Thursday, 10 a.m. Rep. Jimmy Bales last had opposition six years ago, at which time we wrote:

We worried two years ago that Democratic Rep. Jimmy Bales would bring County Council-style politics to the House, which already had more than enough partisanship. Fortunately, our concerns seem to have been overblown. Rep. Bales has been a responsible House member. He has demonstrated an open-mindedness, willingness to buck party leadership and willingness to research issues for himself.

After our meeting with him Thursday morning, I would observe much the same. To be more specific, here are views he expressed on a number of issues:

• "We have too many school districts." So how about consolidating some? "Politically, it’s almost impossible." He thinks the only way would be to create a BRAC-style commission so that "we could only veto it." He says one of the problems is that many of the districts aren’t competent to run schools. "We can’t argue with a straight face that the local people can handle it." In some areas, districts are "not doing a good job — probably because they don’t know how to do it. They’d like to, but…"
• He favors non-partisan elections for county offices. When we suggested that maybe we didn’t need to be electing so many county officials — such as auditors, he said, "I’d like to have the county-manager form" of government.
• Of the House itself, he said "It’s a little too partisan. We act like children."
• School "choice?" PPIC is "too extreme." He likes Republican Bill Cotty‘s idea of having the state go in and form charter schools in failing districts. "I don’t think a charter school is extreme." As for Mr. Cotty’s current political fortunes, "He’s in the fight of his life."
• Cigarette tax. "We need to go to the dollar," he said. "I’m for taxing alcohol, too." On the subject of other politicians getting contributions from the "tobacco people," he added, "They haven’t sent me any money and I don’t think they’re going to." He chuckles at that, then turns serious: "Tobacco has caused so much suffering. And I grew up growing tobacco" in Virginia. "That’s why I’ve got this accent."
• As a former farmer, he went his own way on the chicken farms bill, which forbade counties to pass more restrictive rules on factory farms than those required by he state. "Now I voted for it," because as one who knows about all the regulations a farmer has to contend with, he looked at the DHEC regs and thought they were sufficient to protect the environment.

I’ll close with a little anecdote he told about party-line voting. "Politics is about love; it’s all about emotion." As a result, plenty of folks aren’t careful enough when they enter the booth.

"At my church, people tell me ‘I vote for you,’ but I know they don’t." He says he knows that because they also say they hit the button for the straight Republican ticket. But some go ahead and push the button for him as well, not understanding that they’ve just canceled their ability to choose an individual Democrat. "People just don’t — older people particularly… they don’t understand it."

"I say, ‘Thank you.’ What else can I say?"

Thursday (Sept. 7), 1 p.m. How soon we forget. Until he mentioned it, I had forgotten Jim Harrison had, not so long ago, been in a fight over the speakership — a fight that he lost to Bobby Harrell.

Basically, he mentioned it to dismiss it, although not totally convincingly: "We’re one big happy family now," he said. "It was tense for awhile." But perhaps I should be convinced — after all, things have been smooth enough among the Republican leaders that I had forgotten it.

Anyway, that’s not what our meeting was about; it was about our endorsement. And now that it’s over, I’m still not sure whether we’ll end up endorsing Rep. Jim Harrison or his Democratic opponent. I thought I’d write this first, comparing it to my notes on Mr. Summers, and start our discussions from that point. I think we’ll want to ask a few more questions, and do more research, before we come up with our final decision in October.

Interestingly, he lists the criminal domestic violence bill as one of his main accomplishments of this past session — and that’s one of the issues that motivated Mr. Summers to run against him. "Even though we got all wrapped up in … the John Graham Altman issue," Mr. Harrison said, in the end "we ended up with a better bill."

We spent a good bit of time on PPIC, which he knows we disagree on. Here are some of his comments on the subject:

• "I think you’ve got to look at 17 years, and not just one bill."
• "Personally, I wish that those who are pushing for some school choice had stuck initially to let’s look at ensuring that all of our children, no matter what level of income they had or where they lived, had the opportunity for a quality education."
• "I fully support that choice for children in failing schools that are below a certain income level."
• "I could live very easily without that provision in the last bill that gave a thousand-dollar tax credit, no matter where you lived and no matter what your income was."
• "It ought to be focused on failing schools and low-income families."
• "I agree, it probably won’t work at first in every county."

He said he was optimistic that "more and more people in the House, even in the Republican caucus," are coming to realize the need to address the inequality of educational opportunity between kids in poor districts and their counterparts in more affluent areas. But he didn’t think that growing realization would bear fruit for another two to four years.

"I wish, that as part of the property tax debate, we’d gone ahead and fought that battle last year, too… because they go hand-in-hand," he said. I agree.

He said he believes he is an effective legislator and effective committee chairman. We asked, on that subject, why so many bills that one would think would go through his Judiciary Committee have instead been routed to Ways and Means in recent years.

"David (Wilkins, Harrell’s predecessor as speaker) … was terrified of fights on the floor. I think he was a great speaker, but he wanted control," which he would lose on the floor. It is Mr. Harrison’s belief that Mr. Wilkins had greater confidence that if a bill went through Ways and Means, there was a greater likelihood that things would go the way he and Mr. Harrell wanted.

One thing that did not bypass him, and which he lists as a major accomplishment, is the merit selection process for judges. He thinks that could use improvement, though. With the Legislature poised to create six new judgeships, "I think that the Republican caucus is going to have to commit that a certain number of minorities and women" will be elected "before they are even created."

He worries that the best lawyers, aren’t always seeking the bench. "We need to do a better job of going out and recruiting…" He said he was starting to see too many candidates who are unsuccessful lawyers."If you’re a successful black attorney, you’re probably making too much money to give it up, particularly early in your career," he said.

He talked about the continuing need for comprehensive tax reform, rather than the partial shift that came out of this year’s session. In this context, he spoke words that more than a few anti-tax campaigners need to hear: "Lowering one is easy; the difficult thing is raising a tax." That’s why the Legislature hasn’t implemented a general tax increase since 1987, while every session produces some sort of new tax break or rollback — a reality that provides stark contrast to the anti-tax mythology that lawmakers are "never missing a chance to raise taxes."

He talked about the need for the Legislature to get off local governments’ backs — something he said would be easier to do with the latest property tax bill behind us. We asked why, then, did he support the bill that prevented local governments from regulating billboards? "I’ve always been a property rights guy, since 1994."

On his relationship with Richard Quinn and Associates: "I’m not on the payroll, but I work with them, and am compensated for what I do," which he said is about 30 percent legal work.

On the relationship between our two Republican U.S. senators: "I think behind the scenes, DeMint is trying to come out from behind Lindsey’s shadow."

On why he dressed so informally for the interview: "I knew how y’all would grill me, and I was going to be comfortable."

Friday, 1:25 p.m. Batesburg’s Billy Derrick is Lexington County Council’s lone Democrat. But parties and such aren’t the main thing with him: "I’ve never had any axes to grind or agendas to serve other than to serve the people in my district the best I can."

Beyond his own district, he says the county needs a long-range plan, which the council is about to start work on. Up to now, "We’ve governed through crisis."

And beyond the county, he is a supporter of regional cooperation. For instance, he said "the bus system needs to be addressed," as does the proposed homeless shelter. "We’ve always tried to work with Columbia and Richland County," and as a result, "we’ve caught a lot of grief" from some who would rather leaders not work across the lines on such things as the convention center.

Of course, "Regional cooperation needs to be a two-way street." He appreciates Columbia Mayor Bob Coble helping put a hockey team in Lexington County — and he doesn’t blame the mayor or city leaders a bit for having tried (and failed) to keep SCANA downtown. He said it was "completely natural," and in fact, "I would have been kind of disappointed had they not made a fuss."

And on the transit issue, he thinks it should be recognized that no one in his part of the county will have the chance to ride the bus — routes don’t go that far under anybody’s scenario. For that reason, he suggests maybe the RTA should be funded and run by a Special Purpose District.

On the other hand, "Homeless come from everywhere," so all parts of the counties need to take part in seeking a solution. As to how that effort is going, "I think the process is still in process."

Wednesday, 1 p.m. Longtime GOP House leader Jim Harrison made a mistake: He made Boyd Summers mad at him, and as a result, he has an energetic, well-informed and highly motivated Democratic opponent in the November general election.

Mr. Summers a native Columbian and software executive, is mad about three things:

1. "I find it very offensive what Mr. Harrison and the Legislature did on billboards." It undermined Home Rule in South Carolina. "Government decisions need to be made at the most local level possible." When Gov. Mark Sanford "did the right thing and vetoed it, they overrode" because they "could not look past the big money."
2. Then there is Mr. Harrison’s having championed the idea of taking public money and sending it to private schools — an self-centered agenda being forced on South Carolina by narrow ideologues from out of state. "If I’m elected, I will be an advocate of public schools," said the graduate of Spring Valley High and Clemson.
3. Finally, there is the "arrogance" of the long-time incumbent, which he found most offensively expressed in their handling of the recent criminal domestic violence legislation. He said he and his wife were livid over the "pop her again" clowning-around in a committee room filled with "a bunch of long-time legislators, most of them lawyers, and they just didn’t get it." They didn’t get the fact that South Carolina ranks worst on this most shameful of scales, and that there’s nothing funny about it.

Having "told you what kind of a son-of-a-gun" his opponent is, he went on to say what Boyd Summers would do in office. He would concentrate on getting lawmakers to concentrate on essential services, which have been grossly neglected in recent years. Rather than funding the Hunley, beach renourishment and football stadiums, "how about funding the Highway Patrol?" Or our prisons, so we can "keep the bad guys in." Or mental health services, so that the mentally ill don’t clog up our emergency rooms.

He would do something about the fat and duplication in our public higher education system, and look at consolidating some school districts — although he hesitates to say Richland County has too many with two.

On tax "reform," he said lawmakers start from the wrong direction. "They started from, a lot of people want property tax cuts." They "need to start from, What do the schools need?"

Seeming to recite something I have often written, he said the role of the lawmaker is to ask, "What do we have to do, what services do we need to have, and what’s it going to take to get there."

"We have got to get away from partisanship," he said. "My opponent has governed hard right. Our district wants common-sense solutions." An example? The failure to raise the cigarette tax, as most of the public clearly wants lawmakers to do.

He also believes in continuing the restructuring reforms started by the late Gov. Carroll Campbell, but neglected by present legislative leadership.

"We’re a very Legislative State, and look at where that’s got us."
 

Wednesday, 10:45 a.m. Our second candidate of this election season could hardly be more unlike the first if they had teamed up to do it on purpose. Anton Gunn holds precisely the opposite view on property taxes — he believes they were cut too much by the action in the recent legislative session, and that the burden was shifted to the wrong tax altogether. Lawmakers should have increased the income tax, rather than the already regressive sales tax.

He is also highly knowledgeable about almost every current issue before the Legislature, with extensive experience wrestling with various agencies in the executive branch as well.

This might make for an easy choice if these two men were opposing each other, but they are not. Mr. Gunn is facing a Republican incumbent we also like a lot — Bill Cotty.

Mr. Gunn, whom we endorsed in the June Democratic primary, was one of the more impressive candidates we spoke with in that cycle. I had not known him before, and I was highly impressed with his knowledge, his energy, and his zeal to transform South Carolina into the best of all the states.

He is a big man — a former lineman for the Gamecocks — and he does not think small. "What will our state be like in 2026?" More importantly, what do we want it to be like, and "Who has the vision" to get us there? He says repeatedly that he wants to get South Carolina "past the status quo," in which we have been trapped by lawmakers going for the cheap and easy, not for the best long-term strategies. He says we’re caught in this status quo in part because of "McDonald’s policies." A fast-food burger looks good, smells good and tastes good. Kids love it. "But what happens if you eat it for 10 years?" He says current policies in S.C. are no more nutritious, however appetizing they may seem at a given moment.

He says Mr. Cotty’s principled opposition to "vouchers" for private schools isn’t the same as being for public schools, and he repeatedly says it’s better to define yourself by what you’re for than what you are against. He proposes "signing bonuses" for the best teachers when they go to the worst schools. He wants teachers to have to face their peers’ assessment as well as those of their supervisors. He wants teachers who are letting the team down to be shown the door: "People need a job and they need to make a living. If they aren’t doing that job, you need to help them find another way to make a living." He stops short, however, at letting principals fire teachers at will, preferring the principal to have "significant weight" in a multilateral decision.

He calls health care "the sleeping giant," noting that everybody — from patients to businesses to care deliverers — suffer from the problems in our current system, one way or another.

He is appalled by the recent tax "reform," which moved school funding from the reliable property tax to the volatile sales tax. He says it’s like a breadwinner with a family to feed jumping from a good, steady salary to working on 100 percent commission — it puts the family’s needs at risk. (Mr. Gunn loves analogies.)

And more to the point, "Bill Cotty is the one who sponsored that tax reform bill. He’s the one that wrote it out on the back of that chicken box."

"When I win — and I do think I’m going to win," Mr. Gunn says, "the first meeting I want to have is with Bobby Harrell… to help me understand … what is your vision for South Carolina? How do we get to be the great state we can be?"

He calls himself a bridge-builder who would call upon his years lobbying on behalf of the disadvantaged (as director of SC Fair Share) and similar experiences to help him find the keys to working with other lawmakers of all stripes.

Anton Gunn is nothing if not confident. He dismissed the effect of a third candidate expected to pull votes from Mr. Cotty on the right: "I expected to win by 500 votes. With him in the race, I might win by 800 or 900."

Wednesday, 10 a.m. Ray Maly has never run for political office before, and it shows. He is a sincere, well-meaning citizen, and we need more such folk stepping forward to serve (as he already did, for 20 years in the Army). Unfortunately, he knows very little about the office he is seeking or the issues he would face in that office.

Does that mean we’ll be endorsing his opponent, incumbent Jimmy Bales? I don’t know. We have yet to speak to Rep. Bales, a Richland County Democrat, about the subject. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve spoken with him in several years, so it’s hard to compare any memory of his performance as a candidate.

But I just spoke with Mr. Maly, a retired Army officer, today, and the memory is still fresh.

"What has gotten me into the political process is when I got my property tax," he says, repeating a very, very familiar refrain. And in his case, it’s about as simple as that. He’s dissatisfied with the recent property tax cut the Legislature threw together, and you know why? Because it didn’t do away with residential property taxes entirely.

The concept of the property tax — which, for those of you who forget your basic civics, is based in the rather sensible assumption that those with property benefit most substantially from the kind of community infrastructure that such taxes pay for (police, fire, schools, libraries, and the other amenities that make a community livable and give property therein its value) — confounds him no end.

"I just don’t understand it," he says. "I think it’s reprehensible … that local authorities can just take over your house."

You would think that Mr. Maly has had a terrible time with this tax. Well, you be the judge:

• His home, with improvements, cost him $130,000.
• That was 11 years ago.
• It is now assessed at $240,000, making his tax $2,800.
• He can afford that. As he puts it, "I don’t think I’ll ever be in danger of losing it due to inability to pay." He said he’s worried about other people who are not so fortunate.

But ultimately, it seems it’s the very idea of the tax that offends him, that he would be "paying Richland County to live in my home — that’s paid for.

He’s also bothered that 60 percent of those taxes go to schools, "and they’re not turning out anything." Two of his three children graduated from Lower Richland High. One went to the Citadel, the other to Erskine College. When I noted the irony of his statement in light of those facts, he explained that both children attended Cardinal Newman before transferring to the public institution, and he attributes their success for the solid grounding they received at the Catholic high school.

He says the property tax should be replaced with an even higher sales tax; the hike just enacted wasn’t enough. He said one virtue of the sales tax was that it was more visible; the property tax was less obviously painful. I asked the obvious question: Wouldn’t that make more people, rather than fewer, unhappy about their taxes? "Hopefully so," he said.

"That’ll give ’em a wake-up call." He was referring to politicians, whom he is convinced never think about the tax burden on citizens. Never mind the fact that it often seems — to those of us who have to listen to them for a living — that they never think about anything else.

"They think about spending more money" on their districts so they can get re-elected, he says, with utter confidence. They also waste money on such things as teaching third-graders a second language, when they should be sticking to the basics. That assertion surprised me. I’ve always heard that if you aren’t immersed in a language by age 9, you’ll have more trouble mastering it. Perhaps Mr. Maly is less concerned about that because of his own experience. He immigrated from Austria at age 12, and he speaks accentless English. (Maybe he should give some lessons to the governor of California.)

He says he can’t imagine why people run for the Legislature over and over, when the job only pays $12,000. "Something happens when they get there," he theorizes. "Maybe it’s inside information that leads them to profit or something. I don’t understand it."

For his part, he has no intention of running for a second term. He just wants to accomplish that one goal — eliminating residential property taxes — and he’ll move on.

Woe unto you gray souls who have sulked and griped at my recent attempts at keeping things light and diverting. As of this day, endorsement interviews for the fall general election are under way. Within hours, I will be filing my painfully serious reports on serious interrogations of serious candidates — and the other sorts of candidates as well.

Soon, you will be begging for Top Five Lists to return.

And you will have no one to blame but yourselves.

I’ve written a lot of columns over the years about how and why we endorse candidates in elections. Rather than repeat myself, here are links to a few of those columns:

• February 13, 2000
  — Endorsement calls tough, but worth it.
• June 11, 2000
  — At election time, you don’t get to pick ‘all of the above’
• November 7, 2000
  — Here’s how and why we endorse
• May 30, 2004
  — Some of our endorsement may surprise you and me both
• June 13, 2004
  — Good news: We ‘won’ with DeMint, and ‘lost’ with Quinn

Here’s a column I wrote a couple of years back that might be interesting today.

Note that the figures I worked with have to do with general elections, not primaries. But I thought I’d post this anyway, as long as we were on the subject of endorsements. This column originally ran on Nov. 4, 2004:

November 4, 2004 Thursday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A16
LENGTH: 898 words

HEADLINE: HOW OUR ENDORSEMENTS STACKED UP AGAINST THE RESULTS
BYLINE: BRAD WARTHEN, EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AS I’VE SAID before in this space and elsewhere, there are three things that our political endorsements are not:

• They are not meant to advance the cause of either party. We don’t always endorse Democrats, or always endorse Republicans. We get accused of both about equally, which is fitting, since over time, we endorse about as many of one as the other. Party doesn’t matter.
• They are not predictions. Endorsements are not about who will win; they’re about who ought to win.
• They are not, despite all that you may have heard, the "kiss of death." We’ve heard that one a thousand times: "The State‘s candidates always lose." Actually, election after election, the majority of candidates endorsed by The State win.

    A couple of weeks back, I made a series of presentations to employees of The State explaining our endorsement process. (Only six of the newspaper’s 500 or so employees are members of the editorial board, so the process can be as mysterious to them as to the public, and it is my constant goal to demystify it.) In preparing for those meetings I did something, just for fun, that I’d never done before — at least, not cumulatively: I looked back at all the general elections since I joined the editorial board in 1994, and ran the numbers to determine two things about the candidates we have endorsed: partisan balance, and won-loss record.
    I was just curious, and knew others would be.
    Updated to include the results of Tuesday’s election, here’s the partisan breakdown for the past decade: We have endorsed 43 Democrats, 41 Republicans and one Independent (Bubba Cromer, back in 1994). If you leave out the one Independent, that means our endorsees have been 51 percent Democratic and 49 percent Republican.
    The thing that strikes me about that is how amazingly close to an exact split that is, considering the fact that we don’t factor party into our deliberations. It’s obvious, when you look at individual years, that we’re not deliberately balancing it any more than we’re trying to favor one party over the other. In 1994, we backed 10 Democrats and only four Republicans; in 1996 it was two Democrats and five Republicans, and so on. The balance only occurs over time.
    As for the "kiss of death" — well, that’s one of the more laughable urban myths in the Midlands. Our 10-year record is 64 wins versus 21 losses. If we were trying to pick winners, which we’re not, we’d be batting .753. We haven’t had a "losing season" in the entire decade. Our worst year was 2002 (7-6), and our best was 2000 (16-1).
    This is meaningful only in that it demonstrates the extent to which South Carolina voters tend to think a lot the way we do. But we never know whether that’s going to be the case until the election results are in.
    What about this year, you say? How did we do on Tuesday? Well, we endorsed seven Democrats and seven Republicans (completely unintentionally; I didn’t actually count them until we recapped our endorsements in Tuesday’s paper). Of those, 12 won and two lost. One loser was a Democrat, one a Republican.
    And one of those was a foregone conclusion. I was surprised Swain Whitfield managed to get even his 39 percent against strong incumbent Rep. John Scott.
    This "won-loss" record might actually be better than it would be if we were trying to predict winners. I did that, privately, on Monday night. I sent myself an e-mail from my home computer that night making the following predictions: John Kerry would beat our candidate George W. Bush nationally. Jim DeMint would beat Inez Tenenbaum. S.C. Senate District 22 was too close to call, but I had a feeling Joel Lourie "might eke it out" over Ken Wingate.
    That’s one wrong, one right and one half-right. To elaborate a bit on how those three actually came out:

• When we wrote our Wednesday editorial saying that whoever lost this election, however narrowly, should concede as quickly as possible rather than dragging a nation at war through a repeat of the 2000 debacle, we actually were thinking Sen. Kerry would be the winner. We were fooled into that by exit polls (as well as the trends in polls over the last few days). But we were too careful to say so, and in any case, we meant it either way. And it should be noted to Sen. Kerry’s everlasting credit that he did graciously concede the victory Wednesday to the man we endorsed, President Bush.
• While I criticized Rep. DeMint heavily for choosing to run as a hyperpartisan (despite his record as an independent thinker), there’s little doubt that that strategy was his key to victory. The president won South Carolina 58-41, and Mr. DeMint beat Mrs. Tenenbaum 54-44, demonstrating the power of the coattail effect. I congratulate him, and sincerely hope he now returns to being the thoughtful policy wonk he was before he wrapped himself in party garb in recent weeks.
• The most gratifying result from Tuesday was the fact that Joel Lourie didn’t merely "eke it out," but won a decisive victory over Ken Wingate. I say that not because I wanted to see Ken defeated, but because I wanted to see the voters repudiate the anti-education outsiders who weighed in so heavily in his behalf. The people of District 22 should take great pride in what they accomplished Tuesday — not just for themselves and Joel Lourie, but for all of South Carolina.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.

Andre Bauer is coming in for his interview at 4. I’m reviewing a few questions for him between now and then. I’m curious: What would you ask a lieutenant governor who:

• When stopped speeding down Assembly Street, charged so aggressively at the cop that he felt threatened enough to draw his weapon?
• When driving 101 mph on a wet highway, got on the police radio frequency to tell the patrolman pursuing him that "SC2" was "passing through," and when he was stopped anyway, asked, "Did you not hear me on the radio?"
• Lying to reporters about that incident, then saying you "forgot" about it when confronted with the evidence?
• Showed up to negotiate with the Department of Transportation a price for land he owned — with a member of the transportation commission in tow?
• Has his own Myspace site?
• Seems almost certain to win the GOP nomination again?