Category Archives: Columns

Today’s column, served Web-style

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Nation’s ‘leaders’ need to get priorities straight
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    If everyone in Washington had been as determined to rush help to Louisiana as they now profess to be about investigating how the Hurricane Katrina response failed, the disaster might not have been so bad.
— Detroit Free Press

    AN ANALYSIS in Wednesday’s Washington Post notes the stark contrast in the political reactions to 9/11 and Katrina.
    “When terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans came together in grief and resolve, rallying behind President Bush in an extraordinary show of national unity,” the piece by Dan Balz begins. “But when Hurricane Katrina hit last week, the opposite occurred, with Americans dividing along sharply partisan lines…. This gaping divide has left the president with no reservoir of good will among his political opponents at a critical moment of national need….”
    Yeah, I noticed.
    But it’s not just about Katrina. And for that matter, it’s not just about partisanship.
    The Congress is still in the control of Republicans, and Congress is about to shove other matters aside to hold hearings on FEMA’s response to the disaster. Why? Because GOP leaders aren’t about to get on the wrong side of the rising demand for somebody (besides Mother Nature) to blame. They don’t want it to be them. Meanwhile, the president wants to have his own investigation for the same reason. Republicans are harrumphing defensively, while Democrats do so with relish.
    Hearings. Now. When (and if you’re squeamish, don’t click on this next link) bodies are still floating through the streets of New Orleans, and thousands upon thousands of others are in desperate need of immediate help. And all they can think of to do is hold hearings.
    Well, I can think of something better: Let’s march them out of their hearing rooms, take them to the Gulf Coast and put them to work filling sandbags. Or manning pumps. Or picking up bodies. Or, more urgently, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless and ministering to the sick. (Bill Frist at least had the right idea on that.)
    Maybe they could use their golden tongues to persuade those who still refuse to evacuate. Or do something useful.
    Basically, I’m sick of the petty political nonsense — mostly, but not entirely, of a partisan nature — that keeps getting in the way of the serious, important, legitimate (and in the case of Katrina, critically urgent) functions of government.
    Consider the small matter of choosing two members of the Supreme Court. Advice and consent on this matter is one of the Senate’s most solemn and sober duties — or should be.
    So why do I keep reading that the recent decline in George W. Bush’s popularity means Democrats are going to be tougher on whomever he chooses for the second vacancy — and on John Roberts, too. The long knives are out, and anyone associated with Caesar had best not stand anywhere near Pompey’s statue. But the knives in this case aren’t aimed at preserving the Republic, but at destroying its civil base.
    Are we really this far gone? Why should the president — this one or any other — being in a “weakened position” be a valid reason for political opponents to beat up on his next nominee?
    Oh, I understand why, if we’re talking the law of the jungle. But our civilization, to the extent that we still have one, is supposed to be based on the rule of law, and we’re talking about a person who will have a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. The relative heat of that person’s grilling should depend upon his or her qualities as a candidate, not upon the political weather. Senators should be tough on a weak nominee even if the president has a 90 percent approval rating — and respect a good choice even if the president is a pariah.
    Is it really too much to expect elected representatives to think about how to help the victims of Katrina rather than point fingers? Or consider the actual merit of nominees, rather than what the situation offers in the way of advantage for them and their parties (or the professional ideologues in the private sector)?
    Was the federal government’s response to Katrina inadequate? Yes, it was, and we’ve been here before. Remember the complaints about FEMA after Hurricane Hugo? I do. There are two big differences, of course. Hugo wasn’t nearly as bad as Katrina. And the local and state responses in Charleston and South Carolina were far more effective.
    Two things are simultaneously true: First, this was going to be bad, no matter what the government did. Second, there are things the government should have done, before and after the storm hit, that would have lessened the blow considerably.
    We need to sort that out, and fix it before the next Katrina. But in the meantime, there are far more urgent matters before us.
    Another quote, this one from The Chicago Tribune: “Democrats and Republicans returned Tuesday to a Washington scene changed dramatically by Hurricane Katrina and began maneuvering to seize control of the volatile political terrain, deflect blame and appear compassionate without seeming to politicize a national tragedy.”
    Seeming? Seeming? We know exactly what you’re trying to do, and we deserve better.

Sunday column, with links

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Let’s try the American way for a change
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    WOULD YOU like Ted Kennedy to have just as much power in the day-to-day running of the federal government as President Bush? That question was for Republicans. Here’s one for Democrats: How would you like it if a President Hillary Clinton had no more control over federal agencies than Jim DeMint?
    And here’s a question for us sensible folk who don’t like either party: No matter who holds the offices, does it make any sense for the lowliest congressional freshman to have as much operational influence over, say, the Pentagon as the commander in chief?
    What if the president had to get a majority of Congress to agree on a plan before sending FEMA to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? What if Condoleezza Rice were about to seal a deal on peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the president were urging her to get it done before the window closed, but she decided to hold back because Dick Durbin or Rick Santorum had a few qualms? What if the president actually decided to fire Karl Rove for leaking a CIA officer’s name, but couldn’t do it because Congress didn’t approve?
    Would any of that make sense? Would it be an effective or logical way to run a government? Of course not. At least, I don’t think so. But if you think otherwise, then you must love the way we run things in South Carolina — and in the city of Columbia. The federal hypotheticals above are modeled on the way we hobble our governor, and the way Columbia denies the most basic authority to its mayor.
    What if the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were elected separately from the president? That’s the way we do it in South Carolina, with the top general in the National Guard chosen not by merit, but in a partisan election.
    What if the president were a part-time member of Congress, with but one vote in that body, and no executive powers? That describes the mayor of Columbia. He is just another member of City Council. City employees answer not to him, but to an unelected city manager. Any member of City Council is as much that manager’s boss as the mayor is, meaning the day-to-day operation of the city is pushed and pulled in seven different directions.
    I say all this to explain something about two long-held positions of this editorial board. There’s a consistent pattern here. On both the local and state levels, government is fragmented, ineffective and unaccountable.
    There is a reason why we don’t seem to be able to get our act together. Government on both levels is set up to prevent the desire of the voters for progress — in education, personal income, public health, law enforcement or any other way you want to measure it — from being met.
    If you think it’s fine that our state lags behind the nation on almost every measurement of quality of life, or if you like seeing something as big as the former Central Correctional Institution site as an untouched eyesore at the heart of our city for a decade, you should by all means resist reform. But if you’d like to see some action, demand change.
    Our current systems are designed to avoid accomplishing much of anything — no matter how much the voters may want results. Accountability is so fragmented and diffused that there is no one to blame or credit for what happens — or doesn’t happen.
    We believe in the American system: separation of powers, checks and balances, with each branch of government given the authority — no more and no less — to play its proper role.
    This is why you will see us continue to push the General Assembly to empower the governor to do the job he is elected to do.
    And it is why you will see a series of editorials, starting today, giving our views on the current discussion about whether to change Columbia’s system. As the commission charged with facilitating this debate completes its work in the coming weeks, we hope to hear your views as well.

The Bene Gesserit way

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Deleted from my Friday column fairly early in the writing process. It just didn’t work, and wasn’t worth the digression. But I pass it along for any sci-fi fans out there…

    The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from the science fiction classic Dune sort of sums up the self-congratulatory (and probably selective) memory I have of the event: “I must not fear…. I will face my fear. I will allow my fear to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone I will turn my inner eye to see its path. And where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
    Well, that’s all very well for fictional characters with superhuman abilities, but for ordinary folks living below sea level and facing a Category 5 hurricane, such a philosophy is downright stupid. In the aftermath of Katrina, I say take that litany, dry it out, and sell it as fertilizer.

You see? It just didn’t fit the tone, or anything. I was going to have to shoehorn it in with some transitional gyrations, so I just ditched it.

Friday column, with links

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Betsy experience in no way
prepared us for Katrina’s horrors
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
    I THOUGHT I knew what to expect from Hurricane Katrina. Boy, was I wrong.
    You see, I was there, at Ground Zero, for the last big blow to hit the Big Easy. That was Hurricane Betsy, 40 years ago.
    In fact, that experience at such a young age — I was starting junior high — is probably why I have such a jaded attitude toward weather. Or at least did have.
    I tended to sneer at people getting all worked up because a storm’s coming. And I definitely didn’t need those warnings that interrupt regular TV programming. Hey, I know when there’s going to be a thunderstorm — our remaining dog freaks out, yelping and demanding to come in. I did not share his attitude; as I saw it, the lawn could use the watering.
    And when I saw folks evacuate in the path of a storm that may strike their domiciles, I sniffed in a superior manner and thought:
    We didn’t run and hide back in ’65. We stood our ground — however untenable that ground may have been. We lived in an old barracks that had been converted into apartments for naval officers and their families — a big frame target that the Big Bad Wolf could probably have huffed and puffed away without trying too hard. It was located about a block from the Mississippi River levee, on a nearly defunct Navy base in Algiers, right across the river from the heart of New Orleans.
    The base had most likely been a very busy place during in the war that had ended two decades earlier. But you sure couldn’t tell that at the time I lived there. The base’s vital purpose was a thing of the misty past, and of no interest to a preteen. The base I knew was mostly abandoned buildings (for exploring, if you could dodge the Shore Patrol) and huge, empty fields for playing ball.
    My Dad was executive officer on the USS Hyman, DD-732, an old Sumner-class destroyer that was there to train reservists on weekends. That and an old diesel submarine were the only ships moored at the base.
    The night Betsy hit, Dad was aboard his ship, firmly held in place in the river by cables fore, aft and amidships, and with the engines fired up and running. (There hadn’t been time to put out to sea.) He and the crew spent the night trying to avoid being hit by civilian craft that hadn’t taken such precautions. They still got hit a couple of times. He recalls the shock on the bridge as one freighter headed upriver at eight or nine knots — breakneck speed in that sharply meandering stretch — particularly when the watch realized it was being blown against the current, with no one at the helm.
    My mother, brother and I spent the night in our rickety home with our flashlights and bathtubs full of water, listening to the wind tear and crack and howl around us. We experienced the eerie stillness of the eye passing over, then listened to the fury all over again, only in the opposite direction (at which point we closed windows that were now on the windward side, and opened the ones on the lee). I don’t recall being any more scared than I would have been on a ride at the Lake Ponchartrain amusement park. At my age, it was an adventure, and not to be missed.
    The next day, we saw what the storm had done. Enormous, aromatic red cedar trees across the street in my best friend Tim Moorman’s yard — his dad was a captain, so they rated a big house — were snapped in two. (We pulled off big shards and put them in our closets.) The only damage our apartment sustained was a rip to the screen on our porch, although other apartments in the building suffered from holes in the roof.
    I soon learned we had been among the lucky ones. Fifteen thousand civilian refugees — Ponchartrain spilled over that time, too — were housed for months in the base’s unused buildings and a mobile home village that filled the empty fields.
    My Dad’s destroyer was for several days New Orleans’ only official communication link with the outside world. (We weren’t able to call folks in South Carolina to say we were OK for a week.) The ship was called upon to help find a barge full of chlorine that had been lost — which Dad remembers as the most fouled-up operation he ever took part in. After the ship’s sonar and divers had located about a hundred other barges sunk by the storm, the one they sought was found in the one place everyone assumed the civilians had already looked: Right where it had been moored. The chlorine containers were intact.
    So all was well in the end. We had withstood nature’s worst (I thought), and life went on.
I had thought Katrina would be pretty much the same — especially with all the advance warning that modern technology provides. Sure, it was almost a Category 5 while Betsy was merely a 3, but the city only got brushed by the back side of the storm this time.
    And yet, as we’ve tried to take in the scope of this disaster in the last few days — thousands dead, devastation of apocalyptic proportions across several states — it overwhelms the mind.
    This has to be the worst disaster to hit the mainland United States in my lifetime. When was the last time a major city of this proportion had to be abandoned, possibly for months? And we still don’t fully know how bad things are in the less-populated areas that took the main brunt of this nightmare.
    This horror is so wide and profound that I really don’t know where to grab hold of it for an editorial point. Certainly, we should all seize any opportunity we can identify to reach out and help the victims. Beyond that, I really don’t know what to say.
    But from now on, I’m going to be less nonchalant about weather. Next time the dog starts yelping about a rising wind, rather than telling him to hush and calm down, I just may join him.

Welcome, thecolumbiarecord.com bloggers!

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I hereby issue a hearty welcome to a slew of new bloggers, all associated with the newspaper’s new community blog, TheColumbiaRecord.com. I do this with slightly mixed feelings, as this is competition I can ill afford. Some of these people (if not all of them) are already better at this than I am. I hope they will only spur me on to make my blog that much better. Either that, or the pressure will provide that last little straw necessary to make me crack, and you’ll see me running naked through the streets screaming "The Visigoths are coming!" in Esperanto. Which to you will appear normal, but I promise there is a distinction here somewhere.

Anyway, I thought the most neighborly way I could greet these interlopers would be to run Cindi’s column about them, right here on our stage, with handy links.

So here it is:

TheColumbiaRecord.com will change
how you think about bloggers
By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
    BLOGGERS, like the talking heads on TV “news” channels, tend to be loud-mouthed know-it-alls on the political extremes who delight in their uninformed ignorance and spew disdain upon the rational among us who actually know what they’re talking about.
    So what in the world are Democratic Rep. James Smith and Republican Rep. Ted Pitts doing writing a blog together? Not as point-counterpoint crazies, but as friends and colleagues providing an “issues-based political dialogue”?
    Well, I can’t say for sure yet; they can’t either: They’ve been brainstorming the idea for the past week, and they’re going to lunch today to sketch out a plan. But I know it’s going to be interesting. It might even help break down some of the partisan barriers that are so poisoning our politics, our government and our society.
    This may be a little bolder than the rest of the offerings, but what James and Ted are doing is typical of the approach you’ll find at TheColumbiaRecord.com, which debuts today as the Midlands’ on-line gathering place.
    Like James and Ted, the folks who are already blogging are people who know what they’re talking about. And contrary to the other cliche about blogging, most of them have little or nothing to say about politics.
    This is no accident. The team at The State who developed TheColumbiaRecord.com set out to create something different from the Wild West of the blogosphere, but also different from the typical newspaper site. We sought out people in our community who are experts in their fields — oftentimes fields that don’t get as much coverage in a newspaper as aficionados seek. We recruited some people you know. But we also realized that our community is full of interesting, intelligent, knowledgeable people whom most of us have never heard of, and so we went looking for them.
    The first such person we found (with the help of State food reporter Allison Askins) was cookbook author and culinary instructor Susan Slack, who is now sharing her original recipes and her knowledge to help the rest of us learn to cook like a pro.
    I knew Kathy Plowden had the personality to be a great blogger when she told me about how she had transformed herself from “the person who killed artificial plants” into a master gardener.
    Arborist Jay Clingman heard about the project through word of mouth and contacted us with a full-blown proposal of how he would guide and moderate a dialogue on “trees and forests, timberland, wildlife preserves, wetlands, urban forests, tree problems and even tree and forest politics”; it was a topic we never would have thought to include on the blog site, but what he’s written so far is fun reading.
    Actor/storyteller Darion McCloud, whom State reporter Pat Berman described as “among the most open, enjoyable and quotable people I’ve talked to in the past couple of years,” plans to talk about a bit of everything as he seeks to integrate the arts into modern life.
    And the list goes on, from astronomy buff Hap Griffin and ultra-marathoner Ray Krolewicz to Lisa Yanity, a guidance counselor at A.C. Flora High School and Army Reserve captain who’s serving in Afghanistan, and Dr. Leo Walker, who is integrating non-traditional approaches with traditional medicine to help readers achieve “not merely the absence of disease but an optimum state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being.”
    Of course, you’ll also find politics on TheColumbiaRecord.com, and readers of these pages will find familiar names: Three of the best writers from our old “community columnists” op-ed initiative — political consultant Bob McAlister, systems development specialist Mike Cakora and hydrologist Frank Chapelle — are blogging. (Go to the public square and find out, in his fabulous first posting, how Bob discovered that fellow blogger Brad Warthen isn’t into porn, or what Mike thinks of David Wilkins’ use of the queen’s English. Hint: Mike’s headline is “Did he really say that?”)
    The site also includes Columbia City Council members Daniel Rickenmann and Tameika Isaac Devine, the Columbia Urban League’s J.T. McLawhorn and Brandy Pinkston, who runs the state Consumer Affairs Department and is offering tips and answering questions on scams, pitfalls and urban myths. And, as soon as they work out the details, James and Ted.
    The blogs are just one part of TheColumbiaRecord.com. There’s also a place for people to send in their news about their schools, churches, neighborhoods, clubs, hobbies — whatever interests them. I think that’s going to create exciting and useful community conversations.
    But that’s just what I think. What I know is that the bloggers are great. As we’ve read the early postings, my colleagues at work, and my new blogger friends, have come away time and time again amazed by the great writing and the thoughtfulness of the postings, and by what we’ve learned. It’s changed the way a lot of us think about blogging. I think it will do the same for you.
    Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

August 31 column, w/ links

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Snippets from a conversation:
Bill Gates, innovation and leadership
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
    JOHN WARNER responded to my Sunday column about Inez Tenenbaum’s decision not to seek a third term as education superintendent by quoting Bill Gates.
    Specifically, he quoted from a speech the Microsoft honcho delivered to the National Education Summit on High Schools a while back. Everybody’s talking about it. In fact, Mrs. Tenenbaum was talking about it during our interview last week, holding up Mr. Gates’ efforts as an example of someone doing what she hopes to do once she’s left office — pushing for reform from the private sector. Here’s part of what Mr. Warner cited in comments on my blog:
    “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded — though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools — even when they’re working exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know today…. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”
    I’m afraid my gut response was rather dismissive, along these lines: Yes, everyone’s heard or read what Bill Gates said about our secondary schools system. What I haven’t heard is an understandable explanation of what he would replace it with.
    To be fair to Mr. Gates, I went back to read the full speech. (Which you can also do by following the link from my blog.)
    I found that while much of what he said was interesting and wise, little of it struck me as new. I was pleased to see that he is as interested in equality of opportunity as we are on this editorial board:
    “In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II while low-income minority kids are taught to balance a check book!” he said. “The first group goes on to college and careers; the second group will struggle to make a living wage…. (E)ither we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.”
    I could also write that — along with what he sees as standing in the way of a solution: “The key problem is political will” (as in, the lack thereof).
    His prescription for what should be done sounds much like the central idea behind No Child Left Behind on the federal level, and a number of initiatives — such as more rigorous requirements for graduation — that have been in place in South Carolina since the turn of the century.
    “The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and — for their sake and ours — they have to,” he said, adding that the aim should be “to prepare every student for college.”
    Then, he spelled out the active ingredients of his prescription: “If we can focus on these three steps — high standards for all; public data on our progress; turning around failing schools — we will go a long way toward ensuring that all students have a chance to make the most of their lives.”
    Those are the same principles we’ve already put into action through the Education Accountability Act. It is laudable that Mr. Gates is putting considerable amounts of his own money where his mouth is, transforming hundreds of high schools across the country.
    But there’s only so much he can do, even with his resources. Turning around the dropout rate (which Mr. Gates correctly sees as a national epidemic, not just a South Carolina problem) and taking the next steps in making sure all kids are prepared for productive lives will take leadership in the political sphere.
    Mr. Warner bemoaned that “Today we’re making incremental improvements, and that is good but not sufficient to make the progress we need. There is no way an educational Bill Gates could emerge because there is no vehicle for them to pursue truly innovative ideas.”
    John, I wrote back, the entrepreneurial culture you envision is politically impossible. You know why? Because politicians and their constituents, being extremely jealous of every tax dollar, absolutely refuse to trust educators. Therefore we get rigid standards, tests, measurements and controls that force everyone to follow certain patterns. (I once wrote a whole column on the lack of trust as being the root of all evil in our society. I’ll put that on my blog, too.)
    Everything I’ve seen in my career about the politics of public education indicates that the state will never hire teachers, give them resources and say, “Go to town; be creative!”
    Mr. Warner agreed:
    “Brad, I have been talking to people about this for a long time too. I absolutely agree with you (about the lack of trust).
    “There is the trust factor you mentioned, not trusting educators. There is a lack of trust of parents to make the right decisions. There is also a serious lack of trust among minorities, especially older minorities, who have historical experience that honed their instincts to be wary. There (is) a large segment of people who are cynical in general and don’t trust anyone else, especially those in government. Some of our leading politicians in the state have made an art form out of tapping into this latent cynicism.
    “In a flat world, only innovation can keep us globally competitive. Public education needs to be a part of that culture. Somehow, we need to find a leader in this state who can empower people to begin to create a culture of innovation.
    “Dick Riley brought enlightened leadership to public education 25 years ago. And Carroll Campbell brought it to economic development 15 years ago. Without the next strong leader, it will be difficult for us to make significant progress.”
    What can I say to that, except that he’s absolutely right. This is why I hate to see a leader such as Mrs. Tenenbaum leave the public sphere, and why I worry about who will lead us to the next steps in the reform that is so essential to our state’s future.

Extras from Tenenbaum meeting

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There were a few points of interests from our Thursday editorial board meeting with Inez Tenenbaum that didn’t fit into my column Sunday.

First, she made a number of comments that — despite her continued attempts to be diplomatic — betrayed the degree to which her frustration with Gov. Mark Sanford has grown over the past couple of years. Since he came into office, at the same time that her second term began, she has gone out of her way to be at least neutral toward the governor, if not actually reaching out and trying to build bridges. For instance, she was the only major constitutional officer (as I recall; Cindi or someone correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m at home and have limited access to the archives) to go along with his desire to have her job become appointive rather than elected. Given the partisan currents that swirled all around this issue, the fact that the individual at the center had an accepting attitude should have been very helpful. Beyond that, the superintendent met with the governor once or twice early on, and this encouraged me that two people whose elections I had strongly favored would be able to rise above the partisan and ideological considerations that would have separated lesser individuals. All of this encouraged me greatly in early 2003.

But as time wore on, while the governor continued to say things to me that indicated his willingness to work with Mrs. Tenenbaum (and to this day, while he has shared with me — off the record, of course — negative impressions of a number of other leading political figures, within and without his own party, I don’t remember when he has directly criticized Mrs. Tenenbaum in my hearing), there was a lack of reciprocation on his part that was discouraging. He seemed noncommital personally, and among his administration and its fellow travelers there was a sort of passive-aggressive (and sometimes aggressive-aggressive) antipathy toward Mrs. Tenenbaum and her department that doused my hopes for a productive working relationship between them.

Then, of course, there was the larger problem: It became clear by early 2004 that the ideological wall between them was just too tall, and too thick. And the wall was constructed by the governor. If ideological rigidity were bricks, he’d have enough to build a full-scale model of the Great Wall of China.

In fact, Mr. Sanford’s insistence upon pushing the mad scheme of tuition tax credits for private school over the past year was, I think, the last straw for Mrs. Tenenbaum. You may say that he was for something like this all along, and indeed he was. But it only became fully apparent about a year ago the extent to which this was something he would pull out all stops to accomplish. He went beyond merely clueless about public education to positively destructive. (He would no doubt object to that characterization, and be sincere about it; that’s because he truly has no idea what public schools are all about, and is blind to the outrageousness of his proposal.)

Anyway, while she said a number of cordial things Thursday about the governor that sounded like her old self, there was a fierce passion in her voice when, right after praising other recent governors of both parties for the things they have done to further the cause of education, she uttered the following remarks with regard to their successor:

The whole thing about vouchers without accountability is just extraordinary.
In South Carolina, we have every aspect of our public schools held accountable — the Adequate Yearly Progress, the report cards — and to give money to a system that has no accountability, for financial or student achievement, is extraordinary. We would never do that.

    And then to, not only stand by and watch it, but actively condone and invite out-of-state groups to come in and run negative ads against public education — was irresponsible. And that’s putting it lightly.
    Why would you attack your school system that you’re the head of? And demoralize people when they are trying so hard, particularly in the rural areas, against all odds? It’s unprecedented.
    If you are trying to compete with other states to bring people into South Carolina and be competitive, you do not run down your public education system.
    You celebrate. You are the one who should be leading the charge, and holding a press conference: “We’re number one in improvement in 8th-grade NAEP; our SAT scores were the highest in improvement in the country…
    You know, that’s what a proactive governor does…

    …Someone has to give people hope.
    You just have to have somebody that will give people hope and excitement, that you can do it if you all pull together.

One of the things that frustrates her (and me) about the whole PPIC affair is the way it has bled energy and attention from the ongoing work of implementing the Education Accountability Act. The irony here, as I’ve often mentioned before, is that this was a reform pushed through by a Republican governor and lawmakers before she entered office in 1999. It was an enormous undertaking that fell into her lap the day she started the job, and one she never asked for. Nevertheless, she took it one and made it her priority — and more importantly, made it WORK. Schools have been getting steadily, measurably better. And yet there are precious few Republicans who join her in taking pride in this progress, and too many who embrace the latest fad — which of course, is the precise opposite of accountability. About that, she lamented:

    Traditionally in South Carolina … South Carolina will create a new initiative and say this is what we’re going to do now, and then we lose focus, and 7 or 8 years later, we’ll want to change course, and change directions…

She cited a Rand Corporation study that was done (or came out) right when she came into office in 1999 that cited Texas and North Carolina as the two states that had done the most on education reform. She and other officials dutifully studied those states to see what they had done right. At the same time, she was much impressed by this bitter irony: “But that same report said, had South Carolina stayed the course on the (Education Improvement Act), we would have been ahead of Texas and North Carolina.”

We do indeed have short attention spans — and not only among politicians. Mrs. Tenenbaum, as I noted in my column Sunday, is pinning her hopes on the private sector being able to overcome the political sphere’s attention deficit. This reminds me of comments Larry Wilson made to our editorial board at the governor’s mansion back in 1997 (or was it ’98?) — he said the business community, which was pushing for what would become the EAA would have to keep the state focused on the goals of accountability over the next 12 years, since election cycles would interfere with continuity.

But I question the extent to which the business community has maintained its focus on the goals of accountability. I’ve seen a number of exciting initiatives come out of the private sector, and then all these high-powered private individuals go on and live their lives, leaving the initiatives to sink or float. And they generally sink.

That must not be allowed to happen with accountability. And yet, the main actors in that process have mostly moved on to other enthusiasms, leaving a less dynamic cadre to carry on. Our only hope is that the process is sufficiently rooted in the system now that it can go on without a lot of heavy pushing. And our greatest fear must be that the reform process will be derailed by either PPIC, or some other dangerous distraction.

August 28 column, w/ links

11 Replies

Must one be out of office
to lead on public education?

By BRAD WARTHEN

Editorial Page Editor

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

We have enormous challenges
in South Carolina still, but we need to celebrate our successes. One of the
things that I have learned from Dick Riley is he said you need to motivate
people. A leader motivates people, and celebrates the good things… Success
breeds success, and if you keep working and people get excited — like, “We are making progress, let’s keep
going!”… And that’s what I hope my role has been as the bully pulpit for
education and change.

— Inez Tenenbaum, Aug. 25

INEZ TENENBAUM’s visit to our editorial board last week was an
occasion for her to tout her accomplishments and brush away questions about
political plans.

But I wasn’t interested in that stuff. I knew she had done a good
job — I had written that myself plenty of times — and I knew she wasn’t
planning to run for governor next year.

What I wanted to know was: Who is going to provide leadership
to
keep public education in South Carolina moving forward? Who is going to inspire
South Carolina to shoulder the burden of making sure our kids have futures as
bright as those of kids across the rest of the country?

The challenge before us is one that I sometimes compare to our
situation in Iraq: The odds are enormous. The likelihood of failure is high
unless we are willing to sacrifice and keep trying, no matter how hard the
slogging gets. There are no acceptable alternatives to success; we simply have
to do what it takes to win. Political leadership must rise to heights we have
not yet seen in order to inspire us to keep going in the face of daunting
circumstances. Giving up is not a rational option — and yet there are
burgeoning political movements that demand ever more loudly that we do just
that. With Iraq, it’s “Bring the troops home.” With S.C. public education, it’s
“give people tax credits to abandon the schools.”

In the case of S.C. education, the daunting circumstances mostly
have to do with rural poverty, which pulls down the averages so that it’s all
too easy to ignore the excellence in our suburban schools — or for that matter,
the gradual progress in even the most challenging areas.

Someone has to be a cheerleader for the successes South Carolina
has already had as it has implemented the Education Accountability Act of 1998,
and a goad to make us tackle the greatest unmet challenge, the one we have to
lick if we’re ever to catch up to the rest of the country — the gap between
rich districts and poor ones.

Mrs. Tenenbaum has been a good cheerleader for the successes —
although she can’t be heard easily over a governor who leads the faction that
scoffs at our accomplishments. She has also been a good administrator as the
system has adapted to the strict new regime of accountability. But her ability
to change the education conversation to what we ought to be talking about has been hampered by two things:

First, superintendent of education has never been a sufficiently
bully pulpit to get South Carolina to undertake something as difficult as going
beyond incremental improvement to dramatic change. It takes a governor — and a
governor of singular vision and charisma. That’s one reason the superintendent
job should be appointed rather than elected. (Make a list of major strategic
education initiatives — on the order of the Accountability Act, or the
Education Finance Act — that was conceived and led by anyone in that post. Short list, huh?)

Second, Mrs. Tenenbaum was the biggest vote-getter in the state
in the past two elections, and she is a Democrat. That made her a threat to the
Republican majority in the State House, and those Republicans who care more
about party advantage than the good of the state (and there are plenty such
knaves in both parties) had no hesitation about trashing public schools as a
way of getting at her. (Yet another reason why this position shouldn’t be
elected.)

Still, her eloquence in behalf of South Carolina’s most urgent
cause will certainly be missed in the halls of government. And what will
replace that?

For her part, Mrs. Tenenbaum promises to keep fighting for the
cause from the private sector. She hinted that she might start her own
foundation to add its voice to those already out there advocating continued
momentum on education reform.

Which brings me to the most disturbing point in our discussion
Thursday. Someone raised the question of what happens if the court rejects the
arguments of the poor districts that claim the state isn’t providing them with
adequate resources.

Her answer? “(I)f the court does not decide in favor of the
districts, it will have to be done by the private sector.” She said business
leaders — who were, after all, instrumental in making the Education Accountability Act happen — and other private actors will have to start a
grass-roots movement along the lines of, “so what, it didn’t meet the legal
standard, but we’re going to do something about it anyway.”

What disturbed me was her assumption — and it is unfortunately
well-founded — that the political branches won’t do what’s right. It’s either
the courts or an uprising of private citizens that will provide the leadership
— not the governor or lawmakers.

She’s not the only one who thinks so. Bill Barnet, one of the
business leaders who made the Accountability Act happen and now is mayor of
Spartanburg, agrees that the impetus for progress will have to come from
outside the ranks of the elected: “Until the people in the Legislature hear the
voices of the people who elect them, they are not going to change.”

OK, fine. This is not the way representative democracy is
supposed to work, of course. We’re supposed to be able to elect leaders with
the vision and intestinal fortitude to do the right thing, however difficult it
might be, without constant prodding. But fine. If we’ve all got to organize and
hoot and holler and focus the attention of those in the State House in order to
do right by our schools, then that’s what we’ve got to do. I’m ready. Are you?

NEVER give up on a good idea

3 Replies

I KNEW it!

I KNEW Dr. Sorensen was a man of reason, un’ uomo di rispetto, a man who would not cling to a bad idea in the face of superior alternatives.

Where reason is on your side, there is always hope. Sensible people may scoff at us dreamers, but when the dream makes more sense than the hard facts before you, NEVER give up on the dream.

Yes, I may be pinning a bit much on the USC president’s comments on the radio Friday, which seemed to open the door merely a crack on where USC will put its new baseball park. But now is the time for those who still hope for a better situation for baseball in Columbia — college and minor-league — to put our shoulders to that door and PUSH. Politely, of course.

And yes, other USC officials are still talking about staying the same old obstinate course. But here’s the thing about that: Dr. Sorensen is the man in charge. He has made that clear since the day he arrived on the scene: He will speak for the university, and that includes the independent duchy known as the athletic department. If HE says the school is loosening its grip on a bad idea, it’s time to get excited about the possibilities.

You say this still leaves us a good distance from the ideal — a dual-use (Gamecock and minor league) ballpark down by the river. Does it? Does it really? In truth, it leaves us the merest step from the river, in spite of Chip McKinney’s suggestion that alternatives to the absurd current plan would be closer to the campus, not farther away.

You see, the deal with the Guignard family opened up whole new worlds of possibility. After all, Dr. Sorensen’s vision is for USC’s campus to stretch all the way down to the river, right? What better way to take a great leap forward in that process than to go ahead and build that ballpark right there, on the banks, near the Gervais Street bridge, perhaps? That would immediately lay claim to the riverfront, and make what is now a vision a sudden and dramatic reality. USC would BE on the river, and in a way that could not be missed by anyone.

For Columbia, it would accomplish the rectification of a serious problem with the whole problem of the Vista. We speak of the Congaree Vista, but there are precious few places on the Columbia side from which you can actually see the Congaree. This would immediately open up the river, and it would immediately imbue that riverbank with teeming human activity, as thousands gathered to commune in the glow of the national pasttime.

It’s established that the site USC has been talking about up to now is a very bad idea. The arguments against far outweigh any arguments for. So if the site is moved, why on Earth move back toward the old, the established, the boring? Why not strike out in an inspiring new direction that dramatizes the university’s exciting vision for its future? How could anyone pass up such an opportunity? People say I’m dreaming when I say things like this, but personally, I simply see no alternative. Nothing else makes as much sense as the dream.

And once we put the ballpark where it ought to be, when can take up the matter of who plays there. And we won’t be talking dreams. We’ll be talking about what makes SENSE, in terms of efficient use of the facility and the greater benefit of the entire community.

Never give up on a good idea. Never.

August 21 column, with links

14 Replies

Field in my dreams
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    HERE’S MY TAKE on several recent items in the paper. You may spot a common thread:

  • Columbia City Council told the University of South Carolina that if it wants to put its own personal baseball “stadium” (people keep using that word, although baseball is played in parks) in the worst possible location in town — where it will have to compete with the Colonial Center, the Koger Center, the Coliseum, the new convention center and a booming, revitalized Vista — it will have to come up with a plan for where the cars are going to park, a plan that is more than just wishful thinking. Good for City Council. And good luck on that, USC.
  • The city approved Bill Shanahan’s proposal to use Capital City Stadium — that word again — foræ.æ.æ. well, I’m not sure exactly what. Apparently, there’s this league of college players who get together and play ball over summer vacation. And Columbia’s going to have such a team. It can, we’re told, have players from both USC and Clemson on it. Who is going to root for whom at these games eludes me, but if anyone can make a go of it, Mr. Shanahan can. So good luck to him. Something about this seems ironic, because USC has been so successful in quashing any competition to its sports programs, and now we’re going to have another college game in town — although not during the actual season, so I suppose the Gamecocks are still getting their way on this one. Two City Council members voted against this — Hamilton Osborne, who votes against everything, and Anne Sinclair, who thinks the city can find better ways to spend its funds than putting 30 grand into this each year. I think I’m with the majority on this one, although Ms. Sinclair and I seldom part company on baseball matters. More on that later.
  • As part of its effort to make the unworkable workable, USC wants to take the pedestrian footbridge that led visitors into the old Central Correctional Institution and move it to its proposed new “stadium” location in the Vista. This is precisely the opposite of what should have happened. A joint-use ballpark — for the Gamecocks and a minor-league professional team — should have been located on the old CCI property, which always has been the perfect location. But that’s not going to happen now, is it — not after the city gave up on years of feckless attempts to do something else with the property, and sold it to a developer to build condos — like we need more of those — and, oh yeah, some houses. Well, I’ve got a house. What I don’t have is a ballpark down by the river where I can watch both first-class college and minor-league baseball.
  • And if you don’t think dual-use ballparks down by the river are a big asset to a community, go back and read George Will’s — yeah, the top nationally syndicated columnist, not a yokel hack like me — rhapsodic description of Joe Riley’s park on Thursday’s op-ed page. How come Charleston gets to have both Joe Riley and a beautiful dual-use (RiverDogs and the Citadel) ballpark, and we get neither? Yeah, I know Mayor Bob does the best he can within the limitations of our lousy weak-mayor system, and that he truly loves baseball, and I know he’s never going to forget that we opposed his proposal for a new park sort of near the river several years back. But that deal called for too much city commitment, and too little private. What I find hard to forget is the way the mayor went along with USC in deep-sixing a joint-use deal that had solid private involvement (can you say “Cal Ripken?”). You remember. That was the last act in the drama before USC announced its big plans for going it “alone” in the overcrowded Vista.
  • Local developer Alan Kahn has a chance to bring a Class AA farm team to the Midlands — from my wife’s hometown of Jackson, Tenn. (where I spent the first 10 years of my career). Trouble is, he wants to build his park not in Columbia, but in a part of Richland County that from where I live is more or less halfway to Florence. Listen up: Baseball is for downtown. It’s for a whole community, not a booming suburb. It’s something that’s supposed to bring all the disparate parts of a community together, not set them apart (“We got a ballpark and you don’t.”) And no, I can’t prove any of this; I just know it all to be true.

    I said I would get back to Anne Sinclair, which I do gladly, because she’s about the only player around here who comes anywhere close to seeing this stuff the way I do. About USC’s Vista dreams she says: “I don’t want to leave anyone with any illusions. I am not happy with this location. And don’t even try to lobby me; it will only make me angry.” You go, Anne. She sums up talk about all those jammed-together venues being able to coordinate their schedules thusly: “What kind of piece of you-know-what is that?” Well said.
    She still thinks joint-use, privately driven, down-by-the-river was the way to go, and that it never got a fair hearing.
    But Ms. Sinclair, being a sensible lady, has moved on. If USC can come up with a credible plan, fine. And she thinks Mr. Kahn’s proposal is now our best hope for the return of professional ball.
    I am not a sensible lady. I’m a feverish man with a dream.
    My colleagues on the editorial board keep counseling me, in the kind of soothing tones you use to calm the delusional and overexcited, to accept reality and move on. They say minor-league ball way out in the Northeast is as good as it’s gonna get. They say the only thing wrong with the USC deal is the parking. They say my riverside dreams were never in the cards, and can never, ever happen in the future. One said, “As long as you’re dreaming, are you going to throw in your rapid-transit system, too?” To which I said, “You betcha. I’m gonna ride the train from my house to the ballpark.” They say climb down off the ledge and put down the baseball bat, please.
    What I say is that circumstances change. A few years ago, we had a booming minor league franchise and a relatively ho-hum program at Sarge Frye. That state of affairs changed dramatically. Why can’t this one?
    Mr. Will began his column with this thought: “Realism is overrated. Putting it aside makes possible some sweet things, such as the idea of Santa Claus. And the fact of minor-league baseball.”
I’ll take up realism when it’s as sweet as my dreams.

The debate continues…

16 Replies

Wow. I was so overwhelmed and lulled into a placid state by the kind comments in response to my Sunday column that I didn’t notice until just now that this debate was still going on (and this one, too, in a related vein).

Rather than continue to jump in with my answers and asides in the comments stream, I’m going to respond to a couple of my correspondents with this new posting — largely because I still haven’t mastered a way to insert links, much less files, conveniently into the comments format. I continue to admire those savvy folk who have figured it out.

Anyway, Portia said I had explained my lack of military service — one of the great regrets, or perhaps I should say gripes (since it wasn’t my choice), of my life — in a recent column, but she couldn’t get to it to provide a link. I’ve mentioned it more than once, but I have a feeling that this is the one to which she refers. If not, I’ll go back and look for another one.

Also, the link that Mike C provided was interesting, and I recommend it (although I got lost in exactly what the late William Jennings Bryan Dorn‘s namesake was urging Woodrow Wilson to do; I really need to bone up on that period). But I bring it up here because its title, and this passage …

The profound interpretation recognizes that if there is an invasion the decision for it and for its sweeping historical consequences will be in the hands of one man, The President of the United States, and that he – and he alone – must take complete moral responsibility for this massive intervention in the fate of our species. And this fact is conveyed in the title of Mr. Hammerschlag’s article: it will forever be Bush’s War, no matter what the outcome.

… reminded me of an older column of mine (and here’s where I really had to go to a posting rather than a comment, since I had to attach a Word file, that piece no longer being online).

Oh, and in answer to "Amos Nunoy‘s" last question, namely, "Did you know it wasn’t about mass weapons the whole time? You didn’t say," I most certainly did NOT write "Hey, there’s no WMD." Why? Because I thought, like everyone else, that Saddam had at least one variety of WMD (he had used it in the past, after all), and was working feverishly to develop others. In fact, we mentioned it editorially among the reasons to invade at the time — partly because that cause was more important to others on our editorial board than it was to me, but also because it WAS part of the argument. It just wasn’t what was important to me, and would not have been reason enough alone to justify invasion in MY mind. You can tell this by what I did stress at the time, such as (at least in passing) in the column linked in the paragraph above. Or, more to the point, this one. In fact, the latter is worth quoting here, in case you have trouble calling up that old file:

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons – geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.

That was written, by the way, the month before the 2003 invasion. You’ll notice, "Amos," that while I didn’t specifically mention WMD (because, once again, I thought that threat, while insufficient, was real) I DID say that the president, for Realpolitik reasons, wasn’t frankly stating exactly WHY we had to go into Iraq — or at least, wasn’t stressing it enough to suit me. That’s why that column was headlined, "The uncomfortable truth about why we may have to invade Iraq." I thought it was important to state those reasons more prominently beforehand, so I did.

Morgan and Arthur

14 Replies

You’ve probably already heard enough about my dog who just died, but this wouldn’t fit into my Sunday column, and I’ve always liked the story, so I pass on this deleted passage:

    Her full name was Morgan le Fay, which she didn’t deserve, because she was a good dog. She was dubbed that on the day we got her. I’m fond of Arthurian lore, and for some reason, as we were driving the small black creature home that day — she wedged herself under the car seat in the last display of timidity I can recall on her part — I thought of the habit Arthur’s evil half-sister had of turning herself into a carrion crow (in T.H. White’s version of the story) — about the same size, and precisely the same color. I mentioned it to Andy and the other kids, and they liked it right away, the name having no negative connotations to them.
    Anyway, sometime during the first year we had her, a huge, “yaller” male stray — the biggest, strongest dog I’ve ever tried to hold on a leash — decided to come live with us. Despite his humble origins, he had a regal bearing, and was undoubtedly a warrior. We agreed to keep him while Pets Inc. found someone to adopt him, and we chained him to a post on the front porch. He tolerated this, until the mood would strike him to go on a quest, at which time he would casually break the chain and leave for a day or so. When he returned he bore such wounds of battle as a chunk out of his haunch, or a nearly detached ear. He completely ignored these, but allowed us to take him to the vet.
    Why did we chain him to the porch? To protect him from little Morgan le Fay, who despised this powerful interloper and would attack him with total abandon if he wandered into her backyard. So we called him “Arthur” until he was adopted and went off to his own Avalon.

August 14 column, with links

3 Replies

The best dog I ever knew
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    THE “DOG DAYS” are traditionally a time when there’s not much news, and columnists wander far afield. So even though this has been a fairly eventful August, I hope you’ll forgive me if I write about a dog — specifically, our dog Morgan, who died Thursday.
    Actually, she was our son Andy’s dog, but he’s grown and has his own place, and Morgan still lived Morgan7_2with us. Even though Andy came to see her often, she was the family’s dog, too.
    We got her from a shelter 13 years ago for Andy’s 12th birthday. She looked like a full black Lab while she had the rounded features of a puppy, but we knew her mother was an English setter. As she grew, the more delicate, long-legged bone structure of a setter became obvious. She never weighed more than 40 pounds.
    She had elegant lines and moved like a gazelle, clearing fallen trees higher than her head as though they weren’t there. She had an instinctive love of hunting, though I didn’t hunt and she never caught anything. Her genes were so good, it seemed a shame to have spayed her.
    However delicate her appearance, and gentle her usual demeanor — she had tremendous patience with children, who could climb on her or tug at her fur without fear of even a snort of irritation — she was the toughest dog I ever knew. She expected to be and was the top dog whenever thrown together with others of her species — no matter the size, age or gender.
    If other dogs dared to show disrespect — even with a routine, impertinent sniff for identification purposes — she let them know with immediate, terrible clarity just who she was, going from impassive reserve to snarling, fang-baring furball with a suddenness that alarmed human witnesses.
    But this was a seldom-seen trait, mostly because other dogs generally treated her with due respect. And her tenderness was something to behold. She understood that I did not wish to be licked — brief contact with her tongue would raise a rash that itched like mad. So she showed her affection by pressing the top of her head gently against me — for minutes at a time if I held still.
    When another dog, Guy (right), came to live with us, he never once challenged her authority, though heMorgan_004_1 grew to be thrice her size. So there was peace, except for a brief period when a brash young Great Dane mix (below, left) stayed with us, and she had to put him in his place repeatedly.
    She was an outside dog, because of the allergy thing. But we started bringing her in for meals about a year ago. Guy was badly overweight because she would let him eat from her bowl — a gesture of noblesse oblige on her part.
    She was slower, but still active, healthy and a formidable watchdog (with Guy running behind, assisting) until this summer. She started wheezing, snuffling and gagging. We thought maybe she had an allergy. But it was inoperable throat cancer. We brought her in for longer periods. Andy visited daily. She ate well, but soon you could count her bones.
    Wednesday morning, she came in with no trouble at all, ate in about two minutes, and agreed to go out as soon as she was done. She actually seemed to be feeling better. That evening, I found my wife struggling to help her stand. She couldn’t. She’d teeter, then fall with a crash, her legs limp. My wife had already called the vet and made a Thursday afternoon appointment. We knew this was the Morgan_002end. She spent the night flat on the floor, only occasionally lifting her head to look around for us with dimming eyes, before it dropped heavily back down.
    The next morning, she whimpered. We were appalled. (Even when, years ago, a car shattered her left rear leg and she dragged her bloody body home to show us, she never made a self-pitying sound. The people at the pet hospital where she recuperated from surgery were awed by her fortitude, and they loved her for it.)
    We tried to get her in to the vet earlier, but there were no openings. Andy got off work at 2, and rushed to her side. Morgan died about one minute later. She had waited all day for him, holding death at bay with the same expectation of obedience with which she had ruled her yard.
    I was about to leave work to help take her to the vet when my wife called. I was grateful she had chosen the moment herself. I had never faced anything like this.
    Morgan was in charge to the end, protecting her family from a sad duty just as surely as she had protected our home for 13 years. She was the best dog I’ve ever known. I’m glad I told her that Wednesday night.

Wednesday column, with links

24 Replies

Where have all the heroes gone?
Nowhere, actually
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    APPARENTLY, there are no war heroes any more. At least, there are none that America feels like lifting up as examples and celebrating. This was the premise of a piece in The New York Times’ Week in Review section Sunday that explained some things to me.
    There are, of course, actual heroes in the war on terror. The Times piece gave the names of three of them.
    The problem is, I hadn’t heard of them. You probably hadn’t, either. And the contrast between that ignorance on our part, and the way Sgt. Alvin York and Audie Murphy (whose picture, portraying himself in the autobiographical Hollywood movie, “To Hell and Back,” was the dominant feature of the section’s front page) were lionized during and after their wars, is striking — and shocking. And stupid, if, as the story suggests, it reflects a deliberate policy decision on the part of our government.
    The three mentioned were:

    In an earlier age, Sgt. Hester would have been brought home and sent across the country to sell War Bonds. But we don’t do that today, and not only because there are no War Bonds. (Remember, in this war, the homefront is not being asked to sacrifice in any way whatsoever; instead, we have tax cuts and soaring deficits.)
    The NYT piece gave the following, admittedly speculative, “reasons” for this: “(P)ublic opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”
    Amen to that last. Who get portrayed as heroes? Jessica Lynch and football star Pat Tillman — both victims. One was wounded and captured, the other killed by friendly fire.
    And we hear about the mostly unsung victims who are killed, without any chance to fight back, by roadside IEDs. The message we get from that? “There’s just no use in continuing to try.”
    The actual heroes do get mentioned. President Bush spoke of Sgt. Peralta — a Mexican immigrant who enlisted the day after he got his “green card” — at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast (surely you heard about it). And Sgt. Smith’s name pops up 154 times in the last two years in the news databases I searched. It’s sort of hard to keep the one Medal of Honor awarded in Iraq a complete secret, after all.
    But compare Sgt. Smith’s name recognition to Brad Pitt’s. Or Sgt. Hester’s to Janet Jackson’s. Or Rafael Peralta’s to Rafael Palmeiro’s. See what we elevate as worthy of our attention?
    Let’s confront another rationale the Times identified: Divided public opinion gives all the more reason to stress the nobility and achievements, not only of those who perform traditional acts of valor in combat, but of those who build schools, or train the new Iraqi army.
    Our leaders fear to confront attitudes such as this one, expressed by one Kevin Canterbury in a letter to The Boston Globe:
    “I am disgusted by the American media’s glorification of the blood sport we call war,” he begins. (What glorification? Has this guy seen the news?) “Truly sincere, honorable people like Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who make almost superhuman sacrifices to protect freedom and democracy in America, are used as props to personalize and humanize the big lie that the Iraq debacle is a just and noble endeavor.æ.æ.æ. There is nothing romantic about this war.”
    No war was ever romantic. It is always an unbelievably horrible, nasty, bloody business. Society used to hide that, and do its best to romanticize combat. But to me, heroism means a lot more when depicted against the brutal reality: Are you more impressed by Audie Murphy in the sanitized battle scenes of “To Hell and Back,” or by the portrayal of Dick Winters’ deeds in HBO’s painfully realistic “Band of Brothers”?
    Those of us who believe this war is necessary should not flinch from its horrors. We should hold up what heroes manage to accomplish in spite of it all. Are we squeamish about the fact that the heroism of Sgts. Smith and Hester involved killing the enemy? Yes, we are; even I am. But I think most Americans would appreciate what they’ve done, if they knew enough about them.
Confront directly the attitudes of those like Mr. Canterbury who take the untenable stance of “supporting the troops but not the war.”
    As a political tactic, this is a smart improvement over the Vietnam-era practice of spitting (figuratively if not literally) on returning veterans. But when people say “support the troops by bringing them home,” I see it as spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives. That’s what abandoning Iraq would mean.
    Soldiers kill. Soldiers get killed — and not in pretty ways, keeling over saying “They got me,” without a trace of blood. They get killed in the manner of Sgt. Peralta, whose remains could only be identified by a tattoo on his shoulder.
    If we can’t face that, let’s give up on the whole thing. Let’s disband the military altogether, and just hope the rest of the world decides to show its gratitude by being nice to us from here on.
    Or we can face a grim task, and openly respect those who distinguish themselves in performing that task for us while we sit on our broad behinds watching the Michael Jackson trial.
    On the day after Sgt. Peralta died, his little brother received the first and last letter the Marine ever wrote to him. “Be proud of being an American,” he wrote. Young Ricardo Peralta should take that advice. And America, returning the favor, should be proud of his big brother.

Mark Sanford on Will Folks

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My Sunday column makes the case that Will Folks’ op-ed was worth running because it gave insight into his character and judgment, and therefore into the judgment of his boss, Gov. Mark Sanford. So what does the governor himself have to say about that?

Before asking the governor Friday about Rep. Gresham Barrett’s comments, I asked him one other question:

"Why was Will Folks your press secretary for four years?"

His answer was too involved to just slip into my column without ditching several of the comments from readers that were the reason for the column. And I sure don’t want to write another column on this subject. But I just had to share it, so here goes:

The governor began by noting that Will Folks hadn’t been his spokesman as governor for four years. That period started with the campaign, and that’s when he and Mr. Folks forged their bond, such as it is.

"You start out with a grass-roots campaign, you have very little in the way of resources," the governor said. "You’re working out of the basement of your house…. You can’t afford all the bells and whistles" of a full-blown, professional campaign with experienced people in all the key positions. In any case, he added, that kind of uptight, do-it-by-the-book campaign wasn’t his style.

So, he said, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." (We all knew that’s what he did, but it meant a little more having the governor just say it that way.)

"Given the pressures he was under and the challenges he faced that he had never faced before, I think he did a pretty good job," during the campaign, Mr. Sanford said.

So after the election, he decided to give the young man the same job in the governor’s office. There, as we all saw, Mr. Folks moved from gaffe to gaffe — the Corvette thing, the comments about the Commission on Women, the alleged threats to the Chamber in Anderson.

The governor doesn’t deny that. But, he said, "For the most part, he did a pretty good job."

Bottom line as to why he kept him on so long? "I did it because he was competent," said the governor.

That’s pretty much all he would say for the record. Make of it what you will.

August 7 column, with links

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Folks op-ed sparks lively
discussion in blogosphere
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
     LAST WEEK we ran an op-ed piece from former gubernatorial press secretary Will Folks headlined, “My side of the domestic violence story.”
    As you most likely know, Gov. Mark Sanford’s ex-spokesman was charged with criminal domestic violence after he allegedly kicked open the door of the home he shared with his now-former fiancee and pushed her into furniture, bruising her back.
    When, to my surprise, he called Tuesday to offer a column on the subject, I was quite interested.Folks_mug_2  Of course, I could not decide whether to run it until I had seen it. And I had to make the decision quickly, because he had indicated his intention to share it with other papers. That meant running it, if at all, the next day. We don’t knowingly run local op-eds that have run elsewhere.
    We ended up running it pretty much as it was, with one exception: I removed a passage in which he quoted what he claimed was an e-mail from his ex to his mother. Before making that decision, I asked to see the e-mail, and he forwarded it. Important context was missing from his citation of it. Besides, this was supposed to be his account of what he did, not his version of her account.
    I wrote an item for my blog about the piece. I included the part I had cut, followed by a fuller quotation from the e-mail he had forwarded. The way he had selectively quoted the e-mail to his advantage was striking.
    There was high reader interest. That day, the story about the new “four-strikes” rule at USC got the third-highest number of page views on thestate.com. My blog item and Mr. Folks’ op-ed came in first and second.
    Most interesting to me were the comments readers left on my blog. In keeping with my ongoing quest to make clear to readers why we do what we do, I thought I’d quote some of those comments, and answer them. I only know these correspondents by the names or nicknames they gave on the blog. But their identities are less important to me than the substance of their comments.
    I begin with “Lisa Turner’s” comment for an obvious reason: “You’re becoming a pretty good blogger. While I am intrigued by all the behind-the-scenes iterations of this story, I do not think it should have been run. You say that it was an opportunity The State shouldn’t pass up, but do you really think that Will Folks was going to do anything but try to help himself out?”
    Mr. Folks probably was trying to help himself out. But that’s not what he did. He defied legal (and his father’s) counsel in doing so. I knew I wasn’t helping him a bit by running it. But I wasn’t trying to hurt him, either. It wasn’t about how it affected him. My reasoning was the same as with anything we choose to publish: I ran it for my readers, who had a legitimate interest in knowing more about the man whom the governor had kept for years as his spokesman, despite his obvious liabilities.
    “Bob Steel” wrote: “I think it is irresponsible to allow Mr. Folks the opportunity to give his side of the story without hearing from the victim. It is very apparent Mr. Folks has friends at The State and was able to call in some favors.”
    If Mr. Folks has friends at The State, they certainly weren’t involved in this decision. And again, no favor was done here, as I suspect any attorney would tell you. As to the “other side” angle: I won’t solicit a point/counterpoint on a domestic dispute. The op-ed page is not “The Jerry Springer Show.” If the former fiancee, or anyone else, offers me a relevant, publishable piece rebutting Mr. Folks, I’ll run it. But I am not going to harass someone who (unlike Mr. Folks) is not a public figure during a horrible time in her life by calling and saying: “Your ex-boyfriend has written something trying to defend his actions. You want to respond? By the way, you’ve got about an hour.”
    “Elsa Green” wrote that “The State Newspaper has made a poor decision in allowing Will Folks to write an op-ed about his own personal problems.” But she went on to make my argument for me as to why to run it: “What is particularly frightening about this case is that Will has been an adviser to the top executive of our state.” Exactly. If the column had been simply about a man’s “personal problems,” I would have had no interest. It had value because of what it revealed about that man’s character and judgment, and therefore about the judgment of the governor.
    “Randy O’Toole” understood: “I think that Mr. Folks has a serious problem and it reflects poorly not only on him but the Governor and the State of South Carolina.”
    Not everyone saw it that way. “John Smith” wrote: “The real winner in all of this is, of course, Mark Sanford. After running headlong into a brick wall in terms of ‘taking on’ the governmental status quo, the Governor has now gotten rid of the ‘pit bull’: the very voice and symbol of his renegade attitude towards dealing with the legislature. Perhaps we will see a more cooperative effort from the executive branch as re-election time nears. After all, the voters like to see results.”
    “Deaver Traywick” thought I was unfair to the author: “My only suggestion is that you might have given Mr. Folks the option of running the piece as edited or not at all. As a writer and editor, I am concerned about the editorial policy of publishing changes or truncations without the writer’s consent.” As I regularly do when I make such a substantive change, I called Mr. Folks and told him of it. I half expected him to withdraw the piece, but he didn’t.
    “Thomas McElveen” came to my defense on that point: “Based on my personal experience, Mr. Warthen is extremely fair in his editing, and very graciously allows op-ed contributors input and even critique of his editing.” I wouldn’t dare try to
say it better.
    Finally, “Robert Trout” wrote, “I don’t get Mr. Warthen’s decision to not run an unedited op-ed piece in the newspaper, and yet run it in his blog. I don’t see the differenceæ.æ.æ..” Personally, I see a big difference.
    One of the reasons I took on the demanding additional work of a blog is that it gave me a chance to say things I couldn’t say in the newspaper for lack of space, or because it was unsuitable. The blogosphere, as you may have noticed, is a very different place from a family newspaper. One way I make use of that different forum is to give behind-the-scenes looks at the paper itself. For instance, I recently posted a Robert Ariail cartoon that we had judged too salacious for the paper, and asked readers whether they would have made the same decision. Most said we made the wrong call. Such is life.

July 31 column, with links

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State House needs to get real
about local government — and taxes
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    A MEMBER of my Rotary club last week asked new House Speaker Bobby Harrell a question about property taxes.
    Unfortunately, in answering the question, he did not say anything that sounded like "comprehensive tax reform."
    This is worrisome, because after a buildup of two or three years in which it has looked constantly as though lawmakers were on the verge of getting serious about tackling the entire problem of how we fund essential services in this state, I’m starting to hear a lot of talk that sounds disturbingly like we’re in for another populist, Band-Aid round of property tax cutting without regard for anything else. (See above editorial.)
    Take, for instance, what Mr. Harrell’s Senate counterpart had to say on our July 17 op-ed page.
    This column, by the way, will make more sense if you read that column, from Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell. For stark contrast, also check out the July 26 piece by the Municipal Association‘s Howard Duvall.
    Mr. McConnell’s piece is remarkable for its lack of grounding in reality; Mr. Duvall’s for the precise opposite.
    In case you don’t have access to the Web at the moment, let me offer a few excerpts from Mr. McConnell’s piece, with a little commentary of my own:
    "As long as we have property taxes, we are in effect paying rent to the government for the use of our property…." No, we’re not. What we are doing is paying our fair share for services that benefit us enormously as property owners. Those of us who own property are ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of services that make our communities worth living in: police and fire protection, libraries and, yes, public schools.
    "Local governments can charge us as much as they want and feed their need to spend our money like they have a blank check." Local governments are run by officials who are elected with just as much legitimacy as Mr. McConnell, and who are caught between their mandate to provide everyday, essential services in their communities; state and federal mandates that they do certain things whether they want to or not; and the state Legislature’s never-ending efforts to prevent them from paying what it costs to do these things. If legislators, in their callous disregard , force local governments to raise property taxes beyond what voters find tolerable, it is the local officials who get voted out of office.
    "Their (local governments’) presumption for reform has always been more sources of revenue but fewer and fewer restriction on how and how much they can spend." Well, duh. When costs are increasing, and everybody’s beating you up over the property tax, of course you’re going to seek other sources of revenue. And where in the world do state legislators get off placing restrictions on how local council members spend the revenues that they take full responsibility (and the political risk) for raising? Here’s how this works: When lawmakers passed a bill spelling out how local governments could charge impact fees for new residential development, they forbade the locals to spend the money on the one greatest cost such development generates — public schools. So the locals have to go back to the property tax, and they — not the guilty parties up in the State House — get strung up at the polls for it.
    "Reform must be fair and, at the very least, must not produce a net increase for government in collected taxes." Oh, no. We wouldn’t want to provide rural kids with the same quality education that city kids get, or put enough troopers on the road, or make our prisons secure, or get the mentally ill out of jails and emergency rooms, or any of those other frills we can’t seem to afford with the present tax structure.
    "I hope that then the voices of the people from the mountains to the coast can drown out those of the paid lobbyists." Translation: I hope that rising dissatisfaction with the problem the Legislature created gives me the political license I need to utterly ignore the realistic counsel of the governments closest to the people.
    Local governments deal with the public at the most intimate level, where basic services are provided. They know what the public really wants from government because the public lets them know immediately when they’re failing to provide it. And they know what it costs, and they know what it’s like to be caught between the people they live among and the ideologues in Columbia who keep trying to make their jobs harder.
    I finally understand why Mark Sanford is the first governor I’ve seen Sen. McConnell get along with: Both are passionately, pedantically libertarian. And neither of them allows the reality of what happens at the business end of government — where essential services are provided to real people — interfere with them as they sit in the State House and endlessly spin their anti-government theories.
    Both of them starkly displayed this disconnect on the seat belt issue. But it matters so much more when the governor maligns public schools, or the senator trashes local government, with no regard for what’s actually happening out here in the world.

Sunday, July 24 column w/ links

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It’s hard to find heroes in ongoing Rove saga
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
    WHEN IT FIRST happened 10 days ago, I just glanced over the story and shrugged at a classic example of how political parties distort policymaking to the point that no one in Washington seems capable of simply doing the right and reasonable thing for the good of the country.
    But when I went back a few days later and read more about it, I just got more disgusted. Here are some of the headlines:
    — Newsday: “Partisan battle on Rove; Democrats’ effort to strip Bush adviser’s security clearance fails as GOP retaliates with slap at top Dem.”
    — The Boston Globe: “… Democrats Foiled On Documents.”
    — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Democrats take aim at Rove….”
    What’s wrong with this picture? The issue was whether Karl Rove, President Bush’s political Karl_rove Svengali, should be stripped of his security clearance because he had some as-yet-undefined involvement in the leak of the name of a CIA officer.
    That’s a serious matter, deserving of serious consideration — not a partisan slapfest. My own gut reaction is that of course he shouldn’t have any sort of high-level clearance. He’s a political hack who just happens to hold the title of “deputy chief of staff.” (In the spy world, I believe that’s referred to as having “official cover.”)
    Mr. Rove, good buddy of the appalling Grover Norquist, may currently be at the top of the heap of political hacks, but that just puts him at the bottom of the list of people I would trust with sensitive information. I just don’t trust anyone of that breed, whether we’re talking Mr. Rove, James Carville or Lee Atwater.
    In a rational universe — or a rational republic, which I would settle for — this man would not have had a security clearance to begin with. And by “rational republic,” I mean one in which policy trumped politics, and the national interest did not have to compete with the constant jockeying for partisan advantage.
    But that’s not the way things work. On July 14, apparently frustrated that their campaign to get Mr. Rove fired wasn’t getting enough traction, Democrats presented legislation to deny access to classified information to any federal employee who discloses a covert CIA operative’s identity.
    This stems, of course, from the never-ending battle over whether Mr. Rove did or did not blow the cover of one Valerie Plame as retaliation for a report filed by her husband, ex-diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, that supposedly undermined the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain material for nuclear weapons from Niger. Since an ongoing investigation has apparently pointed at Mr. Rove as having mentioned Ms. Plame (although not by name) to a reporter, Democrats want the president to fire Mr. Rove.
    They pin this demand not on Mr. Rove having committed a crime (it seems highly unlikely at this point that he would become the second person in history ever to be prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982), but on Mr. Bush’s having said he would fire anyone in his employ who was involved in such a leak.
    On one level, that seems a reasonable expectation. I wish I thought that was all that was involved here. Unfortunately, I know Democrats want to make hay from demanding that the president do something they believe he’ll never do.
    This matter is of enormous importance to the president because he sticks by his friends even when he shouldn’t (see Don Rumsfeld), and of equally great importance to the Democrats because they want to embarrass and weaken the president as much as possible, whether Mr. Rove goes or not.
    Mr. Rove doesn’t have to have a title or even a desk in the White House to keep doing all the things that his opposition despises him for. This isn’t about substance, though. It’s about gaining partisan advantage.
    But if the unsuccessful Democratic initiative in the U.S. Senate on the 14th was tainted by partisan interest, it still didn’t smell as bad as the Republican response.
    Majority Leader Bill Frist put forth an amendment to strip Minority Leader Harry M. Reid and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of their security clearances. There was no serious attempt to pretend that this was anything but naked retaliation. It was so bad that 20 of his fellow Republicans joined Wilson_1 Democratic senators in rejecting it, 64 to 33. (The vote on the “get Rove” proposal was along par
ty lines, 53-44.)
    The disgusting thing is that those 20 grownups who bucked their own leader’s idiocy are the only individuals involved in this that a serious, disinterested person can applaud. I certainly can’t cheer for the self-righteous Mr. Wilson, who declared on NBC’s “Today” show that “What this thing has been for the past two years has been a cover-up, a cover-up of the web of lies that underpin the justification for going to war in Iraq.”
    He neglects to mention that a bipartisan (oh, there’s a refreshing word) Senate intelligence committee report found that he has a problem with the truth himself. I quote from The Washington Post of July 10, 2004:
    “The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.”
    Bottom line: No one should pay too much attention to what Mr. Wilson says. But some people will,Karl_rove_bush_1  as long as what he says is to their partisan advantage. And the president shouldn’t listen to what Mr. Rove says. But he does, and he will continue to do so, no matter how this little drama ends.

July 22 column, with links

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Folks in high office keep getting
younger — in more ways than one
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
    I’M NOT USUALLY inclined to help partisans and ideologues, but the Democrats and “liberal groups” who yearn to stop President Bush’s choice for the Supreme Court obviously aren’t trying very hard.
    John Glover Roberts Jr. is flawed in a way that is so obvious, so irrefutable, that the seven Democrats in the “Gang of 14” should have no trouble citing this failing as an “extraordinary circumstance” that frees them from their promise not to filibuster:
    He’s too young.
    I don’t mean “too young in that he would be in a position to steer the court in a conservative direction for a generation.” Mr. Bush’s political opponents would mean it that way, but I don’t care about any of that “liberal vs. conservative” mumbo-jumbo. I mean he’s just plain too young. This isRoberts  not opinion. It is based upon an indisputably objective standard, to wit:
    At 50, he is the first person nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime who is younger than I am.
    Obviously, this is an intolerable situation, and those inclined toward intolerance of all things Bush should seize it with both hands (especially since I doubt they’ll find any other good excuses to oppose him).
    Now, let me help out the Republicans and “conservative groups” that are going to support this mere pup no matter what their opponents say, do or dig up:
    I’m being facetious.
    I spell that out — obvious as it may be to you, dear reader — because the ideologues of the right are as utterly lacking in a sense of irony as their counterparts on the left. And I get enough sputtering e-mail as things stand.
    I will now confuse everyone by not only getting serious, but changing the subject entirely.
    My purpose is not to pass judgment on that callow youth the president introduced Tuesday night (note to “conservatives” —being facetious again there).
    The thing is, my own shock at his youth reminds me of an earlier experience, one that has more substantial implications right here at home in South Carolina.
    In 1994, my first year on this newspaper’s editorial board, we interviewed David Beasley, who was seeking our endorsement (which he didn’t get) for governor.
    At one point, the late Bill Rone asked the candidate of the Christian Right about his reputed past Sc_senate_beasley as a Good-Time Charlie.
    Mr. Beasley looked at him with an expression of sincere, chastened, candid innocence and said, “Yessir, I’ve had good times….” I have never before or since seen anyone seeking public office look quite so much like a once-wayward cherub who was humbly grateful to be back in the heavenly fold. It was not the sort of thing that your everyday man of the world can carry off.
    So as the meeting was breaking up I had to ask: How old are you, anyway? He told me, I nodded, and said wonderingly, “You’re the first gubernatorial candidate I’ve ever interviewed who was younger than I am.”
    I didn’t attach all that much importance to it at the time. Yes, I did detect a certain “What, me worry?” callowness in the candidate, a lack of gravitas that always made it hard for me to take him as seriously as one would like to take a governor of one’s state. But my main thought was that I was getting older, and I might as well get used to this sort of thing.
    And boy, was I right.
    Every governor we’ve had since that day has been younger than I. Jim Hodges didn’t look like it, but it’s true.
    Mr. Hodges, who had been a competent and even admirable legislator, regressed somehow from the moment he began to seek the state’s highest office. He allowed himself to be led by the nose by a self-deluding, 34-year-old political consultant whose awful advice helped him become, like Mr. Hodgeslose Beasley, a one-termer.
    Mark Sanford seems a little older than his two immediate predecessors. He seems more like, say, a graduate student. But his ideas, and his ability to translate them into policy, seem stuck in that stage of development. However good some of them are (and however bad others are), they seem unable to find their way out of the seminar.
    It’s not really a matter of age. Mr. Sanford was five years older than Fritz Hollings was when he became governor, and Mr. Hollings accomplished a lot.
    My concern has more to do with certain attributes we tend to associate with age, and which have been lacking in South Carolina. Our last few governors haven’t been terribly accomplished, either at the time of their election or at the time of their departure.
    Mr. Sanford has yet to depart, but he hasn’t broken the string yet, and his resume in 2002 — six years in Congress with a singular lack of achievements — is consistent with the trend. (Mr. Hodges Sanford_budget had more to show when he ran, but you wouldn’t have known it watching him as governor.)
    Not just to pick on these three, the same can be said of almost everyone who’s sought the office during this time — Joe Riley, who failed to be nominated in 1994, being the noteworthy exception.
    And South Carolina needs more than that. It needs someone who can get things done, because we’ve got a lot that needs doing. Yet the kinds of accomplished men and women who might be able to lead us where we need to go just don’t seek public office. Perhaps it’s that their dignity won’t allow them to run that often degrading gantlet. Perhaps it’s something else.
    But whatever it is, it continues to hold our state back.

July 17 column, with links

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Has South Carolina lost its way on job creation?
    STANDARD & Poor’s dramatically highlighted just how bad off our state is economically when it downgraded our bond rating (see editorial above).
    On Wednesday, new House Speaker Bobby Harrell publicly opined that South Carolina has dropped the ball on job creation and economic development.
    Former Gov. Carroll Campbell “set the standard for economic development (results) and created the model that David Beasley followed, and by following that, our unemployment rate became the third best in the country. Today, we’re third or fourth worst,” the speaker told The Greenville News.
    “My frustration,” he told The Associated Press, “is that I don’t think we’ve been focused on that Harrell since Carroll Campbell and David Beasley were governors. I don’t mean to pick on Mark, and I don’t mean to pick on Jim Hodges.”
    On Friday, he expressed frustration that anyone would think he was trying to pick a fight with his fellow Republican in the governor’s office. “I think it is a total waste of time to talk about blame and who is at fault,” he said. “I think we need to recognize where we are and prepare a road map for where we want to be, and then do it.”
    When I noted that it was inevitable that many would see his remarks as a challenge to the governor, he said: “I’m not interested in challenging anybody. I’m interested in lowering the unemployment rate and raising incomes.”
     Gov. Mark Sanford’s official reaction to the loss of the AAA credit rating was to issue a press release asserting his promise “to continue his efforts to grow South Carolina’s economy, not South Carolina’s government.” It’s tempting to dismiss that as standard libertarian/populist boilerplate, intended to win votes without saying anything.
    But it actually goes to the heart of what Mr. Sanford really believes about how he and other state leaders should go about their jobs. And that’s a problem.
    Am I saying it’s a problem that he doesn’t want to “grow government”? No. I’m saying it’s a problem that the governor fixates too much on the size and shape of government, and too little on what government needs to do and how well it does it.
    That may sound odd coming from someone as passionate about government restructuring as I am. The governor’s proposals in that regard happen to be the ones I had been pushing for more than a decade before he embraced them. But our motives are different: I want government to be more efficient and accountable because it has a huge job to do helping this state catch up with the rest of the country, and it can’t afford waste and lack of direction.
    The governor wants government to be smaller as an end in itself. He essentially doesn’t believe there’s all that much that government needs to do — just get government out of the way, and the market will take care of all.
    But the market has little interest in South Carolina, in large part because our fragmented and visionless government has neglected our roads, our health, public safety and especially the schools that strive to educate our labor force. Other states have done a far better job of keeping up the neighborhood, which encourages capital to want to move in there and not here.
    The governor’s answer is to replenish trust accounts (fine), cut income taxes (again, see above editorial) and implement an arbitrary spending cap keyed to inflation that sounds good: “(Y)ou shouldn’t grow government faster than the taxpayers’ ability to pay for it,” he says reasonably. But what he says is divorced from reality. To him, restoring funding to prior levels after years of (in some cases) double-digit cuts is “growing government.” Never mind that some of these agencies weren’t adequately funded to do their jobs before the cuts.
    (Note that I say “some.” We have praised Mr. Sanford for trying to trim or eliminate overfunded or unnecessary programs. But when lawmakers fail to go along with his targeted cuts, he wants across-the-board caps, which would further undercut the essential agencies.)
    “I don’t want to grow government, either,” Speaker Harrell said Friday. Nor is he necessarily talking about spending more money when he complains that we’re not doing enough to promote job growth. “The conversation ought to be, what is it we need to do? And then talk about what it costs to do that.” (Which is precisely how we ought to approach all government spending.)
    He suspects there’s one area where more is needed: “I think Commerce could use a little help. We’ve made Commerce a lot smaller…. We don’t want to waste any money, but we ought to look at our current level of activity and see if it’s being effective. And the results suggest it’s not.” He’d like to get past blaming and discuss this with the Sanford folks.
    Interestingly, the governor had earlier defended his administration’s efforts by boasting about how Commerce Secretary Bob Faith has restructured, streamlined and redirected the Commerce Department. In other words, he takes particular pride in Commerce being smaller. It’s one part of government he’s managed to restructure to his liking.
    As for results, “It is not just the number” of jobs, “but the quality.” Gov. Sanford said the new jobs that have been created pay 30 percent more than the state average. That’s great, if there are enough of them to pull up the state overall. But that’s not the case, which is what makes Mr. Harrell’s observations ring true.