution is a choice. A tax most certainly is not. But he has a 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 he posted the ad during 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 is pure arrogance. The state might pave a road, and it should run a courthouse. It cannot fix your life.
That points to another thing Mike Cameron would never say in a million years. He would never tell you the government’s job is to make you happy. That belief is precisely why so many voters write Democrats off without a second thought.
Disbrow and Democrats generally echo a script written a century ago. Ever since Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the progressive left has rejected the bedrock principles of the Founding. The men who wrote our founding documents understood that human nature is permanent and flawed, so they designed a limited government with enumerated powers to secure our pre-existing natural rights. Wilson dismissed those ideas as outdated. Roosevelt declared the government had final responsibility for your material well-being. Politicians have been playing Santa Claus ever since.
If a candidate gets that basic truth wrong, everything after it 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. He makes his request while proving he cannot be trusted to look at the road right in front of him. He is wrong about the job he is seeking, and staggeringly careless in how he asks for it.