Category Archives: Deleted Scenes

Saying it right out loud

I had to cut a lot of stuff out of my Sunday column to get it to fit into the paper — about 10 inches worth. About par for the course, really.

But I thought I’d share with you one little parenthetical that I trimmed, because it raises a point about the difference between the press in this country and over in Britain. I had originally stuck this in right after noting that the cover of The Economist last week was emblazoned with the words, "Why America must stay" — which was also the headline of the main editorial in that edition:

(The Economist doesn’t muck about when it has something to say, the way newspapers on this side of the pond do. Its cover is always about its top editorial — or “leader,” to use the Brit jargon.)

I’m not necessarily advocating we do that sort of thing over here, mind. But I do like the frankness of it, and I found the point interesting enough to raise, for those of you not already familiar with this practice. The "leaders," by the way, all appear right up front — before you get to the news content.

One other point: Before you say, "But The Economist isn’t a newspaper; it’s a magazine," I should tell you that, all appearances to the contrary, that publication calls itself a "newspaper." And it’s an awfully good one, too, even if it does only publish once a week.

Perception or reality?

Some additional thoughts I didn’t have room for in today’s column. In fact, these thoughts were actually central to the original idea for the column, but I ended up going in another direction:

A related issue: I’m sick of seeing perception spoken of as though it were substantial. If a poll shows that 57 percent of the country now believes a candidates’ stands on issues should be fair game for questioning (although they didn’t believe so in July, as if such fundamental principles were as mutable as the weather), that does NOT mean that they are fair game for questioning; it means 57 percent of the public didn’t (as of last week, when the poll was conducted) understand what is appropriate and what is not.

I realize that is likely to set off the small-D democrats out there, but the fact is that this country was established as a republic, not a pure democracy, for very good reasons. It wasn’t because those who are elected to represent us are necessarily smarter or better than the rest of us (no one who has spent as much time as I have over at the State House could believe that). It’s that the business of running a government is complicated, and requires more study and attention than the average citizen can devote to it in order to shape sound policy. You can take that same average citizen, and put him in the seat of an elected representative, and if he does the job he’s supposed to do, he will know things that the people who sent him there don’t know, no matter how smart they are. Why? Because they’ve got lives to lead, and he is the one they have delegated to study the issues more closely than they have time to do.

(This is why, for instance, some of the most conscientious Democrats in the Congress, such as Sens. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, are far more committed to sticking it out in Iraq than many of the folks who voted for them. They have done their jobs, and gained expertise in international affairs, and therefore fully understand how disastrous it would be for us to pull out now.)

The Senate, unlike the House, is particularly intended to be shielded from the momentary whims of public opinion — of which this case, in which you have the public exhibiting entirely different sets of values from July to September, is a perfect example. (This is why senators are elected every six years instead of two, and also why they were originally not popularly elected at all, but appointed by legislatures.) And one of the things that senators who take their jobs seriously ought to know is that the suitability of Supreme Court nominees should be based upon their legal credentials, not their personal political opinions. But a weird thing apparently happens in the world of politics: If the president of the opposite party is seen as too popular to challenge, senators tend to toe the line in terms of the propriety of the questions they ask during confirmation hearings. And if the president’s approval rating is in the toilet, one is free to quiz them about anything and everything. To some people (including, according to that poll, a majority of the electorate as of last week), this makes perfect sense. But to the nonpartisan mind, it makes none.

More on perception versus reality: There seems little question that President Bush failed to exhibit the leadership qualities that we deserve in the first days after Katrina hit (although I give him credit for at least trying to hit the right notes since then). I mean, who the expletive cares about Trent Lott’s porch when there are poor folks floating dead in the streets of New Orleans? The answer to that is, the president. And that says some pretty awful things about his suitability as a leader.

But in a larger sense, did the federal government as a whole fail in its job? Well, yes, in the sense that what it did was inadequate to the unbelievably huge task before it. But given the resources (which thanks to budget-cutting, WERE inadequate) and information available to it at the time, was the effort to meet that challenge reasonable?

I don’t know. I realize that makes me sound like an idiot to people who’ve been watching 24/7 news coverage over the last week or so — something I have neither the time or inclination to do. But that’s precisely where my uncertainty comes in. There’s something about that 24/7 news coverage that can shape perception regardless of reality. Decent human beings (with too much time on their hands) who sit and watch hours of human suffering, and then take a lunch break and come back to the tube, say "Oh my God — those people still haven’t been helped yet?" Therefore relief efforts don’t meet their expectations.

But are those expectations realistic? That’s what I don’t know. I’ve heard more than one person who has been involved in such aid operations say that deploying assets within three days of their being requested is actually something of a logistical coup.

I believe there were screw-ups — as there always are in something this big (study the mistakes made on D-Day, or the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, if you want to see governmental action at its most FUBAR). But was it more fouled up than we should expect? I don’t know, and that’s why investigations into what happened are worthwhile — after we deal with the more immediate problems.

Finally, I want to pin some more blame on the media in general — not just the TV cowboys who so often draw my ire. I’m including the press. Back in 1996, I reviewed a book by James Fallows called BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. He wrote that "Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another." More: "By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result."

It’s a malignant application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to American public life. Mr. Fallows said journalists tend lazily to cast every development in the news in terms of how it affects electoral politics. What may need to be reported are complicated facts that give readers and viewers the perspective they need to understand what happened. But that’s hard to do, whereas talking about the political implications is easy because journalists — particularly Washington journalists — live and breathe that stuff.

An example from the past week: When the president decided to name John Roberts as Chief Justice to replace William Rehnquist, the very first question that occurred to me (as a nonexpert on the subject) was, is this kosher? Has this happened before? Has the president ever named a rookie — one who hasn’t even pitched his first game in the majors, and for that matter doesn’t have much experience in the minors — to the top of the heap, over the heads of more experienced jurists?

I was very disappointed not to find the answer to that question in the first few sources I turned to — including The New York Times, which I usually trust to give me the perspective I seek on such matters. What I did find, however, was multiple references to the political implications of Mr. Bush’s declining popularity, and what that meant in terms of the reception his nominees were bound to get — which is what prompted me to write today’s column to begin with.

(By the way, it turns out I was all wet suspecting there was something unusual about a non-justice being named chief justice. Few of the 16 chief justices of the United States were actually on the court before their elevation.)

The Bene Gesserit way

Deleted from my Friday column fairly early in the writing process. It just didn’t work, and wasn’t worth the digression. But I pass it along for any sci-fi fans out there…

    The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from the science fiction classic Dune sort of sums up the self-congratulatory (and probably selective) memory I have of the event: “I must not fear…. I will face my fear. I will allow my fear to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone I will turn my inner eye to see its path. And where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
    Well, that’s all very well for fictional characters with superhuman abilities, but for ordinary folks living below sea level and facing a Category 5 hurricane, such a philosophy is downright stupid. In the aftermath of Katrina, I say take that litany, dry it out, and sell it as fertilizer.

You see? It just didn’t fit the tone, or anything. I was going to have to shoehorn it in with some transitional gyrations, so I just ditched it.

Extras from Tenenbaum meeting

There were a few points of interests from our Thursday editorial board meeting with Inez Tenenbaum that didn’t fit into my column Sunday.

First, she made a number of comments that — despite her continued attempts to be diplomatic — betrayed the degree to which her frustration with Gov. Mark Sanford has grown over the past couple of years. Since he came into office, at the same time that her second term began, she has gone out of her way to be at least neutral toward the governor, if not actually reaching out and trying to build bridges. For instance, she was the only major constitutional officer (as I recall; Cindi or someone correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m at home and have limited access to the archives) to go along with his desire to have her job become appointive rather than elected. Given the partisan currents that swirled all around this issue, the fact that the individual at the center had an accepting attitude should have been very helpful. Beyond that, the superintendent met with the governor once or twice early on, and this encouraged me that two people whose elections I had strongly favored would be able to rise above the partisan and ideological considerations that would have separated lesser individuals. All of this encouraged me greatly in early 2003.

But as time wore on, while the governor continued to say things to me that indicated his willingness to work with Mrs. Tenenbaum (and to this day, while he has shared with me — off the record, of course — negative impressions of a number of other leading political figures, within and without his own party, I don’t remember when he has directly criticized Mrs. Tenenbaum in my hearing), there was a lack of reciprocation on his part that was discouraging. He seemed noncommital personally, and among his administration and its fellow travelers there was a sort of passive-aggressive (and sometimes aggressive-aggressive) antipathy toward Mrs. Tenenbaum and her department that doused my hopes for a productive working relationship between them.

Then, of course, there was the larger problem: It became clear by early 2004 that the ideological wall between them was just too tall, and too thick. And the wall was constructed by the governor. If ideological rigidity were bricks, he’d have enough to build a full-scale model of the Great Wall of China.

In fact, Mr. Sanford’s insistence upon pushing the mad scheme of tuition tax credits for private school over the past year was, I think, the last straw for Mrs. Tenenbaum. You may say that he was for something like this all along, and indeed he was. But it only became fully apparent about a year ago the extent to which this was something he would pull out all stops to accomplish. He went beyond merely clueless about public education to positively destructive. (He would no doubt object to that characterization, and be sincere about it; that’s because he truly has no idea what public schools are all about, and is blind to the outrageousness of his proposal.)

Anyway, while she said a number of cordial things Thursday about the governor that sounded like her old self, there was a fierce passion in her voice when, right after praising other recent governors of both parties for the things they have done to further the cause of education, she uttered the following remarks with regard to their successor:

The whole thing about vouchers without accountability is just extraordinary.
In South Carolina, we have every aspect of our public schools held accountable — the Adequate Yearly Progress, the report cards — and to give money to a system that has no accountability, for financial or student achievement, is extraordinary. We would never do that.

    And then to, not only stand by and watch it, but actively condone and invite out-of-state groups to come in and run negative ads against public education — was irresponsible. And that’s putting it lightly.
    Why would you attack your school system that you’re the head of? And demoralize people when they are trying so hard, particularly in the rural areas, against all odds? It’s unprecedented.
    If you are trying to compete with other states to bring people into South Carolina and be competitive, you do not run down your public education system.
    You celebrate. You are the one who should be leading the charge, and holding a press conference: “We’re number one in improvement in 8th-grade NAEP; our SAT scores were the highest in improvement in the country…
    You know, that’s what a proactive governor does…

    …Someone has to give people hope.
    You just have to have somebody that will give people hope and excitement, that you can do it if you all pull together.

One of the things that frustrates her (and me) about the whole PPIC affair is the way it has bled energy and attention from the ongoing work of implementing the Education Accountability Act. The irony here, as I’ve often mentioned before, is that this was a reform pushed through by a Republican governor and lawmakers before she entered office in 1999. It was an enormous undertaking that fell into her lap the day she started the job, and one she never asked for. Nevertheless, she took it one and made it her priority — and more importantly, made it WORK. Schools have been getting steadily, measurably better. And yet there are precious few Republicans who join her in taking pride in this progress, and too many who embrace the latest fad — which of course, is the precise opposite of accountability. About that, she lamented:

    Traditionally in South Carolina … South Carolina will create a new initiative and say this is what we’re going to do now, and then we lose focus, and 7 or 8 years later, we’ll want to change course, and change directions…

She cited a Rand Corporation study that was done (or came out) right when she came into office in 1999 that cited Texas and North Carolina as the two states that had done the most on education reform. She and other officials dutifully studied those states to see what they had done right. At the same time, she was much impressed by this bitter irony: “But that same report said, had South Carolina stayed the course on the (Education Improvement Act), we would have been ahead of Texas and North Carolina.”

We do indeed have short attention spans — and not only among politicians. Mrs. Tenenbaum, as I noted in my column Sunday, is pinning her hopes on the private sector being able to overcome the political sphere’s attention deficit. This reminds me of comments Larry Wilson made to our editorial board at the governor’s mansion back in 1997 (or was it ’98?) — he said the business community, which was pushing for what would become the EAA would have to keep the state focused on the goals of accountability over the next 12 years, since election cycles would interfere with continuity.

But I question the extent to which the business community has maintained its focus on the goals of accountability. I’ve seen a number of exciting initiatives come out of the private sector, and then all these high-powered private individuals go on and live their lives, leaving the initiatives to sink or float. And they generally sink.

That must not be allowed to happen with accountability. And yet, the main actors in that process have mostly moved on to other enthusiasms, leaving a less dynamic cadre to carry on. Our only hope is that the process is sufficiently rooted in the system now that it can go on without a lot of heavy pushing. And our greatest fear must be that the reform process will be derailed by either PPIC, or some other dangerous distraction.

Morgan and Arthur

You’ve probably already heard enough about my dog who just died, but this wouldn’t fit into my Sunday column, and I’ve always liked the story, so I pass on this deleted passage:

    Her full name was Morgan le Fay, which she didn’t deserve, because she was a good dog. She was dubbed that on the day we got her. I’m fond of Arthurian lore, and for some reason, as we were driving the small black creature home that day — she wedged herself under the car seat in the last display of timidity I can recall on her part — I thought of the habit Arthur’s evil half-sister had of turning herself into a carrion crow (in T.H. White’s version of the story) — about the same size, and precisely the same color. I mentioned it to Andy and the other kids, and they liked it right away, the name having no negative connotations to them.
    Anyway, sometime during the first year we had her, a huge, “yaller” male stray — the biggest, strongest dog I’ve ever tried to hold on a leash — decided to come live with us. Despite his humble origins, he had a regal bearing, and was undoubtedly a warrior. We agreed to keep him while Pets Inc. found someone to adopt him, and we chained him to a post on the front porch. He tolerated this, until the mood would strike him to go on a quest, at which time he would casually break the chain and leave for a day or so. When he returned he bore such wounds of battle as a chunk out of his haunch, or a nearly detached ear. He completely ignored these, but allowed us to take him to the vet.
    Why did we chain him to the porch? To protect him from little Morgan le Fay, who despised this powerful interloper and would attack him with total abandon if he wandered into her backyard. So we called him “Arthur” until he was adopted and went off to his own Avalon.

Saving kids’ lives AND taxpayers’ money

I edited something out of today’s lead editorial before it got into the paper. Originally, it was the last in a series of bulleted items celebrating the few good highway safety provisions in the otherwise pork-laden federal highway bill. Here’s what I cut:

  • The government must study ways to reduce the problem of vehicles accidentally backing over children in driveways.

It’s not that I don’t want to save kids’ lives. It’s that I couldn’t see this newspaper going on the record as praising the idea of spending perfectly good money searching for an answer that is so painfully obvious that it makes you want to weep over humanity’s collective blindness.

You want to know, Mr. and Mrs. America, how to prevent most of these tragedies from occurring?

Stop driving SUVs!

Yes, it’s that simple. This provision came about because some advocates wanted to require TV cameras in the backs of SUVs so that their drivers could actually see little people behind them for a change, and others didn’t want to place that requirement on manufacturers and buyers. This absurdly unnecessary study was the compromise between the two positions.

I’ve seen these devices on high-end SUVs (they run about $1,500 to $2,000), and I just have to shake my head — what an extreme, Rube Goldberg sort of way to solve a problem that wouldn’t even exist if everybody just bought sensible cars to start with.

Of course, even "sensible" cars these days are being built with rear ends so high that it’s hard to see little ones. And why is that? They need the tall trunks as defensive measures, to keep SUVs from running up over them and crushing their occupants. But if where were no SUVs, this wouldn’t be necessary.

Just think, we could prevent these needless tragedies, save the ozone layer, reduce global warming and send a little less money to underwrite terrorism, through the simple expedient of facing the fact that we’re actually driving down the suburban street to the supermarket, and not hunting rhino on the Serengeti.

Anyway, I thought removing that improved the editorial. Don’t you agree?

Mark Sanford on Will Folks

My Sunday column makes the case that Will Folks’ op-ed was worth running because it gave insight into his character and judgment, and therefore into the judgment of his boss, Gov. Mark Sanford. So what does the governor himself have to say about that?

Before asking the governor Friday about Rep. Gresham Barrett’s comments, I asked him one other question:

"Why was Will Folks your press secretary for four years?"

His answer was too involved to just slip into my column without ditching several of the comments from readers that were the reason for the column. And I sure don’t want to write another column on this subject. But I just had to share it, so here goes:

The governor began by noting that Will Folks hadn’t been his spokesman as governor for four years. That period started with the campaign, and that’s when he and Mr. Folks forged their bond, such as it is.

"You start out with a grass-roots campaign, you have very little in the way of resources," the governor said. "You’re working out of the basement of your house…. You can’t afford all the bells and whistles" of a full-blown, professional campaign with experienced people in all the key positions. In any case, he added, that kind of uptight, do-it-by-the-book campaign wasn’t his style.

So, he said, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." (We all knew that’s what he did, but it meant a little more having the governor just say it that way.)

"Given the pressures he was under and the challenges he faced that he had never faced before, I think he did a pretty good job," during the campaign, Mr. Sanford said.

So after the election, he decided to give the young man the same job in the governor’s office. There, as we all saw, Mr. Folks moved from gaffe to gaffe — the Corvette thing, the comments about the Commission on Women, the alleged threats to the Chamber in Anderson.

The governor doesn’t deny that. But, he said, "For the most part, he did a pretty good job."

Bottom line as to why he kept him on so long? "I did it because he was competent," said the governor.

That’s pretty much all he would say for the record. Make of it what you will.

August 7 column, with links

Folks op-ed sparks lively
discussion in blogosphere
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
     LAST WEEK we ran an op-ed piece from former gubernatorial press secretary Will Folks headlined, “My side of the domestic violence story.”
    As you most likely know, Gov. Mark Sanford’s ex-spokesman was charged with criminal domestic violence after he allegedly kicked open the door of the home he shared with his now-former fiancee and pushed her into furniture, bruising her back.
    When, to my surprise, he called Tuesday to offer a column on the subject, I was quite interested.Folks_mug_2  Of course, I could not decide whether to run it until I had seen it. And I had to make the decision quickly, because he had indicated his intention to share it with other papers. That meant running it, if at all, the next day. We don’t knowingly run local op-eds that have run elsewhere.
    We ended up running it pretty much as it was, with one exception: I removed a passage in which he quoted what he claimed was an e-mail from his ex to his mother. Before making that decision, I asked to see the e-mail, and he forwarded it. Important context was missing from his citation of it. Besides, this was supposed to be his account of what he did, not his version of her account.
    I wrote an item for my blog about the piece. I included the part I had cut, followed by a fuller quotation from the e-mail he had forwarded. The way he had selectively quoted the e-mail to his advantage was striking.
    There was high reader interest. That day, the story about the new “four-strikes” rule at USC got the third-highest number of page views on thestate.com. My blog item and Mr. Folks’ op-ed came in first and second.
    Most interesting to me were the comments readers left on my blog. In keeping with my ongoing quest to make clear to readers why we do what we do, I thought I’d quote some of those comments, and answer them. I only know these correspondents by the names or nicknames they gave on the blog. But their identities are less important to me than the substance of their comments.
    I begin with “Lisa Turner’s” comment for an obvious reason: “You’re becoming a pretty good blogger. While I am intrigued by all the behind-the-scenes iterations of this story, I do not think it should have been run. You say that it was an opportunity The State shouldn’t pass up, but do you really think that Will Folks was going to do anything but try to help himself out?”
    Mr. Folks probably was trying to help himself out. But that’s not what he did. He defied legal (and his father’s) counsel in doing so. I knew I wasn’t helping him a bit by running it. But I wasn’t trying to hurt him, either. It wasn’t about how it affected him. My reasoning was the same as with anything we choose to publish: I ran it for my readers, who had a legitimate interest in knowing more about the man whom the governor had kept for years as his spokesman, despite his obvious liabilities.
    “Bob Steel” wrote: “I think it is irresponsible to allow Mr. Folks the opportunity to give his side of the story without hearing from the victim. It is very apparent Mr. Folks has friends at The State and was able to call in some favors.”
    If Mr. Folks has friends at The State, they certainly weren’t involved in this decision. And again, no favor was done here, as I suspect any attorney would tell you. As to the “other side” angle: I won’t solicit a point/counterpoint on a domestic dispute. The op-ed page is not “The Jerry Springer Show.” If the former fiancee, or anyone else, offers me a relevant, publishable piece rebutting Mr. Folks, I’ll run it. But I am not going to harass someone who (unlike Mr. Folks) is not a public figure during a horrible time in her life by calling and saying: “Your ex-boyfriend has written something trying to defend his actions. You want to respond? By the way, you’ve got about an hour.”
    “Elsa Green” wrote that “The State Newspaper has made a poor decision in allowing Will Folks to write an op-ed about his own personal problems.” But she went on to make my argument for me as to why to run it: “What is particularly frightening about this case is that Will has been an adviser to the top executive of our state.” Exactly. If the column had been simply about a man’s “personal problems,” I would have had no interest. It had value because of what it revealed about that man’s character and judgment, and therefore about the judgment of the governor.
    “Randy O’Toole” understood: “I think that Mr. Folks has a serious problem and it reflects poorly not only on him but the Governor and the State of South Carolina.”
    Not everyone saw it that way. “John Smith” wrote: “The real winner in all of this is, of course, Mark Sanford. After running headlong into a brick wall in terms of ‘taking on’ the governmental status quo, the Governor has now gotten rid of the ‘pit bull’: the very voice and symbol of his renegade attitude towards dealing with the legislature. Perhaps we will see a more cooperative effort from the executive branch as re-election time nears. After all, the voters like to see results.”
    “Deaver Traywick” thought I was unfair to the author: “My only suggestion is that you might have given Mr. Folks the option of running the piece as edited or not at all. As a writer and editor, I am concerned about the editorial policy of publishing changes or truncations without the writer’s consent.” As I regularly do when I make such a substantive change, I called Mr. Folks and told him of it. I half expected him to withdraw the piece, but he didn’t.
    “Thomas McElveen” came to my defense on that point: “Based on my personal experience, Mr. Warthen is extremely fair in his editing, and very graciously allows op-ed contributors input and even critique of his editing.” I wouldn’t dare try to
say it better.
    Finally, “Robert Trout” wrote, “I don’t get Mr. Warthen’s decision to not run an unedited op-ed piece in the newspaper, and yet run it in his blog. I don’t see the differenceæ.æ.æ..” Personally, I see a big difference.
    One of the reasons I took on the demanding additional work of a blog is that it gave me a chance to say things I couldn’t say in the newspaper for lack of space, or because it was unsuitable. The blogosphere, as you may have noticed, is a very different place from a family newspaper. One way I make use of that different forum is to give behind-the-scenes looks at the paper itself. For instance, I recently posted a Robert Ariail cartoon that we had judged too salacious for the paper, and asked readers whether they would have made the same decision. Most said we made the wrong call. Such is life.

What I cut from Will Folks’ op-ed

On the day that headlines proclaimed that he would plead guilty to criminal domestic violence charges — while, paradoxically, claiming that he’s innocent — Will Folks called to say he wanted to tell his side of the story. The result was the op-ed piece on today’s page.

It was an unusual request — or offer, depending on how you look at it. But then, Will Folks was an unusual gubernatorial press secretary. He had recently announced his second resignation from Gov. Mark Sanford’s staff. The first time was just before the governor took office, but he quickly returned. This time, after a series of gaffes that testified to his inexperience (by comparison with others who had held his post) and unpredictable temperament.

How often do you get a piece that gives readers a direct look into the thinking of a man charged with domestic violence? How often do you get such a piece from the governor’s ex-spokesman? The short answer to that is, "Never." So on the basis of news value alone, it was an easy decision.

Such pieces are unusual coming from anyone facing such charges, because normally his attorneys will tackle and bind and gag such a person to stop him from writing such a piece. But Will made it clear he didn’t care for advice from "lawyers and all, (who) keep telling me I shouldn’t talk about it." And not just lawyers. Shortly after he called to tell me he was sending the piece, I called back to ask for an ETA, and he hurriedly asked if he could call me right back. He later explained that his father had been trying to talk him out of this step. "He’s totally against it," he said. "He’s so worried about the legal" ramifications. "I just don’t care any more."

That’s why, he said, he had decided to plead guilty. "If they want to put me in jail for 30 days, I’ll go to jail for 30 days." He said this was the way he and the rest of the Sanford team had always operated: Say what you think, let it all hang out, and let others make of it what they will.

So he sent me the piece, and I ran it. But I didn’t run ALL of it. I cut out a key passage. It went between "…I did not intentionally grab or shove her so as to cause her to fall," and "I never set out to deliberately hurt anyone…"

Here’s what was cut:

Even my former fiancee herself, in an e-mail to my mother two days later, said “I do feel that Will did not intend to physically harm me” and further that “he never intended to hurt me.”

She’s right.

Why did I cut that out? A couple of reasons. The first is that this was — as he requested — Mr. Folks’ opportunity to tell his version of what happened. The piece had no business also providing his version of her version of events. (If she wants to share her story, that’s another matter entirely; but that’s up to her.)

The other reason is this: Before we decided to cut that passage, I had called Mr. Folks to tell him I had a problem with it. How was I to confirm that such an e-mail from his ex-intended actually existed? He offered to send me the e-mail itself, which he did.

What that e-mail contained differed significantly in its implications, as he had left out important context. Here’s how the actual, full passage read:

While I do not agree with the statement that Will is totally innocent innocent (sic) of the charge, I do feel that he did not intend to physically harm me– even though laying your hands on a woman in any regard is wrong. I know he just lost control of his anger and that he never intended to hurt me as he did.

As I say, I think it was a good idea to leave out Mr. Folks’ truncated version of that. But I also thought it a good idea to share both versions with you here on my blog. I await your judgment as to whether I was right on either count.

Background on school buses

A lot of folks may think editorials are merely a matter of the way something strikes us at a given moment, or our personal preferences or prejudices, or whatever. I hope not too many people have such misconceptions, but I can understand what might lead some folks to leap to such erroneous conclusions. After all, unlike news stories — which strive to tell you every relevant thing a reporter could learn about an event or issue — editorials tend to be like icebergs: You only see a fraction of their substance. Editorials aren’t very long, and what space they do take up is largely used for argument — rhetoric, if you will — leaving little room for the many facts that went into the conclusion being presented. Most of that remains below the water line.

So it is that I thought I’d use my blog today to show you some of the raw material that went into our editorial today on our state’s school bus problem. For some, this will strengthen the point we’re making. Others will remain unmoved. In fact, some of the more ardent despisers of our public school system and all who sail in her will object to the fact that most of the information I’m showing you came from the state Department of Education. To these fantasists, that impeaches the testimony right off the bat. Well, let me start by telling you, and them, three critical facts:

  1. I went to the Department of Education for a reason similar to the one that (allegedly) motivated Willie Sutton to rob banks: Because that’s where the information is. These are the folks who know the bus system, and the finances involved, far more intimately than anyone else.
  2. And this one is going to shock the anti-school crowd: No one at the Department of Education has ever lied to me. If they have, they certainly haven’t been caught, despite the legions of people out there who would like to catch them. In fact, they are obsessive about making sure I get each fact exactly right. If they tell me something wrong, they’re on the phone setting it straight before I realize the error — and well before I’ve published it.
  3. They didn’t "put me up" to this. In fact, to the contrary. Jim Foster and Betsy Carpentier — especially Ms. Carpentier — kept telling me how happy they were with the level of funding they got this year, because it will enable them to operate the buses, something that looked in doubt at some points in the budgeting process. They’re satisfied, for the moment, though they know that there’s a day of reckoning coming if we don’t get on a regular bus replacement schedule. My colleagues on the editorial board and I are the ones who are disgusted at the situation.

Anyway, all that said, here are some things I learned in the course of researching and writing the editorial, with links to the raw source material:

  • It all started with an Associated Press story that ran in the paper, in part, on Tuesday, July 5. I wrote a blog item about it that very morning. We learned more on Wednesday from a story by The State‘s own Bill Robinson, which confirmed that the sale of the used buses had taken place, and added other details, including political reaction.
  • On Friday of that week, a colleague shared with me another story from the Charleston paper that added this point of interest: South Carolina runs the oldest buses in the nation. This was attributed not only to those "educrats" over at the state department, but to a group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. This group has a thing about old school buses, so it’s kind of embarrassing to see them single out S.C. for yet another such dubious distinction.
  • I felt like this would be a pretty easy editorial. A few numbers to check out, nothing more. I certainly knew the background: It’s been years since the General Assembly has provided sufficient funds to replace buses on a reasonable schedule that keeps them safe and reliable. Then, alerted by an e-mail from SCHotline, I ran across this item. It was the usual ranting you get from right-wing talk radio, but since this guy was directly challenging things I had assumed were fact, I decided to throw his piece at the DOE and see how it reacted.
  • Jim Foster reacted by saying, "I’ve been dealing with that claptrap for several days. It’s a crock." He backed that up with this point-by-point rebuttal.
  • He also sent along this spreadsheet showing what the Legislature had appropriated for buses, and how it had appropriated it — basically, in a way that pretended to fund new bus purchases, but actually only provided a total amount that matched what was needed to fuel and operate existing buses, except for about $3 million in unclaimed lottery prize money.

To sort of walk you through that last document: The key line is line 25 (row 6 in the Excel file), entitled OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES. This refers to just about everything it takes to operate and maintain the current fleet of buses, from fuel to parts. Follow that out to the right, and you’ll see (column L) that it cost $40.7 million to operate the buses this past year. The state education department estimated that with rising costs, it would take $47.75 million (column M) in fiscal year 2006 to do no more than it did in 2005. This was of course a moving target. Diesel fuel had cost a lot less when the department had put in its initial request at the required time — last September. Since then, Inez Tenenbaum had been updating lawmakers on the changing situation. So what did the department actually get for operating expenses under this item? Check row 6, column C, and you’ll find it was about $9.5 million. Kind of short, right?

This is where it gets tricky. Rows 12, 14, 15, 16 and 18 provide more funds for operation. Lines 12, 14 and 18 appear to provide funds for purchasing buses, but the provisos allow the department to use the money for current bus operations if it needs to — which it does, since it only got $9.5 million for that purpose when it needed $47.75 million. Lastly, in columns G and H you’ll see the state department is authorized to collect $7.3 million from local districts for bus operations — if the districts have it (Ms. Carpentier said she was sure the department would get its money).

I’m just going to hurry through the rest. I’m also throwing in:

  • A spreadsheet that shows how, while diesel costs have gone up over the past three years, the General Assembly has appropriated less and less for fuel and other operating expenses (Row 11, OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES.)
  • Another that details diesel price averages over the last few years.
  • Another chart that shows how many buses and what type of buses the state has bought each year since 1979.

I also had a rather lengthy study of what the state should do regarding replacing buses, and a handy chart that showed bus purchases over time a little more simply than the spreadsheet above. But I can’t seem to find the PDF of that study at the moment, and there’s nobody here at 10 p.m. to show me how to turn the handy chart (which came as a fax) into a PDF. I’ll add those to this posting Monday, if anyone’s that interested.

A nation’s blood offering

I mentioned in my column today about visiting Gettysburg. That was a week ago today, and of course, today is the 142nd anniversary of the last day of the battle. After the news of his death came between that day and this, a friend mentioned that Shelby Foote had maintained that one should always visit Civil War battlefields at the same time of year of the battle — partly so you’ll have similar weather, but also so that the foliage will be the same, so you can see things as the participants saw them.

Well, I did that, unintentionally. And I sincerely hope that it wasn’t as hot this day 142 years ago in that spot as it was last week. (One night last weekend, well after dark, my rental car informed me it was still over 90 outside — in Pennsylvania.) The men who were there suffered enough as it was. It was pretty rough strolling around there in a T-shirt; I can’t imagine fighting even in tattered butternut homespun, much less in a heavy wool dark blue military blouse.

As uncomfortable as it was for me, I have to praise the selflessness of my wife and youngest daughter for accompanying me. Touring battlefields is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, and they really wanted to get over to Amish country the other side of Lancaster (given Amish pacifism, about as sharp a contrast with battles as one can find).

Being semi-sensitive to their wishes (we DID get to see some beautiful Amish farms before dark, just as the folks who own them were riding home in their buggies or taking their Sunday rest clad in 026_23a plain finery, in perfect gardens and alongside covered bridges), I decided to take a hit-and-run approach to the site.

I determined that I would find the spot on Little Round Top where, on the second day, a professor of theology named Joshua Chamberlain and his understrength Maine regiment acted with unparalleled courage in one desperate moment and saved the United States of America. (Yes, I realized that’s debatable, but if he had not stopped the Alabama troops who were trying desperately to outflank the Union line, this pivotal battle could have pivoted the other way.) I just wanted to stand in the place where history had stood on a cusp and was decided by sheer, suicidal determination. I expected to feel the power of the place. I didn’t realize that I would be even more awed by another spot altogether.

021_18a The ranger in the main building could hardly believe that was the only place I wanted to go. Still, she patiently showed me on the map the best way to get there, bypassing most of the carefully laid-out tour. When she asked if I was sure that’s the only place I wanted to go, I felt bad enough (her manner seemed to imply that my hurried approach showed insufficient respect to the dead whose final resting place Abraham Lincoln had dedicated only about 100 yards from where we stood.

So I added, "Where’s Cemetery Ridge?" "We’re standing on it," she said. "So where’s the stone wall?" "Right over there, the other side of that building." OK, then. I’ll check that out, too.

That was the thing, as it happened, that blew me away. I knew that the Federals had taken the high ground before the battle even started, and that Pickett’s Charge (as well as the advance of other elements of Longstreet’s corps) had been doomed from the start as a result. But to stand on that high ground, and look out at the perfectly clear fields of fire that looked down on the completely open plain upon which the Virginians advanced — not a scrap of cover to speak of; the trees they emerged from looking to be close to two miles away — I could feel what it must have been like to keep marching into certain death. The men who landed on Omaha Beach had a better tactical advantage than those Rebels did. And still they marched on. Could there have been one of them who expected to live through the next hour, much less prevail? And yet still they advanced.

No movie, no book — no matter how it tried to dramatize what happened — could capture the sheer futility of that situation the way I perceived it standing there and looking down upon the place where it happened. This photograph doesn’t do it. You have to stand there and let your eyes wander from  018_15a_1 the stone wall to those trees so far away, to the flatness below, to the markers behind and around you telling how many batteries of Union artillery poured lead and fire down upon the Southerners.

Little Round Top, when I went there later and saw where Col. Strong Vincent told Col. Chamberlain to "hold this ground at all costs" was every bit as inspiring as I expected it to be. But it didn’t have the emotional kick of standing at the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy and seeing where it left its stain on the magnificent countryside of Pennsylvania.

What was Lee really thinking, attacking the Union center so pointlessly after two days of other, wiser tactics failing? Was it a sort of ennui? A gesture of fatalism? Was he just fed up after three years of mostly successful campaigning? Did he just want an end to it either way — either break the Union Army completely right there in that moment, or suffer a defeat so crippling that it would hasten the inevitable end? (I’m sure there are many reading this who are far better-read than I about Lee’s motives, but who can really know?)

As glad that I am that the Confederate cause failed, I mourn those Southerners who gave their lives so uselessly. If I watch the movie version of this battle, I want to shout at the screen, "Listen to Gen. Longstreet, Marse Robert! Sometimes we South Carolinians know best!" I want his men to live.

But maybe that couldn’t be. Maybe the cliche that the sin of slavery could only be washed away with oceans of blood, both Northern and Southern, is the pure and simple truth. (And please, neo-Confederates, don’t start on the "it wasn’t about slavery" kick. Almost every political interaction between North and South since the beginning of the nation, from the Constitutional Convention through Bleeding Kansas, had in one way or another been about that one issue. Talk about tariffs and such all day, and you can’t get around the fact that one of the two economic systems involved in the debates was founded on slavery, which gave the land its economic value. Talk, as George Bush’s critics do today, about how the Republican president kept changing his stated rationale for the war as it wore on. None of that changes what is obvious to anyone who is not just bound and determined to rationalize that which cannot be justified. Read what the South Carolinians who made the decision to secede said to explain themselves — and don’t forget to do a search to see how many times "slave" occurs in the document. It just doesn’t matter that most Southern soldiers didn’t own slaves; that fact just makes them the victims of those who did.)

Maybe the fact that both North and South had winked at the problem for four score and seven years, tiptoeing around the issue in flawed compromise after compromise in an effort to keep the young nation together, meant there had to be such a titanic holocaust offered on the altar of fratricidal war. You can read that thought in books, but it just doesn’t have the same force as standing there, sweating and weary and ready to go home, upon the altar itself.

It sure didn’t SOUND like a South Carolina idea

An interesting sidelight to my column today… something I didn’t have room for:

In discussing the latest partisan outrage — the SC Republican Party’s plans to push for voter registration by party (the worst idea I’ve heard since the SC Democrats last year almost required a loyalty oath to vote in their presidential primary) — state GOP Chairman Katon Dawson happened to mention that "I think a number of the people in my party who are for it come from other states," where they were accustomed to partisan registration, and, being partisan, thought it was great.

That made sense to me, especially when Katon later mentioned of the party-registration idea, "It’s a pretty good-sized movement. It started in Beaufort County." If there’s anyplace in South Carolina where the county GOP is likely to be chock-full of carpetbaggers, it’s there. When I made that observation (more politely, without the little jest about carpetbaggers), Katon protested that I was being unfair to the Beaufort County organization. But come on — Hilton Head?

I guess I want to believe that because I’d hate to think that any of my fellow Southerners would suggest it’s a good idea to go back to denying our neighbors the right to vote for indefensible reasons.

I also suspect that if you did a poll, you’d find that Republicans from sparsely populated rural counties would be less enamored of this idea than those in the larger metro areas. Why? Because in small towns, people learn to live together with different kinds of people, whereas suburbanites pay a premium to live in neighborhoods where they don’t have to talk to people who don’t think the way they do. This is true of both parties.

Katon, being a city boy himself, is for this monstrous idea. He’s a nice guy, but even the nicest guys have their flaws.

Editors, beware

I do this a lot with my columns — I start off telling a story that only obliquely has anything to do with my point. In this case, the connections are tenuous. In the end, with my column much too long to fit in the paper, I just lopped this off and went straight into my point. But the nice thing about having a blog is that you can go ahead and tell the story you didn’t have room for. So here it is:

Donnie Myers is an expert on the subject of shooting editors of The State and getting away with it.

On two occasions, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing and seeing his animated, well-researched, multimedia presentation on the murder of State co-founder N.G. Gonzales and the subsequent unsuccessful prosecution of his killer, Lt. Gov. James Tillman. It’s highly entertaining as well as informative.

When he put on his show for employees of The State as part of our commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of that political assassination (Mr. Tillman had not liked the things Mr. Gonzales had written about him during his unsuccessful bid for governor), he seemed to particularly relish telling us how the "rednecks" over in Lexington County — where he is the state prosecutor — saw nothing wrong with doing away with stuck-up, elitist editors from over across the river.

At the end, as he ominously warned us to watch out, he pulled out a huge knife and what appeared to be a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol. I, who had introduced him before his talk, was standing a few feet away, grinning. But Publisher Ann Caulkins, who had recently moved to the community and didn’t really know the solicitor from Adam, said she had an awful moment when she actually half-thought this was it — he was going to shoot me. History was repeating itself. (After all, my editorial page had recently been quite critical of Mr. Myers.)

Well, I don’t share my boss’ rather visceral aversion to firearms, and besides, I had caught this act before. So I was not alarmed that day.

But now I am. Not for my personal safety, but for what Mr. Myers has done to the cause of public service in our society.

From there on, the column was as published in the paper.

So there it is. At the end of the day (as the governor would say), I decided the column was better without this. I still think so, don’t you?