Category Archives: Columns

Mike Fitts helped us make up our minds

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A few days back, I shared unwelcome news with colleagues here at The State. You, our readers, ought to know as well.
    It is with the deepest regret that I hereby announce that Associate Editor Mike Fitts has left theChamber_066_0005
newspaper. His last day on the job was Friday, July 18. This page was likely the last of ours that he saw through the composing room.
    Mike, a graduate of the University of Missouri — the gold standard among J-schools — joined the paper in February 1990 after a brief stint at the Anderson Independent Mail.
    I first had the honor of working with him early the next year, when I was asked to drop what I was doing (a year-long project on fundamental problems in South Carolina government called “Power Failure”) to help out on the national desk during the Gulf War. I was immediately impressed with his quick comprehension of the importance and context of national and international events. Not many journalists his age (or mine) took the kind of interest he did in military affairs. He wasChamber_066_0004 no more a veteran than I was, but you didn’t have to tell him the difference between a rifle and a gun. He was fully ready to explain this war to our readers.
    I soon learned that Mike knew something about everything, from current events to national and world
history to the most esoteric bits of popular culture. You didn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with this guy — at least, not for money. Throw a line from an old movie at him, and he’d answer with embellishment. Make a literary allusion or refer to something that happened in politics before he was born, and he’d tell you something about it you didn’t know.
    (After I helped him with something on his last day, he replied by instant message: “Which it’s a kindness, Captain.” He was channeling a character from Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. I first heard of these wonderful books from Mike, and they are a shared passion.Chamber_066_0003 I will miss such exchanges.)
    Most of all, he not only knew things, he knew which ones were important — and why.
    Mike’s abilities in this regard were recognized when he became the newspaper’s national editor, and have been invaluable to the editorial board since he moved to the third floor in 2000.

    Mike has been our expert on national and international issues from Day One. Closer to home, he has taken on the challenging subjects of the environment, energy policy, economic development and higher education. In recent years, as our staff shrank, Mike put his desk experience to work designing our pages.
    But his greatest contribution has not been obvious to the reading public, or indeed to anyone outside of the editorial board. That is his ability to help the group frame difficult decisions, breaking them down into their component parts and setting them out in a logical sequence that does much to lead us to our eventual conclusions. I’ve made passing reference to this in past columns. Of our discussion of whom toChamber_066_0002 endorse in the GOP presidential primary this year, I mentioned that “As our lead editor on national affairs, Mike framed the discussion, speaking at length about each of the Republicans. As others joined in, it quickly became apparent that each of us had reached very similar conclusions….”
    Later that month, I would write that “As he did before the Republican primary, Associate Editor Mike Fitts framed the discussion of our Democratic endorsement, and did a sufficiently thorough job that the rest of us merely elaborated on his observations….”
    It would be an exaggeration to say we endorsed Sens. McCain and Barack Obama because of Mike — we all had our reasons — but he certainly helped us reach consensus more quick
ly and smoothly. Arriving at an answer quickly — if you remain convinced later it’s the right one — is a particular virtue in our profession.
    It’s called “leadership.” Mike has it, and it’s of that rare sort that works unobtrusively, in a collegial setting. This editorial board has benefited greatly, which is why his name’s been on our masthead the last few years.Chamber_066_0001
    Mike is leaving us to work at a new, business-to-business publication that will soon begin here in the Midlands. As far as we are concerned here in editorial, the only good news in his plans is that he will still be around, and we might get to see him and his family from time to time.
    When I asked whether he wanted to write a farewell column, Mike said he’d let his last one stand for
that purpose. In that vein I invite you go to our Web site and read it. It appeared in the last weeks of the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, under the headline, “The necessary ingredient for success: hope.”
    I’ll close with an excerpt:

    In 2008, America needs a strong dose of hope from its politics, which have been a source of gloom for years. Cynicism, partisanship and big-bucks lobbying have led to a government that does too little, as big issues go unaddressed. That’s no fun to cover as a journalist, and brings no satisfaction to suffer through as a citizen, either. In this election year, I hope for better.

For the link to Mike’s last column and more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Would Obama victory be ‘bad for black folks’?

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Obamawhitehouse

My attention was just drawn to this item by Lawrence Bobo on TheRoot.com, headlined, "President Obama: Monumental Success or Secret Setback?" An excerpt:

To hear some barbershop talk, it is as if the racial progress in
America that Obama’s success has helped to crystallize also brings with
it a death knell for true racial justice. If Obama becomes the
president, every remaining, powerfully felt black grievance and every
still deeply etched injustice will be cast out of the realm of polite
discourse. White folks will just stop listening.

A
black president means that America no longer has any race problem to
talk about! It would mean there is no longer any special debt to
African Americans to be repaid! Kiss that 40 acres and a mule goodbye,
my friends (or that BMer and a Rolex in modern reparations exchange
units)….

I have two thoughts about this piece, if it’s OK for a white guy to weigh in on this:

  1. 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.
  2. Because the popular narrative of this is that Obama IS a black man (despite all the evidence I see to the contrary), that’s the way an Obama victory will play in the public imagination. And that WILL be a death knell to the kind of black politics of resentment and grievance practiced by Jesse Jackson and (even more so by) Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright and to some extent by black politicos here in SC (such as Leon Howard, who said the former superintendent of Richland 1 had to go because "He catered to white folks").

Mr. Bobo agrees with me on the latter point, by the way:

"The politics of the perpetual outsiders demanding inclusion will finally end (read: Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will get less face time). And good riddance (perhaps). We’ve come too far over too many years for shrill protest to still be our main political posture today, no matter how necessary and relevant in the past…."

Wrightetal

So you think numbers can’t dance?

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Here’s another digression from my Sunday column that got left on the cutting room floor:

    But things like this always perplex me. I am not an economist, you see, nor a financial expert, which I’m told is something different. Nor am I any kind of a businessman. Put it this way: At my house, I am not allowed to try to balance the checkbook.
    It’s not that I’m stupid, or can’t do math. I took calculus in school, and, for a guy who can’t handle a checkbook, got a ridiculously high score on the math part of my SAT. But something happens to numbers when they appear on a checkbook, or on a spreadsheet, or on anything where the numbers are meant to represent units of money. It’s like the fictional form of mathematics, found only in restaurants, that humorist Douglas Adams called “Bistromath.” One of his characters explained it this way: “On a waiter’s bill pad… numbers dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible.”
    Checkbooks are like that….

I wasn’t just trying to be silly there. The numbers really do dance. Probably my biggest problem with keeping a checkbook is that I am determined to keep it to the penny, or not at all. Since I seldom actually write a check, but use my debit card, keeping the account up to date involves frequently logging the receipts that I keep in my wallet.

Of course, the actual account is never, ever up to date with what I have in my wallet, so I can almost never make a direct, one-to-one comparison between debits and credits as I know them and as the bank currently recognizes them — there’s never a moment when I can look and say, "Yep, that’s the total I have, too."

If you want to see the numbers really dance, of course, try letting your account get close to zero — which mine does at some point during every pay period. Note how lackadaisical your bank is about recording your debits most of the time, but how it will all of a sudden pounce with what looks like a year’s worth when it senses that you are within range of an overdraft. Financial institutions actually have this down to a science, although it looks more like an art to me.

And once you have an overdraft, then try getting it straight what’s actually in your account, what with trying to figure out when the overdraft fee is debited, whether you’ve actually paid the overdraft back, etc. At that point, I get dizzy.

Which is why my wife handles the accounts.

Oh, and on the SAT thing: I did better than Al Gore, but not nearly as well as Bill Gates. I’m not giving you the links (because my wife thinks telling people your SAT scores is really, really uncool); you do the "math."

My point is — at least, I think my point is — that the ability to handle money involves something other than pure mathematical ability. It involves being in touch, somehow, with the whole mystique of money. I suspect that it’s like Zen; I need to relax or something. Or maybe it’s the opposite — maybe keeping accounts requires a whole lot more effort than I’m willing to put into them.

I expect accounts to be really simple — far less simple than calculus — and to easily be computed. After all, it’s just adding and subtracting, right? Well, apparently not.

Do YOU feel sufficiently stimulated? ’Cause I don’t…

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DID you do with your “economic stimulus” check from the government? Did you spend it in a suitably patriotic manner, doing your bit to kick-start the good ol’ U.S. economy?
    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S. economy, I’m feeling a little understimulated.
    But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns.
    Apparently Bear Stearns is a financial institution that the federal government considers “too big to fail,” which makes me wonder, if it’s too big to fail, then why does it need to be bailed out?
    But things like this always perplex me. I am not an economist, nor a financial expert, which I’m told is different. Nor am I any kind of a businessman. At my house, I am not allowed to try to balance the checkbook.
    Anyway, while I’m still pondering why you and I and the guy down the street lent $29 billion to bail out this Bear Stearns, along comes Congress and the president wanting to send somewhat more modest checks to you and me and that same guy.
    I’m all for Democrats and Republicans setting aside pointless bickering to do something for the good of the country, but when the economy’s going into the tank, and the Democratic Congress and the Republican president are racing to see which of them can send us the biggest check, sort of like the Three Stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time, I begin to have doubts.
    I start to think, “With the national debt at — wait a sec while I go check the Internet — 9 trillion dollars, and climbing at a rate of more than a Bear Stearns bailout every month, the government is going to send several hundred dollars to every household in the country?”
    It seems that everybody in Washington was acting along the same lines of reasoning as when, in response to attacks upon this country more deadly than Pearl Harbor, we were told to go out and shop, instead of buying bonds or rationing gas or something that would have made sense to an earlier generation. And now, six-and a half years into the War on Terror, some of us weren’t shopping hard enough. So to help us get back into the fight, the government decided to send us all some more ammunition.
    As it got closer to time for me to get my ammo, my martial spirits rose, and I started thinking this was a better and better idea. If my country needed me to shop, I was going to make sure every shot counted. So I did some research.
    Finally, a suitable target presented itself. Week before last, we all went to Memphis for a wedding. The wife and I stayed with Mary, one of her best friends from high school.
    My wife has always held Mary up as one of the smartest in her class — not only a scholar, but a woman of great good sense and practicality. Mary had recently earned some extra money, and had spent it on a 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set. It had cost her $800 at Sam’s Club. I studied this item very closely while we were there, flicking back and forth between ball games on the HD channels and the same ball games on mere mortal channels, and came to the inescapable conclusion that Mary was indeed the smartest in her class, and had made an excellent investment — way better than the Bear Stearns thing.
    So by the time we got back from Memphis, I was all in a sweat to get that stimulus check, which would amount to $1,200.
    But when it came, do you know what we spent it on? A hospital bill. Not a hospital bill for major surgery or life-saving emergency treatment, because none of us had needed that, thank God. No, this was for a few X-rays for my daughter’s sprained ankle — for my baby, who was temporarily off my insurance but was covered by a separate policy that we were paying $117 a month for, which seemed like a really good deal until she needed some actual routine medical care.
    When you have five kids between the ages of 19 and 31 in the United States of America, you spend a lot of time holding your breath until they get safe jobs with their own group medical insurance. Two of mine have achieved that status, and both know they’d better not try to actually stimulate the economy by starting their own businesses or anything, because their Dad would have a stroke.
    All of this gets me to thinking… If Congress really and truly wants to help the U.S. economy, maybe, just maybe, it should pass a National Health Plan along the lines of practically every other developed nation on the planet, instead of sending me a check that would barely cover two months worth of premiums on health insurance for my wife and me and only one of my children.
    So Congress, I appreciate the thought, but I’ve got to tell you: Sending me $1,200 to throw into a debt hole that I wouldn’t have if I lived in any other industrialized country just doesn’t cut it.

Get stimulated at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Energy Party: Mayor Bob says don’t forget hydrogen

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My latest Energy Party column has been well received, but a common complaint is that not EVERY plank of the platform was mentioned or elaborated upon. This from Mayor Bob Coble of Columbia:

Brad you should add a plank in your Energy Party Platform calling for research and production of hydrogen energy including hydrogen fuel cells. I know you wrote in your Sunday column that a higher gas tax after 9-11 could have been used to accelerate "…the development of hydrogen, solar, wind, clean coal, methanol-from-coal, electric cars, mass transit…" but alternate energy should be a major part of your platform.

On July 14th the Board of the National Hydrogen Association will meet in Columbia in preparation for their convention in March, which will bring to Columbia the international hydrogen and fuel cell industry’s largest companies.  Becoming part of the hydrogen economy is an important economic strategy for Columbia and South Carolina.  In 2008, we will build the first public hydrogen fueling station in the Southeast.  Millennium Cell, a world leader in hydrogen battery technology, is moving a subsidiary company, Gecko Technologies, to Columbia.  USC has the nation’s only National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Fuel Cells.  The Savannah River National Lab and Clemson’s International Center for Automotive Research are centers for hydrogen research.

Every facet of society stands to be impacted by hydrogen generated energy. A major source of global warming could disappear as well as America’s reliance on foreign oil.  Our strategy is to see that Columbia is the site for much of the commercialization of the hydrogen economy. 

Additionally, Innovista, which of course will promote a number of different areas of research, will be Columbia’s greatest opportunity to create jobs and increase our per capita income. According to a recent survey, 90% of City residents support the research campus and these efforts. The Association of University Technology Managers recently ranked USC number 11 out of 114 public universities in the number of start-up businesses created.

Finally, we are trying to connect our citizen to the knowledge economy. Over 8,000 students graduate from Columbia institutions of higher education each year.  The Columbia Talent Magnet project is designed to keep these bright minds in the Columbia region by connecting them to existing community initiatives. Also, the USC Columbia Technology Incubator has assisted 63 companies and created 554 new jobs including 142 minority and female jobs. 

The Energy Party should aggressively promote all alternate forms of energy particularly hydrogen.

Of course, hydrogen has been mentioned in earlier Energy Party documents, such as this original column. An excerpt:

Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power….

Robert’s great Energy Party cartoon

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July_4_cartoon

Over the weekend I neglected to mention (in connection with my Sunday column on the subject) Robert Ariail’s wonderful cartoon of July 4, which states the Energy Party position with the same incisive relevance as the original Ben Franklin cartoon that inspired him did the cause of the Revolution.

And I didn’t even put him up to it…

Neither Obama nor McCain meets Energy Party standard

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are lucky there’s such a thing as Republicans and Democrats in this country, because neither would be able to get the Energy Party nomination.
    They’re also lucky that the Energy Party exists only in my head, because I believe its nominee could tap into a longing, among the very independent voters Messrs. McCain and Obama need to court for victory, for a pragmatic, nonideological, comprehensive national energy policy. This independent voter longs for it, anyway.
    What is the greatest failure of George W. Bush as president? If you answered “Iraq,” you lose. His greatest failure was summed up well by Sen. Joe Biden, who said at the 2006 Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting, “History will judge George Bush harshly not for the mistakes he has made… but because of the opportunities that he has squandered.”
    The biggest wasted opportunity was when he failed, on Sept. 12, 2001, to ask Americans to sacrifice, to work together to shake off “the grip of foreign oil oligarchs,” and “plan the demise of Islamic fundamentalism.”
    Gasoline was between about $1.40 and $1.50 a gallon then. If we had applied a federal tax increase then of $1 or $2 — as voices as varied as Tom Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jim Hoagland and Robert Samuelson have urged for years — we’d still have been paying less per gallon than we are now, and the money would have stayed in this country, in our hands, rather than in those of Mahmoud Ahmajinedad, or Hugo Chavez, or our “friends” the Saudis (you know, the ones who underwrite the Wahhabist madrassas).
    And who, on the day after the terrorist attacks, would have refused? Most Americans would have been glad to be asked to do something to fight back.
    We could have used that money for a lot of things, from funding the War on Terror (rather than passing the debt to our grandchildren) to accelerating the development of hydrogen, solar, wind, clean coal, methanol-from-coal, electric cars, mass transit — on something useful. We would have started conserving a lot more a lot faster, reducing demand enough to deliver a shock to world oil prices. Demand would have resumed its rise because of such irresistible forces as Chinese growth, but we would have had a salutary effect.
    But we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to defund the terrorists or the petrodictators, or to reduce upward pressure on the national debt, or to respond to rising world energy demands, or to save the planet. We didn’t do it because we can’t do it individually and have an appreciable effect — it would take a national effort, and that takes leadership. And no one in a position of political leadership — not the president, not his fellow Republicans, and not their Democratic opposition — has stood up and said, Let’s get our act together, and here’s how….
    Getting our act together would require leaders who are no longer interested in playing the Party Game. In Messrs. McCain and Obama, we had an opportunity. No major Republican is less into party than John McCain, which is why so many Republicans wanted to deny him the nomination. And in Barack Obama, Democrats have finally settled on the far-less-partisan alternative.
    But in the energy realm, what have we gotten? Sen. Obama generally sticks to the liberal/Democratic playbook: No drilling offshore or in ANWR. Play down nuclear, play up solar and wind.
    Sen. McCain, at least, is not doctrinaire Republican on energy. For that, you have to look to someone like Jim DeMint, whose op-ed piece on our pages a week ago extolled drilling, but excoriated “cap and trade.”
    Sen. McCain will at least take some items from the left (cap and trade, CAFE standards) and some from the right (let states decide whether to drill offshore), but he’s mushy about it. And any credit he gets for ideological flexibility is overshadowed by his being the author of the biggest pander on energy this year — the proposal for a “gas tax holiday.”
    An Energy Party nominee wouldn’t propose to lower the price of gasoline at the pump, so if that’s what you want — and a lot of you do want that — you can just stop reading now. Making it temporarily easier to buy more foreign oil is in no way in the national interest, and a leader would have the guts to explain that.
    The Energy nominee would increase domestic production in the short term and lead a no-holds-barred national effort to take us beyond major dependence on anybody’s oil. He (or she) would put America at the forefront of both energy innovation and environmental stewardship, and would not let any sort of ideology stand in the way. (We must distinguish, for instance, between an environmental goal that matters, such as global climate change, and the inconvenience of a few caribou.) The Energy nominee would, given the chance:

  • Drill off our coast, something we’ve seen can be done with minimal environmental risk.
  • Drill in the ANWR (which, as detractors note, would not solve the problem, but it would help, and would demonstrate that we’re serious).
  • Prohibitively tax the ownership of SUVs, and any other unconscionable, antisocial behavior.
  • Lower speed limits, and enforce them (use the fines to pay for more traffic cops).
  • Take money away from highway construction, and devote it to mass transit.
  • Build nuclear plants with the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
  • Develop electric cars at Apollo speed.

    We need leadership that respects no one’s sacred ideological cows, left or right — leadership that will take risks to do what works, both for the nation and ultimately for the planet.
    Is that really so much to ask?

A mixed day for democracy in the Midlands

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

TUESDAY’S primary runoffs produced encouraging results on the state level, but what happened in Richland County was downright disturbing.

    Voters in the Midlands soundly rejected the governor’s efforts, financed by out-of-state extremists, to use South Carolina as a lab rabbit to test their pet ideologies.

    That’s what was at stake in the runoffs between Sheri Few and David Herndon in the state House 79 Republican primary, and between Katrina Shealy and Jake Knotts in Senate District 23. It would be hard to imagine this newspaper endorsing Sen. Knotts under any other circumstances. But things being as they were, we did. We believed that if the governor and his allies managed to take him out as they were trying to do, it would have intimidated other lawmakers into doing their will — even though the lawmakers and their constituents know better. So the governor needed to lose this one. Fortunately, the voters agreed.

    That would lead me to say that Tuesday’s voting demonstrates the unmitigated wisdom inherent in our system of democracy — if not for what happened, on the same day, with the Richland County clerk of court and the same county’s council District 7.

    Of course, we have insisted for years that it makes little sense to elect the clerk of court — or auditor, or coroner, or any office that is highly technical and has nothing to do with setting policies. It would be far better to let county administrators — who report to the elected councils — hire people to do highly technical, ministerial jobs, based on experience and demonstrated competence.

    The result in the clerk’s race reinforces our point.

    In the primary on June 10, we endorsed incumbent Barbara Scott, since — and we saw no clear evidence to the contrary — she was doing an adequate job running the courthouse, collecting child support payments and overseeing the other routine duties of the office. She was judged clerk of the year by the S.C. chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates, which surely knows more about the quality of her day-to-day work than we do.

    Before making that decision, we considered endorsing Gloria Montgomery — who had worked in the clerk’s office for years and seems to understand it thoroughly (certainly better than we or most voters do) — or Kendall Corley, who offered some interesting ideas for improving service.

    But we never for a moment considered endorsing Jeanette McBride. That’s not because Mrs. McBride is married to former state Rep. Frank McBride, whose political career ended in 1991 when he pleaded guilty to vote-selling in the Lost Trust scandal. We didn’t consider her because she offered us no reason whatsoever to believe that she would do a better job than Ms. Scott. She didn’t even try. She did not display any particular interest in what the clerk of court does at all.

    She said, quite simply, that she was running because she thought she could win. She did not explain what went into that calculation, but so what? She was right.

    Her victory will inevitably be compared to the defeat of Harry Huntley — regarded by many as the best auditor in the state — in Richland County in 2006. And it will be suggested that both of these incumbents were the victims of raw racial politics. Mr. Huntley and Ms. Scott are white; Ms. McBride and Paul Brawley are black. A candidate who can pick up most of the black votes in a Democratic primary is increasingly seen as having an advantage in the county.

    I hope voters had a better reason than that for turning out qualified candidates in favor of challengers who seemed to offer no actual qualifications. In fact, I’m wracking my brain trying to think of other explanations. Ms. McBride, in her interview, didn’t help with that. And Mr. Brawley didn’t even bother to talk to The State’s editorial board, so I have no idea what sort of case he made to voters. I hope he made some really compelling, defensible argument. I just haven’t heard it yet.

    In council District 7, race was not the factor. Both runoff candidates were black. That one seems to have been a pure demonstration of another poor reason to win an election: name recognition. Voters went with Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy, a name they’d heard before, over the young and unknown Kiba Anderson. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten that the reason they’d heard the name was that she was one of the council members they booted out of office after she wasted their tax money on a junket to Hawaii.

    In our interview, Ms. Kennedy was like Ms. McBride in one respect: For a former council member, she showed a startling lack of knowledge of, or interest in, issues before the council.

    Mr. Anderson was an unknown quantity, to be sure. But at least we didn’t know he would be a bad council member, which Ms. Kennedy was.

    The optimist in me says that the voters no doubt had some really great reason for sending her back to the council. It’s just escaping me so far.

    That’s the bad news out of the runoffs. I’ll end on a cheery note.

    Before I do, I’ll state as I always do that our endorsements most certainly are not an attempt to predict election outcomes. They are about who should win — and the reasons why — not who will win.

    But several election cycles back, I got tired of our detractors spreading the lie that “our” candidates generally lose, that we are out of touch with the voters, that our endorsement is the “kiss of death,” yadda-yadda. So I started reporting our endorsees’ “won-lost” record after each election.

    The results of the primaries, now that all the recounts and runoffs are done, were as follows: We endorsed 24 candidates. Of those, 19 won. That’s a batting average of .792. So there.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

Marking time at the State House

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
IN THE LAST 15 minutes of the 2008 session of the S.C. General Assembly, there were three things going on in the House chamber: The speaker and clerks and others up on the podium were fussing about finishing important paperwork of some sort. All of the other House members were wandering about on the floor, socializing, saying goodbye, slapping backs, shaking hands, sharing stories and so forth.
    All, that is, but two members, Reps. Chris Hart and Walt McLeod. Mr. Hart was at the lectern. Mr. McLeod was at his desk. Their microphoned voices rose indistinctly above the buzz of their milling, meandering colleagues. A sample of their vaudevillian dialogue:

Rep. McLEOD: Is it correct to say that, at the present time, our state prison system is operating at a deficit?
Rep. HART: That’s absolutely correct, and I’m glad you mentioned that, Mr. McLeod…

    They were discussing a two-part proposal made by Attorney General Henry McMaster earlier in the session. He had proposed to do away with what’s left of parole in our state prisons, while simultaneously creating a new “middle court” that would punish first-time, nonviolent wrongdoers in ways other than sending them to prison.
    What Messrs. McLeod and Hart were teaming up to say — between Mr. McLeod’s friendly, leading questions and Mr. Hart’s “thank you for that good question” answers — was that it would be crazy to do the former without first doing the latter. (Their language was more polite; I’m just cutting to the chase.)
    That’s because, as Mr. Hart explained, South Carolina already did away with parole for violent offenders long ago. And since then, we’ve been jamming more and more prisoners (violent and nonviolent) into our prisons, while cutting the budget of the Corrections Department year after year. We now spend less per prisoner than any other state in the union, while locking up more of our population than most. We lock up more prisoners with fewer guards, and make basically no effort to rehabilitate them. So our prisons are increasingly dangerous places — for the guards, for the prisoners and for those of us on the outside who depend on the worst criminals staying inside.
    Some of you will say, Oh, isn’t that just like a couple of liberal Democrats, prattling on about mollycoddling prisoners. If you say that, you’re not paying attention.
    One of Gov. Mark Sanford’s biggest gripes about the budget the Legislature just passed — and remember, this is Mark Sanford, the most fanatical enemy of “growing government” ever to enter the State House — was that it does not spend enough to run our prisons safely and responsibly.
    He is guided in this by his hyper-conservative director of Corrections, Jon Ozmint. (I once toured a prison with Mr. Ozmint, a former prosecutor. He kept striking up chats with the prisoners. He’d ask, “Who sent you here?” The prisoner would name a judge. Mr. Ozmint would say, “Oh, Judge So-and-So! He’s a really good judge! He’s really fair, isn’t he?” The prisoner would gape at Mr. Ozmint as though he were a Martian.) Mr. Ozmint, after years of refusing to complain on the record, wrote an op-ed piece this year to beg lawmakers not to abolish parole, suggesting that if they did, he and his shrunken staff would not be able to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker.
    Everybody who is familiar with these facts knows these things. Henry McMaster knows these things. So why did he propose something that flew in the face of the facts (abolishing parole), at the same time as proposing something that made perfect sense in light of the same facts (alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders, to reserve prison space for the worst criminals)?
    Because he is a political realist. He knows the South Carolina General Assembly. “No parole” was the tooth-rotting sweetener to help the alternative-sentencing medicine go down.
    The good news here is that the Legislature didn’t abolish parole this year. The bad news is that it didn’t provide for alternative sentencing, either. What it did, in the end, was neglect the whole problem as usual, sending more people behind bars while we pay less and less to keep them there.
    It was the same approach lawmakers took to early-childhood education; our crumbling, unsafe roads; our emergency rooms crammed with mental patients; our struggling rural schools — leave it all to fester.
    What did lawmakers do this year besides throw up their hands over the lack of money, after having cut taxes by about a billion dollars over the last few sessions? Well, they passed an “immigration reform” bill that will accomplish two things: force businesses to do a lot of paperwork, and enable lawmakers to tell the voters in this election year that they had “done something” about illegal immigration. And boy did they spend a lot of time and energy on that.
    Back to Mr. Hart and Mr. McLeod. If the whole abolish parole/alternative sentencing thing was already dead for the year, why were they going on so earnestly? Well, they’re just that way; they’re very earnest guys. It was pointless, really — perhaps even a bit priggish of them. They knew they were just marking time and so did everybody else, so you can’t blame anybody for ignoring them. It was just political theater; they were actors in a play with a “what if?” plot, as in, “What if lawmakers realistically and intelligently engaged the actual challenges facing their state?”
    Only an easily distracted fool who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on would have paid attention to them at all.

See the video of Hart and McLeod here.

A brief political history of the PACT

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
ONE WHO TRIED to decipher what happened in the S.C. Senate last week with regard to the PACT — that’s “Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test” to the uninitiated — can be forgiven for being confused.
I certainly am.
    Start with a press release from Sen. Greg Ryberg, which said in part, “PACT is dead…. the bill we passed today kills it as of July 1, 2008.” He said “the creation and administration of our statewide assessment test belongs with the people at the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) whose sole focus is education and not the General Assembly. I am glad that we have left it in their hands.”
    This was confusing to me because I was here when the PACT was created to measure whether schools were successfully meeting educational standards set in the Education Accountability Act, which the Legislature passed at the behest of business leaders who wanted a better-trained work force and conservative Republicans who were determined that if money was going to be spent on public schools, the schools were by golly going to meet objective standards. The EAA created the EOC and charged it with making sure the DOE (had enough initials yet?) did what the Legislature insisted be done.
    So yeah, if the PACT is to be changed, it’s the bureaucrats’ job to do it. But it’s the Legislature’s job to tell them to do it.
    More confusingly, this is exactly what state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex wanted the Legislature to do. “Teachers and parents are clamoring for these changes, our students need them and our state deserves them,” Mr. Rex said in his own release. “It’s really gratifying to see the Senate make such a strong statement with its unanimous vote.”
    In case the elected officials don’t have you confused enough, the chief organization devoted to diverting public education funds to private schools declared Friday that “The PACT is an expensive and outdated test that lacks the child-specific diagnostic data required by teachers. Unlike tests used in other states, PACT is South Carolina specific, and doesn’t provide educators with a comparison of our schools to regional and national test scores.” SCRG went on to charge that “Superintendent Rex was unwilling to replace PACT on his own,” and celebrated the idea that “final passage of this Senate bill will force him into action.”
    Action that he’s been begging for authorization to take.
    It might be instructive at this point to note that the Senate is run by Republicans, as is the House, which earlier passed legislation authorizing a revamp of the PACT, while Mr. Rex is the state’s highest-ranking elected Democrat. These fact are not at all important to me; I see them as an asinine distraction. But to the players, party considerations are of the utmost importance.
    Republicans are terribly worried at the moment that Mr. Rex will challenge their divine right to the governor’s office by seeking that position in 2010. In fact, some see his insistence that a PACT replacement be in use by a year from now, rather than a year later, as a ploy on his part to give a boost to his campaign. In other words, these Republicans suspect him of being too anxious to replace the PACT, other Republicans see him as too reluctant (or say they do), while Mr. Rex sees his level of enthusiasm for replacing the PACT as being, like the Mama Bear’s porridge, just right.
    How did we get here?
    I already mentioned above how the EAA, and its child the PACT, came into being in the late 1990s. Far from being some sort of oversight, the point was to have a South Carolina-specific test, to measure whether the specific standards our state adopted — some of the highest standards in the country, by the way — were being met by the schools. The point was to make sure the schools didn’t let any students fall through the cracks.
    This Republican-driven reform was never welcome among what critics are pleased to call the “education establishment,” or among Democrats, the party most closely identified with said establishment. But Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, elected in 1998, had to accept the whole shebang as a fait accompli.
    Teachers complained about the PACT from the start. One of their main complaints was that the test (actually, a battery of tests, but let’s keep it simple) was not useful to them in helping individual students. Of course, it had never been intended for that purpose, but it was a complaint with great appeal across the political spectrum. Even SCRG, which is certainly no friend of public school teachers, took it up.
    Add to that the fact that schools felt so much pressure over the PACT that they inflicted pressure on the teachers who then transferred the stress to the students, and before you knew it, it appeared that all teaching ceased in the last weeks of each school year while everyone involved participated in a mass panic attack over the test.
    It is a great shame that teachers have been so conscious of this pressure, and a greater one that students have. This was, after all, about helping the students by making sure the schools, as institutions, did not fail them.
    So it’s good that a bipartisan consensus emerged this year to change the PACT into an instrument that would hold schools accountable, while providing in addition an instrument that teachers can use for timely diagnosis and remediation.
    But it’s bad that partisan craziness has made it so hard for voters and taxpayers — the folks to whom the system was to be held accountable — to tell whether that is happening.

SCRG release about PACT

1 Reply

Here’s the SCRG release about PACT that will be referred to in my column Sunday (I tried to linking to it on the Web but didn’t find it at the SCRG site):

Senators Declare PACT Dead
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Neil Mellen
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Across South Carolina, students began taking the PACT test this week.
The PACT is an expensive and outdated test that lacks the child-specific
diagnostic data required by teachers. Unlike tests used in other states,
PACT is South Carolina specific, and doesn’t provide educators with a
comparison of our schools to regional and national test scores.
Lawmakers and educators have long agreed that PACT ought to be replaced,
but Superintendent Jim Rex (D), who campaigned on a promise to reform
assessment in 2006, has been unwilling to make the change. Instead, Rex
is working with Bob Walker (R) of Spartanburg to push through a
controversial bill, dramatically weakening South Carolina’s precedent
setting accountability laws.
Thankfully, members of the South Carolina Senate have called Rex’s bluff.
Thursday, Senators reached an agreement on an amended version of the
House Bill, which includes specific language eliminating the PACT in
July of 2008.
“Eliminating the PACT this year frees the state to move forward on a new
accountability system,” explained Senator Greg Ryberg, Republican from
Aiken.
Unlike the House version, the Senate is not looking for the Legislature
to micromanage the testing process. Senators made it clear:
responsibility for creation and administration of assessment belongs
with the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education,
and the Education Oversight Committee.
Writing to an open letter to Jim Rex earlier this month, Senator Kevin
Bryant (R) of Anderson expressed frustration about the fact that
Superintendent Rex was unwilling to replace PACT on his own.
“The department you administer holds the responsibility for the PACT
test and might have as early as January 2007, begun the elimination of
the PACT, but instead decided to extend the PACT for another year
(2008). I remain frustrated as to this series of decisions.”
While Rex initially responded to calls from Bryant and others with more
political posturing, final passage of this Senate bill will force him
into action. The Senate bill also prevents an unnecessary expansion of
standardized testing for first and second grade students, children most
experts agree won’t benefit from this type of assessment.
South Carolina’s students deserve an effective test. With a 47 percent
high school graduation rate and 49th placed SAT scores, it is clear that
public schools require an accountability system that helps teachers do
their job. Private schools in South Carolina, and public schools in
other states, have found commercially developed tests such as Stanford
10, Iowa Test of Skills, MAP, and Terra Nova can do just that. Moving to
an existing standardized test would also save millions of dollars in
assessment spending, ensuring more money reaches the classroom for
instruction.
###

The Obama Effect

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
WEEKS SUCH as the one just past — in which I am still mired as I write this — do not lend themselves to complete, extended thought of the sort that leads to coherent columns.
    But when have I ever let that stop me?
    We’re in the middle of candidate interviews for the June primaries — 50-plus meetings with folks seeking their respective parties’ nominations for the state House, state Senate, county councils, sheriff, clerk of court, and on and on ….
    But as disparate as these candidates and their goals and issues may be, sometimes themes emerge, or seem to emerge.
    Here’s one, which I’ll call The Obama Effect, just to have something trendy to call it.
    There’s nothing new about this effect, of course, and I certainly didn’t discover it. But I have been tracking it since last July, when I wrote a column headlined “Obama, the young, and the magic of Making a Difference.” I wasn’t sure what I was describing then. I’m not sure now, either. It’s an amorphous phenomenon, or set of phenomena — but one of considerable force in spite of, or perhaps because of, that lack of easy definition.
    It’s the thing that led to nearly half a million people coming out to vote in the S.C. Democratic presidential primary in January, which is all the more extraordinary when you recall that there had been a very hotly contested Republican presidential primary just the week before, and that no one who voted in that was allowed to vote in the other. The turnout on Jan. 26 was double that of the 2004 Democratic primary. Republicans, after 20 years of touting the growing pull of their party, actually saw participation decline from their last contested presidential primary. This is less because of a decline in GOP fortunes in the state, and more because of an indefinable something over on the Democratic side.
    Detractors mock the phenomenon for the very fact that it is so hard to describe. “Hope” for what? they say. What kind of “Change”? Satirists have no end of fun mocking media types — people who make their livings describing things — for failing to explain why they’re going gaga. None of that diminishes the power of the thing.
    Still, I thought it had rolled on to other states beginning in February. But then we started these interviews, and I began to see a certain something — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on — cropping up on the county and legislative district levels.
    We’re used to candidates coming in with definite reasons for seeking office. Challengers speak of their enthusiasm for a certain cause, or describe in excruciating detail their indignation over having sought help from their representative and found him or her insufficiently responsive (a very common reason to run for office). Incumbents speak of needing just a little more time to accomplish that same thing they wanted to accomplish the last time they ran, and the time before that. And so on. After a few election cycles, you can finish the candidates’ sentences for them.
    But this time, we met some first-time candidates in Democratic primaries who didn’t seem to have a particular reason for filing, beyond a newfound enthusiasm for public service itself. Their reason for being in our interview room was ill-defined. I wrote a summary of one such interview on my blog, which led a curmudgeonly reader to complain that “those bromides tell us exactly nothing” as to what this candidacy was about. But I had included this clue: a quote from said candidate to the effect that this was “an exciting year, an historical year” to get involved….
    Not long after that interview, Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wondered aloud why some of these folks were running, and I ventured the hunch that this was a case of The Obama Effect. She said I had no objective, quantifiable reason for saying that. And she was right, of course.
    A few days later, Richland County Council Chairman Joe McEachern — who’s running for the seat currently held by Rep. John Scott, who’s running for one held by Sen. Kay Patterson — made no bones about it: There was an Obama Factor pulling in folks who had never previously given any consideration to public life. He and other more experienced hands were fielding a lot of questions from enthusiastic people wanting to know exactly how to go about getting involved.
    All of the aforementioned candidates have been black Democrats. But it fell to a white Democrat, Rep. Jimmy Bales, to spell out the thing more overtly. He said he’d like to see his party increase its numbers in the S.C. House, and “this might be the year this happens.”
    “If Obama were the nominee,” he said on May 1, “and if Democrats would come together… I believe that he would come close to carrying this state,” and would in addition have the effect of increasing the number of Democratic S.C. House members — not so much to a majority, but to a less anemic minority. Say, from 51 members out of 124 to 58. He says this dispassionately, calmly, without any signs of hysteria. It’s just that the candidacy of Barack Obama has made some previously unlikely things seem attainable.
    No, I can’t prove it. Nor can I quantify it. But there’s something there, and it’s happening down on a much more local level than has been widely documented so far.

Now I know how Dr. Frankenstein felt

5 Replies

Remember how I posted awhile back on the subject of how online provides a nice forum for public officials to speak to the public? When I wrote that, I was thinking about our new Saturday online page, as a place where Mayor Bob and others could have frequent missives appear without being limited by the one-column-to-a-customer policy we have in the paper, since in-paper space is at such a premium?

Well, Mayor Bob seems to like the idea. In fact, after I told him late last week that I would feature his latest offering on Saturday, and urged him to submit material for that venue in the future, two things happened:

  1. He has sent us yet another piece.
  2. He’s asked me what the length limit is for online.

Feeling for all the world like Victor Frankenstein throwing the switch, I answered:

"There is none."

Alive, alive, IT IS ALIVE!

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

39 Replies

Since, I’m on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn’t post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it’s always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here’s a PDF of the original page, and here’s the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let’s do something about it.
    And while we’re at it, let’s win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
    It’ll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
    In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I’ve written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
    This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going with "Energy" for now.
    Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git ‘er done. So let’s change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
    I’ve made a start on the plan (and mind, I’m not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we’ll refine it as we go along:
— * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It’s possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won’t fit in a Prius. Let’s play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
— * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you’ll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won’t. Or if you do, we’ll go to $5.
— * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we’re going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That’s one thing we’ll spend that new tax money on.
— * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
— * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
— * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can’t (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can’t), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
— * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up — it ain’t happening.
— * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
— * If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
— * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
    You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that’s what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
    Then, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
    How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my — I mean, our– Web Headquarters:  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Waiting for Pennsylvania to buckle down and decide

20 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LATE ONE Monday morning several weeks ago in a small-town diner in central Pennsylvania, I looked up from my paper to see that I was the last customer at the counter. Just the one waitress, the coffee pot and me.
    Filling the silence, I asked for a refill. Then I asked for her thoughts on the upcoming titanic battle in which she and her fellow Pennsylvanians would get to choose the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
    She didn’t have any. Yeah, she knew there was something like that going on, and that some people were really excited, but she had made no effort to follow it. She wasn’t dismissive, and she was willing to hear me talk about it, but to her it was neither here nor there. Some customers want coffee. Others don’t. Some want to talk politics. Whatever.
    This was disconcerting. I looked around the way you do when you’re thinking, somebody back me up here. But it was just her and me. And there was something about the moment — she was so matter-of-fact — that made me feel like I was the one who had to explain himself.
    So I did, at some length. I even confessed that I actually made my living caring about elections and such, thinking and talking and writing about them, which as I said it sounded ludicrous. She just nodded. Some collect stamps; others watch birds. This guy’s into politics. Whatever.
    She even encouraged me, in a noncommittal way. She asked who was still in it. I explained that John McCain had sewn up the Republican nomination, and that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were locked in a tight battle on the Democratic side — one primary going to her, the next to him, back and forth, the suspense building. I told her how folks had come out in huge numbers in South Carolina to support Obama.
    So who will win? she asked, and I said the smart money at that point was on Obama, with more and more Democrats deciding they couldn’t support Hillary.
    She asked: “Why? Because she’s a woman?”
    The question wasn’t a challenge; there was no feminist defiance in it. She was just asking, the way you might ask, “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
    Certainly not, I told her, and tried to explain about the Obama Appeal, about Hope and Change (capitalizing the key words with my voice), and how Sen. Clinton tended to appeal to folks who actually relished the partisan fight between left and right, and that many Democrats, and independents who had voted in Democratic primaries where (unlike Pennsylvania) that was allowed, were tired of the Bad Old Politics, so Obama was really catching on.
    There were, however, certain demographic tendencies to be noted, I said. For instance, quite a few white women over the age of 30 (realizing that I had just described the woman in front of me, I started talking faster to put that part behind us) did seem to support her because she was a woman, but the men and minorities and young people and women who favored Obama were, if they were turned off by Clinton, reacting more to the sort of campaign she had run….
    She nodded, and when I paused to take a breath, told me that the woman who owned the diner, and another waitress who wasn’t on duty that morning, were both Hillary supporters. Apparently, I had described them pretty well. Deciding I should quit while I was ahead, I paid my check, making sure to tip at least 20 percent, and headed back out into the cold March wind.
    And I thought about that woman, and how very normal she had been. She was no silly, apathetic fool, the sort that the passionately committed declare that Democracy Is Wasted Upon. She was intelligent — at least average, if not more than. She was sensible, and perfectly willing to care about things that should be cared about. She was earning a living; she was doing what needed to be done, and not wasting energy on anything that didn’t.
    Since that day, she has come to represent The Pennsylvania Voter in my mind. Down here in South Carolina we knocked ourselves out trying to make a difference, and we did — giving Sen. McCain the payback he had waited eight years for, giving Sen. Obama a big push forward.
    But it’s not over yet on the Democratic side, and it’s within the power of Pennsylvanians to make the final decision, and after the mad pace of having a high-stakes primary about every five minutes from the first of January through early March, nothing has happened for weeks and weeks while we all wait for Pennsylvania to do something, and the latest polls say it’s still a dead heat. Zogby reported Thursday that 45 percent were still for Clinton, 44 percent for Obama, 9 percent undecided, and 3 percent wanted someone else.
    Tied? Undecided? Someone else? They still haven’t decided up there! It’s like they haven’t been paying attention.
    The candidates haven’t helped much, what with Sen. Clinton making up Bosnia war stories (there I was, pinned down…) and Sen. Obama going all cold and detached (religion is the opium of the people…), to the point that you can see how a sensible person might be turned off.
    But I find I want to drive back up there before Tuesday, and go back into that diner, and convince that sensible woman that these are solid candidates, that one of them is likely to become president, that the rest of us took them seriously, so won’t you please just bear with us long enough to go out and vote, and settle this thing for the sake of the country?
    And then, once you do, we can all take a load off, order another cup of coffee, and think about something else until Labor Day.

Dayhawks

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Today’s column may seem a little weird, even by my standards. But it could have been weirder. I did, after all, resist the temptation to make this my second paragraph:

It was just like Edward Hopper’s "Nighthawks." Except that it was in the daytime, and there was just one customer instead of three, and it was in a small town rather than an urban setting, and the counterman was a woman. Other than those things, it was just like "Nighthawks."

…not to be confused, of course, with the Gottfried Helnwein version.

Hear Peter Beattie’s speech

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To hear former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie’s speech to the Columbia Rotary Club last Monday — to which I referred in my Sunday column — go to this page, then scroll down to the calendar. Under April 7, you’ll see "Peter Beattie, former Premier of Queensland, Australia."

Under those words, you’ll see three icons. Click on the middle one — the one that features the image of a speaker — to call up an audio recording of the meeting. Let the full audio download, then skip over the preliminaries (including my presentation of "Health and Happiness") and restart the playback roughly in the middle (or to be precise, 38 minutes, 36 seconds in). That’s where Mr. Beattie starts speaking.

This may sound stupid, but one of the things that I enjoyed about talking with Mr. Beattie was listening to his accent. To my unschooled, untraveled ear, it made him sound like a guy who, instead of talking about seizing opportunities to move into a new economy, ought to be out hunting crocodiles, either for educational purposes or for profit. I mean that in a good way.

But I didn’t put it that way in my column Sunday because over the years I’ve picked up on the fact that some Australians consider that sort of accent declasse — sort of the Down Under equivalent of our Southern or "country" modes of speech — and I didn’t wish to insult Mr. Beattie. It could be that it’s a different sort of accent altogether, and I’m not hearing the difference.

But when I hear it, it has no negative associations. I equate it with strength of character — trustworthiness, forthrightness, the sort of personality that shrugs off adversity. In any case, it’s a mode of speech I like to listen to.

Why can’t we be smart like our sister?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THINK OF South Carolina as a restless schoolboy. He doesn’t test well, but he’s got loads of potential; everybody says so. He’s a well-meaning kid, but has an attention-deficit problem. There he sits, as far to the back of the class as he can get away with. As the teacher drones on about science and stuff, he wonders whether he can get away with spending his lunch money on candy again. Then, just as he’s turned to calculating the number of days left until school is out and he can go to the beach (he’s very good at this sort of math), his reverie is rudely interrupted.
    The teacher stands over him, her eyes just boring into him over the glasses on the end of her nose. She speaks directly to him, demanding to know, “Why can’t you be smart like your sister?”
    The poor kid hears that a lot.
    My own rather feckless, aimless mind (I was born here, you know) has been running along these lines all week, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how well our smart sister has applied herself. Not my sister, personally, but South Carolina’s. Her name is Queensland, and she’s our sister state in Australia.
    Her former premier, Peter Beattie, spoke at my Rotary meeting Monday, although I didn’t realize it at the time because I slipped out of the meeting early (I’m telling you, I am that boy). Mr. Beattie is the one who suggested the whole “sister-state” economic development relationship when he was in office back in the ’90s. He got the idea after a visit here in 1996. He had come to study how our state had taken advantage of the Atlanta Olympics, serving as a training site and hosting the women’s marathon trials. He hoped his state could do the same with the Sydney games.
    As things turned out, though, our “sister” would go on to do some things we should emulate. As premier, he pushed a strategy that would lead to Australia’s “Sunshine State” getting a new alias: “The Smart State.”
    During a week when the S.C. Senate Finance Committee was reacting to tough fiscal times by cutting back on the endowed chairs program and letting K-12 funding slide backward, I kept getting my nose rubbed in the smartness of our sister despite my best efforts to miss the point. On Wednesday, someone sent me a copy of remarks Mr. Beattie — who has been lecturing at USC’s Walker
Institute of International & Area Studies recently — had prepared for a speech this coming Tuesday to the Global Business Forum in Columbia. I skimmed over what he had written…

    Twenty years ago, Queensland was a traditional rocks-and-crops economy where education was not regarded as a priority. But with increasing globalisation, my government knew this was not enough to compete with the new emerging markets of China and India…. We publicly said innovate or stagnate were our choices.
    As a result we developed a strategy called Smart State. This involved a major overhaul of our education and training systems… the cutting edge of developments in biotechnology, energy, information and communications…
    The result has been… Queensland’s lowest unemployment rate in three decades… budget surpluses and a AAA credit rating. Our economic growth has outperformed the nation’s growth for 10 consecutive years and was done on the back of competitive state taxes. Our focus has been long-term and education reform was central.
    Since 1998, the Queensland Government has invested almost $3 billion to boost innovation and R&D infrastructure…

    … but I didn’t have time to read it all just then. Being that unfocused boy, I did find time to write a pointless post on my blog about how “For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me….” That night, I was attending a lecture by Salman Rushdie, who had been brought here by Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist and USC professor, who as it happens grew up in Queensland.
    So guess who I ran into at the reception that night for Mr. Rushdie? Yep — Peter Beattie. (The coincidences were starting to get as weird and mystical as something out of a novel by, well, Salman Rushdie.)
    Cooperating with the inevitable, I introduced myself, and he told me eagerly about the exciting high-tech opportunities he saw here in South Carolina, what with the endowed chairs and Innovista, and our state’s advantages in the fields of hydrogen power, clean coal technology and biotech.
    Biotech, by the way, has been a big one for Queensland, employing 3,200 people, generating $4 billion a year in revenues, and leading to such concrete advances as Ian Fraser’s new human papillomavirus vaccine, which is now protecting 13 million women worldwide from cervical cancer — just so you know it’s not all pie in the sky.
    When I asked him about some of the less-than-visionary (in my view, not his) decisions being made by S.C. political leaders as we spoke, he insisted that was not his place: “I’m a guest here,” he said in that wonderful Down Under accent. “Queensland is like South Carolina. Manners are important.”
    He spoke instead about the opportunities we had in common, and about the fact that places such as Queensland and South Carolina “have to innovate or be left behind.”
    South Carolina, so used to lagging behind the other kids, truly does possess the potential to be a “smart state” like our sister. But too many easily distracted boys over at the State House keep staring out the classroom window…