Yearly Archives: 2009

Obama should seize historic opportunity, say “No, thanks” to Nobel

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Barack Obama has a tremendous opportunity now to recapture lost political capital, unify this country behind his leadership and increase (if that’s possible, in light of today’s development) his international prestige — all of which would be an enormous boost to the things he’s trying to achieve:

He should say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Nobel Peace prize.

If he does that, everyone will think more of him. That is to say, everyone who is susceptible to being influenced. The Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks who make a good living from criticizing him will still do so, but no one but the nuttiest fringe types would still be listening. Everyone with a scintilla of fairmindedness would be impressed if he declined this honor.

If he doesn’t do it, this award will simply be another occasion for the Right to hoot and holler and deride, and the Left to dig in its heels and defend Their Guy, and the crazy polarizing spin cycle will spin on, while health care and everything else gets lost amid the shouting.

I got a foretaste of this this morning. I was about to get out of my truck to go in and have breakfast when I heard the news that had stunned the White House and everyone else: Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In the next few moments, I quickly filed the following three tweets:

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize? The White House is stunned, and so am I. Isn’t it a tad premature or something?

What did Obama win the Nobel FOR? Good intentions? I mean, seriously, the man just GOT here…

Hey, I LIKE Obama; I have hopes he’ll EARN a Nobel one day soon. But he hasn’t had the chance to do so yet…

Then, when I walked in to get my breakfast, I ran into Steve Benjamin and Samuel Tenenbaum, and asked them if they’d heard the news. They had. I expected them to share my shock. I mean, I saw one report (which I haven’t been able to confirm yet) that Obama was only sworn into office TWO WEEKS before the nominations for the Nobel had to be in. The president himself knows better than to claim he’d earned it. Here’s what he said this morning:

Mr. Obama said he doesn’t view the award “as a recognition of my own accomplishments,” but rather as a recognition of goals he has set for the U.S. and the world. Mr. Obama said, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize.”

But Steve and Samuel — especially Samuel — felt like they had to defend the president’s receiving the prize. And here’s why: While I had just heard the news and was naturally flabbergasted, with no other stimuli acting on me, Samuel gets up at 4:30 every morning, and has usually had several full cycles of spin by the time I leave my house. He had already heard right-wingers attacking the award on the airwaves, so he was in defensive mode.

This is what the whole Left vs. Right thing gets us: We can’t even agree when something wild and crazy happens. And the president of the United States getting the Nobel Peace Prize for what he MIGHT do, for what he INTENDS to do, for his POTENTIAL, is wild and crazy.

Face it, folks: The Nobel committee gave him this prize for Not Being George W. Bush. This is a measure of how much they hated that guy. I didn’t like him much either, but come on… (While I haven’t talked to my friend Robert Ariail today, I can picture the cartoon already: Obama clutching the prize to his cheek saying, “They LIKE me! The really, really LIKE me!…”

Here’s where the opportunity comes in. The president was on the right track with the humble talk, but he should go a big step further: He should decline the prize, insisting that he hasn’t earned it yet.

This would transform perception of Barack Obama both domestically and internationally. If he simply takes the award, no matter how eloquent his words, he’ll be seen as an ordinary guy who can’t resist being honored, whether he deserves it or not. The Right will go ape over it and keep on going ape over it, and the Left will ferociously defend him, making all sorts of improbable claims to support his receiving it, and those of us in the middle will see the Right as having the stronger point at the same time that we’re put off by their meanspiritedness, and nothing will be accomplished.

But turning it down, saying, “Not yet; wait until I’ve earned it” would catapult Obama to such a state of greatness that he would overarch all ordinary partisan argument. No one could say he was wrong, and most people would be blown away by such selflessness. It would give him tremendous amounts of juice to get REAL health care reform instead of some watered-down nothing, which is probably what we’re going to get.

Internationally… well, if they love the guy now, they’d be ecstatic over him if he turned it down. I mean it. Think about it: What do they love about this guy? His perceived nobility and humility. They hated Bush for what they perceived as his arrogance, and they love Obama for what they perceive as his humility before the rest of the world. If he just took the prize, the world would just shake his hand and that would be that. But if he turned it down, suddenly Iran would be negotiating with a guy with more respect than anyone in the whole wide world has had in a long time. And maybe we’d get somewhere — with Iran, with Russia, with China, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, take your pick.

As I said, I like Obama, and I want him to succeed. But I know he hasn’t earned this honor yet. And I’m firmly convinced that turning it down would afford him the greatest opportunity to succeed with his agenda that he’ll ever have.

Trying to explain Joe Wilson to France

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This morning I had a very pleasant breakfast at the usual place with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine. I forgot to take a picture of him, but I found the video above from 2008 (I think), in which I think he’s telling the folks back home that Obama was going to win the election. That’s what “Obama va gagner” means, right? Alas, I have no French, although I’ve always felt that I understand Segolene Royal perfectly. Fortunately, Philippe’s English is superb.

It was my first encounter with a French journalist since I shot this video of Cyprien d’Haese shooting video of me back in 2008, in a supremely Marshall McLuhan moment. If you’ll recall, I was interviewed by a lot of national and foreign journalists in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential primaries here. (You may also recall that a lot of them came to me because of my blog, not because I was editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Philippe, of course, also contacted me because of the blog, although he was aware of my former association, and expressed his kind concern for my joblessness.)

He had come to Columbia from New York, which has been his home for 14 years, to ask about “this summer uprising among the conservatives, peaking with the Joe Wilson incident,” as he had put it in his e-mail.

Well, to begin with, I disputed his premise. I don’t think there has been a resurgence of conservatives or of the Republican Party, which is still groping for its identity in the wake of last year’s election. What we’ve seen in the case of Joe Wilson — the outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, after the moment in which he embarrassed the 2nd District — was merely the concentration of political elements that are always there, and are neither stronger nor weaker because of what Joe has said and done. Just as outrage over Joe’s outburst has expressed itself (unfortunately) in an outpouring (I’m trying to see how many words with the prefix “out-” I can use in this sentence) of material support for the unimpressive Rob Miller, the incident was a magnet for the forces of political polarization, in South Carolina and across the country.

What I tried to do is provide historical and sociological context for the fact that Joe Wilson is the natural representative for the 2nd District, and will probably be re-elected (unless someone a lot stronger than Rob Miller emerges and miraculously overcomes his huge warchest). It’s not about Obama (although resistance to the “expansion of government” that he represents is a factor) and it’s not about race (although the fact that districts are gerrymandered to make the 2nd unnaturally white, and the 6th unnaturally black, helps define the districts and their representatives).

In other words, I said a lot of stuff that I said back in this post.

We spoke about a number of other topics as well, some related, some not:

He asked about the reaction in South Carolina to Obama’s election. I told him that obviously, the Democratic minority — which had been energized to an unprecedented degree in the primary, having higher turnout than the Republicans for the first time in many years — was jubilant. The reaction among the Republican minority was more like resignation. Republicans had known that McCain would win South Carolina, but Obama would win the election. I explained that McCain’s win here did not express a rejection of Obama (as some Democrats have chosen to misinterpret), but simply political business as usual — it would have been shocking had the Republican, any Republican, not won against any national Democrat. I spoke, as I explained to him, from the unusual perspective of someone who liked both Obama and McCain very much, but voted for McCain. I think I drew the distinction fairly well between what I think and what various subsets of Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina think…

That got us on the topic of McCain-Bush in 2000, because as I explained to Philippe, I was destined to support McCain even over someone I liked as much as Obama, because I had waited eight years for the opportunity to make up for what happened here in 2000. Philippe agreed that the world would have been a better place had McCain been elected then, but I gather that he subscribes to the conventional wisdom (held by many of you here on the blog) that the McCain of 2008 was much diminished.

Philippe understood 2000, but as a Frenchman, he had trouble understanding how the country re-elected Bush in 2004 (And let me quickly say, for those of you who may be quick to bridle at the French, that Philippe was very gentlemanly about this, the very soul of politeness). So I explained to him how I came to write an endorsement of Bush again in 2004 — a very negative endorsement which indicted him for being wrong about many things, but in the end an endorsement. There was a long explanation of that, and a short one. Here’s the short one: John Kerry. And Philippe understood why a newspaper that generally reflects its state (close to three-fourths of those we endorsed during my tenure won their general election contests) would find it hard to endorse Kerry, once I put it that way. (As those of you who pay attention know, under my leadership The State endorsed slightly more Democrats than Republicans overall, but never broke its string of endorsing Republicans for the presidency, although we came close in 2008.)

Anyway, when we finished our long breakfast (I hadn’t eaten much because I was talking too much, drinking coffee all the while) I gave him a brief “tour” of the Midlands as seen from the 25th floor of Columbia’s tallest building, then gave him numbers for several other sources who might be helpful. He particularly was interested in folks from Joe’s Lexington County base, as well as some political science types, so I referred him to:

  • Rep. Kenny Bingham, the S.C. House Majority Leader who recently held a “Welcome Home” event for Joe Wilson at his (Kenny’s) home.
  • Rep. Nikki Haley, who until recently was the designated Mark Sanford candidate for governor, before she had occasion to distance herself.
  • Sen. Nikki Setzler (I gave him all the Lexington County Nikkis I knew), who could describe the county’s politics from the perspective of the minority party.
  • Blease Graham, the USC political science professor who recently retired but remained plugged in and knowledgeable. (Philippe remarked upon Blease’s unusual name, which started me on a tangent about his ancestor Cole Blease, Ben Tillman, N.G. Gonzales, etc.)
  • Walter Edgar, the author of the definitive history of our state.
  • Neal Thigpen, the longtime political scientist at Francis Marion University who tends to comment from a Republican perspective.
  • Jack Bass, the ex-journalist and political commentator known for his biography of Strom Thurmond and for his liberal Democratic point of view.

I also suggested he stop in at the Gervais Street Starbucks for a downtown Columbia perspective, and the Sunset Restaurant in West Columbia.

I look forward to reading his article, although I might have to get some of y’all to help me with understanding it. With my background in Spanish and two years of Latin I can generally understand French better when written than spoken, but I still might need some help…

Mayor Bob’s happy with his decision

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CobleWalk

Forgot to share this with you over the weekend, but I remembered it when I was cleaning some pictures off my phone.

At the Walk for Life Saturday morning, I heard a voice behind me say, “Well I read on your blog that you would be here…,” and I looked around and it was Bob Coble. As you probably know, his wife Beth is the hostess of the Walk.

Anyway, we walked together for a few minutes, and talked about various things in the news. But the most relevant thing to share was his answer to how he’s adjusting to the fact that he’s not going to be mayor anymore after next year.

He said he’s doing great with it. He hadn’t known for sure, when he was making the decision, how he would feel about it once it was done and too late to change his mind. But as it turns out, he’s loving it.

OK, I’m really, REALLY sorry about all the e-mails, people

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Some of you (about 50 people, I’m guessing) have received the following message from me about 14 times:

If you’re receiving this, you probably also received one of about 65 messages that just went out from my computer and which may have seemed strangely off-topic.
That’s because I first tried to send it to you days or even weeks ago, but somehow it got hung up in my Outbox until just a few minutes ago.
Sorry about that.
-Brad

I am so sorry. I mean, you have no idea how sorry, since I think some of the people I sent it to were prospective employers.

I’m actually quite good with technology, normally.

What happened here is that I finally managed (with a friend’s help) to dislodge a bunch of messages in my Outbox, some of which had been sitting there for weeks.

So, quite naturally, I felt the need to explain to all of those people why they had suddenly received an anachronistic message. So I sent the above message…

… and IT got stuck in my Outbox. So ever since yesterday, I was trying and trying to send it — changing settings, restarting Outlook, clicking send/receive over and over. And now, it seems it has send the message out again for each time I clicked on the button.

And I can’t seem to stop it. And I hesitate to send out ANOTHER apology to all those same people.

I finally managed to delete if from my Outbox, so maybe it will stop now. I hope I hope I hope…

What I learned about swine flu

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Ever since Monday I’ve been meaning to share some things I learned about swine flu at Rotary on Monday. Dr. Stephen L. Shelton from Palmetto Health spoke from a wealth of expertise on the H1N1 virus. (Over at the hospital they call him Boss Hog.)

Some of it was highly technical, such as the diagram of the virus that he used to explain why it’s called H1N1. I’m afraid that sort of went in one ear and out the other. Other parts were sort of obvious, such as a list of typical flu symptoms, or what to do if you get it (drink fluids, avoid contact with others, stay home for 24 hours after fever is gone).

More useful were some of the slides in his presentation, such as the one I photographed above about how to tell when your child needs to go to the emergency room rather than simply be treated at home.

Beyond that, the following points really stood out in my mind:

  • You probably know the signs of flu (fever, cough, body aches, sore throat, runny or stuffed nose, headache, chills, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting), but how do you know you’ve really got it, as opposed to a cold or some such? By the rapid onset of the symptoms. If one hour you’re fine and an hour later it’s like you’ve been hit by a truck, it’s the flu.
  • And if it’s the flu, and you’re getting it now, the odds are 99 to 1 that it’s swine flu, because the regular seasonal variety hasn’t arrived yet.
  • Most swine flu victims are children so far — and they started getting it when school started.
  • Because there is so little immunity in the population, if you are exposed to swine flu, you will almost certainly get sick. This is not true of the more common seasonal flu bugs.
  • Interestingly, the one subset of the population that has some immunity to H1N1 is folks over 55. So for a change, older people are actually the lowest-priority group needing to get the swine flu shots when they arrive (and Dr. Shelton swore this was not a “death panel” plot to get rid of old folks). The highest priority? Pregnant women. Having that baby crowding the diaphragm really makes them vulnerable to a lower-lung infection.
  • However, old folks should still, as usual, get the regular, garden-variety flu shot, if they haven’t already. It helps boost immunity for the other kind.

Anyway, those are the points that made an impression on me.

By the way, for a video version of Dr. Shelton’s presentation, follow this link.

Henry McMaster’s video on the Water War with N.C.

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You know, it occurs to me: How am I going to get people, especially political types, to buy ads on my blog (once I start offering ads on my blog) when I go ahead and put there promotional material on the blog for free? The video above being a case in point.

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll keep sharing stuff like this whenever I have something to say about it.

And what I have to say about this is: It’s a huge improvement over his initial campaign video, but still leaves much to be desired.

It’s an improvement because it isn’t a naked play on partisan resentment. In the earlier video, he blamed unemployment in South Carolina, absurdly, on Barack Obama. In this one, by contrast, his villain is those greedy North Carolinians upstream, which is more credible.

And the tone is laudable because it’s calmly and dispassionately explanatory. That’s nice for a change.

But one thing it fails to do is explain to voters why this has a bearing upon their choice for governor. It doesn’t clearly say that I, Henry McMaster, have taken a particular stand on this issue and my opponents have not, or in any other way related the Water War to the subject at hand, which is nominating a gubernatorial candidate.

You may say I can’t have both calm explanation and overt appeal for votes, but I think I can. If you’re going to take a minute to ‘splain something, ‘splain what I can do about it. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.

Your thoughts?

Submitted for your approval… my apologies for the weird message

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Folks, if you just received an e-mail from me, within the last hour, that seems to have come straight from the Twilight Zone, it’s not just my usual weirdness.

I just discovered that I had about 65 outgoing messages from the last few weeks that never went out. They were stuck in my Outbox in Microsoft Outlook.

Some of them will seem pretty weird to be getting now, but I didn’t have a way to weed through them — it was send them all out, or none.

So sorry about that.

By the way, one reason I’m explaining here is that some of the recipients — KP, Doug Ross, Kathryn and Lee — are blog regulars. Anyway, now you know what happened. Or about as much as I know, anyway…

Women are just nicer than we are

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Yesterday at Rotary, I noticed a stark example of something that we all know, but don’t often see demonstrated this clearly. The speaker at the podium was recognizing a member — Crawford Clarkson — for having belonged to the club for 63 years. We were all duly impressed, and offered applause, even a standing ovation, because we all like Crawford.

But at some point, when Crawford was offering his acknowledgments, or when another speaker was talking about him with him standing there, and the crowd had sat back down, I looked around and noticed something.

All of the women whose faces I could see were smiling. We’re talking maybe six or seven women whose faces were clear to me from where I sat, without craning my neck. It was that sort of smile that makes women the wonderful beings that they are, a sort of Mom smile, the sure sign of a warm heart. They were pleased, on a fundamental level, for Crawford, and the pleasure radiated from them visibly.

Then I made myself look at the men. There are still far more men in Rotary than women, so in a few seconds I checked the faces of maybe a couple of dozen men. All but one was impassive. They might have been pleased, they might not have been pleased; they weren’t going to show it either way. They had stood up and clapped, dammit, so what more did you want from them? What do you expect a guy to do?

Note that I said “All but one.” That one had a slight smile. But for all I know, he was thinking about something else.

I remember hearing something on NPR a few years ago about some women who took a class in which they learned to impersonate men (don’t ask me why). One of the participants interviewed explained that the hardest thing, for her, was to keep herself from smiling. You’ve perhaps noted that most women, if you make eye contact with them, smile (at least, they smile at me; I don’t know about you). Men, perhaps regarding it as a sign of weakness, generally do not. I think there’s something about survival hard-wired into us.

Anyway, I am reminded of a recent case in which I demonstrated what jerks we men can be. Remember when I complained back here that some young woman I’d never heard of had 100 times as many Twitter followers as I did? Well, she certainly told ME off, but in a nice way:

Hi Brad,

Just read your post. Thanks for the mention, or rather, the criticism. I have so many friends because I talk a LOT and I’m always happy for other people’s successes. I hope you find your own comfort zone soon.

Thanks again,

Gerri

Ow. She’s right, of course. Women are just so much readier to be pleased for other people than we are. Guys are always trying to figure out what’s in it for US.

(un)Critical Mass(es)

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Let’s have a little discussion about human nature.

First, take a look at this story from yesterday’s WSJ, which reveals the rating inflation that plagues (or blesses, depending onyour point of view) the Web:

The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.

One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five…

Did that surprise you? It did me, a bit. But then I got to thinking about the one place where I’ve done a lot of rating — Netflix, where over the years (in a vain attempt to teach the site to predict my preferences) I’ve rated more than 2,000 movies. And since I love movies, and do a certain amount of selection before watching them, I knew I had given really high ratings more often than really low ones — specifically, I had awarded 5 stars (to such films as “Casablanca,” “The Godfather” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”) 156 times, and 1 star (examples: “Dances With Wolves,” the made-in-Columbia “Death Sentence” and “Dune”) only 24 times.

Still, if you count up all the movies I’ve rated between 1 and 5, you come up with an average rating of only 3.4. And if you factor in the 815 flicks I’ve rated as “Not Interested,” awarding them a 0 score, it drops to 2.0. But that’s misleading, because some of those are good flicks that some time or other I gave that rating just as a way of saying I wasn’t interested in seeing them at that time. But if you count just a fourth of those, it lowers my average to 2.9.

Which is about where you’d expect me to be. I’m a born critic — flaws leap out at me, and I remember them. And my detractors (such as those who think I’m too tough on Mark Sanford) see me as all criticism, as one who never gives my subjects their due. Actually, though, some of my detractors (such as those who were furious that I continued to admire John McCain throughout the 2008 campaign) attack me for the opposite trait — the fact that I can the good outweighing the bad in some people and some things. (You ladies who love Jane Austen may think of me as a health mix of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, only without their wealth.)

Back to human nature: Why would folks be so overwhelmingly positive on the Web (except, of course, here on this blog)? The story in the Journal speculated as follows:

Culture may play a role in the positivism: Ratings in the U.K. average an even higher 4.4, reports Bazaarvoice. But the largest contributor may be human nature. Marketing research firm Keller Fay Group surveys 100 consumers each week to ask them about what products they mentioned to friends in conversation. “There is an urban myth that people are far more likely to express negatives than positives,” says Ed Keller, the company’s chief executive. But on average, he finds that 65% of the word-of-mouth reviews are positive and only 8% are negative.

“It’s like gambling. Most people remember the times they win and don’t realize that in aggregate they’ve lost money,” says Andy Chen, the chief executive of Power Reviews Inc., a reviews software maker that runs Buzzillions…

Aha! I think I understand… at least, I now understand a possible reason why people gamble.

I don’t know about you, but I have not gambled since I was in college. I went through a period when I shot pool (nine ball being my game) and played a few hands of poker. But the last time I played pool for money and the last time I gambled with cards are etched unforgettably on my mind because of the spectacular ways in which I lost. My opponent at the pool table had had a shocking run in which he had pocketed the nine ball on the break several times in a row. After hours in which no one had had a hand nearly as good, I risked all (even writing a check to another player to get cash to stay in the game) on a full house — only to lose to a full house that was one card better (queens as opposed to jacks).

I’ve never understood, since then, why people would gamble. But this tendency to remember the anomalous wins more clearly than the losses would explain it.

But is that truly human nature?

Frankly, I find myself doubting the very premise of the story. As a newspaperman of 35 years experience, I am so accustomed to hearing from the people who are AGAINST something, or who didn’t like something in the paper, that such universal satisfaction seems unlikely to me. Take letters to the editor. One of my favorite examples were the letters we got for a week or so after U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001: They were overwhelmingly against U.S. military action. I knew they were not representative of South Carolina, not by a long shot, but they were the people who were taking the trouble to write. And that seems to me to be the norm.

Yet this story is saying otherwise. What do you think is true, and why do you think it’s the case?

See you at the Walk for Life (I hope)

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We don’t have a formal team or anything (yet), but my wife and I will be at the Palmetto Health Foundation’s First Ladies’ Walk For Life at 9 a.m. Saturday morning — just over 12 hours from now.

Please come join us. I can’t think of a better cause, and it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. As some of you know, my wife is a cancer survivor, and we’ve been blessed with eight wonderful years, so we look forward to this event as a chance to help others overcome this horrific disease.

And maybe it’s not to late to pull together an impromptu blog team. If you’re on Twitter, send me a Tweet when you get there to let me know where you are and we’ll see if we can march together.

See you there, I hope…

Does Sanford still think he has anything to lose politically?

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This really got my attention in an otherwise boring turn-of-the-screw story over the Sanford ethics case:

Sanford asked the court to intervene Wednesday, arguing that if the State Ethics Commission releases the report, it could be used against him politically or undermine the governor’s ability to defend himself. Sanford’s attorneys will have until noon Tuesday to respond to the Ethics Commission arguments.

The boldface emphasis is mine. I would love to see the original press release or court filing or whatever that led to that paraphrase, “used against him politically.”

Surely the governor doesn’t actually believe that he has anything to lose politically. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he say, in writing, not long ago, that his political career was over? I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because it seemed like a painful case of stating the obvious.

This guy was toast before he dug the hole deeper with his unsuccessful attempt to block the stimulus funds. Already, the leadership of his own party had stopped listening to him, and the stimulus battle just made it less likely that they’d ever start again. All the Argentina madness happened on top of that. Those of us who were all too familiar with this guy and his irrelevance knew far before that explosion that there was no way he would ever have had a chance at national office, once the national media paid any attention to his record whatsoever. And of course there wasn’t anything left for him in South Carolina.

So how on Earth could he be hurt politically by disclosure of the preliminary ethics report, or, for that matter, by anything else? How could you possibly hurt a political career that is SO over, and then some?

But maybe he didn’t say that. Maybe The State got it wrong. I’d love to see what he DID say, so if any of y’all know, please direct me to it. A brief search on my part yielded nothing…

Please forgive my e-mail troubles

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Yesterday, I realized that all those folks who have told me in recent days that they never got my e-mails actually never got my e-mails. So I apologize for thinking y’all were technically incompetent or something when it was me all along.

In fact, I’m such a klutz that I haven’t figured out what’s wrong yet, and I’ve got 65 outgoing e-mails just hanging there in limbo in my Outbox in Outlook. Some of them were pretty important messages, too, like the resume I sent out Monday right after talking to someone about an exciting job opportunity. I had sent it out immediately to display my high interest, only to realize last night that it never went out. Like I need this on top of everything else.

I’ve got someone trying to talk me through a solution, and I hope to arrive at one soon. But then I’ll have a new worry — if they all suddenly go out, some of them are really going to confuse people because of subsequent conversations with those people that have rendered the original message superfluous. They’re going to think I’m nuts — Why is he sending me this now?

All I can do right now is post this generic apology to everyone with whom I correspond. Once the e-mail’s back up, I’ll try to follow up with specific explanations to all the affected people. Dang. What a headache. Maybe I should just stick to playing solitaire on computers; I at least understand that…

Valerie B. is back in town (all too briefly, though)

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This morning I had the good fortune to run into Valerie Bauerlein, formerly of The State and now with The Wall Street Journal. She was having breakfast with Tim Rogers at the Cap City Club, working on a story that she hopes will make the “A-hed” position on page one — that’s the feature that is always such at good read at the center of the bottom of the page. (Fortunately for her, she wasn’t here to do yet another Sanford story.)

Valerie works in the Journal’s Atlanta bureau. While she spends close to half her time on regional general-assignment news reporting, her specific beat these days is the soft drink industry.

After Tim left, Valerie stopped off at my table and we had a chance to catch up. Her biggest news is that she’s expecting her second baby in November, so she has that glow about her — but then, Valerie always had that glow about her. She’s one of the nicest, most pleasant, kindest, most considerate people I ever worked with, to the extent that you wonder how she ended up in the trade. Not that news people are universally unpleasant or anything; it’s just that she was SO nice. And very good at her job, to boot.

Anyway, it was great to see her, and greater to see her doing so well. I thought I’d pass it on for those of you who remember her.

Henry’s got some ‘splainin’ to do

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I tend to yawn at debates over technical violations of ethics rules. Perhaps that will shock you, since journalists tend to be the ones who get the MOST worked up about such.

Consider it yet another one of the little ways that I have always tended to be a contrarian. Here’s my thinking on the matter: Ethics rules usually have little or nothing to do with right or wrong. They’re almost always about the appearance of right or wrong — and usually pretty narrow-gauge rights and wrongs at that. For instance, ethics laws really fret over the appearance of a conflict of interest. I worry about it when it actually leads to (or rather points to; the cause and effect relationship can be fuzzy) a public figure doing something wrong.

For instance — I remember a lot of folks getting really concerned about David Beasley accepting plane rides from folks associated with the Barnwell nuclear waste dump, from whom he had also received campaign contributions. People went on and on about these plane rides, like they mattered. (Folks who get worked up about ethics laws have a particular obsession with plane rides, as we’ve seen recently.)

Me, I was more concerned about the fact that Gov. Beasley had thrown careful interstate negotiations out the window in a reckless bid to overturn years and years of bipartisan effort to get some state other than South Carolina to be the region’s nuclear toilet for awhile. Mind you, he had already done this before all the hoo-hah about the plane rides. I kept trying to explain to anyone who would listen that the plane rides were only significant in that they might point to a cozy relationship with the dump people, which could portend that the governor might do something in the interest of the dump people rather than the interest of the people of South Carolina. But folks, he had already done the worst thing he could have done along those lines. This worrisome indicator (the disclosure of the plane rides) was superfluous and after the fact, and it interested me not in the slightest. It was a matter of straining at gnats.

It struck me as particularly dumb that Democrats were making a huge deal over the plane rides, and to my mind never made enough of the trashing of our nuclear waste policy (if Jim Hodges had run on that instead of the state lottery, he still would have won).

Actually, I could have just given you this short explanation: I care more about the substance than I do the appearance.

Anyway, having the attitude I do about these things, I didn’t make much initially of the story about Henry McMaster’s contributions from lawyers working for the state. But as it happens, The Wall Street Journal did pay attention, and made quite a deal of it:

More interesting than the suit’s dubious merits are Lilly’s recent court filings about the AG’s ties to trial lawyers. Mr. McMaster in 2006 chose three private lawyers—John S. Simmons, John Belton White, Jr., and F. Kenneth Bailey, Jr.—to prosecute Lilly on behalf of the state. The no-bid contingency contract—which Mr. McMaster refused to produce to Lilly for nearly a year—gives the private lawyers a sliding-scale cut of any judgment or settlement, a jackpot potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.

About a month after filing the case in 2007, according to the Lilly documents, Mr. Simmons’s law firm had turned around to contribute the maximum amount allowable ($3,500) under state law to Mr. McMaster’s re-election. Mr. White’s law firm contributed the same amount on the same day, and Mr. White later added a personal maximum donation. All told, the law firms, their lawyers and spouses have contributed more than $60,000 to Mr. McMaster since 2006. The AG can transfer this money to his gubernatorial account.

This sweetheart deal is rife with conflict of interest, and Lilly’s filing also lays out the legal and constitutional problems. Consider due process. Both the U.S. and South Carolina constitutions make clear that the state and its lawyers must be guided by justice and the public interest, not monetary gain. South Carolinians would be outraged if Mr. McMaster won a personal financial cut of any case he won as Attorney General. How is it better that his lawyers get it instead?

And as uninterested as I tend to be in such things, they managed to get my interest in the way they described why it was a bad thing. (It used to be Cindi Scoppe’s job, as the one journalist who knew the most and cared the most about state ethics law, to persuade me when an ethics case was actually worth caring about, and she was good at it. Now I don’t have her around to persuade me, so the WSJ did the persuading this time.)

I’m still not clear that Henry violated any ethics rules in taking this money. But as I say, that’s the kind of thing that bores me. (By the way, the reason most journalists get so worked up over whether an ethics rule — which is usually about appearances, not substance — was technically broken is that news people don’t get to make a judgment call and say, This guy did a bad thing. They can only report whether it technically violated a rule. So they go ape over whether a technical line was crossed, and their eyes are closed to policy actions that are monumentally bad, because with those they have to present just as many views saying it wasn’t bad as saying it was. Are you following me? It’s one of the reasons I put news behind me and moved to editorial in 1994.) What interests me is that the Journal piece makes a pretty good case that there is a degree of coziness here that is a bad thing.

Set aside that the Journal‘s motive is likely the fact that they want to stick up for Big Pharma. Bottom line, this is another embarrassing black eye for South Carolina. Not as bad as Sanford’s Argentina travesty or Joe Wilson’s ongoing foolishness, but the GOPs most promising gubernatorial candidate didn’t need this headache. Henry’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.

A point about our history

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Santee offered a nice, quick review of S.C. history back on this post:

Santee says:

South Carolina always has been an interesting place. The Lords Proprietors decided we were too much of a pain in the neck to keep, for good reasons; they dumped us back on the English government. The colonial government was run by a handful of families for their own benefit. They were charming people — large planters and slave traders, pretenders to English aristocracy, living up to and beyond their considerable means by taking advantage of everyone else in sight regardless of race, creed or color. The back country didn’t get into the Revolution until late because they knew the government in Charleston was worse for them than the one in London. Eventually a similar handful of families pushed secession, to hang on to their slaves. After Reconstruction we were unique among southern states in not electing new younger politicians with a vision for the future. SC brought back those old men longing for their lost rice and cotton plantations. The state’s leaders (especially Pitchfork Ben) thought it wise to create a state government that could not fully function other than through a good old boy network, just in case an African-American might be elected Governor. They might not be sure to control who was elected, but they were sure to control the old boy network. The consequences of this history are still with us in mistrust of government, in mistrust of others, in lack of shared purpose, and in general government malfunction. Personally, I’m tired of it, but I see no end in sight.

But I had to quibble on one point, and since I went to the trouble of typing it, I thought I’d offer it here in a separate post:

Brad Warthen says:

Nice review of our history, Santee, but I will offer one amendment. We tend to blame our current form of government on Pitchfork Ben, on account of the constitution of 1895 coming along during his watch. He was a terror, and makes a convenient villain. My journalistic forebears started The State to fight his machine, and one of the newspaper’s founders was shot down by a Tillman (who got away with it).

My own ancestors despised what he represented, even though he lived next door to my great-grandparents in Kensington, Md., when he was in the Senate. (My great-grandfather was an attorney from SC who had gone to Washington to represent the Treasury and later was one of the men who started the General Accounting Office.) I wrote a column once referring to my grandmother’s memory of having sat on Tillman’s lap as a little girl, which appalled her parents, although she didn’t understand why at the time.Anyway, as neat as it is to blame it all on him, the form of government enshrined in the 1895 constitution merely reproduced what we had had since the time of the Lords Proprietors. John Locke devised a system for Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper that placed diffused power in the hands of the landed, slaveholding gentry. This was maintained through colonial times to make sure the King’s governor had no real power, and the system continued up through 1865.
Keeping power scattered through the Legislature and away from the governor elected by all the people has always been the South Carolina way. This once served our oligarchy fairly well; it doesn’t serve any of us well any more.

State GOP links itself to Wilson more closely than it has to

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Just got a tweet from Karen Floyd — remember Karen? she’s the state GOP chairwoman now — calling my attention to this item about Joe Wilson “thanking the Upstate’s ‘talk radio community’ that he said sparked a critical shift in his approach to fighting Democratic health care reform efforts and ultimately led to his now-celebrity status among some conservatives across the state.”

As I’ve said before, I wasn’t bothered nearly as much by Joe’s Tourette’s Moment during the president’s speech as by his subsequent behavior. We all lose control now and then. No, the thing that is really, profoundly offensive is the way Joe has embraced the extremists who embrace him, and decided to make the foolishness of a moment his new guide for political life.

OK, but even that is understandable to a certain degree. It merely illustrates a weakness common to politicians. It’s related to the “dance with the one that brung you” phenomenon. Since the talk-radio screamers are the only ones asking Joe to dance these days, he’s decided to go home with them. It happens, all across the political spectrum. If these are the only folks who will support him, he’ll support them back, under the logic of political survival.

But you’d think that a state party would want to maintain at least a certain neutral aloofness from this process. Not that I expect them to cast him into the darkness or anything; you’d just sort of think they’d stare into space and try to act like they didn’t notice the faux pas. Think about it: Karen is the chair of a party that contains both Joe Wilson and Bob Inglis, who voted for the resolution to express “disapproval” of Joe’s big moment. In fact, Joe was visiting Inglis’ part of the state to deliver this collective hug to talk radio.

Seems like the state chair would just want to stay out of that, and call as little attention to it as possible. I mean, as silly as the action of the S.C. Democrats often are, do you see Carol Fowler putting out a release to call attention to a Democrat who is making a career out of the most embarrassing moment of his life? Maybe she would. There’s no accounting for parties, and I gave up long ago trying to make sense of their doings.

But this sort of stood out, to me.

O wad some Power the Internet gie us

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Folks who routinely travel beyond state lines return shaking their heads at the image of South Carolina that those from elsewhere hold in their heads. You know the drill: Mark Sanford in Argentina, Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!,” the Confederate flag flying on the lawn of our State House, etc.

If only there were some way to tell objectively what image others truly hold of us (and we’ll suspend for a moment the debate over whether we give a damn what others think; we know that many of you don’t, which is one of the sources of our problems). Well, thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, we do occasionally get an unbiased glimpse.

For instance, I inadvertently had one this morning. On a press release from the University of South Carolina, I saw that a USC study on breast cancer was cited in a story in The Sacramento Bee. Curious to see whether the study played a prominent role in the piece, I followed the link, and saw that the “South Carolina” in the reference to the University was also in hypertext. So I followed it, and found one of those results pages that provided a mishmash of references, from items that are truly about our state to some that merely mention us in a list.

But my eye was drawn to the graphic element on the page, which provided four images under the heading “Sacbee.com photos.” Each image was itself a link to a news item having to do with South Carolina. Here’s what they were:

  1. The first was a locator map that showed the site of a fatal helicopter crash. A tragedy that could have happened anywhere, which doesn’t reflect upon us particularly one way or another.
  2. The next was a sports photo in a garnet-in-black motif, taken by Mary Ann Chastain of our local AP office, leading to a story headlined, “Gamecocks pull Top 5 surprise, beat Ole Miss 16-10.” Wow. Sometimes it seems like all anybody here talks about is Gamecock football. Now it seems that it’s what people elsewhere talk about, too. Huh.
  3. The next photo didn’t look like much of anything — a few scraps of debris scattered on an unremarkable bank of faded red clay. It led to a story out of Anderson about a man who died, alone and penniless, in a tent on the bank of Lake Hartwell. He was described as a “bright but reclusive Civil War buff” who had lost his job at a local museum. Here I was looking for some universal image about our state as a community, and here was a painfully personal tale of a man who died for lack of community. Read into that what you will.
  4. 7FO13WILSONLTRS.xlgraphic.prod_affiliate.4The fourth, alas, was an image all too familiar. I didn’t particularly want to see what it led to, but I followed the link, which was to a letter to the editor of that newspaper. A letter about us, or at least about one of us. And what do folks in California have on their minds when they take up pen to write about one of us? An excerpt: “Similar vitriol and disrespect was the norm from Southern politicians during the years and months leading up to the American Civil War. I fear we may be headed down a similar path, toward disunion, given the tone of our political dialogue since the 2008 national election.”

Sigh.

So, what has the giftie shown you about how others see us?

Of COURSE the health care status quo hurts small businesses

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Sometimes the things said in connection with the health care “debate” are so painfully obvious that they make me want to shout. And while I’m shouting, I wonder, Is it possible anyone doesn’t already know this?

The latest thing to get to me in this way is this bit from a series on health care reform:

Thompson’s challenge is common among small-business owners in South Carolina. Many are too busy to keep up with the complex health care reform policy proposals that Congress is debating. But they know one thing: The current cost of health insurance for very small groups is stifling their growth and hurting their competitiveness.

At this point I would scream “Duh!,” if screaming “Duh!” were not so last-decade.

Of course our current health care “system” is stifling small businesses’ growth and hurting their competitiveness! It’s helping drive some of them out of business. And it’s keeping plenty of others from coming into being in the first place. I know it’s kept me from at least one good job opportunity in the last few months. And it’s the consideration that keeps me from simply hanging out a shingle and earning a living as a “consultant” in communications. Sure, I might be able to pay the light bill and buy groceries and such that way, but I have to have medical coverage — the same sort of coverage that is simply not a consideration in other advanced countries when individuals make career decisions.

Right now, I’m pursuing a number of job opportunities. But most of the opportunities I’m seeing either don’t pay enough to pay my mortgage but have good benefits, or they pay well but the bennies are quite iffy. But one thing I CAN’T consider going forward is going into business for myself. Sure, I can pay a few bills here and there with free-lance work while I’m on COBRA. But my COBRA premiums more than double starting in December.

This strongly discourages entrepreneurship. It seems increasingly to me that the only way a person can go into business for himself is if he and his family and his employees and their families never have to go to the doctor and never will have to go to the doctor. In other words, the only way you start a business in this country is by hypnotizing yourself into believing a lie.

I’d probably be a lot happier if I were able to delude myself that way.

Anyway, yeah, the current health care situation stifles small businesses. Duh.

We need new leadership, all right…

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Just had a bit of an out-of-body experience at Rotary today. Our main speaker was Carroll A. “Tumpy” Campbell III. He was allegedly there to talk to us about economic development in South Carolina, which was weird enough on its face. I mean, what was his qualification to do that, other than the fact that he was on the Ports Authority governing body before Mark Sanford pushed him off, and his daddy was our last really successful governor at ecodevo?

But that’s OK, because that didn’t seem to be why he was there. In fact, I was sufficiently confused about why he was there that I began to wonder why I was there, which was way existential. Anyway, he sounded like a guy who was running for office, although he didn’t overtly say so. Finally, I had to be reminded that he is planning to challenge Henry Brown down in the 1st congressional district. The consensus among folks I spoke to who heard this Rotary speech was that Henry doesn’t have much to worry about. (Which is saying something — I haven’t really paid much attention to Mr. Brown since he went off to Congress, but unless he got a whole lot sharper when he went to Washington, which would be a singular accomplishment if you think about it, he can’t be the world’s most impressive congressman. I remember him as a forgettable state legislator, who for a time chaired the Ways and Means Committee. Same guy, right?)

Sure, he mentioned ecodevo. He said a few painfully obvious things about it, such as the fact that the Port of Charleston is really, really important to economic development. You know the drill — BMW would never have taken a second look at South Carolina without that port, yadda-yadda… and did I mention to you that it’s not a coincidence that my name is Carroll Campbell? Seriously, it was just like that, only not as funny.

I didn’t take any notes on his speech, unfortunately. I usually start taking notes during a Rotary speech when the speaker says something interesting. I mean, I’m not there as a reporter, but if the speaker says one interesting thing, I pull out my notebook and write it down. And if he or she keeps on saying interesting things, I keep the notebook out and keep writing, and maybe mention it on the blog later. Suffice it to say that I was never in danger of even thinking about taking out my notebook during Tumpy’s speech.

Until it was over. Then I realized that I wished I had a record of it. (When the video is posted on the club site, I’ll try to remember to go back and link to it.) I wanted the record because, in retrospect, this speech was strikingly vapid. It was no ordinary bad speech, but a monument to the painful mediocrity that permeates the electoral process in our poor state.

In a nutshell, the gist of it was this: South Carolina needs new and different leadership. That was wedged in among a bunch of half-stated Republican cliches. In other words, the message was We need new leadership, but I sure ain’t it, because I’ve got nothing original to say.

Someone pointed out to me that even the cliches weren’t complete, but they were so unmemorable that I can’t attest to the accuracy of that observation. But thinking back, if you had simply grabbed random phrases from the Tweets of a garden-variety South Carolina Republican — incomplete Tweets, like those I cited from Joe Wilson earlier today — and strung them together, it would sound sort of like that Tumpy Campbell speech. Down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on, and golly but we sure need some real leaders who will say down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on. (Like we’re not already et up with such “leaders.”)

Anyway, that’s my report from the front lines of the 1st District congressional race…

Oh, wait — speaking of Joe Wilson, he was there at Rotary. But he didn’t shout out or anything, so I didn’t realize he was there until later…

“Peter Boyle” and other experts agree: I need a job

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Some of y’all will find this interesting. Remember how, last week, I put off all the folks wanting me to run for office by saying I won’t run unless somebody comes to me, the way Peter Boyle did to Robert Redford in “The Candidate” (note that I’m playing the Redford part — I’m just another victim of typecasting), and says, Look, we want you to run, and we’ll do everything — set up the campaign organization, raise the money, buy the media — and all you have to do is show up and be the candidate. Sort of a turnkey political operation.

I figured that was a good way to shut y’all up on the running-for-office thing (and if that didn’t work, my fallback was to say rude things like “shut y’all up” to people who like me enough to urge me to run for office).

But then, a real-life “Peter Boyle” approached me. Sort of. Basically, I got a message from a long-time political consultant (he first came to South Carolina to work in the Pug Ravenel campaign in 1974) who cited the Peter Boyle thing and said “let’s meet.” So we did, at the usual place, over breakfast last Friday.

And we talked about various offices and the need for someone (preferably, somebody with a little bit on the ball) to run for them. And then we talked about my situation. And I told my “Peter Boyle” that before I run for anything, I really need to get a job — not only a job, but one of those very rare jobs that allow a guy to run for office.

And you know what his considered opinion was? He agreed. I need to get a job, first and foremost.

So we’re back to Go, where I won’t collect $200 until I find employment…