Category Archives: Columns

Hey, I LIKE Mark Sanford…

83 Replies

A couple of replies to the comment by Chris on the last post. Chris, when you say this…

The problem with editorial endorsements is that it alerts readers to
thought processes and reasoning of those making them…

…you point to the precise reason that my colleagues and I on the board write columns — to elaborate on the reasons we endorse, to give readers additional insight into our thinking so that they have more information upon which to base a judgment of our decision, whatever they choose to make of it. The point of my doing the blog is to go even a little deeper into all that, to give you the chance (if you’re at all interested) to know even more about how the editorial page editor ticks, so that you might have even more insight into the editorials. It’s so you don’t have to guess.

The whole point of an endorsement editorial, as I’ve said a thousand times, is not the WHO, but the WHY — the "thought processes and reasoning" behind the decision. It’s really hard to get that message across, because it’s counterintuitive for a lot of folks. It’s not personal, as a Corleone would say. The fact is that — in this case — one of these two men is going to be governor. The purpose of an endorsement is to say, knowing what we know (and in part, what we know is based on dealing with these men repeatedly over the course of years), which way we would go if we just have to vote for one of them.

Our reasons, and the reasons behind our reasons, are all we have to offer you. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about whose side we’re on, or who we "like." If we went on the basis of who we like, I’d probably have gone with Sanford. I know him, and I personally like him. I really have to force myself to look at what he’s doing (and not doing) as governor and shove aside the fact that I like the guy.

I can’t say the same for Tommy Moore, which is not to run him down. I just don’t know him as well. I’ve known him at a distance for almost two decades — much longer than Sanford. But I knew him as an editor dealing with the information that reporters (usually Cindi Scoppe, back in her reporting days) brought to me about him. Mark Sanford I’ve dealt with directly, ever since he was in Congress, because his political career began about the same time I joined the editorial board.

I’ve also dealt with him more because he’s a wonk like us. He’s more into talking about issues than he is about doing anything. I’ve had the impression that he’d rather pick up the phone to chat with me for 45 minutes about some political theory than sit down and wheedle lawmakers to turn ideas into laws. (At least, he was inclined to do that until a few months ago. I don’t think I’ve heard from him at all since my column about his veto of the budget.)

Sen. Moore has never spent much time talking to editorial types — at least, not to me. He was over in the State House, getting stuff done. Since he wasn’t trying to accomplish abstract goals, he had nothing to chat about with perpetual talkers. So I don’t know him that well. I don’t think he’s figured us out, either. To him, I’m that guy who wrote that he didn’t have the "fire in the belly," and he knows he didn’t like that.

So why did we not endorse Mark Sanford? Read the endorsement. Then read my column. Then read other columns. Then read everything you can get your hands on, and talk to everyone you know who might know more about these guys and the issues than you do. Then go out and vote any way you think is best.

If you do that, having made our endorsement even a small part of your own process — even if it’s only to tick you off and make you want to do the opposite, and to work harder to find reasons why we’re wrong — then I will have done my job.

Oops. There I go. Revealing thought processes and reasoning again. Sorry. (Not.)

(One other thing, though, Chris — your comment sort of loses me when you jump from editorial to news coverage, as though there were a connection. If you’re suggesting that what we do has anything to do with what the news department does, you are confused. Reporters, and their editors, would likely laugh their heads off at the idea that they agree with our conclusions. That is, they would if so many people, including sometimes candidates, didn’t make the same assumption you do, which is a major professional pain for them. I think most news people would just as soon the editorial page go away, as it causes them little but grief. Good thing there’s a high wall between our separate divisions to protect us — there are a lot more of them than there are of us.)

Mark Sanford vs. Tommy Moore

48 Replies

Why must we choose
between vision and effectiveness?
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THIS IS THE election year for complementary pairs. For treasurer we have the Brash Rich Kid vs. Everybody’s Granddaddy. For lieutenant governor, Mr. Mature is challenging Wild Thing.
    But the most marked dichotomy is at the top of the ticket.  On one side, we have incumbent Gov. Mark Sanford, a policy wonk who has all sorts of ideas, but who can’t get anything done. The fact that he can’t get anything done is both a bad thing and a good thing, because some of his ideas (restructuring state government) are excellent, while others (paying people to abandon public schools) are very, very bad.
    Opposing him is veteran state Sen. Tommy Moore, a “git ’er done” kind of guy. He prides himself on bringing together lawmakers from across the spectrum who may be miles apart on a given issue, and getting them to sit down and work something out. He can flat get a bill passed, sometimes in the face of considerable odds.
    While he can do what the governor can’t, Sen. Moore is lacking in the very department where the governor is blessed with an overabundance. When I suggested as much to him last week, noting that he seemed to lack as strict and specific an agenda as the governor’s, he said rather grumpily that “I’m glad you didn’t say I didn’t have ideas.”
    Well, I didn’t. But by the time the interview was over, he had provided little in the way of specific proposals. If I put all the ideas he set forth in that meeting in my pants pocket, I could turn it inside-out without making much of a mess on the floor.
    This is not good. I’ve lived all over the country, and I’ve never seen a state that needed principled, effective leadership as much as my dear native South Carolina.
    Some would say I’m asking too much. But people who would fit that bill do exist in our state. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley for one. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for another. They have vision, they see how things are connected, they see what needs to be done, and they have the skills to work with political friend and foe alike to bring about results that represent significant progress.
    But they aren’t running for governor. Instead, we get an ideologue who is so into libertarian think-tank theories that he has no idea how to persuade real people — even in his own party — to work with him. That’s been our governor for four years. And our alternative is a very grounded, realistic veteran deal-maker who can work with whatever you bring to the table, but who doesn’t throw much on it himself.
    This is not to say Tommy Moore lacks principles. In fact, I’d say his principles — grounded as they are in real-life experiences — are probably closer to those of the average South Carolinian than the hothouse hypotheses of the incumbent. He’s certainly a lot closer to me when it comes to understanding the role that government must play in improving life for all South Carolinians.
    “I agree with those folks who are saying, ‘More money isn’t the answer’: More money isn’t necessarily the answer,” Sen. Moore said. “But I can guarantee you that less money over the last three and a half years hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
    He said he would want his legacy to be that he made government more efficient in performing its legitimate functions.
    “The government can be a partner to people,” he said. “Government isn’t evil. You don’t need to starve government to where it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub.” That’s a reference to the governor’s ideological ally Grover Norquist, who has said that’s his ultimate goal as leader of a national anti-tax group.
    “The easiest thing is to come to Columbia and be against something,” said the senator. “The hard thing is to be for something.”
    Trouble is, it’s hard to find much that Sen. Moore is for, specifically, when it comes to education. He’s definitely against being against the public schools. But that doesn’t quite add up to being for a substantive agenda for moving the schools forward.
    He wants to improve prenatal health care and early childhood education. He wants comprehensive tax reform. He would pursue economic development for rural areas. But when you dig for specifics, they are scarce. He keeps saying he wants to hear other people’s ideas. He’s confident he can then sell the good ones to the Legislature.
    The general impression is that he would be a reactive governor who would deal with things as they were brought to him, but would not initiate particular proposals.
    By contrast, the current governor is all about throwing out his ideas to see what will happen — which, generally, is nothing, except for a lot of hard feelings.
    He claims that his pushing of extreme ideas such as the “Put Parents in Charge” bill has led to accelerating public school choice and the development of charter schools. So should we interpret his advocacy of paying people to abandon public schools as a mere strategy to achieve some more moderate goal?
    No, he admits, “because I actually take those extreme positions.” He laughed, and said “I would love to get there if I could.”
    Ultimately, he said South Carolina needs someone who believes in fundamental change, not someone who knows how to work the system.
    “We come from different vantage points,” the governor said of himself and Sen. Moore. “I come from outside the system; he comes from within.”
    “He’s basically said the system ain’t broke…. We say the system is broke.” So if he gets four more years, will we be able to look back and say the system is fixed to any degree? “Nah,” he said. “The political system is such that we all know that you never get the whole bite of any apple.” Nevertheless, he hopes he’d have “a material impact” on government restructuring.
    The governor misses the point. It’s not an either/or. South Carolina needs a governor who is not only committed to positive change, but who also has the ability to work with others to make that change come about.
    Once again, when we go to the polls Nov. 7, we won’t be offered a candidate who fits that description. We need and deserve better.

Sunday candidate roundup

2 Replies

Getting up close and personal
with the candidates

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
JOIN ME on a quick tour of our most recent endorsement interviews (and then you can check out longer observations on my blog —– address below):

Sept. 20, 10 a.m.  This race would be a yawner if Drew Theodore had not revealed that incumbent Comptroller General Rich Eckstrom used a state vehicle and state gas card to take his family on vacation. But Mr. Theodore seems to have his own affinity for old-time politics-as-usual, from back when the great lubricant that made South Carolina’s crazy system of government work was the power of personal relationships. He defends the hermaphroditic Budget and Control Board on those grounds: "When the system and everybody is getting along, it’s a good thing to have." He’s sure he can get along with others better than that socially awkward travelin’ man, Rich Eckstrom.

Monday, 11 a.m. — If you’re looking for the anti-Andre Bauer, it’’s his challenger, Robert Barber. Unlike the incumbent Gov Lite, he says grownup stuff like "I think I bring a level of maturity and judgment to the office that will hold me in good stead." Not that he’s saying anything about his opponent. Maturity and judgment are so-o-o-o boring, don’t you think? After our meeting, I stepped over to turn out one of the table lamps in the boardroom. Without saying a word, he did the same with the lamp’s twin on the other side of the room. No candidate’s ever done that before. Maybe he really is a responsible grownup.

Tuesday, 1:15 p.m. — South Carolina will be farming — and eating — in a whole new way if Emile DeFelice has anything to do with it. The agriculture commissioner candidate’s enthusiasm for change is infectious. He says things like "America is falling in love — again, I should say — with agriculture. And food. Farming. A lot of people are discovering their inner farmer," and it doesn’t even sound particularly weird. Think of him as the Oliver Wendell Douglas in this campaign. (You know — "Green Acres.") When he talks about farming and America, you can hear the fife playing "Yankee Doodle" in the background. And he’s got a great slogan: "Put Your State on Your Plate."

Tuesday, 4 p.m. — "I may not be on the right track, but this is where my spirit leads me," says Cheryl Footman of her quest to replace Mark Hammond as secretary of state. She says the Lord inspired her to run. She also believes it would be important, for the "message it would send to the nation," for a black woman to be elected to the statewide post. "Cheryl Footman would be a step in the right direction — it’s sort of a slogan that I use."

Wednesday, 10 a.m. — OK, voters, sort this out: Democrat Glenn Lindman, unlike incumbent Adjutant General Stan Spears, believes the head of our National Guard should be appointed — as in every other state — instead of elected. He says the appointment should be based on strict criteria. The standards should include being either a federally recognized general officer, or promotable to that. The highest rank the Iraq veteran and Bronze Star recipient achieved was first sergeant. But there’s nothing stopping an NCO from holding the job now, and the only way that’s likely to change soon is if we elect the NCO. Weird, huh?

Wednesday, 11 a.m. — Is there more to Jim Rex than not being the official "voucher" candidate for superintendent of education? Well, yes. He says he appreciates those of us who have been sticking up for the hard-won progress that our public schools have made, but the improvement is only incremental. "What our state desperately needs a comprehensive plan to reform, improve and support public education." And you need all three — you can’t reform without support, you can’t improve without reform, and you won’t get support without improvement. That sounds better than the last time someone running for office said we "desperately needed" something — that was about the lottery. Mr. Rex agrees that the lottery is "not too dissimilar from saying, ‘Let’s have a voucher.’" Both approaches are about saying we can’t do this together.

Thursday, 10 a.m. — Republican agriculture chief Hugh Weathers acknowledges that his opponent, the enthusiastic Mr. DeFelice, has good ideas — as far as they go, but "I bring the big-picture perspective." His focus extends far beyond the niche of organic farming. And Mr. Weathers has at least tried to come up with "my version of a slogan." You ready? It’s "Agriculture delivers." As they say in the advertising biz, "What else have you got?" (I’ll be participating in these guys’ debate, too — same night, same place, only at 7.)

Thursday, 1 p.m. — Our latest interview with the breezy Thomas Ravenel provided another portrait of the classic confidence — some would say arrogance — of the self-made young man. He made it on his own, so all we really need for everyone to be prosperous is to remove obstacles (such as taxes), and everybody else can do the same. "Everybody talks about ‘education, education,’" he says, in a way that indicates that he believes its value is overrated. Look at Cuba, he says — it’s loaded with highly educated people, and the economy is pathetic because of the lack of opportunity. Asked about the controversial Rod Shealy, he says, "I have a lot of consultants." And then he brings up the fact that he’s got Will Folks, admitted woman-batterer, helping him too. "I believe in giving Folks a second chance," he says, enjoying his pun. "(I)n politics, you have to deal with some unsavory characters."

Boyd and Jim column

9 Replies

Up close, even the most clear-cut,
polarizing issue turns gray

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LET’S SET aside all the partisanship and polarization and stupid name-calling for a moment to remind ourselves that when you dig into them deeply enough, things aren’t nearly as bad in our politics as they tend to seem. Or at least, not always.
    That’s because you have people involved. And people are more complicated, and therefore better, than the boxes we would put them in. God bless them for it.
    Look, for instance, at the S.C. House District 75 race in which Richland County Democrat and political newcomer Boyd Summers is challenging Jim Harrison, a 17-year veteran Republican representative and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
    In his recent endorsement interview, Mr. Summers said one of the main reasons he was runningSummersmug_1
was that Rep. Harrison had swung to the “hard right” on such issues as support for public education. The incumbent has been a prime pusher of the “Put Parents in Charge” bill, which would use tax credits to pay parents to abandon public schools.
    The challenger is adamantly against PPIC because “I am firmly in favor of public education,” and he doesn’t want to see finite public resources diverted away from our schools to the private sector.
    Mr. Summers brags that he’s supported by the S.C. Education Association, while the Republican is on the side of “South Carolinians for Responsible Government,” an organization that exists only to push PPIC. It doesn’t get more black-and-white than that.
    But it does get less so. Mr. Harrison chafes at being painted as anti-public school. “I think you’ve got to look at 17 years, and not just one bill,” he says. And he’s right. Besides, he says, his two children went to public schools all the way through — Rosewood Elementary, Hand Middle and Dreher High.
    In fact, Mr. Harrison began his interview by aggressively challenging Mr. Summers’ support of public education, pointing out that his challengers’ two young children do not attend public schools. Of course, one of them is only 3 years old. But the older one, Mr. Harrison says he has heard, is in first grade at Hammond School.
    Not true, Mr. Summers says: The older child is in 5-year-old kindergarten at Hammond.
“What my wife and I have made,” he said, “is the decisions we think are best for each child.” OK, so what about the future? “We evaluate it on a year-by-year basis,” he said, and “we haven’t made any decisions yet” about next year.
    But, he insists, he is a firm believer in the importance of public education, and voters can rely on him to make policy on that basis — a confidence he says they cannot place in the incumbent in light of his advocacy of an extremely destructive idea.
    Has Mr. Harrison caught his opponent in a fatal contradiction? Maybe, maybe not. I understand him. I have always believed in public schools, yet our oldest children started their educations in a Catholic school in Tennessee. We switched to public in 1988.
    Still, I wasn’t running for public office on a platform of “I’m for public schools and he isn’t.” The issue is relevant. It gives voters in the district reason to question Mr. Summers’ level of commitment. He may have a good answer, but it gives them a good question.
Harrisonmug_1
    Mr. Harrison says it’s especially relevant because parents who live in Mr. Summers’ neighborhood behind the VA hospital worry that the local school, Meadowfield Elementary, hasn’t been doing well on the PACT.
    They believe, he says, that if parents in the community would “stick together to work to improve their school rather than bailing out,” it would show improvement.
    He said they felt parents turning to the private option were “not giving Meadowfield a chance.”
Not good news for Mr. Summers. But it also complicates things for Rep. Harrison. I couldn’t help pointing out that he had just described very well what was wrong with PPIC — that it would entice the most motivated, most involved parents to leave troubled schools behind, and those schools would only get worse as a result.
    He didn’t disagree. In fact, he reminded me that he had talked in his earlier interview about how he had been motivated to champion “choice” only for children “below a certain income level.”
    “I could live very easily without that provision in the last bill that gave a thousand-dollar tax credit, no matter where you lived and no matter what your income was,” he had said. “It ought to be focused on failing schools and low-income families.”
    Of course, PPIC had included the tax credit for the affluent, which was politically necessary to generate the bill’s only in-state constituency: those who already home-school or send their kids to private schools. And Mr. Harrison had pushed it in that form.
    Still, I had to sympathize with his lament that it was unfair to use that as an excuse to call him “hard right,” or anti-education, in light of his record otherwise. He said there was something wrong with a system in which “people in the middle that are trying to find some viable options get labeled as extremists.”
    I couldn’t agree more. Of course, I think his advocacy of PPIC is quite a bit more relevant to his public education credentials than where a Summers 5-year-old attends kindergarten.
    But I don’t think the issue is as up-or-down as the likes of SCEA and SCRG would have us believe.
Fortunately, they don’t decide elections. In this case, the voters of District 75 do. And they have a lot to consider.

Unity column

158 Replies

Towers12
When will we unite
to win this fight?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHEN OUR board discussed what to say upon the fifth anniversary of the devastating terror attacks on American soil, I had to be talked into taking the approach we did: Examining what we have done and failed to do in response, right here at home.
    For me, the domestic situation is more depressing than conditions in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a matter of expectations.
    When we sent our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew we were beginning a long and costly endeavor that, even with solid support among the U.S. electorate, would take longer than the time we’ve given it so far. While much that has happened over there has dismayed and even horrified me, little has surprised me.
    But the reaction over here has been a bitter disappointment, made more painful because I had hoped so ardently for something so much better.
    In late October 2001, I wrote:
    “On Sept. 11, amid all the horror, I started seeing and hearing things that gave me a new hope. I felt like the American spirit was maybe, just maybe, awakening from a long and fitful slumber. I knew that defeating this new evil that faced our country would be an all-consuming task that would leave us little energy for the petty bickering that had come to dominate public life. And I believed we would most certainly defeat it. We would rise to the occasion, and in the end we — and the world as a whole — would be better.”
    I haven’t had the opportunity to go to Iraq, and I don’t know how well I could assess the overall situation if I did — a battle looks different to each individual in it. I don’t trust the accounts of the Cassandras and Pollyannas who would have us either despair or pretend everything is all right. The voices I seek are those that speak of what we need to do to achieve success, starting from where we are right now.
    Such voices are all too rare, although sometimes they pipe up in unexpected places. I was pleased last week to see veteran scribe Joe Galloway, who up to now has done little but carp and criticize over the war effort, use his contacts among military leaders to pull together advice on how to win. The same day I read that, I read a column by Newt Gingrich — the very embodiment of pointless partisan infighting — that honestly analyzed grave mistakes made by leaders of his own party, and prescribed stern remedies.
    The best part of that piece was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
    We must indeed think in new ways, but we don’t. And no one among us is blameless.
    Most congressional Republicans give little more than lip service to winning the war. They devote themselves to tax cuts, while at the same time spending at levels previously unimagined. They, along with the president, have not acted as though they acknowledge the crucial connection between the war on terror and our insanely self-destructive energy habits. The president himself has left little hope for leadership — the kind all can follow — until his replacement takes office in 2009.
    The Democrats, rather than acting like a principled opposition and proposing the kinds of sacrifices that would be necessary to free us from foreign oil despots, have chosen instead to demagogue over gasoline prices (which obviously aren’t yet high enough to persuade us to conserve). In the first months and years after 9/11, they seemed stunned into having no ideas to present whatsoever. Now they seem energized by what they tout as our failures in battle, almost as if they welcome such outcomes.
    But you have to understand: The priority for Democrats as a party is not winning the war — it’s winning control of Congress in November.
    The priority of Republicans in general isn’t winning the war, either: It’s stopping the Democrats.
    I wouldn’t give two cents to affect the outcome of that pointless struggle either way. If I could, I’d get rid of most of them and start over, stocking the Congress with people whose priority is asserting and defending the values and interests we hold in common.
    The sin of the rest of us is letting the parties get away with it, while our best and bravest spill their blood on behalf of a people who have done too little to demonstrate that we deserve it.
    Five years ago, for a brief time, we were better than we are today. When will we “disenthrall ourselves,” and this time for good?

Towers7

Sunday grownups column

35 Replies

Dreaming of a world in which
grownups are in charge again
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
REMEMBER when everything from politics to marketing to fashion to entertainment was aimed at grownups?
    Take television: While we kids owned Saturday morning (“Mighty Mouse” and such), prime time was keyed to the buttoned-down square world of people who had come up during the Depression and reached maturity — a sort of maturity most of us would never know — during the last war that this nation could get it together enough to see all the way through.
    “Popular music” was made by these old guys in suits with short, slick hair who looked like they could as easily have been bankers. Perry Como. Andy Williams. The height of hipdom was Dean Martin. He showed he was daring and edgy by walking around with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Pretty sad. (A friend and I would compete as to who could more closely lampoon him: “Oooh, ah think ah’ll go over an’ sit on da cowch…”).
    Every once in a while, they’d throw us a bone. Ed Sullivan, the squarest guy who ever lived, would on rare occasion devote five minutes of his hour presenting something “for you youngsters.” But when he said that, we never knew whether he would be bringing out the Rolling Stones or Topo Gigio, the talking mouse. These morsels were presented within an adult context, as curiosities from an alien culture that adults could smile down upon indulgently.
    Once, these brothers called Smothers tried to have a show that was sort of different. But the grownups put a stop to that.
    So much for popular culture.
    Take politics. It was so quiet and low-key that for the longest time, I didn’t even know it existed. Ike had always been president. (I was born in 1953.) Then this shocking thing happened in 1960. Two guys stood before the nation asking us (asking the grownups) to pick between them to determine which one would replace Ike as president. It came down to a popularity contest. That brought the presidency down a bit in my estimation. Before that, if I had been familiar with the phrase, I would have assumed Ike was “president by the grace of God.”
    I guess it never occurred to me that there was an alternative to Ike being president because back then, even political opponents accepted that that the president was the president, and were content to wait for the next election to have their say.
    And when they had their say, they were so grown-up about it. No mindless pandering to voters’ selfish impulses. Go back and read excerpts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Forget how they looked. Their words were so lofty, so respectful, so intellectual, so well-informed. They debated like… grownups. It was weird.
    Time passed, and I went off to college, just as things were starting to change a bit. (It’s a little-acknowledged fact that for most of us, the ’60s really didn’t happen until the ’70s. Go back and look at high school yearbooks; you’ll see what I mean.) Then I got married, went to work, had kids, and suddenly it was the ’80s.
    MTV. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the very best few seconds that you might have squeezed out of a year of boring television in the early ’60s — only 24 hours a day, every day of the year. But I didn’t have much time for it. Work, mouths to feed. One maturing experience after another.
    And then the millennium passed, and I looked around again, and the kids had taken over. In the grocery line, I was surrounded by headlines that would have insulted a 12-year-old’s intelligence in 1962. I flipped through the channels now available on television, and there was nothing on that any grown man would want to see. OK, there was “House.” But he was overwhelmed by programs that put such an ironic twist on the word “reality” that I guess it just goes over my head. Or under it.
    (I did see one recently that my very grownup wife likes, but only because she likes anything with dancing. All you could hear throughout the show was the kind of screaming that you heard in small bits when The Beatles came on. Only this adolescent keening wasn’t for anything special or exciting; they screamed for everybody. They screamed when people said hello. Here’s the really weird part: What was this show about? People doing the fox trot. It was like Lawrence Welk with semi-nudity.)
    Once, we played war with toy guns, and if we were really daring, we played marbles “for keeps.” Now, kids join gangs to play war with real guns. For keeps.
    How did those who think and act on a childish level get to be in charge? I never got my turn.
    That’s why I celebrated last weekend’s aggressive crackdown on underage drinking in an editorial headlined, “The grownups strike back in Five Points.” For once, maturity was asserting itself as dominant over the random raging of the ungoverned id. It gave me hope. I dared to dream.
    In my dream, a swarm of determined grownups swoop down on the Democrats and Republicans, toss them all aside, and put up a couple of thinking adults for us to choose between for president.
    They compete to see who can say the wisest and most mature things. They tell us we have to stop burning all that oil, and that we have to pay taxes to help come up with an alternative. They tell us that we have to accept the fact that we are the strongest country in the world, and that with that power comes responsibility. They tell us there’s no free lunch — on Social Security, Medicare or anything else. If we build in a flood plain or on a sandy beach, they tell us we should have known better, and maybe this will teach us something. They’ll say the FDA should regulate nicotine. They tell us to stop whining, sit up straight and eat our vegetables.
    I’d vote happily for one of them. And if the other won, I’d respect that. I’d be a man about it.

Civility III: The New Blog Order

30 Replies

I admit it: I’m instituting
a double standard

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SO WHEN AM I going to get off this “civility” kick? Soon. Very soon. After all, electioneering season is almost back upon us in full force; we start endorsement interviews right after Labor Day.
    But that only gives greater urgency to an effort to encourage discussions on public policy issues that go beyond trite, partisan name-calling and sloganeering.
    As you know if you haven’t just tuned me out altogether, I’ve been worrying about the tone of the discussions taking place on my Weblog. Don’t misunderstand: I get hundreds of comments from thoughtful people from across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, some really hostile partisans from both left and right have been running off the folks who want to have a dialogue.
    It’s not that these folks can’t take the heat. They just don’t want to waste their time.
    My greater worry is that such partisan, ideological nonsense is the very problem with politics in America today, aggravating reasonable people to the point that they just want to turn away. My column last week celebrating Joe Lieberman’s independent candidacy was about this same subject. I don’t have the authority to play umpire with regard to the national political discourse. But I can call balls and strikes on the blog.
    So after an online discussion that drew close to 500 reader comments, I’ve come up with a new system that I hope will work. It’s far from perfect, and will be subject to change if it doesn’t appear to be working, but since I want the site to continue to be a place where people are free to disagree strongly, forget about perfect. I’ll settle for better.
    Here’s the plan: I’m implementing a Double Standard (I thought I’d go ahead and call it that before the critics do, seeing as how that’s what it is). Or maybe you’d call it “behavior profiling.”
    Some people will be free to post pretty much whatever they want. With them, I will maintain the same hands-off policy that I’ve applied to everyone up to now. But I’ll have a different rule for everyone not in that select group: I will delete at will any comments that I deem harmful to good-faith dialogue.
    The good news is that you get to choose whether you’ll be a privileged character or not.
    To be among the elect, you just have to give up your anonymity (just as letter-writers on this page do). You won’t have to fill out special forms or show your birth certificate or anything. Just fill out the existing fields that precede comments with your real, full name; your regular, main e-mail address (the one you use for friends or family or co-workers, not something you set up on Yahoo for the purpose of hiding your identity); and if you have a Web site, your URL.
    If it seems necessary (either to you or me) to provide more info to establish who you really are, you can do so either in the text of the comment, or by e-mailing me.
    When would it be helpful to provide more info? Use your judgment — if your name is John Smith and your e-mail is jsmith@aol.com, you might want to tell a little more, such as that you’re a Columbia attorney or a student at USC or whatever. And I’ll use my judgment — if you call yourself Mike Cakora (one of my regulars), but write something totally uncharacteristic of him, I’ll start asking questions.
    To be in the other group, just keep hiding behind anonymity. I’ll still let you through most of the time, but I’m going to start deleting comments that fit into one of two categories:

  • Insulting, demeaning personal remarks aimed at delegitimizing, discouraging or intimidating those with whom you disagree. If you don’t know what I mean by that, you’ll soon find out.
  • Dogmatic, repetitive, sloganeering ideological claptrap that fails to move the conversation forward and just generally wastes the time of anyone who reads through it in search of actual, original thought. If you use partisan buzzwords and labels as a substitute for genuine argument, you’re in this category. Once again, some of you may have trouble understanding exactly what I mean by that (such rhetoric is so reflexive today), but I will do my best to demonstrate.

    Between those two categories, I can tell you already that I will act upon the first with greater alacrity than upon the second. It is the greater offense.
    But, some of you are by now sputtering, this is so subjective! Yep, and to some of you, that’s just plain shocking. Not to me. I’ve had to make millions of such judgments in my 30-plus-year career. It’s what editors do. Every word I have ever allowed into the paper has required, at the most basic level, an unforgiving yes/no type of decision. Space and time constraints require us to leave out a whole lot more than we’re able to put in. Those considerations don’t apply on the Web, but something at least as important does: The need to have at least one place where people can hear each other think without being drowned out by shouted stupidity.
    I expect the number of comments will drop off for awhile. Some will depart in disgust, others in confusion. Still others will be more selective about what they post, which is actually the point of this. I hope we make up in quality what we give up in quantity.
    If you don’t understand how to meet the new standards, here’s a hint:
    Always try to express your ideas in a way that will actually change the minds of people with whom you disagree. Don’t write in a way calculated to win cheers and attaboys from those who already agree with you, or to give yourself a jolt of vindictive satisfaction.
    Oh, and remember: You don’t have to worry about the standards if you have the guts to stand up and identify yourself. Just don’t be a wuss, and you can still be a jerk.
    Unfortunately, given the present polarization of political attitudes, some of you will refuse to believe that “those other people” can ever be persuaded. You think there are people like you, and people like those others, and any attempt to reason across the divide is futile.
    If that describes you, you’ve come to the wrong place. I believe that good-faith dialogue has the power to bring us together over what we have in common. If all you want to do is shake your fist and shout slogans, there are plenty of other blogs out there that welcome that. Just not mine.
    And here’s where you find it: http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Coming up Sunday: The New Blog Policy

38 Replies

Still polishing the new policy to govern comment decorum. Since it’s taken me this long, I thought I’d go ahead and share it with the world as my Sunday column. So you’ll be able to read all about it Sunday, either in the paper or right here.

But here’s a sneak preview, a teaser if you will, just to stir up advance interest:

    I’m implementing a Double Standard:
    The bad news is that one group of people will be free to post pretty
much whatever they want. I will maintain the same hands-off policy with
them that I’ve maintained with everyone up to now. With those in the other group,
I will delete at will any comments that I deem harmful to good-faith
dialogue.
    The good news is that you get to choose which group you’re in.
    To be in the first group, you just have to give up your anonymity.
This won’t require filling out special forms or supplying me with your
birth certificate or blood type or anything. Just fill out the existing
fields that precede comments with your real, full name; your regular,
main e-mail address (the one you use for friends or family or
co-workers, not something you set up on Yahoo for the specific purpose
of hiding your identity); and if you have a Web site, your URL. If it
seems necessary (either to you or me) to provide more info to establish
your legitimacy, you can do so either in the text of the comment, or
more discretely, by e-mailing
the data to me. When would it be helpful to provide more info? Use your
judgment — if your name is John Smith and your e-mail is
jsmith@aol.com, you might want to tell a little more, such as that
you’re the West Columbia attorney or a student at USC or whatever. And
I’ll use my
judgment — if you call yourself Mike Cakora, but write something totally uncharacteristic of him, I’ll start asking questions.
    To be in the other group, keep hiding behind anonymity. I’ll still
let you through most of the time, but I’m going to start deleting
comments that fit into one of two categories…

How will I define those categories? Tune in on Sunday.

You will also be able to read some hints on how to communicate constructively while still making strong points. Here’s an excerpt from that:

    As you write, always try to express your ideas in a way that will actually change the minds of people with whom you disagree.
    As a corollary to that, don’t write in a way calculated to win
cheers and attaboys from those who already agree with you, or to give
yourself a jolt of vindictive satisfaction.
    Bottom line is, if you internalize and act in accordance with those … two principles, you will never have your comments deleted.
    Unfortunately, given the present polarization of political attitudes, some of you will refuse to believe that those other people
can ever be persuaded. You think there are people like you, and people
like those others, and any attempt to reach across the divide with
reason is futile.

Anyway, you won’t have to wait all that long for further explanation. Here’s hoping that this policy — the product of a conversation that involved more than 470 reader comments — will produce a place that all of us find more useful for discussions that move toward real solutions on issues.

If not, we’ll try something else.

Civility II

95 Replies

Readers jump at chance
for a civil conversation

By BRAD WARTHEN

LAST WEEK, I used this space to seek advice as to how to improve the quality of discourse on my Weblog.

Some have been less than civil in their interactions, causing some of the most thoughtful contributors to abandon the discussions – thereby defeating the very purpose of that forum.

I asked readers to join in a discussion (and you can still do so, at the address below), after which I would either require participants to identify themselves by their full, real names or just start deleting offending comments out of hand.

The response was overwhelming, and mostly gratifying. By the end of the day Thursday, there were 217 comments (256 late Saturday). Sure, some were off the subject, but there was plenty to provoke relevant thought. Some folks joined in for the first time, others returned after a hiatus, and stalwart regulars attacked the subject with gusto.

Regular "Herb," whose complaints about "Lee" and "LexWolf" started the whole subject rolling, was inspired to use his full name (Herb Brasher) for the first time, although he asked me not to make that a requirement:

"I’m not sure about the anonymity, but I’ve surrendered mine, as you notice. I’d rather see anonymity continued, in which case a bit of censorship might be needed. I’d go for option two, as long as you really enforce it."

Ervin Shaw agreed:

"I recommend that you (1) remember that yours is "Brad Warthen’s blog", (2) remember that Brad knows a "blog bully" when he sees one, and that you (3) decide to treat blog bullies as you treat spam. You know the type of participation that you want, and you are in control of the delete button. You’ll be criticized, but so what?…what else is new?"

But "bud" spoke for many Web denizens when he asked, "please don’t go overboard and edit this thing to death. We’re all adults and a bit of good natured jabbing is ok with me."

Spencer Gantt took the opposite view:

"Just make the requirements for posting the same as for ‘letters to the editor’. Have people participate on your blog by registering with full name, address, and telephone number. Names are published as above (Shaw & Brasher); address/phone are known only to you (unless one finds them in the Columbia phone book). People shouldn’t be ashamed/afraid to sign their name to their opinion or ‘good natured jabbing’ if that’s what it really is. Most of it is definitely NOT ‘good natured’. I quit with your blog some time ago for the very reasons noted in
your editorial."

From Bill Molnar:

"My suggestion is that you don’t allow respondents to go to far afield of the topic…. Monitoring what people … express is not an easy job. You don’t want to lose good thoughts/ideas or as Bud said, go over board and not allow the humorous jab. However, the blog cannot be a place where 2 or 3 people dominate, attack the person and ignore the issue in any type of intelligent manner. I wish you the best in re-fitting your blog and hope it will become a place that I want to return to for thoughtful discussion on the issue of our lives."

Regular "Randy E" suggested:

"(U)se an abuse reporting procedure  like other sites use. A blogger can report another as being abusive or ‘destructive.’ If the reported blogger meets a threshold of complaints, incremental action can be taken; e.g. warning email from Daddy Warthen, a suspension, and finally even expulsion. This would allow the bloggers to police themselves and preclude censorship. Blogger registration may be necessary. As long as we can say the Yankees suck, I’m  happy!"

I caused "Phillip" to examine his own conscience:

"Your column gave me pause, wondering if I have crossed the line into incivility on occasion. I’ve made strong statements but have tried not to make things personal. I also am not anonymous, as anyone who clicks on my name here can easily find out."

He needn’t have worried. (But then, it seems the people who are the least guilty are generally the first to feel guilty.)

"Dave" was unimpressed with the entire discussion:

"While the Israelis have over 1400 rockets launched at them indiscriminately where mostly civilians can be hit, we have people worried here about blog civility. Why is that? Let’s all worry about  terrorists being civil to the rest of the world and after that is fixed we can worry about people who think other people aren’t nice to them. Sheesh!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"LexWolf," one of those Herb had specifically identified as a "bully," was unrepentant and took the occasion to paint things in partisan/ideological terms (which I take to mean that he actually considers me to be a liberal):

"The problem for you guys is that you are so used to getting your way and to having everybody just shut up while you spout your illogical socialist (minor expletive deleted) that you are stunned when people point out the truth to you. In your opinion, we are being ‘incivil’ just because we point out some undeniable facts but when your side accuses us of the usual sexist/racist/bigot/homophobe litany, I suppose you are exhibiting the height of civility. NOT!"

Fellow defendant "Lee," in one of his 31 comments on the subject, also remained true to form: "Anytime you ‘liberals’ want to clean up the threads by talking honestly about the thread topic with facts, get to it."

I was gratified by the return of former regular Paul DeMarco, who explained that he now visited the site "only occasionally because of its circular and predictable nature. I wonder if there is a way to make the conversation more linear so that we are driving toward a solution or consensus on a specific issue…. BTW, I agree with requiring full names. I’ve done it from the beginning because I knew it would help moderate my own commentary."

That just scratches the surface of the first half of the responses. Of course, in true blog fashion, the civility deteriorates significantly in the second hundred comments. Still, there is a substantial mass of sentiment here for something better, and plenty of ideas on how to achieve it. Please join in the discussion if you haven’t already. You know where to go, don’t you?

Other blogs on civility

71 Replies

Note that two of my brother bloggers have weighed in on the civility debate from their own respective sites.

Here’s Mike Cakora’s thoughtful reflections on the subject, and here’s Bob McAlister’s silly, dismissive take on it. Not that I would express preferences or anything.

Just kidding, Bob! Seriously, the approach he takes — let the hotheads have their say — was the very position I took for more than a year. Then I realized that my policy was running off some of the most serious people who wanted the blog to be a more useful forum for deliberate, civil debate — as did I.

I will take this occasion to thank Mike C for bringing Tony Blair’s speech to our attention. It was a cruel twist of fate that gave us George W. while conferring the blessing of Mr. Blair upon Britain, which doesn’t appreciate him.

If ever you doubt what we’re doing (or supposed to be doing) in the War on Terror, check with Tony. He can always explain it masterfully.

Blog civility column

305 Replies

Making the blogosphere
safe for decent folk
    Lee and LexWolf are ruining your blog for everybody else. They… don’’t just disagree, but demean and ridicule all those who don’’t hold to their position. They… are blog bullies.
            –— "Herb"
    Trust me, Herb, when and if you ever come up with real arguments I will be sure to give them proper respect. So far arguments from your side are rather thin on the ground, if you catch my drift…
            –— "LexWolf"
    (E)xpecting civility on a blog where anonymity rules is a bit like expecting mud wrestling to be played under the same conditions as cricket.
            –— "VOA"

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
After more than a year of lively participation –— and in some cases "lively" should be read as a euphemism –— I wonder whether my Weblog is a useful forum. And if it isn’’t, what can be done to make it so?
    These may seem odd questions to ask regarding something to which I, and many of you, devote so much energy.
    How much energy? Well, since I started on May 17, 2005, I have written more than 600 times on that site. In the same period, I’’ve had 68 columns in the actual newspaper. Readers haven’’t been exactly watching the grass grow, either. Back here at the regular paper we have never received many more than 300 letters to the editor in a single week — including unpublishable scraps without signatures. In the seven days that ended June 16, there were more than 700 comments on my blog.
    We’’re talking a lot of activity here. A lot of heat. The question is, how much light?
    I’’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the comments lately. It’’s not that many of them are rude, dismissive, narrow-minded, combative and hostile to anyone who dares to disagree. I mean, many of them are all those things. But that’’s not the problem. That has been a factor since the first posts in May of last year. It’’s the nature of the medium.
    In the daily newspaper, we have a thing called "standards." Letters have to be signed. Writers have to be prepared for phone calls from us asking them to back up assertions of fact.
    On the blog, very few sign their full names. Add to that the fact that so far, I have deleted only one comment ever for being unacceptable. That one was grotesquely obscene. (Of course, I delete "spam" messages on sight.)
    This creates an atmosphere that some find, shall we say, liberating. And I don’’t mind that. Call me what you like. If you say something I haven’’t heard before, maybe I’’ll send you a nice prize.
    Here’’s what I am worried about: My less mature correspondents are running off the serious, thoughtful people who came to the blog hoping for the very thing I would like that venue to be — a place to exchange sincere, constructive ideas about the challenges facing South Carolina and the rest of the world.
    Lord knows we need a place like that. Check the "debates" in the Legislature, the Congress or on all those shouting matches on 24-hour cable TV "news." Where do most of those get us? Nowhere. Political parties, professional advocacy groups in Washington and closer to home, news directors who see themselves as entertainers, the Blogosphere itself and, yes, the pliable "mainstream media" have in a single generation dragged public discourse down to the point that it seems that a majority of us believe that public policy is about nothing deeper than scoring points with stupid, simplistic bumper-sticker quips.
    They make me want to hurl, and I am far from alone. Why do you think voter turnout and involvement is so pathetic?
    I have always wanted this page to be something better, and the blog was intended to augment that mission, not replace it in any way. The idea was to broaden the discussion, and share a lot of material that either I didn’’t have room for in the paper, or just wasn’’t ready for prime-time exposure as an editorial or column.
    You have responded, and I have been humbled and gratified by your participation — at least, by some of it.
    But now I’’m trying to figure out how to make that space more hospitable to the most thoughtful respondents, a place where they are greeted with respectful dialogue rather than low-minded derision. I’’m not talking hugs and kisses. I want the arguments lively, and no intellectual punches pulled. The childish stuff, however, needs to go.
    Here are my options, as I see them at this point:

  •     Require registration to leave a comment, with full names. Free people should stand behind their words.
  •     Let those who want to maintain their anonymity do so, but cull out the comments that I personally see as destructive.

    Of course, the best thing would be for everyone on the left, the right and the loony middle to learn how to be cool and play better with others. But if I have to be Daddy I will. And don’’t look at me like that, mister.
    People on the Blogosphere hate this kind of talk. But there are plenty of partisan blowoff sites for them to go to. I’’ve never made a secret of the fact that I’’d like this to be something more. And if I didn’’t know that some of you want it to be something more, I would have quit trying long ago.
    Anybody have any other ideas? Go to the blog, and speak up. I’’m going to give this process a couple of weeks before taking any overt action, drastic or otherwise.
    In the meantime, if you have visited the blog in the past and been discouraged, now is the time to come back and help me make the place safe for decent, law-abiding smart folk.
    If you haven’’t been there at all, what’’s wrong with you? The address is right here…

Sanford vs. Moore

12 Replies

Tom_davis
Allegations highlight main difference
between Sanford and Moore

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

EVERYBODY likes Tom Davis. He’s open, sincere, hard-working and honest as the day is long. That makes him a good emissary for Gov. Mark Sanford.
    As legislative liaison during the session, Tom (I can’t call such an approachable guy “Mr. Davis”) is the one bright, warm spot in the governor’s four-year Cold War with the General Assembly. Lawmakers may sometimes use him as a whipping boy because he’s handy and the governor isn’t (that’s him above standing at the back of the House above, watching lawmakers rip into the governor’s veto of the budget this year), but no one stays mad at Tom for long. He’s too nice a guy.
    Sen. Tommy Moore calls Tom Davis a “hired gun.” Not by name. That’s just how he refers to the person responsible for a “white paper” released by the Sanford campaign that attacks his performance in the Senate.
    Tom’s no hired gun; he wouldn’t wear the black hat in anybody’s Western. He’s the faithful sidekick. He has neglected his law practice in Beaufort — and, more importantly to him, his family — for the past four years to help his friend Mark Sanford.
    But he is the guy going around and peddling a set of detailed allegations against Sen. Moore. (You can find a link to Cindi Scoppe’s column on the subject Friday, and to the entire “white paper,” on my blog.)
    The allegations go back to 1988. Sen. Moore is accused of letting a bribery-tainted tax cut slip by him; of watering down ethics legislation after the Lost Trust scandals in the early ’90s; of continuing to hamper efforts to plug ethics loopholes since then; and of supporting a bill that would benefit a company that contributed to his campaigns and was proposing a development in his district. With supporting documents (mostly old news stories from The State and other papers), the handout runs to 45 pages.
    And this is only the beginning. “This isn’t exhaustive,” Tom says. He plans additional “white papers” on the environment, education and possibly other issues.
    Tom’s been working at this since the June 13 primary — poring through Lexis-Nexis, digging articles out of newspapers’ electronic archives. He seems to have enjoyed the change of pace after months of standing at the back of the House and Senate chambers and watching fellow Republicans roll right over his boss on issue after issue: “To me, it was like reading a very, very detailed historical novel.”
    But why would a governor who is 30 points ahead in the polls (according to Tom) go to this kind of trouble to dig up such detailed allegations? Was it, as some speculated at first, a sign of how nervous Mr. Sanford was about a Jake Knotts candidacy that didn’t materialize? No, says Tom; polls showed Sen. Moore losing more votes to Sen. Knotts than the governor would have.
    “Desperate people employ desperate tactics,” says Sen. Moore. “It sounds to me like some people have looked at some poll numbers” and that they weren’t as favorable as Tom lets on. He doesn’t know this, though, as he has yet to get out there with a baseline poll himself — a measure of how far behind he is in fund-raising. It reminds him of former Gov. Jim Hodges’ decision to attack challenger Sanford practically from the day after the primary four years ago. “I thought it was ill-conceived and unwise,” said Sen. Moore. “He must have the Hodges playbook.”
    But Tom’s “white paper” is actually of great value to the voters, for one reason: It highlights the main difference between the two candidates.
    “I don’t think he’s a bad man,” says Tom. “I don’t think he took bribes. I think it (the 1988 tax break) got in the budget because he didn’t read the budget.”
    Note this from the first line of the release: “Sen. Moore’s legislative record shows that he was inattentive to details, easily misled and unconcerned about (providing) legislative due diligence in reviewing legislation….”
    Time and time again, what you see and hear is this contrast:
    Mark Sanford is a stickler for detail. In preparing his executive budget, he challenges every line in an excruciating process that lasts months. (“Every line,” complains Tom. “It’s hell for me.”) Then, when lawmakers pass a budget that he doesn’t like, he vetoes the entire thing rather than work with them to come up with something mutually acceptable. His six-year career in Congress was marked by an utter lack of achievement; he’s remembered for sleeping on a futon, and talking endlessly about Social Security reform that never materialized. He is admired for being uncompromising, even though that means he gets little done.
    Tommy Moore (below, with long-time Senate Chaplain George Meetze) is respected as the “go-to” guy in the Senate. He is regularly appointed to conference committees because he is known for rescuing legislation by getting people of differing views to find something they can agree on and take action. As a result, his 28-year career in the Senate offers much to praise, and much to criticize. Of the 1991 Ethics Reform Act, he says, “You had a lot of people working together,” from the governor and other ardent reformers to lawmakers who didn’t want to pass anything. “You could have had everybody stand firm on their own positions, and then you would have gotten nothing done, and that would have been the absolute worst of all scenarios.”
    To him it would, but not necessarily to Gov. Sanford. There’s the contrast. Tom’s whole point in his 45-page broadside is that “there are bad sides to being the insider who gets things done.”
    But as Sen. Moore points out, there are good things as well.
    Which do you prefer? You have to decide by November.

    More on the subject.

Tommy_meetze

Smoking column

62 Replies

Good news: We get to smoke for free.
Bad news: We have no choice

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WHY IS it called "secondhand smoke"? What’’s "secondhand" about it? When I find myself gagging on it, and look around for the source, it’’s always coming straight from the cigarette. The smoker’’s not using the smoke first before sharing it with me. Most of the time, he’’s not puffing on the thing at all. He’’s just sitting there, letting the tendrils of carcinogenic particulates pollute the room.Smoking

Let’’s give smokers this much credit –— when they do take a pull on their coffin nails, they usually refrain from blowing it right in our faces.

So there’’s nothing secondhand about it. Those of us who "don’’t smoke" are getting the full, genuine, original article, fresh and straight off the rack. Face it, folks –— we’’re smoking. The good news is, we’re not even having to pay for it. The bad news is, we don’’t have any say in the matter.

Now, the term "passive smoke" makes some sense. When you consider that most people are "nonsmokers," but all of them at some time or other have to breathe the stuff anyway, it becomes clear that most who smoke aren’’t doing it on purpose.

Fortunately, the majority has in recent years become a lot less docile. As a result, fewer and fewer of us are forced to work long hours in smoke-saturated factories, stores and offices— the way I was when I first came to work at this newspaper, a fact that cost me thousands in medical bills (even with insurance).

Notice how often I’’m slipping into the first-person here. This makes me uncomfortable, which is why you’’ve probably never read an entire column from me on the subject of smoking, even though it has been for many years my bane. I’’m suspicious of other people who advocate things that would directly benefit them or some group they belong to, so I avoid it myself. When I wrote a column that dealt with my rather extreme food allergies, I spent much of the piece trying to rationalize my self-absorption.

But the subject of public smoking has been brought to the fore, and the time has come to speak out. There’’s a new surgeon general’’s report. The University of South Carolina has moved virtually to ban it. On the state and local levels, there are moves afoot to eliminate smoking from bars and restaurants –— the last broad refuges of the gray haze.

It’’s time to speak up. In fact, I wonder why the majority was so diffident for so long. I guess it was that classic American attitude, "Live and let others fill our air with deadly fumes." An anecdote:

A restaurant in Greenville. Our waiter came up and asked in a whisper whether we’’d mind if a gentleman who smokes were seated next to us. You see, he explained, the petitioner was in a wheelchair, and that was the only table available that would be accessible to him. Granted, this was the nonsmoking section, but if we could accommodate him….

Uh, well, gee. A guy in a wheelchair. Poor fella. It’s not like I can’’t smell the smoke from across the room anyway ("nonsmoking areas" are a joke). I started thinking aloud: "I suppose… I mean… if there is no alternative… I’’m allergic to it and all, but if you have to…."

At this point, the waiter began to back off, and said –— with a tone of deferential reproach that must have taken him years to perfect –— "That’s all right. I’’ll just ask the other gentleman to wait for another table."

Gosh. I felt like a heel. I pictured a hungry, forlorn, Dickensian cripple, waiting for some kind soul to let him have a bit of nourishment. Tiny Tim grown up, being dealt another cruel blow by life. As the waiter started to back away from our table, I was about to relent… when suddenly, a rather obvious point hit me: "Or," I said, "he could just not smoke."

Why did he have to smoke if he sat in the section full of people who had specifically asked not to breathe smoke while dining? Easy answer: He didn’’t. Nor did he need to spit, curse, pick his nose or break wind.

OK, I got off-message. It’s about public health, not offensiveness. As the surgeon general reported, even brief exposure to tobacco smoke "has immediate adverse effects" on the body. (I knew that before, since smoke causes my bronchial tubes to start closing the instant they make contact. I’’m lucky that way. I don’’t have to wait 30 years to get sick.)

Smoke_pipeBut you know what? Even if it were only a matter of being offensive, even if it were nothing more than putting a bad, hazy smell into the air, there would be no excuse for one person imposing it upon even one other person.

We’’re not talking about one person’’s interests being set against another’s. It’s not in anybody’’s interests for anybody to smoke –— unless you make money off that human weakness.

Take that guy in Greenville. He was already in a wheelchair! I’m supposed to waive the rules so that he can make himself sicker, and us with him? What madness.

It’’s not even in the interests of many bars or restaurants –— although, if nonsmoking establishments become the norm, I can foresee a time in which there would be a niche market for smoking dens.

And I’’d prefer for the market to sort that out. I am no libertarian, yet even I hesitate to pass laws to ban smoking in public places. But the market has not addressed the matter to the extent you would expect. Why?

Richland County Councilman Joe McEachern says a restaurateur recently told him, "Joe, I’ve got some great customers who are smoking; I can’t personally put up a sign that says ‘’no smoking.’’" But if there were a law, his business would benefit because the demand for clean-air dining is greater than he can meet now: "I can’’t get enough room for nonsmoking."

OK, so if most people don’’t smoke, and it’’s to everybody’’s benefit to clear the air, why can’’t we work something out?

Maybe this is why: I still feel kind of bad about the guy in the wheelchair. But I shouldn’’t.

All the news that gives you fits

50 Replies

Is ‘The Times’ trying to undermine war effort?
No; it just looks like it

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LAST WEEK our editorial board discussed the controversy surrounding The New York Times’ latest disclosure of secret U.S. intelligence operations.
    (“Controversy” may be too mild a word. “Treason” is bandied about with regularity, and hanging has been mentioned.)
    A colleague said that people who think this is about the Times being anti-Bush or anti-American don’t understand the role of the media: “There’s always been that tension.”
    No, I said. Just because it’s been there our whole careers doesn’t mean that it was always thus. And just because readers don’t like a newspaper’s attitude toward the government doesn’t mean that they don’t understand it. They just don’t like it.
    They would prefer to see the Times cover war the way it did 60 years ago. On June 7, 1944, its lead story began as follows:

    “The German Atlantic Wall has been breached.
    “Thousands of American, Canadian and British soldiers, under cover of the greatest air and sea bombardment of history, have broken through the ‘impregnable’ perimeter of Germany’s ‘European fortress’ in the first phase of the invasion and liberation of the Continent.”

    Two days earlier, it had reported that Americans had “captured Rome tonight, liberating for the first time a German-enslaved European capital….” On Dec. 9, 1941, it had related that the president had “denounced Japanese aggression in ringing tones.”
    Note all those value-loaded words. You’ll also find that Germans are “Nazis” or “the foe.” Allied nations are referred to as “us,” rather than in the third person.
    Today, terrorists are “insurgents,” and the only “ringing tones” most journalists hear are the ones they program into their mobile phones. Taking sides is seen as not only unprofessional, but unethical.
    In some ways, this is healthy. In others, it is excessive. If D-Day occurred today, we would hear that morning on television how hopeless the situation appeared on Omaha Beach. This would be repeated, sliced, diced, analyzed and reacted to for hours before we learned that a few Americans had climbed the cliff and established a tentative foothold.
    We would soon learn how completely our bombers had failed in their critical mission of cratering the German defenses, leading to hundreds of American deaths at Omaha. We’d know that intelligence had been so lame that no one had anticipated how hard it would be to attack through Norman hedgerows, and that American paratroopers had been dropped everywhere except where they were supposed to be, often without weapons or ammunition.
    All of which would be true. And demoralizing.
    So am I saying The New York Times and other media (including the defunct Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, which took pride in its critical investigations of the Iraq war) are trying to undermine our war effort?
    No. It just looks like it.
    This can put the media at odds with more traditional folks who would like to see a little buy-in on the part of the Fourth Estate when American lives are on the line.
    I don’t believe the Times editors had malicious motives. But I do think they went too far in their watchdog role when they revealed details of how we track financial transactions in the pursuit of terrorists.
    When did this big shift in journalistic attitudes occur? After Watergate. I recently saw “All the President’s Men” for the first time in three decades. When I got to the scenes in which several of The Washington Post’s editors say they think the paper is going overboard, that there’s no way the White House would be involved in such doings, I had to pause the DVD to explain to my kids how different things were then. They’ve grown up in a world in which such charges are routinely leveled, and immediately believed. The idea that the opposition will stoop to anything is the starting point of political discourse today.
    Journalists are products of their times as much now as in the past. Today, people who hold high security clearances are prone to tell tales with impunity, and then what does an editor do (especially when you know that if you don’t run it, some blog will)?
    Which is more arrogant in an editor: Telling the readers everything you know, or deciding you won’t tell them certain things? Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet recently co-wrote a column in which they disclosed that “each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits.”
    Oh, yeah? Well who are you to decide that I don’t need to know something?
    Well, they’re the editors, which is probably a more satisfactory answer to me than to you. Under our Constitution, no one but an editor can decide what a newspaper prints or doesn’t print. It’s kind of like democracy — as messy as it is, I wouldn’t want to live under any other kind of system. But with such sweeping rights come a huge responsibility. The editors said they understood that:
    “We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.”
    I agree. In our free society, editors must make those decisions. But there is little doubt that in the country in which I have worked as a journalist, editors make very different decisions — based on very different criteria — from those made by editors in the country my parents grew up in.
    The question is, are we better off now? Sometimes I doubt it.

More from Kit Spires

18 Replies

As promised, here are additional notes from my last interview with Kit Spires. I had been trying to reach him last Thursday in connection with my column for Sunday, and he called back on my cell phone while I was in the waiting room at the Ear, Nose and Throat doc seeing him about my aforementioned perpetual sinus pain. I had a long wait, so he and I were able to talk for about 35 minutes.

The interview was somewhat more awkward than it might have been
otherwise, since our runoff endorsement of his opponent, Rep. Ken Clark, had
run that very day. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as some such chats can
be, and I credit Mr. Spires for that. He was quite gracious,
considering the circumstances, and that speaks well of him.

I had missed him earlier in the day because he had taken off from his pharmacy and had been out campaigning. He said he’d "been out to the senior centers today."

I asked him about his successful day the previous Tuesday, and he said "I was excited by the turnout." As I look back at these notes, I realize I had meant to get back to that and ask him to elaborate. The turnout had been low, and all the Clark supporters I had spoken to at the meeting described in my column had said that low turnout — which they mostly attributed to weather — had been the reason Mr. Spires was going into the runoff with a considerable lead.

(In light of that, if I were inclined to bet, I’d bet that Mr. Spires is going to prevail tomorrow — as wrong as I believe that outcome would be, both for South Carolina and for the voters of District 96. A lot of things can happen in a runoff, but having greater turnout than in the original primary is generally considered to be one of the likely possibilities. All Mr. Clark has to do is turn out another 600 or 700 voters, but that is not easy under the circumstances.)

Anyway, I’m not sure whether Mr. Spires was saying he was pleased by the low turnout, or simply saying he was gratified that enough of his people turned out. He and I have missed each other on the phone in the past 24 hours as I write this. If we make contact, I’ll try to remember to ask him.

He noted that he had taken the Lexington County portions of the district by 48 percent, while "Dean" — the third candidate in the race — had taken the Aiken County portion (barely). Dean Rawls, a candidate with whom I am largely unfamiliar because he never came in for an interview, has thrown his support to Mr. Spires.

Mr. Spires was still saying his main issue was the property tax, particularly older folks such as his 73-year-old mother having to pay property tax for schools when they have no kids in schools. I kept asking him to explain how that could be an issue now that the Legislature — with his opponent’s help — had eliminated all residential property taxes for school operations.

This was about the only point at which we touched on the main issue in the race — tuition tax credits for schools. Excuse me, one of the two main issues in the race. There is, as I noted in my column, something different in this race, which prevented Mr. Clark from prevailing June 13 the way other candidates targeted by out-of-state anti-schools money did. That would be the matter of local issues, particularly in the Swansea area (Mr. Spires will allude tangentially to this below), that really have nothing to do with what a representative is sent to the State House for.

As usual, Mr. Spires spoke in general terms. He seems to have little strong opinion on the subject one way or the other. He seems to have been chosen by the pro-"choice" money people for no greater qualifications than the facts that he is willing to run, and he is not Ken Clark. Ken Clark is a remarkably strong and articulate explainer of everything that is wrong with their position, so the likes of SCRG and CIA are determined to see him go.

"The best solution is compromise," was about as far as Mr. Spires would explain his views on this. He used the example of what he learned in 10 years on the Lexington Medical Center board. He didn’t see the need for the recent political fight over whether the hospital would be allowed to do open-heart surgery. "That should have been an issue with the certificate of need people." Well, he and I agree on that, assuming I understood him right. (The problem was that the Lexington Medical folks and Lexington delegation refused to leave the decision to be handled through that process, and insisted on provoking a bitter battle at the State House.)

Mr. Spires and I did not always understand each other clearly right away. We seemed to be talking past each other, and the imprecision of the way he would express his views often led to misunderstandings and having to backtrack in the conversation. For instance, he said, "There’s got to be a better way to fund public schools than on the backs of the taxpayers." He said this within the context of having expressed doubts about the efficacy of the Legislature’s tax swap, with a sales tax increase making up for eliminating the residential property tax for school operations.

So I asked how he would pay for schools if not with taxes of some kind. He then hastened to explain that he meant it should be done on the backs of property taxpayers.

Then, a moment later, he mentioned the need to fix up state roads, and said, "Let’s take 25 percent of the property tax and designate in for roads and improvements." I asked how, if he was going to cut or eliminate property taxes for broad swathes of the electorate, he would come up with more money for roads. He said he was talking about using car taxes for roads. So I said, you mean a portion of the taxes on cars, boats and airplanes would take care of our huge maintenance backlog on our highways? It seemed unlikely enough that I was trying to make sure I understood him.

He seemed a bit confused at my bringing up boats and planes (he may have misheard me on a cell phone connection), so I explained that personal property taxes apply to those as well. At this point, I think we had it all straight, although his plan doesn’t seem to have any sort of practicality to it. If you raised personal property taxes enough to pay for that billion-dollar or so backlog, the taxpayers would probably totally freak out.

Mr. Spires’ one specific idea about what to do about taxes is that "property taxes (meaning real property taxes) for over 65 be eliminated."

So I said, that’s it? A totally age-based exemption? So 67-year-old millionaires with beachfront homes at Hilton Head would pay no property taxes for schools, while we’d still kick younger folks out of their houses if they couldn’t pay up enough to make the difference of that break? He thought about that a moment and said of the theoretical millionaire who lived mainly in Columbia but had a place at the beach and in the mountains that he should still get the total break on his primary residence.

"I don’t have all the answers," Mr. Spires acknowledged. "If I did, I’d be in Las Vegas trying to bet on the numbers, you know." Well, no, I hadn’t known. It wouldn’t be what I’d do if I had all the answers. I don’t think it’s what Ken Clark would do if he had all the answers, either. That could be one key to the reason I prefer Mr. Clark.

Gambling came up a little later in our chat, when Mr. Spires expressed one of the commonest misconceptions about the state lottery. He was expressing his theory — based on no particular facts or figures that he was able to cite — that "I personally think we have the money" already to do whatever we need to do with education and other functions of state government. "We’ve got the money," he assured me. But "It’s just like the lottery money."

How’s that? Well, "it was supposed to go for all (education), and it seems like it goes too much to the colleges and universities."

OK, once again, for all those folks who paid no attention to what Jim Hodges and other lottery supporters told you before the lottery vote, and who also paid no attention to what those of us who opposed the lottery told you, college scholarships were always the main selling point on the lottery. Sure there was vague talk about "our schools" on the part of the advocates, but the point, for Mr. Hodges, was to hand scholarship checks to middle-class parents who would otherwise vote Republican. Upon receiving that manna that the state took from the poorer and more gullible, said affluent parents might be grateful enough to vote Mr. Hodges in for another term.  It didn’t work out that  way, but we do have the lousy lottery to remember him by.

But I let that go. Instead, I tried to get him going on an area of potential agreement between us. I,  too, believe that a lot (although not nearly all) of what is needed to bring critical state services up to snuff is already being spend, just on the wrong things. So I asked Mr. Spires what he would cut, but he informed me "I don’t want to cut anything." Not even some of those duplicative, wasteful colleges and programs the state funds? No,he wouldn’t cut them; he would allocate the money better without cuts.

He didn’t offer any examples of how he would accomplish that. In fact, he specifically expressed his disagreement with one recent consolidation of services — combining the pharmacy schools of USC and MUSC. He is, as mentioned before, a pharmacist. His explanation of his opposition to consolidation was that "I went to USC, and I personally think we ought to have two" separate schools.

We moved on.

Why did he do so much better than Mr. Clark the previous week? "I’m in touch with the people every day," while "he’s not even in touch with his neighbors." Mr. Spires operated a pharmacy in Swansea for years, but eventually sold it. He still has one in Pelion, while "I still have a lot of friends in Swansea." That showed on June 13.

Those neighbors are the key to it all for Mr. Spires. He doesn’t have to think for himself on issues as long as he’s got them to  guide him. Mr. Spires is very much a "small-D democrat" and not a believer in republican government at all.

"If you polled," he began in the classic argument of believers in pure-democracy, "taxes would be the number-one thing, and education would probably be down on the list."

"That’s what they’re interested in," he said of the voters.

So, he said, "Let’s do the important things first." I thought maybe he meant the budget should be delayed so it could be done in tandem with tax reform.  But no, he was complaining that legislators fail and fail to act on property taxes (and once again, the fact that they just did act,and dramatically, is shunted aside). He essentially suggests that as long as an issue is of overriding importance to people, lawmakers should not take another moment to take up anything until that overriding issue — in this case, tax cuts — has been resolved. He considers the cigarette tax and breast-feeding in public to be two examples of things that should not be talked about until residential property taxes for schools are dealt with.

I tried to make a joke, suggesting that sure, property taxes would be a higher priority — unless you were a hungry baby. I don’t think I delivered it right. Anyway, he did allow as how various issues were of greater or lesser importance to different people. "But everybody is concerned with property tax."

He then added, "And education is important, you know."

That’s about it. We did get on a tangent about the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, which I mentioned in the column.

Ken Clark column

29 Replies

Clark372
Money, ideology, populism,
apathy descend upon Ken Clark

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

THE COLLARD Kitchen was steaming Tuesday night, and I could hardly hear above the sickly hum of the air conditioning. S.C. Rep. Ken Clark was talking his heart out to a “community meeting” of 11 people, not counting his wife and campaign manager.
    One of the finest, smartest and hardest-working members of the Legislature is fighting for his political life against a well-funded challenger who seems to have decided to run on a mere whim.
    Kit Spires, a Gaston pharmacist (below, at right), is not going to like that characterization, and I don’’t blame him. He seems to be a nice man, and he’’s sincere. I spoke to him for this column longer than I did to Mr. Clark, and I like him. I can see why the folks he provides with medicine like him, too.
    But I’’ve covered politics since the 1970s, and I can’’t remember a more lopsided match. Ask bothKispires72 men about any issue you choose, and it is as bright, as sharp, as clear as the edge of a diamond that Ken Clark is a better representative than Kit Spires is prepared to be.
    But Mr. Spires got 45 percent of the vote June 13 to Rep. Clark’’s 35 percent. The third-place finisher has thrown his support to Mr. Spires.
“    "Clark’’s toast,"” says one local official.
    If that’’s true, it’s a dramatic illustration of the corrosive effects of three things that are eating the heart out of American politics:

  • Money. People who see South Carolina as a guinea pig for their project to defund government across the country have sent out 13 mailings attacking him or supporting his opponent. The attacks are off-the-shelf garbage that read like a transcript of those ideological shouting matches on cable TV. “"What’s that smell, you ask? Oh, that’’s just Rep. Ken Clark burning through your hard earned tax dollars."” No specifics, because they don’t exist. I am not making this up. The mailings are actually that stupid.
  • Ideology. The money comes from rich people who have developed a religion around the idea that they should pay less in taxes, and they don’’t give a damn what the money goes to pay for. Mr. Clark gets up every morning and sees problems in this poor state of ours, and he works obsessively to find sensible, cost-effective ways to solve them. The ideologues write checks to pay others to rid them of people like Mr. Clark. (And the money goes to more than mailings. As Mr. Clark noted, Mr. Spires was able to afford signs twice as large as his — see below — and more of them.)
  • Populist apathy. (Or should it be populism and apathy?) This world is rapidly becoming one in which far too few care about anything that happens beyond the ends of their own driveways. Such attitudes have an alarming imperviousness to Mr. Clark’’s 32 years in the U.S. Navy, or his intense service since then on school board and in the House.

    Why “"populist"”? Mr. Clark is a highly intelligent man who does not hide his light. He came up in a system in which capable men made decisions and saw that things got done. Mr. Spires is unassuming, and seems to have rubbed far fewer people the wrong way. Nowadays, that plays better than competence.
    Mr. Spires burns less brightly. He says he’’ll take an interest in whatever he hears people talking about in the local diner, and what he hears them talking about most is property taxes.
    He sees no reason why his mother, who hasn’’t had children in the public schools for 30 years, should have to support them.
    Mr. Spires is an unusual ally of the kind of people who are underwriting his campaign. He praises the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest Big Government spending boondoggle since Lyndon Johnson. But he’’s flexible on the outsiders’’ plan to divert public funds to tax credits for anyone who will send their kids to private schools. "“I’’m not against public schools,"” he says. He just believes "in “compromise."”
Clark272    Mr. Clark does not compromise on anything of such critical importance. That’’s why he works so hard to improve schools, rather than abandon them.
“    "My name is on every piece of education (reform legislation) that has gone to the governor,"” Mr. Clark truthfully tells every soul who will listen. That includes encouraging charter schools, and granting the right to transfer from "“failing"” schools to any public school a parent chooses. He sponsored a law likely to do more than any other idea I’’ve heard to counter our state’’s abysmal dropout rate, by engaging kids in careers early, and preparing them for those careers.
    And taxing and spending? Thanks to legislation he helped pass, “"You will see a decrease in your property tax bill of about 40 percent or 50 percent next year.”"
    Mr. Spires is utterly unimpressed that the Legislature just abolished all residential property taxes for school operations. He rejects the idea that his one motivating issue is now moot. People are still talking about how they don’’t like their property taxes, so how can the issue be dead?
    And maybe he’’s right. He’’s counting on the people who think he’’ll come up with a way of lowering their taxes (he’’s still vague on details) outnumbering the ones who understand that Ken Clark and his fellow lawmakers have just cut their property taxes so dramatically that I don’’t think it’’s entirely sunk in with most of us.
    Besides, thousands of fliers have gone out telling people what a big tax-and-spender Ken Clark is. It doesn’’t matter if it’’s not true. That’’s what folks have in front of them when they go down to the diner and gripe about their taxes.
    Meanwhile, in the place where they cook the collards for Gaston’’s signature festival in the much- cooler month of October, there were only about a dozen people Tuesday night. That counts me, and I don’’t get a vote.

Signs72

A call from Grady Patterson

2 Replies

You get so wrapped up in these primaries that sometimes you forget for a moment that there’s somebody else out there in the fall, and sometimes that somebody’s the incumbent.

We’ve been all atwitter awaiting the electrifying face-off tonight between Jeff Willis and … let’s see … Thomas Ravenel that it’s easy to forget the winner has to beat a very, very, very experienced Democrat in the fall.

I was reminded of that this morning when I got a call from Grady Patterson, who just wanted to congratulate me on "that editorial you did about the budget." I realized after a second that he meant my Sunday column (in this business, a lot of stuff flows under the bridge between a Sunday and Thursday). I thanked him and said something vague like, That’s a real mess, isn’t it?

It’s little surprise that Mr. Patterson, who regularly sides with the two lawmakers to outvote the governor on the Budget and Control Board, would agree with our take on that. Not that he has much hope it’ll do any good.

"I don’t think he’ll listen, but…" Mr. Patterson trailed off.

Well, we’ll see.

More on Sanford veto

33 Replies

Here’s some stuff I didn’t have room for in my Sunday column.

The bottom line is that even the things the governor says that sound reasonable don’t hold up when you run the numbers:

In his veto letter (on page 3), the governor says the following:

I have heard the arguments from some state legislators that "growing government by 13 percent this year simply puts us back to where we were before we had to make those midyear budget  cuts." That is simply not true.The Budget is $744 million above the previous budget high-water mark that people talk of "getting back to," as is shown by the following chart.

He’s right that it is not true. And indeed, in raw, unadjusted dollars there is a $744 million increase over the highest previous year. But the real reason the statement is not true is that there is no real-world increase at all, and the latest budget falls far short of "getting back to" what we were funding before. In fact, it is actually a $247 million cut when adjusted for inflation.

In 2006, you have to come up with $6.623 billion to have the buying power of the $5.632 billion "high-water" budget passed in 2000. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

The budget that the governor just vetoed is $6.376 billion. It falls short by $247 million from getting back to where we were before the cuts.

The governor also writes (on page 2) that:

I have consistently advocated limiting the growth in state government spending to a rate that reasonably correlated with the people’s ability to sustain it over time. Some would argue  that this rate is population plus inflation, currently about 5.5 percent. Others say it should be the  state’s average personal income growth, now about 6 percent.

When adjusted using the same official inflation calculator, the state budget grew by 6.41 percent from the one passed last year — not by 13 percent or even 10 percent.

So lawmakers who argue with the governor — if they have a clue as to what’s really going on — would not say, "growing government by 13 percent this year simply puts us back …." First, because it’s not growing by that rate. Second, because it doesn’t put us back at all. If they said either of those things, they’d be just as wrong as the governor is.

Column on Sanford veto

37 Replies

Sanford_win72
To kill a theoretical gnat,
Sanford drops the Big One

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

FACED WITH global terrorism, the United States, in keeping with its values, drops smart bombs — doing as much as advanced technology will allow to kill mass murderers, and not the noncombatants they hide among.
    Straining at a gnat of his own invention, Gov. Mark Sanford — in keeping with his values — drops the Big One on all of South Carolina.
    Sure, he knew the Legislature had the power to disarm the bomb before it did away with the entire state government. But whether legislators wanted to save the day was up to them. If they had neglected to do their duty the way he abdicated his (if even a third of either the House or the Senate had called his bluff), it would have gone off.
    Not that the governor expected for a moment that they would do that. He counted on them overriding his veto of the entire budget. He’s not insane; he’s just willing to place demagoguery ahead of responsibility.
    The governor knows there must be a government for there to be a civilization in which he is free to engage in politics as a hobby. What he disagrees with the Legislature about is the size of government. Nothing wrong with that, right? We’re dealing with that question every time we argue whether the government should do this, or not do that.
    But that’s not what the governor did. He decided that the government, as measured by expenditures, should grow by no more than this precise percentage.
    The number he picks has nothing to do with the essential demands that a civilization places on government. It’s not based on the number of children to educate, or the number of miles to be paved and patrolled, or the number of prisoners that we decide to lock up, or the number of mentally ill people wandering about.
    No, it’s based on an esoteric calculation involving the functions of inflation and population. He says his growth number is based on “the people’s ability to sustain it.” Never mind that some populations need more cops because they have more criminals per capita, or that a population whose pay is trailing the nation has a greater need to invest in education. Never mind a thousand other ways that the illogic of his proposition can be illustrated. He says you, the taxpayer, shouldn’t have to pay out more than what he says you can afford.
    Sound good? Oh, yeah. On the hustings, it plays much better than actually using your line-item veto power to get as close as you can to your arbitrary number. That would upset voters, because each cut you made would be into something that some of them deem essential. Why not just veto the whole thing, knowing the Legislature will override you, and go into the fall talking about how those people grew government faster than your ability to pay.
    This way, essential functions get sort-of funded (if you think they’re fully funded, count the number of cars ignoring the speed limit in full knowledge there aren’t enough troopers). Legislators still get their pork, rather than anybody forcing them to take a straight-up vote on whether the money would have been better spent on essentials. The governor gets re-elected as the guy who would save you from high taxes and overspending, if only those people would let him.
    Win-win, for everyone but the 4 million people who live in a state that has never gotten it together and set priorities so that it can catch up to the rest of the nation.
    I’ve now blown off enough steam that I can give the governor credit for a couple of things.
He did do the hard work, before the session, of going through state programs dollar-by-dollar — something the Legislature ought to do — and presented a theoretical budget that met his arbitrary figure. A governor should set out his statewide vision, and he did.
    And the Legislature built the budget the way it always does, in big chunks, which meant the governor could not veto some of the specific programs he didn’t like without vetoing others he did like.
    There’s no bigger advocate in this state than I for putting the executive functions of government in the hands of the elected chief executive. Mark Sanford is a slacker on that, compared to me.
    But in any rational republican system, it’s the Legislature’s job to draft a budget. Assuming that lawmakers should simply adopt the governor’s spending vision and go home, without speaking up for the voters who sent them, is to go far beyond the limits of even the most fervid advocates of executive power. It would take us to the point of monarchy.
    To say that the legislative branch had to do it his way or not at all is outrageous. To say that if the government isn’t precisely the size that Mark Sanford wants it to be, there should be no government at all, is horrific.
    You say he expected the Legislature to override him? But in terms of raw, calculating political hypocrisy, that’s even worse than being a head-in-the-sky ideologue who doesn’t know the real-life consequences of his actions.
    Consider this sequence: The governor spent the last days of the primary campaign ignoring his opponent, and running against the General Assembly. His beef was that legislators did not break precedent and stay in town so that he could give them his vetoes, so their votes to sustain or override would be there before the voters on election day. He pontificated mightily on their failure to be accountable.
    Then, when they chose instead to go home and actually face the voters before election day instead of doing his bidding, he took full advantage of the extra time that gave him. He waited until after the polls were closed and the votes counted, and he was safely renominated, before dropping his Big One. He had to do it by midnight that night, so he did it between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. And so Republican primary voters had no opportunity to hold him accountable for what he did with his veto power.
    I thought Mark Sanford was better than this. I really did. Now I don’t.

Primary-day column, WITH LINKS!

6 Replies

Read all about it. Then go vote!

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

AT MONDAY morning’s editorial meeting, we wearily debated how we might have done a better job on these primary elections. Should we have interviewed candidates in fewer races, opening time and space for more detail on the top contests? Did we make the best endorsements we could have? Did we give readers all the information that they need?
    The answer to that last question is, “Of course not.” Resources are limited, and at best, even when our board has been as thorough as it can be in making a recommendation, ours is but one voice in a much broader conversation. Careful voters should attend thoughtfully to all of it.
    My purpose in writing today is to refer you to additional resources, so you have more information available to you on this day of decision than we can fit onto one page.
    Start by going to my blog on the Web. The address is at the bottom of this column. If you don’t feel like typing all that in, just Google “Brad Warthen’s Blog.” Click on the first result.
    Here’s what you’ll find:

  • An electronic version of this column with one-click links to all the other information in this list.
  • The full texts of all of our endorsements. We don’t expect you to be swayed by the brief capsules at left; we provide this recap on election days because readers have requested it. Please read the full editorials.
  • Additional notes from most of the 51 candidate interviews that helped in our decisions. Please leave comments to let me know whether you find these notes helpful; it’s a new thing for me.
  • The Web sites of major candidates. These sites vary greatly in the detail they offer on issues (and in their frankness), but some can be helpful.
  • Addresses for state and local election commissions.
  • More links to last-minute news reports. The State’s news division is entirely separate from the editorial department, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help you find the news — including the Voter’s Guide from Sunday’s paper.
  • Recent columns, including an unpublished piece from teacher and former community columnist Sally Huguley, explaining why teachers should vote in the Republican primary.
  • Various explanations I’ve given in the past for why we do endorsements, and what our track record has been with them.
  • Much, much more — from the silly to the (I hope) profound.

    Please check it out, and leave comments. I want to know what you think — so would others — about the election, about our endorsements, about the blog itself. There were 138 comments left there on one day last week. I’d like to see that record broken. Broaden the conversation beyond the usual suspects (no offense to my regulars; I just want more, and you know you do, too).
    And then, go vote your conscience. Please. A number of observers have said voter interest is low this time around. It shouldn’t be. This election could help determine whether South Carolina does what it needs to do to improve public schools — and therefore improve the future for all of us — or gives up on the idea of universal education.
    I’m not just talking about the governor or superintendent of education contests. As we’ve written in detail (which you can read again on the Web), there are well-funded groups from out of state trying to stack our Legislature so that it does what they want it to do from now on. Don’t stand back and watch that happen. Exercise your birthright. Vote.
    Finally, after the votes are counted, be sure to tune in to ETV from 10 to 11 p.m. I’ll offer live commentary off and on (it won’t be just me for that whole hour, so you’re safe). You young people, ask your parents to let you stay up late. If you’re big enough to be reading the editorial page, you deserve it. You older folks, try to get a nap in the evening and rest up — after you’ve voted.

Here’s the address: http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.