I missed the televised GOP gubernatorial “debate” last night, but I was much gratified to read about one of the questions that was asked of the candidates. It’s one that, going forward, should be asked of all Republican candidates in our state, namely: Are you a Lindsey Graham Republican, or a Jim DeMint Republican? I think every voter in South Carolina deserves to know the answer to that question.

So it was that I was somewhat disappointed that the story I read in The State didn’t tell me, in detail, how each candidate answered that question. And I was deeply disappointed that Henry McMaster dodged the question entirely, cloaking himself in ersatz Ronald Reagan partisan piety. That’s a black mark, to my mind, against a Republican I would expect to give an answer that would please me: Specifically, that he’s a Graham man. I say that because, back in mid-2007, when everybody else was saying it was over for John McCain, Henry and Lindsey and Bobby Harrell were about the only ones in the state still willing to stand up for him. I admired that steadfastness, that willingness to stand against more destructive elements in their party.

So I was sorry that he was unwilling to stand up for the kind of sensible conservatism that McCain and Graham represent, and against the “Waterloo” seeking fringe values of the hyperpartisan, ideologically extreme elements that they stand against.

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to Nikki Haley for standing up and saying right out that she’s a DeMintor. Nikki is making me feel less and less bad about opposing her candidacy. She’s still got that admirable frankness that I’ve always liked in her, but almost every time she employs it these days, it makes me more and more certain that I do NOT want her to get anywhere near the governor’s office. Note that she is the ONLY one of the candidates on the stage whose views are so extreme that she would have voted to censure Lindsey Graham for the sin of being a rational, pragmatic United States Senator working for the good of the country, instead of the wingnut that the less presentable elements of the party want him to be.

Was anyone besides me distracted from following the president’s speech last night by the sound of his hands dropping repeatedly to the lectern as he spoke? I suppose he does this all the time, and I just never noticed it until last night, when someone put a much-too-sensitive microphone in front of him.

Whether you heard it depended on which station you watched. I flipped around, so I know that on most stations it wasn’t audible, but on two or three it was. It was loudest on PBS (although not so much so on the Web version). I guess the engineers on some stations washed it out.

Anyway, what I learned is that he marks time in his speech, dropping his hands down with a distinctive “plop” at each pause. It’s a sort of kinetic form of punctuation that occurs wherever a full or partial stop occurs. It went like this:

Here’s what I ask Congress, though: (PLOP)

Don’t walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close.(PLOP)

Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people.(PLOP)

(Applause.) Let’s get it done.(PLOP)

Let’s get it done.(PLOP)

(Applause.)

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit,(PLOP)

it’s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves.(PLOP)

It’s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve,(PLOP)

and one that’s been subject to a lot of political posturing.(PLOP)

So let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight.(PLOP)

At the beginning of the last decade,(PLOP)

the year 2000,(PLOP)

America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion.(PLOP)

(Applause.) By the time I took office,(PLOP)

we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade.(PLOP)

Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars,(PLOP)

two tax cuts,(PLOP)

and an expensive prescription drug program.(PLOP)

On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget.(PLOP)

All this was before I walked in the door.(PLOP)…

All of us have our speaking quirks. I use the lectern myself, but mostly as a sort of anchor to hold onto as I resist my peripatetic urge to move away from the microphone as I talk.

But now that I’ve noticed this about Obama, even it I don’t hear it in the future, I think I’m going to be conscious of it, and distracted. It sort of breaks the spell, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.

I’m a guy who likes encountering messages that defy stereotyping. For instance, I was happy this morning to see a car with side-by-side bumper stickers for Republican Leighton Lord and Democrat Jim Rex. Now there, thought I, is a voter who thinks. I may or may not agree with his conclusions, but at least he’s not buying his attitudes off the shelf. Very cool. Very UnParty.

But then, later in the day, I wasn’t sure what to think about the truck I was following that featured, among other things:

• Several black-and-white line drawings of fish — some living fish in action poses, some fish skeletons.
• A Confederate flag.
• A South Carolina state flag.
• A POW/MIA sticker.
• The slogan, “I’d rather be kayaking!”
• The following fragment of “Imagine”: “You May Say I’m A Dreamer/But I’m Not The Only One.”

What did it all mean, Mr. Natural?

I really enjoyed the piece I read in The State this morning by the Hilton Head Island Packet‘s Jeff Vrabel, which dared to trash the excessively beloved “Avatar.” To wit:

Anyway, the point is “Avatar” is dumb. It is, as my wife succinctly put it, a corny combination of “Return of the Jedi” and “Ferngully.” It is eight hours long, all characters are played by an iMac (including Sigourney Weaver) and every frame is filled with the suffocating sense of bruising self-importance you would expect from maybe Sarah Palin. Yes, it looks great, and so does Blake Lively, and both she and “Avatar” become distinctly less attractive when their talking-sounds begin.

Moreover, it is the kind of movie in which I, a viewer fully behind the film’s ecology-centered pseudo-doctrines, found myself in the end rooting actively for the military-industrial complex to exterminate the stretchy blue people and their USB-cord hair. Now that’s not their fault, mind you; they seem like nice hippies. It’s just that the way Cameron makes them talk, using extended proclamations of patronizing importance, made me wish for something terrible to happen to them, hopefully by vampires…

I haven’t even seen this movie (and probably won’t until it’s on DVD, or at least showing at the dollar movie house), but I was already tired of hearing people gush about it. And Mr. Vrabel also affirmed my suspicion — based on things I’d heard here and there — that the flick was to a great extent a big-budget wallow in politically tiresome sentimentality, a sort of high-tech “Dances With Wolves.” You know, bad military industrial complex picking on a race of people who are far finer, and much bluer, than we are, yadda-yadda…

Funny thing is, now that I’ve heard it debunked, I’ll probably relax my defenses and actually enjoy the movie when I see it. After all, some people I love love it. But the multimedia worshipfest was getting on my nerves, so Mr. Vrabel’s piece was a nice change of pace … Just watch, I’ll go see it, and get converted, and be talking about what an awful non-blue meanie he is for writing that…

As I job-hunt, I’m particularly envious of those who have really sweet jobs. Like Darcy Willson-Rymer, the managing director of Starbucks in the UK & Ireland. Y’all remember Darcy — he’s the one who was so stuffy and refused to dance with Miss Elizabeth Bennett, saying she was “not handsome enough to tempt me,” and … no, wait. Wrong Darcy. No, this Darcy was the one I got excited about when he started following me on Twitter. Unfortunately, it did not lead to a gig getting paid to blog for promotional purposes in Starbucks stores in London and Dublin, which was a cruel disappointment to me. I felt sure they’d have to go for that one… (And yes, I actually DID, in real life, make that pitch to Mr. Willson-Rymer, as facetious as the rest of this post may be. He let me down politely, using that tone you use for calming down overexcited lunatics…)

Anyway, having been thus jilted, it’s particularly painful to an Anglophile like me to read all about Darcy’s exciting life. He’s always topping it the knob. For instance, today he had a “productive meeting” with the mayor of London. Not the Lord Mayor of the City, mind you, but still a rather important cove who runs the rest of that megalopolis, and does all sorts of things that he’s always showing away about, such as providing 20,000 affordable homes with the wave of his scepter, or whatever the mayor of London waves.

Sigh… And you know what else? I bet Darcy gets all the free Starbucks he wants. That, and Pemberly, too. It’s just not fair. It’s enough to make me want to vote Labour next time…

KP brought this bit from “The Daily Show” to my attention. It was introduced with the explanation that it’s hard coming up with enough material for a comedy show every day, so…

“That’s why we here are especially grateful for those frequent contributors — those who give more than their fair share — like the state of South Carolina…”

He went on to remind his viewers that SC is the place where the elected representatives shout “You lie!,” where the governor goes to Argentina to meet his mistress on the taxpayer’s dime, and where (in a South Carolina story that we paid little attention to, but which is one of Jon Stewart’s favorites — a man is charged with having sex with a horse… twice… with the same horse).

This time the source of hilarity was our lieutenant governor — pause for laughter — who compared poor children to stray animals. Mr. Stewart then played Andre’s “explanation” of his remarks, to which he could only say:

You know, it’s interesting… especially in South Carolina, you keep giving them a chance, and they keep (bleep)ing that same horse.

Barbara Kenly of Little River guards her horse, Sugar, after allegedly catching a man having sex with the mare...

Not second place in the race for governor. No, what I mean is that he no longer has THE most perfect South Carolina name of anyone running for office this year.

That distinction belongs to another Democrat, Ashley Cooper, who is running for lieutenant governor. His Web site says, “Ashley is proud of his South Carolina roots.” Well, duh. With a name like that, he’d better be.

Whenever I get a chance to meet this guy, my first question of course will be, It that your real name? (Second question would obviously be, Are you the present Earl of Shaftesbury?) You’ll recall that the co-author of Cheaper By the Dozen once wrote a newspaper column in the Charleston paper under the pseudonym “Ashley Cooper,” choosing it because nothing could sound more South Carolinian.

I didn’t know there were any real ones walking around…

File photo from June 2006 interview. (Brad Warthen)

There are two schools of thought about what would happen if Mark Sanford were to resign. The first, held by my former co-workers at The State and a number of politicians who feared the consequences were the governor to be impeached, hold that being installed as interim governor would give Andre Bauer a leg up in becoming governor for the next five years.

The Optimist School, to which I am a leading adherent, holds that a year of being governor would have subjected Mr. Bauer to a level of scrutiny that would ensure that he were not elected to anything in the future. As lt. gov. he is almost invisible, and has to do something spectacular, such as rush at a police officer during a traffic stop or crash an airplane, to be noticed. As governor, particularly after the events of recent months (which seems to have awakened the press in SC into thinking, Hey, we’d better actually COVER the governor!), he would be subjected to so much light that his political hopes would evaporate.

Today, we have some fresh evidence supporting my position. Now that he’s a candidate for governor, he is being watched a LITTLE more closely than usual — not as closely as if he were governor, but closely enough that the press picked up on this:

GREENVILLE – Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to “feeding stray animals.”

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said.

In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Bauer’s remarks came during a speech in which he said government should take away assistance if those receiving help didn’t pass drug tests or attend parent-teacher conferences or PTA meetings if their children were receiving free and reduced-price lunches.

Bauer later Friday told The Greenville News he wasn’t saying people on government assistance “were animals or anything else.”…

Gov. Sanford’s press guy says that the governor wasn’t just hanging with his buds and hoping to meet Scott Brown when he went to Washington the day after the State of the State. Ben Fox says the governor and folks from the Commerce Department went up there to meet with an economic development prospect.

Since this ecodevo trip wasn’t to Buenos Aires, I’m inclined to give the gov the benefit of the doubt. In fact, I’ll even give him snaps for letting us think he was goofing off rather than brag on himself. Here’s hoping the trip was successful. You go get ’em, governor…

I hope he breaks all previous records for ecodevo in his last year. And if he does, I’ll applaud as loudly as anyone.

bud suggests several responses when he says this on an earlier post:

I just looked up the phrase “Tilting at Windmills”. I never really understood what that meant. It’s from Don Quixote. Don was fighting a windmill that he perceived to be a giant monster. Seems like Brad does a lot of ’tilting at windmills’ when it comes to Mark Sanford. It’s time to give it up Brad. Sanford has long ago become nothing but a lame duck has-been. To continue piling on only makes me have sympathy for the guy. I’m far more concerned with really dangerous monsters like Lindsey Graham and Sarah Palin. They’re the folks who get people killed, not Mark Sanford.

My responses:

• The phrase, “tilting at windmills” actually has two separate meanings in popular usage. One is to fight imaginary foes. The other is to fight impossible battles, to champion lost causes. “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” to borrow from the Broadway version of Cervantes’ story. And I accept service on that latter sense. There is no way to be the editor I was at The State — one determined to make a difference, to help move my state forward in spite of the immovable, massive cultural and structural barriers to change we have in South Carolina — without having an almost perverse willingness to fight against impossible odds. The things I was tilting at were real; it’s just that the likelihood of overcoming them was often low. I continue to be this way. I don’t understand the concept of surrender. In this, I am a true white South Carolinian. While I abhor their cause, I do have one thing in common with the nutballs who led this state to go to war with the United States of America — a disregard for the odds, and a stubbornness about fighting on way past the point at which most people would quit. Think of Paul Newman being pummeled by George Kennedy in “Cool Hand Luke,” and stupidly, insanely refusing to stay down. (I actually have a case where I literally did that. When I was 47 years old, I got into the kickboxing ring with a 27-year-old construction worker who was 40 pounds heavier than I was — all muscle. He broke four of my ribs in the first round, but I continued even though the pain was terrific. In the third round he hit me again, hard, in the same spot, and I dropped against my will to one knee while I fought to get some breath — but I got up and continued the fight to the end. I even got a few shots of my own in. Perversely, I’m proud of that. My wife considers it disgusting proof that I am an idiot.)
• I consider my main mission as a journalist to be shedding light on critical, pivotal issues that can lead to a better South Carolina. The governor of the state, weak as the office is, is the one person in the best position to make a difference. He’s the only person with a bully-enough pulpit to potentially counterbalance the awful power of the Legislature to resist change, if he focuses and uses the power properly — the way Dick Riley did in passing the EIA, and Carroll Campbell did with that partial and inadequate restructuring of state government. So ever since I started writing opinion in the early 90s, I have kept a pretty bright spotlight on the governor — whether he was Campbell or Beasley or Hodges or Sanford. And with Sanford, I feel if anything a greater responsibility to explain what’s wrong with him because I helped him get elected the first time, and it took me an embarrassingly long time (given that I am, whatever my other flaws, usually the first person in the room to size someone up accurately) to figure out what a disaster he was, and to be able to explain it. From now until the time we have a new governor, it remains critically important not to let voters forget for a moment that this was a mistake that must not be repeated. Keeping the flaws in the current governor front of mind is one of a number of factors that can help us make a smarter decision this time.
• You mention Sarah Palin. Let me tell you something about Sarah Palin. When she was named as John McCain’s running mate, the very first thing I did in trying to figure out this blank slate was go to see what the editorial pages of Alaska were saying about her. And you know what I found? Zip. Just bland, vanilla commentary that told me nothing of substance about her, and certainly nothing negative. They were utterly unhelpful. That’s because most editorial pages in this country don’t have the guts, or the intelligence, to recognize a spade as a spade and to call it that. Most editorial pages are worth very little. This is why Jim Hodges had such a problem with me when he was in office. He thought I personally hated him because I was so critical of his performance. He thought it was extraordinary, and if you looked at the vanilla commentary of other editorial pages in the state, or most editorial pages across the country, he had a point. But it wasn’t about him. That was just my way as someone who cares deeply about South Carolina and is committed to holding the top elected official accountable for what he does and doesn’t do (even though, given our absurd, fragmented executive branch structure, it’s hard to hold him accountable for a lot of things that governors are accountable for in other states). I hit hard when these guys deserve to be hit.
• Now try to imagine what would have happened if — despite all my warnings — McCain had picked Sanford as his running mate. Someone who did a search of the opinion pages of The State would have immediately learned all the reasons why it was an extraordinarily bad idea. And in fact, I like to think John McCain knew better in advance to some degree as a result of our work. But the Fourth Estate in Alaska had not done its job, and it took awhile to figure out what a terrible call it was to have chosen Sarah Palin. If editorial page editors in Alaska had been doing what you excoriate ME for doing here in SC, we wouldn’t be talking about Sarah Palin today, because she would not have been promoted to national prominence.

That’s OK, you don’t have to thank me. I’d do it whether you were grateful or not.

Back when I first started blogging in 2005, way before “social media” took hold, I was really pumped about all the possibilities that blogging posed for connecting with unlikely people, such as … Jerry Brown! My very favorite flaky politician! A guy I actually voted for in a presidential primary once, if only to reinforce my own cred as an eccentric! The guy from whom I learned the term “buzzword”… and so forth.

But then he let me down. You can still go see Jerry’s blog, but you’ll note that he hasn’t posted since Oct. 8, 2005, which is of course pathetic. I had expected better from him. I felt like if anybody would grasp the potential of the blogosphere and make it wail, it would be Jerry Brown, whom I had always seen as a visionary on the level of … I don’t know… Stewart Brand, or Ken Kesey, or something. I mean, this guy dated Linda Ronstadt back when she was really hot, and he was governor. This guy had it going on.

So it is that I am pleased to see that now that he’s running for governor again, Jerry is on Twitter, and Tweeting regularly. Of course, it’s probably some pimply-faced kid on his staff doing it, but at least it’s in his name, which makes me feel like Governor Moonbeam is back on his horse again, and that just makes the world seem more like a place with wild and wonderful possibilities, as it was when I was young…

On the day after Mark Sanford promised us he wouldn’t apologize to us any more — a promise to which I intend to hold him if I can (fat chance, huh?) — you would expect that he’d be busting his hump trying to pass that modest agenda he proposed for his last year in office, right?

You poor sap. You do not know Mark Sanford. No, on the first day after his State of the State that he could have been repairing his relationships with lawmakers and trying to get things done for a change, he was spotted in Washington hanging out, and apparently hoping to get photographed shaking Scott Brown’s hand:

Washington (CNN) – On the morning after delivering his final “State of the State” address in Columbia, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford strolled through the Capitol rotunda Thursday afternoon along with South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis.

Asked why he was in Washington, Sanford, a former House Member, walked toward the House floor as the chamber was about to vote and told CNN: “I was going to catch up with some friends on the House floor.”

Sanford said he has not yet met Massachusetts Sen-elect Scott Brown.

Another Republican governor, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was also visiting House lawmakers today. He is slated to meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the entire House delegation from his state.

What else did you expect from the guy who appeared on Fox News 46 times during the time that he was trying to make sure that we didn’t get our share of the stimulus money that was going to be spent anyway?

You know, the one good thing about these last few awful months with this guy was that we were all certain that his outrageous national ambitions were a thing of the past. And now this. Man oh man oh man…

This morning I got this little bit of fan e-mail:

http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2007/08/why-i-see-john-.html
I always think of this article when I see him on tv

Yes, that is indeed a link to the infamous “Why I see John Edwards as a Big Phony” column. I still have people bringing that up to me. Lots of people. Even people who know nothing about me, or The State newspaper for that matter. That’s because that column, which I didn’t think was anything remarkable when I wrote it, caused 190,000 extra people to come to thestate.com that day (not to mention being picked up by Drudge and The New York Post and other outlets I don’t recall at the moment — Dennis Miller loved it), thus distorting the Web sites figures so that a year later, the Web folks would have to explain at senior staff, “Our numbers are good now; they just don’t look good because we’re comparing to that column of Brad’s…”

It’s weird to think that more people will remember that one thing than any of the stuff I wrote about issues I cared a thousand times more about. That’s an almost statistical certainty, given that more people probably read that than anything else I ever wrote. Which really was not my intention. Sigh.

Anyway, I assume the reason that came up was because of this development:

RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards finally admitted Thursday he fathered a child during an affair before his second White House bid, dropping long-standing denials just ahead of a book by a former campaign aide who initially took the fall.

Edwards released a statement admitting paternity of the girl, Frances Quinn Hunter, who was born in 2008 to videographer Rielle Hunter as the result of an affair Edwards has already confessed to.

“It was wrong for me to ever deny she was my daughter,” he said, adding he was providing financial support for the child and mother. “I am Quinn’s father.”…

In other words, when he came clean and confessed all before, he was actually not coming clean and confessing all. Big freaking surprise.

Note that he uses the phrase, “It was wrong…” Does he mean that? Does he really know it?