Category Archives: Columns

Finally

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Finally, voices of reason
talk back on Iraq
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FINALLY.
    Finally, after weeks of serious talk about taking the suicidal step of pulling American troops out of Iraq — driven by the steady drip of relentless news coverage of a casualty one day, two the next, and virtually nothing else; by poll numbers that fed on that coverage; and by political opportunism on one side of the partisan aisle, and political cowardice on the other — some people who knew better started talking back.
    It started about 10 days ago.
20051126issuecovus400    That’s when The Economist sent out its last week’s edition, with these words on the cover: “Why America Must Stay.”
     After going on at length, with brutal frankness, about the mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq (and I urge you to go to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and follow the links to read this and the other items I will mention), the piece gave both the positive reasons and negative reasons why we have no choice but to maintain our force there until the job is done. The “positive” reasons had to do with political and military progress achieved. Some “negative” reasons: “The cost to America of staying in Iraq may be high, but the cost of retreat would be higher. By fleeing, America would not buy itself peace. Mr. Zarqawi and his fellow fanatics have promised to hound America around the globe. Driving America out of Iraq would grant militant Islam a huge victory. Arabs who want to modernize their region would know that they could not count on America to stand by its friends.”
    Then, on Saturday, political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote in The Wall Street Journal of the kind of speech he’d like to hear President Bush deliver. He complained, quite rightly, that the president was wasting time “arguing against critics of the Iraq war who are trying to rewrite history,” when “What most Americans care about is not who is lying but whether we are winning.”
    And we are winning — a fact of which most Americans are tragically unaware. Mr. Wilson went on to tell how the president should explain that. A sample: “We grieve deeply over every lost American and coalition soldier, but we also recognize what those deaths have accomplished. A nation the size of California, with 25 million inhabitants, has been freed from tyranny, equipped with a new democratic constitution, and provided with a growing new infrastructure that will help every Iraqi and not just the privileged members of a brutal regime. For every American soldier who died, 12,000 Iraqi voters were made into effective citizens.”
    Then on Tuesday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman wrote — once again, in the Journal — a piece headlined “Our Troops Must Stay.” Informed by a recent visit to Iraq, his picture of a nation moving towardLiebermaniraq becoming a vital democracy (as long as we don’t abandon it) was even more compelling than the others. But my own anti-partisan heart was probably warmed most by this passage:
    “I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.” Amen.
    Why such a flurry of similar statements of good sense all at once? It may be that the voices of grim reason finally piped up in alarmed reaction to the fact that the American people were actually starting to think of doing the unthinkable. They also wrote (very specifically, in Mr. Wilson’s case) in reaction to the appalling leadership vacuum left by the failure of the president of the United States to explain, and keep explaining, to his people the stakes in this war.
    Then finally, finally, finally, the president reported for duty on Wednesday. As he should, he counseled “time and patience.” But he did more important things than that. He not only explained why we must think not of timetables for withdrawal, but measures for success. He also spelled out how we will achieve those goals. He showed a way to outcomes that too many Americans have Bushvictory_1stopped being able to imagine.
    And he addressed the mad talk about timetables for withdrawal, promising that “decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders — not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.” In other words, by the brave men and women fighting this fight, rather than by Democratic opportunists and Republican cowards.
    “Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw,” he said, “would send a signal to our enemies — that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends.” Not only that, but it would tell them exactly how long they have to wait — and that would be insane.
    The president’s speech was accompanied by the release of a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” In greater detail than the address, it set out the definition of victory, and the plans for achieving it. It also stated what should be obvious: “(T)he terrorists, Saddamists, and rejectionists do not have the manpower or firepower to achieve a military victory over the Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces. They can win only if we surrender.”
    There remains much left to be said, and even more to be done. But it is gratifying and reassuring that the president and others are now discussing, in de
pth, the actual situation and what should be done about it. Finally.

Yep, you’ve seen it before

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If my column on today’s page looks familiar to you, that’s because it appeared as a blog post last week.

You’re accustomed to seeing my columns from the paper published simultaneously in this space, with links. This time, I thought I’d try the opposite, and see how it goes. Note that I’m not posting the column version, because that would be redundant. If you want to comment on the column — and I hope you will — please go to the original blog post.

This one seemed like a good one to try this with because 1) I had hoped for more feedback on the original post, but didn’t get it (possibly because I posted it on Thanksgiving), and 2) It happened to be column-length, and easily adaptable for print.

Anyway, I look forward to your feedback on the subject. We can’t get this new party (the party for the rest of us) started without a mascot, can we? Once we’ve got that, we’ll come up with a name. Then we’ll recruit candidates — or not. Let’s see how it goes.

Unparty column

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It’s my party, and I’ll vie if I want to
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
INSPIRED BY Ariel Sharon’s decision to abandon the Likud Party he helped build and start another, more centrist one — one that immediately began to catch on to the extent that it looks as though it will propel him past the established factions and into another term in office — I posted a blog item last week that asked, “Why can’t we do this here?”
    Excited at the idea of “giving those of us in the sensible middle an actual alternative to the mutually exclusive, mutually loathing Democrats and Republicans,” I got right to the business of setting up my own faction, posing such questions as: What would be the precepts of such a party? What should we call it? Who would be some good candidates? What animal should be our mascot?
    My respondents quickly brought me down to Earth. I heard from both sides of the partisan divide, and the more ardent were soon ignoring my questions and clawing each other. But both sides seemed to agree that those of us who eschew the current phony ideologies don’t believe in anything ardently enough to get things done.
    What a relief when “David” spoke for me by writing, “I am always intrigued by this argument that moderates aren’t passionate about anything…. I take every issue on its own merits and when I make up my mind, I am as passionate and diehard about that position as any conservative or liberal could ever be.”
    Exactly. Why is it so hard for partisans and ideologues to understand that we might hold our own values and positions even more passionately than they hold theirs, for the simple fact that they are ours. We didn’t do what they did, which was to buy an entire set of attitudes off the rack, preselected and packaged by someone else, and chosen based on nothing deeper than brand name.
    Is there anything wishy-washy about the stands taken by such “moderates” as John McCain and our own Lindsey Graham? Was Joe Lieberman being a fence-sitter when he helped push through the Iraq Liberation Act, which way back in 1998 made the overthrow of Saddam Hussein the official policy of this country?
    These are the people who take the independent risks that make things happen, from campaign finance reform to banning torture. Without them as pivots, giving ideas credibility by virtue of their own independence, we’d be forever in a state of stalemate, unable to settle any difficult issue.
    And those of us who support their like are the ones who decide elections
— not the partisans, who can be taken for granted.
    The best thing is to have no parties. But it’s still fun to imagine what kind of party we who despise them would create if we were so inclined. Let’s give it a go.
    Right off, I’m stumped as to a name. So for now, let’s just call it the “Unparty.” (After all, the “Uncola” caught on for a while.)
    Are there any fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets? Sure:

  • First, unwavering opposition to fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets. Within our party would be many ideas, and in each situation we would sift through them to find the smartest possible approach to the challenge at hand. Another day, a completely different approach might be best.
  • Respect for any good idea, even if it comes from Democrats or Republicans.
  • Contempt for any stupid idea, even if it comes from our own party leaders.
  • Utter freedom to vote however one’s conscience dictates, without condemnation or ostracism from fellow party members.

    Every Unpartisan would have his or her own set of positions on issues, having worked them out independently. But to banish the thought that Unpartisans don’t take strong stands, here would be some positions I would bring to the party table (and remember, this is just me, not the editorial board of The State):

  • Respect for life. Opposition to abortion, the death penalty and torture of prisoners.
  • Belief in just war theory, and in America’s obligation to use its strength for good. (Sort of like the Democrats before Vietnam.)
  • A single-payer national health care system — for the sake of business and the workers. If liberals and conservatives could stop driving a wedge between labor and capital for about five minutes, we could make this a reality.
  • Universal education — as a state, not a national, responsibility. Go ahead and shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and make sure you provide equal educational opportunity for all on the state level.
  • A rational, nonideological energy policy that will make us independent of despotic foreign regimes: Drill in the ANWR. Impose strict efficiency standards on Detroit. Build more refineries. Since we are at war and they are helping the enemy, build internment camps for Hummer drivers. (OK, scratch that; just make the Humvee like automatic weapons — banned for all but military use. In fact, what was wrong with the Jeep?) Launch a Manhattan Project to find something better than fossil fuels. Take the advice of Charles Krauthammer and set gasoline permanently at $3 a gallon — when the price of crude drops, raise the tax to keep the pump price at $3. Unlike Mr. Krauthammer (who’d use the proceeds for tax cuts), I’d make like a real conservative and balance the budget.

    Such ideas are not left, right or wishy-washy. Admittedly, in my zeal to debunk the myth that we “moderates” (an inadequate word, really, for independents) don’t take strong stands, I’ve deliberately chosen some ideas that are attractive to me but are too out there for my own editorial board. (Although the issues they address are similar to some set out by potential Unpartisan Paul DeMarco in comments on my blog.) But wouldn’t that make for some lively Unparty conventions? And wouldn’t they be more worth watching than those scripted, stultifying pep rallies that the Democrats and Republicans hold every four years?
    I certainly think so. In fact, that’s one point on which most of us Unpartisans could agree.

Knight Ridder column

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What will happen to this newspaper?
I don’t know. Nobody does
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ONLY ONCE in my life have I bought stock all by myself, on purpose, with perfectly good money that was sitting safely in my bank account.
    I bought 20 shares of Knight Ridder — the company that owns the newspaper I work for — at the impossibly low price of $62.65. It had been as high as $80 a share just a year before, and was bound to head that way again, right?
    In October, it fell to $52.42.
    I wasn’t the only one who was, um, disappointed. A man named Bruce S. Sherman, whose Private Capital Management company owns 19 percent of Knight Ridder’s stock (even more than I do) wrote a letter telling the corporate brass to put the company up for sale, or else. Last week, the company took a step in that direction. But while the stock has jumped up close to the price at which I bought it, nobody has rushed to scoop us up yet.
    The irony is that people I meet have actually been asking me, as a member of The State’s executive team, what all of this means, and what’s likely to happen next. And I’m the one to whom other senior staffers have to speak very slowly and distinctly when explaining something financial.
    Here’s the bigger irony: What I have to say on the subject is as valuable as what almost anybody else says, because nobody knows what’s going to happen (unless it’s already happened and they haven’t told me).
    I’ve read what the analysts and the smart business writers at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and other publications have had to say. I’ve read memos from corporate. I’ve discussed it with my colleagues. And I’m about where I started.
    Will the company be sold? I don’t know. If so, to whom? I don’t know. Will it be sold intact, or will the pieces be sold off to different buyers? I don’t know. What will it all mean to The State, and the community it serves? I don’t know. What will it mean to me?
    I don’t know. There’s a lot of speculation, most of which will be shown to be nonsense when the whole thing shakes out.
    While such companies as Tribune (as in Chicago), McClatchy and The New York Times are mentioned, Gannett — the only newspaper chain with larger circulation than ours — is seen by some as the only entity with the motivation and resources to swallow us whole. Then again, we could be bought by Yahoo! or eBay.
    The experts say that what has driven this stockholder dissatisfaction is a set of dire portents for the entire industry. The retailers whose advertising is so critical to newspapers are consolidating. Readers are turning to the Internet and other free sources of news. Or they’re just not reading as much as earlier generations.
    Experts also say newspapers are still a good buy, and that Knight Ridder is undervalued. The Journal said a “reasonable valuation range” for KR stock is from $70 to $100. It also said it was doubtful anyone would pay that. So much for experts.
    I actually think that price range is reasonable (and am prepared to sell you a few shares in that range). I also think many of the evil portents are baloney. Readers can turn to the Internet all they want, and they’ll find newspapers already there, providing news content and selling advertising. Eventually, under current or future management, they’ll find a way to make as much money there as they once did peddling dead trees.
    Ultimately, however the news is delivered, it will have to be paid for, either by subscription (a word that freaks out Web-surfers) or advertising. You see, it actually costs something to gather news. If newspapers, with their expensive armies of reporters, all of a sudden went away, you’d find the pickings of actual news on the ’Net to be pretty slim.
    But hey, don’t listen to me. I don’t even know for whom I’ll be working in the new year. But I do know this: I’ve been here before.
    I worked the first 10 years of my career for The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, which was owned by The Des Moines Register Co. Some top shareholders in that privately held company tried to sell us to Dow Jones, which owns the Journal. That caused another major stockholder to try to sell the Des Moines paper to The Washington Post, and our little daily to The New York Times (or so the scuttlebutt had it). All those masters of our little universe were shown up in the end, when Gannett waltzed in and bought it all for $200 million. What this experience taught me is that once a company is in play, even those who think they’re driving the process have no idea how it will come out.
    I’ve heard stories about what happened after Gannett took over, but I don’t know the truth of it, because I had left to go to work for Knight Ridder in Wichita — not because of Gannett, but because I didn’t get along with a new publisher Des Moines had sent us just before all the craziness started. (As it happens, I’m about to get a new publisher here, just as the uncertainty of a potential sale hangs over us all. Again. Interesting, huh?)
    I was miserable in Kansas, and almost immediately after the company bought The State, I came here. As I said, I had gone to Wichita not because I want
ed to be there, but to work for Knight Ridder. Purely a career move. But I learned my lesson, and when I came here I came to work for The State — the largest newspaper serving the people of my native state. I pay little attention to what goes on at corporate (something I can do because Knight Ridder doesn’t believe in meddling in editorial policy). In my first interview for a job at The State, I said my ultimate goal was to be editorial page editor, which was where I thought I could be most useful. And 18 years later, here I am.
    So what’s going to happen next? Well, for my part — and that of the team I work with — we’ll keep on doing our best to make the editorial pages a place where South Carolinians can come together to have constructive conversations about the critical issues that face us all, locally and statewide. We will still be motivated by the dream of a South Carolina that is no longer last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last.
    And we’ll do all that as long as whoever owns the paper lets us.

“Three Amigos” column

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Reform backers disappointed,
but not discouraged
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THEY WERE called the “Three Amigos,” even though there were up to five of them. They were business leaders who were instrumental in pushing the Legislature to pass the Education Accountability Act of 1998. Later, they served on the Education Oversight Committee that was created by that legislation.
    They were Bill Barnet, Larry Wilson, Joel Smith, Bob Staton and James Bennett (scroll down on the link to bio). But the old “Amigos” gag led me to ask three of them for reaction to last week’s news that, for the first time since the standards they pushed went into effect, schools across the state failed to advance.
Far more (354) got a lower grade than received a higher one (55), compared with 2004, while most (668) held steady.
    Messrs. Wilson, Barnet and Staton were all “disappointed” by the results, but none would own up to being “discouraged.”
    They were not surprised by what they saw as a temporary setback on a long “journey.”
After all, this is what the Accountability Act was supposed to do — use tough standardized tests to show objectively where the challenges are, so that they can be addressed.
    “I’m not all that upset about it,” Larry Wilson (whose latest ideas on education and economic development were the subject of last week’s column) called to tell me.
    “You have to look at long-term trends,” he said. One year’s setback isn’t enough to worry about. If schools lose ground next year, too, “Then I’ll begin to be concerned about a trend.”
    He noted that those who have spent their whole school careers under the law’s regimen are showing remarkable progress. For instance, our fourth-graders exceeded the national average in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, the “nation’s report card.”
    “As these students progress, we’ll see better results,” he said.
    He said the state has four big areas to work on:

  • Appropriate, early remediation for kids who need it.
  • Consolidating school districts to eliminate the “inefficiency and high cost of small districts.”
  • Early childhood education, getting children ready for the increased rigor they’ll face in K-12.
  • Raising expectations of students, parents and communities.

    As one trained in systems engineering, he says “education’s no different from any other complex system.” The key is finding the right buttons to push and dials to turn.
    Bill Barnet left the Oversight Committee to become mayor of Spartanburg, but his interest in the mission hasn’t waned.
    He said it’ll take time to overcome the “generational abuse” that led to the conditions the Accountability Act sought to address.
    He illustrated this with a story: For years, he ignored a herniated disc — until the pain in his leg became excruciating, and he consented to surgery. When his leg still hurt weeks later, he complained to the doctor. The doctor told him he couldn’t just assume the pain would go away overnight when he had allowed the damage to continue for 10 years.
    Similarly, the challenges to educational achievement in South Carolina “cannot be solved in any one- or five-year period.”
    He bristles at any suggestion that the struggle should be abandoned for, say, tax credits that encourage parents to abandon the schools.
    “The governor says, ‘How can you be comfortable and pleased with where you are?’.æ.æ.æ. I look him in the eye and say I’m not comfortable and I’m not happy,” he said. And then, he says, he tells Gov. Mark Sanford that while he, Bill Barnet, believes in “choice” (such as charter and magnet schools) where it works, the “Put Parents in Charge Act” is “all about your constituents, and maybe your run for president.” Ultimately, it’s a “huge distraction” from the real issues, such as the inequality between rich and poor districts.
    He keeps an eye on efforts to address that through comprehensive tax reform, but wonders if it is politically possible: “Greenville has to be willing to accept the premise that they’re going to take their money and send it to Dillon.”
    The message, he insists, shouldn’t be “stay the course.” It should be “stay the course, with thoughtful adjustments.”
    The only one of the three still on the Oversight Committee, Bob Staton takes heart from the knowledge that “Our kids are still being better educated than they were seven or eight years ago.”
In fact, he expected a setback such as this one last year — the first time the bar was raised on what schools had to accomplish.
    But he knows not everyone sees it his way: “People will use this information to validate their point of view that we’re awful, we’ve always been awful and we’ll always be awful,” he said.
    “My frustration is, people just look at a piece of it,” such as graduation rates. But today’s dropouts started school before the Accountability Act. “The kids that are beginning to come through it are doing better,” he said. “The graduation rate is the culmination of 18 years of that kid’s life and what goes on in it.”
    He cited “three things to look at” going forward:

  • Where a child is in the third grade. Remediate if necessary.
  • The transition from middle to high school, when reading proficiency is essential to mastering critical thinking skills.
  • Moving out of high school and into career preparation.

    “We’ve got to get them through each of those stages,” he said.
    And my reaction? The questions to be asked today are: What are the conditions that led to 55 schools doing better, and how do we go about replicating them in the 354 that slipped?

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

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A comprehensive plan for
making us wealthier and wiser
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LARRY WILSON, one of the chief architects
of the Education Accountability Act, came by the office the other day and offered a pretty compelling vision for what South Carolina should do next.
    The local entrepreneur doesn’t hold elective office, and doesn’t claim to speak for anyone but himself. But the ideas he put forth are worth sharing because:

  • He is a board member for the Palmetto Institute, and that think tank is expected to join with the Palmetto Business Forum, the Competitiveness Council and the state Chamber of Commerce to set forth a unified vision for how to make the average South Carolinian wealthier. Some of these ideas may crop up in that context.
  • He is also close to the new speaker of the S.C. House, Bobby Harrell. How many of these ideas Mr. Harrell buys into and how many he has told Mr. Wilson — according to Larry’s account — just aren’t feasible I don’t know.

    Nor do I know how many of these ideas my editorial board colleagues and I will go for once we sit down and study them.
    But I was sufficiently impressed by this set of interlocked proposals that it seems worth throwing out to see what others think. If not this, we need some kind of comprehensive strategy for moving South Carolina forward. We must get beyond the usual piecemeal responses to crises and interest group demands if we’re to catch up.
    The critical element that ties all of these ideas together is the unassailable fact that education and economic development are inseparable. If we don’t realize that, we’ll continue to make 80 percent of the national income.
    I don’t have room to set out everything covered in our wide-ranging discussion, but here are the most intriguing and/or appealing ideas that I heard:

EDUCATION
    Mr. Wilson wants an Education Quality Act that includes:

  • Early remediation. Third-graders scoring below basic on the PACT would attend school year-round in the fourth grade, under master teachers or National Board-certified teachers. The teachers’ incentive? Higher pay for 230 days of teaching. He would then add a grade level at a time, on up to high school.
  • Full-day kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This would be provided at “accountable, certified” public and private schools, “financed by vouchers and integrated w/First Steps.” The money might come in part from consolidating current pre-5K efforts, and be distributed in a way markedly different from the awful “Put Parents in Charge” scheme: Low-income kids would get full funding (about $4,000 apiece). The money would go to the school their parents choose. Higher-income folks would get a tax deduction (not a credit) to help with a portion of the cost. “I’m absolutely against vouchers in the public schools, by the way,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is an area where I think it will work.”
  • An appointed state superintendent of education.
  • A BRAC-style commission for reducing the absurd number of school districts in the state. He credited this idea to Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, citing the facts that 41 of the state’s 85 districts serve only 14 percent of all students, but account for 100 percent of schools judged “unsatisfactory” under the Accountability Act.
  • A statewide salary schedule for educators, by category and qualification. This way, for instance, Marion County wouldn’t lose good teachers to Horry just because the Grand Strand county can pay so much more.

KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
    Mr. Wilson would like to increase the lottery money going to endowed chairs from $30 million to $40 million to take greater advantage of this indispensable tool for helping our research universities to boost our economy.
    He would also push for an Industry Partners Act that would:

  • Recruit or set up companies to apply cutting-edge research going on in the state, accelerating the growth of economic clusters built around automotive innovation (Clemson), “Next Energy” development (USC) and biotech (MUSC and USC). The idea would be to market the state’s under-acknowledged assets and provide such incentives as local demonstration projects — say, running buses in the Midlands on hydrogen. The goal: to see these products manufactured here, by highly paid South Carolinians.
  • Define respective, interconnected roles for the state Commerce Department, universities, S.C. Research Authority and tech system in boosting knowledge-based enterprises in the state.

TAX REFORM
    Comprehensive tax reform, of course — the only kind worth talking about. Fortunately, while there’s a lot of talk regarding “property tax relief” as an end in itself, the climate has never been better for realigning our whole tax structure.
    Mr. Wilson calls it “tax-balancing.” He would shift the burden of financing schools to the state (the only way to standardize teacher pay and otherwise reduce the gap between rich and poor districts). A Senate panel is talking about replacing the property tax as a school funding source with a higher sales tax. But Mr. Wilson raises two caveats: Care must be taken not to raise the sales tax to the point that S.C. merchants can’t compete with the Internet and neighboring states, and the tax burden must not be shifted to businesses to the point that it stifles job creation.
    That latter point is worth considering for a reason he didn’t bring up: If only owner-occupied homes were exempted from school property taxes, gross inequality would still exist between districts rich in industry and commerce, and those without that base.
    He would also:

    “The point of all this is, it fits together,” Mr. Wilson concluded. “You can’t fix one problem without fixing the other.”
    Exactly.

Sunday, Oct. 30 column

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Profiles in (incremental) courage
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
SEVEN U.S. senators tried to inject a little sanity into the federal budget last week. We can take pride in the fact that two of them were from South Carolina.
    Aside from Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, the group of Republicans included John McCain of Katrinacost_2 Arizona, John Ensign of Nevada, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Sununu of New Hampshire.
    Their proposals don’t go nearly far enough. But the sad truth is that by Washington standards, the initiative by these seven counts as a really bold move.
    They would:

  • Freeze cost-of-living pay raises for federal employees (including Congress), except those in the military and law enforcement.
  • Delay implementation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, set to begin in 2006. Lower-income folks would still get $1,200 to help pay for medicine, while upper brackets would pay higher Medicare premiums a year earlier than planned.
  • Eliminate $24 billion worth of earmarked pork projects in the recent $286 billion highway bill.
  • Cut discretionary — that is, non-entitlement — spending by 5 percent across the board, exempting only national security.

    Fine, as far as it goes. But consider:

  • This is billed as a way to pay for Katrina relief. It would free up $125 billion. But with a deficit of $318.62 billion in fiscal 2005, and a bigger deficit projected in the year just begun, these moves would be inadequate if we didn’t spend a dime on disaster aid.
  • Folks in Washington were actually celebrating the fact that the deficit was only $318.62 billion. It was expected to be higher. But it’s still the third-highest deficit in history, though dwarfed by the $412.85 billion shortfall in 2004. Another South Carolinian, Democratic Rep. John Spratt, noted that the Bush administration had once predicted a $269 billion surplus for 2005. As he told The Washington Post, that means 2005 turned out “$588 billion worse than the Bush administration projected when it sent up its first budget in 2001.”
  • The new drug benefit should not be merely delayed. It should be thrown out. The original cost projection of $400 billion over 10 years has risen to more than $720 billion. The legislation deliberately avoided obvious steps to lower drug prices, even forbidding the government to use its purchasing clout to force down costs. Kicking this can down the road doesn’t solve the problem.
  • Speaking of can-kicking: Baby boomers will soon start retiring in droves. And nothing has been done yet to pay for their Social Security and Medicare.
  • While federal employees still serving their country would lose raises, those who have retired from federal service will get a 4.1 percent increase in their pension checks starting in January. Nothing against retirees, but this is the biggest cost-of-living increase in 15 years. Is this the time for it?
  • About 48 million Social Security recipients will also get a 4.1 percent increase in the coming year — the biggest since 1991. What with higher energy costs, I doubt that many will be taking luxury cruises on an average hike of $39 a month. Still, do you expect a pay raise of 4.1 percent in the coming year? I don’t, and I don’t think I’m in the minority.
  • Any across-the-board cut — a favorite remedy on the state level in South Carolina — is a cop-out. It avoids tough decisions, and hurts efficient, vital functions of government just as badly as wasteful programs that should be eliminated entirely. If senators can exempt national security (which they should), they can go further and specify what gets cut and what doesn’t elsewhere.
  • Rethinking tax cuts — some of them, anyway (such as $70 billion in new ones proposed in the 2006 budget) — should at least be on the table. Republicans believe religiously that they are necessary to prosperity. I’m an agnostic on this point. It makes sense that some tax cuts would give a kick to the economy. Of course, so can federal spending. Maybe that’s why the GOP has pursued both courses so zealously since gaining control of the political branches. But I can’t believe all tax cuts are created equal in terms of their salutary economic effect. To refuse to reconsider any of them is to be blinded by ideology.

    I don’t expect any of my concerns to gain serious traction on the Hill. The modest proposals put forth by the sensible seven were, of course, immediately assailed by Democrats. Our own Rep. Jim Clyburn complained that these cuts would be unfair to poor and middle-class citizens.
    But Democrats always say things like that. What’s more relevant is what Republicans do, since they’re running the show. And what they’ve done is cut taxes while presiding over the biggest expansion of the federal government (not counting the military, which should have expanded) since Lyndon Johnson. Remember the huge intrusion into state and local affairs called No Child Left Behind? The latest farm bill? The $223 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska (merely a symbol of billions in spending on unnecessary asphalt)?
    Speaking of LBJ — we’re at war, folks. Everybody, rich and poor, should be giving up something Katrinacost2_2 to help us win it. Our volunteer military is doing its part, but almost no one else is.
    As for Katrina relief, the Republican leadership is talking about maybe cutting $50 billion or so — an absurdity in times when we consider deficits of over six times that worthy of applause.
    So what Sens. Graham and DeMint and five others are talking about deserves our praise and encouragement. It might not go far enough, but at least they want to do away with the Alaska bridge. That’s a start.

Three questions, three answers

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To respond to three questions raised by Lee in connection with a previous post:

1. What good does it do if the council members are puppets of special interests? I’d rather have a crooked mayor — which would be easy to see and do something about — than a corrupt, fragmented system with no clear lines of accountability. You know, when I was on the radio show last night, folks kept making ominous, but nonspecific, assertions about powerful business interests supposedly pushing for strong mayor. Well first, I haven’t seen any real pushing going on from any quarter, except from the adamant defenders of the status quo, such as E.W. Cromartie. And second, our editorial board is probably the most vocal advocate for strong-mayor, and I’ll tell you right up front what our vested interest is: We want to be able to tell clearly who is accountable — when bad things happen, when good things happen, and when (the most common situation) nothing happens, or at least things take too long to happen.

2. Well, there are a number of examples I could cite — for instance the way a series of confused signals from local leadership lost us minor-league baseball. But I’ve written enough about that one lately. Let’s talk instead about Canalside. Yeah, a private entity is now poised to start developing that unbelievably choice piece of real estate — 12 years after CCI closed. During those 12 years, development of the riverfront was supposedly a huge priority for the city, yet practically nothing happened. On CCI, we got false starts and indecision. Then there was all that moaning about how hard it was to negotiate with the Guignard family regarding their stretch of riverfront property — until USC (an institution with a clear leader) steps in and makes working with the Guignards look easy. (Whether it was easy or not, I don’t know, but based on the family members I know, I never believed it could have been as hard as the city let on). The president of the university, by the way, is the one most clearly empowered public-sector executive in Columbia. He certainly has more leeway to set forth a vision and implement it than either the governor or the mayor.

3. That’s easy. The same way they can be stopped now — by city council. The point of having a strong mayor isn’t to have a sovereign with supreme power. The city council would still be voting on major projects (certainly those requiring large expenditures), ordinances and overall policy and direction for the city. The value in the strong-mayor position is that it would attract the kind of individual who could make sure that once a decision is made, it is acted upon in a timely and efficient manner.

Radio Radio

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Some of my friends sit around every evening
And they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
And the promise of an early bed…
                        — "Radio Radio," by Elvis Costello

I’ll be joining some of my friends this evening to talk about the times ahead and how to get there — on the radio.

Specifically, we’ll be on Cynthia Hardy’s "On Point" show on WWDM (101.3) from 6 to 7 p.m. Last I heard, J.T. McLawhorn and Howard Duvall will be the other guests.

We’ll be talking about the subject of my column today. Listen in, and then leave your comments on this posting. Don’t be overwhelmed with indifference; join in.

No juice, no Joe

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There’s no either/or:
Without the system,
you don’t get the man

“Charleston will not put up with inefficiency. We’ve been efficient too long.”
                 — Charleston District 7
                     City Councilman
                     Louis L. Waring

“I go to bed thinking about something that needs to get done for the city, and I start my day with it.”
                  — Charleston Mayor
                      Joseph P. Riley Jr.

THE PROBLEM with Joe Riley is that he’s too good at his job. This gives defenders of the status quo in Columbia an excuse to say Charleston’s success is because of the man, not the system. Therefore, they say, there’s no point in ditching Columbia’s useless council-manager form of government for the strong-mayor system that Mr. Riley embodies.
    So Mayor Riley came up from Charleston Wednesday, along with two city council members, to explain to a commission studying reform in Columbia why it’s the form of government that makes the Holy City work.
    As usual, he did a good job.
    Even to raise the question of whether it is the shape of the job or the quality of the individual whoTestify_011 fills it is to miss the point. Charleston’s is the only form of city government that could attract a Joe Riley. A person with the abilities to lead a city forward will only run for a job in which he can make full use of those abilities.
    “I certainly wouldn’t have,” said Mr. Riley when asked by panelist Dalhi Myers whether he would have been interested in the job had it been weaker. “What gets me up in the morning,” he said, “is not a ribbon I cut, but that I accomplish something of importance for my city.”
    “The achievement of getting elected ends pretty soon after the election,” he said. “After that, it’s getting things done.”
    There are, of course, people for whom the honor of being elected to a nothing job — such as lieutenant governor, or Columbia mayor — is more than enough. But it takes a job like Charleston’s to attract an actual leader: “Make it a job that has the capacity and authority,” said Mr. Riley, and “you make it more appealing” to qualified people.
    “Good point,” Columbia attorney Benton Williamson said under his breath. He was sitting next to me at the back of the hearing room. “It’s the point,” I muttered.
    None of the other common objections to strong-mayor stood up to scrutiny:

  • The “professionalism” issue. There is an antidemocratic school of thought that a city is best run by an unelected professional administrator. Mr. Riley provided the obvious answer to that: “How it works is, you hire good people.” Why do advocates of this objection assume voters wouldn’t demand that the mayor they elect hire just the kind of “professionals” that those advocates say they want? Whom do you hold accountable if a city manager hired by seven council members is a dud? Mayor Riley chooses his department heads, and they are ratified by the council. “Many of my department heads have the ability to be city managers,” he said.
  • The “bossism” worry. The city manager system was created as a reform long ago in response to mayors who had too much unchecked power. But with Freedom of Information laws and aggressive media, “Government is very transparent now,” Mr. Riley noted. Besides, the Charleston council is empowered to rein in the mayor if necessary.
  • Cronyism. If you rely on democracy to identify your city leader, how do you keep that person from staffing the city’s departments with unqualified pals and political backers? First, Mr. Riley said, “I don’t discuss politics with my department heads.” When he goes to hire them, “Everybody is going to know their backgrounds, and city council approves them.”
  • Neighborhoods will be neglected. This arises from the fear that if the person running the city is not an employee of council members representing districts, those areas will lose out. Councilmen Waring and Paul Tinkler said it doesn’t work that way in Charleston. If they have a problem, they go straight to city staff and get a quick response (a practice we’ve had to ban in Columbia, because it undermined the politically powerless manager). As a last resort, they go to the mayor. Mr. Waring described a problem he had with a traffic light that changed too quickly: “Within three days, there were more seconds on that light,” and it was fully synchronized with the one on the next block.

    Also, the mayor regularly meets with neighborhood groups, and makes it a point to “get back to them by letter within a week, telling them what we’re going to do, or why we can’t — in writing.” Why? Because like the council members, he needs those votes.
    In Charleston, there is no either/or. Neighborhoods and the city center are both well-served. The mayor appreciates the importance of meeting neighborhood needs, and the district representatives appreciate how a vital city center benefits them all. Everyone has had input into the master plans that guide the city. Yes, in Charleston, such things exist (see above editorial).
    At the end of the hearing, it was evident that some commission members were still dubious. Others were not: Responding to the “it only works in Charleston because they have Joe Riley” argument, Kirkman Finlay III said he doesn’t want to believe “there’s a higher quality of people in Charleston.” Seriously, do we really have such an inferiority complex in Columbia that we believe none of us can do this?
    One person did confess to an epiphany, but it was not a member of the commission: Councilman Tinkler, who had initially said he was there as neither an advocate nor an opponent of the idea that the strong-mayor system made a difference, made this statement at the end: “As I’ve sat here, it’s occurred to me that if it were not for the strong mayor form of government, we would not have” the success his city has enjoyed. He realized that was why the biggest challenge he had faced as a councilman was how to deal with “people beating down the doors to get in” to the city.
    Bottom line on strong-mayor:
    It is a system that works. What Columbia has is one that doesn’t.

Got Pull?

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Hah! And you thought I was paranoid when I said the reason so many food products contain unnecessary ingredients that are deadly to me is because "This country has for decades been run from behind the scenes by the dairy industry."

Well, the proof is in the policy. Look at what happened in Washington just yesterday.

Finally, Congress has started trying to inject a little sanity into runaway spending, and one of theCow1_1 targets is our swollen agricultural giveaways. So they vote to save $3 billion by cutting farm commodity payments over the next five years.

Good enough so far. But one subsidy is left intact. Which one? You’ve got it! Milk.

The excuse is that small dairy operators have to have it. That’s kind of like the famous "Big Bird" defense, whereby S.C. ETV staved off budget cuts years ago by claiming the network would have to cut "Sesame Street:" Big Cheese’s lobbyists plead on behalf of their most sympathetic clients. The big ranchers out West don’t even want it.

This column contains no allergens

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‘Disinterested observer’
corrupted by a can of soup
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    BIG BROTHER is about to step in and make my life — and the lives of a tiny handful of others — better by imposing broad regulations that will probably cost the food industry billions without benefiting the overwhelming majority of Americans one whit.
    And I’m fine with that. But the fact that I’m fine with it does make me a tad uncomfortable.
    I’ve never wanted to be part of an interest group. That’s why I throw away those membership solicitations from AARP (even though I sometimes feel a wee bit envious of the discounts my wife, who lacks such scruples, enjoys).
    For one thing, it’s a liability in my business. Even though I write opinion these days rather than “objective” news, I value detachment. Like the human computers called “mentats” in Frank Herbert’s novels, I prefer my judgments to be generally untainted by “feelings” or self-interest.
    I can be passionate about issues, but they tend to be fairly abstract (say, government accountability) or involve groups to which I don’t belong — such as poor, black, rural children who get the short end of the stick on educational opportunity.
    I cling to the great self-delusion of the Average White Guy, which is that I don’t belong to a group. If there’s a group trait among us white guys, it’s that we don’t see ourselves as having group traits, or interests in common. I look at a rich white guy and don’t celebrate his success (he’s not sharing it with me). And when he goes to the slammer for insider trading or whatever, I’m as likely to feel Schadenfreude as a member of any other ethnic group.
    You can’t even characterize me as a WASP. I’m a half-Celtic mutt, and I’m Catholic. But I refuse to feel aggrieved when secularists (vicious, slanderous dogs that they are) attack the Church. I tend to snort at whiny releases I get from the Catholic League For Religious and Civil Rights (“Yahoo! Displays Bias Against Catholics”), and sneer at politicians’ ham-handed efforts to corral the “Catholic vote.”
    Not that bias against Catholics doesn’t exist. It’s just that I refuse to join the pity party.
    But there are limits to my detachment. I’m no mentat, but a three-dimensional human being, and to fail to recognize that is to fail to see the world accurately (as any mentat would tell you).
    I think it would be great if somebody really did do something about the trains that keep me and others who work on Shop Road from getting downtown and back in a timely fashion. And as an asthmatic, I welcome all the restrictions recently placed on smoking in public places.
    But I can rationalize those. Eliminating train delays would also benefit football fans (a group to which I definitely don’t belong), fairgoers, Farmers Market shoppers, folks trying to get to I-77, and the residents of Arthurtown, Taylors and Little Camden. And everyone is harmed by cigarette smoke; those of us who suffer more immediately are merely the canaries in the coal mine.
    But this latest thing I just can’t rationalize away. On Thursday, I finally became corrupted by the unoriginal sin of narrow interest. That was the day I read in an article (it wouldn’t let me link directly; search for "Zhang" and "allergens") from The Wall Street Journal that a new federal food-labeling law taking effect Jan. 1 will not only cause packagers to highlight the presence of milk, eggs and wheat (to which I am allergic, in the first two instances to a life-threatening degree) and other major allergens, but it will go to the next level — letting the less-savvy know that “whey” and “casein” mean milk just as surely as do butter and cheese. (I was an adult before I realized why I was getting sick from consuming “non-dairy” products containing traces of sodium caseinate.)
    Best of all — and this is the really sweet part — some manufacturers are going so far as to simply eliminate the allergens from their recipes, when they are not key ingredients. You may ask yourself why the allergens were even in there if they were not essential. If so, congratulations! You have finally thought to ask a question that has driven me nuts my whole life. I have to remove my bifocals and press labels against my nose to read the fine print on every packaged product I consider consuming. And more often than not, I find that some innocuous-sounding product such as beef-vegetable soup, or an oat-based cereal, has been inexplicably poisoned with whey or another form of dairy. It doesn’t look creamy, and you can’t taste it, but it’s there.
    And there’s no acceptable explanation for it; the soup or cereal would taste fine without it. As often as not, a competing brand right next to it is made without the offending materials, and with no damage to quality.
    So how to explain it? Why would a food processor go to the expense of buying mass quantities of an irrelevant ingredient, arrange to have it delivered, and put it in the product? Other interest groups have their paranoid conspiracy theories, and here’s mine: This country has for decades been run from behind the scenes by the dairy industry. Don’t try to “reason” with me on this; no other explanation satisfies.
    Yet the iron grip of Big Cheese must be loosening. How else could the FDA be getting ready to enforce these new regulations? How else could Campbell Soup Co. — an outfit that produces a gazillion products, of which I can safely consume about four — be on the verge of purging its products of unnecessary allergens?
    In any case, it’s wonderful news. To me. Suddenly, grocery store aisles are going to seem a lot less like minefields. To me.
    And there’s the rub. I just can’t get around the fact that in this case, I am a member of a hyper-narrow interest group. Sure, millions have “allergies,” in the sense that they get seasonal hay fever, or suffer a little rash when they eat strawberries. But not that many of us have real allergies, in the sense of a clear and present danger of going into deadly
anaphylactic shock from exposure to a common food. Oh, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has “this bizarre thing about peanuts,” but that’s about it. The Journal article says about 150 people die from food allergies a year. So in one sense, the entire food industry is going to be retooled to save about one in every two million people.
    And I think that’s great.
    So I’m human. Sue me. But don’t try sneaking any of your spoiled bovine secretions into my tucker. If you do, Big Brother’s gonna getcha.

Brad’s Baseball Post-Game Show

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This is a follow-up posting to address some of the comments (particularly some of those in the latter half of the string) on my baseball column Sunday.

Lee, Brent, Nathan — calm those itchy, libertarian trigger-fingers. There’s no target here to shoot at.

Read the column again. The only governmental entity involved is USC. USC is going to build a ballpark one way or the other, no matter what I say or what anyone else does. And before your hands start twitching toward your anti-tax guns, remember that the USC athletics department supports itself financially.

The issue here is whether the Gamecocks will get to play in a better ballpark in a better location. That can only happen, as I clearly stated in the column, if a private partner comes along — one that sees a way to put together a deal that benefits both USC and the investors.

Will the city need to be involved at some point? Sure. It is the source for key infrastructure, not to mention zoning and other issues. And if the city kicks in a little something — land, or a break on infrastructure costs — fine.

But — whoa, I see you going for your guns again. Hold on, pardners! I need to make two quick points that ought to settle you down a bit.

  • The first is that any material involvement by the city should be minimal. You’re probably forgetting that this editorial board rejected a plan for a dual-use ballpark put forward by the city because it had too much financial involvement on the part of the city — and therefore too much exposure of city taxpayers to cost and risk. (The mayor is still ticked because we complain about not having minor-league baseball, yet we didn’t go for his deal.) What we liked was the later deal that was offered by private investors, which had minimal city involvement. We tend to be guided by what we call the "Publix Standard." We believe it appropriate for the city to put forth the kind of incentive it did to get a supermarket downtown, as that was key to so many other goals for the city — goals that should eventually dramatically expand the tax base within the city, and more than pay today’s taxpayers back. The kind of deal we oppose is on such as the city’s awful plan to own and run a hotel. And we don’t want them essentially owning a baseball team, either.
  • Second point — The City Council’s politics being what they are, it may or may not be possible to get so much as a dime out of it. The mayor has been burned enough he seems to have little appetite for making a proposal. The council, which seems to be generally ticked at the mayor lately (perhaps over the city government restructuring panel that he convinced it to appoint?), seems inclined to say no to anything he does suggest. The city right now is a huge question mark, and whether it could participate at all will depend upon just how attractive a deal is presented to it.

The University and private partners will drive whatever happens, if anything does happen. And I surely hope it does.

Baseball column, with links

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It’s time to step up
to the plate, and swing away
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    THIS IS A SPECIAL time in the world of baseball. We are approaching a critical cusp of opportunity, a point in the cosmic space-time continuum at which anything can happen, when one bounce of the ball can either fulfill our fondest dreams or crush them altogether.
    No, I’m not talking about the Major League playoffs or the upcoming World Series. I’m talking about something more important: the future of professional baseball in Columbia.
    You say you didn’t know it had a future? You say you thought it all went bye-bye when the Bombers (curse their names and spit) deserted us for Greenville?
    Well, it didn’t. We can still have a joint-use ballpark — in the perfect location, down by the Congaree River — for both the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and a minor-league team.
    But anyone in a position to make this happen needs to move quickly, because this window may only be open for the next few days and weeks.
    Consider the following:

  • USC is looking for an alternative to the crowded Vista site that has been frowned upon by Columbia City Council. This was the site that, until a few weeks ago, the Gamecocks were absolutely, positively going to build on (which caused all my colleagues to tell me to give up my dream). Expect that new site to be identified soon, because the university wants to show coach Ray Tanner and all the fans that a replacement for Sarge Frye Field will happen sooner rather than later. Of course, with a private partner chipping in, that new stadium could be a lot nicer than anything the university would build on its own.
  • Contrary to conventional wisdom, USC President Andrew Sorensen would be open to said ballpark being shared with a minor-league team. Actually, “open” is too weak: “I’m completely supportive of that and wide-open to that,” he told me Friday. In fact, he said he was contacted by a team in the last few months, and while that didn’t lead to anything, he remains “wide-open” to a favorable overture from a pro team. “I’m a big minor-league baseball fan myself,” he said, adding that he goes to see the Jamestown Jammers in Upstate New York when he visits there in the summer. One caveat: “I’m not going to subsidize” a private partner. Any deal with a pro team must be advantageous to USC. When I said I saw no reason why a deal couldn’t be structured to benefit both parties, he agreed.
  • The university recently reached an understanding with the Guignard family
    that could lead to the new research campus extending down to the river. Consultants are working on giving shape to the new possibilities that this opens up. This would be an excellent time for someone — say, a minor-league team in search of a new home, and there are plenty of those out there — to step forward and say, “Why not make baseball a part of that vision, and let us help you?”
  • Developer Alan Kahn is on the verge of presenting Richland County Council with a detailed plan for a ballpark at his Village at Sandhill. He anticipates laying this proposal before the county by the end of this month. He’s been talking with the Columbus Catfish, and has secured from the South Atlantic League exclusive rights to this market for the Catfish. What that means is that for the next few months, no other SAL team can talk to Columbia. Mr. Kahn says he has nothing against a downtown ballpark, and nothing against a joint-use deal with the university — but Columbus is only interested in the suburbs.

    This, sports fans, is where the ball could take a really bad hop. I continue to wish Mr. Kahn all the best in his development out there, but if a minor league team locates way out in the Northeast, what should happen won’t ever happen. Mr. Kahn is just trying to meet a demand. He says the team wants to go where people live. Well, I responded, that’s not where I live. That’s the trouble with baseball in the suburbs — it becomes one neighborhood’s team, rather than bringing the whole community together. It does Columbia, and the Midlands in general, no good at all. And no minor-league team or university can build as fine a park by its lonesome as the two entities can build together.
    You might say that the fact that Columbus — which doesn’t want to build a park where Columbia needs one — has exclusive SAL rights precludes any other team from coming in and rescuing us from a fate worse than sprawl.
    But not all minor-league teams belong to the Sally League. Consider, for instance, the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx, a Southern League Class AA franchise (as opposed to those fickle deserters, the Class A Bombers) that is in a hurry to leave Jackson, Tenn.
    Dan Morris, longtime sports guru of The Jackson Sun (and my former colleague, since I worked there from 1975 to 1985) tells me the Diamond Jaxx plan to be there for one more season, but “I don’t anticipate them staying after that.” In fact, Dan said, they’d rather leave sooner. “They just don’t have a facility to move to, or they’d move right now.” (Anybody hear opportunity knocking?)
    Yes, the team has been in a dispute with the city of Jackson over its lease, but Dan seems to believe the Jaxx are pretty much free to leave. The team can get out of the lease if it draws fewer than 180,000 fans two years in a row. Last year, only 150,000 attended. This year, he said, it may have been fewer than 100,000.
    Here’s the bottom line for this community: We could take a giant leap forward in our efforts to develop our riverfront — and further the university’s exciting expansion — with the kind of ballpark that two strong partners working together could build. This could be a jewel for people throughout the Midlands to enjoy, in an unsurpassable setting.
    This can happen. Given all of the above factors, I refuse to believe that it can’t.
    And the time for someone to step forward and make it happen is right now.

Sunday, Oct. 2 column

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Issues, and people, are too
complex to describe with labels
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    IF YOU GO to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and click on the “comments” link for any given posting, you’ll find a whole lot of opining going on, but the quality of dialogue often leaves something to be desired. Not always (in fact, many of my electronic correspondents are thoughtful enough to make me regret my own superficiality), but often.
    The Internet has done much to facilitate the creation of “communities” of narrow interest, from Monty Python fanatics to shoe fetishists. But it has militated against community in the broader sense. Because you can spend all day talking with people just like you, you tend to be less motivated to understand those who view the world differently. And the more that happens, the more facile our world views become.
    It’s not just the Internet. You don’t even want to get me started (again) on the 24-hour cable news channels, with their shouting matches between opposing partisans substituting for meaningful commentary.
    Nor are newspapers blameless. We have tended to cover politics as spectacle, as a sport with only two sides to each game — winner and loser, left and right, black and white. That makes issues easy to write about on deadline. But it doesn’t help citizens solve problems.
    When issues, and people, are presented as caricatures — that dumb Bush, that flip-flopping Kerry, that skirt-chasing Clinton, that crook Nixon (this is not an entirely new phenomenon) — we can’t truly understand them.
    I try to avoid this by interacting personally with newsmakers as much as possible, whether I need something for publication from them at a given moment or not.
    But “as much as possible” isn’t always enough. Consequently, I still sometimes make facile assumptions.
    Case in point — Perry Bumgarner. Before last week, here’s what I knew about Mr. Bumgarner: He was a founder of We the People of Lexington County, the antitax group. He was running for County Council as a Democrat, after having failed to get elected as a Republican. It seemed highly unlikely that we would be interested in endorsing a person whose only previous interaction with local government was to complain about taxes — especially when he was up against Republican Jim Kinard, a man with practical experience dealing with the day-to-day realities of governing on the Lexington 4 school board.
    We had interviewed Mr. Kinard at length back during the Republican primary process (which had led to not one, but two runoffs), so when he came in to see us last week, we had few questions. Besides, he was up against a two-time loser who apparently was only running as a Democrat to avoid having primary competition. This one was going to be easy.
    But then Mr. Bumgarner came in, and I had to learn for the thousandth time that you can’t assume such things. There was, as always, more to him than the two-dimensional picture in my mind.
    At first, he seemed to fit the caricature. A retired homebuilder, he was dodgy on the subject of impact fees. Asked why he had switched parties, he was startlingly frank: “Because they had three Republicans running, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in that thing.” Yep, a political opportunist who knows nothing about government beyond the fact that he doesn’t like paying for it.
    But then we kept talking, and the caricature took on three-dimensional human form. His U.S. Navy tie tack led to questions, and I found he had served with the Marines as a medical corpsman in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. (“It was cold,” he said, at the “Frozen Chosin” Reservoir. No kidding.)
    He may not have had much to say about impact fees, but he had spent so much time observing county government in recent years that he had something knowledgeable to say about almost everything else. Some of his positions were surprising, coming from an antitax activist. He said he would advocate a half-cent sales tax to support the regional bus system if it would expand into Lexington County beyond its three current routes. Rare is the local politician willing to go out on that limb while seeking office. In fact, rare is the candidate who has thought much about the buses at all. (One GOP primary candidate we spoke to last month didn’t even know there was such a thing as a regional transit authority.)
    He even favors letting the school districts retain the authority to tax — which is certainly more than I would allow. (So who’s the anti-tax activist?) But we found agreement on the need to consolidate school districts, and on the lack of accountability of the special purpose districts that run the county’s recreation facilities.
    When Mr. Bumgarner left, my colleague Warren Bolton and I looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking: There’s more to this guy than we thought.
    So we endorsed him, right? No. But we seriously considered it. In the end, we went with Mr. Kinard, for several reasons: his experience as a school trustee, his more specific ideas about what his district and the county needed, his broad community involvement and his relative youth and energy. I gave him points for being willing to face a crowded primary field, rather than taking the easy route. And he knows where he stands on impact fees: He’s for them, as a sensible alternative to higher p
roperty taxes.
    But it was no slam-dunk. Politics, and life, get complicated when you take the time to see past initial assumptions.
    Maybe I need to get some of those partisans who shoot at each other on my blog together in a room, face-to-face. That could be dangerous, but who knows? We all might learn something.

Regarding Warren’s column today

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This is to lend my own perspective in support of what my colleague Warren Bolton has to say in his column today.

There are an awful lot of white folks out there who are by no means racist but who nevertheless get impatient with black folks seeming to talk about race "all the time." I’ll admit that while I don’t quite go that far, I have had a similar reaction: Sometimes it just seems odd to me that black writers or speakers will inject race into their comments on a subject that seemed — to me — to be totally unrelated.

But while I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, I have managed to figure out that the reason I have that reaction is that I’ve never had the regular experience that black folks have of race being thrown in their faces, and usually in an extremely unpleasant way. This usually happens out of the view of the kind of white folks who would never dream of doing, saying or thinking anything racist, and thus such well-meaning folk think it’s their black neighbors who have an unhealthy fixation.

Working with Warren has helped me see this. I’ll give you an example.

Sometime after Warren Bolton joined our editorial board, he wrote a column or two about the Confederate flag that was then atop our State House dome. At that point, I had already written on the subject — demanding that it come down — about 200 times since I had joined the board myself in 1994.

Warren’s style of writing about it was milder and more polite than mine. He objected to the flag’s presence in a kinder, gentler manner than was my wont. This was partly due to the difference in our personalities. But I suspect it was also because Warren knew, far better than I, what was coming.

You see, I thought I’d seen it all in the way of negative reactions from flag defenders. The editorial department secretary hated the days that one of my pieces on the subject ran, because it meant a day of fielding — and passing on to me — angry call after angry call, followed by a flood of letters.

But what I’d experienced was hugs and kisses compared to the slime that came bursting out of the woodwork from the very first moment that Warren dared to touch upon the subject. The vitriol, the pure hatred that was aimed at him was like nothing I had seen. And what was the difference between his columns and mine? Well, there were two: Mine were somewhat more provocative, and a picture of a black man ran with his.

I was already at that point tired of hearing the canard about how support for the flag never had a thing to do with race, but I really got fed up with it at that point. What provoked the hatred; what was Warren’s offense? Simple. He was guilty of having an opinion on the flag while being black.

This did not surprise Warren. He had, after all, been black all his life. But it was an eye-opener for me.

Warren quotes — with epithets blanked out — one of the worst recent phone messages he’s received. But reading about it doesn’t communicate it. You need to hear it to get the full impact (and sorry, but my attempts to convert the recording to a format that I could link to here have been unsuccessful). The caller starts out speaking VERY softly, so that Warren or anyone else listening would press the receiver more tightly to his ear, and turn up the volume on the phone. Then, without warning, he SCREAMS the really nasty parts at a volume intended to hurt the eardrum of the listener. That this stranger hated Warren could be in no doubt. Nor could the reason be obscure. He hated Warren simply because he was black, and he wanted to put that point across in as offensive and painful a manner as possible.

I’ve never had anything quite like that aimed at me. And if you’re white, you probably haven’t either. If you and I suspect black folks are just a little on the touchy side about race matters, that’s probably because they are. And they have reason to be.

FEMA column, w/ links & art

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Attempt to help evacuees
plagued by failure to communicate
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    THE MAN WAS walking around with a $2,000 FEMA check in his hand, and he didn’t have any idea what to do with it.
    That caused Nola Armstrong, a volunteer at the old Naval Reserve center that houses S.C. Cares’ many services for Katrina evacuees, to realize some folks needed more help than others. The Legal Services volunteers (who work out of the office pictured at right) came up with a way to provide it.Katrina_center_017
    What happened next illustrates a quandary inherent in trying to help the helpless: When someone is dependent upon you for the necessities of life, how responsible are you for what happens to them? Where is the line between compassion and condescension, between brotherly love and paternalism?
    From what I’ve seen at the S.C. Cares center, the volunteer “shepherds” know where to draw the line. But when they tried to make sure no one with mental problems got conned out of the $2,000 FEMA was sending to the head of each evacuee household, they ran into trouble with the feds.
    S.C. Cares chief Samuel Tenenbaum said that from the beginning of Columbia’s hastily organized effort, the main operating principle has been the Golden Rule: “How would I want to be treated?”
    It was decided these were not “refugees” or “evacuees,” but guests, and would be treated as such. They would not be herded into a communal shelter, but housed in motel rooms. Shuttles would Katrina_center_016take them back and forth between their motels and the center where they get medical care, eat a free meal, get reconnected with scattered relatives, make bank transactions without fees, and on and on.
    “What we set up was a community,” said Mr. Tenenbaum, and one that ran better than most.
    When it became obvious that some members of the community might be particularly vulnerable walking around town with $2,000, the organizers approached Probate Judge Amy McCulloch for help. They worried that while the center had a setup for helping the mentally ill, the checks were going to the motels. Judge McCulloch issued an order to change that arrangement. When FEMA heard about it, U.S. Attorney Johnny Gasser got involved.
    FEMA doesn’t dictate to local relief workers how to do the job, Mr. Gasser told me. “They leave it up to the locals to determine” pretty much everything, he said, including “what is the best way to distribute these checks.”
    He said FEMA had signed off on a local plan to have checks sent to the hotels. But when I sought a copy, Mr. Tenenbaum said “there was no written plan,” merely a hasty discussion on Labor Day in the mayor’s office, with planeloads of evacuees about to descend upon Columbia.
    Did Mayor Bob Coble know of any formal agreement with FEMA? “Absolutely not,” he said.
    Mr. Gasser said FEMA had two main problems with Judge McCulloch’s order: First, it departed from “the plan.” He said “FEMA’s in the crosshairs,” and feared a backlash if people who had been promised checks at their hotels had to get them somewhere else. Second, “the civil rights implications.” FEMA thought the language in the order created “a presumption that people had to prove their lucidness prior to receiving their money.”
    But “it was never about screening everyone,” said Judge McCulloch. The idea proposed by S.C.Katrina_center_008 Cares was that if the checks came to the center, where mental health services are available, conservators could be appointed for those who might need help handling money.
    “The issue was, how do we help these people to make sure nobody takes advantage of their dollars?” said Mr. Tenenbaum.
    Mr. Gasser sympathizes. “Everybody was well-intentioned,” he said. S.C. Cares’ concerns are “absolutely legitimate.” He said he told Judge McCulloch that local folks should “just get a new plan approved.”
    “It doesn’t take much time to type up an e-mail to FEMA,” he said. That doesn’t match the experience of those who tried.
    “There were many contacts, not only by me, but by people down there (at S.C. Cares), to contact FEMA” and work out the matter, Judge McCulloch said. “I personally made three phone calls to try to climb the chain” in Washington, she said. “The third person said, ‘We don’t have the authority to do this, and I personally don’t know who would.’”
    He recommended that she call the agency’s 800 number. At that point she issued the order that S.C. Cares had requested.
    “As soon as I issued the order, FEMA called me,” she said. It was the agency’s general counsel, saying “What are you doing?” She explained, and asked for help in getting the checks distributed in a more secure location, rather than leaving the job to “hotel clerks.”
    “Discussions were had,” she said. “People were asked.”
    “The next thing I knew,” she said, “I heard that the U.S. attorney’s office was going to sue me.”
    (When I called FEMA’s general counsel I got a
public affairs guy instead. “I’m not familiar with anyKatrina_center_001 plan,” he said. But, “Our policy is to mail the check to the individual where they are staying.”)
    Mr. Tenenbaum is indignant that anyone would think folks in Columbia were trying to deny anyone their “rights.”
    “Our whole philosophy was the opposite of that,” he said. The irony is, if S.C. Cares had treated its “guests” like “refugees” and kept them in a common shelter, the problem wouldn’t have arisen.
    “FEMA is incapable of getting outside the bureaucratic response and into the people response,” Mayor Coble said, adding that his advice to the agency would be: “Quit having meetings. Help the person in front of you.”
    For Judge McCulloch, “My biggest regret is that we have not solved the problem.”

New publisher column, w/ links

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Initial, feeble efforts
to figure out the new boss
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    OK, I’M GOING to withdraw from the multidirectional gossip matrix for as long as it takes to write a column — or until one of my calls to Wichita gets returned.
    As you probably know by now, I’m about to lose a good boss, and get a new one who I think is a good guy, but only time will tell. (Wait. You don’t think he’ll read this, do you?)
    Ann Caulkins, president and publisher of The State, is leaving at the end of the year to run The Charlotte Observer. Hence the call I received a while ago from an editorial type in Charlotte asking what they should expect.
    Meanwhile, Lou Heldman, publisher of The Wichita Eagle, is to take her place. Hence my calls toAnn Wichita, where I worked from 1985 until I came home to South Carolina in 1987.
    Anyway, I told my caller from Charlotte that they couldn’t do better, from the perspective of editorial. While she is from a business-side background, she’s taken a healthy interest in what we do on these pages — while respecting the consensus process by which we make decisions.
    As a publisher overall, she has led the paper surely and ably, and kept the business as a business on a sound, profitable course. (At least I think she has. I’m not good at reading spreadsheets.)
    She has been more involved in the community than any publisher I’ve ever known. I know she will be missed by folks outside our walls as much as by those of us here at the paper.
    Besides, she gave me a promotion. You can’t beat that.
    Now, on to the new guy.
    I first met Lou Heldman in 1989. He spent that summer at The State directing what was called the “25-43 Project,” or less formally, the “Boomer project.” It was a Knight Ridder effort to find ways to attract younger readers to newspapers. Yes, baby boomers were then considered young.
    I didn’t get all that involved in the project myself, but I did sit in on one or two of the brain-storming sessions, and found Lou to have a nimble and creative mind, and to be fun to work with. (I mean, on further reflection, you’ve got to assume that he is going to read this, right?)
    I had a chance to get somewhat reacquainted with him Monday night at a dinner with some other members of the paper’s senior staff and Knight Ridder Vice President (and former editor at The State) Paula Ellis.
    The dinner reinforced my previous impressions. An illustration:
    He said that when he first went to Wichita, he kept seeing the paper’s mission statement posted around the building. His mind apparently wandering during meetings (more on that later), he found himself thinking about what he saw as missing from the statement.
    He said this is what he would have added:

  • “Have fun every day.”
  • “Be proud of what we do,” which means he expects the kind of good work of which one has a right to be proud.
  • “Make a lot of money for the shareholders.” (Hey, his background might be in news, but he’s a publisher now, so cut him some slack. Besides, in my own tiny way, I am a stockholder.)

    He shared these thoughts with others, and someone suggested he had left out one important consideration. He agreed, and added it to his list:

  • “Be grateful for it all.”

    That’s the way he strikes me so far — as an approachable guy who likes to have fun while definitely getting the job done, and never forgetting to be grateful for life’s blessings.
    He also said that he needs somebody pragmatic, focused and straightforward working with him to keep him grounded and on task. First chance I got, I asked Paula if she’d put in a good word for me as one who could help him keep his feet on the ground. She laughed (a little bitterly, I thought). She did, after all, work with me for years down in the newsroom.
    But hey, I’m a professional journalist, so I’m not just going to go with my own inadequately informed impressions. To get the real skinny, I called my old friend Richard Crowson, Wichita’s editorial cartoonist. Richard and I go back to about 1974. One of the first cartoons he ever did illustrated an opinion column I wrote for our college paper at Memphis State University. We then worked together for years at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee. After I moved to Kansas, I got him to fly out, plied him with liquor, and he’s been there ever since.
    On Tuesday, I abused his trust once again and got him talking freely about what it’s like to work with Lou. I had about half a page of good quotes before I said, “You know this is on the record, right?” This was a total shock, as he had thought we were gossiping. (Not that he’d said anything bad, Lou.)
    Once he knew he was going to be quoted, he started saying stuff like, “Lou is extremelyRichard personable…. I’ll miss Lou, because I really thought he was great.”
    When I read those quotes back to him, he added, “And he’s really kind to animals.”
    He did say one or two substantive things. He said that while Lou told the Eagle’s editorial folks when he first arrived that he was politically conservative, that was probably because he had just come from a college town. Richard suggested that he was more of a centrist by “red-state Kansas” standards.
    Anyway, I’m running out of room here at the same time I’m running out of stuff I know, or think I know, on this subject. One more thing: Lou’s family is going to stay in Kansas until his kids finish the school year. In the meantime, he’ll need a place to stay. So if you know of “an old-fashioned rooming house with a wi-fi connection,” let me know, and I’ll let him know. That should put me in good with him.

Yet another column, w/ links

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Leadership wanted to explain need to succeed in Iraq
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    “I DON’T KNOW how long it’s gonna take. It’s gonna take a while. And it’s gonna cost more money, and it’s gonna cost more blood.”
    That’s what U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham told the Columbia Rotary week before last regarding Iraq. During that meeting, and in subsequent interviews, he talked about how important it is that the Iraq_mp_1 nation’s leaders explain to the American people — over and over — the connection between what we’re doing in Iraq and the war on terror, the absolute necessity of staying there until a stable democracy is achieved, and just how long and costly that is going to be.
    Not that we have a choice to make: “The American people have no option. It was never an option.” The fight that we are engaged in in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere started long before this date four years ago.
    “The root causes of this war had been building over time,” he said. “We ignored them. We disengaged. There were plenty of signs the terrorists were getting stronger and bolder, and we sent them the wrong signal.”
    Until Sept. 11, 2001. After that, we fought back. But there’s a lot more involved in achieving peace and security than just fighting.
    “There are elements of the War on Terror beyond the use of military force, and they are going to be expensive,” the senator said.
     Those elements are also the ones likely to take the longest time, he believes. People in Iraq and other Islamic countries have to realize that “Winner-take-all politics is not a democracy” — or at least, not the kind that works. They have to get not only the politics right, but the fundamental notions of the rule of law. “A courtroom is a place for the unpopular cause,” he said. “How long does it take to get honest judges? A long time.”
     And what about the home front? He agrees that we have to have a better energy strategy, and that includes both drilling in Alaska and an emphasis on conservation. It is, the senator said, “imperative that we get away from fossil fuels in general and Mideast oil in particular.” And we need to turn back to nuclear energy. Other countries, including France, have not had our qualms about using that cleaner source of power. “Surely we can be as bold as the French,” he told the Rotarians to general laughter.
     And then there’s hydrogen, although that is a long-term strategy. “We in South Carolina are going to become, if I have anything to do with it, the Detroit of the hydrogen economy — without the crime.”
    Meanwhile, in Iraq, “The more troops in the country, the better,” for the foreseeable future, the senator said.
    His explanation for why polls increasingly show that the American people want to pull out of Iraq is that they are not getting an accurate picture of what is happening. All they see is quick images of mayhem on television or “a few words in the paper” about the latest car bombing, and they despair. They think, “These people can’t help themselves; why should we help them?” Especially when it costs American lives.
    But Iraq is worth fighting for largely because of the courage of the Iraqi people — the majority that wants their country to be peaceful and free. It is “the one place in the world where people are standing up to terrorists right in their own backyards,” he said. That makes it one place where we have to win if we’re going to win the larger war that we only fully engaged four years ago.
    Aside from roughly 1,900 Americans, thousands of Iraqis have died in this cause, and yet they keep on trying. We have to “stand behind those who are willing to put their lives on the line to build a better Iraq.”
    “If you talk about leaving soon, you don’t understand the situation,” he said. And more than once, he told me, “I want to fire the next general who talks about taking one troop out next year.”
“We’re talking about an exit strategy when we should be talking about a winning strategy.”
    But what about members of Congress, including those in his own party, who are looking at the polls and talking “exit strategy”?
    “Make ’em vote,” he said. “Take (Sen. Russ) Feingold’s resolution (to create a timetable for withdrawing troops) or something and make them vote for it.” He seems quit
e sure they won’t.
    OK, fine. So we have to win in Iraq, the American people don’t fully understand why, we need more troops rather than fewer, it’s going to be more expensive than most taxpayers realize, and we have an administration in place that can’t seem to explain that, and that wants to cut taxes and do everything on the cheap. What about that?
    First, Sen. Graham says he and other supporters of the war in Congress share much of the blame — for being too optimistic about Iraq going in, and for not explaining the stakes well enough to the public.
    He also acknowledges that the president hasn’t done all he should: “His challenge is a constant focus that has been missing.” President Bush used to talk about the “long haul”; more recently he soft-pedaled that.
    But he has seen the president change in recent days. “I think the president is learning from Katrina. I see this president adjusting.” Yes, I’ve seen some of the same things. I’ve actually seen him, for once, admit error, and work hard to make up for it.
    Still, while I agree with pretty much everything that Sen. Graham has to say on the subject, I am Bush_honor_guard not as confident as he is that George W. Bush will exercise the leadership necessary to the situation. I agree with the senator, for instance, that the president gave some very good speeches explaining the stakes in the first days right after Sept. 11, 2001. But that was a long time ago.
    All of that said, I hope Mr. Graham is right. Because this is the president we’ve got; we don’t have any choice there, either. If leadership does not emerge, from Congress as well as from the president, we will fail in this war. And this nation — indeed, the civilized world — can’t afford that.
    Ultimately, as the senator said, “History will judge us not by when we left, but by what we left.”

Perception or reality?

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Some additional thoughts I didn’t have room for in today’s column. In fact, these thoughts were actually central to the original idea for the column, but I ended up going in another direction:

A related issue: I’m sick of seeing perception spoken of as though it were substantial. If a poll shows that 57 percent of the country now believes a candidates’ stands on issues should be fair game for questioning (although they didn’t believe so in July, as if such fundamental principles were as mutable as the weather), that does NOT mean that they are fair game for questioning; it means 57 percent of the public didn’t (as of last week, when the poll was conducted) understand what is appropriate and what is not.

I realize that is likely to set off the small-D democrats out there, but the fact is that this country was established as a republic, not a pure democracy, for very good reasons. It wasn’t because those who are elected to represent us are necessarily smarter or better than the rest of us (no one who has spent as much time as I have over at the State House could believe that). It’s that the business of running a government is complicated, and requires more study and attention than the average citizen can devote to it in order to shape sound policy. You can take that same average citizen, and put him in the seat of an elected representative, and if he does the job he’s supposed to do, he will know things that the people who sent him there don’t know, no matter how smart they are. Why? Because they’ve got lives to lead, and he is the one they have delegated to study the issues more closely than they have time to do.

(This is why, for instance, some of the most conscientious Democrats in the Congress, such as Sens. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, are far more committed to sticking it out in Iraq than many of the folks who voted for them. They have done their jobs, and gained expertise in international affairs, and therefore fully understand how disastrous it would be for us to pull out now.)

The Senate, unlike the House, is particularly intended to be shielded from the momentary whims of public opinion — of which this case, in which you have the public exhibiting entirely different sets of values from July to September, is a perfect example. (This is why senators are elected every six years instead of two, and also why they were originally not popularly elected at all, but appointed by legislatures.) And one of the things that senators who take their jobs seriously ought to know is that the suitability of Supreme Court nominees should be based upon their legal credentials, not their personal political opinions. But a weird thing apparently happens in the world of politics: If the president of the opposite party is seen as too popular to challenge, senators tend to toe the line in terms of the propriety of the questions they ask during confirmation hearings. And if the president’s approval rating is in the toilet, one is free to quiz them about anything and everything. To some people (including, according to that poll, a majority of the electorate as of last week), this makes perfect sense. But to the nonpartisan mind, it makes none.

More on perception versus reality: There seems little question that President Bush failed to exhibit the leadership qualities that we deserve in the first days after Katrina hit (although I give him credit for at least trying to hit the right notes since then). I mean, who the expletive cares about Trent Lott’s porch when there are poor folks floating dead in the streets of New Orleans? The answer to that is, the president. And that says some pretty awful things about his suitability as a leader.

But in a larger sense, did the federal government as a whole fail in its job? Well, yes, in the sense that what it did was inadequate to the unbelievably huge task before it. But given the resources (which thanks to budget-cutting, WERE inadequate) and information available to it at the time, was the effort to meet that challenge reasonable?

I don’t know. I realize that makes me sound like an idiot to people who’ve been watching 24/7 news coverage over the last week or so — something I have neither the time or inclination to do. But that’s precisely where my uncertainty comes in. There’s something about that 24/7 news coverage that can shape perception regardless of reality. Decent human beings (with too much time on their hands) who sit and watch hours of human suffering, and then take a lunch break and come back to the tube, say "Oh my God — those people still haven’t been helped yet?" Therefore relief efforts don’t meet their expectations.

But are those expectations realistic? That’s what I don’t know. I’ve heard more than one person who has been involved in such aid operations say that deploying assets within three days of their being requested is actually something of a logistical coup.

I believe there were screw-ups — as there always are in something this big (study the mistakes made on D-Day, or the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, if you want to see governmental action at its most FUBAR). But was it more fouled up than we should expect? I don’t know, and that’s why investigations into what happened are worthwhile — after we deal with the more immediate problems.

Finally, I want to pin some more blame on the media in general — not just the TV cowboys who so often draw my ire. I’m including the press. Back in 1996, I reviewed a book by James Fallows called BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. He wrote that "Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another." More: "By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result."

It’s a malignant application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to American public life. Mr. Fallows said journalists tend lazily to cast every development in the news in terms of how it affects electoral politics. What may need to be reported are complicated facts that give readers and viewers the perspective they need to understand what happened. But that’s hard to do, whereas talking about the political implications is easy because journalists — particularly Washington journalists — live and breathe that stuff.

An example from the past week: When the president decided to name John Roberts as Chief Justice to replace William Rehnquist, the very first question that occurred to me (as a nonexpert on the subject) was, is this kosher? Has this happened before? Has the president ever named a rookie — one who hasn’t even pitched his first game in the majors, and for that matter doesn’t have much experience in the minors — to the top of the heap, over the heads of more experienced jurists?

I was very disappointed not to find the answer to that question in the first few sources I turned to — including The New York Times, which I usually trust to give me the perspective I seek on such matters. What I did find, however, was multiple references to the political implications of Mr. Bush’s declining popularity, and what that meant in terms of the reception his nominees were bound to get — which is what prompted me to write today’s column to begin with.

(By the way, it turns out I was all wet suspecting there was something unusual about a non-justice being named chief justice. Few of the 16 chief justices of the United States were actually on the court before their elevation.)