1:30 p.m.

Karen Floyd said right off that she’d heard there was no way we would endorse her. So for more than two hours, she really put her heart into trying to win our support.

I appreciate that. She was smart, charming, energetic, sincere, and full of ideas — ideas just chasing each other across the boardroom table. So why would anyone assume we wouldn’t endorse her? Because she’s the school “choice” candidate in this five-way race.

But don’t we like charter schools, magnet schools, alternative schools? Sure. But we draw the line at diverting state resources to private schools, and she does not. She says it’s just one of 68 ideas she’s advocating. She prefers “crumbling the cookie piece by piece” to embracing any one, comprehensive approach.

Unfortunately, tuition tax credits are the one big "education" idea of our governor, and he has thrown party convention to the winds to endorse Mrs. Floyd over four other Republicans. We agree with the governor about a lot of things, but that is his worst idea.

It’s not Mrs. Floyd’s fault that he has inflated the stakes surrounding this one idea over her 67 others. But he has. It’s tough to ignore that, or the fact that pretty much everyone who likes his approach has endorsed her. At the same time, you can’t ignore that there’s more to her than this issue. That makes this one tough.

Wednesday, 10 a.m. “I am, literally, the average person,” said Kerry Wood, a Republican who wants to be state schools superintendent. The computer programmer from Leesville would do away with textbooks and replace them with laptops. Kids would have less to lug around. He also wants smaller classrooms. How would he pay for it all? The money’s already there: “I believe there’s a lot of waste in the system.”

Mr. Wood is one of the three candidates least likely to get into a runoff. For more info on this race, check what I wrote about the superintendent debate, and see our endorsement (which only deals with the front-runners, frankly).

5 p.m. “I’m not going to say right now that I’m absolutely going to do this, or I’m absolutely not going to do that,” said Jim Holcombe, seeking the same job as Mr. Malinowski. That’s good. A councilman should have an open mind. I would have felt better, though, if he’d had more to say about such major issues as how to pay for the regional bus system. He was more interested in school District 5. I agree that it’s “a great system if we don’t let a small group” drag it down. But it doesn’t have much to do with Richland County Council.

I’d also have liked it if he had mentioned that his wife works for a developer whose projects have ticked off a lot of people in the district, to the point that some have made an issue of it. All he had to do was mention it, and explain that he didn’t think it was a big deal, and why. It doesn’t seem like a deal-killer to me. But instead, he sort of gazed at the ceiling at each question, apparently thinking about ways he could avoid telling us anything.

Disappointing. Anyway, here’s our endorsement in this race.

1:30 p.m.

There wasn’t much to argue with in terms of what state Sen. Tommy Moore had to say. The Democrat who would be governor talks about education, jobs and healthcare.

He didn’t have much to say about his Democratic opponents, but he repeatedly said things to distinguish himself from the Republican incumbent.

He kept telling us how he was a product of a mill village, and of public schools. And when it comes to school "choice," he wants “to make every school in South Carolina the best choice.”

He marveled that anyone could make it "the centerpiece of the last two or three years" to push "tax credits for those who make over $50,000 a year, for them to have the choice," leaving those most in need of a good education behind.

As for public school funding, he noted that he did not vote for the budget for fiscal year ’04-’05, when the base student cost called for by law was not fully funded. He repeated more than once what he heard the governor say at a press conference then, that "We are just where we want to be." He  found that appalling.

He would raise the cigarette tax so as not to leave federal Medicaid money on the table. He says he’s willing to change his mind when someone has a better argument, and takes pride in bringing conflicting parties together on divisive legislative issues.

That’s all fine. But I was struck by the almost lethargic manner in which he presented his case. If he has a fire in the belly for this race, I couldn’t see the smoke. Maybe I’m wrong, though. See the video clip (but be warned that it takes a while to load), and see what you think.

Tuesday, 12 p.m.

In the district on the Lexington County side of Columbiana mall, Art Guerry is in a grudge match for his old job. After 12 years on county council, he was ousted by John Carrigg. Mr. Guerry says he now agrees with his opponent, who said in 1994 that 12 years was long enough.

Mr. Guerry, if you recall, was county auditor during his hiatus from the council (he lost his bid for re-election two years ago). He’s proud of the job he did getting out and enforcing the tax laws.

He said there was too much of a write-off on unpaid taxes when he was on council before, so as auditor, he did something about it. He claims credit for a 40 percent rollback in the property tax millage thanks to his making sure everybody was paying their share.

4 p.m. "You can improve education by throwing money at it," said Moore rival Dennis Aughtry. The money would come from casino gambling, which he says would do away with all of South Carolina’s problems from unemployment to property taxes. "I don’t want to sound like it’s the end-all and be-all," he said of gambling. "But frankly, it is."

This was a very interesting and unusual interview. A couple of weeks
earlier, one of the hostesses of the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting
asked me if I knew why Mr. Aughtry was running. All he had talked
about, she said, was gambling. Well, that’s why he’s running.

"I’m going to change this state and it’s going to be a radical change and we’re going to do it through gambling," he proclaimed to us. His model is Mississippi, which he says took in $4.5 billion in taxes in 2005 on casinos.

"Gambling is sure, it’s tried, it’s proven."

He can really wax poetic about it. I admit that I have still not fixed my problem with posting video clips on the Web, but I think it’s worth posting this one. And it’s worth your waiting for it to download. Play solitaire or something. It might take 10 minutes or so.

Highlights from the video include the above quote about "end-all and be-all," plus:

• "This worn-out soybean field, cotton field, tobacco field which had been flooded by the Mississippi River, and burned by the sun… casinos rose like phoenix from the ashes — glistening casinos, which were nothing but piles of money, really." (Referring to Tunica, Miss.)

• "I can tell you to a certainty that if gambling comes to South Carolina, that you won’t have any unemployment, and you won’t have any property tax in a short time. You’re not gonna need it."

• But you gotta get past the South Carolina/North Carolina mentality that it’s gonna send you straight to hell. You’ve gotta get past the mentality that I’m selling out my soul."

• "A lot of people think you get cheated in a casino, which is the furthest thing to happen."

• "You’re not gonna see unemployed people, unless they just don’t wanna work. And every child’s going to have an education."

Monday, 5:30 p.m.

The northwest corner of Richland County needs full-time representation, says William Malinowski, and that’s why he should be chosen over two other Republicans for county council (MOTE: now down to one in the runoff, Jim Holcombe), as he sees it. He’s retired after 31 years as an FBI agent dealing with a lot of “real-life” situations. “I did it. I was out there, I met people face to face in the trenches,” he says.

He had to deal with all sorts of people. In a job like special agent, you "have to know how to talk and deal with all of them."

Now that he’s out, he’s got plenty of time to serve.

He would deal with everything from growth to taxes with a “master plan” that among other things would build an infrastructure fund from impact fees paid by developers. It would work like this: the fees would pay into a fund to pay for the infastructure needs on the next development, and all projects would have to fit in with the master plan.

He said he would serve the "needs of the community… not the needs of the developer."

Earlier today, I posted another one of my observations about candidate endorsement interviews. It was about a guy who as much as anyone is the test case of whether out-of-state groups can really take out legislators who support public schools.

So where did I post it? Well, I backdated it to May 1, the day the interview occurred. Please go read it.

Anyway, I posted this editor’s note at the top of it:

Note to loyal readers: I’m writing this retroactively nine days later. I’ve been too busy participating in interviews to stop and write about them. I’m 12 behind, and if I don’t get this one done before my next interview, I’ll be 15 behind by the end of the day. Therefore, I’m going to try to keep them shorter than I did the first three, which were more or less column length. This way, I’ll at least get to share the highlights with you. (Assuming you care. Do you? I mean, this is probably the most valuable stuff I’ve put on this blog yet, in terms of being information you won’t get anywhere else — information relating to decisions S.C. voters will have to make soon. Yet I’m seeing few or no comments. Maybe you’re reading them and not commenting. I hope so.)

Actually, now at the end of the day, I’m 14 behind. And I admit, I didn’t keep that last one short. But I’ve got to start doing so, or I’ll never catch up…

Two hours with Gov. Mark Sanford covered more than I can summarize here. The most interesting thing was his emerging advocacy of state funding for education (see editorial above). That came at the very end of the interview, and an aide dragged him away before he could get much into it. More on that later.

Oscar Lovelace, quixotic challenger for the GOP nod for governor, is more eloquent than the incumbent and knows it: “I just believe strongly that the governor is missing some critical leadership skills” — communication, cooperation and common sense. “Our governor has never been CEO of anything before we made him CEO of South Carolina,” said the family doctor who has built a practice with 38 employees and 15,000 patients. “Our governor has never attended a public school in South Carolina…. I can speak from the bully pulpit. Mark Sanford can’t, because he hasn’t had the real-world experiences.”

Tuesday, 4:30 p.m.: No. 5 of 55 interviews I’ll be doing before the June primary.

Todd Wood is running against Anton Gunn for the honor of opposing either Rep. Bill Cotty or his GOP primary challenger, Sheri Few, in the fall.

Mr. Wood has run before — against Mr. Cotty in 2004.

Mr. Wood will strike you right away in the following ways: Young, clean-cut, earnest. Family man, four kids. He and his wife care a lot about their community (she’s running for the school board). A real gentleman, soft-spoken, a little nervous.

He’s involved in the Lunch Buddies program, having lunch with a disadvantaged kid in his local school. "If I’m not there, I know the kids notice." He would still do it as a House member. He believes in being civically involved. "I do it because it’s the right thing to do."

He’s concerned about growth without advance preparation — infrastructure, etc. — in his Richland Northeast/Elgin-Lugoff area. "Make sure the school is there before the houses."

He’s concerned about equity in schools. He wants kids in Kershaw County to be able to take Latin the way kids in Richland 2 do. He wants 4K extended to all children, not just those deemed "at-risk." But he’s not sure he wants the state taking over school funding as the means of providing that equality of opportunity. He doesn’t trust the state to dole it out fairly.

He struggles with the idea of school district consolidation. He says he has a Republican friend who keeps on saying, "Why don’t you come on over to the Dark Side?"

His friend advocates district consolidation, which makes Mr. Wood wonder: "I thought, what would be a reason why we should have more than one district in a county? And I can’t think of one."

He seemed sufficiently worried about it that my colleague Cindi Scoppe consoled him by saying to the best of our knowledge, there’s nothing Democratic or Republican about the eminently sensible idea or reducing the ridiculous number of school districts we have in this state.

(We’re not usually in the business of consoling candidates. But sometimes, such as when one is obsessing about something that isn’t even real, it helps to inform them of that so that we can move on.)

Which is good for him. He said that while his district seems to be becoming more Republican, he must have about 4,000 "swing voters" in the area. He likes that. "It’s heartening to know there are people like that out there.

For our endorsement in this race, click here.

Monday, 2:30 p.m.

Rep. Kenny Bingham is a man of many moods — hence the multiple pictures above.

But in all moods, he has always been an advocate for public education — ever since he was elected, as a member of the Lexington 2 school board, to the House six years ago.

That’s why I was disappointed to hear that he was speaking in favor of the latest incarnation of the effort to give tax breaks to subsidize private schools. When he read about that on my blog, he called to elaborate on his support of the bill. We spoke more about it in his formal endorsement interview on Monday.

Rep. Bingham complains that the Legislature is a hard place to get things done. He misses the school board, where if you "get three people to agree with you," you can move ahead. By contrast, "state government is a slow train." Anybody who walks in thinking he’s going to move the world right away has another think coming: "Every day that I’m there, I find out how stupid I am and how little I know."

I know what he means. The world isn’t as simple as many voters (or editorial boards) would like. The question for voters in his district is, what is the level of compromise that is necessary to get things done? The second question is, if they think Mr. Bingham has compromised too much — or not enough — would they vote instead for someone as young, inexperienced and (relatively) single-issue as his primary opponent? (And sorry — no picture of Artie White. He was the first candidate we interviewed on this cycle, and I didn’t think of taking in the camera until later.)

"Everything is about compromise" in the House, said Mr. Bingham. "Take the school ‘choice’ issue, a perfect example."

"There are a number of us (and too few, in the House) who understand public education," he said. "We support public education." That’s why he refused to support "Put Parents in Charge" when asked to sponsor it last year. But there was a limit to his ability to withhold his support and still be effective, he said.

“When you continue to say ‘no, I’m not going to do it,’” you find
you don’t have a “place at the table.”

Besides, he believes the proposal he recently supported — and which failed — would have had little effect. It was for him a damaging political distraction, and he thought it best to get it out of the way. His attitude was, "That’s not gonna solve all the problems" of public education if it passed. At the same time, he thinks it wouldn’t hurt. Public schools, he said, would easily withstand the competition for funds:

“They got all the dang money in the world, more
than any private school.”

So what does he think should be done about school funding? "The state needs to fund education equally," using weighted pupil units. He would regulate the schools less: Give the districts the money, and let them decide how to spend it. "As long as the schools meet objectives, leave them alone."

The big issue is how you get the money: "What do you tax?"

Mr. Bingham, who was an early supporter of the proposal once known as "Quinn-Sheheen," and now known over in the Senate as "the Grooms plan," thinks it’s something that should be talked about, and that conversation is overdue. "We have not had that discussion on the floor of the House. They have not had that discussion on the floor of the Senate."

Monday, 4:30 p.m.

"I want to run because I want to serve," said Chris Hart. Nothing earth-shattering about that; about 50 percent of candidates say it.

Mr. Hart added some context. He was born to a working-class family, his father the first black bus driver for SCE&G, and "Mom does domestic work." They raised him with "strong values," then he went to Howard University, a school that "instills a strong sense of community." He brought that
sense back home with him.

He said he wants "to bring a sense of urgency" to the House of Representatives. "We don’t have time for partisan politics right now. We should be about helping people… We can’t afford incremental change."

“Every legislator should have to articulate a vision.”

Surprise: Rep. Joe E. Brown, the retired school administrator who has represented S.C. House District 73 for 20 years, seems to have viable Democratic opposition. Energetic young lawyer Hart calls the incumbent “a true Southern gentleman” who has “become complacent. He’s become ineffective.”

Some think that’s why former Speaker David Wilkins found him the one Democrat nonthreatening enough to be a committee chairman. Mr. Wilkins used to bring Rep. Brown along to annual meetings with our editorial board, along with his Republican committee chairs. He was the only Democrat, and the only black man who didn’t work for The State, in the room. In those meetings, Mr. Brown spoke only when spoken to, and even then did not say much.

Mr. Brown is a quiet man. We’ll see what he has to say in his interview May 22. He’ll have to go some to make the sort of impression his young challenger did.

Mr. Hart said South Carolina needs to get it together. "Right now, South Carolina’s standing still. We need a mission statement," particularly with regard to education. The state needs to be "committed to providing the highest-quality education at all levels," from early childhood to higher ed.

That’s one thing we can do that "will benefit every person in South Carolina;" it "will position us to compete regionally, nationally and globally."

We "can’t just talk about problems."

"I want to distinguish myself from my opponent," he said. "I want to be solution-oriented.

"It puzzles me why" his opponent, as a retired educator, "isn’t in the forefront of the debate on education."

Mr. Hart says he is running hard, walking the district six days a week ever since January. As for Mr. Brown, "People say this is the first time we have seen campaign signs for him in the district."