THERE’S NO QUESTION that this fall’s presidential contest will be issue-driven. There’s no question that President Obama and his Republican challenger — Mitt Romney, most likely — will be offering competing visions for the country and for how we should go about getting there. Many Americans will not like much of what they hear, but at least they will be presented with two clearly delineated visions from which to choose of what our country should look like five or 10 years from now.

Meanwhile, Cobb voters will be heading to the polls in just more than three months (July 31) to pick the Republican nominee for county commission chairman. At present there are four announced candidates for the job, all Republicans, including incumbent Tim Lee. Yes, Cobb’s demographics are changing, but it’s likely that whoever is chosen that day will be the next chairman.

Cobb’s commission chairman is, in effect, the “mayor” of unincorporated Cobb, an area with a larger land mass and substantially larger population than all of Cobb’s cities combined. Cobb has usually had strong, dynamic leaders in the commission chair during the past four decades, and such a leader is especially needed now. It is a job that bears an unmatched responsibility for laying down a vision for where we need to be and what we need to do to get there.

***IN PART, the primary will be a referendum on the job done thus far by Lee. Has he handled the county’s budget crisis properly? Was he correct to throw his support behind the TSPLOST/TIA plan that Cobb (and other metro Atlanta residents) will also be voting on July 31, and which is undergirded by possible construction of a light-rail line from the Midtown MARTA Station to Cumberland Mall? Did he have enough input into it, or was it primarily a product of the Cobb Chamber/Cumberland Improvement District and Atlanta Regional Commission? Has he done a good-enough job selling the public on it?

Moreover, his decision to take a back seat (at least in public) and let the Chamber and CID steer the course toward the TSPLOST referendum and its contents hasn’t done much to shake the perception that he is their puppet.

***RETIRED business executive Larry Savage and retired Marine Col. Mike Boyce, both of east Cobb, are also running to unseat Lee.

But Lee’s strongest challenger at this juncture appears to be former Chairman Bill Byrne, who led the county through most of the 1990s.

Though a capable administrator in many respects, Byrne’s tenure was marked by his bombast and shoot-from-the-hip rhetoric. He says he has learned from his mistakes, and promises a “kinder, gentler” approach if elected. That’s good, because we suspect few Cobb residents would want four more years of the old Byrne. The question is whether he can make good on such promises. The jury is still out.

***THE NEXT CHAIRMAN will be serving a four-year term, unlike Lee, who is serving out the unexpired term of his predecessor Sam Olens, who resigned to run (successfully) for Georgia attorney general. And as such the next chairman will have a full four years to put his mark on the county, and a full four years to work on fulfilling his campaign promises and pledges. A full four years to achieve the agenda he runs on. So it’s incumbent on all of the candidates to fully flesh out those agendas and communicate them with voters.

What we don’t need are campaigns that consist mostly of back-biting, second-guessing and the politics of personal destruction. Although such barbs have a way of working their way into print and into people’s memories, they don’t do much to educate voters.

It’s easy to criticize. But it’s not so easy to lead.

The best way for one of the hopefuls to prove to the public that he is the best-qualified to lead the county is use the time between now and July 31 to sell the public on his (or her) vision for Cobb, and tell us how to he’ll get us there.

The rest, as they say, will be up to the voters.