Sometimes Twitter allows you to say all that needs to be said about a given subject, and Greenville’s Logan Stewart achieved that this morning with her comment on a certain event coming up tonight:
LOL… yes // RT @danielboan: 10 candidates, 2 parties, and 1 debate sounds like the worst idea I have ever heard
You got that right, Logan….
Oh, wait — that @danielboan means HE said it, and you’re agreeing.
OK. You got that right, Daniel…
Boy, am I tired of hearing references to the Tuesday elections in Virginia and New Jersey by the national media as something with national import, the most common intellectually lazy assertion being that they are somehow A Referendum On Barack Obama.
How absurd. When people go to the polls in Virginia to elect a governor, or whatever else they’re voting for there (I don’t know because I haven’t paid attention, because I don’t frickin’ live in Virginia, so it is none of my business), they will make their decision based on guess what: Which guy they want to be their governor. Or whatever.
But the Washington-based media, having to wait a whole other year until any of the politicians in Washington face the voters again, and not knowing any other way to write about politics except in the simplistic, one-side-vs.-the-other, partisan, sports-oriented, winner-vs.-loser terms of elections, decide to regard these completely unelected contests as being between surrogates, rather than between real people running for real offices with real issues that actually don’t translate past state lines.
As Ron Elving blogged over at NPR:
The people in Virginia or New Jersey may know the names of their candidates for governor; the rest of the country does not. Everyone, however, will recognize the name Obama, and that is where the conversation will turn.
Exactly. Except you don’t blame it on “the rest of the country.” It’s the national media who don’t know anything about the candidates for governor or the issues, so they will pretend it’s really about Obama, because they know who he is. Or think they do. Or believe they can fool enough viewers and readers that they do. And Mr. Elving makes another good point:
And however small the president’s role has actually been this fall, the focus on him is fair in one sense. The results of these elections will affect him. They will make his struggles in Washington a tad easier, or more difficult, depending on how they change the political conversation.
In other words, because the national media will act as though these are referenda on the president (or to a lesser extent the Democrats in Congress), and everybody in Washington will follow their coverage and believe that they are indeed referenda on the president, and will then act according to how said referenda went, it will affect real life in Washington. To the extent that real life can be said to exist there.
This stuff is so wrong, and it really makes me tired.
For years, I’ve been telling Steve Morrison that he should run for office. Every time I hear him speak to a community group, I am struck by his quiet conviction, by the fact that he deeply cares about people, particularly the dispossessed (such as the kids in poor, rural school districts, on whose behalf he has led a long, long pro bono quest through the state’s courts).
But he always sloughed it off, modestly, thereby completing the picture of the quintessential Guy Who Ought to Run for Office But Never Does.
And now he’s thinking about running for office, and I’m not sure what to think. Says Steve:
“If I run, I will be running … to stand for visionary leadership over divisiveness, big-picture interests over pedestrian politics, solid management over risky alternatives and unity over racial discord.”
However, the interesting thing about this situation is that if he does run, he will bring not unity but a sword — one that will messily slice apart the set of people likely to vote for long-declared candidate Steve Benjamin.
You see what would happen, don’t you? If he runs, he and Mr. Benjamin will split the all-important People Who Will Vote for a Guy Named Steve vote. (OK, no more bogus Long-Winded Terms in Capital Letters — at least until the next post.)
Seriously, though, Morrison would likely draw from the same sources — heavily black precincts and Shandon — that Benjamin has been almost surely been counting on ever since Bob Coble dropped out. In other words, for those of you who prefer partisan terms (even in a race that should be blessedly free of such), the Democrats.
This means a likely win for Kirkman Finlay III. Which you might think is a good thing, but if you don’t, then you’ve got to look on a development that splits the Steve vote with some concern. You might say to them, “Hey, the essence of democracy is a wide-open selection, and anyone willing to run should be encouraged to do so, especially when it’s a good guy like Steve Morrison.” Which would be the Civics 101 thing to say. But there is a truth universally acknowledge in politics, that a single man in possession of a good fortune… no wait… wrong cliche. What I meant was, there is a truth universally acknowledged in politics, which is that once a guy with whom you might be expected to agree on a lot of things puts in a lot of time and money on the campaign trail, if you announce against him, it’s personal — as in, you’ve got a beef with the guy. Or you’re carrying water for the other guy. Or something.
When I talk to Steve (Morrison), I’m going to ask him about these things, and whether they matter, or should matter. I wasn’t going to post until I HAD talked to Steve, but I needed to go ahead and post something, it having been two days since I read the news.
Thoughts?
As I read this this morning:
Rex, the state superintendent of education, is known by more of those surveyed than the other Democrats running for governor. More than 60 percent recognized his name. Forty-one percent had a favorable impression of Rex. In contrast, a majority of those surveyed did not know the four other Democratic contenders — Columbia attorney Dwight Drake, state Sen. Robert Ford of Charleston, Charleston attorney Mullins McLeod and state Sen. Vincent Sheheen of Camden.
… I thought, No, there are not four other contenders. Really, there are two — Sheheen and Drake.
News stories can’t say that, because the reporters aren’t allowed to say that Robert Ford would never be a serious factor (and if you think otherwise, you apparently haven’t followed his career or listened to him), and Mullins McLeod, in spite of having an AWESOME South Carolina name and being the nephew of Walt McLeod (one of the coolest people in the Legislature), hasn’t caught on and seems increasingly unlikely to do so.
I could prove to be wrong about this, of course. McLeod could suddenly kick into gear, or Ford could start acting very unFordlike. But if that happens, I’ll say the position has changed and include them. Right now, I wouldn’t be too concerned about them if I were one of the other three.
All right, so it was actually back in June that this ran on Wes Wolfe’s site (the good bit’s at the very end):
Word is, since Quinn is currently the chairman of the S.C. Policy Council, he will be running as an SCPC-style candidate, in the Sanford mold, which is a little outside his normal situation when he was in the House. His primary opposition thus far is Danny Frazier, a town councilman for Lexington and entrepreneur with Frazier-Taylor LLC, and Gary Taylor, who by our scouring of the series of tubes seems to be working with Mungo real estate firm Sovereign Homes (but, we could be very wrong — confirm or correct in the comments).
Some people, they have egos that are a little too big. Quinn’s is pushing him to get back into elective office. But, he didn’t seem to consider the sledgehammer of oppo that will be coming down on his campaign, from the get-go. It will be fun, though. And, it will be even better if (pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease) former The State editorial page editor Brad Warthen gets into the mix.
So maybe they’re not, technically, begging me at the moment. But they have in the recent past. Assuming Wes qualifies as “they.”
Anyway, this was just brought to my attention today, and it caused me to smile, so I thought I’d share it…
Actually, that’s about all I have to say. That headline is a Tweet from earlier today; I just thought I’d reproduce it here so y’all could discuss it.
Oh, all right; here’s some more information:
Rock Hill lawyer Chad McGowan, a Democrat, jumped into the U.S. Senate race Monday, vowing to take on Republican incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint.
McGowan, a trial attorney who has primarily handled medical malpractice cases, says he is a conservative Democrat willing to vote with Republicans or Democrats to improve conditions for South Carolina’s working and middle classes.
“I don’t think anybody can rationally say the middle class is being represented by anybody in Washington,” he said.
McGowan’s list of complaints about Washington politics includes a nearly $12 trillion national debt and the bailouts of the automobile and financial services industries, which, he said, have proved to be “a bill of goods.”
Still, McGowan supports Democratic causes, including health care reform, with or without a public option.
“To do nothing is not an option,” McGowan said. “To do everything is not possible.”…
Over on his blog, Wes Wolfe says it’s not bloody likely that any Democrat can do what Inez Tenenbaum failed to do. And he’s probably right, barring unforeseen circumstance. Of course, life is all about unforeseen circumstances…
I see that most of the money that has unfortunately flowed into the coffers of Joe Wilson and Rob Miller came from out-of-state:
Over the next 21 days, through the Sept. 30 end of this year’s third quarter, Wilson and Miller combined to raise $4.34 million – more than Democratic Rep. John Spratt and GOP challenger Ralph Norman collected over two years for their 2000 election in what had been the state’s richest U.S. House race ever.
No less remarkably, the vast majority of the largest donors to Wilson or Miller live outside South Carolina – 77 percent of Wilson’s new backers, and 86 percent of Miller’s recent supporters…
Nothing remarkable about it. It stands to reason — out-of-state donors don’t know these guys.
A more discriminating, local giver would probably wait and give to a candidate who could provide better representation to the 2nd District (ahem!). These ideologues from elsewhere couldn’t care less about the 2nd District or any other part of South Carolina; they’re just doing their bit to keep the partisan spin cycle spinning.
A donor who’s giving money to Joe Wilson because he yelled “You lie!” probably wouldn’t give it if he knew that normally, Joe is not a natural vessel for delivering such hostility. He’s a fairly mild-mannered guy who lost control for a moment, and initially did what came naturally and apologized, before getting swept up in something ugly.
A donor who wishes to express outrage over what Wilson does probably wouldn’t give to Rob Miller if he knew what a weak candidate he was. (My prediction: If no other candidates get into this — and unfortunately, with them sitting on all this money now, probably no one will — Miller will probably lose to Wilson by almost the same margin by which he’s trailing him in fund-raising. $2.7 million to $1.69 million — well, maybe the Democrat would do a little better than just under 40 percent, but he still will lose substantially.)
Today on Twitter, I chortled:
Scoop! Today’s lead story in the paper was on my blog 4 days ago…
… Not that I’m gloating, of course. I’m just saying, even a blind hog, etc….
And I wouldn’t gloat because, well, it doesn’t mean much.
To begin with, as news goes, it didn’t mean much to me. I’m not really big on the “size of the warchest” horserace stuff in politics, I just wanted to mention having chatted with Steve as one of my routine “contact reports” (I mean, I went to the meeting, so I might as well say something about it), and so I threw out that tidbit — in passing.
I haven’t talked with Adam at the paper, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he heard it the same day I did, but wanted to run down whether it really was a record or not, but then someone decided after a couple of days that he’d better just go ahead and report what he had. But that’s just conjecture on my part. Or maybe, just maybe, he was waiting to see a document rather than just reporting what Steve said, which would be the responsible thing. In any case, it’s not like it was earth-shattering news that you HAD to hear right away.
The reason I raise this now is to say that you will sometimes read things here on this blog before you see them in the paper, and while it might mean the paper’s falling down on its job, it doesn’t necessarily. What brings this point to mind was reading Lee’s comment back here, when he said:
The Free Times, a give-away weekly in Columbia, has plenty of ads, and more in depth coverage of local government than The State. In fact, it has broken many stories of waste and corruption which The State either missed or sat on.
Here’s the thing about that… I don’t want to take anything away from The Free Times, but I will say that if they didn’t have a scoop now and then, there’d be something wrong with them — regardless of how good a job The State is doing.
Here’s why: One newsman worth his salt can always find something that the newsroom with 100 people isn’t writing about. One of the most enviable positions in journalism is to be a one-man bureau in another paper’s town. Given the fact that the largest news organization in the world, and the best one in the world, is only going to cover more than a fraction of the thousands, or millions, of things going on in a given coverage area, you can always hit ’em where they ain’t.
And if you’d like to create the impression that they’re falling down on the job and only you are telling folks what is truly going on, all you have to do is beat them on one fairly significant development about once a year or so. That’s because nobody notices the thousands of times they beat YOU (many times a day, usually), because they’re supposed to beat you. It’s also because no one expects YOU to cover everything. And of course, nobody CAN cover everything, but the dominant local medium catches hell for anything significant that it misses, because it’s supposed to at least give the impression of covering everything of significance. Whereas if you’re the one-man operation, you can work on your one story, the one you hope will be a scoop, and ignore everything else — and no one will think the worse of you.
If I went to New York, I could do it to The New York Times. If Burl, who has spent his whole career in Hawaii, came to Columbia, he could do it to The State. So can I. I just did, without trying…
The dominant local medium always plays defense; you’re always on offense. The big paper never “wins” but occasionally you do — and when you do, folks like Lee are ready to damn the paper for its “failure.” And I say that not to criticize Lee; I’ve heard that many, many times from nice, smart people who are really upset that their paper didn’t have the story first. Sometimes they’re right to feel that way. But sometimes they’re not.
This morning I had a very pleasant breakfast at the usual place with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine. I forgot to take a picture of him, but I found the video above from 2008 (I think), in which I think he’s telling the folks back home that Obama was going to win the election. That’s what “Obama va gagner” means, right? Alas, I have no French, although I’ve always felt that I understand Segolene Royal perfectly. Fortunately, Philippe’s English is superb.
It was my first encounter with a French journalist since I shot this video of Cyprien d’Haese shooting video of me back in 2008, in a supremely Marshall McLuhan moment. If you’ll recall, I was interviewed by a lot of national and foreign journalists in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential primaries here. (You may also recall that a lot of them came to me because of my blog, not because I was editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Philippe, of course, also contacted me because of the blog, although he was aware of my former association, and expressed his kind concern for my joblessness.)
He had come to Columbia from New York, which has been his home for 14 years, to ask about “this summer uprising among the conservatives, peaking with the Joe Wilson incident,” as he had put it in his e-mail.
Well, to begin with, I disputed his premise. I don’t think there has been a resurgence of conservatives or of the Republican Party, which is still groping for its identity in the wake of last year’s election. What we’ve seen in the case of Joe Wilson — the outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, after the moment in which he embarrassed the 2nd District — was merely the concentration of political elements that are always there, and are neither stronger nor weaker because of what Joe has said and done. Just as outrage over Joe’s outburst has expressed itself (unfortunately) in an outpouring (I’m trying to see how many words with the prefix “out-” I can use in this sentence) of material support for the unimpressive Rob Miller, the incident was a magnet for the forces of political polarization, in South Carolina and across the country.
What I tried to do is provide historical and sociological context for the fact that Joe Wilson is the natural representative for the 2nd District, and will probably be re-elected (unless someone a lot stronger than Rob Miller emerges and miraculously overcomes his huge warchest). It’s not about Obama (although resistance to the “expansion of government” that he represents is a factor) and it’s not about race (although the fact that districts are gerrymandered to make the 2nd unnaturally white, and the 6th unnaturally black, helps define the districts and their representatives).
In other words, I said a lot of stuff that I said back in this post.
We spoke about a number of other topics as well, some related, some not:
He asked about the reaction in South Carolina to Obama’s election. I told him that obviously, the Democratic minority — which had been energized to an unprecedented degree in the primary, having higher turnout than the Republicans for the first time in many years — was jubilant. The reaction among the Republican minority was more like resignation. Republicans had known that McCain would win South Carolina, but Obama would win the election. I explained that McCain’s win here did not express a rejection of Obama (as some Democrats have chosen to misinterpret), but simply political business as usual — it would have been shocking had the Republican, any Republican, not won against any national Democrat. I spoke, as I explained to him, from the unusual perspective of someone who liked both Obama and McCain very much, but voted for McCain. I think I drew the distinction fairly well between what I think and what various subsets of Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina think…
That got us on the topic of McCain-Bush in 2000, because as I explained to Philippe, I was destined to support McCain even over someone I liked as much as Obama, because I had waited eight years for the opportunity to make up for what happened here in 2000. Philippe agreed that the world would have been a better place had McCain been elected then, but I gather that he subscribes to the conventional wisdom (held by many of you here on the blog) that the McCain of 2008 was much diminished.
Philippe understood 2000, but as a Frenchman, he had trouble understanding how the country re-elected Bush in 2004 (And let me quickly say, for those of you who may be quick to bridle at the French, that Philippe was very gentlemanly about this, the very soul of politeness). So I explained to him how I came to write an endorsement of Bush again in 2004 — a very negative endorsement which indicted him for being wrong about many things, but in the end an endorsement. There was a long explanation of that, and a short one. Here’s the short one: John Kerry. And Philippe understood why a newspaper that generally reflects its state (close to three-fourths of those we endorsed during my tenure won their general election contests) would find it hard to endorse Kerry, once I put it that way. (As those of you who pay attention know, under my leadership The State endorsed slightly more Democrats than Republicans overall, but never broke its string of endorsing Republicans for the presidency, although we came close in 2008.)
Anyway, when we finished our long breakfast (I hadn’t eaten much because I was talking too much, drinking coffee all the while) I gave him a brief “tour” of the Midlands as seen from the 25th floor of Columbia’s tallest building, then gave him numbers for several other sources who might be helpful. He particularly was interested in folks from Joe’s Lexington County base, as well as some political science types, so I referred him to:
I also suggested he stop in at the Gervais Street Starbucks for a downtown Columbia perspective, and the Sunset Restaurant in West Columbia.
I look forward to reading his article, although I might have to get some of y’all to help me with understanding it. With my background in Spanish and two years of Latin I can generally understand French better when written than spoken, but I still might need some help…
Forgot to share this with you over the weekend, but I remembered it when I was cleaning some pictures off my phone.
At the Walk for Life Saturday morning, I heard a voice behind me say, “Well I read on your blog that you would be here…,” and I looked around and it was Bob Coble. As you probably know, his wife Beth is the hostess of the Walk.
Anyway, we walked together for a few minutes, and talked about various things in the news. But the most relevant thing to share was his answer to how he’s adjusting to the fact that he’s not going to be mayor anymore after next year.
He said he’s doing great with it. He hadn’t known for sure, when he was making the decision, how he would feel about it once it was done and too late to change his mind. But as it turns out, he’s loving it.
You know, it occurs to me: How am I going to get people, especially political types, to buy ads on my blog (once I start offering ads on my blog) when I go ahead and put there promotional material on the blog for free? The video above being a case in point.
Well, I don’t know. But I’ll keep sharing stuff like this whenever I have something to say about it.
And what I have to say about this is: It’s a huge improvement over his initial campaign video, but still leaves much to be desired.
It’s an improvement because it isn’t a naked play on partisan resentment. In the earlier video, he blamed unemployment in South Carolina, absurdly, on Barack Obama. In this one, by contrast, his villain is those greedy North Carolinians upstream, which is more credible.
And the tone is laudable because it’s calmly and dispassionately explanatory. That’s nice for a change.
But one thing it fails to do is explain to voters why this has a bearing upon their choice for governor. It doesn’t clearly say that I, Henry McMaster, have taken a particular stand on this issue and my opponents have not, or in any other way related the Water War to the subject at hand, which is nominating a gubernatorial candidate.
You may say I can’t have both calm explanation and overt appeal for votes, but I think I can. If you’re going to take a minute to ‘splain something, ‘splain what I can do about it. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.
Your thoughts?
I tend to yawn at debates over technical violations of ethics rules. Perhaps that will shock you, since journalists tend to be the ones who get the MOST worked up about such.
Consider it yet another one of the little ways that I have always tended to be a contrarian. Here’s my thinking on the matter: Ethics rules usually have little or nothing to do with right or wrong. They’re almost always about the appearance of right or wrong — and usually pretty narrow-gauge rights and wrongs at that. For instance, ethics laws really fret over the appearance of a conflict of interest. I worry about it when it actually leads to (or rather points to; the cause and effect relationship can be fuzzy) a public figure doing something wrong.
For instance — I remember a lot of folks getting really concerned about David Beasley accepting plane rides from folks associated with the Barnwell nuclear waste dump, from whom he had also received campaign contributions. People went on and on about these plane rides, like they mattered. (Folks who get worked up about ethics laws have a particular obsession with plane rides, as we’ve seen recently.)
Me, I was more concerned about the fact that Gov. Beasley had thrown careful interstate negotiations out the window in a reckless bid to overturn years and years of bipartisan effort to get some state other than South Carolina to be the region’s nuclear toilet for awhile. Mind you, he had already done this before all the hoo-hah about the plane rides. I kept trying to explain to anyone who would listen that the plane rides were only significant in that they might point to a cozy relationship with the dump people, which could portend that the governor might do something in the interest of the dump people rather than the interest of the people of South Carolina. But folks, he had already done the worst thing he could have done along those lines. This worrisome indicator (the disclosure of the plane rides) was superfluous and after the fact, and it interested me not in the slightest. It was a matter of straining at gnats.
It struck me as particularly dumb that Democrats were making a huge deal over the plane rides, and to my mind never made enough of the trashing of our nuclear waste policy (if Jim Hodges had run on that instead of the state lottery, he still would have won).
Actually, I could have just given you this short explanation: I care more about the substance than I do the appearance.
Anyway, having the attitude I do about these things, I didn’t make much initially of the story about Henry McMaster’s contributions from lawyers working for the state. But as it happens, The Wall Street Journal did pay attention, and made quite a deal of it:
More interesting than the suit’s dubious merits are Lilly’s recent court filings about the AG’s ties to trial lawyers. Mr. McMaster in 2006 chose three private lawyers—John S. Simmons, John Belton White, Jr., and F. Kenneth Bailey, Jr.—to prosecute Lilly on behalf of the state. The no-bid contingency contract—which Mr. McMaster refused to produce to Lilly for nearly a year—gives the private lawyers a sliding-scale cut of any judgment or settlement, a jackpot potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.
About a month after filing the case in 2007, according to the Lilly documents, Mr. Simmons’s law firm had turned around to contribute the maximum amount allowable ($3,500) under state law to Mr. McMaster’s re-election. Mr. White’s law firm contributed the same amount on the same day, and Mr. White later added a personal maximum donation. All told, the law firms, their lawyers and spouses have contributed more than $60,000 to Mr. McMaster since 2006. The AG can transfer this money to his gubernatorial account.
This sweetheart deal is rife with conflict of interest, and Lilly’s filing also lays out the legal and constitutional problems. Consider due process. Both the U.S. and South Carolina constitutions make clear that the state and its lawyers must be guided by justice and the public interest, not monetary gain. South Carolinians would be outraged if Mr. McMaster won a personal financial cut of any case he won as Attorney General. How is it better that his lawyers get it instead?
And as uninterested as I tend to be in such things, they managed to get my interest in the way they described why it was a bad thing. (It used to be Cindi Scoppe’s job, as the one journalist who knew the most and cared the most about state ethics law, to persuade me when an ethics case was actually worth caring about, and she was good at it. Now I don’t have her around to persuade me, so the WSJ did the persuading this time.)
I’m still not clear that Henry violated any ethics rules in taking this money. But as I say, that’s the kind of thing that bores me. (By the way, the reason most journalists get so worked up over whether an ethics rule — which is usually about appearances, not substance — was technically broken is that news people don’t get to make a judgment call and say, This guy did a bad thing. They can only report whether it technically violated a rule. So they go ape over whether a technical line was crossed, and their eyes are closed to policy actions that are monumentally bad, because with those they have to present just as many views saying it wasn’t bad as saying it was. Are you following me? It’s one of the reasons I put news behind me and moved to editorial in 1994.) What interests me is that the Journal piece makes a pretty good case that there is a degree of coziness here that is a bad thing.
Set aside that the Journal‘s motive is likely the fact that they want to stick up for Big Pharma. Bottom line, this is another embarrassing black eye for South Carolina. Not as bad as Sanford’s Argentina travesty or Joe Wilson’s ongoing foolishness, but the GOPs most promising gubernatorial candidate didn’t need this headache. Henry’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Just had a bit of an out-of-body experience at Rotary today. Our main speaker was Carroll A. “Tumpy” Campbell III. He was allegedly there to talk to us about economic development in South Carolina, which was weird enough on its face. I mean, what was his qualification to do that, other than the fact that he was on the Ports Authority governing body before Mark Sanford pushed him off, and his daddy was our last really successful governor at ecodevo?
But that’s OK, because that didn’t seem to be why he was there. In fact, I was sufficiently confused about why he was there that I began to wonder why I was there, which was way existential. Anyway, he sounded like a guy who was running for office, although he didn’t overtly say so. Finally, I had to be reminded that he is planning to challenge Henry Brown down in the 1st congressional district. The consensus among folks I spoke to who heard this Rotary speech was that Henry doesn’t have much to worry about. (Which is saying something — I haven’t really paid much attention to Mr. Brown since he went off to Congress, but unless he got a whole lot sharper when he went to Washington, which would be a singular accomplishment if you think about it, he can’t be the world’s most impressive congressman. I remember him as a forgettable state legislator, who for a time chaired the Ways and Means Committee. Same guy, right?)
Sure, he mentioned ecodevo. He said a few painfully obvious things about it, such as the fact that the Port of Charleston is really, really important to economic development. You know the drill — BMW would never have taken a second look at South Carolina without that port, yadda-yadda… and did I mention to you that it’s not a coincidence that my name is Carroll Campbell? Seriously, it was just like that, only not as funny.
I didn’t take any notes on his speech, unfortunately. I usually start taking notes during a Rotary speech when the speaker says something interesting. I mean, I’m not there as a reporter, but if the speaker says one interesting thing, I pull out my notebook and write it down. And if he or she keeps on saying interesting things, I keep the notebook out and keep writing, and maybe mention it on the blog later. Suffice it to say that I was never in danger of even thinking about taking out my notebook during Tumpy’s speech.
Until it was over. Then I realized that I wished I had a record of it. (When the video is posted on the club site, I’ll try to remember to go back and link to it.) I wanted the record because, in retrospect, this speech was strikingly vapid. It was no ordinary bad speech, but a monument to the painful mediocrity that permeates the electoral process in our poor state.
In a nutshell, the gist of it was this: South Carolina needs new and different leadership. That was wedged in among a bunch of half-stated Republican cliches. In other words, the message was We need new leadership, but I sure ain’t it, because I’ve got nothing original to say.
Someone pointed out to me that even the cliches weren’t complete, but they were so unmemorable that I can’t attest to the accuracy of that observation. But thinking back, if you had simply grabbed random phrases from the Tweets of a garden-variety South Carolina Republican — incomplete Tweets, like those I cited from Joe Wilson earlier today — and strung them together, it would sound sort of like that Tumpy Campbell speech. Down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on, and golly but we sure need some real leaders who will say down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on. (Like we’re not already et up with such “leaders.”)
Anyway, that’s my report from the front lines of the 1st District congressional race…
Oh, wait — speaking of Joe Wilson, he was there at Rotary. But he didn’t shout out or anything, so I didn’t realize he was there until later…
Some of y’all will find this interesting. Remember how, last week, I put off all the folks wanting me to run for office by saying I won’t run unless somebody comes to me, the way Peter Boyle did to Robert Redford in “The Candidate” (note that I’m playing the Redford part — I’m just another victim of typecasting), and says, Look, we want you to run, and we’ll do everything — set up the campaign organization, raise the money, buy the media — and all you have to do is show up and be the candidate. Sort of a turnkey political operation.
I figured that was a good way to shut y’all up on the running-for-office thing (and if that didn’t work, my fallback was to say rude things like “shut y’all up” to people who like me enough to urge me to run for office).
But then, a real-life “Peter Boyle” approached me. Sort of. Basically, I got a message from a long-time political consultant (he first came to South Carolina to work in the Pug Ravenel campaign in 1974) who cited the Peter Boyle thing and said “let’s meet.” So we did, at the usual place, over breakfast last Friday.
And we talked about various offices and the need for someone (preferably, somebody with a little bit on the ball) to run for them. And then we talked about my situation. And I told my “Peter Boyle” that before I run for anything, I really need to get a job — not only a job, but one of those very rare jobs that allow a guy to run for office.
And you know what his considered opinion was? He agreed. I need to get a job, first and foremost.
So we’re back to Go, where I won’t collect $200 until I find employment…
Folks, I’m about to go over to this Steve Benjamin thing at 701 Whaley. But as usual, my attendance will not be an expression of personal political preference. I’m just going to check it out.
And of course, in keeping with my principles, I’m not planning to pay. I plan to go, walk around with a beer or something and try to blend, and learn what I can. As Capt. Mal said to River Tam in “Serenity,” “It’s what I do, darlin’. It’s what I do. I am an inveterate free-loader. It’s my M.O., and if I ever were to pay for anything, it would ruin my reputation in more ways than one. (Some would say I shouldn’t accept free beer. I believe my high school buddy Burl has said he wouldn’t, and maybe I should listen, because he is a journalist who still has a jobby-job. But Burl doesn’t understand the whole Southern thing. It’s not polite to refuse a drink from one’s host. And I’m very polite.)
Or at least, I plan to do those things until they throw me out. Anyway, maybe I’ll see you there. It starts at 5:30. Here’s the info. The most interesting thing on that link, by the way, is the list of the host committee, which is as follows:
Governor Jim Hodges
Emile DeFelice
Jenni & Cameron Runyan
Tiffany and Anton Gunn
DJ Carson
Bubba Cromer
Robbie Butt
Beth Binkley
Trav Robertson
Courtney Gibbes
Rhodes Bailey
Laurin Manning
Brad Weeks and Chris Terlinden
Hal Peters
Dana Bruce
Shani and Aaron Gilchrist
Debbie McDaniel
Mark Sweatman
Ashley Newton
Bosie Martin
Will Bryant
Amy and Rick Quinn
Jen and John Adams
Brian Murrell
Ashley Medbery and Adam Floyd
John Nichols
Kevin S. Baltimore
Marti Bluestein
Jocelyn & Derwin Brannon
Brandon Anderson
Tony Mizzell
Shennice and LeBrian Cleckley
Now — does anybody know of any Kirkman Finley III events I can crash? I want to be perfectly fair and balanced about this.
And when a third viable candidate emerges (it is my considered opinion that there will have to be third major vote-getter for Finlay to have a chance against Benjamin, so I’m sort of waiting for another shoe to drop here), I will be thrilled to crash any party they have as well.
Just some scattered thoughts as I listen to the GOP debate last night via the Web. Can’t call it “live-blogging,” but it’s kind of like that, so I’ll call it “dead-blogging,” which sort of reflects my level of enthusiasm about the candidates so far, a few minutes into it. Some random observations:
OK, I’ve got to stop watching now… lunch appointment. More later, if I get time…
Oh, man, look at this lame stuff from Joe Wilson:
Joe heads home to continue his focus on the families of South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional district and over 100 supporters turn out to walk with him in the Lexington DooDah parade. In this short video, Joe thanks his supporters for standing with him in his fight against government run health care.
Joe’s fight has really angered the big government liberals who are working to push their health care plan through Congress. They are storming the district and targeting Joe in next year’s election.
But Joe won’t back down.
No, Joe, it’s not your “fight” that’s got them ticked off. It’s your childish outburst, and your subsequent decision to cash in on it. At least, that’s what has the rest of us disgusted; I can’t speak for these “big government liberals” that are your straw men.
Oh, by the way, Joe doesn’t thank people for supporting him on health care in the short video — at least, not specifically. What he does is celebrate the common decency and patriotism of the folks in the heart of his district. And maybe it’s a good thing for Joe to get in touch with those qualities instead of having his head turned, the way he has for the past week or so, by the kinds of spiteful extremists who want to lionize him for doing something that he was initially, and appropriately, ashamed of.
Wow, I am really humbled by the nice things some of y’all said about me running for office back on this post (am I sounding like a candidate yet? they’re supposed to say stuff like that, about being humbled, etc.).
But again, what office? The context was that we were talking about Congress. But as Karen suggested, maybe I’m better suited for state office. State issues are the ones I’m most knowledgeable about and passionate about.
Not that I don’t know as much as (or more than) the other declared candidates for Congress about national and international issues. I’m pretty confident that I do — or at least that I can hold my own, and I can certainly approach those issues in a fresh way that would break the partisan, shouting-back-and-forth pattern that I, for one, am sick of.
But what if I were elected to Congress? I would just feel pretty weird going off to Washington and watching another lame governor take office back here. And you know what? My own mother called me up the other day and said I should run for governor. So that’s one vote I could count on, I guess. (Right, Mom?)
You know what I need at this point? I need Peter Boyle to come see me and make a pitch. You ever see “The Candidate?” Excellent movie. Peter Boyle plays a political consultant type who talks Robert Redford — son of a prominent politician — into running for the U.S. Senate. Redford is a nonprofit activist who is uninterested in the compromises one must make to run for office. Boyle promises him he can stand up for everything he believes in, and points out that this is a great opportunity to give those things he believes in greater exposure. Redford asks something like How does that work? or What’s the catch? and Boyle hands him a matchbook on which he has written two words: “You lose.” On that basis, Redford agrees to run.
But as the campaign proceeds, the itch to win — or at least not lose by an embarrassing margin — starts to get to him….
Anyway, to run for office what I need is a Peter Boyle moment — somebody to say, we’ll take care of the mechanics of the campaign, you just be the candidate. Because I’m an issues guy, not a mechanics guy. Renting an office and getting phone lines set up would be the overwhelming part for me. Seriously.
This, of course, is why most people run under the auspices of parties. Each of the parties has loads of people like Peter Boyle who can say, here’s your infrastructure, you just concentrate on running for office (and raising money).
What I need is an UnParty Peter Boyle. I guess that would be a party stalwart who has become disillusioned. Or who sees greater opportunity in breaking away from the two-party dichotomy.
It’s interesting to contemplate where such a person would come from. On an earlier post, I speculated that if I were to give in and run under the banner of one of the parties next year for pragmatic reasons (see the above discourse on Peter Boyle), especially for Congress, it would probably have to be the Democratic Party. Why? Well, not because I’m a Democrat, but because I don’t see a Republican having a good-enough shot against an incumbent of that party. Too much of an uphill climb.
But it occurs to me that if I run as an independent, my theoretical Peter Boyle would be more likely to come from the Republican Party. It’s the party in trouble. It’s the party that’s falling apart, rather pathetically clinging to tired slogans and petty resentments that have not served it well of late (whereas the Democrats have been doing OK, for the moment, with their tired slogans and petty resentments). It seems more likely that a smart Republican would calculate that an UnParty bid would be advisable than that a smart Democrat would do the same. Democrats are smelling opportunity now, and are unlikely to jump ship.
Then again, there could be a smart Democrat who would rather see me elected than Joe Wilson, and who also sees as I do that Rob Miller is not the best candidate to take advantage of this moment, and yet he’s the Democrat with the money, and has a leg up toward the nomination. Going with me might be the way to step around that problem. I don’t know. That’s the kind of hard-eyed political calculation that I’m depending on this Peter Boyle person to make — I’m the candidate, not the backroom strategist.
Anyway, now would be a good time for my Peter Boyle to step forward. I’ve got a job interview later this week, and possibly another soon after. This window won’t be open for long (I certainly hope.)
The kindness of friends is one thing, and I truly appreciate the supportive things y’all have said here. But at this point I need a nudge from a hard-eyed professional who truly believes this can be done. You might say I should go out and find that person. But I’m thinking that if I truly have a chance, that pragmatic person will see it and come to me. If I don’t — if it’s just me indulging myself and some friends egging me on — then there’s no point in continuing the discussion. Does that make sense? It does to me… Call it the first test of my viability…
Today after Rotary, Kathryn F. buttonholed me and started egging me to run for office. Hey, it’s easy for her to say — I’m the one who would be making a fool of himself, not to mention having to go to all those chicken dinners.
Run for what, you’re thinking? Yeah, I know — it’s hard to remember what Brad isn’t running for today: Is it the S.C. House? Or governor? Or Congress?
In this case, it’s specifically Congress that I’m being coy about.
Kathryn’s not the only one, by the way. Nathan Ballentine asked me about it when I ran into him this morning. Of course, he said it with a smile.
Anyway, I gave Kathryn all the reasons why I can’t run, and she tried to knock them all down:
And lots and lots of other reasons. Y’all can probably think of more reasons than I can — after all, I would vote for myself.
At least, I think I would. The idea of sending myself up to Ground Zero of all the partisan madness I constantly decry… well, it’s not something I’d wish on a yaller dog. Or an elephant.
But at least Kathryn has given me a small taste of that phenomenon that causes candidates to piously claim that they’re only running because of the people urging them to do so…
Anyway, now that I’ve totally turned you off with my self-absorption — and made some of you laugh because it may sound like I’m actually considering this… Think about this: Almost any normal person who thinks about running for office goes through these same sorts of thoughts. And for almost any normal person, the answers to all these questions would add up to a big, resounding NO. In fact, you have to ask, given that there are all these natural objections to running for office, what it is that’s wrong with the people who actually DO? And you begin to understand why politics is as messed up as it is…
As y’all know, I pretty well dismissed John Edwards early on, to avoid the rush. Therefore I had nothing to say when he crashed and burned later.
But I do find myself wondering something when I read this:
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A man who once claimed to have fathered the child of John Edwards’ mistress says in a book proposal the former presidential candidate is the real father and that he and Edwards worked with his campaign finance chairman to hide that secret, according to a newspaper report published online Saturday….
What I wonder is, Why would anybody have bothered to lie about that? I mean, if you admit (finally) that the affair happened, why on Earth bother to deny being the father if you were the father? What would be the point? Are we to believe that Edwards was calculating that if we just thought he was fooling around with a woman sufficiently loose as to be carrying on a separate affair with one of his aides while his wife was campaigning her heart out for him during a recurrence of cancer, then just maybe he could salvage his political prospects — but if he was technically (as opposed to morally) responsible for impregnating her, we just couldn’t forgive him?
I don’t know. And I don’t care. But I can assure you that, with or without the sensational teasers, I will not read this book. So don’t bother.