Category Archives: Columns

Obama’s right about Pakistan. But who would follow?

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BARACK OBAMA was right to threaten to invade Pakistan in order to hit al-Qaida, quite literally, where it lives. And as long as we’re on this tack, remind me again why it is that we’re not at war with Iran.
OK, OK, I know the reasons: Our military is overextended; the American people lack the appetite; the nutball factor is only an inch deep in Iran, and once you get past Ahmadinejad and the more radical mullahs the Iranian people aren’t so bad, but they’d get crazy quick if we attacked, and so forth.
I can also come up with reasons not to invade Pakistan, or even to talk about invading Pakistan. We’ve heard them often enough. Pakistan is (and say this in reverent tones) a sovereign country; Pervez Musharraf is our “friend”; we need him helping us in the War on Terror; he is already politically weak and this could do him in; he could be replaced by Islamists sufficiently radical that they would actively support Osama bin Laden and friends, rather than merely fail to look aggressively enough to find them; fighting our way into, and seeking a needle in, the towering, rocky haystacks of that region is easier said than done, and on and on.
But when you get down to it, it all boils down to the reason I mentioned in passing in the first instance — Americans lack the appetite. So with a long line of people vying to be our new commander in chief, it’s helpful when one of them breaks out of the mold of what we might want to hear, and spells out a real challenge before us.
Most of us believe that the baddest bad guys in this War on Terror have been hiding in, and more relevantly operating from, the remote reaches of western Pakistan ever since they slipped through our fingers in 2001.
The diplomatic and strategic delicacy that the Bush administration (contrary to its image) has demonstrated with regard to the generalissimo in Pakistan has been something to behold. Now we see this guy we have done so much, by our self-restraint, to build up on the verge of collapse. We could end up with the crazy clerics anyway, or at least a surrender to, or sharing of power with, Benazir Bhutto.
But even if all the conditions were right abroad — even if the mountains were leveled and a new regime in Islamabad sent our Army an engraved invitation along with Mapquest directions to bin Laden’s cave — we’d still have the problem of American political shyness.
Same deal with Iran. In the past week a senior U.S. general announced that elite Iranian troops are in Iraq training Shiite militias in how to better kill Americans — and Sunnis, of course.
So it is that the United States is asking the United Nations to declare the Revolutionary Guard Corps — less a military outfit than a sort of government-sanctioned Mafia family, with huge legit covers in pumping oil, operating ports and manufacturing pharmaceuticals — a terrorist organization.
What is the response of the Revolutionary Guards to all this? Well, they’re not exactly gluing halos to their turbans. The head of the Guard Corps promised that “America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future.”
General Yahya Rahim Safavi was quoted in an Iranian newspaper as adding, “We will never remain silent in the face of US pressure and we will use our leverage against them.”
And the United States is engaged in debate with other “civilized” nations over what names we will call these thugs. The world’s strongest nation — its one “indispensable nation,” to quote President Clinton’s secretary of state — ought to be able to work up a more muscular response than that. If we hadn’t gained a recent reputation for shyness, all we’d really have to do with those muscles is flex them.
The one thing I liked about George W. Bush was that he was able to convince the world’s bad guys (and a lot of our friends, too, but you can’t have everything) that he was crazy enough to cross borders to go after them, if they gave him half an excuse. This worked, as long as the American people were behind him.
If only the next president were able to project similar willingness to act, and be credible about it. A saber rattled by such a leader can put a stop to much dangerous nonsense in the world.
But does the will exist in the American electorate? Not now, it doesn’t. When Obama said his tough piece, the nation sort of patted its charismatic prodigy on his head and explained that he was green and untested, and was bound to spout silly things now and then. (Rudy Giuliani, to his credit, said Obama was right. Others tut-tutted over the “rookie mistake.”)
While we’re thinking about who’s going to lead the United States, maybe we’d better think about whether America will follow a leader who says what ought to be said — whether it’s on Iraq, Pakistan or Iran, or energy policy. Will we follow a president who tells us we should increase the price of gasoline rather than moaning about how “high” it is? How about a president who says we’re going to have to pay more for less in Social Security benefits in the future?
Winning in Iraq and chasing down bin Laden are not necessarily either/or alternatives. This nation is large enough, rich enough and militarily savvy enough to field a much larger, more versatile force. Can you say “draft”? Well, actually, no — within the context of American politics with a presidential election coming up, you can’t. Not without being hooted down.
That crowd of candidates is vying to lead a crippled giant. And the giant, sitting there fecklessly munching junk food and watching “reality” TV, can only blame himself for his condition.

Lee Bandy’s column, the movie

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When I saw that Lee Bandy led his own John McCain column with the candidate’s remarks re Don Imus, it occurred to me that I might dig back into my video from last week and provide my readers with that portion of the interview, in addition to what you’ve already seen:

As an added bonus, and only if you act now, we will include this extra footage of the candidate complaining that the voters are interested in a whole lot of other stuff besides whether his campaign is moribund or not:

That infuriating John McCain, or, How do you pitch to a hero?

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Mccain1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
HOW ARE YOU supposed to do your job with professional detachment when every time you see one of the main guys running for president, every time you read about him, every time he opens his mouth or takes an action in public, you think, “Hero”?
How are you supposed to keep your rep when you keep thinking, I admire this guy? Of all things, admire! It’s embarrassing.
On top of that, how do you do it when so many of the smart, hip, unfettered, scalpel-minded professionals around you snort when the hero’s name is mentioned, and use terms like “has-been” and “loser” and “that poor old guy”?
It’s not easy. Maybe it’s not even possible. It wasn’t possible on Monday, when John McCain visited our editorial board.
I presided as usual, asking most of the questions and so forth. But I never quite hit my stride. I was uneasy; I stumbled in bringing forth the simplest questions. It was weird. I’d pitched to this guy a number of times before with no trouble, even in post-season play. And here he was stepping up to bat in my ball park, where the rubber on the mound has molded itself to my cleats, and I can’t put a simple fastball over the plate, much less a curve.
I kept remembering our last formal meeting with him, in 2000, on the day that we would decide whom Mccain3
to endorse in a GOP primary that would either slingshot him onward toward victory, or enable George W. Bush to stop his insurgency cold. I wasn’t out of sorts like this. I had stated my case — my strong belief that we should endorse Sen. McCain — several days before in a 4,000-word memo to my then-publisher, a committed Bush man. I was fully prepared to make it again to the full board once the candidate left the room. And I was ready to lose like a pro if it came to that. Which it did.
But now, 9/11 has happened. The nation is at war, and bitterly divided, even over whether we’re “at war.” And I keep thinking — as I sit a couple of feet from the candidate, aiming my digital camera with my left hand, scribbling the occasional haphazard note with my right, glancing from time to time at the audio recorder on the table to note how many minutes into the interview he said such-and-such, so busy recording the event that I don’t really have time to be there — this is the guy who should have been president for the past seven years.
The odd thing is, a lot of people who now dismiss the McCain candidacy also believe he should have been president — that we’d be less divided at home, more admired abroad, more successful at war. But they talk like the poor old guy missed his chance. It’s like candidates have “sell by” dates stamped on them like bacon, and his was several years back. Too bad for him, they say. But I think, too bad for the nation — if they’re right.
The best thing for me, as a professional critic, as a jaded observer, would be for those people to be right. I have no trouble assessing the relative merits of the other candidates in either major party. I even like some of them. Life could be good, professionally speaking, if that old “hero” guy really did just fade away.
But he doesn’t. There he is, sitting there, being all honest and straightforward and fair-minded and brave and admirable. Dang.
Go ahead, get mad at him. He’s let the moment get away from him. You can’t take a man seriously as a leader when he’s blown all that money only to lose ground, when he can’t stop his hired rats from diving overboard. Focus on his mottled scars. Murmur about how even the best of men slow down with age.
But then you think about how this guy aged early. You look at his awkwardness as he holds his coffee cup, and you think about how the North Vietnamese strung him up by his broken arms, and all he had to do to end it was agree to go home. But he wouldn’t.
That was then, of course, but it’s just as bad now. Think about how you asked him several months ago why he thought he had to do something about immigration now, when the only people who cared passionately about the issue and would vote on the basis of that one thing were the ones who would hate him forever for being sensible about it. He had no excuse; he just thought it was the right thing to do.
Mccainstarbucks
You think of all the Democrats and “moderates” who egged him on when he was Bush’s No. 1 critic (which he still is, if you actually listen), but who now dismiss him as the president’s “lapdog” because he (gasp!) — supports the surge and actually, if you can stand it, thinks it’s working! These political goldfish forget that their favorite maverick criticized Bush for not sending enough troops, so of course he supports a “surge” when the president knuckles under and implements one.
Oh, but don’t speak of such people dismissively. This ridiculously admirable guy at the end of the table, who long ago forgave both his communist torturers and the protesters at home who would have spit on him given the chance, won’t have it. When I speak less than flatteringly of the impatience of Americans on Iraq, he corrects me, and relates a list of perfectly good reasons for them to be fed up.
So when it’s over, you try to produce a McCain column for Wednesday, but you can’t. Wednesday, Sam Brownback steps to the same plate, and your arm is fine. You interrogate the guy, assess him, reach a conclusion, and slap a column on the Thursday page. Three up, three down. You’ve got your stuff back.
But Sunday’s deadline draws nearer, and it’s gone again. Desperate, you think: How about a bulleted list of what he said Monday? There’s plenty of it. Naw, that’s a news story, not an opinion column.
And you know, you just know, that the one thing you can’t write is the truth, which is that you just admire the hell out of this infuriating old guy. The fans won’t stand for it. You can hear the beer bottles clattering around you on the mound already.
But it’s no use. You just can’t get the ball across today.

For actual information regarding the McCain interview, and more, go to http://blogs.
thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

John McCain videos

Audio: Brownback’s proposal to end the fear of cancer

Sam Brownback of Kansas: The Beatific Conservative

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Brownback_028

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
TO SAM BROWNBACK of Kansas, a “kinder, gentler” America is more than just a line from a speech by Peggy Noonan. It’s about who he is, what he believes. It’s about the kind of America he would like to lead.
The bumper-sticker take on Mr. Brownback is that he’s the Christian Conservative in the GOP presidential field — or one of them, anyway. But in his case, we’re talking actual Christianity, as in the Beatitudes.
Or maybe we’re talking Micah 6:8 — as president, he says he would act justly, love mercy and walk humbly.
That’s what drew Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson, a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, to the Brownback camp. He was disillusioned by “some of the so-called ‘Christian Right… I was looking for someone who exhibits, and walks the walk that they talk, and that’s a rare thing in politics.”
When Sen. Brownback met with our editorial board Wednesday, I was impressed as well. I was struck by how interesting things can be when you get off the path beaten by national TV news and the covers of slick magazines. You find a guy who brings “Christian” and “conservative” together in ways that belie our common political vocabulary.
Sure, he’s adamantly pro-life. But for him, that means being “whole life” as well — “Life’s sacred in the womb, but I think it’s also sacred in Darfur.” He’s just as concerned about genocide or starvation or slave traffic in Africa or North Korea as about abortion clinics in Peoria. Did he get there, as a Catholic convert, via the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life?” No — he explains that initially, he was more influenced by “the great theologian Bono.”
This sort of atypical association plays out again and again. His plan for Iraq is the same as Joe Biden’s, quite literally. (You know Joe Biden — the Democrat who has campaigned in South Carolina the longest and hardest, the one who’s arguably the best-qualified candidate in that field, but you don’t hear about him much on TV? Yeah, that Joe Biden….) Their bill would partition the country more along the lines of the old Ottoman Empire.
I have some doubts about that plan, but let’s suppose it worked, and we achieved some sort of stasis in Iraq. What about the next crisis, and the next one after that? What about Sudan, Iran, North Korea? What is America’s proper stance toward the world?
“I think we’ve got to walk around the world wiser and more humble,” he said. It’s an answer you might expect from Jimmy Carter, or a flower-bedecked pacifist at an antiwar vigil. Sure, the true conservative position, from Pat Buchanan to George Will, has been one of aversion to international hubris. But Sam Brownback carries it off without a tinge of either fascism or pomposity, and that sets him apart.
“Africa’s moving. Latin America is moving,” he said. “That’s where I’m talking about walking wiser and humbler. The first step in Latin America is going to be to go there and just listen.” Why is it, we should ask ourselves, “that a Chavez can come forward with his old, bad ideas, and win elections?”
“People in Latin America are saying, my quality of life has not improved.” And as a result, they’re willing to go with a dictator. “I think we need to go there and say, what is it we can do to help these economies grow…. It’s our big problem with Mexico and immigration.”
Back to Africa: “This is a place where America’s goodness can really make a big difference to a lot of people in the world, and it would be in our long-term vital and strategic interest.”
Asked about domestic issues, he cites “rebuilding the family” as his top concern. That may sound like standard, right-off-the-shelf Christian Right talk. But he comes to it more via Daniel Patrick Moynihan than James Dobson. He said he’s had it with beating his head against the brick hearts of Hollywood producers, and draws an analogy to smoking: Sure, people knew there was a connection between cigarettes and their nagging coughs, but Big Tobacco had room to dissemble until a direct, scientific line was drawn between their product and lung cancer.
Just as the government now puts out unemployment statistics, he would have it gather and release data on out-of-wedlock childbirth, marriages ending in divorce, and the empirically demonstrable connections between ubiquitous pornography and a variety of social pathologies. He’d put the data out there, and let society decide from there how to react. But first, you need the data.
His second domestic issue is energy (push electric cars) and his third is health care (he would “end deaths to cancer in 10 years”). He’s a conservative, but by no means one who wants government to butt out of our lives.
“Humility, as a nation or as individuals, is an effective thing,” Mr. Stevenson said in explaining his support for Sen. Brownback. “It’s the right thing, and it’s also a Christian principle.”
But that doesn’t mean you don’t take action. The Kansan summed up his attitude on many issues, foreign and domestic, in describing his reaction to Darfur: “Well you look at that, and you know that’s something that ought to be addressed… I mean, you’re the most powerful nation in the world… you can’t learn about these things and then say, well, I guess I’m just not going to do anything about it.”
Well, some could. But it reflects to Sam Brownback’s credit that he says he could not.

Brownback_037

A dialogue on the Edwards flap

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After spending a good bit of time in e-conversation with this reader, I thought I might as well share it with the rest of y’all. This is the message that started it:

From: Amy Holleman
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 9:35 AM
To: Warthen, Brad – External Email
Subject: Edwards and other Candidates

Mr. Warthen,

I continue to disagree with your claim that John Edwards is a phony and just love (note sarcasm) the way you used editorial space to toot your own horn and describe all of the attention you got. Your editorial response to the responses you got make me wonder who the real phony is here. While we’re all happy you got a good ego stroke, I hope you have not somehow damaged the reputation of a man who seems to really care.

At any rate, it is not my intention nor desire to figure out how genuine you may or may not be. I can tell you though, as a person who has "bird-dogged" candidates since I was in high school (I’m in my 30’s now) on various issues, Edwards seems to me to be one of the most genuine politicians I’ve encountered over the last 15 years on the face-to-face level. I cannot say that I’ve found any other candidate in any party this particular go-round who, face-to-face, seems so genuinely concerned with the problems that the majority of Americans face. I cannot say that I’ve spoken to any other candidate about issues, such as AIDS, who seems to really care.

Do I think politicians in general are phonies? You bet I do. Politicians, or the majority of them, do not seem to be in "the game" to make the country or world better anymore but for their own power gains. Am I saying John Edwards is the perfect candidate? Not at all. No one’s perfect. Am I saying that I believe you need to give John Edwards another look? Not really, your opinion seems to be quite strong and one that probably will not change. I’ll tell you one thing though, while I would never stifle another’s right to say what he or she wants as I believe strongly in our Constitutional rights, I believe the media hurts the American public more than anyone when it comes to elections. Where people get off thinking it is OK to tell people how to think, I’ll never know. The media, especially outlets such as The State and Fox News seem to completely disregard concepts like informing the public in an unbiased manner.

Amy Holleman

To which I replied:

Well, I don’t — think most politicians are phonies. And my somewhat more positive assessment is based on having observed these folks professionally for 30-something years. I’m afraid that my impression of Mr. Edwards is that he is a bit of a standout on this point. Do you believe, for instance, that Barack Obama is a phony? I don’t.

Meanwhile, I agree with you that "the media hurts the American public more than anyone when it comes to elections" — or at least, just as much as. Mostly, they hurt it by shaping everyone’s political vocabulary so that most folks find it difficult to engage anything like my column for what it was — they try to force it into their narrow little polarized boxes, and that makes it into something else entirely, and THAT is what caused all the hullabaloo last week.

I have a great deal of distaste for the way media cover politics in general. And I don’t hold out a lot of hope for it getting better.

Ms. Holleman replied today:

I think the hullabaloo last week was seeing an editorial writer for the only newspaper we have around these parts (the corporate trash that is has become at that) take a candidate that people overall see as sincere. I can admit to being a fairly liberal democrat (and don’t try to hide it by saying things like "I’m not liberal; I’m progressive"), but I’ve even got a few Republican, Libertarian, and independent-minded friends that were turned off by your column. These friends are all quite intelligent and do not need the media to tell them what to think; the majority do not read The State but read the article because someone sent it to them.

I do not think the Barack Obama is a phony. I think Hillary Clinton is, but if it comes down to it, she will have my vote. I think that McCain, Romney, and Giuliani are all phonies. I do not think that Brownback, Paul, and Huckabee are phonies, but I’d never vote for them regardless. I think our current "president’ is the biggest phony out there. I think that many who are most sincere about making our country and world better, many with the most passion for politics and the like, do not ever get a chance to be seen or heard because money rules the game and the people with the most of it often do not even know how to be genuine anymore.

I’ll tell you one thing though, even though I whole-heartedly disagree with the words you wrote, I do thank you for initiating the discussion. I’ve heard people defending Edwards whom I never thought would defend him, and I’ve seen people who are big supporters question their support. It is always good to question ourselves and why we feel the way we do about things, especially something so important as the presidential race. The next POTUS, no matter who he or she may be or which party he or she is affiliated, will have a big job to do that will involve a whole lot of trying to mend this great land of ours and the ties we have outside of our borders. W. and his puppet master, Cheney, have created a holy mess.

And, a few minutes ago, I sent this final rejoinder:

Well, I’m glad you could thank me for one thing. That’s some consolation. But I think you have a broader definition of "phony" than I do, since you can apply it to Sens. Clinton and McCain, Gov. Romney and Mayor Giuliani. I find it hard to understand why you could cast your net that widely, yet still miss Sen. Edwards — who still seems to me the likeliest fish in that sea.

I would not label any of those as "phony," with the possible exception of Romney — but I still haven’t been exposed to him enough to know. In fact, I haven’t met him yet. And among all the Republicans, McCain is the least phony — just as I think Obama is the least phony among Democrats.

Then there’s Joe Biden, the master of "blarney" — which is a different thing.

I realize that "phony" sounds like a broad label, easily applied. But I did not apply it broadly or lightly. Nor am I alone in applying it to him. Quite a few South Carolina Democrats, including some statewide party leaders, see him the same way. They’ll just never say so on the record, which sort of leaves me with nothing more than my own personal observations to back up the assertion — that’s enough for me, but obviously not for you or quite a few other people, which is why I’ve made a couple of (unsuccessful) stabs this week to get some of those folks to come out of the shadows and be honest about what they think. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in it for them. But their private opinions expressed to me provide me with far more certainty of my assessment than I needed to write what I did.

You should know that I don’t have to go looking for such affirmation from these anonymous folk; it finds me regularly. I had lunch yesterday with Teresa Wells from the Edwards campaign, and while I was waiting for her to arrive, someone who was the Democratic nominee for a statewide office in 2004 told me that he agreed completely with my assessment. But he wasn’t around when Teresa arrived…

OK, now y’all jump in.

Tomorrow’s column: Sam Brownback

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My column tomorrow is from our first editorial board meeting with Sam Brownback of Kansas. The headline: "Sam Brownback of Kansas: The Beatific Conservative."

It should be available on the blog shortly after midnight.

For those who can’t wait, here’s a clip from the interview upon which the column is based:

My week in the ‘phony’ Spin Cycle

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
HAD YOU asked me on Monday what I would be writing about for Sunday, a second column dealing — even peripherally — with presidential wannabe John Edwards would have been the last thing I would have guessed.
Yet here I am. What choice do I have? I’ve spent so much time this past week dealing with the reaction from the first one that I haven’t had time to develop anything on another topic.
It was just a midweek column, not worthy of a Sunday slot, a back-burner thing I had promised to address several months earlier on my blog, after readers challenged me for calling the man a “phony” without explaining the series of experiences that had led to that impression — which is all it was.
(And in case you didn’t read that column and are wondering what those experiences were, I have neither the space nor inclination to repeat them here. They took up a whole column the first time. You can find it on my blog. The address is below.)
But without ever intending or wanting to, I got caught up in the Spin Cycle of national politics. My musings had become, for that brief moment, Topic A — or at least B or C or D — and believe me: You don’t even want to be Topic Z in that alphabet.
Subsequent events didn’t follow each other in any way that made sense, so I’ll just throw them out in no particular order:

The Drudge Report picked up my column Tuesday morning, which launched the craziness as much as any one thing.
The New York Post called asking to reprint it, which it did the following day under the headline, “POOR LITTLE PHONY: JOHN EDWARDS’ FAKE EMPATHY.”
Dennis Miller of “Saturday Night Live” fame interviewed me on his radio show Thursday.
I got mocked by the “Wonkette”: “Brad Warthen of the South Carolina’s The State has a controversial opinion about John Edwards! His controversial opinion, which he, Brad Warthen, thought of himself, and which he is going to share… with you now, is as follows: John Edwards is a phony! A big fat phony!”
After two more radio shows called — one from Charlotte (for Thursday), another from Canada (for today), I called Andy Gobeil so that S.C. ETV wouldn’t miss out, and he had me on his show Friday morning.
My column was the lead political story on the Fox News network Tuesday night. Or rather, the response the Edwards campaign felt compelled to produce — and I do feel sorry for them for that — was the lead story. The story posted online began: “John Edwards’ campaign scoffed Tuesday at a new effort to depict the Democratic presidential candidate as phony after an influential columnist for a newspaper in Edwards’ birth state wrote that his personal experiences only reinforce his image of Edwards as plastic.”
My blog had its third-biggest day ever Tuesday with 5,825 page views, and its fourth-biggest on Wednesday. The biggest ever had been in June, when state Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted. That made sense. This did not.
ABC News National Senior Correspondent Jake Tapper wrote on his blog about my “rather nasty op-ed” in these terms: “I personally find the evidence rather thin for such a scathing verbal attack.” Hey, if I had meant to mount a “scathing verbal attack,” I would have come up with some thicker stuff.
Someone named Pamela Leavey, writing on “The Democratic Daily,” said I was “Spewing Right-Wing Talking Points About John Edwards,” and thereby providing “a classic example of what’s wrong with our media.”

Obama_detail
I guess I had been spewing “Left-Wing Talking Points” when I said nice things about Barack Obama the week before. Of course, Ms. Leavey wouldn’t know about that, because she had probably never heard of me before Tuesday. That was true of most of the people commenting.
And yet, they seemed to think they knew an awful lot about me. Their confidence in passing judgment was far greater than my own. All I had done was describe impressions I had formed from actual experiences in my life. I didn’t consider them any better than anyone else’s experiences. When Zeke Stokes wrote in saying that when he worked on the Edwards campaign earlier this year he had formed a very different impression, I urged readers to take what he said every bit as seriously as what I had said.
But folks out in the blogosphere or in the 24/7 political spin cycle don’t have time for reflections upon personal experience. They have a convenient short-hand vocabulary for passing judgment instantly upon anything and everything, and all of it is based in childishly simplistic, partisan labels: “He’s one of them! I don’t like them!” or “He’s one of us! Everything he says is true!”
Among the more than 1,500 unread e-mails awaiting me Tuesday morning were quite a few from across the country praising or damning me for having expressed my opinion. Many were as shallow as Ms. Leavey’s “reflections.”
But here and there were messages from someone who got the point, which was this: We all form subjective impressions, often unconsciously. In my column I tried to determine exactly when and where I had picked up the bits that formed my overall impression of this one guy among many running for president. I thought that such an airing would be mildly interesting to readers, who often wonder what sorts of gut “biases” inform what we write in the paper, and where they come from.
A few readers appreciated that, saying that there had been something about Edwards that had nagged at them, and my column had helped them define it: “You hit something in me that I had not been able to figure out,” wrote Glenice Pearson. “Thanks for explaining what was wrong with him,” wrote Nancy Padgett. “I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t enthuse even though he is a SC boy.”
In turn, I appreciate those few readers who got it. The rest of it I could have done without.

Listen to Zeke Stokes

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For a whole other perspective on John Edwards, be sure to read Zeke Stokes’ letter on today’s editorial page. For you lazy types, I reproduce it here:

John Edwards
is genuine, caring

During the first half of this year, I was privileged to work with Sen. John Edwards, traveling throughout the United States as he and his wife, Elizabeth, began this campaign for the White House. I have spent hours in cars and on planes with him. I have witnessed him in front of crowds and behind closed doors. And I can tell you without reservation that Brad Warthen misjudged him and painted an inaccurate picture of him in his column Tuesday (“Why I see John Edwards as a big phony”).
John and Elizabeth Edwards are two of the most caring and genuine people I have met in public life, and they have made it their life’s mission to improve the lives of people like so many of those in rural Lee County, where I grew up, and all across South Carolina and the country.
While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are seizing the limelight, John Edwards is seizing the hearts and minds of the people of this country who have been forgotten: those in poverty, without adequate heath care, without good jobs, without hope. Our nation would be blessed to have him in the White House.

ZEKE STOKES
Columbia

I wrote my column to explain the subjective impression I had formed of John Edwards from my experience, and it was what it was. Zeke — who is a good, trustworthy young man of respect, an up-and-comer in Democratic campaign circles who helped guide Jim Rex to victory last year — formed an entirely different perspective.

I urge you to pay every bit as much attention to his opinion as to mine. That’s why we have letters to the editor — to foster productive dialogue, from which we can all learn.

He doesn’t change my mind about my experiences, but he does give me another perspective to think about. And that’s the point of it all.

So that’s what I look like in tabloid

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When the weather’s like this, I’m pretty much a seersucker kind of guy (OK, no "Sophie’s Choice" cracks, wise guys), but I happened to run across the New York Post version of my column from yesterday, and now I know what I look like in tabloid.

OK, so with this look, I guess I ditch the bow tie, right? I think I’d better check with Eddie over at Lourie’s.

Listen for me on the radio

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Over the next two days, I’ll be on three radio shows, starting with this one:

Hello, Brad. My name is Christian Bladt and I am the producer
for The Dennis Miller Show, which airs on 119 stations for Westwood One radio. I
wanted to extend an invitation to
appear on our show for a phone interview that
would last between 10 and 15 minutes. We do the show from 7am-10am Pacific /
10am-1pm Eastern, and as you would probably have imagined we would have you on
to discuss John Edwards, whom Dennis has spoken about on numerous occassions.
Ideally, we would love to have you on Thursday morning. Let me know if you would
be available.

I said yes, and I’ll be on at 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time Thursday. That one should be fun.

Then, at 5:30 on the same day, I’ll be on this one:

Brad-

My name is Shawn Stinson and I’m the executive producer with the Danny
Fontana Show in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m writing to schedule an interview
with you to discuss your blog talking about why you see John Edwards as a big
phony.

We broadcast from 3 – 6 p.m., Monday through Friday and the interview will
last around 6 to 8 minutes.

I confess I’m not familiar with that one, but I seldom turn town public appearances, especially when I can phone them in.

Then, on Friday sometime after 9, I’ll be back with sidekick Andy Gobeil on S.C. ETV Radio, as compensation for having ruined his regimen, as he griped in this message:

Brad,

I’m very upset with you. You’re column -and the voluminous responses-
are keeping me from my run this afternoon (actually, that’s not a bad
idea…it’s too darn hot today).
Great piece…I think you touched on a concern many people have with Edwards.
I’d like to try to make some time for you Friday morning.
Hope you’re doing well.
-A

Hey, I fully intend to work out every day, and don’t, and you don’t see me going around blaming it on other people… But maybe I should blame Bush. It seems to work on everything else.

Anyway, all these shows want to talk about the Edwards column, which, if you’d asked me when I was writing it Sunday night, I would have told you in no uncertain terms would have been forgotten by now. It just wasn’t all that deep — just me explaining how I formed the perfectly subjective impression that this one guy is a phony. Well, as Dennis Miller once said, "There’s nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you’re insightful about it."

Yeah, I like Joe Lieberman. So?

10 Replies

As readers of this blog know, I’m a big Joe Lieberman fan. I’m big on John McCain, too. And Lindsey Graham. I like people who take principled stands — in favor of fighting terrorism even when it occurs in Iraq, or instituting rational immigration reform even when it means being fair to Mexicans — and stick to those stands, even when the ideological nutjobs in their respective parties are skinning them alive for doing so.

So I had to smile when somebody who works for Edwards — feeling compelled, to my surprise, to respond to my column, which turned out to be a WAY bigger deal than I would have expected — dismissed my obserrvations by saying we endorsed Lieberman in 2004:

Edwards spokesman Eric Schultz suggested the editorial is a farce and noted that columnist Brad Warthen of The State newspaper, based in Columbia, S.C., endorsed Joe Lieberman a day before the Connecticut senator dropped out of the Democratic primary race in 2004.

I smile because I essentially browbeat my colleagues into endorsing Joe, in a three-hour talkathon in which I just plain wore them down, on the very day we had to write our endorsement and put it on the page (John Kerry had not come in until that day, and Howard Dean had requested a second meeting — the one mentioned in the anecdote in my column — so we couldn’t have our discussion until then).

And you know, some of those colleagues drew the same connection as Mr. Schultz — they said the fact that Lieberman was going to get creamed in the S.C. primary had something to do with whether we should endorse him. As I respect my colleagues, I respect Mr. Shultz’s observation. But the two fact had nothing to do with each other in my mind. To me, it didn’t matter whether Joe got a single vote, as long as he was the best candidate in the field. And he was.

Anyway, for your nostalgic pleasure, I hereby copy the column I wrote explaining that editorial decision. I wrote it to exculpate my colleagues as much as anything. I didn’t find endorsing Joe embarrassing after his loss, but I sensed that they did. So I explained how it happened. I do stuff like that. I was doing that this morning — and everybody freaked. I guess that’s because it became a national story and the national folk don’t know me. Anyway, here’s that column:

The State (Columbia, SC)
February 8, 2004 Sunday FINAL EDITION
HERE’S WHAT WE LOOK FOR IN A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
BYLINE: BRAD WARTHEN, EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. D2
LENGTH: 972 words

IN THE COUPLE of months leading up to last week’s Democratic presidential primary here, most of the candidates came by our offices for interviews with the editorial board. In chronological order, they were Dick Gephardt, Carol Moseley Braun, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Howard Dean and John Kerry.
The moment John Kerry left – on the Friday afternoon before the primary – we gathered to make a decision on our endorsement, which would run that Sunday. Present were Publisher Ann Caulkins, Associate Editors Warren Bolton, Cindi Scoppe and Nina Brook, Editorial Writer Mike Fitts and yours truly.
It took us almost three hours. For much of the first hour, no one mentioned any candidate by name. Instead, we spent that time discussing the criteria that we should use in making our decision. The points we set out are worth relating because they are relevant not only to the decision we make in the fall on the presidential race, but in some cases to other endorsements we make.
Mike Fitts, who has had primary responsibility for tracking this race for us, started us off, and pretty much mentioned all the main parameters. With the caveats that some criteria would militate against others, and that no candidate was likely to be the best on all counts, he said that based on what we have written and said in the past, anyone we endorse for president should:

Be someone that we, and a consensus of South Carolinians, would be comfortable with philosophically. We have well-defined positions on most issues; so do the candidates. Intellectual consistency would demand that we look for as close a match as possible.

Recognize that national security, while not everything, is certainly the first and foremost responsibility of the job. More particularly, given our position, we wanted someone who would be fully committed to bringing positive change to the parts of the world that most threaten national and collective security.

Think for himself rather than adhere to any party’s narrow ideology. We favor people who work across lines and are intellectually diverse.

Have relevant experience in elective office, which is particularly valuable in itself. A candidate might be a natural-born leader and have all the vision in the world, but probably would not achieve much in office without having mastered the give-and-take of politics.

Finally, Mike raised a question: In a primary, to what extent do we take into account whether someone would be the best standard-bearer for his party?
As we went around the table, Warren gave probably the best answer to that one: "We ought to be thinking about who can be the president of the United States, regardless of party affiliation." Nina and Cindi said much the same, with Cindi adding that everyone should feel free to vote in our state’s open primaries. (This was before we knew about the loyalty oath, which fortunately was dropped at the last minute.)
Warren wanted to make sure we agreed that no one criterion should be a disqualifier, noting that while elective experience is worth a lot, it’s not everything. "People bring other things to the table," he said.
To Mike’s list, Nina added that we should also not be afraid to be a conscience for the state, even when we’re a little alone.
I thought Mike and the others had summed it up fairly well, but added two criteria that have long guided my own thinking:

Endorsements should always be about who should win, not who will win. We should endorse the best candidate, even if he or she doesn’t have a chance.

Presidential endorsements are a different animal. With most local and state races, readers have few or no other reliable sources of information on the candidates. With the presidential contest, they are inundated. They will usually come to our endorsement with a well-informed opinion of their own. Therefore our endorsement takes on a more symbolic value; readers can use it as a guide to see whether they want to trust our judgment on the candidates and issues they know less about.

Finally, of course, we got around to discussing the candidates themselves. We quickly narrowed it down to Sens. Edwards, Kerry and Lieberman. That’s when the hard part started.
Once again, Mike helped define the dilemma before us, logically and mathematically.
He divided the field of three into three overlapping sets of two, with each pair having advantages over the remaining candidate. That sounds complicated. Here’s what I mean:

Sens. Lieberman and Kerry had the distinct advantage on experience.

Sens. Kerry and Edwards had more dynamic leadership skills – important in a chief executive.

Sens. Lieberman and Edwards were closer to us and South Carolina politically.

A three-way stalemate.
Still, to me at least, it seemed clear that Joe Lieberman came out ahead on most of Mike’s criteria – good philosophical fit, sterling national security credentials, by far the one most willing to work across party lines, and a distinguished 30-year record of public service.
The sticking point in our discussion was over one of my criteria: The one about who should win versus who will win. We all knew Sen. Lieberman had little chance of surviving beyond Tuesday, and there was considerable sentiment for using our endorsement to boost someone with a better shot. That would have taken the form of either affirming Sen. Edwards’ front-runner status or giving a boost to Sen. Kerry.
In the end, we stood by Joe Lieberman. I’m glad we did.
I share all of this because, even though our guy is out of the race, the same criteria we used will be applied as we look toward November. And while many readers say they just know who we’ll endorse, they’re ahead of me. Based on the criteria we use, it remains a very open question.

Fox, or Edwards, or SOMEBODY is mighty excited about my column

3 Replies

It appears to be Fox’s top political story at the moment.

Well, that will pass — perhaps even before you click on the link.

I hear I’m on the telly, too — but I don’t have time to look. I’ve got some pages to get out, since Mike had to leave early. See, we actually are plain working folk around here — in our white-collar way.

Oddly, no one from Fox has called to ask me about it.

Why I see John Edwards as a big phony: Director’s Cut

216 Replies

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SEVERAL MONTHS ago, I observed on my blog that I think John
Edwards is a phony — a make-believe Man of The People.
It’s not so much that he’s lying
when he says he wants to help One America -– the Deserving Poor, whom he wants
to vote for him -– get what it has coming to it from the Other America (that of
the Really Rich, to which he disarmingly admits he belongs).
He’s a pro at this, and at some point, pros can’t be liars. On
some level, they have to believe in themselves, whether it’s stepping to the
plate to beat the home run record or striding to the podium to drip pure,
sincere concern upon the people. Mr. Edwards has a sufficiently plausible
background story to convince himself that he is, deep-down, that dirt-poor,
mill-town child he invokes in his personal anecdotes. So he is persuaded, even if I am not.
Why am I not? Well, I
hadn’t ever planned to get into that; I’ve just devoted more attention to other
candidates of both parties. I kept hoping that maybe Mr. Edwards would just
drop out. But he’s still in it, or trying to be. As The State’s Aaron Sheinin wrote in a piece headlined “Edwards
staying positive,” the former senator is “betting he can come from behind again
in 2008, as he did in 2004.”
Sigh. So I guess I’d
better “put up” and explain why I called him, on Feb. 8 on my blog, “one of the
phoniest faux populists ever to get his name in the papers.” The
impression is mainly the result of three encounters:

Strike One: Sept. 16, 2003.
The candidate was supposed to appear on a makeshift stage on Greene Street in
front of the Russell House. The stage was on the south side, with seating
before it in the street, and bleachers to both left and right. I stood on
higher ground on the north side with, as it would turn out, an unflattering
angle of view.
He was supposed to arrive at 4 p.m. but it was at least 5 before
he showed; I can no longer cite the exact time. When his appearance was
imminent, his wife appeared on the stage and built expectation in a manner I
found appealing and sincere. As either she or another introducer was speaking,
I saw Mr. Edwards step to an offstage position just behind the bleachers to my
left (toward the east). None of the folks in the “good” seats could see him.
His face was impassive, slack, bored: Another crowd, another
show. Nothing wrong with that, thought I -– just a professional at work.
But then, I saw the thing that stuck with me: In the last seconds
as his introduction reached its climax, he straightened, and turned on a
thousand-watt smile as easily and artificially as flipping a switch. He assumed
the look of a man who had just, quite unexpectedly, run into a long-lost best
friend. Then he stepped into view of the crowd at large, and worked his way, Bill Clinton-like, from the back of the
crowd toward the stage -– a man of the
people, coming out from among the
people -– shaking hands with the humble,
grateful enthusiasm of a poor soul who had just won the Irish Sweepstakes.
It was so well done, but so obviously a thing of art, that I was
taken aback despite three decades of seeing politicians at work, both on-stage
and off. Not enough for you? OK.

Strike Two: Jan. 23, 2004.
Seeking our support in the primary contest he would win 11 days later, he came to an interview with The
State’s editorial board.
He was all ersatz-cracker bonhomie, beginning the session by swinging
his salt-encrusted left snowboot onto the polished boardroom table, booming,
“How do y’all like my boots?” He had
not, it seemed, had time to change footwear since leaving New Hampshire.
The interview proceeded according to script, a lot of
aw-shucking, much smiling, consistent shows of genuine concern, and warm
expressions of determination to close the gap between the Two Americas. Then he
left, and I didn’t think much more about it, until a week later.
On the 30th, Howard Dean came in to see us for the second time.
Once again, I was struck by how personable he was, so unlike the screamer of
Web fame. I happened to ride down on the elevator with him afterward, along
with my administrative assistant and another staffer who was a real Dean fan
(but, worse luck for Gov. Dean, not a member of our board). After he took his
leave, I paused to watch him take his time to greet everyone in our foyer -–
treating each person who wanted to shake his hand as every bit as important as
any editorial board member, if not more so. I remarked upon it.
“Isn’t he a nice man?” said our copy editor (the fan). I agreed.
Then came the revelation: “Unlike John Edwards,” observed the administrative
assistant. What’s that, I asked? It seems that when she alone had met then-Sen.
Edwards at the reception desk, she had been struck by the way he utterly
ignored the folks in our customer service department and others who had hoped
for a handshake or a word from the Great Man. He had saved all his amiability,
all his professionally entertaining energy and talent, for the folks upstairs
who would have a say in the paper’s endorsement. He had no time for anyone
else.
At that moment, my impression acquired stony bulwarks of Gothic
dimensions.

Strike Three: Sept. 22,
2004. I decided to drop by a reception held for then-vice-presidential
nominee Edwards at the Capital City Club that afternoon. I had stuffed my press
credentials into my pocket after arrival so as to mix freely with the
high-rollers and hear what they had to say. (They knew who I was, but the
stuffy types who want writers to stand like cattle behind barriers did not.)
Good thing, too, because there was plenty of time to kill, and there’s no more
informative way to kill it than with the sort of folks whom candidates want to
meet at such receptions.
It was well past the candidate’s alleged time of arrival, but no
one seemed to mind. Then a prominent Democrat who lives in a fashionable
downtown neighborhood confided we’d be waiting even longer. We all knew the
candidate had a more public appearance at Martin Luther King Park before this
one, and no one begrudged him such face time with real voters. But this
particular insider knew something else: He had bided his own time because he
had seen Sen. Edwards go jogging in front of his house, along with his security
detail, after the time that the MLK
event was to have started.
As reported in The State the next day, “Edwards was running late, and the throng waiting to rally with
him at Martin Luther King Jr. Park took notice. They sat for two hours in the
sweltering heat inside the community center, a block off Five Points.”
We were cool at the Cap City Club, drinking, schmoozing,
snacking, hardly taking notice. So he’s late? What are these folks going to do –- write checks for the Republicans?
But my impression had been reinforced with steel girders: John
Edwards, Man of The People, is a phony. And until I see an awful lot of
stunning evidence to the contrary, that impression is not likely to change.

Obama, the young, and the magic of Making a Difference

20 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
HOW’RE YOU gonna keep ’em down on the blog after they’ve heard Obama?
For an old guy, I have a lot of ways of keeping in touch with the young, idealistic and enthusiastic — my kids, my kids’ friends, my friends’ kids… and Weblogs.
But these kids today — they need to learn to stick to something. Law student Laurin Manning was really cooking with her LaurinLine, one of the foremost political blogs in the state. Then she quit to Max2_2
politick for real, rather than just writing about it.
Then there’s Max Blachman [at right],
son of my friend Moss, who started “Democrats in the South” just over a year ago and was cooking along fairly well for a while. He last posted on March 3.
Both Laurin and Max have gone to work for Barack Obama.
And they are far from alone. Thursday, I met Elizabeth Wilkins [below left], originally from New York, who’s down here as youth vote director for the Obama
campaign. What pulls Elizabeth so far away from home? “It’s not
every 23-year-old who gets to work on a campaign Wilkins for a man who might be the first black president.” True, but there’s more than that.
Poor John McCain is laying off members of the Pepsi Generation left and right, but his Senate colleague from Chicago seems to have an employment agency going for the kids. (Not that they’re all paid. Most aren’t.)
Yes, campaigns in general tend to be youth-heavy. The rest of us have family responsibilities; we seek job security more lasting than the next news cycle.
But there’s something about Obama that makes the youthfulness of his supporters seem more apt, something that reminds me of my own youth — and not just because the first time I saw him in person was when he spoke to the College Democrats of America over at the Russell House on Thursday. It was there that I heard him, among other things, reassert (to applause) that he would rush right out and have meaningful talks with the thugs who run Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and, by logical extension, pretty much any other regime that would be tickled magenta to be handed such a great propaganda photo-op.
It’s easy for a graybeard like me, or that crusty old neocon Charles Krauthammer, or Hillary Clinton for that matter, to dismiss such promises as “irresponsible and frankly naive” — as did Sen. Clinton to anyone who would listen last week after her chief rival gave her that opportunity to sound mature, tough and sane.
But beyond the fact that young people think mean people suck, and it’s mean not to talk to people, and that we should have done more of that before going all Angry Daddy on Saddam, there’s a positive reason why Obama has a particular appeal to the young: He describes public service as something you can engage in and still feel clean.
Poor Joe Biden, who’s even older than I am, got into all sorts of trouble for calling Obama “clean,” but that’s just what he is. And for those who are focusing on details of the latest 24/7 news cycle’s scandal or whatever, it’s easy to forget how appealing “clean” can be to the fresh-faced.
It can be a compelling issue, and it belongs completely to Obama. Bill Clinton’s wife, late of the Rose Law Firm, can’t touch it. Nor can the $400 haircut who wants to be the nation’s trial lawyer. And those old guys over on the GOP side — forget it.
The 23-year-old who still gasps somewhere within me is convinced that Barack Obama is completely for real when he channels JFK via Jimmy Carter. Remember Jimmy Carter — not the old guy with the hammer who shakes his finger at us like Miz Lillian when we fail to be sweet to other nations, not the Grand Incompetent of Reagan Revolution lore, but the original, the one whose green bumper sticker I had on my orange 1972 Vega back when even I was 23?
He was never going to lie to us. He would lead us from the partisan, crooked, nasty cesspool of Watergate and the angst of Vietnam. He would help us to be the kind of country that JFK had promised we would get to be, back before Everything Went Wrong.
Well, I do. And it wasn’t about Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative or black or white or money or any of that stuff embraced by the people who had messed things up. It was about Clean. It was about Meaning.
I first spoke to Barack Obama — very briefly, because of cell phone problems while I was traveling through mountains — a month ago. He only wanted to talk about one thing: Clean. He was unveiling his plan for “the most sweeping ethics reform in history,” — “Closing the Revolving Door,” “Increasing Public Access to Information,” and other Clean Government 101 stuff.
But with that overflow crowd of college kids providing better reception than my Treo, I realized that for this candidate, such yadda-yadda basics were more than just the talking points of that one day.
“Here’s the point,” he told them. “I wanted you to know that I’ve been where you are. I loved the world as a young man, and I wanted to make a difference. I’ve often been told that change wasn’t possible, but I’ve learned that it was. I believe that it still is. And I’m ready to join you in changing the course …”
Not just the course of war, or the wicked oil companies, or me-first politics, or meanness, but changing the lousy way that things are, period.
He invoked “an image of young people, back in the civil rights movement, straight-backed, clear-eyed, marching for justice…” and told them they could be those young people. They were those young people.
He reaches across time, across cynicism, across the sordidness of Politics As Practiced, offering to pull them in to the place where they can make a difference.
You can see how, to someone who’s 23, he’d be worth ditching the blog for.

Good news, bad news: Back to the political branches

14 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AS THE ABOVE editorial indicates, the matter of whether young children will have a chance at a good education in South Carolina is back in the hands of the political branches. That’s very good and very bad.
It’s very good because such matters of fundamental policy are political in nature. The courts can and should do no more than give us the constitutional parameters within which to act. And what the constitution says isn’t much:
“The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free public schools open to all children in the State and shall establish, organize and support such other public institutions of learning, as may be desirable.”
Courts have elaborated on that slightly. In 1999, the state Supreme Court added “minimally adequate” in front of “system” (not literally, as in amending the constitution, but in terms of our legal understanding). Many education advocates today, just a very few years later, see that “minimally” as a damning sentence of inadequacy. The great irony in that is that the chief justice who presided over that addition saw it as a great step forward for the progressive approach to education, insisting that South Carolina not define “adequate” below a certain, minimal level. That’s not the proper purview of judges, but in any case he did not have the effect he’d hoped for.
Words can be slippery.
I am reminded of the late Douglas Adams’ hilarious series of satirical science fiction novels. One of his main characters was a researcher for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The universe being a big place, the Guide had devoted only one word to describing Earth: “Harmless.” After 15 years of intensive research here on our planet, the field man manages to get his editors to expand the entry so that it reads, in its entirety: “Mostly harmless.”
As it happens, 15 years is only one year longer than the life span of the lawsuit over where we will set the floor for educational opportunity in the poor, rural parts of our state. Abbeville County School District (et al.) v. the State of South Carolina was filed on Nov. 2, 1993. Almost 14 years later, it has added “minimally adequate” to our understanding of our constitutional obligation regarding education — and not even the people who agree on what they want our school system to be can agree on whether “minimally” is a good addition or a bad one.
On to the political branches. That’s where the “very bad news” part comes in.
Education is the biggest thing government does at the state level, which is why people who vaguely, but insistently, desire to “reduce the size of government” are always talking about vouchers and tax credits aimed at preventing the state from spending so much on public schools.
It also happens to be the one thing that government does that can most affect whether our state prospers. South Carolina hasn’t done it very well, relatively speaking, and so we have not prospered as well as other states. It’s not that we don’t know how to educate. It’s that we’ve never resolved to extend the sort of education available in our prosperous suburbs to the rural parts of our state that have been economically irrelevant since the end of slavery. The test scores from those areas pull down the state’s averages, scaring off economic development, which keeps those areas poor, which continues to scare off economic development, etc.
It’s possible to break the cycle, but it would take a tremendous mustering and focusing of political will to overcome certain rather powerful political barriers.
The Legislature won’t provide the answer, because it is the nexus of 170 political agendas. Many of the most adept of the 170 are from districts that see themselves as losing what they’ve got in any effort to focus resources on the poorest districts.
The one political figure in the state in a position to chart a course that steers around all those shoals of local interest — to articulate a bold vision of statewide interest over the heads of lawmakers and fire up the electorate — is the governor. And our current governor hasn’t the slightest interest in doing that. He’s one of the folks who wants us to spend less on public education.
(But “Spending alone won’t do it!”, you cry. You’re right. It will require implementing a comprehensive vision of reform, from classrooms to the state Department of Education. But if you’re not willing to spend, you can forget the rest. As long as the affluent parts of our state see themselves losing in a zero-sum game, you can’t turn around the poor parts with current overall spending levels.)
The alternative would be an uprising of the people, a grass-roots movement that would make it impossible for even the most parochial of lawmakers to ignore the broader view.
There is such a movement. A group called “Education First” plans to dramatize the need to get serious about improving public schools by putting up interstate billboards that will welcome visitors to South Carolina, the “home of ‘minimally adequate’ education.” This will humiliate us all, and effectively dramatize the moral indignation of the sincere, well-meaning liberal Democrats who lead “Education First.”
Meanwhile, the State House is run by Republicans. Fortunately, many of those Republicans are more interested in public schools than the governor is, at least within the contexts of their own districts. Unfortunately, for them to become emboldened to risk themselves for a broader cause, they need to hear a message that sounds like it came from the people who elected them, and might elect them again.
So much for the political branches.
This state of affairs is not “mostly harmless” to South Carolina. Tragically, it is not even minimally so.

Here’s how we fail to understand each other

33 Replies

I got a very nice e-mail from a very nice person who was complimentary of my column Sunday, but then it went on to say something that seemed to perfectly illustrate the point of the column. Here’s the message:

Dear Brad,

I very much enjoyed and agree with your editorial
"Policy isn’t about personalities". However, is
this not the reason why The State (and the media
in general) ignores the FairTax? This plan will
unburden American citizens and businesses and
create economic prosperity by making US-made
products globally competitive. The benefits to our
country are enormous, so I must ask, is it the
proposal itself or is it because Neal Boortz
co-wrote the FairTax book and the legislation is
sponsored by a Republican? (This is what I have
been led to believe). As your column suggests,
ideas should not be judged based on who supports
them.

I welcome your comments.

And here was my response:

No and not. And now I have to ask you:
— Who is Neal Bortz? I’ve never heard of him.
— Why on Earth would you or anyone else have the impression that we would ignore something "because … the legislation is sponsored by a Republican." That’s bizarre.
With all due respect, I think your note is another illustration of my point. Only someone who thinks very differently from the way I do could think my interest in something could be turned on or off by an individual or the party associated with it. Those are alien concepts to me.
As far as the "Fair Tax" is concerned, is that the thing Jim DeMint was pushing back when he ran for the Senate? If so, we examined it pretty carefully at the time, and weren’t too crazy about it. No one has brought it up to me since then. I’ve been vaguely aware there was an effort out there to revive the idea — I think there was a meeting or something at the same time that everybody was busy with the GOP debate, and I saw a banner about it at the luncheon that Fred Thompson spoke at. That’s about all I know.

— Brad Warthen

So now I guess I’ll have to look up this Fair Tax thing at some point, and this Neal Bortz guy too (I mean "Boortz," Google corrected me, sorry for not reading the message more carefully), and I have no idea that I will find either particularly interesting. But I’ll look, when I get time. Right now, I’m processing e-mail. I provide the links so you can look, in case you have time today.

(Tomorrow Mike comes back, and I go back to being only a couple of people, instead of three or four.)

Policy isn’t about personalities. Or at least, it shouldn’t be

41 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LAST WEEK, I saw a clip from Martin Scorcese’s 2004 film about Howard Hughes, “The Aviator.” I had seen it before. But this time, I had a different reaction when Leonardo DiCaprio, as gazillionaire Hughes, went into a compulsive fit, helplessly repeating:
“Show me all the blueprints. Show me all the blueprints. Show me all the blueprints. SHOW ME ALL THE BLUEPRINTS….”
The first time, I thought, Whoa, that’s messed up. This time, I thought, I can identify….
Over the past weeks I’ve found myself saying something over and over — sounding just like Howard Hughes, only without the money:
“How we should proceed with regard to Iraq should not be determined by our opinion of President Bush. The best course in Iraq is not dependent upon personal regard for the president. Success in Iraq isn’t about Bush. Iraq isn’t about Bush. Iraq’s not about Bush. It’s not about Bush!”
Whether we should give Gen. David Petraeus more time to pursue his strategy that actually seems to be starting to work — whether a cause that Americans have fought and died for for more than four years will lead to a good result — is far more important than what we think or feel toward the guy in the White House.
Compared to this profoundly important strategic decision, it simply doesn’t matter whether you think Mr. Bush lied to you before the invasion (he didn’t) or whether he applied grossly inadequate policies and strategies over the next three years (he did).
Nor is it relevant that you think Dick Cheney must be what Darth Vader looks like without his helmet on (I’m not arguing with you there).
But listen to how every development of the “decision-making” (most of the participants decided a long time ago, of course) process in Washington is expressed. It’s always about Bush.
Democrats are said to be trying to deliver a setback to the president. John McCain is said to be steadfastly loyal to the president’s strategy (despite the fact that the “surge” was closer to his idea all along than to the Bush/Rumsfeld “do it cheap” approach). Dick Lugar is described as breaking with the president.
Folks, the president isn’t the one fighting and sacrificing and bleeding and dying for this cause. It’s some of the bravest young people this nation has ever produced. It’s also a few million ordinary Iraqis who, brave or not, don’t have anyplace else to go.
And as what I said a moment ago about the vice president suggests, not even this “not about Bush” rant I’m on is about Bush. It’s not even about Iraq. It’s more about whether a free people can govern themselves through a system of representative democracy. Not just in Iraq, but right here.
We’re personality-mad, from the people on the tabloids who are famous just for being famous (what is it that Paris Hilton does again?) to deciding which course history will take depending upon who suggested the direction.
Consider one of the most devastating arguments leveled against the late immigration bill — I mean, when critics got tired of saying “Grahamnesty” — Ted Kennedy’s for it. Whoa. OK. Case closed.
(Yes, I realize that, just as with Iraq, many people who rose up against the immigration bill have detailed, point-by-point arguments based on a careful, critical reading of all the available facts. But you know and I know that for some folks, “Teddy” was enough. That’s why we heard it so often.)
Sometimes, of course, a person is the issue. But even then, what’s most important to our society is what that person in the news represents in a larger sense. Thomas Ravenel’s drug problem, as described by his father, is a personal and family tragedy — and none of your or my business. But the indictment of the state treasurer, about whom the voters knew little beyond the fact that he photographed well, points to the serious flaw in our system for determining who’s going to hold our money for us.
It’s up to Tommy Moore whether he wants to be a state senator or work for the payday lending industry. Forget him. What the rest of us should think about is how much longer we’re going to tolerate our Legislature rolling over for special interests instead of acting in behalf of the greater good.
Finally, it’s not about Mark Sanford. Yes, he’s a pain with his ideology-over-reality shtick, up to the point that we endorsed Tommy Moore over him — even though our opinion of then-Sen. Moore was such that none of us was terribly shocked last week.
But when he says we should restructure government to make it accountable, he’s right. When he says you shouldn’t dictate local laws from the state level, he’s right. He’s right about a lot of stuff. But lawmakers take a particular delight in sticking it to Mark Sanford personally. Sure, he gives them cause, but that’s not what they’re there for.
South Carolina isn’t just about Mark Sanford.
I could go on and on about the problems with making political judgments personal, but let’s face a critical fact: Either you get my point by now, or you stopped reading about 20 inches ago because you don’t trust that stupid Brad Warthen anyway. In which case you just proved my point.

I just blew my chance to be on the Lehrer show

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