Category Archives: Columns

Flashback: Bush crosses the Rubicon

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Everybody’s acting like it’s a big deal that President Bush said he would not be the one to finish the job in Iraq — that it would be up to his successor. (Well, everybody except The New York Times. They consigned it to the third paragraph of their lead story. They decided, for reasons that elude me, that it was a bigger deal that the president conceded that the war was eroding his political status.)Bush1_2

And I suppose it is — to anyone to whom this rather obvious fact is a surprise. But I have trouble understanding why it would be. This is what I always assumed to be the case. I guess it’s why I hardly know what to say to the growing number of people who talk about pulling out of Iraq, as if that would make any kind of geopolitical sense to do so — for this country, or for the rest of the world.

Once the first American boots were on the ground in-country, we were committed to a process that was bound to take longer than Mr. Bush would serve in office. But rather than rewrite what I’ve already said, I’ll just fill the rest of this post with the column that I wrote for March 23, 2003. It seems quite appropriate to the present moment:

Copyright 2003 The State
All Rights Reserved 
http://www.TheState.com
The State (Columbia, SC)
MARCH 23, 2003 Sunday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. D2
LENGTH: 966 words

HEADLINE: THE ‘LONG HAUL’ WILL LAST LONGER THAN BUSH PRESIDENCY;
THEN WHAT?

BYLINE: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor
BODY:
GEORGE W. BUSH has crossed his Rubicon, and he has taken us with him.

Julius Caesar set world history on a new course when he took his legion into Italy in defiance of the Senate. President Bush has taken an equally irrevocable step by entering the Tigris and Euphrates basin to wage war in spite of U.N. objections.

The United States has rightly set aside its existing security relationships in favor of a new strategy. No longer can Americans be complacent isolationists who only rise up when prodded, then go back to our pleasures. Now, we have set out as knights errant to slay dragons, before the dragons can slay us and others.

This is one of those moments when everything changes.

The United Nations’ future is in doubt, as is NATO’s. Some of our best friends in the world have turned out to be something else altogether, and we’re going to have to sort that out. Going into Iraq is likely to rattle the foundations of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iran and many others. It will change the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, cause North Korea to do who knows what, and freak out the Chinese more than that bomb on their Belgrade embassy did.

In other words, it will create both problems and opportunities, as do all of history’s great turning points.

This is all happening because the president has decided to use the military might of the most powerful nation in history to hunt down bad guys wherever they might be. It is a development that I welcome. With great power comes the responsibility to act.

Like The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, I worry that the president may have fumbled efforts to get international support – support that is crucial to long-term success, even if we don’t need it for the actual fighting. I fret that the president has good instincts about what to do in Iraq, but doesn’t clearly see how to make his goals in that area mesh logically with other policies.

But you know what? This is the guy we’ve got. And you know what else? He’s probably the only one stubborn enough to see this thing through. And that may be exactly what we need. We could maybe have had a more wonkish sort in the White House who was better able to articulate the big picture, but everyone I can think of who might fit that description would be far too likely to try to fight the war with one finger in the wind, ready to bolt at the first casualty or discouraging word.

George W. Bush is different. Something happened to him right after Sept. 11. He realized how dangerous it is to neglect the world, to let dangerous situations fester, to pretend that we have threats "contained" when all they have to do is buy an airline ticket.

Many others realized that, too. But most settled back into a routine after the main fighting in Afghanistan. Mr. Bush never settled back. He meant everything he said about the "long haul."

Anti-war protesters are wrong about many things, but they are right about the one thing that seems to be eating at many of them the most: We probably would not have gone to war in Iraq if George W. Bush were not president. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have done it. Mr. Bush’s own father wouldn’t have (it wouldn’t be prudent). FDR couldn’t even pull it off; as badly as he wanted to help Britain fight Hitler, he had to wait for Pearl Harbor (after which Hitler proved his madness by declaring war on us) to proceed.

George W. Bush doesn’t seem to care what this does to him politically, or to his place in history, or any of that usual stuff. He is going to see this thing through until the world is made safe from Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, the ayatollahs in Tehran and, yes, Osama bin Laden.

That is a fact that both reassures me and makes me worried about the long term.

The United States can’t back down now. To do so is to show the kind of faintheartedness that (among many other factors) led to 9/11/01. Osama bin Laden made certain calculations after we backed off from finishing Saddam the first time, and then skedaddled out of Somalia as soon as we suffered some casualties. He thought that all he had to do to defeat us was draw blood.

"The long haul" means a lot longer than four years, and there’s no going back. So what happens if this uniquely determined president is replaced next year? While I might like some of the people lining up to run against him in many ways, I don’t think any of them is as single-minded about this course of action as is the current president. And they need to be. There will be times when the resolve of the man in the Oval Office is tested as severely as that of Abraham Lincoln in his darkest hours.

And right now, Mr. Bush is the only one who’s enough of a cowboy to see it through.

So is that an endorsement of the incumbent in 2004? No. Because we have to face the fact that the "long haul" is also longer than eight years, and at the end of that time, we will definitely have a new leader. Whether we change horses in 2004 or 2008, we’re still going to be in midstream. This Rubicon is wider than the one Caesar crossed.

So what do we do about it? A lot of the burden falls on Mr. Bush himself. He needs to sell this war, both to the American people and to our sometime allies, with the same kind of relentlessness with which he has moved on Saddam.

Sure, he has tried. He’s done speeches, and generally said the right things. But he needs to try harder. That’s because his strategy is not going to succeed unless there is a sufficiently strong consensus in this country to support it for many years to come.

That consensus will determine who the next president will be. And whether Mr. Bush wants to think about it or not, there will be a next president at some point.

Repeating myself

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Nobody else is likely to notice this, so I’ll just go ahead and tell it on myself.

I realized that in my Sunday column, I was referring to an anecdote I had used once before, so I boiled it down to as brief a reference as possible:

I was once told that someday I would have to decide whether I wanted to be right or effective. There is no doubt which paths these two have chosen.

Only after the page was gone on Friday did I realize I had told this story twice before, once toward the bottom of a column on July 6, 2003 …

One of the many long-suffering bosses I’ve had in my career, thoroughly exasperated with the bullheaded way I tended to play with others, said that if I wanted to be successful, I would have to make up my mind: Did I want to be right, or be effective?

This was at least a decade ago, so I don’t recall exactly how I responded. But I remember being torn between saying either, "Both, of course," or "If I have to choose, I’d rather go down in flames being right."

… and, in an expanded form that actually led the column, I wrote about it again on April 4, 2004:

I ONCE HAD a boss who, in the throes of frustration with me (not an uncommon state among bosses I have known), told me that one of these days, "You’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want to be right, or you want to be effective."

Of course, I wanted to be both. But if absolutely forced to choose, I would dig in and choose the former, and go down in flames if necessary. Hence his frustration.

He was definitely on to something. I’ve had a number of setbacks in my career based on that very propensity. Still, I tend to want politicians to exhibit a similar trait. I keep wanting politics to be about honestly advocating what you believe at all times, and stoically accepting the consequences if your ideas prove to be insufficiently popular to have the effect you desire.

Both references were to make a point about Gov. Mark Sanford, by the way.

You know, the former boss in question — Gil Thelen, who ran The State‘s newsroom back in the long-ago days (more than 12 years ago, now) when I was a part of that department — would probably feel gratified that his point comes to my mind so frequently. Maybe that’s because I still struggle over which one I want more. My answer still tends to be, "both."

Sure, I could just not have mentioned it at all in the first place, but it seemed the
quickest way to introduce the whole organizing dichotomy of the column. And it was in that context that the idea struck me.

And I didn’t think it was worth the wasted money of redoing the page, when I found out I had done it twice. If I had realized what I was doing sooner, I might have introduced the idea another way. I could have said,

I’ve written more than once that Gov. Mark Sanford must choose whether he wants to be right or be effective.

… and so forth. Then I would have felt a little less like a bore. Too late now, though. And here I’ve gone and bored you again with this pointless explaining. Oh, well. You didn’t have to read it.

Right or effective?

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Which will it be, Columbia
voters: ‘right’ or ‘effective’?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
CHALLENGER Kevin Fisher talks a lot about Columbia Mayor Bob Coble. He criticizes, in great detail, a long litany of actions and inactions by the mayor. He talks about how he would have done things differently.
    The ad and PR man says that rather than lead, “Mayor Bob” sits around waiting for consensus to emerge. “He is a very nice man who makes no decision, or who makes the wrong decision, which amounts to the same thing.”
    “His main concern is, never offend anyone.” By contrast, says Mr. Fisher, “I will be looking to set the agenda and the tone.”
    “With or without a strong-mayor system,” he asserts, “I would be a strong mayor.”
    That, boiled down, is Kevin Fisher’s position as candidate for mayor in the April 4 election.
    For his part, Mayor Coble agrees that he values diplomacy. That’s because you don’t get much done “if you tell people what you think about them every single time.”
   I was once told that someday I would have to decide whether I wanted to be right or effective. There is no doubt which paths these two have chosen. Mr. Fisher is a passionate and articulate advocate of what he believes is right. He seems to have given much less thought as to how, going forward, to get things done.
    Mayor Coble is far less concerned about getting everyone to see things his way. He claims to be effective.
    The mayor has his own litanies. There is his list of “strategic accomplishments.” He says that during his 16-year tenure, the city reversed a long decline in home ownership, population and property values; became “far safer”; experienced a “renaissance” from the Vista to a transformed stretch of Two Notch Road, and much more; embraced the “knowledge economy,” building on a much-improved relationship with the University of South Carolina; and did it all with only two property tax increases, of two mils each, both for more police.
    His main goals for the future:

  • Build upon existing economic pillars, such as Fort Jackson.
  • Follow through on the “innovation economy.”
  • Keep improving “livability,” so “people will want to stay here and come here.”
  • Change the city’s form of government to make it more effective and accountable.

    In an interview last week, Mr. Fisher did not present a list of specific proposals for the future, beyond saying he would not repeat such past mistakes as:

  • An “attempted waste of 41 million tax dollars” on a city-owned hotel. It would take “unmitigated gall” to seek re-election “if I had presided over that,” he said.
  • The plan to block the view of the river with a development at the corner of Gervais and Huger. “If you put a nine-story building on Huger, you don’t have a Vista.”
  • Deciding to back Marvin Chernoff’s vision for an arts festival. “Where is that money going to come from? And what else could it have gone to pay for?”

    “Of course, the mayor is for it,” he says of one thing after another he criticizes. “Being for everything is not leadership, and the mayor is absolutely for everything.”
    Mr. Coble, in the context of talking about candidates for City Council, said, “At the debates, they at least have said what they would do if elected. I don’t think Kevin has done that…. It’s one thing to say, ‘I wouldn’t do Air South,’ et cetera. What would you do? I think that’s essential to govern.”
    (The third candidate on the ballot, Five Points businessman Joe Azar, agrees with the mayor on that, if on nothing else.)
    Indeed, Mr. Fisher’s eloquence tends to falter if you ask, “What would you do now?” An example:
He says a “compliant mayor” gave SCE&G a cheap way out of its century-old promise to provide public transit in exchange for rights to the Columbia market.
    “We let them out of that deal for what — for a few million dollars, which is already gone,” he complains. “They still have the monopoly, but we don’t have the mass transit.”
    He says the utility fobbed old equipment and a “brownfield” bus barn onto the city. Since then, “Routes have been cut back; fares have been raised. We’re getting less service for more money, and it’s still going out of business.” And how is the mayor proposing to keep it going? A new tax.
    After Mr. Fisher had gone on a while about that “horrendous deal,” Associate Editor Warren Bolton asked what, given the current situation, he would do. He seemed less certain about that. He said he would “allocate funds better,” and pursue federal money. “Finally, I would go back to SCE&G and try to cajole them, shame them, whatever word you want to use, into making an annual contribution.”
    If the utility declined such a do-over, Mr. Fisher says, he would turn to a dedicated tax source. But “that would be the legacy of Mayor Coble and the council.”
    Mayor Coble seems to accept that ultimately, the public will have to pay to have a public transit system, just like in every other city in the country. His own ruminations on the subject center around strategies for passing the necessary referendum to do that.
    Another example: Regarding the former state prison property that has stood vacant for more than a decade, the mayor is pleased that — thanks in part to the Vista and riverfront having become so much more desirable — the private sector was finally willing to take it off the city’s hands. He sees that as best.
    For his part, Mr. Fisher says it was a “tremendous missed opportunity” not to have left part of the prison standing. “Cellblock One was our Alcatraz,” a potentially huge attraction for tourists from all over who would come to be regaled with “the legends of Pee Wee Gaskins and the rest.”
    The mayor just marvels at an idea “so far out of left field. A Pee Wee Gaskins museum would never have made it.”
    So, Mr., Mrs. and Ms. Columbia Voter, which will it be — the guy who says he’s right, or the guy who says he’s effective? You’ve got 16 days to decide.

McClatchy column

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I just want you to know,
my offer still stands
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
DEAR McCLATCHY: This is to assure you that my offer is still open.
    You folks have a lot on your plate right now, what with sorting out your acquisition of a company three times your size and the need to sell the 12 Knight Ridder papers that the whole world has essentially said, for the past four months, it doesn’t want.
    But I figure you could use some cash right now, just in case Philadelphia, San Jose and those other big papers don’t jump off the shelves as quick as you’d like.
    I hereby offer to help you keep the lights on in the interim by paying you up to $500 million for the dinky old State paper, which you don’t need, seeing as how you already have a bunch of papers around here.
    When will you have the money? Soon as somebody gives it to me. I explained all that in my Friday column. (I’ll add that my business plan doesn’t absolutely depend upon my saving Bill Gates’ life and him being insanely grateful. Any other billionaire who feels endangered should just holler; I will come running.)
    Readers may wonder why I’d part with such a large chunk of my soon-to-be-hard-earned pay. After all, isn’t being bought by the McClatchy Company the best possible outcome for The State and the community it serves? Besides, whenever I do get the cash, why would I want to blow it on a newspaper? Haven’t Wall Street analysts made it clear that print is all but dead?
    First, yes, most KR journalists, and probably most of the business side folks, too, have been crossing fingers, rubbing rabbits’ feet and otherwise doing all we could (which ain’t much) to ensure that McClatchy would be the buyer. That’s why, as readers of my blog might have noticed, when I said in my Friday column there was one scenario (out of many awful ones) in which we would have a good outcome, that sentence linked to a Financial Times story about McClatchy leading the bidders.
    All the signs right now are that we will be better off than we were before. But as great as it is for McClatchy to own us, think how much better it would be if I did. I’m sure you can see that.
    And the analysts’ dire predictions? Well, if you took everything the Wall Street analysts know about the future of newspapers and converted it into high-quality chicken manure, you’d be better off, but you’d have to go to the store and buy another bag to have enough to fertilize a fig tree.
    But I’ll admit they sure helped out McClatchy, running down perceptions to where it was able to buy KR for at a bargain price. (I wouldn’t have sold my piddling shares for that. But I guess now I will.)
    Knight Ridder — which was doing so badly that the greedheads who owned the biggest chunks of it just had to dump it — has recently been running a profit margin of under 20 percent. And 20 percent is only twice the average of companies in the S&P 500.
    To be sure, McClatchy does better, at 23 percent. But both look pretty low compared to what The State pulls in.
    But that’s now, say the analysts. With all that competition online for the advertising dollar, they say, this can’t last.
    The gaping hole in that logic is that newspapers are also online, that our online ad revenues are climbing astronomically, and that we have an advantage competitors can’t match: an unrivaled franchise in local news — which has great appeal among customers our advertisers want — as an added inducement to come to our sites and see the ads. Our competitors either have no content, or much less, or content that you can find in a thousand other places.
    Newspapers are going to be around for a long time (for the rest of my career, anyway, which is all you need to worry about). If The State didn’t exist, somebody would start something like it. Why? The demand is there.
    It would actually be a huge boost to our business if people suddenly did decide they don’t want their news printed on dead trees. That would leave us growing online, and would cut our operating expenses almost in half: We could take those gargantuan presses and create artificial reefs off the Grand Strand. No more newsprint and ink to buy by the trainload. No more delivery trucks; no more gasoline. No more waiting half the night from the time we’re done putting the news together to when it’s placed in your driveway.
    We would simply finish writing and editing, press a button, and you would have your news instantly. Which is actually how it works now, from our end — the fact that you don’t get it for hours after we press the button is purely a function of the fact that the market still wants a newspaper.
    I’ve been waiting for that demand to evaporate since the early ’80s, when we started writing and editing the news with computers. There’s nothing sacred to me about the paper part of the paper. I mean, I have a sentimental attachment. But paper, plastic or digital, our value is in our content.
    The determining factor, though, is that the market still has a substantial attachment. People still want the paper — not as many as once upon a time, but far too many to quit printing it.
    So we continue the extremely expensive practice of producing a paper while still innovating online. For now. But however you want to get your news, our industry’s future is bright. And The State’s is more so, which is good for you, as one of those bright folks who understand how critical a good newspaper is to a community. McClatchy will see you have that.
    As for me, I would very much enjoy working for McClatchy in my current capacity. But I’ve reached a time when I need to start putting my money — once I have some — into a solid investment to take care of me and mine in our Golden Years.
    As the song says, God bless the child that’s got his own. Newspaper, that is.

Gang of 14 still rides

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Graham provides model of what
parties should be, but are not
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THERE’S something reassuring about sitting and talking with a U.S. senator and thinking, “This guy is smarter than I am.”
    Even better thoughts: “He’s smarter than most other senators, and the nation sees that. And he represents South Carolina.”
Lindsey1_1    Lindsey Graham makes us all look good up there. That’s a rare and welcome thing.
    It’s not just about being smart. Fritz Hollings was and is sharp as a razor, but in ways that turn a lot of people off. It’s sad to say, but too many voters would rather vote for “folks like me” than above-average intelligence. If you doubt this, let me introduce you to a few hundred office-holders.
    Mr. Graham actually manages to be humble and unassuming (which Fritz could never do) while being erudite. That’s a neat trick. It’s so neat in this case, I don’t even think it’s a trick. (To help you tell the difference, when John Edwards
does it, it’s a trick.)
    Remember my column last week, in which I wrote about the Emory University study that showed the brains of political partisans are wired to reinforce their prejudices — that their gray matter actually produces a big shot of pleasure when they refuse to see the other side’s point?
    We centrists must have a similar mechanism that kicks in when politicians do see the other side, and even work across the partisan divide. When somebody mentions fighting for a good cause alongside both John McCain and Joe Lieberman, a flood of endorphins breaches my levees ofLindsey2 cynicism, and I think, “What a smart guy.”
    But partisans should think the same thing — especially those Republicans who had such a fit when Sen. Graham joined the Gang of 14 to force a compromise that stopped the “nuclear option” from being dropped over filibusters and judicial nominees.
    Boy, were they ever wrong. And it was obvious at the time that they were wrong, even from their skewed, one-sided perspective. Sure, Democrats were high-fiving because the GOP hadn’t changed Senate rules to prevent filibusters, but they were just as blind. From the time the seven Republicans and seven Democrats made their deal, it was impossible for Democrats to carry off a successful filibuster of a qualified nominee. They couldn’t overcome cloture without the Democrats in the Gang, who had promised their colleagues — such things are taken seriously by senators — they wouldn’t back a filibuster in the absence of “extraordinary circumstances.”
    And there simply isn’t anything extraordinary about Bush nominees not seeing the world the way Democrats do. They would need something more substantial than a political difference over something like abortion.
    The practical upshot for Republicans? They gained two conservative Supreme Court justices.
“Nobody really got tricked,” Sen. Graham said. Each of the seven Democrats had a sound political reason to be there. Besides, at least six of them have constituencies closer to his than to Ted Kennedy’s.
    They came out of it fine, partly because “nobody on either leadership team wanted to take that vote.” As for Sen. Graham himself, “It helped me personally immensely within the body.” Contrary to what was being said publicly, “Everything about this deal was known to both leadership teams…. There was a big difference between the rhetoric in the morning and the negotiations in the afternoon.”
    The important things to him were that “The institution fared well; the president fared well,” and so did his nominees. Both John Roberts and Samuel Alito enjoyed relatively smooth roads to favorable up-or-down votes.
    But the fact that 14 senators had the common sense and guts to save the partisan majority from Lindsey3_3itself yielded benefits beyond that, and not just for Republicans.
    Once the Senate was “back in business,” National Guard and Reserve personnel got medical benefits. “There would be just no way we would have had Tricare by now” without the Gang’s deal.
    It also enabled Sen. Graham to play a key role in holding the Bush administration accountable for the way it treats captured enemy combatants. “We got the Congress off the sidelines and into the War on Terror,” he said. “We had been AWOL.”
    “I trust President Bush,” he said later. “I like President Bush.” But there’s just “no substitute for checks and balances.”
    He doesn’t let you forget he’s a Republican. When he speaks of his party’s recent troubles, he says, “The only thing we’ve got going for us is the Democrats, and don’t underestimate them.” Partisan or not, I did enjoy that one.
    What I really liked, though, was the soliloquy with which he ended the meeting, after being asked about the political dangers of his having been photographed with Hillary Clinton. It was a nice statement of what political parties ought to be, but are not. In fact, I’ll just turn the rest of the column over to him. Take it, Senator:

    “There are people on both sides that can’t be happy unless the other side’s disappointed. The way some people judge political success: Is my enemy unhappy? The way I judge political success: Is my country better off, and is my party on the right track?
    “My country is better off when the Guard and Reserve families and those who serve in the Guard and Reserve have health care they can count on. The country will be better off if a manufacturing company (he and Sen. Clinton have started and jointly lead a new Manufacturing Caucus) can stay and make a profit and not have to leave to go overseas….Hillary_claps
    “If she came here and said something nice about me, I would consider it a compliment. And I would return the compliment. And in the next sentence I would say… I like her, but I don’t want her to be president… because she’ll bring an agenda to the table that I don’t agree with in terms of, you know, the whole.
    “But I’m not going to say anything bad about her, because I do like her, I think she’s smart, I enjoy working with her, and… if … the only way I can win is to have to run down people I know, I mean, have to say things about people I know not to be true, I don’t want the job.
    “If that’s the kind of senator you want, I don’t want the job.”

    Well, it’s not the kind I want. So stick around.

Newspapers as an investment

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I often find the column form to be highly constricting. Today was one of those cases. There was about 15 inches worth of stuff I had to cut in order to jam it in. Actually, I had to cut a lot more than that, but I only missed the three chunks that made up the 15 inches, because they helped explain some things.

The first chunk addressed some of the responses I got the last time I wrote about the paper’s, and Knight Ridder’s, profitability. Readers pointed out the inadequacy of comparing the percentage of profit margin of our business versus Wal-Mart’s comparatively pitiful (and people who know a lot more than I do about business have said it was low, too) margin. OK, I thought, I’ll put it another way. Hence the following paragraph:

We do a whole lot better than Knight Ridder as a whole, which made a pitiful (by Wall Street’s expectations of the newspaper business) profit margin of 19.4 percent last year. You know, only like twice the average of companies in the S&P 500.

The fact is, it’s absolutely ridiculous that a) investors aren’t satisfied with the margins most newspapers make, and b) analysts have so bad-mouthed newspapers as an investment in recent years that they have driven down the stock to something like 25 percent below what it ought to be, as a function of the profits they produce. The "reasoning" of analysts on this point goes along these lines: "Sure, they’re still making money now, but with all that competition on-line for the advertising dollar, this can’t last." The gaping hole in that logic is that newspapers are also on-line, that our on-line ad revenues are more or less doubling each year, and that we have an advantage that competitors can’t match: An exclusive franchise in local news — which has tremendous appeal among the customers our advertisers want — as an added inducement to come to our sites and see the ads. Our competitors either have NO content, or content that you can find in a thousand other places. Anyway, the second chunk was on the subject of the industry’s future:

Contrary to what those idiots on Wall Street say, this newspaper would be an excellent investment. You see, in spite of all that stuff you hear, newspapers are going to be around for a long time. If The State didn’t exist, somebody would start something like it in its place. Why? Because the demand is there.

It would actually be a huge boost to our business if people suddenly  did decide they don’t want their news printed on dead trees. That would leave us growing online, and would cut our operating expenses almost in half: We could take those gargantuan presses and create artificial reefs off the Grand Strand. No more newsprint and ink to buy by the trainload. No more huge distribution center with its complicated equipment and large labor force for physically stuffing in ad inserts and bundling papers. No more delivery trucks; no more gasoline. No more page-sized typesetters or plate-making machinery. No more waiting half the night from the time we’re done putting the news together to when it’s placed in your driveway.

We would simply finish writing and editing, press a button, and you would have your news instantly. Which is actually how it works now, from our end — the fact that you don’t get it for hours after we press the button is purely a function of the fact that the market still wants a newspaper.

I’ve been looking forward to the day when that demand would evaporate since the early 1980s, which is when we started writing and editing the news completely with computers. You see, there’s nothing sacred to me about the paper part of the paper. Our value is in our content, specifically our local content, which no other entity in the world has the resources to duplicate.

But I’ve come to realize that the demand for the hard-copy version isn’t going away in my lifetime. So we have to continue the extremely expensive practice of producing the  paper while still innovating online. Our online revenues, by the way, have been growing at a phenomenal rate. And with the talent we already have in-house in that arena, we could do a good deal better without folks in California trying to tell us how to do it.

Then, there was the bit where I explained why I needed somebody to just give me the money to buy the paper, rather than help out some other way. On the one hand, this was tongue-in-cheek. On the other, it explains why I seriously would worry about some wealthy local individual (other than me, if I could join that category) to rescue us from becoming part of some other large corporation.

You say you’d rather lend me the money? OK, but don’t hold your breath to be paid back, since I plan to plow all profits into improving the paper. You want to put together a deal to buy the paper yourself and just let me and my colleagues run it for you? Well, that could work, but it’s fraught with risk. No matter how good your intentions, it might be tough to resist the temptation — having spent all that money — to influence the way we write about your best friends, or your worst enemies. For those of us who are used to criticizing everybody, that could be problematic.

You see, the one advantage of being owned by a publicly-traded company from the other side of the continent is that they don’t give a damn about what sorts of editorial stands we take. In fact, they don’t care about much any more besides the bottom line, which is where we get into the disadvantages.

So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just have the cash, free and clear, with no strings attached. I may seem to be asking a lot, but it’s for a good cause, and as you see, I have my reasons.

Ultimately, there’s just no substitute for the perfect situation of owning the paper myself. Even Mark Whittington should be able to agree with me on that — the workers (or, in this case, worker singular) owning the means of production. Well, actually, he probably wouldn’t, since I’m envisioning a benign despotism rather than collectivism.

Anyway, as the song says, God bless the child that’s got his own. Newspaper, that is.

I need half a billion. Now.

11 Replies

Buddy, can you spare half a billion?
And be quick about it?
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
HEY, PAL, can you spare half a billion? You don’t have it on you? Then please check with your rich friends.
    Oh, and one more thing: Hurry. I don’t have much time. You see, this newspaper’s for sale, and I want to buy it. And if you fully understand the alternatives, you’ll want me to buy it, too.
    Actually, it’s the corporation that currently owns the paper that’s for sale. The deadline for bids was Thursday, and we could learn today, or early next week, who (if anyone) will be buying Knight Ridder, which owns this newspaper and 30 others. How this will turn out I don’t know. There are all sorts of scenarios. Only one or two are attractive.
    It could be bought by an equity company of the sort whose dissatisfaction with our stock price has led to years of pound-foolish expense slashing that has reduced the value of our product, and led ultimately to this sale. Such a company, knowing (and caring) nothing about newspapers, would either have to keep current corporate leadership (which is highly unlikely to produce different results), or hire God-knows-whom to replace it. But this is unlikely.
    It could be bought by another newspaper company or partnership of such companies, or partnership of such a company and one or more equity outfits.
    Or — and for us, this might be the worst of all — there might be no buyer. This would reflect the fact that so many analysts are (wrongly) down on newspapers as investments.
    It could be bought by an outfit that believes in newspapers, and in leaving them alone to do their thing as long as they are producing a reasonable profit. That would be great.
    But rather than take my chances, I’d rather just buy the paper myself. That’s why I need the cash. You sure you don’t have it? Have you checked behind the cushions in the upholstery?
    You say I’m already too late, since the deadline was Thursday? You don’t understand. I don’t want to buy Knight Ridder. I don’t give two figs about Knight Ridder.
    All I care about is The State, and the people it serves.
    Here’s what I’m counting on: that whoever buys KR will turn around and sell some of the papers. The problem is that this new owner will want to sell the white elephants — Philadelphia, Akron, San Jose, St. Paul — and hang on to such wildly profitable properties as The State.
    That’s why I need at least half a billion, even though I figure the fair price for The State is about $400 million or less. I might have to make an offer the seller can’t refuse. If I can get it for less, I’ve got a few capital improvements I can use the rest on.
    Don’t think I’m rushing into this because of what’s happening. For years, I’ve had this recurring fantasy. Not that kind of fantasy. In this one, I save Bill Gates’ life or something (I’ve never worked out the details), and he offers to halve his kingdom, and I say, “Naw, that’s OK; just gimme half a billion. After taxes. Or a billion if you don’t have change.” Then I’d buy the paper, and operate it on a nonprofit basis.
    I would still expect my friends in advertising to sell just as hard and come up with just as much money each year. And this paper makes a lot of money. As I’ve written before, if we could stand alone, we’d have no trouble from Wall Street, even if the paper were publicly traded (which, under my ownership, it wouldn’t be; I’d keep it in the family via primogeniture or entail or some such).
    But I wouldn’t want to pocket a penny of profit. I’d plow every bit back into the business. Sure, I’d pay myself a nice salary — maybe twice what I’m making now. I haven’t taken a vow of poverty. But making any more than that doesn’t interest me. The only thing I would ever want great wealth for would be to buy this paper. Once I’d bought it, making it better — not making money — would be how I got my kicks.
    I’d increase the space available for news. I would restore key positions lost to cost-cutting in recent years. Our reporters and editors would have what they needed to put out the kind of newspaper of record they already know how to produce. No more important news being hacked to TV-sized bites for lack of newsprint. We’d be all our promotional slogan used to say: “In Depth. In Detail. Indispensable.”
    I’d pay those reporters and editors enough that the very best of them would stop looking around for better opportunities — and enough so that when any slackers can’t keep pace, up-and-comers from across the country would line up to replace them.
    I’d reopen the bureaus around the state that we closed over a decade ago, putting the whole state back into The State. I would again deliver the paper to far-flung areas that we’ve cut off over the years. (Few realize how much of our loss of circulation was due to readers we deliberately cut off  because routes weren’t cost-effective.)
    And don’t worry. We’d cover the capital of this state as it’s never been covered before.
    I’d be a good steward, and listen carefully to my CFO and publisher, because they know a lot more about money than I do. I wouldn’t waste a dime, but I wouldn’t hesitate to spend a million if I knew it could make the paper that much better.
    Because the paper, and its readers, and my native state of South Carolina are what matter. They, aside from feeding my family, are the only reasons I drag my lazy behind into work every morning, and stay until late at night. This poor state of ours, which lags behind the rest of the nation in so many ways, needs a good, tireless, fearless, growing, improving newspaper more than any other state in the union. And that’s just what I want it to have. That’s my dream.
    Most alternatives involve the paper being owned by some faceless entity that just wants to squeeze it like a lemon. That would be bad for me, and bad for you. That’s why I prefer dreaming to facing facts. Why not? I can’t do anything to affect the outcome.
    Not unless you and your rich friends — or a grateful Bill Gates, or whoever — come across with a few hundred million.
    And please be quick about it.
    Read more on this subject at http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Column on taking sides

61 Replies

Katon Dawson gets it. Why doesn’t everybody?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
OVER A LATE breakfast at a New York deli in September 2004, S.C. Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson cheerfully told me this story:Katon_1
    Years earlier, as a novice candidate who had been burned once by his own frankness, he started carrying a piece of paper that he would look at whenever he spoke to one of my colleagues. On it he had written some good advice: “Cindi Scoppe is not your friend.”
    It did not mean she was his “enemy”; it was just his reminder to be wary because a good reporter isn’t on anybody’s side.
    You see, Katon Dawson gets it. Plenty of other people don’t.
    I believe that one of my few qualifications for my job is that I am vehemently, stridently, nonpartisan. Mr. Dawson, and his Democratic counterpart Joe Erwin, would say I’m too harsh.
    But the problem isn’t just the two major parties, loathsome as they may be. It’s this ubiquitous thing of everything being divided into “sides” — you’ve got to pick, one or the other — to the point that even smart people are unable to frame issues any other way.
    Here’s another anecdote, involving the same Ms. Scoppe: A lawmaker told her there was an inconsistency on last Sunday’s editorial page.
    The editorial criticized House members for rejecting, on specious grounds, business leaders’ input in the tax reform debate. The column dissected the General Assembly’s rush to override the governor’s veto of an odious bill stripping local governments of the ability to regulate billboards in their communities.
    When Cindi told me the lawmaker said the two pieces contradicted each other, I retorted, “Huh?” If anything, they had a consistent theme: the Legislature acting against the public interest.
    But the lawmaker saw it this way: The editorial slapped lawmakers for not doing what business wanted them to do, and the column hit them for doing what “business” (the billboard industry) wanted.
    I responded, “Say what?”
    Cindi said maybe we hadn’t expressed ourselves clearly enough. At this, I got a bit shrill: “How on Earth could we have been expected to anticipate that anybody would read it THAT way?”
    And yet, people are always reading what we write that way. The whole world encourages them to perceive every public expression as pro-business or anti-business, or siding with Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, black people or white people, rich or poor, fat or thin… you get the idea. That’s the trouble. Everybody gets the idea.
    This is a profoundly flawed way of looking at the world. If you accept or reject arguments, or even facts, according to whether they help or hurt your side, how can we ever get together and solve anything in a way that serves the common good?
    And yes, I know that the news media — especially television, although print is a culprit too — help create and reinforce this dichotomous world view. But that just makes me feel more obligated to use this page to encourage multilateral discussions that help people see things as they are, rather than the way one side or the other wants them to be.
    We’re not alone in this. We ran an op-ed piece Thursday from an assistant professor at USC-Aiken who faces the exact same problem every day in the classroom.
    Steven Millies wrote about a disturbing Emory University study. When the study’s author “showed negative information to his subjects about a politician they admired, the areas of their brains that control emotion lit up, while their reasoning centers showed no new activity.” Worse, when the subjects rejected information that they did not want to hear, their brains were rewarded in a pattern “similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix.”
    The damning conclusion was “that our political opinions are dominated by emotion, and that the reasoning part of our brain is not interested in political information that challenges us. In fact, our brains will work very hard to avoid that information.”
    This means Dr. Millies has an uphill fight in trying to teach his students that “In our political choices, we should not settle for the hollow comfort of feeling gratifyingly consistent in our assurance that one party is always right and the other always is wrong.”
    The trouble is, according to polls, about two-thirds of the electorate does cling to such assurance. That makes things tough for a fair-minded professor. It also makes it tough to publish a nonpartisan editorial page, and persuade partisans that that is actually what you are doing. No matter what you wrote the day before or the day after, a partisan tends to remember only the last thing you said that ticked him off, and to take that as proof positive that you’re on that other side.
    It doesn’t help that so many editorial pages are partisan, even at the best papers. You can almost always predict which “side” The New York Times will be on, and rely upon The Wall Street Journal to take the opposite view.
    None of us is immune to wrapping ourselves in comforting notions. Look at me: I didn’t want to hear what Cindi was trying to tell me. But I try to learn. I try to anticipate the way partisans of all sorts will perceive what I’m saying, and to express myself in a way that they see what I mean. But I often fail, and often in ways that surprise me, even after three decades of observing politics.
    Now here’s another perception problem to think about: “pro-business” or “anti-business.” Well, all I can say is that I’ll try.
    In the meantime, just in case anyone is still unclear: Sometimes business people are right; sometimes they’re wrong; sometimes they’re both. And when we write about them, we’re doing our best to sort all that out.
    It’s just like S.C. lawmakers: They don’t always do stupid stuff. It’s merely coincidence that on the two issues we wrote about last Sunday, they did.

The billboard sellout

40 Replies

Just in case today’s column by Associate Editor Cindi Scoppe didn’t quite convince you as to how indefensibly irresponsible the S.C. Legislature was last week in smooching the billboard industry’s big ol’ fat behind, here are two additional pieces of information.

The first is Gov. Mark Sanford’s veto message on the billboard bill — a document that lawmakers obviously took no time to read before overriding his laudable action.

The second item will be the roll-call votes in both the Senate and House.

Here’s the governor’s veto message:

R. 233, H. 3381–ORDERED PRINTED IN THE JOURNAL

The SPEAKER ordered the following veto printed in the Journal:

February 21, 2006
The Honorable Robert W. Harrell, Jr.
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Post Office Box 11867
Columbia, South Carolina 29211

Dear Mr. Speaker and Members of the House:

I believe that we must always stand fast against the government taking or regulating away the use of property. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management." Private property rights are fundamental to a free society, and I appreciate your efforts to address them in H. 3381.

The protection of private property rights is also essential to our market-based economy. Recognition of those rights provides the legal certainty necessary for individuals to commit resources to ventures. And those rights provide the basis for the development of financial markets that are essential for economic growth and development.

For these reasons, I have consistently acted to protect private property rights and fight unnecessary government regulation. For example, as a member of the 106th Congress, I voted for the Private Property Rights Implementation Act to give greater access to federal courts for individuals with property grievances against the government. In March 2004, I vetoed S. 560, the Life Sciences Act, in part because it extended the awesome power of eminent domain to dozens of new entities by including all state institutions of higher learning. In May 2004, I signed into law H. 4130 – commonly referred to as "The Small Business Regulatory Relief Act" – to require state agencies to consider their impact on small business before they issue final regulations. In June 2005, I vetoed S. 97 because it opened the door for more property, including agricultural, to be declared blighted or abandoned and subsequently condemned.

Given the importance of protecting private property rights, I recognize the need for a uniform approach to takings that is consistent with the overall purposes of the just compensation provision of Article 1, Section 13 of the South Carolina Constitution. Unfortunately, for the three specific reasons set forth below, I do not believe H. 3381 represents that uniform approach.
In my judgment, at least part of the reason why H. 3381 is not a consistent approach to the question of takings stems from the fact that the public debate on this particular bill has taken place in the narrow context of special legislation affecting one particular industry – an approach to legislative debate which, in my opinion, does not fit with the spirit of Article III, Section 34, IX of the South Carolina Constitution, which provides that: "In all other cases where general law can be made applicable, no special law shall be enacted …"

A broader public debate on the issue of just compensation for takings is now taking place in the General Assembly in connection with the eminent domain bills pending in the House and Senate (H. 4502, H. 4505, S. 1029, S. 1030 and S. 1031), and it is my hope and expectation that the three specific concerns I have in regard to H. 3381 will be considered as that broader public debate moves forward. Accordingly, I am hereby returning H. 3381, R. 233 without my approval for the following reasons:

First, the bill would not treat billboard owners and billboard tenants as we treat other property owners and other business tenants. This bill seeks to level the playing field by putting billboards on par with other asset classes but actually serves to set billboards apart. H. 3381 would treat billboards as real property for compensation, while they would be con-sidered as personal property for taxing purposes.

As a matter of public policy, I believe billboards should be treated as we treat other property owners, but not put in a position superior to homeowners, farmers and other businesses. Currently, billboard owners pay personal property taxes based on the sign’s original cost less depreciation, and accordingly, just compensation is determined in the same way. Likewise, if the government takes a home to build a road, one value system for real property is applied for taxes and compensation. In effect, H. 3381 would give billboard owners the tax benefits of being classified as personal property and the just compensation benefits of being classified as real property which is not something enjoyed by the other asset classes just listed.

Second, I do not think that we should have one standard for state government and another standard for local government. H. 3381 would establish a double standard in that the new compensation requirements for removing billboards would apply only to local governments, not state agencies.

Again, I think we ought to treat government at different levels consistently. Under H. 3381, local governments are held to a higher standard than the state when calculating just compensation, in that local governments are required to utilize the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practices, including a number of mandatory considerations, when calculating the amount of just compensation due the billboard owner, whereas the state is not. I do not believe it is good public policy to maintain two sets of pricing – one for state government and another for local governments. I think when we look at something as fundamental as private property rights they should be consistently administered.

Third, I think we need to be careful about saying we believe in Home Rule as a governing principle, but then reverse local governments’ decisions when they disagree with the state on an issue like this one. With a retroactive effective date of April 14, 2005, the bill would invalidate at least seven billboard ordinances that were passed legally by local governments. I believe that tossing out the ordinances of one group of local governments while respecting the ordinances of others – both of which were passed subject to the laws in place at that time – raises once again the uniformity issue that has caused me to struggle with this bill. Why should two local governments, under the same circumstances and afforded the same privileges of Home Rule, be treated differently?

Finally, as a matter of consistency, I believe that this bill undermines the very principle it purports to represent. By limiting the use of billboards by owners, certain provisions of this bill essentially constitute a regulatory taking without providing for just compensation – quite the opposite, I believe, of what the bill seeks to achieve. In keeping with the notion of federalism, I believe that all levels of government have to more clearly define their roles and responsibilities, and the way a community looks and feels should fundamentally be a local municipal or county decision. I do not believe it is the role of the state legislature to determine community standards from Columbia by regulating the content of billboards in the many towns and counties across South Carolina.

For these reasons, I am hereby vetoing and returning without my approval H. 3381.

Sincerely,
Mark Sanford
Governor

Having pointedly, insultingly ignored that, here’s how the  lawmakers voted (and if you’d like to find out how to contact individual lawmakers, go here for senators and here for House members; if you’re not sure which ones represent you, look it up here):

The 28-13 roll call by which the South Carolina Senate voted to override Gov. Mark Sanford’s veto of a bill making it harder for local governments to force the removal of billboards.
   A "yes" vote was a vote to override the veto, and a "no" vote was a vote to let the veto stand.
   Voting "yes" were 9 Democrats and 19 Republicans.
   Voting "no" were 8 Democrats and 5 Republicans.
   Not voting were 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans.

Democrats Voting "Yes"
   Anderson, Greenville; Elliott, North Myrtle Beach; Ford, Charleston; Land, Manning; Matthews, Bowman; Moore, Clearwater; Patterson, Columbia; Reese, Boiling Springs; Williams, Marion.

Republicans Voting "Yes"
   Alexander, Walhalla; Bryant, Anderson; Cleary, Murrells Inlet; Cromer, Prosperity; Fair, Greenville; Grooms, Bonneau; Hawkins, Spartanburg; Knotts, West Columbia; Leatherman, Florence; Martin, Pickens; McConnell, Charleston; O’Dell, Ware Shoals; Peeler, Gaffney; Rankin, Myrtle Beach; Ritchie, Spartanburg; Ryberg, Aiken; Scott, Summerville; Thomas, Fountain Inn; Verdin, Laurens.

Democrats Voting "No"
   Drummond, Ninety Six; Hutto, Orangeburg; Leventis, Sumter; Lourie, Columbia; Malloy, Hartsville; McGill, Kingstree; Sheheen, Camden; Short, Chester.

Republicans Voting "No"
   Campsen, Isle of Palms; Courson, Columbia; Gregory, Lancaster; Hayes, Rock Hill; Richardson, Hilton Head Island.

Not Voting
   Democrats: Jackson, Hopkins; Pinckney, Ridgeland; Setzler, West Columbia.
   Republicans: Mescher, Pinopolis; Smith, Greer.

—————————————————————————–
The 78-25 roll call by which the South Carolina House voted to override Gov. Mark Sanford’s veto of a bill making it harder for local governments to force the removal of billboards.
   A "yes" vote was a vote to override the veto, and a "no" vote was a vote to let the veto stand.
   Voting "yes" were 29 Democrats and 49 Republicans.
   Voting "no" were 13 Democrats and 12 Republicans.
   Not voting were 6 Democrats and 14 Republicans.

Democrats Voting "Yes"
   Allen, Greenville; Anderson, Georgetown; Anthony, Union; Branham, Lake City; G. Brown, Bishopville; J. Brown, Columbia; Clyburn, Aiken; Cobb-Hunter, Orangeburg; Coleman, Winnsboro; Govan, Orangeburg; Hayes, Hamer; J. Hines, Lamar; Hodges, Green Pond; Hosey, Barnwell; Howard, Columbia; Jefferson, Pineville; Jennings, Bennettsville; Kennedy, Greeleyville; Mack, North Charleston; McCraw, Gaffney; Moody-Lawrence, Rock Hill; J.H. Neal, Hopkins; Neilson, Darlington; Ott, St. Matthews; Phillips, Gaffney; Rhoad, Branchville; Rutherford, Columbia; F.N. Smith, Greenville; Vick, Chesterfield.

Republicans Voting "Yes"
   Altman, Charleston; Bailey, St. George; Barfield, Conway; Cato, Travelers Rest; Ceips, Beaufort; Chalk, Hilton Head Island; Chellis, Summerville; Clark, Swansea; Clemmons, Myrtle Beach; Coates, Florence; Cooper, Piedmont; Davenport, Boiling Springs; Delleney, Chester; Duncan, Clinton; Edge, North Myrtle Beach; Frye, Batesburg-Leesville; Haley, Lexington; Hamilton, Taylors; Hardwick, Surfside Beach; Harrell, Charleston; Harrison, Columbia; Haskins, Greenville; Hinson, Goose Creek; Hiott, Pickens; Huggins, Columbia; Leach, Greer; Littlejohn, Spartanburg; Mahaffey, Lyman; Martin, Anderson; Merrill, Daniel Island; Norman, Rock Hill; Perry, Aiken; E.H. Pitts, Lexington; M.A. Pitts, Laurens; Rice, Easley; Sandifer, Seneca; Simrill, Rock Hill; Skelton, Six Mile; G.M. Smith, Sumter; G.R. Smith, Simpsonville; W.D. Smith, Spartanburg; Talley, Spartanburg; Taylor, Laurens; Thompson, Anderson; Townsend, Anderson; Tripp, Mauldin; White, Anderson; Witherspoon, Conway; Young, Summerville.

Democrats Voting "No"
   Battle, Nichols; Bowers, Brunson; R. Brown, Hollywood; Emory, Lancaster; Funderburk, Camden; Kirsh, Clover; McLeod, Little Mountain; Miller, Pawleys Island; J.M. Neal, Kershaw; Rivers, Ridgeland; J.E. Smith, Columbia; Weeks, Sumter; Whipper, North Charleston.

Republicans Voting "No"
   Agnew, Abbeville; Ballentine, Irmo; Bannister, Greenville; Brady, Columbia; Cotty, Columbia; Hagood, Mt. Pleasant; Limehouse, Charleston; Lucas, Hartsville; Scarborough, Charleston; D.C. Smith, North Augusta; Toole, West Columbia; Umphlett, Moncks Corner.

Those Not Voting
   Democrats: Bales, Eastover; Breeland, Charleston; M. Hines, Florence; Mitchell, Spartanburg; Parks, Greenwood; Scott, Columbia;
   Republicans: Bingham, West Columbia; Dantzler, Goose Creek; Herbkersman, Bluffton; Loftis, Greenville; McGee, Florence; Owens, Pickens; Pinson, Greenwood; Sinclair, Spartanburg; J.R. Smith, Langley; Stewart, Aiken; Vaughn, Taylors; Viers, Myrtle Beach; Walker, Landrum; Whitmire, Walhalla.

Guilt column

103 Replies

OK, I feel guilty about Katrina;
so what do you want me to DO?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EARLIER this month, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland made me feel pretty guilty, and I thought about expiating that guilt with a column of my own.
    I managed to forget about it. I’m resilient that way.
    But then, Mac Bennett and some other folks from the local United Way came in for a visit and reminded me of it. Yes, they brought up Hurricane Katrina.Katrinademolish_1
    The devastation of the Gulf Coast has cut into local fund-raising. It’s been hard to compete with. “How many days was Katrina on the front page” of newspapers? Mac asked. Actually, he understated the case. He should have used present tense; it was the centerpiece on USA Today’s front the very day he said that.
    Well, don’t blame me, Mac. The last time I had a column that was actually about Katrina was Sept. 23. By that time, I had said what I had to say about it, and was ready to move on. So I did.
But thousands upon thousands of people whose lives were wrecked have not moved on.
    I find this irritating.
    That’s why I feel guilty.
    It was just a vague sort of guilt creeping around the edges of my consciousness. I would climb groggily out of bed and hit the snooze button on the radio because NPR was doing yet another story on the plight of New Orleans. “I’ve heard all that,” I would think as I got up. “That’s not a very worthy sentiment,” I would think as I climbed back into bed. “After all, those poor people are still…” Zzzzzzz.
    Then Mr. Hoagland pegged people like me dead-on in his Feb. 5 column. It was about why the State of the Union message didn’t linger on Katrina. He suggested that maybe this was not because BushdoorPresident Bush “is out of touch.”
    “My fear is more ominous,” he wrote: “After a great deal of study and some polling, Bush is reflecting national opinion fairly well on the challenges still faced by the people of New Orleans: We wish them well, but it is their problem, not ours anymore.”
    Ow. That hit home. That’s just what I had been thinking.
    I’m a good guy. Really. I give to United Way, and my church. I don’t vote self-interest: If taxes need to go up, say, to help the poor get a better education, I’m for it. I’ve served on nonprofit boards. Hey, I was chairman of the local Habitat for Humanity. I’ve spent whole vacations on blitz builds — framing, roofing, putting on siding (not lately, but I’ve done it). Not even Jimmy Carter, the most self-consciously decent and moral president of my lifetime, has anything on me there. Right?
    But now, if Mr. Hoagland is right (and I fear he is), it’s George Bush who’s got me nailed.
    I know that Katrina, the worst national disaster in the nation’s history, was an event loaded with a profound message; it stripped away a veneer and exposed underlying problems that have always been there, problems that America needs to find a way to address meaningfully if we’re truly to be the land of opportunity.
    We said this on Sept. 23:
    “(T)here are millions of people who are so poor that they have no way to flee a killer storm. People who, even if transportation were available, wouldn’t leave because all they own is in their home:Katrinareport_1 They have no bank accounts, credit cards, job skills or network of family and friends in other cities to take them in. We have glimpsed for a harrowing moment the kind of random, wanton violence that the middle class never has to experience, but that plagues too many impoverished neighborhoods.”
    I meant all that. Still do. But we said it, and on some gut level, I’m more than ready to get on to other important issues, because, let’s face it, that one’s depressing. Poverty right here in South CKatrinachertoff_1arolina is a consuming passion of this editorial board. But as daunting as that challenge is, I at least have a clue what to say in terms of what we need to do about it.
    Besides, Columbia and South Carolina responded superbly to Katrina. Do you think I could motivate my readers to do more than they’ve done? I don’t.
    When another report comes out, as one did last week, saying government on all levels failed Katrina’s victims, and that things might have been better if the president had taken a personal interest earlier, I think, “Didn’t we establish all that some time back?”
    When I read, as I also did last week, that some Katrina victims are being booted out of their government-subsidized motel rooms, I think: “What? They’re still there? It’s been — what — almost seven months, and they still haven’t found a place on theirKatrinamotel_1
own?”
    When folks wring their hands over whether the poor of the Ninth Ward will get to return home, I’ve thought: “Would it be the worst thing in the world if they didn’t? Other communities — such as Columbia — have given them a leg up; maybe they have a better chance in new surroundings. (Maybe the president’s Mom had a point.) Maybe the rest of the country is better able right now to provide permanent homes to poor folks. Maybe New Orleans would have a better chance of recovering — and becoming a better place for the poor to make a living in the future — if for a few years it was a community of empowered, middle-class people with a compelling economic reason to be there. Maybe an electorate like that would choose better local lKatrina9thward_1eadership, and clean up the police department and other services that failed the poor so miserably. Would that be bad?”
    So now I’ve gotten that off my chest — but I don’t feel better.
    Look, I don’t know what the solution is. If you can think of something I can do, let me know. I’ll be glad to pay a higher gas tax or something. Go on, Mr. President, ask me. You don’t have my number on that. I want  you to ask me to sacrifice for something.
    Of course, the gas tax would help in the war on terror, which I’d be proud to do, but not do much for the Gulf.
    So until I see something I can do, I will probably still think, whenever I see or hear another Katrina story, that it’s past time for those folks and the rest of us to move on — even while I think it’s wrong to think that.
    But at least I feel guilty about it. That’s something. Isn’t it?

Grownups column

35 Replies

Reprinting lousy drawings
just doesn’t make good sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS SORT of disappointed at Kathleen Parker’s take on the whole Danish cartoon/Islamic riots thing (see facing page) — not because I felt strongly about it one way or the other, but because it seemed so unlike her.
    When I received the column from her syndicate, it was only the second expression of that particular sentiment I had seen since this craziness started (I’ve seen others since). The first cameCartoons4 from sometime radio host Michael Graham. That did not surprise me; it was just like him.
    But I’ve had the opportunity in the past to speak with Kathleen about the philosophy that underlies her writing. On each occasion, I have appreciated (and identified with) the fact that although she is commonly labeled “conservative,” in fact that she does not think of herself as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. She describes her outlook as simply a matter of “being a grownup.” It’s my belief that her writing is generally consistent with that, which is why I like to read her.
    That’s why I was disappointed to see her saying, essentially, that we editors should republish these cartoons because we can, because we are free and (by implication) because “they” don’t want us to. Or, to put it another way, to prove we are not “sensitive.”
    That hardly seems like the grown-up response. It’s more like the eternal cry of the adolescent.
    I choose not to republish those lousy cartoons. And they are lousy, by the way — typically European, most are by U.S. standards not even fully developed cartoons. They are lame illustrations, the kind a page designer might drop into a page just to break up the gray text.
Robert0212_1    When I run cartoons on this issue, they’re going to be good ones with a point, such as the seven we’ve run in the past week from our own Robert Ariail and others.
    While I defend the right of those Danes to publish what they wanted, their decision to undertake the project was childish. Seriously, what grownup goes out of his way to mock anyone’s religion? And what did it accomplish? It put the rest of the West in the position of having to defend an immature editorial decision in the face of the even more infantile reaction of the kinds of lunatics who are all too common in Islamic circles. Personally, I’d rather defend something nobler than that.
    I mean, if they wanted to decry the fact that Europeans were wusses about Islamist madness and show they weren’t going to be a part of that, why not criticize Islamist actions, rather than mocking the religion? There’s plenty to say within that arena — things worth saying.
    And there would be nothing “fine” about cartoons mocking the Holocaust. As for “Piss Christ” and the like, my own personal reaction is that such “art” provides a good argument for reviving the Inquisition. (Maybe we can manage that now that we papists have taken over the Supreme Court.)
    Anyway, I choose not to publish the lousy drawings. I take the grown-up perspective: I am free to publish them, but I’m even freer than that, which means I am free not to publish them. I do not feelCartoons3_2 constrained by any need to prove I’m man enough to cock a snook at a bunch of pathetic idiots running around screaming in foreign cities. Nor do I feel the need to be “sensitive.” I do feel a need to be pragmatic and strategic, as someone who deeply wants my country to prevail in this war on terror.
    That’s why I have written in the past that while people in the United States who loudly protest the war in Iraq have every right to do so, they need to be grown-up enough to recognize the consequences: They encourage terrorists and Baathists in Iraq to keep killing Americans (and Iraqis), because our enemies assume (with reason) that if they inflict just a few more casualties, we will cave. Protesters have the right to express themselves, but in the real world of cause and effect, they are encouraging the enemy.
    It’s also why we said the president should have ditched Donald rumsfeld
after Abu Ghraib, even if one can’t draw a direct line of responsibility to him. Only a gesture such as that would have shown the world — and the people of Iraq, our proteges in the project of democracy — how seriously we take these things that happened on his watch. Showing that we stand firmly behind the ideals we espouse is far more important strategically than Rummy keeping his job. In fact, if he were replaced by someone who believed in sending over enough troops to get the job done to start with, we’d probably be better off.
    (All of this follows the same reasoning we use when adults tell their teenage daughters not to go out dressed like that. Girls may see doing so as their right, but grownups know that, the world being unfair, exercising that “right” would make them more likely to draw the attention of evil men who would do them harm.)
    The unifying principle in all these cases (except the parenthetical)? I want us to win the war.
    Am I saying newspapers in the U.S. shouldn’t publish the cartoons because we don’t want to offend a bunch of idiots in the Arab street? No. I’m saying I see no sensible reason to do so.
    Not to cast aspersions, but those people over there are nuts. They’ve been nuts for as long as I Cartoons5_1can remember. One could provide all sorts of excuses for them if one were inclined to be “sensitive” — they are traumatized by alienation, by poverty, by propaganda, by an inferiority complex at their once-proud culture becoming subordinate to the West in so many ways — but hey, nuts is nuts. There’s absolutely no excuse for reacting violently to a few stupid drawings. But republishing them just to show we can is no way to lead them to sanity.
    If you actually haven’t seen them, and want to, you can easily find them on the Web. If you do, I predict you’ll be sorry that you wasted the time.

Outsourcing the republic

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Outsourcing the deliberative process
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE POSITION we take in the above editorial is an uncomfortable one. I say that not because using a “BRAC” approach to consolidate school districts is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great one. But it shouldn’t be.
    Our system of representative democracy is all about the deliberative process: We, the people, elect representatives to go to Congress or the Legislature and study complex issues in detail, debate them, make tough decisions for the sake of the whole nation or state, and then come back and face the voters.
    This proposal sidesteps that process: It empowers a separate body — not directly elected — to address a long-neglected statewide problem. The members of that body do all the studying and work out all the details — that is, the actual discernment. Then they hand the whole package to the elected body for a simple “yes” or “no.”
    The tragedy is that this is apparently the only way that our small state can do away with the shameful waste of having 85 school districts — some of them incredibly tiny, each with its own separate administration.
    Why? Because elected representatives won’t touch it. Why? Because they’re elected.
    Anyone with common sense looking objectively at this can see that it would be insane not to consolidate districts. But any representative who advocates shuttering a local district faces the danger
of not getting re-elected.
    So we find ourselves in a situation in which the most effective approach is to outsource the deliberative process. And school consolidation isn’t the only tough state issue that our delegates may choose to sub-contract.
    S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell is proposing the same approach on tax reform. He would have a special panel draw up a list of sales tax exemptions to eliminate. Why? Because elected representatives don’t have the guts to face the narrow constituencies (from auto dealers to newspapers) whose tax breaks such a plan might eliminate.
    The truth nowadays is that on some issues, our republic’s deliberative process freezes up and dies like a car engine without a drop of oil in it.
    That’s how “BRAC” — for Base Realignment and Closure — entered the language to start with. It was impossible for Congress to achieve savings and efficiencies by closing and consolidating domestic military bases. Why? Because every member of Congress had to have one. Or two, or more.
    Instead of an objective comparison of the relative merits of this or that military facility, followed by tough but smart decisions, the only sort of “debate” that occurred before BRAC went like this: “You keep my base open, and I’ll scratch your back, too.”
    Our system is dysfunctional — at least on issues that involve sacred cows — not because representatives are out of touch, but because they are never out of touch with home long enough to collaborate seriously with their colleagues for the greater good.
    Most advocates of term limits say lawmakers get “corrupted” by Washington or Columbia to the point that they forget the wishes of the folks back home. Hardly.
    Syndicated columnist George Will has advocated term limits for the opposite reason. He says the only way lawmakers will stop listening to the folks back home long enough to think is if they cannot run for re-election.
    I oppose term limits for various reasons, including the fact that I’d rather have laws made by people with some experience at it. But we’ve got to find some way to make critical decisions that politicians with their eyes on the next election refuse to face.
    One good thing about a BRAC is that it can be seen as representative democracy the way it was intended to work: A group is delegated to study the issues with few distractions and deliberate until a rational plan emerges.
    This may be the only way our elected representatives ever vote on a proposal that takes the whole state’s interest into account. A plan that makes the tough calls would probably never make it to the floor otherwise.
    I like to think our system is timeless. But that reckons without technology: In the days before the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, cell phones and mass e-mails, representatives had a chance to concentrate constructively on issues and make decisions accordingly. The cacophony of modern communications makes that nearly impossible.
    Some look at this situation and come up with a whole other way: skirting the republican system entirely. Gov. Mark Sanford would ask voters to curtail the Legislature’s power to appropriate, by setting an arbitrary constitutional limit on spending growth.
    His reasoning sounds a bit like ours: The system isn’t working. When I asked how he could advocate undermining “small-R” republican ideals, he said: “You need to be more aware of the political environment that you’re operating in — be less, you know, idealistic, less, uh, you know, high and lofty, and just get down into the gears of how our government system actually works.”
    Talk about being disillusioned. Of course, I can identify. But there’s a difference. While the BRAC idea reflects a lack of faith in the Legislature’s deliberative fortitude, it does not abandon faith in deliberation
itself. In fact, it gives the General Assembly a little help in that area.
    The contrast between such a careful, studious process of objective decision-making and what the governor is proposing — a quick Election Day show of hands, yes or no, on an unfathomably complex fiscal question — could hardly be greater.
    I’m still not thrilled about having to institute a “work-around” to set policy, but comparing a “BRAC” to setting future budgets in a single plebiscite makes me feel a lot better about it.

Anybody care about the mayor’s race?

16 Replies

Hello? Hello?

I’m perplexed as to why, after over 24 hours, there are NO comments on my last post. Is it me? Was it badly written? Or is it the topic? It’s me, isn’t it? I knew it. I’m ugly and my mother dresses me funny. Boo-hoo.

Seriously, I’m not just whining that no one is paying attention to me here. There’s a serious point. I’m still figuring out this blog thing, and trying to understand why some posts will get over 60 comments, and others none. I thought this one, with just a few days left to filing, would be a talker. Lord knows I get plenty of mail and phone calls from people who complain about poor ol’ Mayor Bob. Thing is, no one with a chance ever runs against him. You’d think people would be interested if someone with even a slight chance (and I’ll admit, he doesn’t have much of one) stepped forward, or was thinking about stepping forward.

Maybe lots of people read it, had nothing to say yet, and are waiting to see whether Mr. Fisher actually runs. Or maybe they’re not interested.

So please respond to this one, and tell me, so that I might serve you better: What sorts of topics interest you most? What would be more likely, in your opinion, to get a good debate going among a wide variety of people? I’ve pored over the posts that get the most comments and the ones that get the least, and I have yet to discern reliable patterns that I can put to practical use.

Of course, there are some topics that need to be discussed whether they have high market value or not. So here’s a corollary question: How might I approach local politics in a way that would engage more people?

Thanking you in advance for your advice…

Will Fisher run?

4 Replies

Businessman ought to run
against Coble to ‘raise issues’
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THE DEADLINE to file to run against Mayor Bob Coble is a week from today, and so far the only challenger is perennial candidate Joe Azar.
    This could change.
    I asked Columbia ad man Kevin Fisher, president of Fisher Communications, about rumors that he may step in to provide an alternative to another lopsided Coble-Azar match-up.
    He didn’t say “yes,” but he hadn’t decided against it, either. If he goes for it, we could have the Fisherk_1first competitive contest since Mr. Coble toppled
incumbent Patton Adams in 1990. We could see, for the first time in 16 years, a lively debate about critical issues facing the city — and at a pivotal moment in its history. As a result, more than a few voters might actually turn out to participate for a change. (A record 14,035 voted in the 1990 election; in 2002, only 8,680 bothered.)
    That, said Mr. Fisher, would be his motivation if he does decide to go for it. “I would like to see a hot mayor’s race,” he said — one that engaged the community constructively.
    He said he doubts that he could win on April 4, saying he would likely be a “sacrificial lamb” against an incumbent with far more political experience and name recognition than he. He’s likely right about this.
    As he said, a lot of people in Columbia really like Mayor Bob. In fact, Mr. Fisher likes him: “He’s a really nice guy, and much nicer than me.”
    He thinks that’s part of the problem. He sees Mr. Coble as the sort of “nice guy” who “can’t say no” to bad ideas, and can’t get good ideas implemented.
    “Bob waits for consensus to build” rather than leading, Mr. Fisher said. Under the current weak-mayor, or council-manager, form of government, the citizens of Columbia “really do have seven little mayors,” he said.
    While he advocates changing to a strong-mayor form of government — a possibility that has been under study by a special commission that appears to be going nowhere — he said that even under the current system, the city “would have a stronger mayor” if he succeeded in replacing the current officeholder.
    He says he might have a chance to make a respectable showing against the incumbent if, as he suspects, voters’ liking for Mr. Coble is “mile-wide, inch-deep.”
    But in any case, he would see the race as worthwhile if he managed to “raise the issues” in a wayCoble_2 that engaged the community.
    And what are those issues? In our conversation Wednesday, Mr. Fisher cited a litany of bad decisions and missed opportunities, from AirSouth to the Three Rivers Festival to the city-owned convention hotel idea; from the deal to take over the bus system from SCANA (which he thinks could have been negotiated on terms much more favorable to the taxpayers) to the 10-year failure to get the Canalside project under way (which Mr. Fisher says ended with the city selling the prime property to a developer for less than taxpayers had invested in it).
    As a frequent contributor to our op-ed page, Mr. Fisher has aired his views on a number of other local issues. While I don’t necessarily agree with all his points, he usually presents them emphatically and persuasively — suggesting that he might do the same in a political campaign. Some of the views expressed in these columns:

  • The city shouldn’t
    have given $375,000 to Trelys, a venture capital firm started by entrepreneur Larry Wilson and other wealthy investors.
  • A new arts festival proposed by long-time ad executive Marvin Chernoff is a "boondoggle"
    that should not receive the $218,000 it is seeking from the city.
  • The commission charged with studying the city’s structure
    should dismiss the mayor’s “silly” proposal for a “hybrid” system that would call for a full-time mayor while keeping the city manager.
  • “The building of EdVenture in the State Museum parking lot represents the perfect storm
    of no vision, no leadership and no sense of aesthetics.”

    Mr. Fisher says he doesn’t understand why, “with a week to go,” he is the only viable challenger being mentioned. He thinks there are plenty of other strong potential candidates. In particular, “I… think it’s a great opportunity — but nobody’s doing it — for a minority.” (Mr. Fisher, by the way, is white.)
    So with only a week to go, what is keeping him from making up his mind whether to file? He says there’s only one factor in the way: He’s not sure he could run effectively for the part-time job — and if successful, do the job as well as he would want — and still make a living. He said his business makes it hard to delegate: “So much of it is about me…. I sell myself.”
    He said he has no big-time backers, although he has gained the impression that some might step forward if he filed and demonstrated that he was serious.
    But he won’t know unless he tries.
    Does my writing this column indicate that I would prefer Mr. Fisher to Mayor Coble? Nope. I really don’t know at this point. But I do know I’d like to see a lively, relevant and competitive campaign that fully engages the electorate. With everything happening and on the verge of happening right now, our capital city can’t afford another yawner.
    That’s why I hope Mr. Fisher goes for it.

No commies here

25 Replies

Mark Sanford is not a communistSanford_state_2
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
‘I DON’T want people to lose sight of who they’re talking to, and I sound like a half communist by the time I’ve laid out all these different options,” said Gov. Mark Sanford at a pre-speech briefing on his State of the State address Wednesday.
    “… which I’m obviously not,” he added with an easy laugh, the same laugh he uses when he calls me a “socialist,” which he does with some frequency.
    I should add some context.
    First, the governor isn’t any kind of communist — half, quarter or full. Nor am I a socialist; he just says that because he’s such a thoroughgoing libertarian, and I’m not. I’m sort of in the middle on the whole small-government-versus-big-government thing. Government should be as big or small as we the people, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should be, and whether taxes rise or fall should depend upon the situation.
    The governor was mock-concerned about being perceived as a demi-Marxist because in his speech, he was actually taking a more pragmatic view of the whole tax-and-spend thing. While insisting that if lawmakers swap a sales tax increase for a property tax reduction it must be revenue-neutral or even an overall decrease, he went on to speak about the need to consider other aspects of our overall tax system. In other words, he was to an extent embracing our position that tax reform must be comprehensive.
    He spoke positively of impact fees to transfer the cost of growth to new development, and proposed to “take the opportunity to look at (sales tax) exemptions that are not serving their purpose.”
    Mr. Sanford tiptoed repeatedly around the question of whether he considers property tax relief — which conventional wisdom holds is Job One in this election year — really needs to happen in 2006.
His fancy footwork on that went over the heads of many legislators — the first time they interrupted him with applause for a policy statement was on page 21 of a 24-page speech, when he said, “We think this can be the year of property tax relief….”
    The solons clapped like crazy, and I had to wonder why.
    Can be? Not will be? What did he mean by that? Back at that luncheon briefing with editorial page editors, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams tried for several minutes to pin him down on that. Finally, with a somewhat exasperated tone, she said: “Are you pushing for it this year? This is what I’m asking. Are you going to be one of those who says we’ve got to absolutely do something this year?”
    “Do you see that written in here?” the governor asked.
    “No,” she said.
    After a grunt that sort of sounds like “Yeah” on my recording, he concluded, “But that’s as much as I’m going to say.”
    But even though he refuses to declare himself clearly as part of this headlong rush to placate angry homeowners before November, the governor need not fear that anyone will erect a bust of him alongside Lenin’s (assuming anyone still has a bust of Lenin).
    Never mind that he has stopped saying overtly dismissive things about public education. Nor should you attach much importance to the fact that he keeps saying things like, “This is not about some philosophical jihad that says government is bad and the private sector is good.”
    Make no mistake: Mark Sanford is still a libertarian to his core. It’s hard-wired into his reflexive responses, even while he’s trying to reach out to folks to the “left” of him by repeatedly citing Thomas Friedman.
    Check out the one most radical proposal in his speech.
    This is a man who ran for office on a plan to restructure South Carolina’s government so that each branch can exercise its separate, enumerated powers, with proper checks and balances. So you’d think he’d understand the way the system should work.
    And yet, he proposes to undermine the central deliberative principle underlying the republican form of government devised by our nation’s Founders. He would do this by asking voters to approve a change in the state constitution that would set a specific formula for future spending growth, regardless of what future needs might be.
    Does that sound good to you? Well, fortunately, George Washington and James Madison and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton et al. realized that you couldn’t conduct the complex business of running a government — even one firmly rooted in the consent of the governed — through simple, up-or-down plebiscites. They knew that we would need to delegate the business of deciding what needed to be done through government, how much it would cost, and how to pay for it. And that if we didn’t like the decisions delegates made, we could elect somebody else.
    If you ask most people, without context, whether they want to limit government spending — yes or no, no in-between — they will of course say “yes.” If you ask me that, I’ll say yes, and mean it.
    But if you ask me whether I think this state is adequately meeting its duty to, for instance, keep our highways safe, I’ll say “no.” And if you ask me whether insufficient funds might be a factor in that failure, I’ll say “yes.” And if you ask me whether I have the slightest idea what percentage of our state economy the General Assembly would need to devote to that purpose to get the job done in future years, I’d have to say, “Of course not.”
    And yet that is the kind of arbitrary judgment that the governor would have us make this fall — and lock into our constitution — with his proposed “Taxpayer Empowerment Amendment” plebiscite.
So never fear: Mark Sanford is still Mark Sanford, and he’s certainly no commie.
    If Mark Sanford were not still the supply-side, privatizing, anti-tax, anti-spending guy we’ve all come to know over the past four years, I’d be disappointed in him. I’ve always res
pected his honesty and consistency. And those are definitely still intact.

Let’s talk tax reform

23 Replies

That’s right, I didn’t have a column today. Not out of laziness, I assure you — as plausible as that explanation may sound — but because I thought it worth making room for our full-page editorial overview of the main issues that should be considered as the state embarks upon tax reform.

Comprehensive tax reform, of course, has long been one of our favorite hobby horses, right up there with government restructuring. But here we put most of the main principles involved in one place. I urge you to peruse it, and use this post as a forum for sharing your thoughts on the subject. Or better yet, write us a letter to the editor.

Or best of all, write or call your lawmakers, and urge them to carefully consider the good of the whole state in changing our tax laws for the better.

Lake rising column

14 Replies

First, take action to make
the whole lake rise
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
POLITICAL NOSTRUMS often become obnoxious with excessive application. Some simply start out that way.
    For me, one that has always fit in the latter category is “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
    I’ve never denied that there’s truth in it. At least, I intuit that there’s truth in it. I’m no economist, but it’s always made sense that if you pump more wealth into a reasonably fair and open economic system, many people’s boats — if not most people’s — should float somewhat higher. Not all boats, of course, what with the poor always being with us, but there was logic in the saying.
    I still didn’t like it. It was too devil-may-care: Don’t worry about whether everybody’s boat is seaworthy; just don’t impede the tide, and assume everything will be copacetic. It’s like something one would say over drinks at the 19th hole, followed by: “I’m fine. Aren’t you fine? Well, then everybody must be fine.”
    Oh, and don’t give me a bunch of guff about “class warfare.” I enjoy a round of golf as much as the next man. That doesn’t mean I have to adopt an air of insouciance toward society’s have-nots. So the “rising tide” metaphor always left me a little cold.
    At least, it did until last week, when I heard it put another way: “The whole lake has got to rise for my boat to rise.” That implies a sense of responsibility for raising the water.
    Harris DeLoach — chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sonoco Products — said that Wednesday, when he and other state business leaders presented their “Competitiveness Agenda” for the 2006 legislative session, which starts Tuesday.
    This is an agenda with considerable juice behind it, since it is being promoted in common by the state Chamber of Commerce, the Palmetto Institute, the S.C. Council on Competitiveness and the Palmetto Business Forum.
    The groups banded together last year to push successfully for tort reform, retirement system restructuring, a measure to encourage high school students to choose “career clusters” that help them see the point of staying in school, and “innovation centers” to connect university-based research to the marketplace.
    They had less success advocating adequate funding for highways and health care, but overall, the stratagem showed what could happen when state business leaders combine their clout and let lawmakers know they’re truly serious about some issues.
    “This time last year, I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive,” said Chamber President Hunter Howard, who has carried water for his organization in the State House lobby for many a session. But once he tried a “whole new approach… going after the Legislature with really a stick kind of approach — but in a nice way,” he was pleased with the results.
    There will no doubt be those who detect an odor of self-interest whenever business people push for anything. And there’s truth in that, too. Mr. DeLoach does want his boat to rise, after all. But the encouraging thing is that he and the others leading this coalition understand that for that to happen, the water has to rise for everyone. Rather than simply saying “I’ve got mine” and being satisfied, they are pursuing policies that — whether you think they’re smartly crafted or not — acknowledge the truth that we’re all in this together: If the least of these in South Carolina are left back, so are we all.
    Take tax reform, for instance. As my colleague Cindi Scoppe noted in a recent column, the business sector is determined not to be outsqueaked by homeowners to the extent that businesses bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden.
    But there’s good in that. Lawmakers are coming back to town this week all in a sweat to get angry residential property taxpayers off their backs, which creates the danger of overreacting yet again with little regard for the stability, fairness and efficacy of the overall tax system.
    Basically, the business honchos are saying what this editorial board has said for years — that however much emotion swirls around property taxes or some other outrage of the moment, the goal should be “comprehensive tax system reform.”
    Of course, the biz types have a few things on their wish list that most of us would never think to ask for, such as workers’ compensation “reform.” (I put that in quotes because I haven’t decided whether it’s reform or not.)
    But I’m still struck by the extent to which these business leaders seem more interested than many of our politicians in doing, as Mr. DeLoach put it, “what’s good for the whole state,” seeing that as the way to benefit them all.
    Those who reflexively distrust the private sector see it as wanting nothing more from government than to cut its taxes and leave it alone. But too many aspects of this agenda give the lie to that.
    In fact, “We’re referred to as the group that wants to raise taxes,” said Carolina First Bank CEO Mack Whittle. “Well, we’re the businesses that pay the taxes” (about 43 percent of the total, asserts the Palmetto Institute’s Jim Fields). “We have to look at the road system; we have to look at education. And if it does take more revenue, then so be it.”
    So it is that you see the business community leading the charge for kindergarten for all 4-year-olds who need it.
    It is, in large part, the kind of agenda that reflects what real pro-business conservatives — the kind who have a proven ability to meet a payroll, and a realistic grasp of what it would take to provide better paychecks for all South Carolinians — see as the state’s real needs.
    What they come up with differs necessarily from what professional “conservatives” who are all theory and no practice tend to advocate. You know, the Grover Norquists, and those w
ho would play along with them.
    Am I endorsing this whole agenda? Of course not. I haven’t begun to make up my mind about significant portions of it. Others I know I’m against. For instance, while I welcome these groups to the comprehensive tax reform cause, my colleagues and I staunchly oppose some of the particulars they advocate under that umbrella — such as imposing spending caps on local government. And we disagree with their position on the powers of the Ports Authority.
    But I do like the stated attitude that underlies much of this approach. Like Mr. DeLoach, I want to see the whole lake rise.

Profitability column

16 Replies

Why is KR for sale? Because
the market makes no sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
JENNIFER HARDING, The State’s vice president for advertising, was frustrated, exasperated and disgusted at her division’s October revenue figures.
    “It was horrible, just horrible,” she said with vehemence at a senior staff meeting in November. (These quotes, by the way, are reconstructions; I wasn’t taking notes. But I’m sure I’m faithful to the spirit. If Jennifer feels misrepresented, she knows where to find me.) “We’re all going to go out back, build a bonfire and burn our calendars. Everybody’s welcome; bring marshmallows.”
    After repeated budget reforecasts accompanied by a series of cost cuts that had started as early as January, this was not what we wanted to hear. (“We,” by the way, refers to the heads of the various divisions of the newspaper: news, advertising, circulation, human resources, editorial, etc.) One of our number asked glumly whether that meant October revenues had been down compared to the previous October.
    “Oh, no! Of course not,” Jennifer said. She just meant we had “missed goal.” Her division had performed admirably. Advertising revenue for the month had been 2.8 percent higher than 12 months earlier. But that was 7.1 percent less than the much-higher number we were expected to hit.
    And that’s today’s newspaper business in a single anecdote.
    Who expected us to hit that number? That would be Knight Ridder, the corporation that owns this and 31 other dailies. So they’re the bad guys, right?
    Well, it’s tempting to say “yes” — especially since those folks in San Jose (KR’s headquarters) are less and less likely to own us for much longer — but the insanity doesn’t start with them. They just pass it on, the same way my publisher passes it on to me, and I pass it on to the people who report to me. I’m the bad guy when I tell my folks that yet again, we’re going to have to do with less.
    So while it’s easy to cuss corporate (an exercise that would lack novelty, believe me), I know those folks are just trying to keep their heads above the surging flood of irrational expectations from Wall Street.
    I don’t begin to understand the stock market, and my experience with the way investors have batted the newspaper industry around in recent years hasn’t made it any easier to figure out.
For instance, I read recently in The Wall Street Journal that Wal-Mart — that monster of capitalism — maintains a profit margin of 3.5 percent. And nobody’s talking about angry investors demanding that Wal-Mart be sold.
    In our industry, numbers such as 3.5 — indeed, any single-digit numbers — are used to measure expectations of growth in profit margin, not the total.
    If a newspaper company isn’t making 20 percent or better, it’s in trouble. (Yes, I know Wal-Mart’s 3.5 percent, which is 2.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, is worth more than any newspaper chain’s 20 percent. Still — and I guess I’m showing my ignorance — isn’t it better performance to get 20 cents back on every dollar than to get 3.5?)
    Knight Ridder’s operating profit margin in 2004 was 19.4 percent. It hasn’t exactly shown dramatic improvement this year. So Knight Ridder is in trouble.
    Hence all those budget cuts. Of course, we’ve been cutting for years. Our editorial department lost one full-time position years ago. But things got worse in 2005. My Sunday column mentioned that one plus in turning our entire Monday editorial pages over to writers in the community was that it meant “fewer editorials we have to write.” That consideration wasn’t rooted in laziness. It does reduce our writing load by 14 percent. But I now have 25 percent fewer writers.
    We are, of course, far from alone. The State’s newsroom, a separate and much larger division, has lost more positions than I can count without taking my shoes off. The newsroom is particularly vulnerable because it tends to have a much higher rate of turnover than does a staid bunch such as the editorial staff. And when you’re in cost-cutting mode, there are not enough comings to match the goings.
    That means everybody working harder to get the job done, which fortunately leaves us less time to think about the fact that the market is still not satisfied.
    The reason the company is up for sale is that KR’s three largest investors had the leverage to act upon their displeasure.
    Here’s the bit that makes it all surreal for us here at The State: If all of Knight Ridder performed the way The State does, the folks in San Jose wouldn’t have the Bruce Shermans of the world breathing down their necks.
    Or to put it another way, if The State were a publicly traded company in its own right (although why it would want to be publicly traded in any arrangement is beyond me), it would be fine. More than fine, actually.
    As it stands, we could get new owners who will strip our resources down to a point that we’ll look back on 2005 as the fat old days. And we won’t be the only ones noticing. You’ll see it in the quality of the product.
    Or we could be bought by a company that believes in investing in the product, and is better insulated against the whims of the equity markets.
    Or something else could happen — something I can’t imagine.
    So why am I telling you all this? Because nice people in the community keep expressing their sympathy that we’re doing so poorly. It’s as if we were losing money, or maybe only making pitiful, Wal-Mart-sized margins.
    Well, I would laugh, except that under the circumstances, it would probably hurt too much.

Column about Mondays

4 Replies

Less room for us,
and more room for you
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LAST MONDAY, for the first time ever to my knowledge, we published this page without a single editorial.
    An editorial, I should explain, is what we call that vertical item to the upper left. The thing you are reading right now is called a “column.” A column expresses an individual writer’s perspective, while an editorial reflects the consensus of the newspaper’s editorial board. That’s why editorials, unlike columns, are not signed.
    Anyway, we didn’t have any of those on last Monday’s page. And we’re not going to have any tomorrow, or on any subsequent Mondays, as long as this is well received by readers and keeps working for us.
    Letters to the Editor are one of the most popular items in the newspaper. We always have more letters than we can fit into the paper, so why not give you more of what you like? And of course, that’s fewer editorials we have to write, which is where the “working for us” part comes in.
    Anyway, we gave it a try last week, and then I asked readers of my blog to let me know what they thought of it. Here’s a sampling of the responses:
    “Dave” wrote:

I would weigh in with a thumbs up on the Monday Forum. Another idea would be to pose one key question and solicit “person on the street” answers, preferably with pictures….

    Then “Herb,” whom I promise I did not put up to this, responded:

Personally, I like the editorials better, because I have a great degree of trust in you guys and your perspective. You have access to a lot more facts and I presume, more time to process it, at least on local and national issues. I’m not trying to (“)smear honey on your beard” (German proverb) — I am honest when I say that your position carries a lot more weight than the average Joe Blow, who may be just venting.

    Mark Whittington countered that:

Why don’t you get out of the office and come and actually talk to the people (the workers)?… Nobody reads the paper because it doesn’t apply to their own lives. Over and over again, I hear people talk about being worked into the ground, not having any rights, being paid crummy wages, missing their families, not having enough time to take care of their business, etc…. Why don’t you make Monday, “Worker’s Day”?

    Michael Bloom pleaded:

DON’T do a “person on the street” segment. Unless you do it the right way, and show your readers how dumb a vast majority of people are. Like ask them first… if they are voters, and if they are, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and/or the Preamble to the Constitution. Now that would be sad but enlightening. I would definitely read that….

    “Dave” came back with:

The “Man on the Street” interviews are invaluable for exactly the reasons you note. You may find one college student who may be historically illiterate and you may find a cab driver who reads Shakespeare. That is what makes that form of data collection interesting to read. So, yes, it has to be done the right way and you don’t want to intentionally humiliate anyone either.

    “Lee,” who seldom agrees with Mark, did for once:

I agree that the editors should use their day off to meet some real people, and avoid their usual chums, like politicians and each other. Better yet, the editors should start their own sideline businesses so they can get some real experience as taxpayers.

    “james potter” made several points in e.e. cummings style:

i do not think it will end up working. extremists will simply take over the editorial page every week on their pet topic. i think monday editorials are also useful to help focus the general assembly during the legislative session. i will normally glance or read the editorials, i rarely pay attention to the letters to the editor since many appear to be “organized”.

    I thought Mr. “potter” raised some points worth addressing, which I did along these lines:
    1. No one, “extremists” or otherwise, will “take over” the page. The fact is that we still have to sift through the vast number of letters we get, pick a good, representative sample of them to run, edit them, put them on the page, then proof the page before publishing it. Our role in all that is in no way diminished. (In other words, “Lee,” this doesn’t give us a “day off.”) There’s just room for more letters than before.
    2. The first morning legislators are in town each week of the session is Tuesday, not Monday. So the most relevant days to run statewide-issue editorials, if you want lawmakers to be part of your audience, are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and our biggest-circulation day, Sunday.
    3. We do our best to spot and frustrate any attempt to stuff our letters space via an “organized” campaign. I’m sure there are some that are sophisticated enough to mask it, but from what I’ve seen, most letter-writing campaigns are pretty ham-handed and obvious. On the other hand, will you see people making similar points and seeming to walk in lockstep with other letter writers? Yep. But that is mostly attributable to the fact that partisan politics — with the media acting as facilitators — has oversimplified all too many complex issues to the point that too many people see things in the same black-and-white terms, and even express themselves using the same “talking points” that one side or the other of our polarized politics has generally agreed upon. That can make a lot of letters look like a part of a campaign when they are not.
    Check out tomorrow’s page and see what you think.

Judicial independence column

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America must uphold judicial
independence at home, too
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DO Viktor Yushchenko, Saddam Hussein, Clement Haynsworth and Samuel Alito all have in common?
    Judicial independence.
    That is to say, all have been at the center of events that illustrate the importance of that criticalUkraine2 element, which anchors our republic in the rule of law.
    This is what was on South Carolina Chief Justice Jean Toal’s mind when she spoke to the Columbia Rotary on Monday.
    She started off with last year’s Ukrainian election, which ultimately led to Mr. Yushchenko’s election as president — but not until the bully boys behind Viktor Yanukovych had tried everything from election fraud to assassination by poison to keep the people’s choice from power.
    What saved the day? Well, the “Orange Revolution” in the streets had a lot to do with it, as did international pressure from the United States and others. But ultimately, there would not have been a happy ending for democracy if the Ukrainian supreme court Ukraine1had not stepped in — after the central election committee had refused to hear fraud complaints — and ordered a second runoff election, declaring the results of the crooked first one invalid.
    “How did the Ukraine Supreme Court have the courage and the tools to conduct this important judicial review?” Chief Justice Toal asked. “Many credit the… strong decision for the rule of law to their training by a team of American judges and lawyers sent on an outreach mission to newly emerging democracies to school their judges in the art of creating and operating an independent court system.”
    It is commonly understood that “America is exporting Democracy in the form of free elections” all over the world, to Afghanistan and Iraq certainly, but also less visibly to Bosnia, Saudia Arabia, and so on, she said. But just as importantly, we are “also exporting the idea of the importance of a stable court system.”
    Saddam Hussein knows that, and so do his most violent supporters. That’s why Baathists assassinated a judge involved in charging the former (and would-be future) dictator. It’s also why Saddam has done so much to challenge the viability of the court trying him, from theatrics in the courtroom to refusal to show up.
    The old order in Iraq knows that an independent judiciary that enjoys broad public confidence isSaddam_trial yet another nail in their coffin.
    The chief justice’s remarks remind me of something Sen. Lindsey Graham told me recently. While others measure progress toward success in terms of Iraqi army battalions and police forces trained and effective, he has thought in terms of a functioning cadre of judges who value law over the will of men. That’s one reason he thinks of American disengagement in terms of years rather than the months that political expedience would dictate.
    As Ms. Toal put it, America must be “a beacon to the world,” shining a light on “what living by the rule of law can contribute to the liberty of all.”
    But for the judiciary to be effective, it must enjoy public acceptance — which is not at all the same as “agreement.”
    That’s why she worries about the intersection of politics and judicial selection in Washington.
She tries to stay hopeful, and has seen recent signs that things can go well, even inside the Beltway. She said it will “be interesting to see whether (the nomination of) Alito follows the same positive process” as that of Chief Justice John Roberts.
    “One can only pray for the republic that that is the way it proceeds.” Mr. Roberts was eminently qualified, and was treated accordingly. Ms. Toal said she doesn’t know all there is to know about Mr. Alito, but “what I do know suggests that he is in the cream of the cream,” she said in a Thursday interview.
    But she worries that Senate Democrats, frustrated that they found no chinks in Mr. Roberts’ armor, are determined to make up for it now. And when politicians make up their minds to do that, the stuff is going to fly.
    She’s seen it before — when South Carolinian Clement Haynsworth was nominated by Richard Nixon in 1969 to replace Abe Fortas on the nation’s high court.
    She was working in the Haynsworth firm at the time, and her husband was Judge Haynsworth’s clerk. She watched as her fellow Democrats “drummed up” all sorts of bogus accusations at Judge Haynsworth, who was “revered and highly respected” by both sides of the political fence.
    But after Republicans had succeeded in blocking Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Justice Fortas to be chief justice, “Democrats vowed that they would go after the first nominee of Nixon as payback.” So they did, with Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh leading the charge.
    This was long before the verb “to Bork” entered the language. But things have only gotten worse as the years have passed.
    “Too often, what we are doing is judging the judges on the basis of the hot-button issues,” said Ms. Toal, when “The real examination ought to be, is he fair and will he call them as he sees them?”
    Many will remember that as a politician, Ms. Toal was a Democrat. But she was “an anomaly — a pro-life Democrat.” So she was never one to embrace the litmus tests of Washington.
    Being a judge, and one who is particularly devoted to her calling, strengthens her aversion to what she fears the fight over Mr. Alito could become.
    But you don’t have to be chief
justice to agree with her. All you have to be is someone who respects the rule of law to understand that you’re not supposed to try to “put someone on there who will sing your song.”