Category Archives: Civility

The Herman Cain harassment charges

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Uh, oh — Rush Limbaugh and I agree about something. Quick, Robin — the antidote! It’s on your utility belt, you young fool!

Actually, not quite — but I do see he said something that may sound superficially like something I said. Earlier this morning, I wrote,

Yeah, I heard that. NPR interviewed the Politico guy who broke the story. As he mentioned having learned about this the last few weeks, I got to wondering: Who brought his attention to it, and why?

Well, the obvious guess would be his recently-threatened opponents. But I got to think about how if that’s the case, it seems like a case of overkill. Instead, his opponents should pony up money to air his videos everywhere, and as America gets totally wierded out, their Herman Cain problem would go away on its own.

I thought that, and I also thought, here we go again, with white men perpetuating the story about how black men just can’t leave women alone…

… as though white men can or something…

Then, later in the day, I saw that Limbaugh had said,

The Politico and the mainstream media has launched an unconscionable, racially stereotypical attack on an independent, self-reliant conservative black because for him that behavior is not allowed.

So you see, not quite the same thing. I wasn’t criticizing Politico for doing the story. It’s just that, as a longtime editor, one wonders where the story originated. And one puts the fact that all of a sudden Cain’s a threat with the fact that all of a sudden, this is out there. It doesn’t matter; the story is still a story, whatever the motives of the sources. And my evocation of the Clarence Thomas, high-tech lynching charge was just an added throwaway to set up the next line.

I think Rush actually means it. And for that matter, on a certain level, I mean it, too — in that I hate to see this happen to another prominent black man. Weird how it does seem to be the conservatives among that demographic group…. I also hate that I sort of believe it, because it would mean those women were subjected the boorish behavior. But hey, I don’t know what happened.

Anyway, consider this my backhanded way of giving y’all a place to write about the allegations reported by Politico.

Now I need to run. I’ve just got time to put together a Mark Block costume. I figure all I need is a pack of smokes…

Nikki Haley vs. Occupy Columbia: Pick your side

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Because I can’t. An excerpt from a release that just came in from Occupy Columbia:

On Thursday, Governor Nikki Haley said that unions are behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. We contest that accusation. This is a leaderless movement that welcomes participation from all groups, but neither bows down nor endorses any. We’ve publicly invited all people or organizations, whether they be Unions or the Tea Party, to come take part in a conversation about economic injustice and a system that is rigged to benefit the 1% at the direct expense of the 99%.

We challenge Governor Haley to produce evidence to back up her claim. If she would attend one of our General Assemblies (held every day at 10:00am and 7:00pm), she would realize that all decicions made by Occupy Columbia are voted on by those in attendence. We require a 90% threshold for consensus, and no group, Union or otherwise, has the ability to control that.

Whom should I back here? This is a toughie…

Seriously, though — I don’t think the gov should have said that about them, without justification. Shades of her tale about the drug-addled unemployed.

But then, I don’t agree with OC that Nephron locating here is a bad idea. The rest of the release:

On the other hand, it was the Governor herself who said, earlier this morning, that she is the “number one employee” of a pharmaceutical company and that their success is her “number one goal.” This company, Nephron Pharmaceuticals is the same company whose private jet she used to fly to a fundraiser in Dallas, TX last month, according to Fits News.

We had members in attendance for this morning’s announcement, one holding a sign reading “Who owns you?” Her number one priority should be the success of the people of South Carolina, not the non-body person that is a major pharmaceutical company.

By her statement, she is the personification of the merger of state and corporate interests. We applaud her bold honesty, but find it hard to believe that she can be expected to be accountable after such a declaritive pledge of allegiance to the highest bidder.

So I’m where I started, without a side. But that’s my usual position…

Just for the record, I am not mad at Boyd

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Rep. Boyd Brown at Yesterday's.

About an hour after Kevin Fisher called me to set the record straight on whether he had called me, I met Boyd Brown for a beer at Yesterday’s.

We had a fine time getting acquainted — I don’t believe we’d every had a conversation before — although it was unnecessary from my point of view. Boyd had suggested the meeting because he thought I was mad at him or something, and I went along because, as my readers know, I’m always glad to spend time at Yesterday’s (see the ad at right).

It was a very South Carolina kind of conversation. We talked about Boyd’s experiences with his Daddy (who is probably younger than I, since Boyd is younger than my fourth child) being on county council in Fairfield County, and about when his grandfather was a high official in state government, and about the people he’s related to in Bennettsville (my birthplace), and partisan politics, and race, and… just a little of everything.

And, more to the point… Boyd says he did not realize until after he had said it that in the case of our governor, his remark could be construed on yet a third level that, he agreed, is inappropriate. So we had a total meeting of the minds. Except, to some extent, when we got on the subject of upcoming legislation that he’s planning to push, but more about that later…

SC Atty. Gen. Alan Wilson at Rotary today…

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“Ironically, I tend to look left,” said SC Atty. Gen. Alan Wilson at the Columbia Rotary Club today. “That’s a joke.”

He said that because he had already gotten a big laugh, unintentionally. Worried about his time, he had turned to tell our president that he was just going to speak a minute-and-a-half about Yucca Mountain before going to questions. Except that our president, Rodger Stroup, was on his right, and he turned the other way and said it to David Kunz, who was seated up there to do Health and Happiness. The laugh came when David said, very enthusiastically, “All right by me!”

But the rest of his speech went pretty well. Crawford Clarkson turned to me afterward to say it was one of the best speakers he’d heard at Rotary. And Crawford’s been in Rotary approximately forever. I said I didn’t know about that, but I thought he did well.

He did well because he spoke as something other than what detractors of his Dad might expect. Sure, he started out sounding a lot like Joe, looking around the room and recognizing his many friends. But that was cool. I’ve always liked that about Joe. He’s very sincere about it, and so was Alan. Alan was a bit cooler about it, in fact. Joe tends to be rather manic in his extreme excitement to be there as a congressman.

Anyway, as I said, some would like to think that Alan is another Charlie Condon. (Charlie, who is a perfectly reasonable human being in person out of the limelight, turned into a sort of pandering monster as A.G., pursuing one issue after another that seemed fabricated to further his political career.) But I haven’t seen that yet, and there was none of that in the presentation we got today. Charlie would have worked in the “electric couch” somewhere, but not Alan.

Wilson spent a large portion of his time simply talking about the routine work that the A.G.’s office does in the course of meeting its statutory and constitutional obligations — handling civil litigation, criminal prosecution, post-conviction relief, criminal domestic violence, etc. That he chose to do so, to explain his office in such professional terms rather than political ones, is to me worthy of praise. Perhaps because I’m always on the lookout for another Charlie. (Fellow Rotarian Henry McMaster was a welcome change from Charlie — and it should be pointed out, Henry was largely responsible for the emphasis on CDV. I’m glad to see Wilson is continuing to be interested in that.)

Then he got onto the controversial issues — the NLRB/Boeing thing (although in SC, that’s hardly controversial), the health care mandate, Yucca Mountain — and he fought his corner well on these. His point on each was that he approached them according to the law as he read it. Of course, I’m less likely to disbelieve him than some, since I see the first and third ones the way he does. I disagree strongly with him on the middle one (and the idea that he could be successful in pursuing severability appalls me), although I fear he may be right that in the end it will be settled by a 5-4 SCOTUS decision, one way or the other.

In supporting his assertion that for him it’s about the law and not political advantage, he cited the Cornell Arms case, in which a security guard shot and killed an unarmed man who he said he thought was threatening him. Wilson said some told him that “You’ll take heat” from 2nd Amendment advocates for supporting the government’s prosecution of the guard. But in his account, he said, “That’s irrelevant.” The man had served five years, and would have been released by the state Supreme Court had Wilson not filed for a rehearing. As John Monk (happy birthday, John!) reported after the meeting:

“This has nothing to do with the right to carry (guns), nothing to do with the gun issue,” Wilson said. “The defense has the right to appeal at each level of litigation, and the state has a right to ask the court to reconsider their decision.”

A  good example for the point the A.G. was making. But whether you agree that he’s always representing the law rather than serving politics, I was impressed that he took no opportunity to posture before Rotary. There was no ideological cant about “big government” or, to cite something his predecessor sank to in trying to run for governor, about promising to protect us from Obama and his Washington “vultures.” He opposes the mandate and sees it as constitutionally unsound. Fine. I just disagree. At least he expresses himself like someone who respects the law, rather than an ideological ranter.

And that counts for a lot. Now, to be perfectly frank, his website seems a tad more self-promotional than his speech today (I went there to get y’all a link to look up more about these issues and his involvement with them). But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good speech. That it was, and well received.

That’s more like it, Boyd. Good lad!

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Last night, Phil Bailey called me with five minutes to go and asked me to be a last-minute replacement for Joel Lourie on Pub Politics, so of course I said yes, and they held the show for a few minutes to give me time to get there.

That’s seven times now, people. No one else comes close. The Five-Timer Club long ago became passé for me. I’m the standard fill-in guest. The one sad thing is that I can never be a stand-in guest co-host, because you have to be a Democrat or Republican. That’s the format. Speaking of which, Wesley Donehue was out of town again (China was mentioned), and Joel Sawyer filled in for him. You know, the former press secretary to Mark Sanford, now state campaign director for Jon Huntsman. He did great.

One of our topics, as it happened, was Kevin Fisher’s column about my post about Boyd Brown’s inappropriate little witticism. (When I entered The Whig, I saw Corey Hutchins seated at a table, went over and stood over him, cocked a fist back and said, “Look out — I’m liable to attack you…”) Our discussion — during which both Phil took the position that Boyd’s comment was great, and Joel held that it was Corey’s journalistic obligation to report it — led me to an ironic observation: While one of them represented the left and the other the right, I was the only real conservative at the table. They would only agree that I was the grouchy old guy upholding outdated notions of civility and propriety. (Which is basically what conservatism is, properly understood.)

We also discussed other, more interesting stuff. I’ll post the show when it’s available.

But that’s not why I come to you today in this post. I wanted to share with you this op-ed from the aforementioned young Mr. Brown, in which he expresses his thoughts regarding the “F” the governor gave him in a far more mature and appropriate manner. An excerpt:

Recently, as you may have heard, Gov. Nikki Haley released her legislative report cards for 2011. I will not venture into the sheer pettiness of this nonsense, although it is just that – petty nonsense. Instead, I’ll explain why I got the grade I received, and why, for the first time in my life, I’ll ignore the “teacher’s” advice on how to improve my grade.

According to her standards, I was given an “F.” Not since my first year of Carolina have I been awarded an “F,” and now that I’m in law school, I hope it’s not a recurring theme. I was ashamed of the “F” I received on my first test in freshman philosophy, but I recovered and did well in the course. I can’t say the same for the “F” I was awarded by Nikki Haley; instead, I am proud of it.

Some would argue that since she is our governor, she knows what the people of South Carolina want. Those who are really drunk on her Kool-Aid would probably argue that point loudly and irrationally. Here is my argument:

The “F” I received stands for Fairfield, for your family. In last year’s election, Senator Vincent Sheheen won our county with overwhelming numbers. Nikki Haley and her platform (or lack thereof) were soundly rejected. She is clearly out of touch and out of step with our community – just look at the election returns.

It is offensive to me for her to think that her agenda for our state trumps the agenda of those who I represent. For her to think otherwise shows her skyrocketing level of arrogance, which only rises higher with every national news show she visits, and every out of state fundraiser she attends….

And so forth.

This is good. This is right. Far better that you express clearly why you are offended by her actions (and you have every reason to be offended by her presumption) that for you to be offensive yourself.

That’s it. That’s my fatherly, or at least avuncular, advice for today.

Kevin says I ‘attacked’ Free Times. News to me…

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Perhaps you should go back and read my original post. Not much to see, really — a lightweight stream-of-consciousness thing in which I started out joking about something I’d read on Twitter, teasing everyone involved… and then decided, near the end, that that was too much levity and that I should play the grownup and harrumph a bit over the Decline of Western Civilization. So I did. And down below, I will again.

My award-wining colleague Kevin Fisher seems to have taken it quite seriously:

Brad Warthen, local blogger and former editorial page editor of The State, is someone I know, like and read regularly. But it seems he needs a trip back to the newsroom at his old haunt on Shop Road, or to sit in on a Journalism 101 class at USC, or to reflect on the wisdom of shooting the messenger.

In a post on bradwarthen.com that surprised me (and I bet others who know and respect him), Warthen attacked Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins for accurately reporting a comment made by Rep. Boyd Brown (D-Fairfield) about Gov. Nikki Haley…

He was even offended by the joshing part, before I got around to the harrumphing:

Yet Warthen seemed unable to differentiate between the message and the messenger in his Oct. 5 post on the subject, writing: “And Corey and Boyd — what are you boys doing using language like that …”

“You boys.” Tsk, tsk. Yeah, that sounds like me rolling out the big guns, all right. Kevin should refresh his memory regarding the way I write when I’m being critical. This, for instance, is me criticizing someone:

Mark Sanford approaches elective office with the detachment of a dilettante, as though it simply does not matter whether anything is accomplished. His six years in Congress are remembered for a futon and a voting record replete with empty, ideological gestures. As governor, he has proven himself utterly unable — or perhaps worse, unwilling — to lead even within his own majority party. He is easily the most politically isolated governor we can recall. He is startlingly content to toss out marginal ideas and move on, unruffled by the fact that most of his seeds fall on rocky ground.

I guess I should have sensed a foreshadowing of this. Initially, Corey Hutchins and Eva Moore seemed a bit put out with me, but then I decided they were being ironic, too. A day or two later, I worried that I’d misread that situation when Corey Tweeted another mention of me. But all was well, he assured me when I inquired: “All in good fun, friend!”

Maybe THAT was ironic. But I don’t think so.

Originally, the headline of that post was something like, “Don’t use that language around Amanda!” or something similarly silly. Me being the avuncular old guy, protecting the young lady’s sensitive ears: “(W)hat are you boys doing using language like that around Amanda?” See what a corrupting influence this has had upon the poor lass?

But just before I published it, my rather slow mental processes finally penetrated down a couple of layers and realized what I was looking at. So I began the “Seriously, folks…” part, and then changed the headline. (I dig alliteration.)

Why did I do that? What did I see that I hadn’t seen when I started out being facetious?

First, consider that on a superficial level there was nothing original in what Boyd had said. It’s become a bit of tired joke in politics to say something like, “Oh, he’s only doing to her what he’s been doing to the rest of the country for four years.” The reference is a bit salacious, but refers obviously to what the speaker believes as harmful policies. (I say “old.” The earliest references that I find in a quick search — such as here — refer to Bill Clinton. I found some to Bush and Obama, too. But I actually think the device is older than that, a bit of a chestnut.)

But this was said with reference, specifically, to Nikki Haley. Who is not only the first woman ever to be governor. but the only candidate I can recall to have been accused, repeatedly and VERY publicly, of marital infidelity in the course of a political campaign.

Which takes on something different from the meaning of that joke in the normal course of political waggery. And which is, as I said, “grossly inappropriate” in the public sphere, whoever says it and whoever passes it on — particularly when one cutely plays around with the coarsest word we have in the language for such activity.

I shouldn’t have to explain all that. Our sense of propriety should not be so far gone that such an explanation should be necessary. But what should be and what is are not always the same.

Here’s a place for you to talk about Spurrier, Morris, Garcia, etc.

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A reader Tweeted, as I was headed to a late lunch (1:46 p.m. EST), “Eager to read your thoughts on Spurrier v. Morris.” I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, but now I do. I’ve seen the video and everything. (Interestingly, I could not find anything about it on the mobile version of thestate.com, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the browser version at the time.)

Of course, by that time, the news that the coach, or Eric Hyman, or somebody, had thrown Stephen Garcia off the team — apparently for real, this time. Hyman explained, “For Stephen to return to and remain with the football squad this fall, we agreed on several established guidelines. Unfortunately, he has not been able to abide by those guidelines and has therefore forfeited his position on the roster.”

I don’t know what the guidelines were, as I don’t follow this stuff. But I did see the Auburn game, and a reasonable guess would be that one of his guidelines involved throwing the football straight. Yes, I’m joking. Sort of.

But Micah apparently wanted to know what I thought about the Ron Morris thing. Gee, I don’t know.

I’m not Ron’s editor; never was. If I were, right now I’d be saying, “What the hell, Ron?” Or perhaps I’d use some other, saltier, newsroom expression. And Ron would tell me what was going on as well as he could, from his perspective. Although, based on the performance I saw on the video, it might not be altogether clear to him what it’s all about (apart from the usual animus that, from what I’ve seen, Ron is accustomed to engendering). Anyway, assuming he had the information available, I would have Ron lay out for me his version of the story. Then, I would check it out as well as I could.

If Coach Spurrier had an ounce of professionalism in him, of course, he would already have communicated to me (as Ron’s theoretical editor) what his beef was. Let’s assume he does, and he did. In that case, I would already have had it out with Ron about it and, given the way Spurrier acted today, probably would have told him I’d decided to back Ron. Hence the public tantrum.

Of course, if the coach did NOT try the normal, civil route first, then his performance today was inexcusable. Perhaps understandable on some level given that his QB was just canned after letting him down, but still not excusable in a man paid $2.8 million a year by a public institution to represent that institution.

Speaking of which, if I were Eric Hyman or Harris Pastides, I’d right now be having a serious talk with the coach about his performance — a sort of mirror of the one I’d be having with Ron as his editor. We’d start by watching his game film. Some of the things I’d be asking him:

  • What’s this really about, Steve? And don’t give me that nonsense about some column last spring. That was last spring; you blew up today. What’s really going on? (Oh, wait: Maybe THIS is the column Spurrier is referring to, in which Morris wrote, “Spurrier poached Horn’s program.”)
  • What exactly do you mean when you say it’s “my right as a head coach” not to talk to Ron Morris? Is that some special right we don’t know about? Do assistant coaches, or ordinary mortals walking the streets, not have that right? Because one would think that they do; that any human being walking the planet would have the right not to talk to Ron Morris if they chose not to. (Unless, of course, they were working for us, and we were paying them $2.8 million a year, and we told them to talk to him…) So what’s this imperious “as a head coach” stuff? Have we really made you feel that important?

And so on. That would just be for starters. And I’d be doing that in between fielding phone calls from people over at the newspaper asking me, “What the heck?” Because they use language like that in talking to the public.

So, as I say, if I were charged with taking a position on this, I’d be in fact-finding mode now before making a decision. But if you held the proverbial gun to my head (and I’d much prefer that to a literal one), I’d have to choose Ron on this one. And I might get embarrassed doing so — I might later have to run a full retraction on the challenged column last spring or something if it turned out Ron was wrong. But if you forced me, I’d go with him on this, because I know him. Or at least, I know him better than I do Spurrier, whom I’ve never met.

That means I used to run into Ron in the hallway sometimes, and stop to chat. I never actually worked with him. I don’t think he was in the newsroom when I was (pre-1994), and even if he had been, we’d have had little occasion to deal with each other. But he has always struck me as a pretty thoughtful, careful guy.

I knew people hated him — people of the “Cocky is God” persuasion. And I used to wonder about that, but I’ve often had occasion to wonder about really serious football fans. Sometimes, when one of Ron’s columns caused a splash of some sort, I’d actually turn to the sports pages and read it. And it usually read OK to me — of course, I was judging it outside the context of having any particular knowledge of the subject matter.

So Micah, that’s what I think.

Defining deviancy down in our discourse

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Corey Hutchins started this rolling on Twitter this morning, but what shocked me was that Amanda Alpert Loveday reTweeted it:

Best @nikkihaley quote ever! “She’s been busy F-ing the rest of the state. I’m not surprised that she F-ed me.”@HBoydBrown @CoreyHutchins

My shock arises partly from Amanda being the… well, something over at the SC Democratic Party (apparently they’re too democratic at party HQ for titles, but she recently appeared on Pub Politics as the counterpart of Matt Moore, the GOP executive director). I know that her Twitter feed says “My tweets reflect my personal opinions…..,”  but still…

The second is that, well, Amanda just seems like such a sweet “little girl” (to use our governor’s term) to an alter cocker like me. I mean, look at her; I ask you.

Amanda, Amanda, Amanda…

And Corey, and Boyd — what are you boys doing using language like that around Amanda?

Seriously, folks… This is not only grossly inappropriate language to be used when referring to the governor of our state, it’s not an appropriate topic, even if you used euphemisms.

And why am I writing about it? Well, I wouldn’t have if this had come from one of the usual sources for such. But this was said (apparently on the record) by a state representative, repeated by a representative of the Fourth Estate, and picked up by a party official.

And that’s wrong, on all counts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a term for it, or at least one that can be adapted to this purpose: Defining deviancy down.

We don’t need to be on this downward spiral, people.

The worst thing about Haley’s chirpy greeting order is the insulting assumption that underlies it

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The worst thing about the “It’s a great day in South Carolina!” order isn’t the fact that it is so grating and insulting to the caller. Callers can shrug that off; if they really need to do business with the state, they’ll take a breath and go ahead (even while filing a mental note that they now think less of SC government than they did before).

The worst thing is the attitude that underlies the order, which was ably set out in the newspaper this morning by Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey:

“While the press focuses on the negative, the governor is changing the culture of our state.. She is proud of South Carolina, and while we have challenges, we are making great progress every day. The focus of this greeting is to have state employees pass along a positive attitude and ask the caller, ‘How can I help you?’ so that they remember – and the people know – that they work for the taxpayers. The governor has always said that it’s time for government to work for the people, and this is the first step.”

She’s changing the culture of our state…. It’s time for government to work for the people…

This is the first step.

Because, you see, that never happened before. It’s never occurred to any state employee that they serve the people of South Carolina. Ever. Nikki Haley invented it. Thank God for Nikki Haley, because not one single state employee in the history of South Carolina has ever considered serving the public, even for a moment. If any had, this would not be the “first step” in implementing this wonderful new day. And this is the first step.

Again, we are seeing what we get when a person who does not have a clue about an organization — what it’s for, whom it serves, what its personnel are like, how it works, how it should work — is placed in charge of that organization.

Tragically for all of us, that organization is our state government — an institution that the people of our state, perhaps more than the people of any other state in the union, badly need to be well-led.

But there’s more to it than that. Nikki Haley is merely a symptom of a sickness in the politics of our state. The sickness is a nasty attitude of despising those who serve the public — and despising them more and more as their jobs become more difficult.

She is now engaged in the process of tearing down that workforce. And the first step is humiliation.

Is Lamar Alexander about to do something very cool — from an UnParty perspective?

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I’m puzzling, hopefully, over what this means:

The no. 3 Republican in the Senate will step down from his leadership position early next year, despite having no plans to retire from Congress.

Lamar Alexander informed his fellow GOP colleagues of his rather surprising decision on Tuesday morning in a letter obtained byPolitico, saying that the move was the best decision for him and the Senate.

“Stepping down from leadership will liberate me to spend more time working for results on the issues I care most about,” the 71-year-old former Tennessee governor wrote. “I want to do more to make the Senate a more effective institution so that it can deal better with serious issues. There are different ways to provide leadership within the Senate. After nine years here, this is how I believe I can now make my greatest contribution. For these same reasons I do not plan to seek a leadership position in the next Congress.”…

I’ve respected Lamar Alexander since  I covered him in his first successful run for governor in 1978, spending a good bit of time with him on the road (OK, so I was on the road with him 24/7 for one week before switching over to cover his opponent, but it was enough time to form a positive impression).

Lamar was never a guy you get particularly excited about. He was… bland. One of the most striking things about him was how much his speaking voice sounded like Pat Boone’s. (Once, I heard a PSA on the radio by Boone, and I thought it was the governor until he identified himself at the end — or was it the other way around?) His much-publicized walk across Tennessee in the trademark red-and-black shirt was SO contrived, such an earnest bid to be interesting, that I would joke about it, while at the same time appreciating his seriousness. He was what Tennessee needed after the rollicking corruption of Ray Blanton (who had defeated him four years earlier, on the very first election night of my newspaper career, when I was a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal). I would joke that Lamar’s main appeal to the voters was to subliminally project, “I won’t steal the silverware from the governor’s mansion.” But after Blanton, that was progress.

Turned out that there was a lot more progress to come with Alexander. He was different from any Republican governor I have seen since. He started out appointing Democrats to his Cabinet (his chief political adviser was someone who had worked for Democrats), and he reached out to the Democratic majority in the legislature to get his agenda passed, including significant movement toward merit pay for teachers. From day one, he was about raising the incomes of the average Tennessean, and he was for working with whomever it took to get that done. He worked particularly productively with the iconic speaker of the House (and later governor) Ned Ray McWherter.

He has served his state, and now his country, with pragmatic dedication and moderate sensibilities. So I’m sorry to see him leave leadership.

And puzzled. What does he mean he can be more effective outside that role? There’s a hint in the original Politico story:

Alexander says the decision was rooted in his desire to foster consensus in the gridlocked Senate, a role he felt constrained playing while spearheading the partisan Senate GOP messaging machine.

That sounds very cool — and even, despite this being Lamar Alexander, exciting. In an UnParty sense. I’d love to hear an elaboration on that. It would be nice to have back about 15 minutes of that time I spent riding around with him in cars and planes back in the day. I think I’d have more interesting questions now…

On the campaign plane with Alexander, back in the day./Brad Warthen

Moderates are rare in office, but fairly numerous out here in the real world

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The other day, Bart shared with me the following piece from The New York Times. Before I provide an excerpt, I’ll share what Bart had to say first:

Brad,

I am copying and pasting an article in the NYT about Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog Democrat considered to be the last true moderate in the House.  A very good read.  FYI – linking to articles is not one of my strong points.

Personally, I think he has identified the turning point of politics in my lifetime and how things have devolved since Newt Gingrich, a man I have never liked for one second, was elected to congress.  Gingrich tries to come across as an intellectual but in my estimation, he is a man possessing a high I.Q. but without the ability to put it to proper use for the good of everyone, not just his own personal ambitions.

The article is a refreshing walk down memory lane when one considers the tone of things out there today.  There was a time when politics was populated with men and women who had a certain sense of duty to all citizens, not just party loyalty.

Thanks,
Bart

My response to Bart was to say:

I don’t know whether Cooper is the LAST, but there are precious few — in office. We’re not so rare out in the population.

Which is true. Unfortunately, our vaunted two-party system increasingly guarantees that moderates will not make it to Congress. No one has a chance in the fall without the backing of one party or the other. And the nominating process weeds out reasonable people, most of the time. Sort of makes me want to try running myself sometime, just to see how hard it would be. My prediction: Hard as getting a Republican to say something nice about Barack Obama. Or a Democrat about W.

Here’s the excerpt:

The Last Moderate

By 

Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog Democrat who represents the Nashville area, was first elected to Congress in 1982. He was 28, and if it’s not quite right to say he’s been there ever since — he spent eight years in the private sector after losing the race for Al Gore’s Senate seat — he’s still been a congressman most of his adult life.

You’d think that Cooper’s tenure would ensure him the privileges of seniority. It doesn’t. Considering that he’s a mild-mannered man, you’d think he’d have friends on both sides of the aisle. Not so. He’s loathed by Republicans for being in the wrong party, and scorned by Democrats for his fiscal conservatism. At the least, you’d think that he’d be respected for his institutional memory. Wrong again.

The reason is that Cooper is the House’s conscience, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era. He remembers when compromise was not a dirty word and politicians put country ahead of party. And he’s not afraid to talk about it. “We’ve gone from Brigadoon to Lord of the Flies,” he likes to say….

Read the rest here.

Here’s how our governor apologizes: It’s HER fault!

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Earlier today, I passed on a headline on the WIS site that said, “SC Gov Haley says she regrets ‘little girl’ remark.”

WIS later took down that headline because they realized what I did when I read their story. There was nothing supporting the implication of the headline, which was that the governor had apologized.

Later in the day, Gina Smith over at The State explained what had actually happened. Here’s the operative paragraph:

“The story painted a grossly inaccurate picture and was unprofessionally done,” Haley said in a statement. “But my ‘little girl’ comment was inappropriate and I regret that. Everyone can have a bad day. I’ll forgive her bad story, if she’ll forgive my poor choice of words.”

Yep. In her expression of “regret,” she went further in trying to insult the reporter.

That’s our governor. If she does something she shouldn’t obviously it’s someone else’s fault.

Once, we had a “young lady” reporter at the paper, and a governor wanted to SPANK her. No, really.

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Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors,  they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:

CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer

If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.

The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?

Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.

But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.

This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.

At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”

A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.

It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .

A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.

Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.

The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.

Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”

Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”

No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.

At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.

Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.

Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?

Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?

Of course, the late Gov.  Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.

I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.

Check it out, guys! Girl fight! With Nikki Haley…

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A friend — a woman friend — passed on to me this item from The Post and Courier. She told me it might not appeal to me because it was “chick stuff” — that she nearly passed on it for the same reason (you’d have to know this woman, who in some ways thinks more like a guy than I do) — but that she thought it was worth a moment’s attention. An excerpt:

A lot of women are going to be disappointed with your comments on conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham’s radio show….

Maybe you were still feeling some fallout from reporter Renee Dudley’s story about your European job-recruiting trip funded by the taxpayers.

But that was no reason to say what you said.

Near the end of your interview, Ingraham offers this observation:

“This character at The Post and Courier clearly wants to portray you as someone hypocritical, that you’re not what you pretend to be.”

(No, governor, you’re doing a really good job of that on your own, actually, but that’s beside the point.)

You responded: “All I will tell you is, God bless that little girl at The Post and Courier. Her job is to create conflict, my job is to create jobs.”

Little girl?

The governor of the great state of South Carolina called another woman a little girl?…

Gee, all they had to do to get my attention was yell, “Girl Fight!” I would have come running. Any guy who’s ever been a third-grader would. We’d also be careful not to get in the middle of it…

Anybody else think Jim DeMint, the Man Who Would Be Kingmaker, has gotten too big for his britches?

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Or breeches, if you prefer to be proper. I just like using the colloquial version in this context.

I was not set off by the video above, but rather by this headline in the paper this morning:

DeMint mocks Obama in video, won’t attend speech

What I’m saying is that boycotting the speech is what gets me much more than the video, which is fairly run-of-the-mill, even tame. But the part where he won’t deign to listen to the president, after the president has already been dissed by the House, takes us to a new level.

Jim DeMint, between refusing to tolerate the presence of the president of the United States (perhaps our latter-day Wellington is frustrated not to have brought about Mr. Obama’s “Waterloo” yet) to his peremptorily summoning those who would replace the president before him, to be questioned one at a time like prisoners in the dock, seems to be trying to carve out a unique space for himself in American politics.

It seems to be a position something like that of a king (or something more powerful, a kingmaker). In any case, it’s nothing that our Framers envisioned in setting up this system of governance. It’s personal. It’s specific to him. And it answers to no one. We need to come up with a whole new system of political science (or at least, hark back to a very old one) even to come up with the terminology with which to explain what he is doing.

How does his pattern of behavior strike you?

We gotcher treason right HERE, Mr. Texas!

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Folks on the left in South Carolina, few as they are, have really been cranking out some videos lately.

Now there’s this one, above, from SCForwardProgress, which rips into Rick Perry for calling our homeboy, Ben Bernanke, “treasonous.”

And yeah, I felt pretty indignant, too. Ben’s one of us. He’s from the county right next to mine. He worked at South of the Border when he was in school, for goodness sakes. And he was appointed by George W. Bush, not that Obama feller or any other blamed librul.

And of course, in all serious, speaking that way of the fed chair is in NO way appropriate coming from someone even thinking of becoming president of the United States. The remark was, not to put too fine a point on it, gross.

But on the other hand, if you’re surprised, you haven’t spent much time around the Tea Party. They talk like this.

(Oh, one last thought, about the latter part of that video. We SC boys aren’t in much of a position to get on other people’s cases for talking secession. Puts us at a disadvantage…)

Trey Gowdy’s performance at Rotary Monday

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On the whole, it was good. He was well-received. Probably more so than Nikki Haley was a few weeks back, and she did pretty well also.

He certainly struck me — and to a much greater extent seemed to strike others — as a far, far more reasonable guy than the one who ran to the far right of Bob Inglis and eviscerated him in last year’s primary. It’s hard to explain to you why that was such a big deal unless you already understand. I had enough trouble finding time to write this post without taking time to go over the last 19 years.

But briefly: Bob Inglis shocked political observers across the state when he came out of nowhere to beat the Democratic incumbent in 1992. Scribes had to make excuses to their editors for why they hadn’t seen it coming. A favorite that I heard was “He cheated. He didn’t run a conventional campaign. He ran underground, through the churches.” Inglis was the prototype of two separate waves of revolution on the right that didn’t fully break until two years later. He was a new-wave religious conservative two years before David Beasley shocked the Republican establishment with the rise of that faction. (And boy, did the country club crowd sneer at the Bible-thumpers at the time!) But more to the point, he came along two years before the Class of 1994, and showed us a kind of fiscal conservatism that was not only rare, but unprecedented.

I had thought he was just another rhetorical fiscal conservative until, shortly after being elected, he did something I’d never seen one of them do: He voted against federal highway money for South Carolina, for his own constituents. Whoa, I thought. This guy’s actually for real. He continued in that vein. He term-limited himself after three terms. Then, after failing to beat Fritz Hollings (who called Inglis a “goddamn skunk”), he sat out for a bit and then came back. He came back as the same unique sort of conservative he’d always been. Inglis had always acted out of his own beliefs and conclusions, not because he was taking orders from any party or movement.

And that was his undoing. He always asked himself what was right, rather than what a faction demanded of him. And so it was that he favored a carbon tax. And voted (wrongly, but I respect his conscience on the matter) against the Iraq Surge. And was one of only seven Republicans to vote to reprove Joe Wilson for his outburst.

And for that Trey Gowdy crushed him in the primary last year. So I was very curious to see the kind of guy who could run that way to the right of Bob Inglis (from the Gowdy campaign website: “Inglis the Most Liberal Congressman of SC Republicans”), of all people — the guy with the 93.5% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. What kind of guy could accuse Bob Inglis of “hypocrisy” for chastising Joe?

The new look for Congress.

The Trey Gowdy I saw Monday is an interesting guy on a number of levels. I had never seen him before, and my eye ran right over him at first, as someone who could not be our speaker. For instance, he apparently does not own a comb. He appeared before the largest Rotary in the state without a tie, and with his hair looking the way mine looks only on Saturdays if I don’t take a shower first thing — not only disheveled, but matted from the pillow. (Others tell me it always looks like that, and evidence seems to support them.) If I go out like that, I wear a hat. He also evoked Saturday by the fact that he had not shaved that day. I kept thinking that was an optical illusion, that the light was just glinting off his chin in a funny way — until I saw him up close, and knew for sure that he had not shaved that day, if the day before.

He was going all-out to show that he was a different kind of congressman. Old-school Joe Wilson was there, and I tried to imagine him showing up to speak even to the smallest Rotary in the state in such a state of disarray. Impossible. Joe might get wild and crazy for two seconds once a career, but that’s about it. He’s a grownup, and Daddy shaves on weekdays.

So immediately, without saying a word, Mr. Gowdy projects: Not what you expected to see.

And then he shifts and does the conventional thing: He makes a number of disarming remarks to begin, such as praising Joe for being the father of four sons who have served in uniform, and saying things such as this: “I will promise each of you, you will disagree with at least one thing I say today. Some of you with everything that I say today. And that is absolutely fantastic.” That made some Rotarians chuckle with appreciation, but I wasn’t laughing. I knew this was a guy who needed to say things like that, because of how he got here.

And he said them, and he said them well. He ably presented the indisputable facts about the spending hole we’re in in this country — and to his credit presented them not as challenges to those horrible people on the other side of the aisle, but as things that everyone, left and right, stipulated as fact. To give you the benefit of his Powerpoint presentation, I got it from his staffer who was there. She had a bit of trouble emailing it, and broke it into three parts: this one, and then this one, and then this one. I hope you can view the slides. It’s hard for me to tell since I don’t have that application on this machine — except for a viewer, which may not work the same as the full software.

He preceded his slide show with another statement that I appreciated: “These are not Republican numbers, these aren’t Democrat (sic) numbers, these aren’t Tea Party numbers, these aren’t independent numbers, these are the numbers. If Chris von Holland, who was the ranking member of the Budget Committee and a Democrat were here, he would not take issue with any of these numbers.”

OK, point taken. And appreciated. I found little to dispute in what he said. And that was actually one of the main points he strove to make on Monday: That there really isn’t as much disagreement as you might think. It was good to hear.

All of which makes you wonder why, from afar, it seems no one can agree on anything. And there’s the rub. Mr. Gowdy stayed away from the kind of stuff that might have helped explain that — the kind of stuff that got him elected (that is, got him nominated, which where he lives is the same as elected), or that drew such national attention to the “SC5.”

And as it happened, my mind started to focus on those gaps. Several times in his speech or in answering questions, he would say something ingratiating and charming, something that was engaging and charming because it left certain pertinent details out. Here are a few examples:

  • He repeatedly said he had nothing against addressing taxes, that he and everyone else was for “tax reform.” But he said, suppose you let the Bush tax cuts expire. That would only give you $92 million a day in new revenue, when we borrow $4.7 billion a day. And then he moved on — without addressing why he wouldn’t go ahead and drop the tax cuts anyway. Why not? Why not put yourself on the high ground and make it possible for a grand bargain to be made? Especially when the taxes thus levied are not all that great, as you say. But he moved on without explaining that, except for a passing remark that he knew guys who would gladly let the Bush cuts expire in exchange for a Balance Budget Amendment. He said that as though it were a natural trade, as though such an absolutist change to the constitution itself were a concession no greater than itty-bitty (in his estimation) tax cuts to expire as they were scheduled to do. As though that were an even swap…
  • “I’ll commit to tax reform if everybody will commit to fiscal reform.” Really? Well then, please explain to me exactly who in Washington, what significant faction, came to the table refusing to cut spending. Everybody was willing to cut spending. And if you had given a little on taxes, you could have pushed them to cut more spending, so hungry were certain parties (such as the president, whose re-election seems in trouble) for a Grand Bargain. But he did not explain that discrepancy.
  • He was asked (by Julian Fowler) why, if everyone agreed in private on the basic facts as he said, why did Congress treat “compromise” as a dirty word? “I think you will see compromise in the last term of most people’s political careers. And I say that with a sad heart, to be honest with you. Primary politics is, um, is different from general election politics. That’s just a fact.” Really? Really? It makes you said that you nailed Bob Inglis’ hide to the wall for daring to compromise, to think for himself, for occasionally even voting with the other side when his conscience demanded? Yep, that kind of thing is indeed… different. A moment later he said, “I don’t like to vilify people.” Really?

There were other things that, in the kind of editorial board meetings I was accustomed to in my previous life, would have caused me to say, “Wait a minute,” and seek an explanation. (And, I suspect, Mr. Gowdy would have been able to provide satisfactory ones in some cases.) But the Rotarians Monday were not raising such objections. Listeners to speeches seldom do. Most people want to like the guy in front of them, especially when he puts himself out to be liked. And they liked Trey Gowdy. Two Rotarians thanked him for giving it to them straight, “without political spin.”

I liked him, too. But sometime I want to sit down with him and dig into a few of those omissions.

No, Joe — it was for inappropriate BEHAVIOR, not any point you were trying to make

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Wesley Donehue would be disappointed in me if I let one of his Joe Wilson releases go by without commentary. An excerpt from today’s:

Nearly two years ago I made national news when I voiced your outrage at the misrepresentations being perpetuated by the Obama administration. The media and Obama’s liberal allies attacked me for only pointing out the truth that ObamaCare would cover illegal immigrants.

Yesterday, my point was vindicated when the Department of Health and Human Services announced its newest ObamaCare grant. CNS News reported:

“Because the health care centers receiving $8.5 million in ObamaCare money ‘to target services to migrant and seasonal farm workers’ will not check the immigration status of the migrant workers who seek their services it is inevitable that they will serve illegal aliens.”

The president specifically promised the American people that ObamaCare would not cover those who are here illegally. He misled all of us.

Let’s go back to your initial assertion. No, Joe. You weren’t “attacked” for “only pointing out the truth.” You weren’t attacked, or criticized, for any sort of point you may have been trying to make.

No, you were criticized for the gross indecorum of shouting “You lie!” in the House chamber, at the President of the United States, while he was speaking to you. You “made national news” not for making some pithy, pertinent point, but for startlingly rude behavior.

You know that. You know it was wrong. You apologized. You’re not normally the kind of guy who does stuff like that, and you knew better.

Everybody slips up. But please, please stop going about with this martyrdom act pretending you were somehow a victim in this.

It is NOT a defense, it does not excuse the inappropriateness of the act, for you to say now, “But he WAS lying.” For the purpose of judging whether YOUR behavior was right or not, that doesn’t matter.

Let’s say you were sitting there listening to a speech by a president whose parents were not married when he was born. It would STILL be inappropriate for you to interrupt him by yelling, “You’re a bastard!” And it would be even less seemly, a year or two later, for you to send out a press release showing documentation of his illegitimacy in order to moan about how unfairly YOU have been treated.

OK?

B-minus?!?!?!? Well, that’s just so SC; we’re too polite to be honest

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Did you see this in The State today?

Legislators give Haley ‘B-‘ grade for first session

You’re kidding me, right? You want me to believe that the honest assessment of “legislators” is that Nikki Haley’s performance as governor is worthy of a B-minus? There’s just no way.

Yeah, I realize people who don’t know the State House, and who get their notions of such things from watching national TV news, will say, “That’s understandable — most of them are Republicans, right?” The majority of Republicans would seem to be the last people who would think Nikki Haley — or her predecessor — was worthy of a passing grade. Much less a B-minus. I mean — these people just sued her (successfully) for trying to boss them around. Or McConnell did, which amounts to the same thing. And that was not the low point of the relationship.

Yeah, I know how they are. It’s just the first session. At this point, they were trying to give Mark Sanford every chance, too.

But a grade — a grade isn’t supposed to be a tool of diplomacy, or an expression of future hopes (“Maybe she’ll get better…”)

A grade should be an honest assessment of actual performance. It should confront uncomfortable truths. An honest teacher says, “I know you’re trying hard, and nothing personal, but you flunked the course.”

But we don’t do that in South Carolina, do we? And it’s why we don’t move forward as a state; it’s why we lag behind. We’re so busy being polite and worrying about offending anyone that we never state the case, analyse the problem, and move to fix it.

We can be so pathetic.

I don’t even want to know how The State chose the lawmakers it interviewed. In any case, it was only 20 percent of the General Assembly. I wonder what an actual poll of the whole legislative branch, with secret ballots, would have produced. Probably something much closer to what The State‘s readership came up with. Yeah, the readers who responded were heavily Richland County. But that Democratic bias would have been balanced, in a real survey of the General Assembly, by the fact that those officeholders know her, which should make them just as likely to be negative as Democrats…

Talk about being Ms. Bossypants…

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One of the women in my household took it back to the library, so I didn’t get far enough in Tina Fey’s Bossypants to find out what happened after she hit puberty, but that’s cool. The part I did read was pretty funny.

What is not funny is the Gov. Bossypants we have over at the State House, who did this today:

Gov. Nikki Haley ordered lawmakers back to Columbia next week after they failed to pass a key piece of her legislative agenda on the legislative session’s last day, sparking dissention among legislative Republicans and howls from Democrats.

Haley wants lawmakers to return at 10 a.m. Tuesday to consider bills creating a Department of Administration, allowing the governor and lieutenant governor to run as a ticket, allow the governor to appoint the secretary of education and a bill merging the Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole into the Department of Corrections.

“Pick any two,” Haley said, asking lawmakers to voluntarily forfeit the $250 daily pay they are due, a total of $42,500 a day….

In other words, Do my will, and don’t get paid for doing it.

What a supreme mix of autocratic egoism and faux populism. The perfect Tea Party mix, steeped so as to make the maximum Palin-style impression.

Of course, she did allow them to pick two out of four, which I suppose Her Bossiness would consider to be magnanimity.

Here’s the problem with that: I would gladly vote for three out of the four (if her Bossiness could deign to condescend to do so, I would, were I a lawmaker, have to ask her to explain the virtues of combining the D of PP&P with Corrections). You know why? Because I am one of South Carolina’s most monotonously persistent advocates of giving the executive branch the ability to effectively administer the executive branch and be accountable for it.

But this kind of presumption of dictating to the legislative branch plays straight into the hands of those lawmakers who want to mischaracterize such proposals as a case of executive overreaching: See? She’s trying to FORCE lawmakers to pass the laws she wants. She should advocate strenuously for her positions, but there is a world of difference between advocating that a coequal branch of government do something, and using the power of one’s own branch to FORCE an issue that is the prerogative of that other branch.

The latter is not cool. Which, to turn full circle, brings us back to Tina Fey — a standing prop of her comedy is that she is not cool, not by a long shot.

But when Gov. Haley does the Bossypants routine, it’s just not as funny.