Category Archives: Columns

Legislators about to sweeten their perk (quietly)

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As the week drew to an end, it became more and more apparent that, tied up as I was getting the Saturday Opinion Extra thing done, any column that I did was going to be a rush job and probably not worthy of a Sunday.

Fortunately, Cindi Scoppe already had a column done that was better than either of the ideas I was kicking around (one would have been about the continuing dialogue we’ve had here about the cognitive divide between black and white over the Rev. Wright, the other would have been a look at the Pennsylvania primary, leading with an anecdote from when I was up there recently).

Cindi had written again about the absurdly generous pensions that S.C. lawmakers provide for themselves out of our pockets. More particularly, it was about the fact that they are about to vote themselves an increase in those pensions without so much as a debate.

    But the House is poised not only to approve the plan this week, but to do so without a bit of debate. That would have happened on Thursday, but for a procedural delay. And the Senate might not be far behind.
    Representatives are poised to act without so much as acknowledging what they’re doing. That means some legislators won’t realize what they’re doing — and with a few exceptions, those who do realize what they’re doing can get away with claiming ignorance.
    Or rather they could have. The purpose of this column is to make sure everybody — not just voters, but legislators as well — knows what’s happening, so there can be no claims of innocence.

Follow the link to read the rest of it. Along with the column was this informative box:

How generous is it?
• For every dollar state employees contribute to their pensions, the taxpayers kick in $1.27; for every dollar legislators pay into their system, taxpayers pay $3.91.
• The average pension for career state employees is $17,536 — 53 percent of their final salary. The average pension for our part-time legislators is $18,218 — or 102 percent of their pay.
• Former legislators can buy “service credit” at the same super-subsidized rate after they leave office. A legislator who leaves office after eight years can buy credit for $2,280 a year for the next 22 years, and then collect an annual pension of $32,980. He will recoup his “investment” in three years, and clear $33,000 a year in profit for the rest of his life.
State employees get no subsidy if they buy additional credit after they quit working.
• Former legislators can start drawing a full pension at age 60. That means an extra $91,000, on average.

It occurs to me that after reading this stuff, you might want to contact your representatives in the Legislature. To find out how to do that, go to www.scstatehouse.net and select “Find your legislator” on the left. Or call 1-888-VOTE-SMART.

On Saturdays, you’ll find us on the Web

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SINCE YOU’RE reading this, we can assume you found us in our new location. Actually, Page D2 is sort of an old location for the Sunday editorial page. We were here for many years before jumping to the A section a little more than a year ago.
    Being back on D2 feels like home to me; I hope it will make our pages more convenient each week for you as well.
    But my purpose today is not to talk about a change already made, but one coming up. And this one is going to feel a lot less familiar to all of us.
    Starting six days from now, we will no longer publish opinion and commentary pages on Saturdays in The State. Instead, we’ll unveil a new Web page featuring content of the sort that we would have published in the paper, only more of it. The new page will be called “Saturday Opinion Extra.”
    Why are we doing this? Two reasons, which I’ll keep as simple as possible:

  1. We have to cut costs.
  2. There are things we can do online we can’t do in the paper.

    Now, about the cost-cutting:
    You may have read that newspapers don’t make as much money as they used to. We still make money, just not as much as the stock market demands. And when you’re a publicly traded company, you have no options: Making less money is something shareholders don’t stand for.
    So you do two things: You work like crazy to bring in more revenue, which is not my department. And you cut costs, which does involve the editorial staff.
    When we lost one writing position three years ago, we eliminated staff-written copy from our Monday pages. Now, faced with further reductions, we’re eliminating editorials from another day, plus eliminating two pages of newsprint a week.
    But just as we replaced the staff copy with a lot more letters to the editor (one of the most popular features in the paper) on Mondays, you’ll get more content on Saturdays online than we could possibly put in the paper. For instance:

  • We get far more syndicated and local guest columns than we can fit on our op-ed pages during the week. On our new Saturday Web page, we’ll be able to give you several op-ed pages worth of columns from the likes of David Broder, Kathleen Parker, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Cal Thomas, Paul Krugman and Charles Krauthammer.
  • Add to that at least one column from a local writer, just as you would normally have received on Saturdays. But the particular columns we put online might be something you’d never have gotten in the paper. We often get more than one column in a month from such newsmakers as Gov. Mark Sanford (Columbia Mayor Bob Coble has submitted three this past month). But since space in the paper is at such a premium, we try to limit each writer to no more than one a month. We also turn down most columns that other newspapers have published. So we turn down some interesting, relevant columns — but finite space in the paper demands tough choices. Online space is virtually unlimited, so you’ll get additional chances to read what newsmakers, and others, are thinking.
  • You will see at least as many letters to the editor online as you would have received in the paper, with the added bonus that some of them will be letters held out for no reason other than that they were too long for our page, and didn’t lend themselves to trimming.
  • We regularly shoot video during editorial board interviews with newsmakers. I’ve been using some of it on my blog the last couple of years, but sporadically; the Saturday Opinion Extra page gives us a place to showcase some of the most interesting footage from the past week.
  • You’ll find links to such things as a new, improved page devoted to Robert Ariail’s recent cartoons, featuring such DVD-style bonus features as unpublished sketches, archives, and video of Robert talking about what he does. (There will also be links to recent posts on my blog, of course.)

    That’s the content we’ll be starting with, and I hope you will suggest more.
    This is a big and scary step for us in the editorial department. We have always published editorial and op-ed pages daily, and departing from that feels a little like stepping off something firm and secure into thin air.
    But like skydiving, it’s also pretty exciting. Ever since the 1980s — since before there was a Worldwide Web — I’ve been interested in the potential of an electronic opinion forum, with immediacy and interactivity you can’t get on paper. That’s why I started the blog; this takes us another step.
    Sure, we’ve let  our paper content flow onto the Web for years, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do there in the opinion realm. The editorial board needs to turn some attention to better serving the 800,000 unique visitors who come to thestate.com each month.
    Please check out this new feature on Saturday, and let us know what you think of it. Even more than a published page, this new venture will always be a living work in progress, and I’m counting on our readers to help us shape it.

Until the new Saturday Opinion Extra page appears, please come to my blog to share your thoughts:  thestate.com/bradsblog/. Or send us a letter at stateeditor@thestate.com.

Tom Davis predicting Rod Shealy attack

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A reader yesterday asked what I thought about the smear job, reportedly engineered by Rod Shealy, that hit Tom Davis this week at the outset of his attempt to unseat Sen. Catherine Ceips.

When I read about it, I just nodded. Tom, the subject of my column this past Sunday, indicated last week that he expected something of the kind, and that it would probably be worse than even he expected:

    I hadn’t even thought about that, to be honest with you… I hadn’t even thought about what it’s gonna be like having a guy who wakes up in the morning who just wants to strip the bark off me. I mean, and that’s what Rod Shealy’s gonna wanna do… I’ve never been through a campaign. I’ve been told just to expect, whatever it is about you that you don’t want people to know, expect it to be known.

Tom thought it would be about something true about him — such as the fact that he was a Democrat when he was young — instead of this illegal-alien nonsense. But that’s Tom’s great liability in this race: He’s a Mr. Smith type. He’s a very open, candid, straightforward, sincere kind of guy (I would have added "thrifty, brave, clean and reverent," but you get the idea), so he figured whatever he was hit with would be something real.

So he was right: He hadn’t really thought through what it would be like with Rod Shealy after him. That’s because Tom Davis is incapable of thinking like Rod Shealy.

It’s a helluva thing, isn’t it, when honest people have to fear running for public office because of sleazy stuff that will be done to them that has nothing to do with their suitability for office?

Oh, but wait! Rod Shealy is reformed! It’s got to be true… PBS said so…

Anyway, in the video above, you’ll see and hear Tom talking about this subject.

An ‘exit interview’ with the governor’s right-hand man

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Tom_davis_021

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MY BEST CONTACT in the governor’s office left Mark Sanford’s employ last week, which is bad news for me. The jury is still out on whether it’s a good thing for South Carolina.
    The jury in this case will be the voters of S.C. Senate District 46 in Beaufort County. Tom Davis, formerly chief of staff to Mr. Sanford, will oppose Sen. Catherine Ceips in the Republican primary in June. I have no idea which should win; we’ll have our hands full on the editorial board just trying to endorse in primaries for Midlands districts.
    But Tom dropped by our offices on his way out of town last week, and I thought I’d share with you some observations from what one might term this “exit interview” — less for the light it sheds on a Senate contest, and more for what they tell us about the guy who’s been the governor’s point man for most of his time in office.
    You will have gathered from previous columns that I am, shall we say, disappointed in this governor. But Tom Davis has always impressed me with his passionate support of his boss. He is so earnest and so insistent in his faithful advocacy — from taking flak from lawmakers without resentment to sending me e-mails so intensely detailed in their rebuttal of criticism that I have to set them aside until I can find the time — that you can’t help but respect and like the guy, even when you disagree.
    The five issues he says he most wants to address distill some of the best things the governor has at least theoretically stood for (with a hint here and there of the worst). They also remind us how little has been achieved under this governor, despite Tom’s efforts:

1. Education funding. He would take all the money from the bewildering array of sources we have now — the EIA, the EFA, the whole EIEIO — and put it all into one stream, “so you can see where the money’s going and what it’s doing.” He’d have the money follow each child rather than districts and programs. This, of course, brings to mind the governor’s voucher and tax credits crusade. But it also points to the work that Tom has done reaching out to Education Superintendent Jim Rex. I’ve often been frustrated at the governor’s slowness to work personally with Mr. Rex on reforms they agree about, but Tom has definitely been the good cop on this one. Tom praises Mr. Rex’s efforts at public school choice, and says what’s needed to make the plan work is the funding reform he advocates.
2. “The way we tax.” Rather than get bogged down with the governor’s obsession with the income tax, Tom clearly advocates the comprehensive tax reform that our board has pushed for what seems like forever.
3. Government restructuring. The main reason we endorsed Mr. Sanford in 2002 was his embrace of our restructuring agenda — and his fecklessness on the issue played a role in our not endorsing him in 2006. Tom wants to try working for these crucial reforms from the very citadel of resistance, the S.C. Senate. And he understands that the state’s systemic problems extend far beyond just reducing fragmentation at the state level — he would stress prying the state’s fingers from the throat of local governments (my terminology, not his) so that the governments closest to the people can do their jobs.
4. Quality of life. One purpose of restoring the promise of Home Rule would be empowering local governments to fight sprawl. This is a natural outgrowth of the uncontrolled growth he’s seen in the Lowcountry, and an area where he and the governor have a lot more in common with Theodore Roosevelt than too many modern Republicans.
5. “The Ports.” One of the subjects of some of Tom’s most recent e-mails has been his fierce insistence that I am wrong when I say the governor hasn’t accomplished much. His evidence is the deal that he, Tom Davis, has helped engineer between our governor and Georgia’s over a new Jasper County port. He acknowledges this has been his “silo” at the governor’s office and perhaps looms larger in his mind than other people’s. But he maintains, with some justice, that there are few things more important to South Carolina’s economy than the health of its ports.

    Tom argued a bit with us about vouchers. He says that movement has led to such promising developments as Mr. Rex’s open enrollment initiative. I say it’s brought any efforts to improve public schools to a grinding halt, consuming all the political oxygen that could be going to fight for such things as merit pay for teachers and district consolidation — things the governor has said he favors, but has done little to promote.
    Tom said that if elected, he would actively push those things. That would be good. It would be even better if Mark Sanford would.

The hottest City Council race money can buy

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MY QUOTE of the week — I don’t usually name a quote of the week, but I’ll make an exception — is from Charles T. “Bud” Ferillo:
    “We will not be outspent.”
    Bud was speaking in his capacity as campaign consultant to Belinda Gergel, who is seeking the 3rd District Columbia City Council seat being vacated by Anne Sinclair. This will, by all accounts, be the most expensive City Council district race ever in Columbia, with most of it spent by Ms. Gergel and rival Brian Boyer. A third candidate, Reed Swearingen, is running a much lower-key campaign.
    Mr. Boyer started running a TV ad Wednesday depicting photos of him as a Dreher High School athlete and Army officer serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In all, he plans to spend $50,000 on television between now and the April 1 election, out of a total campaign budget of $130,000 to $140,000.
    Belinda Gergel has raised $164,000, and had not intended to use any of it for TV, but that changed this past week — her own campaign commercial started airing early Friday morning. (You can see both ads, plus video from our endorsement interviews with the candidates, on my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.)
    Where does all the money come from? Mr. Boyer’s is replete with the names of local builders and Realtors, including that of Don Tomlin — the candidate’s brother-in-law and president of the homebuilding company of which Mr. Boyer is a vice president. Other names include Kirkman Finlay III and Gayle Averyt, who have been allied with Mr. Tomlin.
    Ms. Gergel’s rather longer list includes a lot of names long associated with local political activism, such as Joel Lourie, Ed Sellers, Bill Boyd, J. Lewis Cromer, Zoe Nettles, Barbara Moxon … and Bud Ferillo.
    Those lists play into the conventional wisdom that, despite City Council being nonpartisan, the two most visible candidates represent distinct, rival factions:
    Mr. Boyer, a homebuilder, is seen as the “developer” candidate, representing the political faction led by Mr. Tomlin, who has also backed council members Tameika Devine, Kirkman Finlay III and Daniel Rickenmann. Ms. Gergel, as the past president of Historic Columbia Foundation, is perceived as the “preservationist” candidate, representing Mayor Bob Coble and other Democrats. (Never mind that Mr. Tomlin et al. supported Mr. Coble’s re-election in 2006; “conventional wisdom” overlooks such things.)
    Ms. Gergel, the retired head of the history and political science departments at Columbia College, rejects that pigeonhole, stressing that “I believe in the nonpartisanship of this election.” And indeed, among her contributors are names such as Jack Van Loan, a Five Points business leader and confidante of John McCain.
    “As far as this ‘camps’ thing,” Ms. Gergel says, “I don’t know where this is coming from, and I have no idea why someone would focus on what camp Belinda would be in. I am a strong, independent woman; that is what Columbia College did for me as a student, and what we worked on as faculty to encourage in our students. I have no permanent enemies and no personal friends on councilæ….”
    And as the daughter of a developer herself, she was not brought up to be “anti-development.” She says she’s for smart development that enhances existing communities, and fully understands how vital such growth is to the local economy.
    Mr. Boyer laughs off talk of factions, and of the Tomlin connection says he can’t help who his sister happened to marry. “I’m about as independent as they come.” As for the folks who are supposedly behind him, “none of them were there in the mountains of Afghanistan” or the “deserts of Iraq,” where he earned the Bronze Star before returning home to become a homebuilder.
    “I sort of feel that I’ve proved myself, and proved my decision-making ability, long before I knew those guys.”
    And he takes great pride in the kind of development he has been able to do, including homes priced for low-income buyers in the Arsenal Hill area.
    In our endorsement interviews, all of the candidates stressed public safety issues — Mr. Boyer suggesting his military experience qualifies him in that area, Ms. Gergel speaking of her own experiences dealing with crime in her University Hill neighborhood, and Mr. Swearingen promising to spend more on police whatever the political cost.
    All three decried the lack of accountability recently with regard to city finances. Messrs. Boyer and Swearingen both favor switching to a “strong-mayor” form of government to make city administration more answerable to the voters. Ms. Gergel, a veteran of the commission that considered changing city government, said she went in as a strong-mayor advocate, but realized it’s not going to happen politically, so the thing to do is “fix the system that we have now.”
    This isn’t the only City Council race on the ballot — three challengers are running to unseat at-large member Daniel Rickenmann. We’ll get to that one another day.

S.C. budget earmarks

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Here’s how to find the earmark list Cindi wrote about in her column this morning:

    Here’s the link: http://www.scstatehouse.net/sess117_2007-2008/appropriations2008/gab4800.htm.
    It’s the second item listed under "H. 4800, GENERAL APPROPRIATIONS BILL": "Earmarked Projects Pursuant to House Rule 5.3(F) (Excel format)."

    Cindi being the obsessively thorough type, she also suggests that I give "step-by-step directions for finding it," in case the link fails. (So that’s why I’m doing this; it’s not that I think you’re stupid or something:

    To FIND the list, go to www.scstatehouse.net, select "Current Legislation" from the options listed across the top of the page, then select "The Budget" on the right side of the page, then select "Fiscal Year 2008-2009 – General Appropriations Bill H. 4800 of 2008" to get to the link above.

Governing as a hobby

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
SOME OF Gov. Mark Sanford’s more insistent critics have been pretty worked up lately. Take this communique Thursday from Carol Fowler, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party:

    “There should be an investigation into Mark Sanford’s shady deal…. This type of cash-for-favors politics is better suited for mafia movies and crime dramas than real life.”

    Sen. Jake Knotts, nominally a Republican, recently said this to his colleagues about some of Mr. Sanford’s recent actions: “I want to ask you for the sake of the people of South Carolina to go in and protect our government from these type of atrocities.”
    What “atrocities”? For one thing, the governor kicked Carroll “Tumpy” Campbell III off the State Ports Authority board, an action that at least two people who take politics very personally — Sen. Knotts and Mr. Campbell himself — say was a case of the governor inappropriately injecting personal influence.
    As Mr. Campbell complained on our op-ed page Friday, the action filled him with “sadness and a profound sense of disappointment” since he “worked very hard to help elect Mark Sanford.” Mr. Campbell has also said the governor called his Mom in the course of trying to get him to resign.
    The irony is that I remember his Dad being a big believer in the governor having control of executive state agencies, with power to appoint and remove agency heads and board members at will.
    But that’s not all that’s eating at Mr. Sanford’s critics. They have also criticized the governor for making a phone call to Circuit Judge James Lockemy about an annexation case.
    And the Democratic Party chair is in high dudgeon over the governor’s interference in the Ports Authority’s $26 million sale of its Port Royal property. The governor took it upon himself to talk with some friends in the real estate biz, then called the authority’s chairman and an attorney representing the agency in the deal, and shared some negative things he’d heard about the eventual buyer.
    During an earlier, unsuccessful effort to sell the port, Mr. Sanford had had a chat with bidder Jim Chaffin, and decided he liked some of the developer’s ideas. But that sale didn’t happen.
    Blogger Adam Fogle of “The Palmetto Scoop” has reported with fanfare that Mr. Chaffin and his wife contributed a total of about $4,000 to Mr. Sanford in the year before his 2006 re-election.
    But I don’t see a “crime drama” here. I do see a pattern, but of a different sort. It’s the phone calls — to Judge Lockemy, to his real estate friends, to the Ports Authority officials, to Tumpy’s Mom — that ring a bell.
    Back in the early days of his first term, I’d get phone calls from the governor that were unlike any I’d ever had from a politician. He would ask, in that casual way of his, how things were going. I’d say “fine,” and he’d say he was sort of thinking about some issue, and here’s what he was thinking about it, and he kind of wondered what I thought about it. Setting aside my “why’s he asking me that?” reaction, I would answer him. I’m not shy about sharing what I think with anyone who asks, pretty much any time.
    But under these circumstances I spoke very carefully, trying not to say anything that we didn’t say in the paper about the issue. It was not my job to be some kind of Kitchen Cabinet confidential adviser. The governor, who apparently saw nothing odd about him interviewing me, would eventually say “Sorry to bother you,” or “To be continued…,” and hang up, leaving me to wonder what had just transpired, and why.
    I take that experience, and these recent calls I’ve heard about, and a few other things, and I form a certain impression:
    Mark Sanford, as a fervent libertarian, doesn’t see the job of governing the way any other governor I’ve ever known sees it. He doesn’t come into work every day eager to run the government. The main thing he wants the government to do, generally speaking, is less of whatever it is that it does.
    But he takes a sort of dabbler’s interest in bits and pieces of the government’s business, here and there — like a browser in an antique shop idly picking up an item, turning it this way and that, setting it down and moving on to the next thing that catches his eye. Like a guy who sees governing as a hobby, at most.
    Most governors, for that matter most people with experience running any large organization, would — if they wanted to poke around into the port deal, or find out what was happening with a lawsuit — ask a subordinate to look into it and get back to him. A staffer could obtain the information without raising eyebrows. But Mark Sanford, like a guy with nothing better to do, does it himself. And when he’s done, everybody involved goes, “What was that about?” And some assume there’s something nefarious in it.
    But the problem with Mark Sanford is much bigger and more obvious than any particular action that would enable them to cry, “Gotcha!”
    I’m not worried by the governor’s quirky phone calls, nor do I care about a lousy $4,000 in contributions in the past.
    You want to worry? Think about the fact that we have a governor who basically doesn’t believe in some of the most fundamental missions of government, such as running public schools. Sweat over the coming campaign to take out legislators of his own party who disagree with him.
    You want to follow the money? Watch for the thousands upon thousands expected to flow from out of state into those efforts to unseat lawmakers on his “hit list” — a list he says doesn’t exist, but pretty much the whole State House is convinced does.
    You want to get worked up? Work yourself up over that.

An old column on the same subject as Sunday’s

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As I was preparing the blog version of my Sunday column for this week, I kept thinking of a column I wrote a while back making a similar point. Working from home, my only way to search for it was on Lexis-Nexis (rather than our internal database). Oddly, I found where it had been reproduced in The Denver Post, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator — but not the original from The State.

Anyway, hoping not too much of it got edited out, I provide here the Denver Post version. I figure the more ways I explain my point the better. I put the sentence where I fully state the point in boldface:

The Denver Post
August 10, 1995 Thursday 2D EDITION
Jury’s wisdom beats ‘dittohead justice’
BYLINE: Brad Warthen
SECTION: DENVER & THE WEST; Pg. B-11
LENGTH: 861 words

Call it dittohead justice.
    For three days during the penalty phase of the Susan Smith trial, America Online asked its subscribers whether she should get the death penalty or life in prison for killing her two little boys.
    The result? A whopping 96 percent said she should die. Of course, only 77 people responded, a fact which wasn’t reported as widely as the percentage. When Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted a real, statistically valid poll on the same question, only 63 percent voted for the chair.
    But that’s still a sizable majority, and a far cry from the decision of the jury, which took 2 1/2 hours to decide unanimously on life.
    The difference is that no one participating in the America Online survey or the Princeton poll was required to know anything or read anything, or listen or talk about the trial before giving an opinion. They operated on the principle that opinions are like a certain part of the human anatomy: Everybody’s got one. Just point and click, and express yours to the world.
    The same principle drives some radio call-in shows: Hit a few buttons and sound off. Speak from the gut with no sober reflection to get in the way. Like those who call Rush and G. Gordon, the AOL respondents were self-selected — the sample consisted of people who had an impulse to sound off.
    Of course, they didn’t get to sound off in any detail; it was thumbs up or thumbs down. But AOL subscribers had the opportunity to elaborate in an electronic message folder in the ABC News section of the service. The folder quickly filled up; a second one had 288 messages at last count. Some of the messages on both sides were thoughtful. This seemed more typical: "guilty as sin should die in the lake strapped in the car and let it sink very slowly she is crazy like a fox its a good excuse but not one I’ll buy"
    Note how this individual’s need to spout allowed no time for punctuation. Dittoheads are impatient. Letting the killer sit in a cell and dwell on her crime is too subtle. Get it over with and make it irrevocable.
    Note that I use "dittoheads" in a generic sense (stay cool, Rush fans). I’m referring to anyone who is in a spout-off mode, who fails to take time to reflect on evidence that argues against initial impulses. In this sense, we’re all dittoheads sometimes. We get fed up and we want the offending thing or person removed from our lives: Fry her! Bomb them into the Stone Age! Crucify him!
    That was true of the people of Union, whose hatred of Susan Smith knew no bounds when they first learned she had killed the children they had frantically searched for. But then they learned more, and took time to think. Those who were chosen as jurors went further. They heard not about excuses, but about mitigating circumstances which caused a woman who was a wreck of a human being on many levels to be in an abnormal state of mind the night of the murders.
    Those circumstances in no way altered the horrible nature of what she did. The jurors empathized with David Smith in his grief as well as with Beverly Russell, the guilt-wracked stepfather who claimed a portion of the blame. They stared unblinkingly at the gruesome evidence of the little boys’ suffering in their last moments.
    They saw and heard it all, they took it in soberly, and they deliberated. Their verdict was sound on any level you consider it, legal or moral. In the end, no juror could accept defense lawyer David Bruck’s invitation to "cast the first stone."
    Stone-throwing is easy for poll respondents. But I believe there’s no fundamental difference between them and the Smith jurors. However vengeful our initial impulses, when confronted with all of the evidence, and required to sit down and soberly deliberate, most of us would do what the jury did.
    The bottom line is, calm deliberation based on full access to the facts beats gut reaction almost every time.
    There’s a lot of talk these days about how technology is making our form of government obsolete. Representative democracy was fine for the 18th century, but not for the age of the information superhighway. We’ll sit in front of our interactive home entertainment systems and pick our movies, plane tickets and groceries — why not our laws?
    Neopopulists say we no longer need city councils, legislatures or Congress to make critical decisions such as whether to raise or lower taxes, or what to do about Bosnia. We can be our own representatives.
    But with jobs, families and other activities constantly making it harder to find time to sleep, only people who have been duly delegated by the rest of us have the luxury to study issues and deliberate over them to the extent that they can make decisions of the quality shown by the Smith jury.
    When we make our judgments from our own living rooms (or editorial offices), and express them at a distance, we do so in a vacuum. Inconvenient facts can be ignored; competing interests need not be balanced.
    That’s why we need deliberative bodies, to give us something better than dittohead justice. Or dittohead democracy.
    Brad Warthen is an editorial page associate editor at The State, P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202

Tax cigarettes more, but not because a poll said so

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
WHAT DO YOU think of the results of the latest Winthrop/ETV poll of South Carolinians, released late last week?
    Here’s what I think: Thank goodness the founders of this country bequeathed us a republic rather than a system of direct democracy, and those who devised our state system sorta, kinda went along with that.
    You say that’s not what you thought? Well, let’s look back at a couple of the poll’s findings:

    I look at that first result and hail the wisdom of the electorate. Numbers like that tempt me to run around the State House and wave them at all those finger-in-the-wind lawmakers, to get them to get off their duffs and raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax.
    But then I look at the second result, and I want to warn lawmakers not to govern by poll. Sound hypocritical? Let me see if I can explain my way out of this.
    Poll after poll, year after year, South Carolinians say they want the cigarette tax raised. This is useful to know, because lawmakers keep trying to excuse their inaction on the tax by saying voters don’t like tax increases. These polls indicate that voters do want this tax increased.
    But that’s not why it should be increased. It should be increased because it’s been thoroughly demonstrated that every dime by which we increase the cost of buying a pack of cigarettes decreases the number of kids who get hooked on tobacco. If you want to use the proceeds to pay for Medicaid, great. But that’s not the point. The point is pricing cigarettes beyond the reach of adolescents.
    Any lawmaker who does not know that about the cigarette tax is one who has not been paying attention to the debate at the State House. And a lawmaker who doesn’t pay attention to the debate is one who isn’t doing his or her job.
    You don’t raise a tax because you get a thumbs-up from a poll. You raise it, or lower it, or do something else, or do nothing, because you’ve done the due diligence necessary to draw intelligent conclusions about the likely consequences of such action. And that is your job as an elected representative.
    In a small group — say, small enough to fit in one of those iconic New England town halls that express the ideal of direct democracy — it’s at least theoretically possible to examine an issue thoroughly. People on various sides of an issue can challenge each other with questions; those who know more about a specific issue can share their knowledge with those who know less; and all of that can take place before a vote on what to do.
    Polls don’t do that. Polls derive overly simplistic conclusions from the gut, off-the-top-of-the-head reactions of folks who didn’t get a chance to study before the test. They provide useful information, but are a lousy way to make decisions.
    This is true even when those crafting the poll try to maximize the respondent’s preparation with questions that sound halfway like lectures. That was the case with this poll. Consider the way the constitutional-officers question was asked: “In South Carolina, we have several statewide elected offices. These include the Secretary of State, Superintendent of Education, Comptroller General, Commissioner of Agriculture, and others. Some people believe that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government if some of these positions were appointed by the governor, while others feel that they should continue to be elected and remain directly accountable to the voters. Which of these comes closer to your opinion?” The respondent then gets a choice between “Appointed by governor” and “Continue to be elected.”
    I’m not a bit surprised that three-fourths of respondents answered “continued to be elected” after all that — especially after they had just been told that was the way to keep those officials “directly accountable to the voters.”
    But I firmly believe that if you gave me five minutes with each of those folks, the result would be different.
    First, I’d ask the respondent to name each of those elected officials. Most would know who the governor is, almost none would know all of them. Then I’d ask, how do you hold someone accountable if you don’t even know that person’s name?
    I’d talk about the two current officers who had to be appointed because the ones who were elected ran afoul of the law. I’d ask whether they thought the governor — the official they know — should be held accountable for running the government day to day. Then I’d ask how they think he’s going to do that when most of the government doesn’t answer to him.
    I believe most folks would change their minds. I believe that because I trust the voters.
You see, I don’t oppose government by plebiscite because I think the people are less intelligent than politicians. I know too many politicians to think that. I oppose it because it’s not the best process. If you take poll respondents and put them in a situation in which they could thoroughly study and debate an issue before voting on it, their decisions would be far better than those they’d make on the spur of the moment.
    Sometimes, this process even works with politicians. But not when they spend all their time looking at polls.

Here’s what Don Fowler was talking about

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Speaking of parties and partisanship, I ran across something interesting in our archives yesterday while searching for something completely unrelated. You may (but probably don’t) recall this from my account of my exchange with Don Fowler last month regarding his having urged Hillary Clinton not to speak to our editorial board:

But I’d never had such a frustrating conversation with someone as well
educated and experienced as Don, his party’s former national chairman.
He kept clinging to this notion that we would never endorse anyone with
the name Clinton — which made no sense to me — what’s in a name; are
we Montagues and Capulets here? I mean, if he knows that, he
knows something I don’t know. He said he based his absolute conclusion
on a visit he made to the editorial board on Bill Clinton’s behalf in
1996. Not remembering the specifics of that meeting, I didn’t get into
it, but I pointed out that of the five current members of the board,
I’m the only one who was on the board then. No matter. He suggested
that the fix was in, that we would endorse the Republican no matter
what, and that it must hold just as true today as then.

Now I can say I do recall the specifics of that meeting, because I ran across a forgotten column that was inspired by it. Here it is, in its entirety:

THE STATE
PARTIES: WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
Published on: 11/05/1996
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A10
By BRAD WARTHEN
Don Fowler came to visit last week, to try to persuade our editorial board to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. There never was much chance of that, but we were glad to talk with him anyway.
    Don Fowler is the Columbian who took the helm of the Democratic National Committee in one of that party’s darkest hours, when Newt Gingrich and his enfants terrible had supposedly captured the hearts and minds of all "normal people" for good.
    Today, less than two years later, there is talk of the Democrats taking back the House, on the coattails of the first Democratic president to win re-election since 1936. That gives Mr. Fowler reason to feel pretty good about being a Democrat these days — the gathering storm over Asian campaign contributors notwithstanding (much of which has broken in the days since our interview). So it probably seemed inappropriate when I asked him this question: "What earthly good are political parties to our country today?"
    He apologized that he’d have to preface his answer with a brief historical overview. And like the college lecturer he has been, he proceeded to do just that. I settled in to wait patiently. I really wanted an answer to this question.
    You see, I have this prejudice against political parties. I consider them to be among the most destructive factors in public life today. It’s not that the parties themselves cause the nastiness and intellectual dishonesty that stain our political discourse. They just provide a means for these phenomena to manifest themselves without individuals having to take responsibility for any of it. Far worse, partisan considerations militate against solutions to the real problems that face our society.
    A lot of smart people whom I otherwise admire, such as political writers David Broder and E.J. Dionne, have suggested in years past that the main thing wrong with Congress is that party discipline is a thing of the past — too many members out there pursuing their own agendas on their own terms instead of working their way up through the party system the way God and Sam Rayburn intended.
    But I think that we’ve all seen altogether too much partisan groupthink in recent years. For instance: The most responsible thing Bill Clinton tried to do in his first year in office was to present a deficit-reduction plan that was a model of nonpartisan sobriety, and which was destined to actually improve the situation. So, of course, not one Republican in either house of Congress voted for it. Not only did they vote against it, they’ve spent the past three years misrepresenting it to the people.
    But that pales in comparison to the disinformation campaign the GOP conducted over the Clinton health plan. The plan never had a chance, which in a way was too bad, seeing as how most Americans wanted something done about health-care costs and availability, but what was that next to the need for the GOP to achieve its strategic objectives?
    The voters punished the GOP for that by giving it control of the Congress. Now, the party had to govern. So Republicans set about trying to rein in Medicare costs.
    Turnabout’s fair play, thought the Democrats in unison, and they proceeded to torpedo the GOP’s effort to be sensible by scaring the nation’s old people half to death. It worked. Never mind the fact that Medicare is still a mess — the Democrats are resurgent, having prevented the GOP from doing anything to help the country.
    That’s what political parties do for us. What would I replace them with? Nothing. I’d send each successful candidate into office all by his lonesome. He couldn’t get into office or stay there by characterizing his opponent as a "tax- and-spend liberal" or someone who "wants to take away your Social Security." He’d have to come up with sensible ideas, and sell them on their merits. His colleagues, having no overriding partisan strategies, would be more likely to weigh the ideas on the same basis.
    Back to Dr. Fowler. The short version of his answer to my question goes like this:
    There has historically been a consensus in our country about certain basic principles, such as individual freedom, the sanctity of elections, the dominance of the private sector in our economy, the Bill of Rights and the viability of our basic structure of government.
    That leaves room for disagreement and political competition over such things as economic interests. So the Democrats have positioned themselves as representing the interests of the less well off, while Republicans have appealed to the more fortunate (and those who think they will be). Americans, Dr. Fowler went on, are not a very political people. We like to go about our individual pursuits, and only pay attention to electoral politics when the time rolls around to go vote.
    So it is, he said, that elephants and donkeys and such provide a service to our inattentive electorate: "The political party provides a political shorthand for enabling them to vote their economic interests without talking about it and arguing about it every day."
    Precisely. That’s exactly why I don’t like parties, only I would say the same thing in a slightly different way: Political parties enable us to vote without having to think.
    All content © THE STATE and may not be republished without permission.

So what does this tell us? It tells me that Dr. Fowler read my statement that "There never was much chance of" our endorsing Clinton-Gore in 1996, and extrapolated it to mean that this editorial board, even with turnover that left me as the only surviving member of the 1996 board, would never endorse anyone named "Clinton."

This seems like a stretch to me for several reasons. First, this wasn’t even a column about not endorsing Clinton. Our endorsement of Bob Dole had run two days earlier. Here’s a copy of it. That editorial was written not by me, but by my predecessor, who retired in 1997. A little historical footnote here: I would have written the editorial except that by that point in the campaign, I could no longer do so in good conscience. Dole had run such a disastrous campaign that I could not be the one to tell voters (even anonymously) that he was better able to run the White House. So my editor, who still preferred Dole, wrote it instead. Dr. Fowler had no way of knowing any of that. But the context of the statement was clear: We had just endorsed Dole, and all that we had written about the race up to that point led naturally to such a conclusion — including editorials I had written myself, earlier in the campaign. I still thought Dole was a better man than Bill Clinton; I just no longer thought he’d be a better president. It was also clear I wasn’t going to win any argument on that point — hence my wording in that column.

Second, anyone who read past that perfectly factual, supportable observation (that there was no way the board would endorse Clinton), would get to the other points I made, which took either a balanced, or even positive, view of Mr. Clinton. For instance, just to repeat myself:

    … The most responsible thing Bill Clinton tried to do in his first year
in office was to present a deficit-reduction plan that was a model of
nonpartisan sobriety, and which was destined to actually improve the
situation. So, of course, not one Republican in either house of
Congress voted for it. Not only did they vote against it, they’ve spent
the past three years misrepresenting it to the people.
    But that pales in comparison to the disinformation campaign the GOP
conducted over the Clinton health plan. The plan never had a chance,
which in a way was too bad, seeing as how most Americans wanted
something done about health-care costs and availability, but what was
that next to the need for the GOP to achieve its strategic objectives?…

Again, remember: I am the only editorial board member left from those days. And could a reasonable person conclude that the guy who wrote that passage would never, ever endorse Bill Clinton — much less "a Clinton?" I would say not. I would say that this was a guy I had a chance of winning over. But that’s just me.

Anyway, all that aside, the point of the column was, as the headline suggests, to decry the disastrous effect that the political parties have on our politics. This has been a recurring theme in my work ever since, and I have never wavered from it. If you’ve read the paper on anything like a regular basis, there’s really no excuse for misunderstanding me on this point.

The villain of the piece was not Bill Clinton, or even Newt Gingrich, but the Democratic and Republican parties.

Sanford fails to derail progress — this time

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LATE WEDNESDAY, I thought I had come up with an excuse to say something encouraging about Gov. Mark Sanford.
    Such opportunities come so seldom that I didn’t want this idea to get away from me. I sent a note to my colleagues to enlist their help in remembering: “Should we do some kind of attaboy on the governor using his bully pulpit for this good cause (as opposed to some of the others he is wont to push)?” I was referring to his efforts to jawbone the Legislature into meaningful reform of our DUI law.
    Moments later, I read the governor’s guest column on our op-ed page about a flat tax, which was his latest attempt to slip through an income tax cut, which at times seems to be the only thing he cares about doing as governor. This chased thoughts of praise from my mind.
    For the gazillionth time, he cited Tom Friedman in a way that would likely mortify the columnist and author. His “argument,” if you want to call it that: Since The World Is Flat, folks on the other side of the world are going to get ahead of us if we take a couple of hours to pull together our receipts and file a tax return. Really. “Rooting around shoeboxes of receipts” once a year was going to do us in. (And never mind the fact that most paperwork is done on the federal return, with the state return piggybacking on that.)
    Then, he argued that his plan for cutting the income tax (which was his point, not avoiding the onerous filing) was necessary to offset a proposed cigarette tax increase. The alternative would be “to grow government,” which is how he describes using revenue to get a three-to-one federal match to provide health care for some of our uninsured citizens.
    Here in the real world, folks want to raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to price the coffin nails beyond the means of teenagers. Everybody who has in any way participated in conversations at the State House about the issue over the last several years knows this. Yet the governor of our state, who seems only to have conversations with himself, can ask this about raising that tax: “(W)hat for, more government or a lower-tax option?” In his narrowly limited version of reality, those are the only considerations.
    But enough about that essay from an alternative dimension. What I read on the front page the next morning drove it from my mind: “Sanford: ‘Endowed chairs’ a failure.” It was about his latest attack on one of the few really smart, strategic moves this state has made in the past decade.
    It’s the one good thing to come out of Gov. Jim Hodges’ execrable state lottery. (I used to struggle to come up with good things to say about him, too, but this was one such thing.) The scholarships? We were doing that without the lottery, and would have expanded them without the lottery except Gov. Hodges vetoed that bill (because he wanted a lottery).
    But a small chunk of the new “chump tax” was set aside to provide seed money to attract some of the best and brightest minds to South Carolina, and put them to work building our economy. Gov. Sanford has never liked this idea, because he doesn’t like the state to invest in the future in any appreciable way apart from land conservation (which is a fine idea, but hardly a shot in the arm to the economy). He believes we don’t need to invest more in education, or research, or even our Department of Commerce, which he takes such pride in having trimmed. His entire “economic development” plan is to cut the income tax. This attracts folks who have already made their pile and are looking for a tax haven in which to hide it, and makes him a hero to the only political entity in the nation that sees him as a hot property: the Club for Growth, whose president showed just how out of touch that group is with even the Republican portion of the electorate by suggesting John McCain pick Mr. Sanford as his running mate.
    The thing that made this outburst from the governor particularly galling is that on Wednesday, I had met Jay Moskowitz, the new head of Health Sciences South Carolina — a consortium of universities and hospitals teaming together to make our state healthier, both physically and economically.
    Dr. Moskowitz is the former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, and most recently held a stack of impressive titles at Penn State, including “chief scientific officer.” He made it clear that he would not be here if not for the endowed chairs program. Nor would others. He spoke of the top people he’s recruited in his few months here, who have in turn recruited others, an example of the “cascade of people that are going to be recruited with each of these chairs.”
    These folks aren’t just coming to buy a few T-shirts at the beach and leave. They’re here to make their home, and to build their new home into the kind of place that will attract other creative minds. The endowed chairs program is the principal factor that convinces them to pull up stakes and make the effort. “I had a wonderful job in Pennsylvania,” said Dr. Moskowitz, and he wouldn’t have left it without believing that South Carolina was committed to moving forward on a broad research front.
    He doesn’t say it this way, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t have come if he had thought Mark Sanford’s “leave it alone” approach was typical of our state’s leadership.
    Fortunately, it is not. The S.C. House, led by Speaker Bobby Harrell, rose up in response to the governor’s naysaying and voted unanimously to extend the endowed chairs program.
    This is a moment of high irony for me. For 17 years I’ve pushed to give more power to South Carolina’s governor because our state so badly needed visionary leadership, and I thought there was little reason to expect it would come from our Legislature.
    But on Thursday, it did. And if the Senate has the wisdom to follow suit, your children and my grandchildren will have reason to be grateful.

The real split in American politics

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LATE ON SUPER Tuesday, I was typing on my blog in one room while Hillary Clinton was addressing her supporters on the TV in another.
    I couldn’t hear every word, but the ones that did cut through were telling:

    Now, we know the Republicans won’t give up the White House without a fight. Well, let me be clear — I won’t let anyone swift boat this country’s future.

    “Republicans.” “Fight.” “Swift boat.” Terms calculated to stir the blood of the Angry Faithful. Then, later: “Together, we’re going to take back America.”
    There was kinder, gentler stuff (if I’m allowed to borrow language from that other side) in the speech, about health care for all and supporting our veterans and helping the powerless. But Barack Obama talks about that stuff, too. Since these primaries are about choosing one or the other, one listens for the differences.
    Between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama, the difference lies in those fighting words. It’s a difference set out with great clarity in a recent letter to the editor in this newspaper:

    …(W)hile Sen. Barack Obama is an incredible orator and inspires hope for a post-partisan future, the reality of American politics is partisan. Astute voters realize this and want the candidate who is best suited to fight the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton and her team have gone toe-to-toe with the Republicans and beaten them more often than not.

    The reality of American politics is partisan. And Barack Obama is running on a platform of changing that reality. So, in his own way, is John McCain.
    The Democrats to whom Sen. Clinton appeals don’t despise Sen. Obama (they save that for Republicans), but they don’t see him as having his blood sufficiently up for doing battle with the “enemy.” And they’re right.
    Consider what Sen. Obama said in South Carolina on the night of his primary victory:

    We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents… it’s the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea — even if it’s one you never agreed with. That’s the kind of politics that is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.

    In the Republican camp, Sen. McCain has done more than just talk about moving beyond mindless partisanship; he’s risked his political future repeatedly to work with Democrats to achieve goals that put country before party. Last week, he asked the Angry Faithful in his party to “calm down,” and defended his habit of working across the aisle. Self-appointed spokesman for the Angry Faithful Rush Limbaugh responded:

    When did the measure of conservatism… become reaching out to Democrats?… If this were a war, what we’re saying is, “Enemy, come on in, and come be who you are when you get here.”… We view those people as threats to the American way of life, as we’ve always known it…. We view them as people who need to be defeated, not worked with.

    The truly great irony here is that the Angries on the left and the right do work together. In their pas de deux of mutual loathing, they cling to each other so tightly that there’s no room for anyone who’d like to separate them and create a space for rational discourse, or — the gods of left and right forbid — agreement on issues.
    Here’s an example of how the left’s Angries work with their counterparts on the right: The left emotionally demands stem cell research, as Sen. Clinton did in her speech Tuesday. The right cries, No, Never! Ignored are such facts as a) stem cell research is going on, just without federal funding in some areas; b) recent breakthroughs could make embryonic stem cells, the kind being fought over, irrelevant; and c) the man Sen. Clinton seeks to face in the fall, John McCain, favors broadened stem cell research.
    Another example: Last week, the leftists of the Berkeley, Calif., city council dissed the U.S. Marines. Eager warriors on the right (such as our own Rep. Joe Wilson and Sen. Jim DeMint) practically fell over themselves rushing to denounce the Berkeley council. The Marines are a great bogeyman for the loonies in Berkeley; Berkeley is a rare, juicy steak to the right. Call me paranoid, but sometimes I suspect the two sides of working out these stunts between them ahead of time. Everybody comes out on top, except the Marines — and somehow I think the guys who took Iwo Jima will overcome this as well.
    There is indeed a stark divide in this country, but it’s not between the Angry Left and the Angry Right. They just prop each other up. Collectively, they are both the Other Side to me, striving to distract us from realizing the central truth that we’re all in this together.
    On the one hand are the Clinton Democrats and the Republicans who sincerely would rather see Sen. Clinton elected than Sen. McCain. They depend upon each other. They deserve each other.
    The rest of us believe we deserve, for once, a presidential election between candidates who care more about solutions than whether left or right “wins.”
    This is not about affirming some “mushy middle.” You can hardly find two positions farther apart that the McCain and Obama views on Iraq. They have very different ideas on how to fight America’s enemies abroad. But at least neither of them sees the main “enemy” as being their fellow Americans who happen to disagree.

Give me that old-time conservatism

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    My regular readers will recognize this column as having been adapted from a post from late last week. Sorry to be repetitive, but increasingly (and conveniently) I find blog posts to be adaptable into columns. I’ve developed it a bit — cutting some here, adding some there (particularly, a new ending, and therefor a new point). But the inspiration was the same.

    Aside from making my seven-day week a little more manageable, adapting a column such as this one at least exposes it to a slightly more friendly audience. The Blogosphere is more densely populated with the kinds of people who would take exception to the ideas expressed herein. I find that the newspaper’s readership contains more folks who harbor my notion of the best sort of conservatism. Every once in a while, even I would like to get a little encouragement, you know. Speaking of which, thank you, Chief Warrant Officer Libbon. It was good to get your message before the mob started screaming.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE IDEOLOGUES in the Republican Party — you know, the ones who don’t care who can actually become president, as long as their candidate thinks exactly the way they do about everything — don’t know whether to spit or go blind with John McCain as their presumptive nominee.
    And I gotta tell ya, I’m loving it. My happiness will be complete once the “anger” faction of the Democratic Party is similarly discombobulated by having Barack Obama as its nominee. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves on that.
    My other favorite candidate, John McCain (The State has endorsed both him and Sen. Obama), may not quite have the Republican nomination sewn up, but he’s close enough to it to give the more objectionable elements within his party considerable indigestion. True, Mitt Romney is doing everything he possibly can to stop the McCain bandwagon, spending $1 million on ads in California alone.
    But while this moment of promise lasts, let’s savor it.
    A colleague who listens to such things says right-wing talk radio is abuzz with apocalyptic rantings about the End Times for the GOP, which sounds lovely to me, UnParty adherent that I am. But I content myself with reading about it in the papers. Let’s take just one day (Thursday) of one newspaper (The Wall Street Journal) widely associated with Conservative Orthodoxy. Under the headline, “McCain Takes the GOP Lead,” we read:

    Republicans have a clear front-runner in Arizona Sen. John McCain. By nearly all accounts, he is the candidate many Democrats least want to face, the one who would best remake his party’s battered image and draw independent voters needed to win in November.
    But Sen. McCain still confronts a problem both in the remainder of the nomination race, and, if he wins, in the fall: He is simply loathed by many fellow Republicans, often for the very bipartisanship and maverick streak that attracts independents.

    Under “Giuliani Fund-Raisers Sit on Fence for Now,” we learn that while Rudy Giuliani may have pulled out…

    Mr. Giuliani’s well-heeled supporters might not throw their money behind the cash-strapped Arizona senator so fast. “We haven’t decided what we’re going to do,” says T. Boone Pickens, the Dallas tycoon who has raised more than $1 million for Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, since late 2006…

    Then, on the opinion pages, that font of oracular conservative wisdom, the very lead editorial of the hallowed WSJ itself, under the real-life headline “McCain’s Apostasies,” pronounces the following:

    Mr. McCain’s great political strength has also long been his main weakness, which is that his political convictions are more personal than ideological. He believes in duty, honor and country more than he does in any specific ideas.
    These personal qualities are genuine political assets…. But he is now on the cusp of leading a coalition that also believes in certain principles, and its “footsoldiers” (to borrow a favorite McCain word) need to be convinced that the Senator is enough on their side to warrant enthusiastic support…

    By “ideas,” the Journal does not mean “removing the inordinate influence of money from politics,” or “restraining wasteful spending” or “believing the surge would work” or “life begins at conception” or “maybe we should secure our borders without totally alienating the Hispanic vote.” No, it means such lofty concepts as: “What do you always, always do with a tax? Cut it!”
    Duty, honor and country indeed! What’s conservative about that stuff?
    Speaking of the Gimme-Gimme wing of the party, another newspaper (conservatives should cover their sensitive ears before I name it), The New York Times, reported on Friday that “leaders of the right” have practically been doing backflips trying to adjust to the new reality. My favorite in this regard is Grover “Shrink Government Until You Can Drown it in a Bathtub” Norquist, who goes further than anyone to spin this into a personal victory:
    “He has moved in the right direction strongly and forcefully on taxes,” Mr. Norquist says, adding that he’s been talking to Sen. McCain’s “tax guys” for some time. So you see, not only does this make everything OK, but Grover gets to take credit! Because, as anyone who has ever had cause to regret signing his “No New Taxes” pledge can testify, it’s all about Grover.
    By now some of you think I have it in for all things “conservative.” I don’t. I just grew up with a different concept of it from that which has in recent years been appropriated by extremists. I grew up in a conservative family — a Navy family, as a matter of fact. To the extent that “conservative ideas” were instilled in me, they weren’t the kind that make a person fume over paying his taxes, or get apoplectic at the sound of spoken Spanish. They were instead 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.

To learn more about the UnParty, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Living down our history

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MY GRANDMOTHER used to tell a story about when she was a very little girl living in the Washington area.
    Her family was from South Carolina. Her father was an attorney working for the federal government. One of their neighbors was a U.S. senator from South Carolina. When her parents learned that she had visited the senator in his garden, sitting on his lap and begging for a peek under his eye patch, they were shocked and appalled.
    The senator was “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the state’s former governor, and a vehement advocate of lynching who had participated in the murders of black South Carolinians as a “Red Shirt” vigilante.
    Grandma’s people were of a very different political persuasion, as were of the founders of this newspaper, which was established for the express purpose of fighting the Tillman machine. That’s a second personal connection for me, and one of which I’m proud: We still fight the things that race-baiter stood for.
    Ben Tillman launched his rise to power with a fiery speech in Bennettsville, the town where I was born. But we’ve come a long way since then. Two very different politicians have spoken in Bennettsville in recent days.
    In November, Sen. Hillary Clinton spoke there, outlining her plan “to cut the dropout rate among minority students in half and help a new generation of Americans pursue their dreams.”
    John Edwards was there Wednesday. Tillman was a populist; John Edwards is a populist. But there the resemblance ends. Former Sen. Edwards’ advocacy for the poor helped endear him to black voters in South Carolina in 2004, propelling him to victory in that year’s primary here. His appearance in B’ville was in connection with his attempt to repeat that achievement.
    So my hometown and my home state have come a long way in the past century or so, at least with regard to the intersection of race and politics.
    Not far enough, of course. I don’t just say that because a statue honoring Tillman still stands on the State House grounds, a few yards from where the Confederate flag still flies.
    On the day that this newspaper endorsed Barack Obama, our publisher’s assistant passed on a phone message from a reader who was livid because we are “supporting a black man for president of the United States.” He continued: “I am ashamed that we’ve got a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, one of the best cities in America, and yet we’ve got a black operation supporting black candidates…. I am disappointed and upset that we’ve got a black newspaper right here in the city of Columbia.”
    How many white South Carolinians still think that way? Too many, if there’s only one of them. But such people stand out and are worth mentioning because we have come so far, and increasingly, people who think the way that caller does are the exception, not the rule.
    And truth be told, South Carolina is not the only part of these United States where you can still find folks whose minds are all twisted up over race.
    As I noted, Mr. Edwards did very well among black voters in 2004, but not this time. Several months ago, Sen. Clinton seemed to be the heir to that support. The wife of the “first black president” had lined up a lot of African-American community leaders, which was a big part of why she commanded an overwhelming lead in S.C. polls.
    But in the last few weeks, something happened. Sen. Obama won in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, and black South Carolinians began to believe he had a chance, and that a vote for Obama would not be “wasted.” This week, according to pollster John Zogby, he’s had the backing of between 56 and 65 percent of black voters, while Sen. Clinton can only claim at most 18 percent of that demographic.
    And as the days wear down to what is an almost-certain Obama victory in South Carolina, Sen. Clinton has gone on to spend most of her time campaigning elsewhere, leaving her husband behind to bloody Obama as much as he can.
    So it is that I would expect the Clinton campaign to say, after Saturday, that she didn’t really try to win here. But there’s another narrative that could emerge: Sure, he won South Carolina, but so did Jesse Jackson — just because of the huge black vote there. To win in November, Democrats need a candidate with wider appeal, right?
    Maybe that won’t happen. It would be outrageous if it did. But those with an outrageous way of looking at politics see it as a possibility. Dick Morris — the former Clinton ally (but now a relentless critic), the master of triangulation — wrote in The New York Post this week: “Obama’s South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.”
    As a South Carolinian who’s proud of how far my state has come, I want to say right now, well ahead of time: As Joe Biden got himself in trouble for saying, and as Iowa voters confirmed, Barack Obama is no Jesse Jackson. Nor is he Bill Clinton, or John Edwards, or anybody else. He’s just Barack Obama, and Barack Obama is the best-qualified Democrat seeking the presidency of the United States.
    And no one should dismiss South Carolinians for being wise enough to see that.

Obama inspires board, offers hope

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Obamaboard

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A remarkable thing happened this week to The State’s editorial board — again. For us, it was the equivalent of lightning striking the same place, twice in the same month.
    After difficult, agonizing discussions over presidential primary endorsements in both 2000 and 2004, we arrived at a quick consensus on endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for the S.C. Democratic Primary on Saturday.
    We met with Sen. Obama Monday morning, before he and the other candidates spoke at the State House. (Neither Hillary Clinton nor John Edwards ever met with us, despite long-standing invitations — repeated invitations, in Sen. Clinton’s case.)
    Our decision was made easier by the departure of Sen. Joe Biden. We might have been torn between his experience and foreign policy vision, and fresh hope for the future offered by Sen. Obama.
    As it was, Sen. Obama clearly stood out as the best remaining candidate — and he had always been the most exciting and inspiring in the field.
    It’s not just that he might be the first black president — Sen. Clinton would make history, too. It’s that he offers a fresh start for American politics. It is his ambition to be a president for all of us — black and white, male and female, Democrat and Republican. The nomination of Sen. Clinton would by contrast kick off another bitter round of the pointless partisanship that has plagued the nation under presidents named “Bush” and “Clinton.”
    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.
    First, he mentioned the support John Edwards had enjoyed among members of our board in 2004, although he did not get our endorsement then (in a grueling three-hour talkathon, I successfully pressed the board to choose Joe Lieberman instead). This time, he was “a substantially different guy” — an unappealing embodiment of class resentment.
    Also, his extreme position on Iraq — wanting to pull all troops out, even those who are training Iraqis — made him a nonstarter.
    About Hillary Clinton, Mike said the same thing he said about Mitt Romney 10 days earlier — “Boy, I wish she’d come in to see us, because I have so many questions.” Mike cited her obvious intelligence, and the fact that she “knows where the levers of power are” — especially within the Democratic Party. She’s worked the corridors of Washington since well before her time as first lady.
    But she could never have built the kind of coalitions that could break the partisan gridlock inside the Beltway — even if she wanted to, and we’ve seen little indication that she would want to.
    And her policy prowess is that of the insider. We saw her failed effort to reform our health care system as emblematic of her style — get a bunch of wonks in a room, close the door, and come up with something too complex and nuanced to sell.
    Barack Obama, by contrast, would be oriented toward — and more successful at — bringing the American public into the debate, and persuading us to agree to a solution. He has that leadership ability that she lacks.
    Sen. Obama has political gifts that are more reminiscent of former President Clinton. Of Sen. Clinton, Mike said, “She’s sort of caught between Obama and her husband, as two of the most evocative leaders we’ve had in a while.”
    While Sen. Obama is completely true to the highest traditions of the Democratic Party, he would have the potential to lead others as well. Sen. Clinton’s main interest in Republicans seems to be beating them, prevailing over them, having things go her way rather than theirs.
    “I would really like us to be talking about Joe Biden or Bill Richardson,” said Associate Editor Cindi Scoppe. That leaves her with what she sees as “an emotional decision,” which initially makes her uncomfortable. Cindi usually prefers the wonkiest option, but in the end she’s quite OK with “going for the exciting person who gives us hope.”
    “Hillary is very smart,” Associate Editor Warren Bolton agrees. But “I think she thinks she is the only one who has the answers.” Publisher Henry Haitz said the same thing, in almost the same words, a moment later.
    In the end, we came to a second quick consensus for much the same reason as the first time: We thought among the Republicans, John McCain had the best chance of uniting the country and leading in a positive direction. On the Democratic side, the one person who offers that same hope is Barack Obama.

(Both photos from the board’s meeting are by Chip Oglesby of thestate.com. To read The State‘s endorsement of Barack Obama, click here. For video about the endorsement, click here.)

Obamawarthen

Which do you want, JFK or LBJ?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BARACK OBAMA and Hillary Clinton decided last week to put their spat over MLK, JFK and LBJ behind them. That’s nice for them, but the rest of us shouldn’t drop the subject so quickly.
Intentionally or not, the statement that started all the trouble points to the main difference between the two front-runners.
    And that difference has nothing to do with race.
    Now you’re thinking, “Only a Clueless White Guy could say that had nothing to do with race,” and you’d have a point. When it comes to judging whether a statement or an issue is about race, there is a profound and tragic cognitive divide between black and white in this country.
But hear me out. It started when the senator from New York said the following, with reference to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:
    “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
    The white woman running against a black man for the Democratic Party nomination could only get herself into trouble mentioning Dr. King in anything other than laudatory terms, particularly as she headed for a state where half of the voters likely to decide her fate are black.
    You have to suppose she knew that. And yet, she dug her hole even deeper by saying:
    “Senator Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to criticize me. Basically compared himself to two of our greatest heroes. He basically said that President Kennedy and Dr. King had made great speeches and that speeches were important. Well, no one denies that. But if all there is (is) a speech, then it doesn’t change anything.”
    She wasn’t insulting black Americans — intentionally — any more than she was trying to dis Irish Catholics.
    To bring what I’m saying into focus, set aside Dr. King for the moment — we’ll honor him tomorrow. The very real contrast between the two Democratic front-runners shows in the other comparison she offered.
    She was saying that, given a choice between John F. Kennedy and his successor, she was more like the latter. This was stark honesty — who on Earth would cast herself that way who didn’t believe it was true? — and it was instructive.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson was the Master of the Senate when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. If he wanted the Senate to do something, it generally happened, however many heads had to be cracked.
    LBJ was not made for the television era that was dawning. With features like a hound dog (and one of the most enduring images of him remains the one in which he is holding an actual hound dog up by its ears), and a lugubrious Texas drawl, he preferred to git ’er done behind the scenes, and no one did it better.
    Sen. Johnson lost the nomination to that inexperienced young pup Jack Kennedy, but brought himself to accept the No. 2 spot. After an assassin put him into the Oval Office, he managed to win election overwhelmingly in 1964, when the Republicans gave him the gift of Barry Goldwater. But Vietnam brought him down hard. He gave up even trying to get his party’s nomination in 1968.
    But he was a masterful lawmaker. And he did indeed push the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law, knowing as he did so that he was sacrificing his party’s hold on the South.
    He brought into being a stunning array of social programs — Medicare, federal aid to education, urban renewal, and the War on Poverty.
    So, on the one hand, not a popular guy — wouldn’t want to be him. On the other hand, President Kennedy never approached his level of achievement during his tragically short tenure.
    You might say that if Sen. Obama is to be compared to President Kennedy — and he is, his call to public service enchanting young voters, and drawing the endorsement of JFK’s closest adviser, Ted Sorensen — Sen. Clinton flatters herself in a different way by invoking President Johnson.
    They are different kinds of smart, offering a choice between the kid you’d want on your debating team and the one you’d want helping you do your homework.
    Sen. Obama offers himself as a refreshing antidote to the vicious partisanship of the Bush and Clinton dynasties. That sounds wonderful. But Sen. Clinton has, somewhat less dramatically, formed practical coalitions with Republican colleagues to address issues of mutual concern — such as with Lindsey Graham on military health care.
    Sen. Clinton, whose effort to follow up the Great Society with a comprehensive health care solution fell flat in the last decade, has yet to live up to the Johnson standard of achievement. For that matter, Sen. Obama has yet to bring Camelot back into being.
    As The Washington Post’s David Broder pointed out, in their debate in Las Vegas last week, the pair offered very different concepts of the proper role of the president. Sen. Obama said it wasn’t about seeing that “the paperwork is being shuffled effectively,” but rather about setting goals, uniting people to pursue them, building public support — in other words, about inspiration.
    Sen. Clinton talked about managing the bureaucracy and demanding accountability.
    Sen. Obama offers a leader, while Sen. Clinton offers a manager. It would be nice to have both. But six days from now, South Carolinians will have to choose one or the other.

Just one more day

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AT TIMES this week it has seemed as though, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the media themselves were the message.
    For me, the apex of absurdity was achieved Monday morning, when I sat in a conference room here at the paper shooting video of a guy from French television who was shooting video of me talking about Saturday’s S.C. Republican presidential primary. You remember how, in old-fashioned barbershops, you could see yourself sitting in the chair in the mirror in front of you, reflecting the mirror behind you, and on and on? It was kind of like that.
    After the interview, the Frenchman followed me to the Columbia Rotary Club, where I had been asked to speak about the newspaper and its endorsement in said primary. In case you missed it, we rather emphatically endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in Sunday’s paper. See more about that at my blog (address below).
    As I was stepping down from the podium at Rotary, a Danish journalist gave me her card, saying she wanted to interview me later. She had followed Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson to the meeting. Poor Hal. I had been sending some of the national media who were calling me to him, as a good, thoughtful example of the “religious conservative” kind of voter they were so eager to talk to. Now here he was, dragging journalists right back at me. (Just keep looking into the mirrors. Whoa … is that what the back of my head looks like?)
    On Tuesday, Michele Norris of NPR’s “All Things Considered” called on her cell while traveling across South Carolina, and we spoke for 53 minutes. But that was just the preliminary; we’ll tape the actual interview this morning. I’m also supposed to be on local public radio with Andy Gobeil this morning — and Andy and I will be on ETV live for primary results Saturday night.
    Thursday, I spoke with Dennis Miller of SNL fame, who’s now a conservative talk show host. He wanted to know how come South Carolina was having its Republican primary Saturday, but the Democratic primary a week later. I couldn’t give him a good reason, because there isn’t one.
    All this attention can be fun, but some get tired of it. Bob McAlister, for one. Bob is a Republican media consultant who made his rep as chief of staff to the late Gov. Carroll Campbell. In 2000, he was for George W. Bush. This time, he’s for McCain. He’s feeling pretty confident that he’ll be on the winning side again.
     But he’s got a beef with all the media types. “The national press wants to know about segments” of the GOP electorate, he complained. As in, don’t you think McCain has the retired military vote sewn up, or will McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney split the evangelical vote?
    “They talk about evangelicals as though we were some sort of subset of the culture,” Bob (a Baptist) complains. “They try to put us in a little box, as though we were apart from the mainstream in the Republican Party.
    “But in South Carolina, we are the mainstream.”
    As The Wall Street Journal said Thursday, “McCain campaign aides are hoping Mr. McCain and his rivals — Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson — divide the evangelical vote, leaving the state’s sizable population of military and independent voters to Mr. McCain.”
    Mr. Huckabee’s main hope, as a Baptist preacher himself, is to attract that whole evangelical “subset” of the GOP here. But it seems pretty divided. Fred Thompson, surprisingly, has the endorsement of S.C. Right to Life. Bob’s for McCain. Hal Stevenson is for Huckabee, but he seemed worried Thursday that there aren’t quite enough like him to put the former Arkansas governor over the top. He said he’s found “a lot of support for McCain and Romney among social conservatives,” because they think they have broader appeal. He particularly notes the McCain advantage on national security.
    Sen. McCain is counting on people like Jack Van Loan, about whom I wrote in this space yesterday. Jack’s a retired Air Force pilot, now a Columbia community leader, who met Sen. McCain when they were both prisoners of the North Vietnamese.
    In the interests of full disclosure, and in order to keep with my theme of media-as-message, he’s also counting on people like my Dad — a retired Navy captain who lives in West Columbia. My father is like most career military officers — politics has been something other people did, while those in uniform did their duty.
    Not this time. Dad spent a couple of hours working the phones at McCain HQ in Columbia Thursday morning. He was given a list of names to call, which he dutifully did. Speaking of mirrors, he was amused to find his own name and number on his list. Orders are orders — he called the number, and talked to my Mom.
    I did go out and check the pulse of the real world once or twice this week. But I didn’t gain much new information.
    Take Tuesday night: I went to hear Fred Thompson speaking at the Sticky Fingers in Harbison. He did OK — the crowd was good-sized, and seemed to like him. If you were in the Fred Thompson bubble, you might think he had a chance to win.
    Then I went out toward Lexington, to Hudson’s Smokehouse, to hear Mike Huckabee. Wow. The place was packed, and the people were pumped. That, I thought, was what a contender’s rally looks like in the last week. The crowd was impressive, even though from where I sat it was hard to see past the — you guessed it — media types.
    I missed the McCain rally on Gervais Street Thursday, because it happened at the same time that I had promised to talk to Dennis Miller. Bob McAlister says it was awesome, and had all the marks of a campaign headed for victory. But he would say that, wouldn’t he, being a McCain man.
    Maybe I’ll call a reporter who was there and get an objective view. Just kidding — sort of.
    Just one more day, folks. Tomorrow, it’s what you say that counts. Then we can do it all over again with the Democrats.

What it was really like at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’

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Vanloanjack
        Jack Van Loan in 2006.

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON MAY 20, 1967, Air Force pilot Jack Van Loan was shot down over North Vietnam. His parachute carried him to Earth well enough, but he landed all wrong.
    “I hit the ground, and I slid, and I hit a tree,” he said. This provided an opportunity for his captors at the prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
    “My knee was kind of screwed up and they … any time they found you with some problems, then they would, they would bear down on the problems,” he said. “I mean, they worked on my knee pretty good … and, you know, just torturing me.”
    In October of Jack’s first year in Hanoi, a new prisoner came in, a naval aviator named John McCain. He was in really bad shape. He had ejected over Hanoi, and had landed in a lake right in the middle of the city. He suffered two broken arms and a broken leg ejecting. He nearly drowned in the lake before a mob pulled him out, and then set upon him. They spat on him, kicked him and stripped his clothes off. Then they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and bayoneted him in his left foot and his groin.
    That gave the enemy something to “bear down on.” Lt. Cmdr. McCain would be strung up tight by his unhealed arms, hog-tied and left that way for the night.
    “John was no different than anyone else, except that he was so badly hurt,” said Jack. “He was really badly, badly hurt.”
    Jack and I got to talking about all this when he called me Wednesday morning, outraged over a story that had appeared in that morning’s paper, headlined “McCain’s war record attacked.” A flier put out by an anti-McCain group was claiming the candidate had given up military information in return for medical treatment as a POW in Vietnam.
    This was the kind of thing the McCain campaign had been watching out for. The Arizona senator came into South Carolina off a New Hampshire win back in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush after voters received anonymous phone calls telling particularly nasty lies about his private life. So the campaign has been on hair-trigger alert in these last days before the 2008 primary on Saturday.
    Jack, a retired colonel whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing for more than a decade, believes his old comrade would make the best president “because of all the stressful situations that he’s been under, and the way he’s responded.” But he had called me about something more important than that. It was a matter of honor.
    Jack was incredulous: “To say that John would ask for medical treatment in return for military information is just preposterous. He turned down an opportunity to go home early, and that was right in front of all of us.”
    “I mean, he was yelling it. I couldn’t repeat the language he used, and I wouldn’t repeat the language he used, but boy, it was really something. I turned to my cellmate … who heard it all also loud and clear; I said, ‘My God, they’re gonna kill him for that.’”
    The North Vietnamese by this time had stopped the torture — even taken McCain to the hospital, which almost certainly saved his life — and now they wanted just one thing: They wanted him to agree to go home, ahead of other prisoners. They saw in him an opportunity for a propaganda coup, because of something they’d figured out about him.
    “They found out rather quick that John’s father was (Admiral) John Sidney McCain II,” who was soon to be named commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Jack said. “And they came in and said, ‘Your father big man, and blah-blah-blah,’ and John gave ’em name, rank and serial number and date of birth.”
    But McCain refused to accept early release, and Jack says he never acknowledged that his Dad was CINCPAC.
    Jack tries hard to help people who weren’t there understand what it was like. He gave a speech right after he finally was freed and went home. His father, a community college president in Oregon and “a consummate public speaker,” told him “That was the best talk I’ve ever heard you give.”
    But, his father added: “‘They didn’t believe you.’
    “It just stopped me cold. ‘What do you mean, they didn’t believe me?’ He said, ‘They didn’t understand what you were talking about; you’ve got to learn to relate to them.’”
    “And I’ve worked hard on that,” he told me. “But it’s hard as hell…. You might be talking to an audience of two or three hundred people; there might be one or two guys that spent a night in a drunk tank. Trying to tell ‘em what solitary confinement is all about, most people … they don’t even relate to it.”
    Jack went home in the second large group of POWs to be freed in connection with the Paris Peace Talks, on March 4, 1973. “I was in for 70 months. Seven-zero — seventy months.” Doctors told him that if he lived long enough, he’d have trouble with that knee. He eventually got orthoscopic surgery right here in Columbia, where he is an active community leader — the current president of the Columbia Rotary.
    John McCain, who to this day is unable to raise his hands above his head — an aide has to comb his hair for him before campaign appearances — was released in the third group. He could have gone home long, long before that, but he wasn’t going to let his country or his comrades down.
    The reason Jack called me Wednesday was to make sure I knew that.

Each Republican faces a different challenge in S.C.

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
TO ALL THE candidates seeking the presidency of the United States of America: Welcome to South Carolina. Iowa is behind you; so is New Hampshire, and we understand that we are to have your undivided attention for the next couple of weeks, which is gratifying.
    So let’s take advantage of the opportunity. The South Carolina primaries have little purpose unless we learn more about you than we have thus far, so we have a few matters we’d like you to address while you’re here.
    Let’s do Republicans first, since y’all face S.C. voters first (on the 19th) and come back to the Democrats (after the cliffhanger night Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just went through, they could probably do with a rest today).
    We’d like some specifics beyond the vehement claims that pretty much each and every one of you is “the real conservative” in the race.
    We’ll start with John McCain, the big winner in New Hampshire Tuesday.
You’re a war hero, and you’ve got the most experience in national defense and foreign affairs. You take a back seat to no one in fighting government waste. You were for a “surge” in Iraq long before the White House even considered the idea, and you weren’t afraid to say so. It’s no surprise that you lead among retired military officers, and others who have been there and done that.
    But folks who are not retired would like some reassurance that the oldest man in the race, with a spotty medical history, is up to the world’s most demanding job.
    Most of all, though, South Carolinians need to better understand your position on immigration. You’re the one who decided to try to lead on this radioactive issue in the middle of a campaign, and plenty of folks around here don’t like the direction you chose. Start explaining.
    Next, Mike Huckabee. You have qualities that Sen. McCain lacks: You’re (relatively) young, fresh, new and exciting. As a Baptist preacher, you’re definitely in sync with S.C. Republicans on cultural issues. More than that, you are on the cutting edge of a new kind of Republicanism, one that is more attuned to the concerns of ordinary working people, from health care to education.
    But let’s look at some headlines from this week: The U.S. Navy almost had to blow some Iranian gunboats out of the water. Hundreds are dead in Kenya, one of the few African countries we’d thought immune to such political violence. Pakistan, nuclear power and current address of Osama bin Laden, continues to teeter on the edge of chaos after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. I could go on.
    Every day, something that threatens the security of this country happens in yet another hot spot, calling for a depth of knowledge and experience for which on-the-job training is no substitute. Those blank looks you’ve given when asked about current events are disturbing. Reassure us. We know you don’t get daily intelligence briefings yet, but you could at least read the paper.
    Mitt Romney, you come across as Central Casting’s idea of a Republican: Perfect coif, square jaw, a private-sector portfolio that confirms your can-do credentials. Moreover, as governor of Massachusetts you presided over health care reform that many other states are looking to as a model.
    But increasingly, 21st century Republicans are less impressed by a business suit, and I think you’ll find South Carolinians a lot like Iowans in that regard. You’ve got to have more to offer.
    Also, voters here would like to hear more positive reasons to vote for you, and less about what’s wrong with everybody else. In all the years since I’ve been getting e-mails, I have never seen anything like the blizzard of releases from your folks trashing this or that rival.
    After the nasty whispering campaign that sank Sen. McCain in 2000, South Carolinians have had a bellyful of the whole “going negative” thing. Just forget the other guys, and tell us what’s good about you.
    As for Rudy Giuliani, we know you’re a tough guy, and a tough guy can be a good thing to have in the White House. You inspired the nation through some of Gotham’s darkest days, and you took on all Five Families at once as a mob-busting federal prosecutor, which is why John Gotti and some others on the Commission wanted to have you whacked. You’re definitely a man of respect.
    But if you do bother to campaign down here, South Carolina Republicans might be forgiven for wondering whether you’re one of them. You were doing OK in polls a couple of months ago, but let’s face it — that was just the early national media buzz, and we’ve gotten past that.
    You need to do some fast talking — we hear New Yorkers are good at that — about some of those “cultural issues” that, to put it mildly, distinguish you from candidates who happen to be Baptist preachers.
    Finally, Fred Thompson — you certainly have no need for a translator. As your wife, Jeri, reminded me when she dropped by our office Tuesday, you speak fluent Southern.
    But there’s a reason y’all were campaigning down here rather than up in New Hampshire: After the biggest “will he or won’t he” buildup in modern political history, your campaign failed to catch fire nationally after it finally got rolling.
    That could be because, while you can play a “conservative” well on TV, you have yet to communicate exactly what you bring to the campaign that other candidates don’t bring more of. Are you better on national security than McCain, or more in tune on abortion than Huckabee? And if what the party was crying out for was a guy who was tough enough on immigration (as your supporters keep telling me), why didn’t it go for Tom Tancredo?
    Once again, welcome one and all to the Palmetto State. Whether you go on from here may depend in large part on how you answer the above questions.
For my blog, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.