One conclusion to be drawn from my last two posts — the one about censuring Sanford and the one about the S.C. Senate’s slavish devotion to a bankrupt governing philosophy — is that our state is in desperate need of better leadership. Or just leadership, period, for a change.
The importance of this coming gubernatorial election cannot be overestimated. It is so pivotal for our state, such a chance to turn a page and start in a new direction. Of course, I’ve been preaching that for sometime. It’s why I started scrutinizing candidates closely before I left the paper, much earlier in the process than I normally would. It’s why I’m willing to do such things as rank the candidates intellectually — anything to get a smart conversation started.
We need a way of communicating that clearly, of raising awareness so that voters start really paying close attention and make a smart choice this time. As much as I eschew bumper stickers and other forms of oversimplification, I’m now in the hunt for a slogan to express what is needed. Something like:
- Let’s do it right this time.
- Beasley, Hodges, Sanford. That’s enough.
- Time to pick a new direction.
- Fecklessness has gotten us nowhere.
- Leadership is not a four-letter word.
- Vote smart. The alternative has gotten us nowhere.
- Get your act together, South Carolina.
I’m not happy with any of those. Suggestions?
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It’s the legislature, stupid!
Be responsible. Don’t vote for incumbents.
Blame yourselves.
You get the government you deserve. That makes you a corrupt self-serving idiot.
How many of your tax dollars do you want to waste today?
Strom’s dead. Move on.
If you vote in South Carolina, you might be a redneck.
South Carolina be about the future or be history?
Why is our choice for governor so important if the post has so little power? Given the power of the General Assembly, in particular those it chooses as its leaders, the people who exercise the real power in this State were chosen by only a fraction of us (1/124th or 1/46th). The leaders of both houses swing much bigger sticks than the governor yet no one outside of Charleston County (unless their districts have some minor spillover into neighboring counties) has any direct voice in their selection.
I guess its better than the Barnwell Ring, but how much?
@ Greg– The “Good Man” theory–if somehow a charismatic, sensible person became governor, perhaps he or she could effect the kind of changes we need by sheer force of personality….
At least that’s a thought…
Actually, Kathryn, I think you’re thinking of the “Great Man” theory, although in our case, “Good” would be a step up.
Greg, here’s the thing: There’s no way that we’re going to reform government so that the governor’s office is worth more than a warm bucket of spit without someone with a statewide constituency — someone with greater legitimacy than a mere legislator elected from a district — pushing for it. That person would most likely be a governor. So it’s important to have a strong governor even under our weak-governor system, because it would take an extraordinarily gifted leader with a significant mandate to push for, and win, such reforms. Once the governor is actually put in charge of the executive branch, I believe we’ll have much stronger candidates running for the office in the future.
Mark Sanford is the sort of governor you get under the current system — a guy who doesn’t believe in government, and therefore doesn’t mind that he has no authority to govern. What we need, and what has been so hard to find, is a candidate of extraordinary ability (“a man of shining parts,” as they once said) willing to run for the office as it is, and work for the needed changes.
I think in terms of the long haul, because we’re not going to get to where we need to be in a hurry. I’ve been thinking this way since 1990, so I am a ridiculously patient man.
But not as patient as I once was. I wrote a column about my growing impatience at the start of this year. Ironically, that column had an unstated subtext: I didn’t think I’d be at the newspaper much longer, and I was running out of time. I didn’t think for a moment I’d be laid off (shows how much I know, huh); I thought I’d get fed up and walk away. So I felt myself running out of time.
I appreciated that Jim Rex went out of his way to express his identification with my impatience. And I would add that Vincent Sheheen has been an advocate for restructuring for years, a rarity in the Democratic Party. So there are some candidates out there with good inclinations in this regard. Whether others such as Henry Mac or Dwight Drake would work for reform, I don’t know. I know that Nikki Haley will advocate for restructuring, but I’ve already had my fill of supposed reformers who are actually avid anti-government types. We THOUGHT Mark Sanford would get us restructuring, but that was certainly a disappointment… I’ve come to the conclusion that people who don’tbelieve in government, on a fundamental level, can’t be trusted to make government better.
I think you make a mistake when you assume all small government types (and I am one) want to, as you so often quote Grover Norquist as saying, shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub. That is a gross overgeneralization. I doubt Nikki Haley wants no government. She has been active in the governmental process. One who wants less government than you do is not an anarchist, merely one who feels that 1) in some areas we could get buy with less regulation; 2) many functions performed by government could be contracted to private firms with government acting as contract administrator; and 3) many necessary function are currently performed inefficiently as a result of the lack of a profit motive. While I know you find those who want less government than you to be tedious and nonsensical I find your broad brush mischaracterizations to be the same.
I don’t mean to be uncivil here, I just wish you would listen to what each individual is saying before you drop them under a handy label.
Greg, I don’t mean to generalize; I mean to be specific.
Mark Sanford did not strike me as a dangerous radical when he first ran for office, or I wouldn’t have endorsed him. But fool me once…
Nikki has made it clear that Gov. Sanford is her role model. Until the scandal broke, she was quite overt about it. While she no longer posts pictures of herself with him, there is no question that, philosophically, she meant to emulate the current governor. And Mark Sanford IS a Grover Norquist disciple, and Norquist is very proud of having said what he did about the bathtub. He handed me a copy of the article quoting him as saying that when we met. It was not an inadvertent remark, or a misquote, or a misunderstanding. I’m not dealing in wild generalization or supposition here.
And more of THAT philosophy is the last thing we need in South Carolina. We’ve had way more than enough of it.
The truth is that neither Grover Norquist nor Mark Sanford nor Nikki Haley actually wants to ‘drown government’. They’ve all done well over a period of years by wailing about government (well, Sanford, not so much lately).
What SC really needs is a medium, someone who can communicate with the spirits of John West and Carroll Campbell.
It’s almost surreal to read Brad’s constant harping about restructuring. WE ALREADY HAD RESTRUCTURING. Why is that so damn hard to acknowledge. AND IT FAILED. Admit it Brad, you got a good bit of what you wanted in 1992/93 and it simply did not work the way you believed it would. Why should I believe it will work now?
Didn’t you endorse Mark Sanford twice? Even after four years of him, didn’t you continued to think he was the best man for the job?
Do The State editorial writers feel pressure to endorse a Republican because most of their readers and advertisers favor Republicans?
No, Elliott, we did not. In spite of the fact that the Democrats didn’t offer us a real choice in 2006, we endorsed Tommy on the basis of his not being Sanford. I wrote a fairly scathing column about Sanford at the time.
I don’t know what we would have done if we’d thought Tommy had had a chance of being elected. You remember, of course, what Tommy did soon after the election…
But you mustn’t have thought he was all bad.
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2006/06/our_primary_end.html
First, I don’t think anybody’s all bad.
Second, what you’re pointing to there is another illustration of what I just referred to. There were no really credible opponents for Sanford, either in the primary or the general election. We personally liked Oscar Lovelace very much, and thought him to be right on a lot of issues that Sanford was grossly right on. But we weren’t prepared to endorse a neophyte — someone we’d never had the chance to observe in a position of public trust — for an office that high. (I know that drives Doug Ross crazy, but it is my considered professional opinion that people need to earn our trust as voters before they ask to be our governor. Think about it: If we had seen enough of Sanford in office, we wouldn’t have endorsed him the first time. We thought we’d seen enough with his congressional service — and we had, if we’d paid close enough attention — but we were wrong.)
But we came close. We agonized over that one. And a couple of months later, I’m pretty sure we would have endorsed Dr. Lovelace, despite our concerns about his lack of preparation. He was a much more attractive candidate than Tommy Moore.
You have to remember what happened between the primary and the general. Sanford showed his colors far more dramatically than he had ever done before, with his veto of the entire state budget.
If you’ll recall (see my column on the subject), the really gross thing about that action (well, one of the gross things about it) was that he deliberately timed it for just after polls closed in the primary. That was a defining moment. It was pivotal. If he had done it a few days earlier, I’m confident we would have endorsed Oscar Lovelace.
At the time of the primary endorsement, our revulsion at the Sanford agenda and his approach to the office had not fully blossomed to the point that I would write what I wrote in the fall, washing my hands of him entirely.
You thought a guy who slept on a futon in his office, etc., was such a trustworthy choice for governor. Ha!
Hey, I was just nitpickin’ ya.
Though I disagree on the importance you place in it, I don’t blame you for picking a known over an unknown. And surely we’ve all seen that anytime you put someone in such a high office it’s a risk regardless of whether they’ve been in a “position of public trust”.
The Sanford endorsement just burns me a little because I think he was the first politician that I really felt contempt for over an issue (and it was the biggest one for me at the time, higher education).