This is me (or rather, a reasonable facsimile) making a pitch to an unappreciative client.
You know, I’ve been trying hard to learn to be an ad man. I watch the TV show religiously. I try to dress sharp (even if my sartorial style is a bit more Bert Cooper than Don Draper). I don’t get home until late because I stop at any gathering where free highballs are served. I’ve thought of changing my name to Dick Whitman.
So why is it I have so much trouble pitching my truly awesome ad ideas? Here are some of my recent rejects:
I’m particularly proud of the sensitive way I addressed a delicate public health problem in that last one…
OK, seriously, folks — Kathryn Fenner shared with me this post — “TOP 48 ADS THAT WOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TODAY” — knowing I’d be interested. Some of the examples were pretty cringe-inducing, such as this one. Others… well, others weren’t bad at all. In fact, I don’t think this one below should have been on the list at all: I don’t know about you, but my most memorable Christmas present ever was the Daisy 1894-model air rifle, which I found tucked into my new sleeping bag spread out in front of the tree…
Gotta hand it to the folks at GM. This ad, which I first saw during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, is a grabber. It works really well.
The part that really pulled me in and kept me watching long enough to find out what it was about? The bit from “Animal House” when the Deltas are all sitting around looking dejected. They offer that slightly vague little pop culture reference, and it feels like a bit of a challenge, like, “Do you know what this is?” and you do, and you feel cool for knowing, so you keep watching to see what else you’ll see.
You get the sense that it’s pitched at Boomers and our elders, because of the combination of that and Popeye, and to a slightly lesser extent Evel Knievel, and especially the failed launch from the early days of NASA. (I had to explain that to my daughter, because she didn’t understand there was a time when we all thought, as Tom Wolfe summed it up, “Our rockets always blow up!“) It’s nice to see an ad pitched to grownups, one that makes us feel like we’re with it. If we listen hard enough, we even realize that piano is wandering about the melody of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” (I thought, “Long and Winding…” no, but something about a road being long… Um, Neil Diamond… no, not originally… then I got it. The Hollies.)
Anyway, nice job. It was almost worth all that money we gave y’all.
Sorry I haven’t posted much this week, but I’ve been REALLY busy doing high-level, important stuff… such as sending out copies of the ADCO virtual Thanksgiving card to various folks from my contact list.
In case you didn’t get one, here’s a post about it on the ADCO blog, and I quote:
You think YOU’VE got it tough this Thanksgiving – what about the poor turkey? With the president too busy fielding questions about official airport groping this holiday season (and we are not making this up), the noble bird might not get the traditional pardon. Only you can save him! Help him collect enough balloons to get off the ground. Then you can gorge on Thursday with a clear conscience!
If you could get through the first level of Super Mario Brothers, you can save the turkey! Click here to play the game.
And yes! This is what we’ve been doing while you were working, you poor sap. You can thank us later…
Obviously, we decided against the usual static pieties and had a little fun. The game is the work of Giovianni Difeterici of ADCO Interactive.
And don’t be afraid to try it. It’s really easy. Your kids and grandkids will probably turn their noses up at it, as being far easier than, say, Super Mario Brothers circa 1980 something (but they would probably only make that comparison if they are into antique games). But I figure it’s just about y’all’s speed, if I’m right about my demographics. And if I’m not, get back to playing Black Ops and stop sneering at the rest of us…
Nikki Haley and the Tea Party are inseparable, right? So what’s next?
Nikki Tea, the boot.
That’s right. It’s an actual product produces by Clarks. I learned about it from the Dillard’s ad on Page A10 of today’s paper. Or rather, my wife did. When she read it out to me, I thought she meant “Nickie T,” or something, but she said, no, Nikki like Haley and T-E-A like Tea Party.
Pretty freaky. Especially seeing as how I can’t imagine Nikki wearing anything that looked like that. Of course, before this year, I couldn’t have imagined her turning into a populist demagogue to win an election, so what do I know?
I would love to know how they came up with that name, or why they thought it described that boot. But I do know it’s pretty weird.
Here are the brief remarks I prepared this morning for my election post-mortem address to the SC Telecommunications Association‘s Fall Conference at the Radisson.
I had planned to just jot down some notes in my notepad over breakfast, but chickened out and, before leaving the house, typed out the following to read.
Of course, most of the time was taken up with questions and answers, which is the way I prefer it. I feel SO much more comfortable reacting to questions than I do delivering a prepared speech. I relax and that point, because I know we’re actually talking about something that interests the audience, or at least a portion of it. But the conventions dictate that your say SOMETHING before the blessed relief of questions, so this is what I prepared, and more or less read:
What happened Tuesday?
Well, not a whole lot.
On the national level, we saw the usual thing happen: The party that did NOT hold the White House gained seats in Congress two years after the president’s election. This phenomenon was intensified somewhat by the fact that the Democrats had gained big for two cycles, and the Republicans were overdue to win some of those seats back.
There was extra emotional intensity this time because of the Tea Party movement, which arose in connection with general voter dissatisfaction in a time of prolonged economic anxiety. There was a lot of anti-incumbent anger out there, and the party in power took a big hit as a result.
What will happen next? Well, what usually happens. Congress will not suddenly become a more highly functional institution. In fact, given the platforms on which many of the newcomers were elected, expect to see a lot more yelling and posturing without anything new actually happening. On election night, I recall hearing one Republican say that the GOP would repeal the new health care legislation every day and send it to the president for his veto. This is not a recipe for getting the public to think more highly of the folks in Washington. And even THAT is going to be pretty tough to accomplish since the GOP didn’t win control of the Senate.
And yes, I realize that threat was probably mere rhetorical hyperbole, but in terms of productivity, I don’t think the result it would produce is terribly different from what we’re likely to see actually happening.
So what will we see happen? Well, in two years, or perhaps four, the pendulum will swing back to the Democrats. And we’ll continue to see this kind of back-and-forth until Americans get totally fed up with the two parties, and some viable alternative emerges.
Here at home, we saw what we expected to see – a Republican sweep in a state where that is pretty much the norm now, especially in a year in which Republicans were winning everywhere.
The forces causing this to happen were so powerful that they caused voters to sweep aside a number of concerns that had been raised about the GOP gubernatorial candidate, from her failures to pay taxes on time to her somewhat sketchy employment record. As it happened, she won, but with a smaller margin than any other Republican running statewide. It will be interesting to see whether she does anything differently than planned as a result of having garnered less than a mandate in a year in which a GOP nominee should have had a landslide.
Going forward, we’re going to see a phenomenon we’ve already seen advance and become more pronounced: With the Republican Party being so dominant, we’ve been seeing for some time the emergence of factions within that party. It’s like the days when Democrats were so dominant: Since essentially everyone in power was a Democrat, factions emerged, and the characters of individual Democrats became more important. Since everyone was a Democrat, just being a Democrat wasn’t much of a recommendation.
Expect a power struggle between the faction of the party that strongly supported Nikki Haley – and her mentor Mark Sanford before her – and the current legislative leadership. The question remains whether the present leadership will be the future leadership. But whether they are or not, the main conflicts we see in the State House are going to be in the future, even more than we’ve seen in recent years, conflicts among Republicans.
Democrats won’t agree with me on this, but in a way I see this as a fundamentally healthy thing. Any trend that causes people to disregard party labels – which I regard as extremely destructive to the deliberative process upon which our system of representative democracy depends – and look at other, more meaningful factors, is essentially a promising thing.
Now, I’d like to go to your questions.
And fortunately, questions were forthcoming, and they were thoughtful. I got engaged in a conversation afterwards with a gentleman who wondered whether the current divide between the largely Democratic urban areas and the generally Republican rest of the country would continue to be worse. I had no idea, beyond agreeing with him that suburbs and exurbs tended to foster GOP sentiments, while more densely packed people tended the other way. And we were probably on the verge of something interesting as we discussed how population density had a profound effect on basic economics (something a man in the telephone industry would certainly understand), it led to different assumptions about what should be done in common via government and what should not. But at that point I had to run to ADCO. I really do have to buckle down and do some real work, now that the election is over.
Saturday morning I speak to a partisan crowd — the Lower Richland Dems. This will be a new experience for me. I have spoken to groups that turned out to be quite partisan, to my dismay, but were not billed that way. The message they get will be essentially the same, although maybe I’ll think of some stuff to add between now and then. It will be interesting to see how they react to it.
That was my compromise headline, by the way. My first thought was “How Nikki Haley seduced me,” and boy, that would have driven my traffic up and helped me sell some ads. It would have been a perfectly fine use of figurative language. But I decided against it. I’m not THAT anxious to sell ads (if I were, I’d spend some time on the phone selling, and you’d see more of them). Then I thought of, “How Nikki Haley fooled me,” but that would have been TOO prosaic. So I went with the compromise.
And what it means is this: Folks, I know how attractive (as a candidate, I mean) Nikki Haley can be. I mean, she had me at “I’m running against Larry Koon” way back in 2002, and she totally pulled me into her orbit when she told me of how his redneck supporters were attacking her ethnicity, causing me to write an impassioned defense of her and condemnation of them. (I have this atavistic impulse toward knight errantry. It’s what causes me to have a notion that the United States should ride about the world slaying ogres in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and the like. And if I can actually, literally defend a lady in distress — well, all the better.)
Being on Nikki’s side made us feel good about ourselves. She came across as an absolute paragon of political virtue taking on the entrenched interests, and she did it well. At the time, we didn’t know that as she was advocating “running government like a business,” she was failing to pay taxes on time for the business for which she was the accountant. We didn’t know she was parlaying her support of Lexington Medical Center getting an open-heart center into a $110,000-a-year job that didn’t require her to show up.
And most of all, we did not know that she — who chaired a subcommittee charged with coming up with regulations for the payday lending industry — would tap that industry for contributions to her employer’s cause.
Now that I do know those things, I’ve thought back a number of times to the portion of my last extended interview with her when she spoke of how she was stymied by her leadership and prevented from passing meaningful reform of payday lending. You will hear her speak knowledgeably and energetically about how her committee carefully researched the issue and came up with a bill she was proud of (one that would regulate, not eliminate, such lenders), only to see it cavalierly deep-sixed by her leadership.
It was, in retrospect, quite a performance, and I believed in it entirely. I believe in it now as I watch it. You probably will, too. Look at her face as I ask her to clarify — was it Harry Cato who killed your bill. Yes, she nods, with wide eyes, evincing reluctance at seeming to tell tales, then smiling winningly.
The thing is, it’s so convincing that I still believe that she was sincere. I mean, look at her. But that sincere young woman who spoke of how much she was learning as a novice legislator has been very little in evidence since she found “the power of her voice” as a Sarah-Palin-style demagogue who despises experience and nuance, and speaks almost entirely in bumper stickers.
The Nikki Haley on the video was … smarter than the one we hear today. And more believable. She was almost… wonkish. Definitely our kind of gal, the sort we’d be sure to have an editorial crush on.
And I still marvel over how she’s changed.
Bottom line… I have a lot of experience observing Nikki Haley. So when I tell people who just recently discovered her that she isn’t all that she seems, and that it would be a bad idea to elect her to higher office, my assessment has very deep roots. It took me a LONG time to realize just how problematic Nikki Haley was. And voters just haven’t had enough time with her. It’s like being a pilot — I’ve got a couple of thousand hours with this particular aircraft, and it’s hard to explain all that I’ve learned about her idiosyncracies to anyone who’s had less than a hundred.
Which is why I wish Election Day were a little farther off. Eventually, I believe everybody will see all the sides of Nikki Haley. But after Tuesday, it will be too late to help our state.
Vincent Sheheen talks a lot about how he would emulate Carroll Campbell on economic development and other issues. That’s not just some line to hoax the yokels.
Two top business supporters of Campbell (and Thurmond and Dole and other Republicans) have officially endorsed his candidacy, including a former commerce secretary from a GOP administration:
GOP Business Leaders Endorse Sheheen
Columbia, SC – With only five days until the General Election, two of South Carolina’s most notable and successful business leaders, both of whom have been Republican Party mainstays, have endorsed the Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Today, W. W.“ Hootie” Johnson of Columbia and Robert Royall of Huger endorsed Democrat Vincent Sheheen. Both men have a long history of supporting Republicans at every level but say this year’s election is too important to be bound by partisanship.
The two banking pioneers are well known for their staunch support of the Republican Party and its candidates. Johnson chaired campaign finance committees for Strom Thurmond and Carroll Campbell and was also Bob Dole’s SC finance chair during the presidential campaign of 1996. Royall was state commerce secretary under Governor David Beasley and US ambassador to Tanzania under President George W. Bush. The two have made substantial financial contributions to Republicans over the years.
“This is a crucial time in South Carolina. Our next governor must be a statesman who is focused on addressing our challenges. We have worked for the election of South Carolinians like Strom Thurmond and Carroll Campbell,” said Johnson and Royall. “We see Vincent Sheheen as having the potential leadership qualities of these two great South Carolinians.”
“South Carolina needs a trust-worthy leader with a good understanding of government and business. Vincent Sheheen has an abundance of these qualities and he has the temperament to be a unifier in the legislature. We desperately need a governor who can get this state back on the right path, and Vincent can be that governor,” said Johnson and Royall.
####
Will this tip the balance? Nope. Because 99.99 percent of people voting next Tuesday are NOT knowledgeable Republicans who’ve been there and done that, or respected business leaders. In fact, in this populist environment, such things are denigrated. If you had to actually know something about economic development to vote — or if you had to actually KNOW both Vincent Sheheen and Nikki Haley well — Sheheen would win in a walk. But that’s not the way our democracy works.
The thing is, most of the people who will vote Tuesday — for either candidate — probably never heard of Hootie Johnson or Bob Royall.
Is it just me, or is that guy a dead ringer for our own Joe Neal, preacher and legislator?
I don’t think it’s just me. When I got back and took a look at his official picture on the legislative Web site (the same one that has Nikki as “Mrs. William Michael”), Joe looked even more like the guy on the menu than I had remembered.
I’m impressed. For an SC lawmaker to have such a connection, however coincidental, to the unparalleled Memphis barbecue tradition is worth celebrating…
The last couple of days have been busy, too busy for me to report adequately on Nikki Haley’s appearance before the Columbia Rotary Club Monday.
Of course, there’s not much to report. She basically gave the same speech I’ve heard all year — the same one I heard at that Sarah Palin rally, which frankly I see as the moment Nikki peaked. She was at the height of her powers. She was that creature I’ve recognized so often — one who knows he or she is on the ascendance. It was that evening that I knew she was going to win the primary.
What’s remarkable is that now she’s still giving the same speech. For instance, she still has the gall to tout her experience and ability as an accountant — even though now (as opposed to when she started giving this speech) we know that pretty much every opportunity she’s had to apply these skills, in her personal finances and her family’s business, she’s left a mess behind, littered with broken deadlines and fines that had to be paid. Have you ever had to pay a fine for failure to pay taxes on time? And do you go around boasting about how you’re a great accountant? Well, she still does, and she demonstrably is not.
But that doesn’t seem to bother her.
My friend Mike Fitts, who writes for Columbia Regional Business Report, asked to come to Rotary as my guest, so I invited him. I gather Mike has had a bit of trouble getting Nikki’s attention. But when I asked him that, he said no, he had been allowed 20 minutes with her — in August.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley said her family “was struggling” financially when they failed to pay or file their income taxes on time.
Haley took a question about the tax issues during her Monday visit to the downtown Columbia Rotary Club. According to published reports, Haley was late paying her taxes for the years 2004 to 2006, accruing more than $4,000 in late payment penalties. The family did see its reported income cut in half between 2005 and 2006, dropping to just more than $40,000.
Haley said she and her husband had lost some income at the time and were shutting down a business. The economic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks had dented their retail business, as it had many others.
“We know what it’s like to struggle,” Haley said.
While the Internal Revenue Service does allow extensions for paperwork, it expects taxpayers to make an accurate assessment of the likely tax bill and to pay on time.
The question came from a Rotarian who described himself as a supporter, saying he wanted to give the Lexington Republican a chance to clear up the issue….
Maybe that was the best, newest angle to come out of the session; I don’t know. But I remember that when I heard her say it, I thought, “Duh!” I mean, we kinda assumed that she was having financial difficulties. Not paying your taxes is a financial difficulty in itself.
The issue, of course, is how you deal with difficulties. And since she obviously dealt with hers in less than a stellar manner — especially for such an ace accountant — the question remains how she squares this with her touted skills. At two points in her performance Monday, she said the following:
If you’re in business, you know: The best decisions are when you go through the hardest times. There’s an opportunity there, because it will force us to prioritize…
What I’d like to know is how she squares that with how poorly she handled tough times. I know a thing or two about tough times, about seeing your source of income kicked out from under you and wondering how you’re going to get the mortgage paid. But I also know that one thing you want to avoid is getting in a situation in which you have to pay a fine on top of the taxes you owe. I’m no accountant, but I can figure that out.
And you definitely don’t do it if you’re going to have the nerve to ask voters to elect you to handle their money.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly materialistic person, or a sensualist per se (except withincertain parameters). And I am most definitely, certainly not a foodie. Personally, I find foodism… off-putting.
But there are two things that I look forward to every day, and that are hard for me to forgo — coffee in the morning (and sometimes in the afternoon), and beer at night.
Hey, you can have the wine. And I’d rather that the cheese not be in the same building. But the best coffee in the world, followed by beer? I would never want to leave.
If that is Andre, then, as a guy who was unemployed for nearly a year, I’m all for what he’s doing. To quote Don Corleone, “I want to congratulate you on your new business and I’m sure you’ll do very well and good luck to you. Especially since your interests don’t conflict with mine.”
Actually, I don’t know if it’s a new business. I seem to recall that Andre started a business when he was in college having something to do with Gamecock memorabilia, but I had idea he was still doing it.
And the thing is, if there’s a fortune to be made in souvenir photos, Andre will make it. He styles himself the hardest-working man in SC politics, and the hustle he’s always shown on the hustings backs it up. I’ll bet if HE were trying to sell blog ads, he’d do better than I have…
OK, guys, calm down. I don’t mean that Debbie, or any of the other trash running through your heads. This call is from Debbie McDaniel, owner of Revente and Sid&Nancy in Five Points:
Attn all my guy friends:
We need jeans and other casual clothing at Revente’s Last Call to dress the homeless veterans that are referred to us.
These items are NOT sold, but placed in our clothing closet just for them. May be dropped off at any of our shops if you cannot get to the Millwood location. Many thanks!!!!!!
So run those old jeans on down to Debbie’s place over on Saluda. And while you’re there, tell her she should buy an ad on the blog….
Nikki Haley keeps looking for ways to counter the fact that she, a Republican, does not have such support. Yesterday, her campaign announced that it had received the endorsement of the National Federation of Independent Business. My first thought was yeah, she’d have to go to a national organization for such a nod, because the locals know better — but then I saw that this was the South Carolina affiliate of that organization. So I didn’t really know what it meant.
But then somebody brought this blog post to my attention:
Will the NFIB please go away…..
Let’s be honest–I absolutely abhor the so-called National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). It’s not a representative business group. In 2004 95% of their members said they voted for Bush, compared to 53% of all small business owners. (Remember that election was 50–50) Nonetheless, the first line of the recent NY Times article on NFIB joining the Republican Attorneys-General lawsuit on the individual mandate is that they’re trying to depoliticize the “largely Republican assault” on the new health care law. Ha, bloody ha.
But I’m not grumpy that the NFIB is joining this pointless lawsuit. I’m grumpy that they’re so blatantly going against the interest of small businesses. And yes I run one! So to remind you how stupid the NFIB is (in global not political terms) I’ve reprinted an article I wrote on Spot-on back in 2006–-and sadly nothing has changed. (The great thing about being a relatively veteran blogger is that I can really recycle material!)…
If all that is right, that would tend to explain the Haley endorsement.
When Newsweek first put Sarah Palin (I mean, Nikki Haley — I know the difference, but the superficial, pandering twits editing Newsweek apparently don’t) on its cover, I wrote about how Vincent Sheheen faces a problem that no other candidate for governor of South Carolina had ever faced — an opponent who gets vast amounts of free national media coverage. It’s a disadvantage that no candidate can raise enough money for paid media to overcome. It distorts everything. (See “The Newsweek endorsement of Nikki Haley,” July 6.) I wrote:
Oh, you say it’s not an endorsement? Don’t bore me with semantics. As I said, the national media — not giving a damn one way or the other about South Carolina, or about who Nikki Haley really is or what she would do in office — is enraptured at the idea that South Carolina will elect a female Indian-American (Bobby Jindal in a skirt, they think, fairly hugging themselves with enthusiasm), which just may be the most extreme example of Identity Politics Gone Mad that I’ve seen.
And do they have any serious, substantive reason to do this? Of course not. The putative reason for putting Nikki’s smiling mug on the cover again is to discuss the burning issue of “mama grizzlies.” I am not making this up.
Of course, if you turn inside to one of the few remaining pages in this pamplet — right in there next to the scholarly treatise on “Men Look at Women’s Bodies: Is Evolution at Work?” — you can find some home truths about Nikki. Such as:
Haley, who has two children but has never referred to herself as a grizzly [so why the freak did you put her on this stupid cover? never mind; I realize there’s no rational answer, beyond maybe that you had a picture of her in red], is just the sort of pro–business, low-tax, limited–government conservative Palin loves. Her platform is focused mostly on economic issues: creating jobs and unleashing entrepreneurial energy by slashing taxes. She holds herself out as a paragon of fiscal responsibility (never mind that she and her husband have failed to pay their taxes on time in each of the past five years).
But I must ask you: How many of the undecided voters who might be gullible enough to be razzle-dazzled into voting for Nikki do you think will read that far into the piece? Just being on this cover is all Nikki could possibly ever want or need from Newsweek.
Folks, I gotta tell ya — I never thought a whole lot of Newsweek. Back in the day when I was even in the market for such a publication, I always read TIME — and I haven’t done that in 30 years. Whatever value that format had ceased to be anything you could take seriously so, so long ago. Those publications became pretty much everything I disdain about TV “news.”
Since he agreed to purchase the magazine from Washington Post Co. earlier this month, pundits have called Mr. Harman’s motives—and sanity—into question. He took on more than $50 million in liabilities and agreed to keep most of Newsweek‘s employees—all for a magazine on track to lose at least $20 million this year, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Good luck with that, pal.
My advice to you readers? You want to read news in a magazine format? Go with The Economist. That is still a serious source of news and commentary. Interestingly, it calls itself a “newspaper,” in spite of its format. It’s certainly better than all but a handful of newspapers on this side of the pond. Yet another reason to love The Economist — so far, no Nikki Haley covers (that I’ve seen, anyway).
I’m posting this especially for my cartoonist friends, especially Robert Ariail and Richard Crowson — both laid off from their newspapers. Like me. And like Bill Day.
Meanwhile, Bill Day — who was laid off from the Memphis Commercial Appeal within a few days of when Robert and I were canned — has also picked up honors, such as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and SPJ’s Green Eyeshade Award, as well as the National Press Association’s Award of Special Merit.
Bill, wanting to make sure that the folks at my first newspaper (I was a copy boy at the C.A. back in 1974, while a student at Memphis State) didn’t miss the point, set up a table out in front of the Commercial Appeal‘s offices and posed with his awards.
The unfortunate truth, of course, is that increasingly newspapers care little for such indications of excellence. In fact, the people who were good enough to win awards also tended to be the people whose salaries rose the highest back before newspaper revenues took a nosedive — making them among the first, rather than the last, to get laid off. Such is life in the brave new world, what we have come to term the New Normal.
But at least they know what they’re missing out on. Bill made sure of that.
Caroline Whitson speaks to the gathering at the Penny Sales Tax campaign kickoff.
You know that press conference that they had at the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce Thursday to support the sales tax referendum for transportation Thursday? I was there, and not as a blogger. I mean, I’m always a blogger — here I am writing about it — but that’s not why I was there.
I was there to support the referendum. Ike McLeese and Betty Gregory with the Chamber had asked a group of supporters (and I had told them I was willing to help) to show up so that the media people could see a nice cross-section of the community willing to stand up for it.
This would not be a big deal for most people, but it is for me. I’ve always been a professional observer, which is to say, I’ve always been on the sidelines. Sure, I’ve been telling people in writing where I stand on issues off and on since the early ’70s, when I was the editorial page editor of The Helmsman, the student newspaper at Memphis State. And ever since I joined The State‘s editorial board in ’94, I’ve not only written what I thought about all and sundry, but I’ve also always been clear about my views when I speak to groups in the community. In fact, since we were SO strongly against the state lottery, and we were so committed to using any venue we could in trying (against all odds) to defeat it, I actually argued against it in some public debates in the months leading up to the referendum. My good friend Samuel Tenenbaum and I had a regular road show going — he would be “pro” and I would be “anti.” I had right on my side, but of course his side won.
But this is different. I have agreed, in writing, to be a public supporter of an issue before voters on the November ballot.
Why have I taken this stand? Well, I’ll tell ya…
In some ways, it’s an unlikely place to start being involved. If I’d tried to predict it, I would have said I’d save myself for something big, and statewide — say, helping Vincent Sheheen get elected. As y’all know, I have held for many years that THE most important electoral decision voters make every four years is choosing a governor. With our state being so dominated by the Legislature, and the Legislature by nature being extremely resistant to change, the only way our state is ever going to stop being last where we want to be first and first where we want to last is for someone elected statewide to use the bully pulpit (which is about the only tool the governor has) to exert a counterbalancing force for reform and progress. And it is especially critical that Sheheen be elected rather than the Sanford disciple he’s up against. But beyond what I write here, I’m not doing anything to help him. (Disclosure: ADCO Interactive did the new Sheheen Web site, but I was not and am not involved with that project.)
But I got involved with this instead. Here are some reasons why:
I believe public transit is essential for our community to grow and prosper (as J.T. McLawhorn said at the meeting, public transit is a vital part of a community’s circulatory system, and without that, “You’re dead.”), and next year the bus system — a rather poor, lame excuse for public transportation, but it’s all we’ve got — runs out of money.
Every other venue for keeping it going has been thoroughly explored. And I think you will notice that those opposing this referendum don’t present a viable alternative. A community group spent vast amounts of volunteer time two years ago studying all of Richland County’s transportation needs. $500,000 worth of studies were done. This was the only viable way to do it, given the straitjacket that the Legislature puts communities in when it comes to taxing and spending. Ask Columbia College President Caroline Whitson, who chaired that effort: This is the way to do it. The unpopular temporary wheel tax that’s keeping it going now is not a workable permanent solution.
That revenue would also pay for a number of other needed improvements to transportation infrastructure — bike and hiking trails, and road improvements — that were identified through that same wide-ranging community conversation two years back. This answers those who say “I don’t ride the bus” (as if taxes were a user fee, but let’s not go down that philosophical rathole right now). This plan has something for everyone in the county. And it’s not a wish list; there is considerable community support behind each of these projects.
Funding from other sources for the road projects is not any more forthcoming — from state or federal sources, or anywhere else — than is funding for the bus system. This is truly a case in which a community has come together to determine it’s needs, and identified a sensible way to pay for it without asking for a handout — a handout that, as I say, isn’t coming. This is something Richland County needs to do for itself, and this is the best way available to do it.
It’s a fair way to pay for this. Some may protest that I don’t live in the county, so who am I to speak out? My answer to that is that THIS is the way to get people like me — who spend almost all our waking hours in Richland County, and benefit from its roads and other services — to pay our share. I’m more than willing to do it. Richland County residents who pay property taxes should be twice as willing, even eager.
Like many of you, I’m concerned about putting too much stress on the sales tax. Nikki Haley and the other lawmakers who wrongheadedly supported Act 388, and adamantly refuse to repeal it, badly distorted our already fouled-up tax system. They eliminated school operations taxes on owner-occupied homes by raising the sales tax by a penny. They did this on top of the fact that they had forced local communities to turn to a local option sales tax by proscribing or restricting other revenue sources. Because of all that, this is the only option local communities have for such needs as this. And of course, it also has the virtue I mentioned above. A magnet county like Richland, drawing people from all over central South Carolina, should rely more on a sales tax than other counties.
This method has been used with great success in other communities across the state — Charleston, Florence and York counties have benefited greatly. For a lot of the business leaders who are lining up behind this, watching those communities improve their infrastructure and get a leg up in economic development while we continue to fall behind is a huge motivation factor in supporting this.
There are other reasons that aren’t coming to me at the moment as I type this, which I will no doubt write about in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you might want to peruse this summary of the proposal.
The folks who turned out for the kickoff Thursday were a pretty good group. As I stood in the crowd listening to the speakers, I could see from where I was standing: Ted Speth (the first speaker), Steve Benjamin, Joel & Kit Smith, Barbara Rackes, Samuel Tenenbaum, Rick Silver, Emily Brady, Col. Angelo Perri, Cathy Novinger, Bernice Scott, Jennifer Harding, Chuck Beamon, J.T. McLawhorn, Candy Waites, Paul Livingston, Greg Pearce, Lee Bussell, Sonny White and Mac Bennett.
Duncan MacRae, my very favorite advertiser, just invited me to Yesterday’s Facebook page. If you like Yesterday’s, you should really like (that means CLICK on the “LIKE” button, in case I have to spell it out for you) this page.
If you were following it you’d know that the special today is salmon and grits, with collard greens.
You’d also be aware that…
Yesterday’s Restaurant and Tavern Thurs. Night 9/23 Jim Leblanc will be playing your favorite hits from the 60’s and 70’s while you have dinner. Jim will be playing from 6:30 to 9:30. Stop in have a fun time while you enjoy our tasty entrees. First person to ask Jim to play American Pie gets a $20.00 Gift Card to Yesterdays.
Yesterday’s Restaurant and Tavern Going To Auburn this weekend? If your not traveling– come on down to Yesterdays to watch the game on one of our 4 large flat screens and enjoy our gametime specials. If you have your Gamecock colors on you can get two for the price of one on orders of 10 wings. We will also have a special on our tasty Garnet and Black… pints of Killians and Guiness @ $4.00 a pint during the game( usually $ 5.25)
As the fourth season of “Mad Men” unfolds, fans wonder:
Will Don Draper get it together, or continue to unravel?
Will Peggy or Joan just get fed up to the point that she slaps every man on the show upside the head in a vain attempt to inject some sense into them?
Will Betty and her new husband just be written out of the show? Please?
Now that it’s 1964, will the show work with a post-Beatles sound track, or will the whole martinis-and-skinny ties mystique evaporate? (Hearing “Satisfaction” in the background the other night really made ol’ Don seem more anachronistic than usual, which I suppose was the point. Although I suppose the “can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke/the same cigarettes as me” part was apropos.)
Is Don Draper actually modeled on real-life Mad Man Brad Warthen?
On that last one, to end your suspense, the answer is no: The uncanny physical resemblance is merely coincidental.
In fact, we have learned who the real-life model was: Draper Daniels, who called himself Dan (… were in the next room at the hoedown… Sorry; I can’t resist a good song cue). His widow wrote a fascinating piece about him, and about their relationship, in Chicago magazine. You should read the whole thing, headlined “I Married a Mad Man” — as my wife said, it’s an “awesome” story — but here’s an excerpt:
In the 1960s, Draper Daniels was something of a legendary character in American advertising. As the creative head of Leo Burnett in Chicago in the 1950s, he had fathered the Marlboro Man campaign, among others, and become known as one of the top idea men in the business. He was also a bit of a maverick.
Matthew Weiner, the producer of the television show Mad Men (and previously producer and writer for The Sopranos), acknowledged that he based his protagonist Don Draper in part on Draper Daniels, whom he called “one of the great copy guys.” Weiner’s show, which takes place at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency on Madison Avenue, draws from the golden age of American advertising. Some of its depictions are quite accurate—yes, there was a lot of drinking and smoking back then, and a lot of chauvinism; some aren’t so accurate. I know this, because I worked with Draper Daniels in the ad biz for many years. We did several mergers together, the longest of which lasted from 1967 until his death in 1983. That merger is my favorite Draper Daniels story.
Reading that article, I wondered: If Don is Dan, who on the show is Myra?
As I read, I got a sense that it could be… Peggy. A woman who was a professional colleague of the main characters, a woman who had risen to an unprecedented role for her gender at the agency? Sounds kinda like Peggy to me — aside from the age difference. After all, Peggy and Don got awfully cozy that night of the Clay-Liston fight…
We’ll see…
Peggy and Don on the night of the Clay-Liston fight (Feb. 24, 1964).
Just got this from the Sheheen campaign under the headline, “Help Vincent Fight Back with the Truth:”
Dear Brad –
This week, the race for governor changed. Vincent Sheheen’s second week of television ads have introduced him to a statewide audience and voters are impressed. We learned that Nikki Haley, who claims her skills as an accountant qualify her to be governor, had even more problems paying her taxes, this time for her business. The onslaught of bad news has the Haley campaign on the defensive.
Having already misled the public on her record, her positions and her business acumen, Nikki Haley has now resorted to false attacks on Vincent Sheheen rather than answering tough questions about her positions and her business problems.
In the last week, she falsely accused Vincent of wanting to raise taxes to solve the budget crisis but she is the only candidate who wants higher taxes; Haley wants to raise our grocery tax.
She claimed: “Vince Sheheen will kill our state’s competitiveness” but the Sanford-Haley philosophy of the last eight years has already left our job recruitment efforts in dismal shape and more of the same won’t improve them.
She even blamed Vincent for the fiscal problems of Washington DC and border security in Arizona. Vincent responded that maybe Nikki Haley was running for governor of the United States that the last thing we needed was another governor focused on national office and not our state.
Trav Robertson
Campaign Manager
Sheheen for Governor
OK, all that is true.
But here’s some more truth: Nikki’s not on the ropes. She’s not on the defensive, even thought she should be, since every supposed strength she’s touted (transparency, business acumen) has turned out to be a weakness. She’s on a roll.
Today, I heard two different accounts of the appearance of the two candidates before the Palmetto Business Forum yesterday. Both said Vincent was fine and said the right things, but was low key and seemed to lack the fire in the belly.
Nikki, they said, was ON. She was in the zone. She had obviously been superbly prepared by her handlers, and recited everything perfectly. My witnesses knew, as I know, that Nikki’s understanding of issues is at best skin deep, generally not going beyond a bumper-sticker message. But she delivers the bumper sticker well.
This is a continuation of what I saw at the Sarah Palin event a couple of months back. I saw something that is unmistakable to me after my decades of observing politics and politicians closely: A candidate who was peaking, who was confident, poised, energetic and on message. She was ladling out stuff that that Tea Party crowd was lapping up, and she’s still doing it. Knowing that the business community doesn’t trust her, she has worked hard at learning key things to say to win them over. And that, according to my witnesses, was what was on display last night.
It is extremely important to South Carolina that Vincent Sheheen win this election. He is THE reform candidate, and the governor our state needs. But unless something happens to change the game, he’s not going to. Win, that is. And the business community, and the rest of us, are going to suffer another four years of a governor who fundamentally does not understand or appreciate economic development, and can’t work with key players to help move our state forward.
And we can’t afford that. But right now, that’s where we’re headed.
Spotted Lt Gov Andre Bauer hawking framed photos after USC game. Hid himself behind one of his photos when I tried to shoot a pix. 
