The Starch Room at Fat Man’s Café and Catering was standing room only around noon on Monday, as a crowd gathered for a panel featuring Gov. Brian Kemp and Senate candidate Derek Dooley.
The free public event, organized by Atlanta nonprofit Hardworking Georgians and hosted by Fat Man’s owner Brad Usry, comprised of a mediated talk between Kemp, Dooley and Usry, followed by a brief Q&A.
Dooley, a former University of Tennessee football coach who in August announced his bid to run for the GOP against Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff, remarked alongside Kemp on a variety of topics ranging from energy development, to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” to the recent murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
“I have a lot of disdain for a lot of the politics that goes up in D.C.,” said Dooley, whose senate campaign marks his first electoral run. “I think people go up there too long. They get too little done, they make too much money and they become really more concerned about their political careers than they are serving the people that elected them to go up there.”
Both Dooley and the governor praised the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by the president on July 4 of this year.
Dooley said that “the largest tax increase on our American families” would have resulted had the bill not passed, while Kemp emphasized that Trump, during his 2024 presidential run, along with GOP congress candidates, “implemented what they campaigned on.”
When the conversation came to energy, while Kemp touted the completion of the Plant Vogtle nuclear reactors in Burke County, Dooley highlighted artificial intelligence tech as the latest economic milestone in which the U.S. must compete for dominance against China.
“It requires a tremendous amount of energy, energy that we’ve never… had to pull in our lifetime,” he said, going on to stress that China is “different than most of our adversaries in the past, who were more military,” and that the “technological competition we have with China is going to dictate sort of where we’re headed for the next 80 to 100 years.”
Both Kemp and Dooley also condemned “political violence,” urged civility in political disagreements and expressed sympathy for the family of Charlie Kirk, with Kemp saying “we’ve just got to do better” about disagreeing.
“You know, it starts with me. I’ve had a lot of people, you know, saying you should say this or do that, and to me, my actions [are] the biggest thing that I can be responsible for,” said Kemp, a remark for which Dooley immediately lauded him.
“Common sense” was a recurring phrase in Dooley’s addresses, as he underscored his experience as a coach, even using the locker room as an example of spaces where “people… come together from every single background, race, income, religion, politics” come together for healthy discussion.
“They’re not all in agreement, but they know they have something in common,” he said. “We’ve don’t just have differences, we’ve got a lot of similarities, and we work through them with respect for each other, and we can learn a lot from the locker room, and I hope our country continues in doing that.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering general reporting for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com
