Category Archives: Columns

What do you mean by ‘choice?’

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So you’re for ‘school choice.’
What do you mean by that?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY likes “school choice,” it seems. S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex is for it. Gov. Mark Sanford is for it.
    Even my bishop, Robert Baker of the Diocese of Charleston, favors it, as he said in a letter
thatBishop
appeared in our bulletin at St. Peter’s Catholic Church 14 days ago.
    But look just a bit closer at what “school choice” means to each of them, and you find profound differences.
    Personally, I’m suspicious when any policy issue is summed up as a matter of “choice.” It often means that the people advocating the given position can’t sell it on its merits. They may be avoiding less palatable, but more descriptive, terms such as “abortion,” or “public subsidies for private schools.”
    But not always.
    Of course, the governor is pushing public subsidies for private schools.
    Mr. Rex seems to be clothing his proposed liberalization of school attendance rules in the “choice” mantle, at least in part, in order to head off the folks on the governor’s side.
    In last year’s election, he essentially said to the school privatization crowd: You want choice? I got your choice right here, in the public schools.
    Then, he trotted out his proposals in a press conference the day before the usual crowd unveiled its usual private-school-subsidy plan last week.
    Not that I don’t think Mr. Rex is sincere. He really does want to make it possible for parents to send their kids to the public schools of their choice. It’s an attractive idea.
    But the idea has its limitations. Richland District 2 — which already has a generous intradistrict “choice” policy — can’t make enough room when every child in Fairfield County wants to come on down. How will the state pay to transport those children, when — as is too often the case — their families can’t afford a car?
    The other side has the same problems. Even if we fantasize that an excellent, welcoming private school even exists in a poor, rural child’s county, and has space for him and his voucher — how’s he going to travel the 10 miles each day?
    I know Mr. Rex has thought about those things, by contrast with the private-school choice advocates. We’ll see how well he addresses them.
    The governor is sincere, too. He really does want to use tax money to pay people to desert public schools.
    I know my bishop is sincere. He believes parents should determine what sort of education their children receive, and that it’s important to provide an option for them that teaches Christian values. I agree completely.
    Where we differ is on whether it’s right to ask state taxpayers to subsidize Catholic education. I say no. We shouldn’t do that any more than we should ask the state to fund a new steeple for us.
    The bishop’s letter pretty much freaked me out, because it used rhetoric of the more extreme advocates of privatization. Worse, it urged Catholics to attend a rally those folks are holding at the State House on Tuesday.
    Since then, the bishop has assured me that he did not mean to back any movement that criticized or attacked public schools. And while he’s not withdrawing his support for the Catholic “choice,” you won’t see him at that rally.
    “I apologize for the tone of my letter,” he said, referring to portions that repeated the “South Carolinians for Responsible Government” mantra that “most of our children are not receiving a sound education” from public schools. “I would reword it” if he had it to do over, he told me Friday. He “would like to be seen as a respectful partner in dialogue” with public educators.
    He just wants people to be able to afford the Catholic option. The diocese closed a number of schools that served poor and minority communities back before he became bishop, and he’d like to reverse that trend.
    He would only seek state subsidies “for the working poor and people who are economically at the poverty level.” That’s just what Mark Sanford said he wanted when he ran for governor in 2002. But when out-of-state libertarian extremists started funneling vast sums of money into the state, he embraced their far more radical agenda, which has its roots in the notion that “government schools” are essentially a bad idea.
    My bishop doesn’t embrace that. Of course, I oppose even the more limited funding of Catholic schools with public money. If we Catholics want to provide education to the less fortunate — which we should do — we need to dig into our pockets and pay for that ministry ourselves.
    Jesus didn’t fund his ministry with the money St. Matthew had squeezed from the public as a tax collector. He didn’t take from the world; he gave. He told us to do likewise. We Catholics are far too stingy when the collection basket comes around, and that should change. We shouldn’t force Baptists, Jews, agnostics or anyone else to make up for our failing.
    Uh-oh; I’m preaching again.
    Another eminent Charlestonian told me he was concerned about the bishop’s letter, and kept meaning to say something to him, but hesitated because of his reluctance as a lifelong Catholic to tell his bishop what he ought to do.
    As a convert baptized at Thomas Memorial Baptist Church in Bennettsville, I was not so inhibited. I sort of went all Martin Luther on the bishop. That’s OK, he said: “You’re free to say you disagree.” Which I do. But not entirely. I’m glad we spoke.
    Bottom line: When somebody says they’re for “school choice,” ask for details. The differences are huge, and of critical importance to what kind of state we’re all going to live in.

For the bishop’s letter, my letter to him, and more, go to  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Fixing glitches

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We got my column up on line finally, but I was tied up in meetings and such most of the day, so I’m just now getting around to posting the link.

I haven’t posted it as a separate post on the blog, with links, because it repeats so much from the original post upon which it was based. There are some new bits, of course, plus the "Vote for Pedro" allusion in the headline of the print version (how many readers do you suppose got that?). If you want links to anything that’s in the column version, let me know. Otherwise, you can wait for such extra features for when the DVD comes out.

Meanwhile, I got a lot of feedback today from Rotary from people saying they wanted to join my party. Really; they said that. Of course, if the contributions don’t start flooding in pretty quickly, I’m going to suspect that some of them were just being polite.

Seriously, though, the face-to-face feedback I’ve received on my "extreme" proposals has been unusually positive. You know what this tells me? That if an elected leader — or someone aspiring to be an elected leader, would have the guts to step out and push for all these "politically impossible" solutions, the people just might respect that person enough to follow. But until somebody asks them to sacrifice, within the context of a coherent, no-fooling-around strategy for energy independence, they’re not gonna.

Finally, I would have had this up a little earlier, but Typepad was down for a while this afternoon. I would apologize to my loyal patrons for any inconvenience, but it strikes me that I’m not getting a dime out of this and y’all sure aren’t paying for it, so quitcher griping.

Reform gets fragged

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Reform gets fragged
in the S.C. Senate

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
“Here we are clinging to this antiquated system just like we clung to segregation, just like we clung to Jim Crow. I don’t mean to equate them, but in South Carolina it takes a long time to get over bad ideas.”
                                — Sen. Greg Gregory

ONCE AGAIN, the Senate has rejected the idea of letting voters decide whether they want to have a governor they can hold accountable for what state agencies do, or nine separate little governors pulling the state apart.
    Not all of the Senate, mind you. Just enough of them to ensure failure, to keep government fragmented so that it can’t ever get its act together.
    Whom can we hold accountable? Well, I can’t tell you. It was done in such a classic, befuddled manner that it is virtually impossible to fix blame. That, of course, is the hallmark of the Legislative State.
    We must applaud in spite of ourselves. It was a thing of great subtlety, even beauty, if you’re theSenate_003_1
sort who is turned on by stagnation: “The Senate, Now More Than Ever,” as the old bumper sticker said the last time senators deflected and diluted reform.
    It’s poetic. The problem with having the adjutant general, superintendent of education, agriculture commissioner, etc., all elected separately from the governor is that there is no coordination between their agencies and the rest of the state government. So when roads are falling apart, rural schools aren’t educating kids, prisons are about to burst, we have more state colleges than neighboring states but none as good as they do, and so forth, we can’t hold anybody responsible. (Is it any wonder so few South Carolinians bother to vote?)
    Some senators like fragmentation, so they “fragged” the plan to do away with it. And no one can tell who threw the grenade.
    A majority of senators voted to put the elected schools chief, the ag commissioner, the adjutant general and secretary of state on the chopping block — but they needed a two-thirds majority. Having the governor and lieutenant governor run on the same ticket didn’t even get 50 percent. The only office a sufficient number of senators were willing to risk a public vote on was comptroller general, and that’s just because he “asked for it.” Afterwards, even some of the reform-minded were saying, ah, what’s the use of changing just one of them. So we might not even get that. A true muddle.
    Just for fun, just so we can fully appreciate this ancient art, let’s try to fix blame (this will at least amuse the senators):

  • Start with the easy part: the 10 who didn’t support reform on any of the votes — Robert Ford, Darrell Jackson, John Land, Phil Leventis, Gerald Malloy, John Matthews, Yancey McGill, Kay Patterson, Clementa Pinckney and Glenn Reese. But others had to join with them, in shifting coalitions, to deny the supermajority in the half-dozen votes.
  • Was it Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, who had promised the governor a quick vote on the matter — and delivered just that, a vote without debate, held before the votes were lined up? He would be a prime suspect, given his history as a defender of legislative prerogative. Do we really believe that he of all people would have so mishandled the matter accidentally? But we can’t prove that, and must therefore give him credit for being sincere. People do change, you know.
  • Was it Senate Democrats, who have become convinced that the only statewide office a member of their party can aspire to is superintendent of education, and they don’t want to give that up? Or were the Dems just trying to stick it to a Republican governor? Well, all 10 above were Democrats, but the Senate just isn’t partisan enough to make it that simple. There were Republican “nays” on some votes. Besides, Vincent Sheheen voted for all the changes, and surely, he is a Democrat.
  • Maybe it was just the small-“d” democrats who believe that the people shouldn’t have the right to vote on every minor official taken away from them? Certain senators did wrap themselves in that. But it’s just not credible that they really believe it. Try this: Ask the next 10 voters you meet to name the nine statewide officers, and then ask yourself: If they don’t know who they are, how are they supposed to hold them accountable? The long ballot dilutes the will of the voters, and that’s the only thing it does efficiently. Besides, if you care so much about the people’s will, why won’t you at least let them vote on whether they want to change?
  • The Senate is more about personal relationships than about party. So-o-o … was it yet another case of friends of one constitutional officer making deals with the friends of other constitutional officers, plus senators who might themselves want to be constitutional officers someday, in order to get just barely a large-enough minority to kill the thing? That’s always worked in the past. But where do you grab ahold of that kind of multidirectional backscratching so you can stop it?

    Well, you don’t. You can’t. Truth is, you can’t blame any of the above causes, because it was most likely several of them, working together. You can’t blame any one phenomenon, party, faction or ego. If you try to fight it, you’ll be overwhelmed by Lilliputians before you decide which way to swing your sword.
    Now mind you, I’m not saying there should be any one person running the Senate (sorry, Sen. McConnell). A legislative body should represent and balance diverse views on the way to making laws.
    But an executive branch should not be that way. Once everybody’s had their say, and the law is a fact, somebody needs to be charged with carrying it out. At the point of execution, diverse interests are a distraction, an obstacle, a waste of money. We have all that and more in South Carolina.
And there’s nobody to blame — except maybe you, if you continue to sit still for this.

For how they all voted, click on this.

Asking the governor

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This is the audio of my effort to get the governor talking about the reform ideas that he and new Superintendent of Education Jim Rex have in common. I wrote about this in today’s column.

It was interesting for me to go back and listen to it. I had forgotten how long and hard I had pressed to get a few seconds of response from the governor — and what he did say was remarkably noncommital even by his standards. (My question took a minute-and-a-half to set up and ask; the governor answered vaguely for 15 seconds.)

Poor Tom Davis jumped in and talked and talked (for more than two minutes) after the governor stopped, and I had the impression he was consciously trying to make up for the governor’s apparent lack of interest in what is really a remarkable opportunity to achieve some dramatic reforms by reaching across party lines.

I remain hopeful, though. If the governor does decide to seize this chance, he should find a willing partner in Mr. Rex, who pretty much jumps at any opportunity to build bridges on these issues. For a little corroboration of that, check out this video from after the State of the State address. You can fast-forward through it; Mr. Rex is the last person interviewed by my sometime TV sidekick Andy Gobeil.

Sanford and Rex column

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Sanford, Rex should work together
on common reform goals

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
“I think there is a lot of common ground, and hopefully we’ll find it.”
    — Jim Rex,
    superintendent of education,
    on reform ideas that both he
    and Gov. Mark Sanford support

Gov. Mark Sanford is the most prominent advocate of converting South Carolina’s separately elected constitutional offices into Cabinet posts. He is also probably the biggest political impediment to such essential reform.
    One day after Sen. Glenn McConnell delivered
on his promise to get constitutional officers legislation out of committee, a Democratic senator said what so many have said before: He sees the merit in consolidating the executive branch, but the idea of giving the governor power to appoint the superintendent of education really gives him heartburn.
    And no wonder. This governor showed virtually no interest in our schools in his first term, beyond leading an all-out campaign to undermine taxpayer confidence in the very idea of public education, and pay parents to desert it.
    But that was then. Now, with a new term, and a new superintendent, there’s an opportunity for progress — if the governor (and the superintendent of education, but I’m less worried about him) will seize it.
    Based on what Mr. Sanford has said over the past four years, and what Jim Rex said during the 2006 campaign, there are significant reform ideas that both of them favor.
    If they are serious about these ideas, they should get behind them with all their might:

  • Merit pay for teachers. Mr. Rex has told teachers they’d better get used to the idea of being paid according to their performance, rather than just by the old standards of degrees and longevity. The governor has proposed that.
  • More educational “choice.” Mr. Rex, who has the support of the very forces who have most resisted the governor’s “choice” advocacy (which has unfortunately focused primarily on promoting private schools), wants parents to be able to choose the public schools their children attend.
  • Comprehensive tax reform. This would help beyond education, but it is essential to fixing the inequitable way schools are funded across the state.
  • School district consolidation. The governor would reduce the state’s wasteful, duplicative archipelago of 85 districts to one per county. Mr. Rex wouldn’t go that far — he suspects that some counties, such as Horry, are too big for a single administration — but he sees the need for some consolidation of districts, and certainly sharing services across district lines. There seems room for an alliance between them on at least the concept.

    The concept is simple common sense. Some of the worst schools in the state are in some of the tiniest, least rationally conceived, districts. There is a crying need for consolidation, and a fierce resistance that has kept the Legislature deaf to it.
    Ditto with the other ideas, which have been mightily resisted by what detractors call the “education establishment” — a constituency that lawmakers have been loathe to offend.
    But if both of these statewide elected officials really poured their considerable political capital — the governor was re-elected by the greatest margin in 16 years, and Mr. Rex has the almost total support of the most critical constituencies — into these fundamental reforms, our state could be transformed.
    That would, incidentally, also advance the idea of putting the state Department of Education — which presides over nearly half of state spending — where it should be, under the authority of future governors. Ironically, Mr. Rex actually opposes that. But if education advocates could for once see this governor publicly backing serious proposals for positive change, and see Mr. Rex behind those same ideas, they could be reassured that maybe the governor’s office isn’t an inherently destructive force.
    Can it happen? I don’t know. The governor has expended little energy on pushing these ideas in the past. For that matter, we’ve yet to confirm whether Mr. Rex is more than talk — and senior Sanford adviser Tom Davis has expressed doubts that the superintendent will be able to stand firm in the face of opposition within his own party.
    But so far Mr. Rex has been the guy pushing. He initiated a meeting with the governor several weeks ago. He says both “talked candidly about the belief that we had a lot of common ground.”
    “Yeah,” said the governor when I asked him about it. “We’ve had a couple of visits, and they’ve been pleasant, and um, I think productive. I like his style; he seems to be very matter of fact. Ummm. So, yeah.”
    When the governor went no further, Mr. Davis jumped in to say there was “tremendous opportunity” to work together on these issues. But the governor’s staff still seems to wonder how far Mr. Rex would go with them.
    If I were Mr. Rex, I’d be wondering to what degree the governor’s commitment exceeds lip service. But there’s one way for everyone to be sure: Come out together on these issues in a huge, public way, each binding the other with his unmistakable commitment.
    The governor was also friendly, in a noncommittal way, with Inez Tenenbaum at the start of his first term. But all that evaporated when he and well-funded out-of-state allies started attacking public schools outright in pushing his tax credit idea. “It was just all-out war after that,” Mrs. Tenenbaum recalls.
    If both the governor and the new superintendent would seize the chance to have a much more positive relationship than that, it would be good for Mark Sanford, good for Jim Rex, and very good for South Carolina.

Iraq “Surge” Column

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It’s a sound plan,
but Bush can’t sell it

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WE HAVE in place much of what we need to succeed in Iraq. We have a new, comprehensive plan that corrects many of the mistakes of the past three years. We have new leadership on the ground, in the form of a general who has shown that he knows what it takes to win this war.
    We just need a better salesman.
    If you saw and heard President Bush’s address to the nation live Wednesday night, and listened with an open mind, you probably still went away saying, “Huh? How is this going to improve the situation?”
    I’m glad that wasn’t my first impression. I missed the live broadcast. And before watching a replay of the Bush speech, I called U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.
    George W. Bush has two, and only two, virtues as our commander in chief: He understands, on some fundamental, gut level, how important it is that we succeed. And he won’t give up. Those are fine, but they’re not enough.
    We need someone in charge who is able to communicate to the nation why we need to be in Iraq, how we need to proceed, and why that course of action can work. He needs to persuade fair-minded people to believe him, and to follow.
    Of course, he has to have a good plan to start with. If I had heard him tell about it first, I would doubt that he does.
    In fairness, it helps if you start by asking the right question. The president was trying to talk to a nation that polls tell him is asking, “Why on Earth are you sending more troops?” I asked Sen. Graham, “Why on Earth do you think 20,000 will be enough?”
    Sen. Graham and his friend and ally Sen. John McCain have maintained that we need more troops in Iraq. The senator from Arizona has insisted that it needed to be a lot more. But Sen. Graham had indicated he was pleased with this smaller “surge.” Why? Because it’s a part, and not the largest part, of a comprehensive new approach that stresses diplomatic, economic and political initiatives.
    The military mission is specific: Put in enough troops to provide security in Baghdad and increase our muscle over on the Syrian border, in Anbar province.
    Here are some critical points related by Sen. Graham that the president failed to get across:

  • Tremendous pressure is being placed on the Shia-dominated Iraqi government to ensure Sunni leaders that their people will get their cut of the country’s oil wealth. Assure them that their tribe will not starve out in the cold, and you remove ordinary Sunni Arab insurgents’ motivation to kill Shiites. That removes the cloak of legitimacy from the Shiite militias, which their communities will no longer see as essential to their protection. Extremists — Shia and Sunni — become isolated. Neighbors start dropping a dime on IED factories. We destroy those, and we largely eliminate the cause of 80 percent of current U.S. casualties.
  • None of the above can happen without the capital being secure. How would such a small surge make that happen? It would double the U.S. combat capability in the capital, a force that would be multiplied by embedding the U.S. troops in the Iraqi units that will have the job of actually kicking down doors and cleaning up militant neighborhoods (one idea taken from the Iraq Study Group). As the president did mention, those neighborhoods will no longer be “off limits”; the Maliki government can no longer protect the Sadr militia.
  • The brigade sent to Anbar would have interdiction as a large part of its mission. Amazingly, we have never shut down the terrorist superhighway flowing out of Syria; this would address that.
  • The pivotal role of the new U.S. commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus. Sen. Graham describes the plan not as what President Bush wants to do, but what Gen. Petraeus wants to do. He doesn’t say Congress needs to listen to the president. He says “Listen to this new general; give him a chance to make the case.”

    Who is David Petraeus? He’s a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. from Princeton. He’s the former commander of the 101st Airborne Division. Under his command, the 101st was described by the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq as the one Army outfit that was doing it right — providing security in its area, and winning hearts and minds. The general himself is the author of the Army’s new manual on counterinsurgency, which applies practical tactics that work.
    The president didn’t do an awful job in his speech. He explained how things went wrong, emphasizing the critical bombing of the Golden Mosque. He mentioned increased diplomatic efforts, the fact that we need to hold as well as clear dangerous areas, and that troops will now go wherever they need to go to get the job done. He let us know that even if things go perfectly, there will be more casualties.
    But a wartime president who has lost the people’s trust to the degree that he has needed to go a lot farther, and the president did not. He failed to draw a clear, bright line between his past failure and a future in which we have a realistic expectation of success.
    Why the president didn’t even mention the name “Petraeus,” explaining what a departure he was from the discredited Rumsfeld approach, is beyond me.
    After talking to Sen. Graham, I feel a lot better about our future in Iraq. I’m still not positive that six brigades is enough, but I now have sound reasons to believe we’re finally on a better track.
    I’ve put a recording of that interview on my blog. I urge you to go listen to it — and don’t miss the senator’s column on the facing page.

For that, and observations on last week’s inaugural activities, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Low expectations column

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Living with low expectations
in the Palmetto State

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SHORTLY AFTER midnight, at the weary outset of Friday morning, a heavy-set woman stood outside the elaborate revolving doors of the Palmetto Health Richland emergency department, smoking a cigarette.
    She tilted her head at the sound of a distant siren, the volume and Doppler effect indicating its rapid approach.
    “Here they come again,” she said with resignation. “They bring in another one, we go to the back of the line.”
    I was standing nearby, preferring the mists of the night to the unwholesome miasma of the packed waiting room. A few moments earlier, I had used the last few drops of energy in my PDA to post this brief comment on my blog (hey, as a distraction it beats ragged old copies of People):
    I’m standing outside a hospital ER at 11:52 p.m., waiting for MY turn to go in and see my daughter, hoping they’ve started the IV that I’m pretty sure she needs (you know how it is in a state that refuses to adequately fund mental health or other essential services — if you have an emergency, you’ll be treated in a hallway if you’re lucky enough to get treated at all)….
    In the hallway, she could only have one visitor at a time. She eventually got into a room, receiving about four liters of fluid, and got stronger. I’ve got no complaints at this point about her treatment — certainly not against Palmetto Richland. The crowding at Lexington Medical had been worse. It was the worst I’d ever seen it, and with five mostly grown kids, I’ve seen it a few times. So we were at Richland.
    It’s not the fault of either hospital. It’s just a fact of life in South Carolina. Like the woman with the cigarette, we’ve come to accept it. Go to an emergency room on a typical evening, and if you’re not bleeding out your eyeballs, you’ll generally have a long wait. My experience tells me that if, for instance, you need some stitches and a tetanus shot but don’t have anything life-threatening, you should not be surprised to wait as long as four hours. It’s not always that long, but you’re no longer surprised if it is.
    (My daughter was “lucky” in that she obviously needed quick treatment for dehydration caused by a two-day stomach bug.)
    I don’t know, specifically, what caused the backlogs of Friday’s wee hours. I suppose if I had about a month and could get around the HIPAA privacy rules and track down every patient and interview them, I could give you a reliable answer.
    But I do know that there is a constant, underlying condition in this state that causes ER waiting rooms to overflow whenever other human variables — a rash of wrecks on a slippery night, a stomach virus going around — collide with it: Hospital beds are occupied by the mentally ill, who are often found on the streets, off their meds, and police have no other place to put them, their jail cells being full of actual criminals.
    The variables may be hard to pin down in a specific instance, but that one constant is not.
    “It’ll happen the same way tomorrow night and the night after that,” says Thornton Kirby, president and CEO of the S.C. Hospital Association. But there are two constants, not one, he reminded me. The second is the fact that so many uninsured people go to the emergency room for their basic medical care, not just when they’re in crisis. As the sign behind the desk at the Richland ER proclaims, in both English and Spanish, the hospital is forbidden by law to turn you away if you need medical care. Regardless of your ability to pay, the medicos have to do what they can for you.
    That second constant is a national problem, although the responsibility for it is shared by the states, via Medicaid funding and administration. The first one seems to be particularly acute in South Carolina. It’s related to the underfunding of the state Department of Mental Health over the last few years. People with brain problems who formerly would have received greater attention and care from the state now wander our cities, seriously strung out, a danger to themselves and others.
    So eventually they end up in an ER — quite likely at a comprehensive indigent care facility such as Richland — where they wait for someone to figure out something else to do with them. That can take a while.
    So the rest of us, when we have a situation that won’t wait until regular doctors open shop in the morning, find ourselves waiting much of the night, and accepting it, because that’s the way things are in South Carolina.
    We accept it the way we accept people whizzing past us at 90 miles an hour on the interstate (or faster, in the case of the lieutenant governor), secure in the knowledge that they will not be ticketed. There simply aren’t nearly enough troopers on the road to enforce the speed limits, and everybody who didn’t just fall out of the stupid tree knows it. This is because the folks who make up our state budget haven’t stepped up to pay for such enforcement.
    But hey, rest assured that when a loud minority of homeowners whose McMansions are appreciating too rapidly squeal about it, our state lawmakers take quick action to slash their taxes radically — by raising the sales tax on all of us, but refusing as usual to reform the overall tax system comprehensively, to make it fair and effective for a change.
    They can’t assess the state’s actual needs, set priorities and address them, but they can surely lubricate a squeaky wheel in one quick hurry — just in time for elections, in fact.
With our elected followers set to come back and do their thing for another half-year starting Tuesday, I stand out in the misty night, thinking about stuff like that.

Column on Lee Bandy

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Bandy1
Lee Bandy at work in his hotel room at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.

Lee Bandy, the fairest of us all

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LOOKING AROUND at a crowd of journalists, I gestured to Lee Bandy and said, “This is the fairest guy in the room.”
    Like Snow White’s stepmother, scribes generally don’t like to hear that anyone is fairer than they. But no one disputed the point, as all present had gathered to bid a fond farewell to Bandy as he retired after 40 years of remarkable service to this newspaper and its readers.
    I was Lee’s editor when I first came to this newspaper almost 20 years ago. I was young enough and arrogant enough not to be intimidated — as I should have been — at the thought of supervising a man who had been covering Washington since the Kennedy administration. That was OK with Lee; he tolerated me. He tolerated everybody, and enjoyed the company of the human race in general. He still does.
    That’s not the only way in which he stood out from the rest of us scribblers. He was also completely fair and impartial. Sure, all of us are, yadda-yadda, but he really was, and many people found it disconcerting.
    One of the first things I was told about Lee Bandy was that he was a Republican. It had to be true, because Democrats kept telling me so over and over.
    As you can guess, I watched him closely as a result. In my nine years as an editor at two other newspapers I had known one other reporter who was a Republican — he made no bones about it, so I’m not casting aspersions — and he ended up leaving us to become press secretary to a newly elected GOP congressman. Next thing you know he was wearing fancy suits and suspenders; he’s now a lobbyist.
    Not wanting to risk another such ugly episode, I was extra careful with Mr. Bandy’s copy. Strangely, though, I never found any evidence that he skewed Republican. He seemed to be scrupulously fair to all his subjects.
    That, apparently, was what had aroused the suspicion of S.C. Democrats. They were still in the majority. Not long before, there hadn’t been anything in the state but Democrats, so anything having to do with these newfangled Republican critters seemed unnatural and made them wary. The fact that Lee Bandy was just as fair to Republicans as he was to normal people made them think he must be one of them.
    But he wasn’t, believe me. I had edited other political writers over the years who were routinely fair to Republicans, and I had worked with that one actual Republican, so I knew the difference.
You can see why Democrats wondered, though. Republicans on the national and state levels actually trusted Lee Bandy, and this made him conspicuous. When Lee Atwater, Democrats’ ultimate bete noir (before W. and Rove), contracted cancer, he would only speak to one reporter in Washington or anywhere else — Bandy.
    Years later, when former Gov. Carroll Campbell revealed that he had Alzheimer’s, Lee Bandy was the only one he wanted to tell the story. That would seem to indict him permanently as a Republican, or at best a friend of Republicans, if not for one thing:
    By this time, the conventional “wisdom” had shifted. Now, it was common knowledge among Republicans everywhere that Lee Bandy  was a dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant, proselytizing, big-government-loving, yellow-dog left-leaning liberal Democrat, and probably a socialist.
    I have learned this unassailable truth from letters to the editor in recent years. If you’re a regular reader, you know exactly what I’m talking about. In fact, you were probably disoriented by the first part of this column, unless you’re an old-timer like Lee. Your younger, or more recently converted, Republicans would just as soon vote to restore welfare as we used to know it as believe that Lee Bandy could possibly be one of them.
    What changed? Nothing. Lee’s great sin was that he was just as fair to the now-despised minority Democrats as he had been to Republicans back when they were little more than an oddity.
    What hadn’t changed was that he was still the pre-eminent political writer of South Carolina’s largest newspaper — its capital city newspaper — which magnified his sin of being fair and magnanimous to those whom the partisan majority of the moment would prefer to see him despise.
    Lee can’t help it. That’s just the way he is. He likes people, and he’s nice to them. Don’t ask me to explain how a guy like that kept a newspaper job for 40 years. It’s unnatural, but there it is.
    We’ll miss you, Lee.

Bandy2

The Manly Art of last-minute shopping

5 Replies

Big game shopping with
Conan the Contrarian

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“For years to come, the simple merchant folk of Columbiana will speak of this day, and their voices will be filled with awe,” I announced to my household as I strutted back and forth.
    My household rolled its eyes. But I was not to be gainsaid, nor was my glory to be denied. I had just returned from a good, clean shop, the sort of shop that makes a shopping man proud to be what he is. I had gone, I had seen, I had shopped, and no one could take that away.
    There are those who derogate the virtues of shopping, especially at this time of year. My friend and comrade Mike Fitts did so on this very page not three days hence. But he is to be forgiven; he has been woefully misled.
    There are other men — I spoke to one just recently — who wrongly hold that shopping is properly the work of women. What an abominable falsehood! It denies our hunter-gatherer heritage. Those who propagate it have forgotten the visceral joys of the hunt.
    Now the gathering, I grant you, can just as easily be accomplished by women. I would not say otherwise. But the shop itself? It requires certain atavistic reflexes that come only with the Y chromosome. Or two of them, in the case of the great shoppers. It demands strength, agility, a lack of fear, and an innate ability to manipulate objects in space and time.
    Forgive me; I boast. But my satisfaction is great. There is something about a good shop that draws upon testosterone, releases endorphins, dilates pupils, opens breathing passages, and makes a man speak boldly in the cadences of Conan the Barbarian.
    Which, out of mercy to you, I will now stop doing.
    What’s wrong with enjoying the raw challenge of shopping?
    I know: Christmas shouldn’t be commercialized. In fact, this isn’t even Christmas season yet, except in the minds of those of us brainwashed by merchandisers. This is Advent. I’m Catholic, and I can read a liturgical calendar.
    This is supposed to be a quiet, contemplative time of prayerful anticipation, and for me at least, it never works out that way, for which I feel appropriately guilty. How bad is it? This bad: I was so busy I didn’t go to the special Advent reconciliation service at my church Tuesday, at which I had planned to confess that once again, I had failed to be contemplatively prayerful this month. (So in lieu of that, I confess it to you, my brothers and sisters.)
    And yes, it’s really bad for people to get all greedy and acquisitive, and to claw and tear at each other in the struggle to obtain one of a limited supply of something that nobody had heard of a month ago, and without which billions of people have lived happy, fulfilling lives.
    But I’m not going to buy one of those. What I am going to do is be honest, and admit that I enjoy the hunt —  the shop.
    In many ways, I am not a regular guy. I hate football. No, I don’t mean I’m not interested in it; I actively hate it.  And yet I don’t hate it as much as “Reality TV,” and look how popular that is. What’s wrong with me?
    But when it comes to shopping, I am at one with the zeitgeist. At least, I think I am. So many people complain about having to do it that I wonder. I guess it intimidates them.
    But it’s not the shopping itself they fear; it’s the hassle. I’ve never been to war, but if I had to, I think the part I would dread the most would not be the short periods of getting shot at. It would be the months of training, away from home, living in foxholes, not bathing, freezing or roasting, eating MREs, living cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of other smelly guys and standing in line to use the latrine: The hassle.
    Shopping can be like that. But it also has its moments of adrenaline rush that make you glad you got out there amongst ’em rather than staying home and ordering gifts from the Web.
    Hey, it’s OK to be afraid, kid; we all are. But it’s what you do in spite of your fear that makes the difference.
    Before heading out to Harbison last weekend, I groaned as I beheld my list. Why me, I moaned. But there was no question that the time had arrived to begin — all the ads said “Last-minute Gift Ideas,” and that’s a sure sign.
    So I made my plans, girded myself, and headed out. And once I was in it, I was in it all the way. Wham! I hit Dutch Square long enough to exchange something that was the wrong size, pick up a couple of other things, and then Bam! slipped into Harbison the back way, evading the congested paths, my mind going at light speed improvising the best, the fastest path to the kill. I pulled into the alley behind PetSmart, left my vehicle next to the dumpster (parking lots are for amateurs), ran in a crouch through the landscaping at the side of the strip, all senses at full alert, and Pow! was into Michael’s and out with the item I had come for, slipping swiftly back to the alley before anyone could ask, “May I help you?” Then back into the car, down the alley the back way to Barnes & Noble (encountering not a single opposing vehicle), where Bam! Bam! BambamBAM! I bought five gifts in as many minutes, and was off, infiltrating the very citadel of capitalism itself — the holy of holies, the Mall — before Harbison had even awakened to my presence… pant, pant. Less than an hour had passed since I had left the house.
    Now that’s what I call shopping. Yes! You know it! You have to attack, grab the initiative and maintain it, never giving those who would stop you a chance. If you slow down, you’re finished.
    OK, OK, I know this is stupid, and now you’re ticked off that you’ve read this far, but here’s my point: You’ve got to do it anyway. Christmas is Monday. You might as well enjoy it. Be a man. Get out there. Show us how it’s done.

Draft column

162 Replies

Why doesn’t Uncle Sam want me?
Or you, for that matter

   

It was the first American army and an army of everyone, men of every size and shape and makeup, different colors, different nationalities, different ways of talking, and all degrees of physical condition. Many were missing teeth or fingers, pitted by smallpox or scarred by past wars or the all-too-common hazards of life and toil in the eighteenth century.

— 1776, by David McCullough

My first ambition in life was to be a United States Marine. I was 3 or 4 years old and we lived in Columbia, where my Dad — a career naval officer — was doing a brief tour at the local recruiting depot. I guess the posters made an impression.
    The aspiration never went away, even as I moved on to more achievable goals. I learned that neither the Corps nor the Army nor any other service would take me. They had this thing about people with asthma.
    I accepted it, but couldn’t help thinking, “There’s got to be some way they could use me.”
But no. As long as there was a Selective Service, there was a huge supply of young guys with no black marks on their medical histories. And in the initial decades after the draft ended, the nation’s military needs were met by volunteers.
    But not any more.
    Today, the Army and the Marine Corps need recruits. The Army has increased the maximum age to 42. Not high enough for me, but it’s a start.
    The Washington Post reported just last week that the services plan to ask new Defense Secretary Robert Gates for 30,000 more soldiers and three more Marine battalions. Unlike his predecessor, he might actually say “yes.”
    But where’s he going to get them? Here’s one place:
    The Post reported that in addition to seeking those regulars, “the Army will press hard for ‘full access’ to the 346,000-strong Army National Guard and the 196,000-strong Army Reserves by asking Gates to take the politically sensitive step of easing the Pentagon restrictions on the frequency and duration of involuntary call-ups for reservists, according to two senior Army officials.”
    The post-Vietnam military has been highly resistant to the idea of a draft. Draftees are harder to motivate, train and rely on than volunteers. A positive attitude counts for a lot under combat conditions. But what do you call “involuntary call-ups” if not a draft? Some of those people are older than I am, and some are in worse physical condition.
    Sure, they’re much less likely to complain about being called up, since they volunteered originally. I realize that they are already trained, and generally more experienced than the regulars. I understand that veterans tend to be more valuable in combat than green troops. Experience counts in everything.
    But it’s wrong to keep asking the same brave people to give and give and give until they’ve got nothing left. It’s even more wrong that the rest of us haven’t been asked to do anything.
    Sen. Joe Biden has this speech that I’ve heard three or four times now about how George W. Bush’s greatest failing as president is the opportunity he threw away in 2001. On Sept. 12, he could have asked us to change our lives so that we could be independent of the oil-producing thugs that finance terrorism. We would have done it gladly.
    But we weren’t asked to do that. We were given a free pass while our very best bled and died in our behalf. We weren’t even asked to buy war bonds. To our everlasting shame, we opted for the opposite — we got tax cuts, even as our troops went without the equipment and the reinforcements needed to do the job.
    Personally, I think we should have a draft, and not for Rep. Charles Rangel’s reasons. He seems to think that if more people were subject to a draft, we’d have no wars. I think we ought to have a draft for the simple reason that citizenship ought to cost something. We scorn illegal aliens who risk their lives crossing the desert to come here and do our menial labor, but the rest of us are citizens why — because we were born here? How is that fair?
    We ought to have a draft, but not like the one we had when I was a kid. We need a universal draft, one that will find a use for every man (I wouldn’t draft women, but we can argue about that later).
    Set aside for a moment (but not for long) our immediate, urgent need for a lot more boots on the ground. Even in peacetime, veterans make better citizens, and better leaders. The last generation of leaders had the experience of World War II in common, and we were better off for it. They understood that they were Americans first, and that it was possible to work with people who didn’t think the way they did. They knew citizenship was a precious thing, and they appreciated it as a result. How many people in the top echelons of politics — or the media, for that matter — have that kind of understanding to that degree? Far too few.
    If we’re not going to have a draft, why not let more people who actually want to serve do so, at least in some capacity? Sure, I’m 53 and I take five different drugs to keep me breathing, but fitness is relative — my pulse, blood pressure and cholesterol are all great, and I can do 30 push-ups. Try me.
    A postscript: It reads like I’m setting myself up as far braver than Bill Clinton and his ilk. I don’t mean to. If I had been healthier when I was younger, I might have been the biggest coward in Ontario. If the Army were taking 53-year-olds today, I might shut up. I have no idea. All I can do is write what I actually think, as I actually am.
    And what I think is that more of us have to get off the sidelines and do something to help fight this war, which is going to go on for a long, long time, no matter what happens in Iraq.

Iraq Study Group column

46 Replies

Consensus on an Iraq plan
that works will come a lot harder

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THAT OLD GUARD sure can get things done — so long as you don’t expect too much.
    On the very day that the Iraq Study Group released its much-anticipated report, it produced results. Politicians from across the spectrum aligned themselves with a bipartisan unanimity that would do credit to the worthies on the study panel itself.
    “I appreciate the hard work and thought that the distinguished members of the Iraq Study Group put into their final report,” said Sen. John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful.
    “The Baker-Hamilton report is a first step toward a bipartisan way forward in Iraq,” wrote Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat who would also like to occupy the White House.
    “I commend the Iraq Study Group for offering a serious contribution to the discussion of how we should move forward in Iraq,” concurred independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who used to want to be president.
    The man who actually is the president couldn’t have agreed more. After noting that the report was “prepared by a distinguished panel of our fellow citizens,” George W. Bush promised it “will be taken very seriously by this administration.”
    No one could deny that the panel was distinguished. And bipartisan. And serious.
    But before we line up for the victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, note that few elected representatives were promising more with regard to the report than what Rep. Jim Clyburn promised: “We will use it for what it is intended to be — recommendations… .”
    Many expected the group’s report would provide cover for both the president and the newly Democratic Congress to… well, to do something, and the most popular “something” was to get us the heck out of there.
    But the release of the group’s report helped clarify again what we learned in the days after the election that many of our antsier citizens had hoped would settle this business: There is no way to conclude our involvement in Iraq that is both quick and satisfactory.
    The 10 elders on that panel brought some sorely needed qualities to the debate — collegiality, maturity, pragmatism and a sincere desire for what is best for our country. The nation will be well-served if everyone involved adopts those same virtues as the debate continues.
    And the job will be a lot tougher than the panel made it look. They labored in obscurity, left in relative peace for most of the panel’s existence — without the frantic, insistent pull of unavoidable constituent groups. Our elected officials won’t enjoy such luxury. But it is, after all, their job to do. It can’t be delegated.
    And approaches that will work will be harder to agree upon than the ones the panel adopted.
Take the widely reported proposal to draw down U.S. combat troops by early 2008 to the point that none are left except those “embedded with Iraqi forces.”
    According to The New York Times, the panel achieved the miracle of agreement on that point via a simple expedient: “The group’s final military recommendations were not discussed with the retired officers who serve on the group’s Military Senior Adviser Panel before publication, several of those officers said.”
    Advisers that the Times spoke to said the prediction is not based in reality. One noted that the panel’s assumption says more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”
    Not that the panel didn’t leave wiggle-room. Few have noted that the 142-page report actually says that “all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq” by the stated deadline. That’s a loophole big enough to drive several divisions through, if you can find the divisions.
    As for working with Iran and Syria, Sen. McCain exhibited his mastery of understatement when he said, “Our interests in Iraq diverge significantly from those of Damascus and Tehran.” Sen. Lieberman and others have rightly echoed that assessment.
    The panel leaders’ defense of the idea has been lame. James Baker said if Iran is uncooperative, “we will hold them up to public scrutiny as (a) rejectionist state.” Ooh. I can just see the mullahs trembling over that one.
    Lee Hamilton said, “We do not think it’s in the Iranian interest for the American policy to fail completely, and to lead to chaos in that country.” Really? It’s hard to imagine an outcome more likely to generate welcome opportunities for Tehran. A weakened, discredited United States and a power vacuum in the Shi’a-majority nation next door? They would see it as final proof that Allah is on their side.
    The fundamental truths about our involvement in Iraq have not changed. The security situation has worsened greatly, and with it the political environment back in the United States — the “absence of political will” described above by retired Army Chief of Staff Jack Keane.
    Well, we’re going to have to muster some to come up with something more realistic than the Baker-Hamilton approach, because here’s what hasn’t changed: As Sen. Lieberman put it, “There is no alternative to success in Iraq.” Sen. Graham said, “we have no alternative but to win.”
    And how are we going to accomplish that? I’m inclined to think Sen. McCain has it right when he says we need a lot more troops over there. You say it’s impossible to make that happen with our current defeatist attitude? You may be right.
    But note that on Wednesday, it was the conventional wisdom that the president and Congress had little choice but to embrace whatever the study group came up with. By Friday, many of its core proposals had been declared toast by the president, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and most of the folks quoted above.
    As unlikely as it sometimes seems, attitudes change. In this case, they’re going to have to.

Washington’s Iraq situation

64 Replies

Hadley

Is a stable, functioning democracy
still an option — in America?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE IRAQ SITUATION has become so chaotic, such a tangled knot of irreconcilable competing factions and contradictory indications that it’s almost impossible even to know what’s really going on, much less determine what ought to happen next.
    The great moment of optimism following historic elections has faded. It’s bad enough to tempt even the most stalwart advocate of democracy to want to declare the capital city a lost cause and withdraw immediately.
    But we can’t, because we’re not talking about Baghdad, but about Washington.
    In that strife-torn city by the Potomac, it’s gotten hard to tell who wants to do what, much less what will or should happen next, or when. Confused? Well, that means you’re starting to get it.
    Look at just one development of the past week.
    On Wednesday — the eve of President Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — the lead story in The New York Times was headlined, “Bush Adviser’s Memo Cites Doubts about Iraqi Leader.”
    “His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans,” National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley wrote of Mr. Maliki, “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”
    In other words, our boy either can’t deliver or won’t. Bad either way. But, insisted the “administration official” who gave the five-page memo to a Times reporter despite its being “classified secret,” the administration “retains confidence in the Iraqi leader.”
    The very fact that the memo was released the way it was and when it was (weeks after it was drafted) suggests just how difficult it will be to chart a new course for Iraq, even while everybody from newly elected Democrats to administration officials to friends of the president’s daddy are trying like crazy to find one.
    Read about the memo, and the following thoughts are likely to occur in quick succession:
    Oh, there goes The New York Times again, undermining the nation’s ability to act effectively in a time of war by revealing critical secrets at critical moments. No, wait — this looks like an authorized, carefully spun leak. So the administration deliberately put it out there just as the president is about to meet with this guy to tell him he’s doing a heckuva job.
    Little wonder Mr. Maliki canceled the first of his scheduled sessions with the president. He has no more confidence in our friendship than we do in his.
    Obviously, the administration doesn’t know what to do next. But it’s hardly alone. Nobody else seems to know either (except the folks in the “pull-out-now” wing, whom you can watch get increasingly furious over the coming weeks as they realize that the Democrats who won the election aren’t that irresponsible).
    The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t know, although he insisted to the Columbia Rotary Club last week that he’s the one guy who does know.
Joe Biden told of confidently laying down the law to Mr. Bush:
    “Mr. President… if the Lord Almighty came down in the middle of the table here in the RooseveltPhoto_112706_001
Room, and looked you in the eye and said, ‘Mr. President, every single jihadi, every single member of al Qaida has been wiped off the face of the earth,’ Mr. President, you’d still have a full-blown war. A full-blown war. In Iraq. And it’s a civil war, Mr. President. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to…” etc.
    But most of what he had to say about Iraq was stuff we already knew: The factions must find a way to work together and trust each other (or at least check each other, via a loose federal system), we won’t solve it through military force alone, and so forth.
    He wants to start drawing down U.S. troops sometime soon, but he sets no deadlines. Why? He understands the stakes too well.
    Back to the Times: A news analysis on Friday concluded that “the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option” — certainly within the administration, but also among some key Democrats.
    More importantly, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that so many who want out have pinned their hopes on apparently will avoid timetables as well. I say “apparently” because the group hasn’t released its report yet — all that authoritative prattling you’ve been hearing has been based on leaks.
    So what do we do from here? As Sen. Biden told the Rotarians, when it comes to Iraq, “We’re gonna have to choose to hang together, or we’re all going to hang separately.”
    The factions in Washington seem to find it as hard to work together as do those in Iraq — even without all that literal bad blood. To be sure, there is a common drift — among Democrats and on the study group — toward a vague plan that talks about redeployment, but sets no timetable.
    That’s hardly a firm consensus on a clear course. One thing is clear, though: As various factors — the study group’s report, the administration’s reassessment, the convening of a Democratic Congress — converge in the coming weeks, we have to come up with something that we can agree upon, and that works.
    President Bush will have to listen to people he doesn’t want to listen to, and then those people are going to have to unite behind him — as distasteful as that will be for them — as everyone works to implement a course that won’t entirely please anybody.
    Sound impossible? Perhaps so. But either those things happen, or we might as well kiss this whole risky nation-building enterprise goodbye.
    And once again, I’m not talking about Iraq. I mean this shaky republican experiment called the United States of America.

Standards column

15 Replies

Oj

Could standards, of all things,
be making a comeback?

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
STANDARDS are making a comeback. We may be able to get a civilization going here after all. You doubt me? I have several reasons for my optimism:
    We’ll begin with a trivial matter. The New York Times carried an essay last week from a senior physician wringing her hands about the inappropriate attire worn by young doctors today.
    “Every day, it seems, I see a bit of midriff here, a plunging neckline there,” she fretted. “Open-toed sandals, displaying brightly manicured toes, seem ubiquitous.”
    She thought it was because she worked in Miami, but colleagues elsewhere assure her it’s a nationwide epidemic, from unshaven male interns in T-shirts, to females with plunging necklines.
“One colleague commented that a particularly statuesque student ‘must have thought all her male patients were having strokes’ when she walked in their exam room wearing a low-cut top and a miniskirt.”
    I’ve never seen a doctor like that myself, although I’ve seen an actress play one on TV. But I agree that it’s far better for patients to have confidence in the seriousness of one into whose hands they place their lives.
    I recently saw a new specialist about a chronic sinus thing, and I recall being reassured by his attire. He took propriety to places it had not been since about 1955. He had on the white coat, of course (take note, Dr. House), which helped set off his bow tie. But what made the costume was the proverbial reflector on a headband. It was so wonderfully nerdy, it helped me forget his otherwise unforgivable youth. So good for him. I’m quite sure he would never wear open-toed shoes.
    It’s good that some doctors are worrying about the small things that provide us with little touchstones of order amid the chaos of life in 2006. The essayist’s employer, the University of Miami, has a dress code specifying “that students have hair ‘of a natural human color,’ among other things.” That’s got to be tough to enforce. But it’s worth trying.
    On a more sensational front, someone stood up for standards last week in a way that defied belief: That it was Rupert Murdoch elevates this particular miracle to biblical, Cecil B. DeMille proportions.
    A lot of people had shaken their heads and looked away, certain that the plan for a book and a TV special in which O.J. Simpson would tell us how he killed his wife — while pretending that he was speaking hypothetically — was just another incident in our society’s inevitable slide into utter shamelessness. First reality TV, now this. Nothing to be done.
    But fortunately, others hadn’t given up right and wrong, and they raised enough ruckus that Mr. Sleaze himself backed off — canceled the book, the TV show, the whole grotesque mess. My own mother had told me to call the local Fox affiliate and tell them they shouldn’t air the TV part of the spectacle.
    I didn’t do it, but plenty of others did, and good for them. It gives me hope I didn’t have. Next thing you know, shame will actually make a comeback in America. Not that O.J. will ever feel any, but it’s not too late for the rest of us.
    “Seinfeld” was about something: Shallowness. That was the running gag, and it worked wonderfully. Everything in life, big and little, was a joke. Comedic conflict centered around the failure of the four central characters to be sufficiently serious and respectful of the things that mattered in life: Yadda-yadda.
    So it’s little wonder that when Jerry Seinfeld arranged for his friend to apologize on the Letterman show for his outrageous behavior at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles a few nights earlier, some in the studio audience took it at first as a gag. Mr. Seinfeld had to interject to say that Michael Richards’ words of abject regret were not meant to be funny.
    And nothing about it was funny. Mr. Richards, better known as “Cosmo Kramer,” had loosed an obscenity-laced barrage of racist insults at some black hecklers. You can see a cell-phone video of it on the Internet. Warning: It’s profoundly unpleasant. It’s as though “Kramer” had taken his Jedi-class frenetic eccentricity over to the Dark Side. A human being self-destructs with loathing on a stage, and perhaps the most disturbing aspect is that some people kept trying to laugh. They had paid good money to be amused, and were slow to adjust.
    Some of you out there will write or call to say the hecklers are just as much to blame. Well, hecklers are a pretty low life form, and while I can’t hear much of what they said, these don’t seem to be much of an exception. But Mr. Richards was the one with the microphone. Listen to how he responded to that routine hazard of his profession on this occasion, and ask yourself whether you could ever justify reacting as he did. If you can, seek counseling.
    That’s exactly what “Kramer” needs to do, because a public “sorry” doesn’t cure the things that lie behind that kind of rage.
    It would be easy to dismiss his mea culpa entirely: A has-been comic tries to salvage what’s left of his career by offering a big dose of schmaltz to the gods of political correctness. But forget the politics. This is a guy who lost it to the point of stepping outside all the bounds — and he knows it, Jerry Seinfeld knows it, and so does David Letterman.
    I appreciate comedy, and “Seinfeld” provided some of the best. But when the funnymen can sober up long enough to say, “This goes too far,” it helps us all be a little more civilized.

Kramerjesse

Never give up column

67 Replies

Flagsiraq

We can’t cut and run from
our public schools (or Iraq, either)

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE CRITICS SEE themselves as realists, and can’t imagine why those of us who believe we must continue to slog on refuse to see things as they are.
    The whole thing is futile, they say, and it would be madness to keep sacrificing billions of dollars, much less all those fine young people, on our stubborn hubris.
    Don’t we know that “those people” will never embrace the opportunity we’ve sacrificed so much in order to give them? Chalk it up to DNA, or simply growing up in horrific poverty and having never known any other way. Either way, we’re wasting our time.
Karenpost
    Look at the generations — the centuries — of culture and tragic history that we’re presuming to overturn.
    It would be better, they say, to begin a phased withdrawal.
    The more sensible among us over in the “never say die” camp — those of us who believe we would be sacrificing our society’s future to cut and run — agree that mistakes were made. But rather than put it in such passive, Reaganesque terms, we know whom to blame. We are appalled at the “stay the course” fanatics who dig in their heels against new tactics.
    We want new approaches — but in the pursuit of success, not surrender. The odds are long, we know. Progress is slow, and sometimes — such as in recent weeks — it doesn’t look like progress at all. We see how it could look to some as though our best efforts have led to nothing but ruined lives and wasted money.
    To keep going takes determination, resolve, and a practically Churchillian refusal to give up.
    Of course, we’re talking about public education in South Carolina. Oh, you thought this was about the war in Iraq? Fine, because it is. I see both struggles in the same terms:

It’s not optional. South Carolina has no choice but to provide the opportunity for a good education to all of its young people. We know we can do education well; just look at the public schools in our affluent suburbs. More relevantly, look at how successful Richland 2 is at educating even the disadvantaged. We must duplicate that kind of success throughout the state, particularly in the most stubborn pockets of resistance — the poor, rural areas.
    Invading Iraq was optional. We once had the choice of other ways and other places to insert the lever of change in the Mideast (our strategic objective; 9/11 taught us that our old strategy of promoting stability in the region was suicidal). But we didn’t, and now the choices are success, or handing a titanic victory to Islamist terrorists, tribalists and totalitarian thugs. Success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve at this point, but failure is unthinkable.
    The I-95 corridor is South Carolina’s Sunni Triangle. We have to figure out how to succeed there, or we fail.

If we don’t do it, no one will. No one’s going to help in Iraq; that much has been made quite clear over the last three years. Certainly not the feckless Europeans. Even the Brits are just barely hanging in there with us, thanks to the courage and vision of Tony Blair. The only other entities with a motivation to stabilize any portion of Iraq are people we would not want to see doing so — Iran’s mullahs, or the Ba’athists in both Iraq and Syria.
    Universal education can only be achieved by pooling our resources as a society and doing it, inSoldieriraq
spite of the odds and the cost. The fantasy that the private sector would create wonderful schools in communities that can’t even attract a McDonald’s is dangerously delusional. The amazing thing is that this approach is espoused by people who insist they believe in markets, when market forces are precisely why those areas have fallen so far behind. The state has to do the job — the market lacks the motive.
    The appointment of a new secretary of defense may not get the job done, but it’s a very encouraging sign. So is the election of a state superintendent of education committed to real reform.

We can win, but it’s going to take a long, long time. We’re talking about a generational (at least) struggle here, both in Iraq and S.C. public schools. Anyone who expects us to either win quickly or pull out simply doesn’t understand either the odds or the consequences of failure.

We can’t quit. South Carolina has too many problems — we are at the bottom of too many rankings — to give up on educating our people so that they can attract, get and hold good jobs.
    In this profoundly dangerous post-Cold War world, history’s most powerful and essential republic cannot be weakened by another Vietnam. After three years of horrific mistakes, President Bush has now done two things worthy of praise: He dumped Donald Rumsfeld, and he went to Vietnam (finally) and drew this distinction between the two conflicts: “We’ll succeed,” he said, “unless we quit.” Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but there’s a sure-fire way to change that fact: Give up.
    We could pull out of Vietnam in the middle of the Cold War, and the Russians still knew we had all those nukes pointed at them. So the world didn’t fall apart, even though our nation’s ability to affect world events atrophied for many years.
    Today, too many forces of chaos, from al-Qaida to totalitarians with nukes, are poised to fill any vacuum we leave behind.
    So we can’t quit — either here or over there.

Rexpost

Election stats column

38 Replies

How did ‘our’ candidates do
last week? Very well, as always

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
IT IS WIDELY believed that, like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather II,” I have the power to administer the “kiss of death.” This is not true. In order to administer this kiss, I must first consult with my consiglieri — I mean, my fellow members of the editorial board of The State.
    Actually, it is even less true than that. There is no “kiss of death.”
    It is popular — among people we have not endorsed, and particularly those whom we will never endorse, for political office — to say they are glad not to get our nod, because our endorsement is the “kiss of death.” Our candidates always lose. There is truth in this, yes?
    No. Of course, if there were a correlation between candidates we anoint and those who suffer humiliation at the polls, it would not matter, because we are not trying to make predictions. We are saying whom we believe should win, not who will win.
    OK, so maybe it would matter a little. That might be taken as our being seriously out of sync with the people of South Carolina.
    But it doesn’t matter at all because it isn’t true. I knew “our” candidates usually did pretty well, but it wasn’t until two years ago that I went back and studied 10 years worth
of endorsements versus actual election results. The people we endorsed won about three-fourths of the time in general elections. From 1994 through 2004, we endorsed 85 candidates, and 64 won, for a 75.29 percentage.
    I found out something else.
    Certainly you know that we always endorse Republicans. That is, you know that if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a Republican, you are just as certain that we always endorse Democrats. Obviously, one of you is wrong. Less obviously, both of you are.
    Here’s the skinny:
    It turns out that over that same decade ending in 2004, our candidates split almost perfectly down the middle — 43 Democrats, 41 Republicans and one independent. This was a surprise, and completely unintentional. Party being unimportant to us, we are just as likely to endorse mostly Democrats or mostly Republicans in a given election year.
    It was encouraging to realize how it worked out over time.
    So enough with the history. How did our candidates do this year?
    I was sort of hoping for a big Republican year to make the overall figures perfectly even. No such luck. The Democrats fielded some good candidates, there were a number of Republican incumbents who seriously needed tossing out, and most of our favorite Republicans had no opposition — hence no endorsement.
    The result? As I realized the day before the election, we had endorsed 12 Democrats and five Republicans. Yikes.
    That was setting us up for a really bad year on the won-loss score (not that it matters, but I’d like to see them win).
    Or so I thought. At this point, if you count Jim Rex as a win (and admittedly that’s still a significant if), then 12 of our candidates won, and five lost.
    How is that? Every one of the five Republicans we backed (Thomas Ravenel, Hugh Weathers, Mark Hammond, Joe Wilson and Bill Cotty) won, and only five of “our” Democrats (Tommy Moore, Drew Theodore, Robert Barber, Boyd Summers and Sadie Wannamaker) lost.
    So every time we picked a Republican, the voters agreed with us. They also agreed on seven out of the 12 Democrats.
    If we had been trying to pick winners (which we weren’t), we would have done pretty well. Although it’s not really anything to brag about. Since 12 is less than three-fourths of 17, our running “win” average has now dropped
to 74.5 percent (sigh).
    Separately from the whole endorsement business, I (and I alone) did try to pick winners a few days before the election.
    Tempted by an e-mail invitation, I tried my hand at predicting. To keep myself honest, I posted my prognostications on my blog.
    I was only asked specifically about the eight statewide races on the ballot. I picked six Republicans and two Democrats to win. How did I come out? I was right on five, wrong on three. Both of the Democrats I had picked to win (Grady Patterson, whom we had not endorsed, and Mr. Theodore, whom we had) lost, and so did one of my Republicans (Karen Floyd, whom we had not endorsed).
    That’s a batting average of .625, which would be good in baseball, but is not nearly as good as the success rate of the candidates that our editorial board picks as the best without regard to whether they will win or lose.
    Sure, I did it just off the top of my head, whereas we had spent months choosing our preferred candidates — as had the voters. And they came up with pretty much the same results we did. Smart voters. Smart us, too.
    But I don’t think I’d better give up my day job for predicting the weather. Or anything else, for that matter.

Robert Gates column

111 Replies

Gates1

The return of the professional

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
“AMID TAWDRINESS, he stands for honor, duty and decency,” another author once wrote of John le Carre’s fictional hero George Smiley.
    George was the master Cold Warrior brought back in from retirement to save British intelligence from the liars, self-dealers, ideologues, social climbers and traitors who had turned it inside out. He did so quietly, humbly and competently. Then he went his way, with little gratitude from the system.
    With Robert Gates’ nomination to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, old George seemsGates3
to have come back in from the cold yet again, although in different form.
    Mr. Gates is a Smileyesque professional. He was the only Director of Central Intelligence ever to have come up through the ranks. He had spent two decades in the Agency, from 1969 through 1989, with a several-year hiatus at the National Security Council. He received the National Security Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal (twice) and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (three times).
    I trust professionals, particularly those who have devoted themselves to national service. Not in every case, of course — there are idiots and scoundrels in every walk of life — but if all other things are equal, give me the pro from Dover over someone’s golf buddy every time.
    Perhaps that’s why I sometimes lower my standards from the le Carre level to enjoy a Tom Clancy novel. Jack Ryan moves in a world peopled by competent, heroically dedicated public servants. Most wear uniforms — soldiers, sailors, Marines, cops — but others are costumed in the conservative suits of the FBI, CIA or Secret Service. The ones you have to watch out for are the politicians; they always have agendas that have little to do with protecting the country or the rule of law.
Rumsfeld
    This has a ring of truth to me. I grew up in the Navy and have spent my adult life dealing with a broad variety of people from cops to lawyers to FBI agents to politicians to private business types. I know a lot of fine politicos and private-sector executives, but as a percentage, I’ll more quickly trust the honor of public-service professionals.
    Of course, they often don’t trust me — at least not at first — and I don’t blame them. The press spends too much time with publicans and sinners, and absorbs too many of their values. As a group, for instance, we tend to love it when a special prosecutor is appointed. That means fireworks, and fireworks are news.
    Call me a heretic, but I’ve always wondered why we don’t just let the professional investigators do their jobs. Do we really think the FBI — not the political appointees at the top, but the career agents who do the work — can’t investigate corruption? Sure, a politician can try to get such a civil servant fired or transferred to garbage detail, but such overt efforts to subvert the system tend to get noticed, a la Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
    Mr. Gates has had his own run-ins with politicians and special counsel. He withdrew from consideration to become Ronald Reagan’s CIA director in 1987 because he had been senior enough for the Iran-Contra affair to have cast its shadow over him. He was under formal investigation in that connection when he was nominated again under George H.W. Bush. No one ever pinned any wrongdoing on him, and he was confirmed by the Senate.
    This time, the Democrats who are likely to line the gauntlet he must again run to confirmationGates2
were generally supportive of his nomination. Of course, look at the act he’d be following. Mr. Gates is described as a soft-spoken, yet tough-minded, “pragmatist and realist,” an antithesis to the civilian ideologues who have been running the war.
    In Thursday’s news reports, the Gates nomination was treated as another sign of “the ascendancy of the team that served the president’s father.” There’s truth — and reassurance, for pragmatists — in that. He has for the past several months served as one of the “Wise Men” reviewing and critiquing the conduct of the Iraq War, along with former Secretary of State James Baker. That makes him particularly, if not uniquely, well prepared to run the war more successfully.
    Of course, he’s not a Defense professional. But the Pentagon might be an exception to my general preference. In that particular case, the real professionals — the uniformed leaders, the warriors —spend their careers trying to stay out of the Pentagon. I worry about the ones who do otherwise. Beyond that, it’s probably best that Defense not be headed by a general or admiral, to preserve the principle of civilian oversight. But it would be nice if they had a boss who would listen to them.
    Given those conditions, who would be better than a pragmatic national security professional who possesses mastery of the entire spectrum of intelligence gathering and analysis, and has been studying in depth what has gone wrong in Iraq? He just needs to help the president pick a direction. The generals and admirals will know how to get the job done from that point.
    They’re professionals, too.

Rummy

Thursday election roundup column

59 Replies

Sanfordmandate

Mandates: From Sanford
to Pelosi to Lieberman

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR


ANYBODY WHO thinks there was any one theme, message or lesson from Tuesday’s elections has a few more thinks coming. Let’s start with these:


The Sanford Mandate. Gov. Mark Sanford’s victory statement Tuesday night was the best speech I’ve ever heard him give. I’m hoping to hear more of the same. He talked about a mandate, but with a tone of humility. He said it was a mandate for “change,” and I think he was right. What he did not mention was the plan to privatize public education, and with good reason, given the results in certain other races across the state. That still leaves us with government restructuring, and if the governor pushes as hard on that in the next four years as he has said he would, I’ll be cheering him every step of the way.


Real education reform. Despite her long head start as the governor’s anointed “choice” standard-bearer, despite all those tens of thousands in campaign cash from out-of-state ideologues, despite having that crucial “R” after her name, Karen Floyd was slightly trailing Jim Rex in the superintendent of education race. It could still go either way. Does that mean the voters sent an uncertain message as to whether they want education reform? Absolutely not. The wisest course for the winner of this race, the governor and lawmakers would be to embrace the common-sense reforms that both of these candidates talked about, such as merit pay for teachers.


Bill Cotty survives. They tried to do him in in the GOP primary. When that didn’t work, they tried to take him down in the general by running an independent candidate to split the Republican vote. They flooded his state House district with one slick mailing after another, accusing him of everything they could think of short of having WMD. But the most obvious House Republican opponent to private school vouchers and tax credits withstood everything they could throw at him, and prevailed. And consider this: His Democratic opponent, Anton Gunn, was just as strongly against their agenda as Mr. Cotty was. That means that in spite of all that out-of-state money and effort, 87 percent of the voters utterly rejected their agenda. The people of District 79 love and appreciate their public schools. And they are far from alone.


Eckstrom’s vindication. So how does a guy who calls himself a fiscal watchdog (which is just what a comptroller ought to be), then takes a long family vacation in a state vehicle on a state gas card, then dares to run for re-election as a fiscal watchdog again manage to win? Here’s how: He got voters to believe his whining that he was being picked on, that the criticism of his Minnesota road trip was just the pettiest kind of political nit-picking. Well, it wasn’t. He broke faith with the voters, he never thought it was wrong, and now that he’s gotten away with it, he seems less likely than ever to learn anything from the incident.


The national picture. Everyone says the Democrats’ congressional victories are about Iraq — but what does that mean? Those of us who have backed the war from the start have demanded changes in the way the war has been prosecuted since early on. We’ve been demanding, for instance, that the president dump Donald Rumsfeld. (Mr. Bush got that message right away — three years late, but he got it.)
    After all that talk about the war, I’ve yet to hear specifically what Democrats think the voters want them to do. I heard Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha on the radio Wednesday morning. Pretty nonspecific. They want “change.” Nobody’s saying pull the troops out. The party’s most agitated wing will be flapping for that, but wiser heads know better: If that was what the people wanted, Ned Lamont would have won in Connecticut.
    I think the country was rejecting the bitter partisanship of the last few years, of which the president and Speaker Dennis Hastert are prime examples. Voters want people who will work across ideological lines to the betterment of the country, both at home and abroad. They reject the Ned Lamonts on the left and the Rick Santorums on the right. They want common sense, not MoveOn.org or Rush Limbaugh.
    Who were the Democrats who won? Pro-life candidate Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. Fiscal moderate John Spratt right here in South Carolina. The extremists need to take heed, or prepare to lose the House again in the next election — or the one after.


Joementum! Yes! I practically shouted it out during the live election-night broadcast on S.C. ETV. Joe Lieberman did it! He showed that the right man with the right ideas (including the will to win in Iraq, take note) doesn’t need a political party to win high office.
    This is a start. All the U.S. Senate needs now is 50 more like him. Then you’ll see me jumping up and down the way the Democrats are doing nationally, and (most) Republicans are doing in South Carolina. Why? Because for the first time ever, my party will have its chance. I promise you here and now, given that opportunity, we will not let the American people down.

Joewins4

A nicer-looking version of Floyd ‘plan’

45 Replies

My Sunday column promised that my blog would feature a copy of the outline that Karen Floyd’s campaign had sent me as a guide to what she would propose to do as superintendent of education.Floydplan

I couldn’t lay hands on it over the weekend (we recently changed e-mail servers, and I
had lost the message from her campaign with that attachment), so I linked you to a lame photograph of a black-and-white printout of the "plan." (I had printed it out to have in front of me during last week’s debate.) Well, that hardly met this blog’s standards.

So here’s a link
to the original PDF, as it was sent to me. I’ll go back and replace it in the other post as well.

Once again, if you can put together her description of her plans during the debate and this outline and come up with something coherent, then my hat is off to you, Gunga Din.

Single-issue obsession

92 Replies

Debate1

Superintendent debate revolves
around dangerous obsession

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
AFTER THE debate Monday night between candidates for state superintendent of education, Republican Karen Floyd accused me of being obsessed with a “single issue.”
    Say what? Moi? Hey, I was the very last person there to mention that issue. Her opponent, Democrat Jim Rex, brought it up. She vaguely touched upon it herself. S.C. ETV moderator Andy Gobeil pressed her repeatedly, but to no avail, to answer a simple “yes” or “no” question about it.
    That issue, of course, is the one that has paralyzed debate over schools in South Carolina ever since Gov. Mark Sanford introduced it, and thereby attracted vast sums of money from out-of-state extremists determined to undermine the very idea of public education. It’s the issue of whether to abandon the concept of accountability for tax dollars spent on education, and instead throw money to individuals to spend on any alternative that strikes them as attractive.
    Before the governor weighed in, parents, educators and policymakers were debating all sorts of ways to improve the quality of those schools that did not meet South Carolina’s standards — which, ever since the 1998 Education Accountability Act, have been among the most demanding in the nation.
    The governor used his bully pulpit to change the debate from how to meet those standards to whether we should even try. He wants to take money that would be spent on that strict regimen of improvement, and toss it at parents in the vague hope that better options will naturally spring up to take their money.
    And Karen Floyd is his candidate. In the year since he anointed her, she has presented no other convincing reason why she is on the ballot. She has absolutely no relevant experience. She has never improved a school system, or even one school, or one classroom. To my knowledge she had never publicly exhibited any interest in school reform of any kind before she decided to run for this statewide office.
    Her opponent offers 30 years of experience in education, from K-12 through higher education, both public and private. Her response is to dismiss completely the value of his experience, airily proclaiming that what our schools need is an outsider’s perspective. She can boast an infinite supply of that.
    Dr. Rex, product of “the system,” is the one telling the system that it needs to do some radicalDebate4
things that lawmakers have never dared require — such as paying teachers by their performance rather than how many degrees they have, and empowering principals to fire the teachers who don’t measure up.
    She says she’s for those things, too. But she doesn’t articulate them as well, possibly because she knows far less regarding what she’s talking about.
    Visit her Web site. Under “Issues,” she offers four brief position papers. One is about tweaking the PACT — which is her most substantive foray into actual academic improvement. Another is about preventing violence in schools. The other two are about channeling resources to the private sector of education — one about contracting with “diverse providers” and the other “choice,” which is her and the governor’s preferred term for taking tax money away from public schools and urging parents to spend it on something else.
    I don’t find all of Jim Rex’s proposals on his site, either. But I do find the kind of comprehensive approach you get from a thorough professional who is fed up with the status quo.
    To back up her assertion that her version of “choice” is but one subtopic in a multifaceted plan, she had a campaign assistant draft a chart and send it to us recently. It’s on my blog if you’re curious. But I warn you: Your only chance of making any sense out of it is to look at it while you listen to the streaming video of her buzzword-laden elaboration during Monday night’s debate. Good luck with that, because it didn’t help me much.
    So please excuse me if I identify her with the single issue that caused the governor to endorse her before it was known who else would even seek the Republican nomination.
    But I’m the single-issue guy, right? I think I know where that came from. Even though I was the last one at the table to address vouchers and such, I was the one who did so in embarrassingly specific terms. She managed to slough off Mr. Gobeil’s several attempts to get a straight answer, but I was more successful back during the primary debate in the spring. It took three attempts, and even then she answered with great reluctance. Yes, she had said, she would have voted for the last version of the governor’s proposal considered by the Legislature.
    OK, I said last week, so that means that rather than just advocating options for the disadvantaged trapped in “failing schools,” you favor giving these tax credits to anyone who is already sending their kids to private school or home-schooling them — because that bill did that.
    She turned to the camera and gave another long nonanswer. (Along the way she cited Shakespeare as having compared legislation to making sausages. But it was Otto Von Bismarck, not the Bard, who said that.)
    Let’s face it: When it comes to factors bearing upon her candidacy to preside over our state’s public schools, Mrs. Floyd is the single-issue candidate. She could dismiss it with a word if she chose, but she won’t. Consequently, that one thing looms over everything else she says or does.
    And on that one issue, she’s wrong.

Debate2