Category Archives: Columns

Helen Alvaré on Obama and abortion

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Tomorrow, I plan to write a column for Sunday about how the remarks of the candidates on judicial selection in the third debate solidified my preference for John McCain, on several levels.

It won’t be about the abortion issue. Obviously, Obama and I disagree about abortion. But so do most Democrats, and I’ve supported plenty of Democrats in my day. What I plan to get into is the less emotional aspects of that debate, those that deal with bipartisanship, pragmatism, the Constitution and the proper roles of the respective branches of government. For instance, as I’ve mentioned here, I was rather shocked to hear a Harvard-trained attorney equate the inferred (and I believe, nonexistent) "right to privacy" to the all-important First Amendment, deliberately stating that the first is just as sacrosanct a principle to him as the latter.

Here’s my text from which I’ll be working. It’s this passage from the transcript of the third presidential debate:

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let’s stop there and go to another question. And this one goes to Senator McCain. Senator McCain, you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Senator Obama, you believe it shouldn’t.

Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on this issue? Senator McCain?

MCCAIN: I would never and have never in all the years I’ve been there imposed a litmus test on any nominee to the court. That’s not appropriate to do.

SCHIEFFER: But you don’t want Roe v. Wade to be overturned?

MCCAIN: I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. Now, let me say that there was a time a few years ago when the United States Senate was about to blow up. Republicans wanted to have just a majority vote to confirm a judge and the Democrats were blocking in an unprecedented fashion.

We got together seven Republicans, seven Democrats. You were offered a chance to join. You chose not to because you were afraid of the appointment of, quote, "conservative judges."

I voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences when presidents are nominated. This is a very important issue we’re talking about.

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer [sic — he meant Alito] and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn’t meet his ideological standards. That’s not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. They should be judged on their qualifications. And so that’s what I will do.

I will find the best people in the world — in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.

SCHIEFFER: But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?

MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

OBAMA: Well, I think it’s true that we shouldn’t apply a strict litmus test and the most important thing in any judge is their capacity to provide fairness and justice to the American people.

And it is true that this is going to be, I think, one of the most consequential decisions of the next president. It is very likely that one of us will be making at least one and probably more than one appointments and Roe versus Wade probably hangs in the balance.

Now I would not provide a litmus test. But I am somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was rightly decided. I think that abortion is a very difficult issue and it is a moral issue and one that I think good people on both sides can disagree on.

But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision. And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.

OBAMA: So this is going to be an important issue. I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.

I won’t get into the right or wrong about abortion per se in my column except to acknowledge that yes, I’m pro-life, so there’s a fundamental disagreement there, and I think Roe has been enormously destructive to the politics of our nation. Then I’ll move on to the more abstract stuff, where I believe I will make points that someone should be able to relate to regardless of their position on abortion itself.

Other Catholics have taken on the ethical issue head-on, however, and are actively appalled at the idea of a "President Obama." A few minutes ago, I got an op-ed submission from Helen Alvaré, as follows:

(Helen Alvaré was the planning and information director for the pro-life efforts of the nations’ Catholic bishops for 10 years. She is now an Associate Professor at the George Mason University School of Law. The opinions expressed herein are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of either of these institutions)

My name has been closely associated with Catholic Church pro-life efforts for almost two decades. For that reason, and because I believe ardently that religion cannot be reduced to politics, I have studiously avoided public commentary about particular candidates over the course of 18 years of pro-life work.  It still offends me at three or four levels when a minivan sporting a political bumper sticker arrives at carpool at my kids’ Catholic school, or parks for Sunday Mass.  I will not have one.

But Barack Obama has pushed me over the edge of anonymity.  Whatever else is true about the dangers of appearing to claim (wrongly) that God has a horse in this race, it is more dangerous to pretend that I’m less than horrified at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

For here is a man who has publicly thrown his considerable influence behind the idea that it is acceptable to let newborn infants die if their mothers wanted an abortion and the child was mistakenly delivered alive. Here is a man who can countenance doctors  partially-delivering living unborn children,  and then stabbing, suctioning and crushing their heads – all in the name of preserving “abortion rights.”   His public record is unambiguous in this regard, despite attempts by the some to torture the meanings of Senator Obama’s voting record.  The facts are simple. While an Illinois state senator, Senator Obama led the opposition to a law that would have protected children who were accidentally born alive after an abortion-attempt. He also worked with the nation’s leading chain of abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood, to strategize the defeat of bills that would have given parents information about their minor girls’ abortions.  As a U.S. Senator, he denounced an overwhelmingly popular law to ban the killing of partially-born infants. And as a presidential candidate, he told Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund on July 17, 2007 that the “first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” For emphasis, he repeated: “That’s the first thing I’d do.”  This is overwhelming on its face. Among all the first statements about the meaning of his historic presidency a President Obama could choose, it would be this: an expanded abortion license.   

What can be made of such a man?  It is no good to say he is simply acting to champion women’s rights when most American women would outlaw or more stringently regulate abortion (New York Times, April 19, 2007 Megan Thee, Public Opinion on Abortion).  Or when even Obama concedes the possibility that abortion is killing, which of course makes it a forbidden “means” to any end – woman’s rights or any other.  He cynically leaves it to others at a higher “pay grade” to determine the exact moment when life begins, but we all know the instrumental purposes of this utterance: appear to maintain common ground with both sides of the ever-churning abortion debate.

Some readers will say of my position:  “She is a single-issue voter, and those people don’t care what becomes of the rest of us.”  To the exact contrary, I am suggesting that when Obama supports allowing a parent to kill a child, at perhaps the most defenseless moment of his or her life, and when he refuses to see this killing as an intrinsic wrong, but calls it rather a cherished right,  we should understand that none of us is safe.  For where does his “reasoning” leave other defenseless persons?  What does it imply about all of the decisions a “President Obama” will make?

Some will say that the good Obama will do for some people simply outweighs the harm he will do to others. Even this calculus is absurd; Obama’s judicial appointments will ensure that legalized abortion continues to be forced upon every state, as it has been since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court in one fell swoop overturned laws against most abortions in every state in the Union.  We’re talking millions more abortions during our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children.   Obama has even declared himself opposed to continued funding for “crisis centers” offering pregnant women a way to support the children they wish to keep.

But even were the above calculus somehow measurable and correct, it is never acceptable to endorse killing as a means to any end.  By endorsing it, then, candidate Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t have a conscience that functions in a way Americans should even recognize.   Rather, his is a “conscience” which surely comprehends what it must be like to die violently, or by means of starvation and dehydrations; yet he votes to allow these to continue.  Elevating such a man to the most important legal and social bully pulpit in the nation is unthinkable. Worse, it is a national tragedy.

For these reasons, and for the first time in my life, I have to speak out. An Obama presidency would be a moral nightmare.

.
Professor Helen Alvaré  is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia.

I certainly understand where Ms. Alvaré is coming from on this, even though I’m going to be tackling this from another angle.

Personally, I haven’t been as shocked by Obama’s positions on this as she is. I say, you want to be shocked? Look at Joe Biden. He’s a Catholic; he should know better. And yet, as I’ve said plenty of times before, I like Joe. And I’m not horrified by the idea of an Obama presidency, he is after all my strong second choice. But pieces such as this make me wonder about myself: Maybe I’ve allowed myself to accept too much about the "political realities" of being a Democrat in America. There is an alternative — pro-life Democrats such as Bob Casey in Pennsylvania DO get elected nowadays, even with NARAL fighting tooth and nail to stop them. Obama and Biden have a moral alternative. So what excuses their position, from my own Catholic point of view?

But that’s not what my column’s going to be about.

More about the McCain endorsement

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MANY WHO KNOW my views — and between my columns and my blog, readers probably know my mind better than they do any other editor’s of their acquaintance — assumed all along that we would endorse John McCain.
    I’ve made it clear many times that I thought we should have done so in 2000 (in the GOP primary). And my belief in his suitability remains undiminished, despite much that has happened in this general election campaign. (I found both Sen. McCain and Barack Obama more appealing running against the angry elements in their respective parties, rather than as their standard-bearers.) My judgments tend to be cumulative, based on years of observation more than the spin cycle topic of the day.
    But to assume this endorsement was inevitable is to presume to know more than I did.
    First, I am not the editorial board; I merely preside over it. Associate Editors Warren Bolton (whose strong, eloquent dissenting opinion is on the facing page) and Cindi Ross Scoppe both have their say, as does my boss, President and Publisher Henry Haitz. To absurdly condense a two-hour discussion: Henry and I favored McCain, Warren preferred Obama, and Cindi wasn’t sure — and she is seldom unsure about anything. She asked me whether a tie meant no endorsement, or whether Henry’s and my votes outweighed hers and Warren’s. I acknowledged that if it came to that, yes — our votes counted more. (In 2000, the board was evenly split between Bush and McCain, with our then-publisher on one side and me on the other, so I lost.) Only when she thought the matter was thus settled did she say she thought she was leaning ever so slightly toward Sen. Obama. She remains torn. (She plans her own column on the subject for next week.)
    So this was not a foregone conclusion. But lest you think we’re terribly divided, remember that we unanimously and enthusiastically endorsed both McCain and Obama in their respective primaries in January. We just split over which we like more.
    Even if I had had to decide all alone, I would have struggled with not endorsing Barack Obama. I meant every word that we said in praising him in January. Also, ever since I became editorial page editor in 1997, I have looked forward to the day that we could break the paper’s long pattern of endorsing Republicans for president, if only because in some people’s minds, that makes us a “Republican newspaper,” and I find it deeply distasteful to be identified with either party. Yes, I can point to the fact that in my tenure, we have endorsed slightly more Democrats than Republicans — and we spend far more time on those state and local races than we do on the presidential. But people attach huge importance to the presidential endorsement — many don’t pay attention to anything else. So I’ve hoped for years that the national Democratic Party would give us a nominee we could support.
    Barack Obama is that Democrat. We would happily endorse him over Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, or Mike Huckabee — and certainly over the current occupant of the White House.
    But he was up against the one Republican who happens to be the national political figure I respect and admire most, and have wanted to see in the White House for at least a decade. So his timing couldn’t have been worse.
    I don’t regret endorsing John McCain one bit; I’m proud to see this day. But I hate missing the chance to endorse Obama.
    Beyond that, let me briefly address several questions that came up on my blog after we posted our endorsement online Friday (I answer them more fully on the blog itself):
    Why does the endorsement not talk about the current economic crisis? Because it doesn’t figure in our preference for Sen. McCain. Both senators backed the $700 billion rescue plan, which I think they were right to do. Beyond that, I remain unconvinced that either of them has a better idea what to do next than the other. I wish I did, but I don’t. So I consider their positions on this critical issue something of a wash, and therefore out of place in the endorsement.
    Why so many words about the Colombian Free Trade Agreement? Because it has broader implications that do illustrate a clear, dramatic difference between the candidates, and one that points unequivocally to McCain. Besides, it is an issue you may not have heard as much about (meaning it took a certain number of words merely to explain), and if an endorsement accomplishes nothing else, we hope it helps you think of things you might not have thought about otherwise.
    Why didn’t you mention Sarah Palin? Because the endorsement was about why we did choose McCain, not about why we “shouldn’t have.” I don’t think Sarah Palin is ready to be president. She has about as much experience in government as Barack Obama, but let’s face it — he’s smarter. If I were choosing the president solely on the basis of his choice of a running mate, I’d pick Obama, because I like Joe Biden. But I’ve never picked a presidential preference on that basis before, and see insufficient reason to start now. Bottom line: For me, the reasons to favor Sen. McCain outweigh my misgivings about Gov. Palin.
    We could go on and on, and we will. Please come to my blog and continue the conversation.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Faith of our Fathers

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H92607

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day in late summer 1970, I was playing tennis on the courts next to the Officer’s Club at Pearl Harbor. I was 16. My opponent, a long-haired boy whose name I now forget, was younger. He was a visitor from the mainland, the little brother of the wife of a junior officer on my Dad’s ship.
    Suddenly, a gnarly bantam rooster of a man rushed onto our court through one of the gates, followed by an entourage of followers who could only be senior naval officers, despite the fact that all were in white shorts, conspicuously devoid of insignia.
    Without pausing in his stride, the first man commanded, “You boys get out of here! I’ve got this court.” Taken aback, we nevertheless immediately moved to obey. I knew active-duty officers had precedence over dependents on Navy courts, and although this man looked old for active duty — at 59, he seemed ancient — we could not doubt his authority. As we moved to collect our gear, he noticed my father — at that time the executive officer of the USS Kawishiwi — sitting on the bench where he had been watching us play. The man went immediately to Dad and spoke to him briefly, then came quickly over to us boys. I was unprepared for what came next — an apology.
    Introducing himself, he explained that he was extremely busy, that he reserved the court for this time and that it was the only recreation he had, so he had been in a hurry to get to it, which explained but did not excuse his brusqueness, and he hoped we would understand.
    No problem, admiral, I said. Don’t mind us. We’re moving. Enjoy your game.
    The man was John S. McCain Jr. Had he been in uniform, he would have worn four stars — the same rank his father had attained in World War II. He was CINCPAC — the Commander In Chief Pacific Command — a title that to a Navy brat had the same ring as the words “the king” would have had to someone in Medieval Europe. Except that no king of old ever had authority over as much military power. He commanded all U.S. forces in and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from the U.S. west coast to the Persian Gulf. The American forces fighting the war in Vietnam were only a portion of his responsibility.
    Among the hundreds of thousands of men under his command was a lieutenant commander being held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The naval aviator was nearing his third anniversary in captivity, most of that time in solitary confinement in a tiny, stifling cell, his monotony relieved only by brutal interrogations. His body, and at one point even his spirit, broken, he would be there for another two-and-a-half years.
    I didn’t know any of that at the time. Only years after Sen. John McCain had risen to national prominence did I connect him to the admiral I’d met that day. But even among the many who knew about the connection, few ever heard CINCPAC speak of it. Only those closest to him knew about the ritual with which he would mark each Christmas: Every year, he would go to Vietnam and visit troops stationed closest to the DMZ. At some point he would go off by himself to the edge of the base and stare silently northward, in the direction of his son.
    Last week, you read (I hope) a column headlined “Barack Like Me,” in which I explained my sense of identification with elements of Barack Obama’s personal journey of self-definition. If you missed it, I urge you to go to my blog (the address is at the end of this piece) and read it. This column is a companion to it. I wrote the earlier piece after reading Sen. Obama’s autobiography about his youth.
    This past week, I read Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, by John McCain and Mark Salter. It’s the very different story of a young man who was far less confused about who he was or where he came from. And as much as I felt I understood “Barry” Obama, my commonality with Navy brat McCain is much more direct, and certainly simpler.
    A few months ago, I wrote another column headlined, “Give me that old-time conservatism,” in which I wrote of the values I had learned growing up in a Navy family, “the old-fashioned ones: Traditional moral values. Respect for others. Good stewardship. Plain speaking. And finally, the concept that no passing fancy, no merely political idea, is worth as much as Duty, Honor and Country.” It was written shortly after Sen. McCain won the S.C. primary, at a time when “conservatives” in his party were doing all they could to stop him.
    His autobiography is a 349-page exploration of those values.
    His grandfather was a hard-driving, smoking, drinking, gambling old salt who cried when he read casualty reports. He had less regard for his own welfare, once telling his wife he would not spend a penny on doctors, preferring to lavish all his money “on riotous living.” He commanded the fast carriers of Task Force 38 through one epic battle after another across the Pacific, stood in the front row at the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, then flew home that day. He dropped dead during the party his wife threw to welcome him home.
    His father was a cigar-chomping submarine commander in the same war, who over the next 25 years worked ceaselessly to live up to his father’s example. As CINCPAC, he unsuccessfully pressed his civilian superiors to let him pursue victory in Vietnam. The B-52 attacks on Hanoi (wildly cheered by his son and fellow prisoners as the bombs fell around them) and mining of Haiphong harbor helped focus the North Vietnamese on an eventual peace agreement in Paris. But Admiral McCain didn’t even get to see the war to that unsatisfactory conclusion before being relieved as CINCPAC. He retired, and lived another nine years, but was never a well man after that. His son believes that he, “like his father before him, sacrificed his life” to the strains of wartime command.
    On the fringes of this presidential campaign, one reads silly e-mails and blogs accusing Barack Obama of being less than American because of the African, Muslim part of his ancestry. Some Democrats weakly respond that John McCain isn’t an American, either, having been born in the Canal Zone in Panama. I have to smile at that, because in my life’s experience, the Zone looms as the very essence of America. During the two-and-a-half years I lived in South America in the 1960s, Panama was the place we occasionally visited to get our booster shot of home, the Land of the Big PX, a place to revel in the miracles of television and drinking water straight from the tap without fear.
    Ironically, Panama means far less to John McCain, since his family left there when he was three months old. It was the start of a routine that I know very well:

As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order.

    If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. It fostered in McCain and me and thousand
s like us an independence that’s hard to explain to those who never experienced it. I suspect it contributed greatly to the characteristics that his campaign inadequately, and monotonously, tries to describe with the word “maverick.”
    But there was a constant in our lives. Growing up, I most often heard the United States Navy referred to as “the Service.” It both described what my father did and why he did it. It was the same for the McCains.
    Barack Obama struggled for identity in his formative years largely because of the absence of his father. John McCain and I both experienced the absence of fathers: “We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war.” But unlike Mr. Obama, we understood exactly who our fathers were and why they were gone:

    You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you… drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance.

    But as much as our childhoods were alike, John McCain the man is very different. It’s one thing to know “the Service” as a dependent. It’s far different to serve. As I type that, it sounds terribly trite. Yes, we all know John McCain is a war hero, yadda-yadda, right? But I don’t care how much of a cliche it’s become, it’s true. And it sets him apart.
    I can’t write a “McCain Like Me” column because from an early age, he was different. He always knew he would follow his father and grandfather to the Naval Academy. I knew nothing of the kind, and not just because my father graduated from Presbyterian College. There was a brief time in my late 20s when I considered giving up journalism for the Navy; I even took a written test for prospective officer candidates, and did well on it. But my father pointed out to me what I had always known: My chronic asthma would keep me out. So I dropped the idea.
    John McCain, by contrast, rebelled against inevitability, raising hell and breaking rules all the way through his four years at Annapolis, repeatedly stepping to the brink of expulsion, and graduating fifth from the bottom of his class. Even reading about the hazing he experienced as a plebe, when upperclassmen did everything they could think of to break him and cause him to “bilge out” — nothing, compared to what he would suffer as a POW — I thought, Did I ever experience such treatment? Was I ever tested to that extent? And the answer was “no.” Nor, despite all his doubts about himself, his own period of rebellion or his sense of alienation, did Barack Obama have such a formative experience. If so, he doesn’t tell about it.
    The gulf between John McCain and me would exist if he had never been captured. His heroism during those five unimaginable years — a time when he finally learned the full importance of being part of something larger than himself — only turns the gulf into an ocean.
    I say that not to criticize Sen. Obama, or myself. But it’s a fact. We never knew anything like it. Men like John McCain and my friend Jack Van Loan — his fellow prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton — will forever be imbued with an aura that not even The One can claim. Some dismiss the McCain slogan “Country First” as worn-out rhetoric. But I know that for him, perhaps more than for any candidate I’ve ever known, it simply describes who he is and how he’s lived his life.
    That almost certainly is not enough to help him win the election. As I watch him on the verge of failure, that saddens me. He’s had three decades to come to terms with the fact that the war in which he gave so much caused so many of his fellow Americans to lose their faith in their country, and he’s dealt with it admirably.
    Now this. As I watch him drift further from his goal, I can say “Barack Like Me,” but McCain — he’s on a different plane, and always has been. And increasingly, he seems to be there alone.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/

Ap610714012

 

Watch for the McCain opus Sunday

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And this time, I’ll try to remember to make sure it posts on the blog before Monday.

This piece will have several things in common with the "Barack Like Me" column:

  • It will be just as long (sorry, but it took a good bit of trimming even to get them down to that length).
  • It will be based on a number of things that cause me to feel a personal connection to the candidate and as a result enable me to say some things I hope you will find at least somewhat original.
  • It will be written right after reading an autobiography about the candidate, although much of it will be based in experiences I had long ago.

Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t think this column is quite as good as the first one. With McCain, the "like me" thing breaks down at a certain point, which is ironic because of the greater superficial similarities in our backgrounds. But while we’re both Navy brats, that’s all I was — a dependent. I never served, much less serving heroically, and that creates a crimp in the whole identification thing.

But I think it still rises above my usual columns in what it offers. I was just very satisfied with the way I was able to tie a lot of disparate observations within a single defensible theme in the Obama piece; and that didn’t work quite as well with this one. Maybe it’s just that I’m really tired (after reading late into the night the last two weeks) and struggled with the writing this time. Or maybe it’s just as I will say in the column: the thesis broke down.

By the way, I’ve gotten a lot of kind comments about the "Barack" piece — and some not so kind. But they all had something in common — all (or most, now that I think back) seemed to assume I was choosing sides in the election, and meant to laud Obama accordingly. That misses the point. So I sent variations on this message to several people who wrote to me about it in the past week:

Thank you so much; you’re very kind.

On Sunday, please watch for my companion piece about McCain.

A caveat: Neither of these columns should be seen as an endorsement, or even an attempt to assess the suitability of either man for the presidency. If you go back and read more closely, you’ll see they don’t even get into that.

What I was trying to do is just raise some thoughts that you might not have seen elsewhere about the formative experiences of both men.

I just say all that because some seemed to take my Obama piece as pro-Obama (some were happy about that; some angry), but that’s not what it was meant to be. The potential exists for some readers to assume the same about the upcoming McCain piece.

We WILL be endorsing, but haven’t yet made the decision whether it will be McCain or Obama. We’ll be deciding that next week.

What you need to remember as you read is that I like BOTH of these guys a lot; our endorsements of them in January were quite enthusiastic. The general election endorsement will be made all the tougher because of that. I know some of you think you know how we’re going to endorse, and you have a 50-50 chance of being right. But you’re wrong if you think the decision is already made. And as the days have gone by, the decision has loomed tougher and tougher. I’m dreading the discussion next week, and still trying to decide how to lead it. I will really be missing Mike Fitts, because as I described in this column and this one, he did a masterful job of helping walk us through these decisions.

The column’s up now. Sorry

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You find me in a foul mood this morning. After all that work last week, and a couple of hours spent Saturday night dressing it up with links and so forth, someone thought to tell me at 10:30 Monday morning that my ginormous column didn’t post on Sunday.

So I’m pretty ticked about that. Normally, of course, I would not have made it through Sunday without checking, but I was busy living my life yesterday, and I was really too tired of the piece by that time to look at it again. It never, ever occurred to me that I still had it saved on "draft."

Well, it’s there now. And now that that’s behind me, I have another book to read this week, which I haven’t started yet. I’ll try to get that book report done this week for Sunday, but I’m not in a position to promise it.

Barack Like Me

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Obamapunahou1
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day when I was on the Radford High School track team in Hawaii, I was watching a race from the sidelines, which is where I spent my entire brief track career. A teammate was pulling away from the other schools’ runners. Two other teammates standing near me, both Hawaiians, got very excited.
“Look at that haole run!” one cried.
The other boy corrected him: “He’s not a haole.” A haole, you see, was someone who looked like me. The runner who was winning the race was of African descent.
The first speaker paused a second before happily shouting, “Look at that black Hawaiian run!” With that, his pedantic friend enthusiastically agreed.
I’ve recalled that scene many times in recent months, as Barack Obama won a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination, and proceeded to the point that he is poised to become president of the United States, barring a turnaround in both the economy and the political competence of his opposition.
Whenever I hear people speak breathlessly of his becoming the first black president, I think no, that’s not quite right. I don’t think of him that way. The details I know about him and his life just don’t add up to the description of “black man,” in terms of what that means here on the mainland.
I’ve said that several times, and each time, someone will demand to know what I mean. I have two answers to that. The first is short and simple: He has no ancestors who were brought to America in chains as slaves. Not one. That separates him from the entire American narrative of race.
This very long, rather complicated column is my other answer. This is who I think Barack Obama is, to the extent that you force me to categorize him ethnically.
First, I don’t want to do that. I don’t like doing that with anybody, and I like doing it even less in this case. I can look at John McCain and agree with you that he’s a white guy — a fact to which I attach no importance, but an easy one to agree upon and then set aside. But the Barack Obama who drew my support and that of my colleagues in the South Carolina primary is a person who — at least in my mind — defies such simple categorization. I don’t think of him as a white man or a black man. I think of him as the man who inspired a transported, ecstatic crowd in Columbia, S.C., to chant “Race doesn’t matter!” on the magical night of his victory.
Hard-headed pragmatists will point out to me that this man I see as the post-racial ideal won with more than three-quarters of the black vote that day in January, and that many of those voters were very excited about voting for him as a black man. This is true. But it is also true that a month or two earlier, most of those same voters had been expected to support Hillary Clinton. And while part of it was that they thought that as a black man he had no chance, part of it was also rooted in the oft-repeated charge that Sen. Obama was not “black enough.” The first excuse vanished when he won in lily-white Iowa. The second was no longer mentioned, although it remains as accurate as ever, if you consider a certain amount of “blackness” as being necessary. Which I don’t.
The thing that has struck me over and over is that in some ways Sen. Obama has as much in common with me as with the average black American voter. Hence the headline of this column, obviously drawn from the iconic book about a white man who tried to experience life as a black man, Black Like Me. You might think me presumptuous. But presumptuousness is but one trait I believe I have in common with the candidate. Some might call it “audacity.”
Granted, the fact that both of us graduated from high school on the island of Oahu is a thin commonality, but it’s a telling one. It’s certainly more significant than the coincidence that I once lived in his grandparents’ hometown of Wichita. There are important differences in our Hawaiian narratives, of course. He went to Punahou, a posh private school; Radford was public. I only attended the 12th grade there; he grew up there.
That is, he grew up there when he wasn’t living for several years in Djakarta, Indonesia. I also lived inObamalolo
the Third World as a child. In fact, I lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, longer than anywhere else growing up. Young “Barry” and I both spent part of the 1960s thinking in a language other than English. Both of us lived a joyous outdoor, Huck Finn sort of existence in tropical, pre-television worlds (“one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life,” he would later write), and just as happily returned to what he termed “the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture.” We both had a period of adjustment in which our soccer-trained bodies struggled to “throw a football in a spiral.”
He lived with his (white) maternal grandparents while his mother was still in Indonesia and his father was far off in Kenya. I lived with my maternal grandparents (although with my mother and brother) while my Dad was in Vietnam.
We both ended our childhoods on an island where there were “too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland’s rigid caste system,” which produced what he called “the legend” of Hawaii “as the one true melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony.”
To me, it was more than a legend; it was reality. It was the first place where I saw significant numbers of interracial couples, and the only place where such unions excited little comment — within my hearing, at least.
But that’s where our stories diverge. It’s where Barack Obama began a quest to define himself, both ethnically and personally, as the son of his absent and little-known African father. He decided something I never felt compelled to decide — “that I needed a race.” Because of his father, and because of his own very limited experience with people around him calling attention to his unique appearance and strange name, he began a complex quest: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”
That quote, and the preceding ones, are from his book about that quest, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. That memoir forced me to remember things that run against the perfection of my Hawaiian memories. As I read of his few personal encounters with racism in those years, from the real (a coach using the “n” word) to the merely suspected (why, he wondered, did a woman in the supermarket ask whether he played basketball?), I’m reminded of a girl I knew at Radford.
Her father was black, and her mother was white, which had never meant anything to me. But one day one of my best buddies told me of a terrible dilemma: He wanted to date this girl, and her mother insisted that any boy who took out her daughter had to first introduce her to his parents. This horrified both my friend and me, but for different reasons. I was pathologically shy, and had few dates in high school. If I’d had to introduce those girls first to my parents, I’d have had no dates at all — it would have raised the emotional stakes out of my range. I kept my two worlds — the one in which there were parents, and the one in which girls existed — strictly apart. So I thought it horribly cruel of the mother to raise an almost engagement-high barrier to her daughter’s social life.
But I also understood she was trying her best to protect her: My friend’s problem with taking her home was that he thought his working-class Irish parents would not approve.
It was amid such tensions between Hawaiian racelessness and Mainland prejudices that Barry Obama struggled to define himself. He listened to Marvin Gaye and mimicked the dance steps on “Soul Train.” He learned to curse like Richard Pryor. He sought out basketball games with the few young black men he could find. He turned to a friend who had lived in L.A. — the two of them were practically the only “black” students in the school — for clues. He read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as did I; it was required at Radford).
But in Hawaii, it was a struggle. While he believed he had to be a black man, it was nevertheless an identity he had to learn.
His conviction that blackness was an unavoidable thing he had to come to terms with is something that he does seem to have in common with most black Americans. It’s the perfect complement to my own white complacency about race as something we can all forget about.
But both of us emerged from polyglot, rootless childhoods to deliberately put on identities as adults. He worked on the mean streets of Chicago, eventually defining himself more specifically as a black man from Chicago. After a childhood devoid of religious identity, he joined the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
For my part, I went from attending nondenominational military chapels to converting to Catholicism, and while I believe it is my true spiritual path, I also know that on some superficial level I embraced it as a welcome, sharply defined identity, a clear sense of self that I could never achieve as a white, partly Anglo-Saxon, vague Protestant.
And I quite deliberately went from being a geographically universal Navy brat without a trace of accent to define myself as a South Carolinian. I moved to the state of my birth, my mother’s home state, in 1987, and have never moved again. As Barack Obama — not Barry any more — dug relentlessly in the soil of Kenya for his heritage, I wrote scores of columns and editorials about the problematic meaning of the flag that my Confederate forefathers served under.
Very different, perhaps, but the process of deliberate self-definition unites us. That, and a certain analytical detachment of perspective that mars the perfection of our new identities.
There’s a reason why a lot of military brats become journalists. We become, as children, accustomed to trying to fit in, but at the same time being observers of the communities we try to embrace. There is a sense of outsiderness, a sense of being watchers, that we never entirely shake. So it is that I see a kindred spirit in the candidate who spoke in such professorial tones of “bitter” working-class whites — without malice, but with a detachment that alienated those he described.
And I could be dead wrong, but I think I understand how a man of such inclusive instincts could have sat in a pew for 20 years listening to the Rev. Wright’s outrageous black nationalism. There are times when, confronted with some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of Catholicism — say, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus — I think on some level, I suppose these Catholics do these things. And since I have decided to be Catholic, I accept it. I suspect there were times, many times, when Barack Obama thought on some level, I suppose these black preachers say these things, and accepted against his own inclinations.
Do you think I’ve gotten myself into enough trouble with enough people in this long, rambling reflection? I’m sure I have. But I hope I’ve communicated that while I see why some simply call Sen. Obama a “black man,” I’m more likely to think, “Barack like me.”

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Obamaindo1

Breathless over Sarah (column version)

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Poor Joe Biden. He likes attention, and he deserves it. He’s smart, experienced, engaging, witty, and has a smile that, could its brightness be tapped, would give the nation a nice start toward energy independence.
    But he can’t get any. Attention, I mean. He certainly couldn’t when he sought the presidential nomination. And then, even after he got picked for the team, when his big moment came — it was all about Sarah.
    I think I can speak for much of America here when I say Sarah Palin had me breathless Thursday night. I don’t mean “breathless” the way Kathleen Parker meant it when she described the way she felt watching the veep candidate in her earlier interviews, pulling for her “like so many” women (this was before she decided Mrs. Palin was a “problem” and should drop out).
    Nor was I breathless in the sense that David Brooks meant it in The New York Times Friday, when he wrote of “Republicans around the country crouched nervously behind their sofas,” afraid for their gal. First, I’m not a Republican (or a Democrat). Second, as much as I admire and respect John McCain, and have for years, I was not enchanted by his choice. It was like, If I can’t have Joe Lieberman, I don’t care WHO it is; if this is what the base wants, they can have her. Which is not a good way to pick a potential future president.
    Nor was it that she’s a “babe,” as I have learned not to say on my blog. She’s pretty, but not to the point of constricting one’s breath.
    No, I realized Thursday night that I was getting light-headed whenever she spoke for the same reason that some movies and TV shows are painful to watch. You know how you can tell when something’s about to happen that will be enormously embarrassing to the character on the screen, and even if you don’t like the character (although it’s worse if they’re likable, and Gov. Palin is that), you cringe, because you don’t want to see it. You get embarrassed for the human race; you empathize no matter how much you try not to.
    Think of the boss character on “The Office,” in almost any scene.
    Often at such moments, I leave the room. Life is painful enough without having your nose rubbed in contrived discomfort. But I had to keep watching the debate, on account of it being my job.
    Fortunately, it went fine for all concerned. Sarah did fine. There were moments, of course, such as her repeated demonstrations that she learned to pronounce “nuclear” by listening to the current president (he oughta know, right?). And if she had said “maverick” just one more time…
    (I had reached my saturation point on that word during the convention. At least there it had the appeal of being extremely ironic, since the hall was full of people who hated him for being a… you know. Yes, he is one of those, and I like that about him; just don’t say it again. Try “nonconformist,” or even “iconoclast.” Sure, it doesn’t sound as macho, and maybe lots of folks don’t know what it means, and those who do may not like its anti-religious roots. But gosh darn it, if Sarah Palin started saying “iconoclast,” hockey moms all over the lower 48 would start sayin’ it, and first thing ya know it would be as American as snowmobiles.)
    But she did fine. And Joe did fine. And in the end I was fine, because I was breathing again.
    You may say, “of course Joe did fine,” but things could have gone very badly for him. He likes to show how smart he is, and up against an opponent that much of America is worried for, regardless of how they’ll vote (a friend who had described Gov. Palin’s convention speech to me as “venomous” confided Friday morning that he, too, had been breathless,) he was crossing a minefield.
    At this point, you may justly wonder, “Was there substance in this debate, or is it just about how it made you feel?” Suitably chastened, I would admit that there probably was. There was all that talk about Iraq, for instance. And come to think of it, by my lights, Sarah Palin had the right of it, and Joe Biden was wrong. But then, she was just channeling what John McCain has always said — that we can’t afford to lose there. Come to think of it, Sen. Biden was reflecting what Barack Obama, and the folks who swept him to the nomination, believe about Iraq. Joe Biden knows better. Or at least, he used to.
    And I don’t know which was more unsettling — the idea of Sarah Palin suddenly becoming president (as she said, “heaven forbid”), or Joe Biden’s intimation that we didn’t need to worry, he’d be there in the Oval Office at all times keeping an eye on that fine young fellow he’s running with (although he quickly added, “He’s president, not me…”).
    Not that a Palin presidency wouldn’t be interesting. Imagine the State of the Union delivered in the voice of Frances McDormand in “Fargo,” but speaking lines from an Andy Hardy movie: “We’ll reduce the deficit by puttin’ on a show in the barn! You betcha!”
    Forgive me. I get carried away. But I find that we’re in a strange and unexpected place. I had expected to be pretty pumped right about now, because the two guys I wanted to win their respective nominations did so, and I don’t remember that having happened before. But I wasn’t exactly blown away by the first presidential debate; it seemed overshadowed by the Wall Street implosion, which wasn’t the kind of dominant theme I had expected. Nor, apparently, had the nominees.
    So we turned to the vice presidential debate, which actually turned out to be more interesting and engaging, to the credit of Mr. Biden and Mrs. Palin.
    Still, I don’t think it helped anyone make up their minds — even if it did, for a brief time, have some of us breathless.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Earning that first piece of plastic

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Credit used to make sense to me, and now it doesn’t. Here’s the way it once worked, according to my sepia-toned memories:
    When I got out of college in 1975, I went to work for The Jackson Sun in West Tennessee as a copy editor for the lordly sum of $130 a week. That’s $6,760 a year. After a three-week trial period I got a $15-a-week raise, which was quite a thrill at the time. I was married, my wife was in graduate school, and our first child would arrive about a year later.
    My first week, a woman who also worked on the copy desk, taking me under her wing, told me her husband worked at one of the banks, and to contact him if I needed help in that line. As it turned out, I did soon need a loan to pay for a used Vega (yes, I know, a bad call there).
    After the baby came, we decided we needed a credit card to help us through the weeks when my pay (by then $160!) didn’t meet the necessities. So I went to see Paul at the bank, but he said I couldn’t get one until I had established more of a credit record. The car loan helped, and so did the fact that we paid the hospital for the baby in installments. But that wasn’t enough to get a BankAmericard.
    Paul suggested I go to Sears, because they’d give a credit card to anybody. So I did (after which we rewarded Sears’ faith in the proletariat by buying most of the children’s clothes, and all tools and appliances, from there for years to come). Once I produced my Sears card at the bank, I got my “real” credit card.
    My wife, who handles the accounts and pays the bills at our house, now curses the day that piece of plastic came into our house — she has told me more than once in the past week, and apparently will keep telling me until it sinks in, that at our current rate of payment, we will not live long enough to pay off our credit card debt, according to all the actuarial tables or something like that (in one ear, out the other).
    But back then the card was helpful, and actually earning the privilege of having one seemed a sort of milestone. I was now someone deemed worthy of credit.
    In the intervening years a lot has changed. For instance, the Sears card morphed into a Mastercard that I no longer use (under threat of bodily harm) because the usurious rate is high even for a credit card, but that I carry in my wallet for sentimental reasons: It still says “member since 1976.”
    That’s a distinction that wore off long, long ago, though. Today, on the rare occasions when I get to the mail before my wife does, there is always at least one offer of a new credit card, and usually more than one. My children have been getting those come-ons at our house since they entered their teens. Even with all of them moved out, they still come. And my wife still throws them away.
    But that’s credit cards. Let’s talk mortgages.
    My understanding of mortgages does not extend beyond the explanation offered by George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which Robert Ariail lampoons in his cartoon today. Here’s the original dialogue:

    No, but you’re… you’re, you’re, you’re thinkin’ of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. Th-th-the money’s not here… why, your money’s in Joe’s house, that’s right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitland’s house, and, and a hundred others…. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re gonna pay it back to you as best they can, now what’re you gonna do, foreclose on them?

    That I understand. And while my mortgage might not be with ol’ George down the street, I did take it out with a very nice person in an office that I could go to and ask questions later if I needed to. But before long my mortgage and yours got bundled up with a thousand others and turned into a financial product that greedheads would buy and sell back and forth across the country as though the biggest contract I’ll ever enter into were merely another drop in a barrel of oil.
    Meanwhile, mortgages were being extended as casually and promiscuously as those credit card solicitations, without regard to the buyers’ ability to pay back, which eventually, as near as I can make out, led to this bizarre situation in which the president of the United States went on the TV last week to tell us that if we don’t come up with $700 billion in one quick hurry, we’ll all soon be living in Pottersville instead of Bedford Falls.
    Apparently, this happened in part because as a nation we decided that everybody ought to have a mortgage, whether they could afford one or not. That sounds really nice and egalitarian and everything. It also sounds just like the arguments I hear from the payday lending industry — that they have to exist because everybody needs to be able to take out loans, and you don’t want to be all paternalistic and tell them they can’t afford it.
    But I’m of the paternalistic school, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. For years, I was on the local Habitat for Humanity board, and we didn’t sell those houses to just anybody. We made sure that while the families were low-income enough to need our service, they had enough income to make their payments. We provided counseling. We required that they pile up sweat equity by working to build other people’s houses before their own foundation was laid.
    Those hurdles existed to keep the unwary from getting into debt over their heads, just as Paul’s bank once required certain demonstrations before I could have that card.
    And now, apparently the whole nation is being sucked into a vortex of bad decisions chasing each other ’round and ’round.
    And to me, that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s because I don’t understand credit. Not anymore, anyway.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The Granny within us all

3 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
KILLING TIME during my too-short stay at the beach over the summer, I flipped on the tube and vegged out briefly over an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies:”
    Granny became suspicious of banker Milburn Drysdale. To reassure her, Jed accompanied her to the bank and asked that Mr. Drysdale show Granny her money. Mr. Drysdale sputtered that he didn’t have it, that it had been invested, that it would take weeks to gather that much cash. Jed, deeply disappointed, soberly told him he’d best do so right quick; Granny felt bitterly vindicated in her lack of trust.
    Oh, those silly, unsophisticated Clampetts! What a laugh! They thought those millions were in actual notes and coins in the vault! What rubes.
    Too lowbrow for you? Consider Shakespeare’s Polonius, who advises Laertes:

    Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
    And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry….

    Oh, that silly, pompous old windbag and his cliches! If he’d minded his own business, “Hamlet” wouldn’t have turned out as a tragedy.
    Of course one cannot have a modern economy without a whole heap of borrowing and lending — only the richest of us could own homes, or go to college, or drive cars; businesses couldn’t grow; factories would shut down for the lack of raw materials. No one could trade in stocks or commodities.
    And all wealth is based on the sort of trust that Granny was so reluctant to extend to Mr. Drysdale. Most who have achieved middle-class status seldom hold in their wallets an amount equal to even a single paycheck. If you do direct deposit, your compensation consists of 1s and Os transferred from one financial institution to another, and the only reason your debit card works at the grocery store is that everyone involved, from your employer to your bank to the store, plus various middlemen, trusts that those blips of data represent something of real and quantifiable value.
    And yet, it seems that on some level, the crisis on Wall Street that so threatens our entire economy is the result of major financial institutions not having sufficient assets to balance their debts — no cash to show Granny, even given time to gather it, in terms I can understand — leading the normally trusting Jeds of the world to say “Hold on!” to such an extent that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saw all borrowing and lending about to come to a screeching halt. In the prosaic wording of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, what those officials saw was “the circulatory system of the U.S. economy — credit markets — starting to fail.”
    So it was that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress late last week to ask for a $700 billion bailout of our financial infrastructure.
    Congress was at first deeply impressed. Speaking of a presentation by Mr. Paulson, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “When you listened to him describe it, you gulped.” Over the weekend, though, the usual sorts of reflexes kicked in, questions were raised, and more than one voice said, “Hold on.”
    As one who would have trouble coming up with $700 on such short notice, I find myself wondering whom I trust in all this. And I wonder that even as I remain convinced that I must trust someone. In fact, the restoration of a healthy state of affairs seems to my mean understanding dependent on a multilateral restoration of trust throughout the system.
    On Monday morning, I read everything I could get my hands on trying to decide what I think Congress should do. Unfortunately, everything I read caused me to question whether I trusted the source.
If Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke know what they’re doing, how did things get this bad? Congressional Democrats make sense when they say the bad behavior of executives at these failed financial firms should not be rewarded by the taxpayers, but how much of that is populist demagoguery? And conservatives are right to say that there are limits to the extent that government can shield us from risk and consequences, but at what point do their objections become mere ideological pedantry in the face of a crisis of this proportion?
    Consider the piece on the opposite page by Paul Krugman. I chose it because it broke down the situation into elements even I could understand. But given his oft-demonstrated animus toward the Bush administration, am I at all surprised that he concludes that he doesn’t like its plan?
    The really awful thing is that it was trusting the experts — from the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to an administration headed by, as Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote over the weekend, “the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it-did-us” — that got us here.
    The even awfuler thing is that our only way out of this mess is to trust. We have to rely upon the “experts” in the administration, and members of Congress and their staffs, to draft the right plan and make it work. And then we have to trust our bankers and brokers and each other going forward, or nothing the government can do can get our economy back on its feet.
    That means we’re going to have to hush up the Granny within us, and given present circumstances, that’s not going to be easy.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Beware excessive certainty about Wall Street crisis

22 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
We all have our ways of escaping when the world is too much with us. Some find that “reality” TV serves. Others have football. I’ve been rereading the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian.
    In the one I’m on now, there is an enduring image that has stuck with me this week: a frail wooden ship, its sails reefed to the minimum, riding an enormous swell in the chilly latitudes far south of the Cape of Good Hope. Each wave is higher than the masts, and the crew scrambles from moment to moment to keep from being overwhelmed by wind and water.
    Following the crisis on Wall Street has been like that, except that the ship’s crew could do something. Watching the unbelievably high waves of financial news breaking, I felt more like a passenger who doesn’t know port from starboard. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
    In fact, I know I’m not. What I’ve read in recent days has caused me to beware anyone who sounds too glibly sure about how we got where we are, and what we should do next.
    Early in the week, I was glib myself, on my blog. I complained mightily that my worst fears (first voiced in January) were being realized, that this would end up being an election about the economy. My whole career, I had considered a newspaper front page that led with economic news a dead giveaway that nothing interesting was happening in the world. But by the end of the week, the sheer scale of what was happening shut me up on that score.
    The Wall Street Journal played the turmoil on its turf across six columns at the top of the front page, five days in a row. Rupert Murdoch or no Rupert Murdoch, that just doesn’t happen. And a smaller headline on one of those same pages proclaimed the “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.” A terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen got pushed to an inside page, and not even I scoffed at the editors’ judgment.
    The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, usually a mortal enemy of hyperbole, wrote that “Wall Street as we know it is kaput.” I did not doubt him.
    The fall of giants of high finance, from Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch to AIG, seemed less significant than the fundamental, systemic changes that happened in reaction — reinforcing the metaphor of a deep ocean swell as opposed to mere whitecaps. The Federal Reserve teamed up with other nations’ central banks to “improve the liquidity conditions in global financial markets.” The U.S. Treasury secretary and chief of the Fed huddled repeatedly with other major players — in not only New York, but London, other foreign capitals and right up the road in Charlotte — to reshape the U.S. financial system.
    The phrase “on the fly” would appear in report after report, giving the impression of erstwhile Masters of the Universe scrambling like common sailors between the waves washing over the deck, desperately trying different combinations of sail and rudder.
    Amid all this, some pundits would air their erudition regarding such affairs, but what certainty they were able to muster seemed to arise from their own political prejudices. On the facing page you see that Paul Krugman notes with satisfaction that “much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.” Mr. Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton. But other smart people wrote the opposite. George Will grumbled about the rapid increase of “government entanglement with our less-and-less-private enterprise system,” and a member of the Journal’s editorial board flatly said, “Government largely created this mess.”
    Ignorant as I am, I strongly suspect that the best way through this storm will thoroughly please neither supply-siders nor the acolytes of John Maynard Keynes.
    So it is that, perhaps paradoxically, I was reassured to see just how uncertain the two candidates for president were in the face of this unexpected challenge.
    They, too, started the week glib. As late as Tuesday, John McCain was blithely expressing his opposition to the AIG buyout, and Barack Obama was responding with the usual comfort that Democrats feel with pocketbook issues, pontificating that “John McCain cannot be trusted to re-establish proper oversight of our financial markets for one simple reason: He has shown time and again that he does not believe in it.”
    But the next day, Sen. McCain more humbly acquiesced to the necessity of the bailout, saying “there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here.” On Friday, he tried to put his views in a coherent context with a speech to a Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin, while Sen. Obama said his own more extended proposals would be forthcoming once he had met with his advisers later that day.
    In this kind of environment, with each news cycle bearing down on us like a wave that seemingly could, in Bob Dylan’s words, drown the whole world, I find greater comfort in such humble confusion than in the positive tones of those who are too sure of their analyses.
    As The New York Times noted, “The actions of both men captured how they were being forced to make policy proposals and pronouncements on the fly, from one campaign rally to another, as each day’s developments in the financial markets and in Washington were overtaken by new ones the following day.” The campaign had become an “audition for who could best handle a national economic emergency.”
    At some point we’re going to need some FDR-like self-assurance mixed with pragmatic solutions. And in this election that is suddenly about the economy, it’s unclear which candidate will pass that part of the audition.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Just in case you think all the shouting happens here in the Blogosphere…

14 Replies

My colleague who processes incoming letters regularly forwards copies of those that are specifically responding to a personal column. I’ve been copied several of those today from my Sunday column. Here are my two favorites so far. They illustrate the point that those of us who edit editorial pages had been dealing with the "blogosphere" for years before the word was coined.

By the way, I have no idea whether either of these will be among the few chosen to be published. I’m satisfied to see them (or not) when they show up (or don’t) on the page.

Anyway, first I get BAM from the left:

    In "Worrying  about what happens if Obama loses" (Sunday September 14), if Brad Warthen doesn’t consider Barack Obama to be a black man, then what does he consider him to be?   Nevermind the angst over a polarized country, Mr. Warthen has more important worries such as how he can educate himself on issues of racism.  Surely, anyone who has spent five minutes seriously considering racism on a real level would instantly know that the Rev. Joe Darby is dead on with his assessment of white middle America.  Not so?  Try imagining Sarah Palin’s life superimposed on the Obama family and see if the same sympathy and understanding resonates.
    It would seem that Mr. Warthen doesn’t consider Obama black because he obviously doesn’t see black: par for the course in South Carolina.  And like so many typical South Carolinians, if you don’t see race, then you certainly don’t have to deal with the issue in any meaningful way.

Then I get BAM-BAM from the right:

    Mr. Darby is about as racial as you can get.  I have read his diatribes promoted as Guest Columns.  In many ways he reminds me of Mr. Limbaugh, except at the opposite viewpoint.  Unfortunately to the Liberal Media, such as NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and "The State", a comment can only be considered racial if the person making it is not of the Black Community. 
    In my letter to the Editor of August 28, 2008, which was censured and intentionally not put into print, I had predicted that the Liberal Media and the Black Community want to get Mr. Obama elected, not because he is qualified but to make history as the first Black to win the Presidency.  I had also forecasted that the race card would be played by them to make people of all other races and creeds guilty if they did not vote him in.  Mr. Darby considers the Presidency for Mr. Obama, as an Entitlement.
    I also find it mind boggling that Mr. Warthen wears blinders when he harps about Ms. Palin’s lack of experience.  While I agree that Ms. Palin does not have enough experience, she at least has 1 1/2 years of it as the Governor of Alaska and she is running for Vice President.  Mr. Obama is running for the Office of the President and he has zilch "NADA" experience of  any kind.
    It has not dawned on Mr. Warthen that a larger majority of the people in this State are either Independent or Conservative in their views and The State’s Editorial Group is out of place.  Maybe this is why The State continues to and will lose readership.  I predict that "The State" will pick Mr. Obama as their choice in November.

I’m always intrigued by the letter writers who see a huge, PERSONAL slight in their letters not being among the ones chosen for the paper, as though we run ALL of them, except the few that we choose not to run, just to be mean. For the record — I just went and asked — we run about half of the letters submitted.

I also enjoyed that one because of the endorsement prediction. So THERE, those of you who accuse us of having decided already for McCain…. Also, when did I "harp on" Sarah Palin’s lack of experience?

The first letter I liked because this reader just can’t wait for that promised column about how I don’t consider Obama to be a black man. Those of you who read the blog of course have read about this upcoming column before, back on this post:

Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me," and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one before the summer is over.

Obviously, I didn’t get it done before the summer is over. There have been two holdups:

  1. I haven’t had time to read that book yet, and I expect reading it will make the column better.
  2. I have thought about the blasted column so much, and have so many points I want to make in it, that I dread the hard work of having to cram it all into 25 inches. That happens some times with columns that I keep MEANING to write — they get delayed further by my having thought too much about them. (Although the two columns are not at all alike, I had the same problem with the John Edwards column that caused such a stir — I had promised it for months, and just kept putting it off.)

Maybe I should just skip reading the book (which may complicate the writing further) and write it this week or next.

Oh, one other thing about that first letter: Someone else — I think it was in another letter we ran, or maybe somebody else — raised that "imagine if Sarah Palin were black" thing, with the assumption that she’d be perceived differently. (At least, I THINK that’s what was meant by "superimposed on the Obama family;" maybe it meant something else.) I thought the same thing then that I think reading this now: How do you figure?

Philly columnist sees same problem I do

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Well, this is eerie. I’m going through the lastest columns to move on the wire, looking for something acceptable for the Tuesday op-ed page, and I run across this one from Kevin Ferris of The Philadelphia Inquirer, headlined "Don’t cry racism if Obama loses," which is weirdly like my Sunday column. An excerpt:

Last month, one of our two major political parties nominated an African American as its candidate for president of the United States.

Historic progress to be celebrated?

Apparently not. A few weeks and polls later, and some are already bemoaning the rampant racism that might keep a black man from ascending to the presidency.

Hey, Barack Obama could not have clinched the nomination without votes from white Americans. The other party isn’t supposed to just concede the election based on skin color. Voters shouldn’t have to choose based on race when they disagree on issues or believe a candidate isn’t up to the job.

But expect to see the bemoaners looking to the heavens and saying, "We’re not ready."

Baloney. Maybe it’s Obama who’s not ready and the people who recognize that – men and women, whites and blacks, Hispanics and Asians – are just fine.

So maybe I’m not totally crazy, huh? Or maybe this Ferris guy is.

In any case, I have never met or previously worked with Mr. Ferris, near as I can recall.

Worrying about what happens if Obama loses

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THIS PAST week, I’ve been worrying a good deal over the very thing that
has had Republicans so giddy and Democrats in such dudgeon: the
distinct possibility that Barack Obama may lose this election.

At
this point, you reflexive Republicans need to remove your feet from the
stirrups of your high horses. I didn’t say I was worried that John
McCain might win. I like McCain. My worry arises from the fact that the
other guy I like might lose, which is a different consideration
altogether.

Back during the conventions, I was bewildered by
something Bill Moyers kept saying in a promo during station breaks on
PBS, something to the effect of the stakes never having been higher
than in this election. Really? I said on my blog. How about 1932? Or
1800…? Or how, pray tell, about 1860? Pretty doggoned high stakes
there, I’d venture to say.

Mike Cakora responded that Mr. Moyers
was “simply conveying the left’s notion that over the past eight years
the US has been governed, no, ruled by a war-mongering,
liberty-restricting criminal enterprise and now is the time to end
that… .”

For me, that brought to the fore a thing that had
until then dwelt at the back of my mind: that if Barack Obama loses
this election, Democrats — who have been very charged up about their
expectation of winning, and whose hatred of Republicans has reached new
depths in the past eight years, will be so bitter that — and I dread
even to form this thought — the political polarization will be even
worse in this country. MoveOn.org, to name but one segment of the
alliance, will probably implode to the point of nuclear fusion.

(Republicans,
by contrast, have been expecting to lose all year. This had calmed
them. As recently as 10 days ago, when I wrote that Moyers post, I
would have expected the GOP to accept defeat in November relatively
fatalistically. Of course, that was before Sarah Palin got them
excited. Now, if they lose, I expect the usual level of bitterness,
just not as severe as what I think is in store if Democrats lose.)

That’s
without taking race into consideration. But my attention was yanked in
that direction by a guest column by my old friend Joe Darby on Friday’s
op-ed page. An excerpt:

Those who criticized Sen. Obama for his
lack of experience, labeled him as long on rhetoric and charisma and
short on substance and said they can’t vote for him because they don’t
“know” him have gleefully embraced a governor who hasn’t completed her
first term…

When you strip away the hyperbole and the political
strategy, Sarah Palin has been hailed as an exemplary choice… simply
because she’s white and because white, middle America identifies with
her…

Somehow, Rev. Darby looked at the fact that Republicans
like an inexperienced conservative Republican, but don’t like an
inexperienced liberal Democrat, and saw it as racism. After more than
half a century living in this country, I should not be shocked at yet
another excruciating instance of the apparently unbridgeable cognitive
divide between black and white Americans. But I was shocked, and even
more worried.

I had already sensed a potent paradox flowing
through the black electorate: disbelief that a black man (if you
consider Obama to be a black man, which I don’t — another subject for
another day) has won a major party nomination, combined with an
expectation that he will now go all the way.

But that had not
prepared me for Rev. Darby seeing racism in the fact that Republicans
like Sarah Palin and not Barack Obama. To my white brain (and I don’t
think of myself as having a “white brain,” but my inability to follow
such logic as this suggests that I do), this made no kind of sense. I
invite you to go read the piece — the link, as usual, is on my blog —
and see if it makes sense to you.

I was still reeling from the implication of that piece when I read this in The Wall Street Journal Friday morning:

An
anxious murmur is rising among black voters as the presidential race
tightens: What if Barack Obama loses?… If Sen. Obama loses,
“African-Americans could be disappointed to the point of not engaging
in the process anymore,” or consider forming a third political party,
said Richard McIntire, communications director for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This is not a good place to be.

I
first met Joe Darby 15 years ago. The newspaper sponsored a black-white
dialogue group that was coordinated by a reporter I supervised. Joe was
one of the panelists, and I was struck by his patience and mildness of
manner in explaining his perspective to whites flustered over black
citizens’ sense of aggrievement.

I’m sure Joe would have been
just as patient with the white acquaintance — someone I’ve known for
many years, and who is no kind of racist — who approached me Friday
morning to say, “That Joe Darby is a racist.” I insisted that I knew
Joe Darby well, and he was not, but this reaction was just what I had
predicted to a colleague when I saw the proof the day before: The guest
column was the kind of thing that alienates white conservatives,
driving the wedge of race deeper into the nation’s heart. (So why run
it? Because I knew Rev. Darby and others sincerely believed what he was
saying, and a newspaper’s role is to put everyone’s political cards on
the table.)

Fifteen years after that black-white dialogue
experience — and many, many less formal such dialogues later — I find
myself close to despair that mutual understanding can be achieved.

Particularly if Barack Obama loses the election.

Seven years on

33 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Seven years ago this week, I was filled with optimism. Not everyone responded to the events of 9/11/01 that way, but I did.
    Yes, I was mindful of the horrific loss of human life. But nothing could change that; my optimism rose from what I believed would come next.
    Surely, I thought, we could set aside foolishness and use the unprecedented resources our nation possessed — military power, certainly, but also our economic dominance and perhaps most of all the strength of the ideas upon which our nation is built — to make future 9/11s less likely.
    By “foolishness” I mean a number of things. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for oil produced by nations that consider fostering al-Qaidas as being consistent with their interests. (Joe Biden has a great speech he’s given around South Carolina for years about the incalculable opportunity wasted by George W. Bush on Sept. 12, when, instead of urging us to every sacrifice and every effort toward transforming the energy underpinnings of our economy, he told us to go shopping and delegate the war fighting to the professionals.)
    But the greatest foolishness was the pointless, poisonous partisanship that militated against focusing the nation’s resources toward solving any problem. It should have been the easiest to set aside. It’s not that I read too much into those Democrats and Republicans singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; it’s that partisanship is based on considerations that are so much less substantial than the realities of 9/11. Those attacks should have melted away party differences like the noonday tropical sun burning away a morning mist.
    But partisanship is an industry that employs thousands of Americans — in the offices of Beltway advocacy groups, in the studios of 24/7 cable TV “news” channels, in party headquarters, on congressional staffs and in the White House. And they are much better focused on that which sustains them — polarization for its own sake — than the rest of us are on the interests we hold in common.
    They lay low for awhile, but as most of us went back to shopping while our all-volunteer military went to war, the polarization industry went back to work dividing us, hammer and tongs. They tapped the powerful emotions of 9/11 to their purposes, and led us to levels of bitterness that none of us had seen in our lifetimes.
    But what did I expect to happen, seven years ago? Nothing less than using our considerable influence to build a better world. Go ahead, laugh. All done now?
    In an editorial the Sunday after the attacks, I wrote that “We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term — military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.” That meant abandoning a lot of foolishness.
    Take, for instance, our policy toward the Mideast. Our goal had been stability above all. Prop up some oppressive regimes and come to terms with others; just don’t let anything interfere with the smooth flow of petroleum. Saddam upsets the equilibrium by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia? Send half a million troops to restore the status quo ante, but don’t topple his regime, because that would upset the balance.
    But 9/11 showed us that the status quo was extraordinarily dangerous. It produced millions of disaffected young men, frustrated and humiliated by the oppression that we propped up. Things needed to change.
    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed part of the equation well in Cairo in 2005: “For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” The New York Times’ Tom Friedman took it further, speaking of the need to “drain swamps,” the figurative kind that bred terrorists the way literal bogs breed malaria.
    But instead of leading a national effort on every possible front — the military speaks of our national power as being based in the acronym DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic” resources (those who put their lives on the line are wise about these things) — we’ve spent most of the past seven years bickering over the military aspect alone. This argument between the antiwar left and the hawkish right has so weakened the national will to do anything that we came close to failure in Iraq, could still fail in Afghanistan and are helpless in the face of Russian aggression in the Caucasus and Iranian nuclear ambition.
    So how do I feel about our national prospects today, given all that has happened? Forgive me, but I am once again (cautiously) optimistic, based on a number of signs, from small to momentous:

  • Dramatic improvement in Iraq — thanks largely to the “surge” that he belatedly embraced after four years of floundering — has changed the national conversation, and led President Bush to speak of starting the process of moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the battleground even the partisans can agree upon.
  • Last week Secretary Rice sat down to solidify a new understanding with Moammar Quaddafi of Libya, the once-intractable sponsor of terror whose mind was changed by the Iraq invasion.
  • The choice for president is between two men who gained their respective parties’ nominations by speaking to the deep national desire to move beyond partisan paralysis. (I realize they would lead in different directions. But if either can lead a national consensus toward implementing his best ideas, we will be better off — if only for having had the experience of agreeing with each other for once.)

Yes, the threads of hope to which I cling are delicate, and cynics will regard me as laughably foolish. But the alternative is not to hope. And that, given the potential of this nation, would be the ultimate foolishness.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Surfing in Minnesota

43 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LISTENING to John McCain’s acceptance speech Thursday night was like surfing. That is, it was like surfing if you’re me:

    Paddle, paddle, here comes the wave, can I catch it, paddle, paddle, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, can I get on my feet, yes I’m getting up, I can’t believe it I’m standing, I’m doing this, can I straighten up, yes this is it, whoa, whoa, yow, WIPEOUT, long fall forward, interminable period way under water, scraping on coral, pop back up, swim to board, paddle, paddle, paddle….

    Exhausting.
    I haven’t surfed since 1971, because that’s the last time I was in Hawaii, therefore the last time I saw a wave worth the effort. A long wait. But I’ve waited my whole life for someone to give the speech Sen. McCain set out to give Thursday night. And, in stretches that practically made my heart stop — stretches where I thought, he’s going for broke, standing up, can he ride it all the way? — he actually gave it.
    Earlier in the week, I had thought I’d have to settle for Joe Lieberman’s paean to post-partisanship, the best bits of which went over like a lead butterfly with that partisan crowd. Most of the week was just like the week before in Denver, the usual party pooge. Sarah Palin did a great job for a rookie her first time at bat, but hers was the usual veep role — take down the opposition.
    But in the hours leading up to the McCain speech, the word went out that he was going to try the thing that had not been tried before: to accept a major party’s nomination while simultaneously rejecting and opposing all the vicious nonsense that parties have stood for over the past 16 years. Just minutes before he started, I read on The New York Times Web site: “McCain Plans to Speak of Dedication to Bipartisanship.” He was going to try the thing that I had hoped Barack Obama would try the week before — but which, except for a few encouraging passages, he passed on, delivering a pretty standard crowd-pleasing acceptance in Denver.
    McCain was better positioned to attempt the unprecedented. Poor Obama had to please all those Clintonistas who hadn’t wanted him. McCain had greatly appeased those in his party who least wanted him with his choice of Gov. Palin, which freed him to reach out over the heads of the convention delegates to the rest of America.
    And for the first 26 minutes and 44 seconds, he delivered a speech that was all that I’d hoped for. “I don’t work for a party,” he said, and you knew he meant it.
    Then, just when you thought he had decided to give a speech that told all partisans where to get off, wipeout, he’d spend several moments underwater. But then he’d climb back up and gamely start paddling again.
    There were so many indelible impressions to be gained from that speech, but here are some of the highs and lows for me:

  • He mentioned, as so many had before him (to the point of monotony), his reputation as a “maverick,” saying “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment; sometimes it’s not.” That was a mild way to describe the central ironic tension of the moment. That hall was filled with people who had long despised him for going his own way, and now he was their nominee, and what could they do but grin and bear it?
  • The passage about education was just embarrassing, a wipeout of stupendous proportions. In almost the same breath, he promised the ideologues who hate public schools their “choice” and then implied he’d improve public schools by renewing the teacher corps — attracting and rewarding the best, running off the worst. Let me give you two clues, John: First, the American taxpayer will never foot the bill for both turning around failing public schools and paying people to leave them; it’s one or the other. Second, Ronald Reagan had it right — the federal government has no business trying to run our schools.
  • “Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, and that’s an association that means more to me than any other.” No one could doubt that this man truly believed that. He has lived it.
  • “His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat… stands between you and your doctor.” Oh, spare me. The one thing wrong with what Obama wants to do on health care is that he doesn’t have the guts to say, “single-payer” — and nothing short of that will solve the problem. At about this point, I started thinking how Obama and McCain are a complementary pair: One can sound dangerously naive on foreign affairs, the other on domestic.
  • The very best part was the part that could have gone very bad: talking about his own heroism. He made it a parable of why radical individualism is a dead end. “I thought I was tougher than anyone. I was pretty independent….” But God sent him misfortune as a gift. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even feed myself. They did it for me. I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence.” And that’s when he truly learned to love his country.
  • At other points he vacillated between the self-centered ideology that Obama has decried as “you’re on your own,” and assurances that he’d make “government start working for you again,” even extending New Dealish assistance to those workers displaced in the shifting global economy.

    On the whole a noble effort, but the occasional dunkings in waves of cold ideology left me worn out. I’m so glad these conventions are over. Maybe once they escape the suffocating embraces of their respective parties, both Obama and McCain can better remind me of why I wanted them to win those nominations to start with.
    McCain made a good start on that Thursday.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

What I wrote about SPDs in 1991

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Things don’t change in South Carolina; they just don’t. If you doubt me, read this piece I wrote in 1991. It was in connection with the 13th installment of the Power Failure project that I directed that year, when I was still in The State‘s newsroom. I quoted from it in my Sunday column.

For those of you who don’t remember, I spent that whole year (except for brief stints when I pulled away to help with our national desk with coverage of the Gulf War and the Soviet coup) running this project that delved very deeply into the fundamental, structural problems with government on the state and local levels in South Carolina. Before that, I had been The State’s governmental affairs editor. After, I took on other, temporary editing assignments as I awaited my chance to join the editorial board. Power Failure had pretty much ruined me for news work.

The piece I refer you to was a little invention of mine that I called the "thread." After the first installment or so of the series (there were 17), I realized that each installment threw an awful lot at people. I wanted to make sure that there was some consistent feature, from installment to installment, that linked that day’s installment with all the previous ones, making sure readers saw the themes that ran through them all. The threads were very short columns by me — about 11 inches long — that essentially answered the questions, What do I need to get out of this installment? How is it related to the rest of the series?

Anyway, I call your attention in particular to this passage. As I noted in my Sunday column, we always have to deal with supporters of SPDs acting like we’re after them personally when we criticized the continued existence of these anachronistic little governments. One of their favorite defenses is to cite the fine work they do providing needed services — as though the same services couldn’t be provided under more sensible governing arrangements. And yet, from the very start, I had anticipated and moved past such objections on their part:

Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.

There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.

The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.

That ran in our paper on Oct. 10, 1991.

Come to think of it, I’ll just make this easy for you and reproduce the whole "thread" for that day here, in case you’re at all interested:

THE STATE
HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS DO WE NEED?
Published on: 10/20/1991
Section: IMPACT
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1D
By Brad Warthen
Memo: POWER FAILURE: The Government That Answers to No One Thirteenth in a series

Do we really need this much government?
    Apart from the mess at the state level — such as an executive branch split into 133 completely independent entities — South Carolina has 46 counties, 271 towns and 91 school districts.
    And about 500 special-purpose districts.
    Maybe we do need this much government. But do we need this many governments, separate and frequently competing?
    Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.
    There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.
    The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.
    These districts are part of the legacy of the Legislative State, and point to some key characteristics of that odd system:

  • Legislative dominance. Until "Home Rule" was passed in 1975, only legislators had the power to solve local problems, such as providing services to unincorporated areas. Rather than empower local governments, legislators did what they always did — set up separate entities that drew their power from the lawmakers, not from voters.
  • Our rural past. Once, most people lived in the country. Now, most people live in or around towns. In many areas, more conventional elected local governments can provide the services SPDs provide — if allowed to. Special- purpose districts deny the urban present and affirm the rural past, as does legislative government itself.
  • That "personal" touch. Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.

    The bottom line is that, on the local level as well as on the state, policymaking and service delivery are fragmented, and we’re paying for more administration than we need. No one is in charge.
    Only the Legislature can solve this problem. It can start by setting up a procedure for dissolving SPDs, when and where warranted.
    Then, if it can stop listening to the interests who profit from fragmentation, it can do what voters said 19 years they wanted it to do — allow local government to be consolidated and simplified.
    According to the main lobbyist for the SPDs, "It appears that proponents of consolidation just want power." He’s right; they do. And so do the opponents.
    And so do the people, who have waited for it long enough.
All content © THE STATE and may not be republished without permission.
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Oh, one thing that has changed, slightly. The Legislature did, after this series, finally pass enabling legislation to allow for consolidation of governments. Not that we’ve seen that happen much since.

And we still have more than 500 SPDs. And still, no one knows the exact number.

Forget business. In S.C., it’s always personal

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “Forget about business; it’s personal.”
— what Michael Corleone would have said in “The Godfather,” had he been a South Carolinian

EVERY WORD of the following paragraph, which I wrote in 1991 about our state government, remains true today:
    Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.
    Special purpose districts are difficult to talk about to anyone who is not personally involved with them. A quick primer:
    Until 1975, county councils did not exist in South Carolina. State legislators ran everything; lawmakers from a given county made all the local decisions that in most other parts of the country would be made by local government. They provided local services such as recreation, sewerage and fire protection with tiny, ad hoc mini-governments called “special purpose districts.” The districts generally did not follow county lines; often there were several for the same purpose within a county.
    Even after county councils were formed in the ’70s, lawmakers refused to do away with SPDs, leading in many cases to conflict and duplication, and to confused lines of responsibility (confusing to the average voter, that is; insiders knew how things worked). There are more than 500 SPDs in the state today. No one knows the exact number, not even the S.C. Association of Special Purpose Districts.
    The continued existence of these extra little governments, which derive their power from the Legislature, is one of the ways that state lawmakers keep county government weak and ineffective.
    If SPDs ceased to exist today (not likely, by the way), some would and should quickly be reconstituted because they address purposes that go beyond the reach of a single county — such as the body that governs the Columbia airport, or Riverbanks Zoo. But most need to be eliminated, and their duties absorbed by elected city and county governments.
    Whenever we on this editorial board say this, folks who work for or derive some measure of power from SPDs get very upset with us. They take it very personally. But for us, it’s not personal; it’s strictly business — the business of good government.
    In America, we like to say that we have a government of laws and not of men (or of women, either, if you want to be pedantic about it). But our small state’s Byzantine governing arrangements militate in the opposite direction.
    I was reminded of this when the head of the state association of SPDs, Mike Hancock, came to visit us last week. His purpose was to let us know that the folks who run SPDs weren’t monsters; his goal was easily achievable because we’ve never thought anything of the kind — we just disagree with them. But while he knew he wasn’t a monster — in point of fact, he seems a very nice man — he apparently wasn’t so sure about us. He admitted to being uneasy, apparently because he did not have a personal relationship with us. To address that, he had brought along his attorney, Jay Bender, who just happens to be this newspaper’s longtime attorney. Personal.
    Mr. Hancock did try to establish something of a bond at the start of our conversation, reminding us that several years back when my colleague Cindi Scoppe and I spoke to the SPD association, he moderated, and did his best to prevent us from being ridden on a rail. I had not remembered his being there. The only person I clearly remember by name from that confab was a lady who asked us to do that gig — an old and dear friend of my longtime friend and colleague Lee Bandy. Personal.
    At one point in the conversation, we were talking about the fact that under current law, it’s impossible to eliminate one SPD; you’d have to disband them all (which, once again, isn’t about to happen). Cindi noted that this will continue to be the case unless Chief Justice Jean Toal gets another ally on the Supreme Court who believes the state constitution allows the SPDs’ individual dissolution. Personal.
    A moment later, Mr. Hancock was expressing uncertainty about his association’s legislative strategy (chief goal: protecting SPDs), noting that with Bill Cotty retiring, he didn’t even know who his own state representative was going to be, which put him at a disadvantage. Personal.
    But in South Carolina, Mr. Hancock and his association truly have the advantage in their campaign to preserve SPDs.
    It’s like with the adjutant general. Every other state in the union holds to the principle that military officers should be apolitical. But in South Carolina, we elect the head of our National Guard. That is unlikely to change because lawmakers defer to the preferences of Guard members, and Guard members generally tend to be closely tied to their current commanding officer (which is how it works in banana republics; the U.S. military avoids this by transferring officers frequently), who is always totally invested in the system “that brung him” — popular election. Personal.
    Similarly, with more than 500 SPDs, there are thousands of people personally invested in their continued existence. This makes for a huge constituency for the status quo. There are, after all, only 46 counties.
    Mr. Hancock has nothing to worry about, no matter what we busybodies on the editorial page may say about SPDs. He seems to be a very nice guy, and he’s allied with a lot of other nice folks. And over at our State House, it’s always personal.

What the Capital City Club did for Columbia (column version)

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Yep, once again, my column today was something you’ve read before here. In fact, the earlier blog version was more complete — I couldn’t fit all that into the paper today.

But there is something new to mention on the subject, which is to urge you to watch for Clif LeBlanc’s follow-up story to the one he wrote that appeared on our front page Wednesday. The folo will be in the paper Sunday (or so I’m told), and it will address the question that  has occurred to me a number of times in the years since the Capital City Club opened Columbia’s private club world to minorities and women:

Just how open ARE the rest of the Midlands’ clubs today?

I look forward to reading it.

Slight error in Sunday column

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My pastor, Msgr. Leigh Lehocky, gently corrected me this morning. My column said St. Peter’s "Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes." He told me the number is now 46.

I probably remember the 35 figure from back when I was president of the parish council, back in the early 90s. I’ve heard different numbers since then, and consider it one of those wobbly numbers that can never be perfectly correct — even if you give the precise count for right now, based on parish registration, registration itself is a fuzzy thing — not everyone who attends our masses is registered, and some who are registered could have left us.

My point was that it was a bunch of ZIP codes, and I knew I would not be exaggerating if I said 35, so I covered myself by saying "something like." Bottom line, I’m right — it’s a bunch.

Msgr. Lehocky reminded me of something else I’d forgotten. Speaking of The Big Sort, the book that inspired the Robert Samuelson column that inspired my column, he said, "That’s the book I was telling you about a couple of weeks ago." Monsignor had been reading it, and recommended it to me. All I knew was that when I read the title in the Samuelson piece, I knew that I recognized it from a recent conversation; I had forgotten with whom.

Msgr. Lehocky said the book beats up on churches for the usual MLK thing (about 11 a.m. Sunday being the most segregated hour in America), but agreed that St. Peter’s was something of an exception to that "rule."

"And thank God for that," he added.

And perhaps our parish — and particularly the sub-community of those of us who habitually attend the only Mass that is bi-lingual — is an exception. But it’s the only church community I have, so my point that I don’t have the kinds of associations Mr. Bishop writes of — at least, not in any form that comes to mind — holds true.

However we pay for it, we all need a better transit system

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

On Wednesday, my truck was in the shop. This sort of situation may mean slightly different things to different people. Here’s what it meant to me:

Wednesday morning, I needed a way to get from home — out west of West Columbia — to work, if for no other reason than I needed the paycheck to pay for getting my truck fixed.

Fortunately, my eldest daughter was staying at our house with her children — her husband is remodeling their home — and she works downtown. So she drove me way south of downtown to my office, before turning around and going back to her office.

(My wife couldn’t take me because she had my daughter’s six-month-old twins, and her car isn’t set up to accommodate the Apollo-capsule-type arrangements that they call baby carseats these days.)

From that point, I was stuck. I knew I was going to have to stay late at the office that night — later than anyone in my department — because I was going to be off Friday and needed to get at least a week’s worth of work done in the four days available. Besides, no one in my department lives anywhere near me. In fact, I started writing this column on Wednesday to get ahead, and as I typed this sentence at 5:23 p.m., I had no idea how I’d get home.

As it happened, my daughter got me at 8 p.m. Fortunately, she and her children had to go back into town anyway; otherwise picking me up would have involved a long round trip for somebody, with gasoline at $4 a gallon. I wasn’t quite at a stopping place when she arrived, so she waited downstairs for me with, as near as I could tell over her cell phone, at least one of the twins screaming.

Then, on Thursday morning, my truck still wasn’t ready. So we improvised a whole new plan, in which I drove my wife’s car into town, and my daughter left work at midday to take her car out to my wife so that she could go to work in the afternoon. But at least I was covered in case the job required me to be somewhere else in the course of the day, which sometimes happens.

This is ridiculous, folks.

Yes, I know: Poor me. These are decidedly spoiled American, middle-class problems.

But never mind me. The truth is, if you are less fortunate, you have a harder time owning a vehicle, fixing it when it’s broken, filling it with gasoline, or paying to park it. Nor can you afford to do without that job that the vehicle would take you to.

There are many places in this country where folks don’t have these problems. I have a New York subway card in my wallet from my last trip there, which I can’t bring myself to throw away because of the wonderful thing it represents: freedom from driving and pumping gas and finding a place to park, simply ducking down a few steps, and moments later finding myself in whatever part of town that I need to be in.

In the Columbia metropolitan area, we have our own sort of mass transit system, in theory. But it isn’t fully adequate to anyone’s needs. It doesn’t go from enough places to enough places often enough, and it’s tough for someone who just needs it occasionally to find out quickly and easily how to use it.

What we need is a better transit system, but what we’re in danger of having now is a worse one, or none at all. That’s because Richland County — the one local government that’s done the most to step up to the challenge of funding said system — is going to stop stepping up in October. That’s when the vehicle tax the county levied for that purpose runs out.

Last week, the County Council ditched a plan to hold a referendum asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the buses and other transportation needs and wants. I don’t blame the council. As we said in an editorial before the action, the Legislature has jacked up our sales taxes too high already. And besides, some of the things in that transportation proposal were more wants than needs, and only in there to get people who don’t ride buses to back the proposal.

No one knows where we go from here. The County Council doesn’t know. The citizens group that put together the plan the council rejected doesn’t know.

And just in case we got the notion that the city of Columbia would be taking up the slack, I got a preemptive call from Mayor Bob Coble Thursday morning to tell me that the options range from few to none. (While the mayor didn’t say so, that’s largely thanks to the Legislature’s tireless efforts to make sure local governments can’t pay for any local need that they aren’t paying for already.)

About the only person offering new ideas last week was regular contributor “bud” on my blog, who suggested using the city’s and county’s shares of the “hospitality tax,” a lot of which currently goes for things a whole lot less essential than a mass transit system.

As I write this, I don’t know what the best way to pay for a better transit system might be. What I do know is that Midlands governments need to find a way, for the sake of:

  • Those who have no other way to get to work now.
  • Those of us who would like a better way to work than we have now (and sometimes need one).
  • Those “knowledge workers” who are supposed to make the planned Innovista work, and who have the option of working instead in a community where it’s easier, and cheaper, and cleaner to get around.

For more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.