Category Archives: History

Who are your Top Five Presidents?

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Salon is SO predictable. For President’s Day, they post a piece posing the question, “Who’s the worst president of them all?” And of course, since that site is totally in the grip of Bush Derangement Syndrome (still), it boils down to a choice between George W. Bush and someone else. In this case, Buchanan.

Of course, being Salon, that’s why they ran it. But you know where they would go before you clicked on the link, right? So partisan. So parochial. So lacking in historical perspective.

Yawn.

Me, I’m not interested in a worst, or a worst list, because that just doesn’t seem in the spirit of Presidents’ Day, which is about celebrating rather than tearing down. So, who are your Top Five, All Time, Desert-Island presidents?

Oh, and if you include Barack Obama, which to me would be the flip side of picking W. as the worst, as if you can’t think outside your own 21st century chauvinism, I’ll just quote Barry at you:

Couldn’t you make it any more obvious than that? What about the Beatles? What about the Rolling Stones? What about…Beethoven? Track one side one of the Fifth Symphony?…

(You sort of have to know Barry to get that. And if you don’t, I definitely recommend that you read High Fidelity, which is where I got this mania for Top Five Lists. The movie’s fine, but read the book.)

My own list is a little shaky, but I’ll just throw some out there to get this started:

  1. Abraham Lincoln — The guy who held us together at the fulcrum of our history, and did it with heroic force of will and epic strength of character while at the same time maintaining his own instinctive humility. He seemed at times to stand alone, politically, in his insistence on holding the nation together (and thank God he did). No one outdoes him in rising above finger-in-the-wind politics to embody leadership; only Washington and FDR come close. That brooding statue at the memorial is the visual evocation of what I’m talking about, which is what makes it so iconic. Of course, if you’re of pacifist tendencies, you have to note that no one person in our history was more singlehandedly responsible for the shedding of more American blood — without his force of will, the nation likely wouldn’t have stayed the course that long. But then, you have to ask yourself, was it worth it? Unfortunately, we’re still fighting over that in SC.
  2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt — Again, almost superhuman leadership through crises of such scope and sweep that they stagger the mind. Argue all you want about the effectiveness of the New Deal, I think it was this cripple’s ebullient refusal to be a cripple, or let his country wallow in its troubles, that pulled us through the Depression more than anything. As for the Second World War — the nation was right to feel panicky when he died just before we’d finished winning it; his leadership was that critical on an abstract, spiritual level. The fact that we went ahead and won it quickly is a testament to what he’d already done, but also, it should be said, proof that the nation’s greatness and strength exceeds that of one man, however great the man. You could say that anybody who was president through those crises would be deemed great after they ended successfully. But I would say the nation was very fortunate to have this particular man at that time. And the people of this country knew it, which is why they elected him four times.
  3. John Adams — OK, he’s not necessarily the greatest AS president (in fact, that was one of the low points of his career), and sure, there’s that business where he let the more partisan Federalists maneuver him into the Alien and Sedition Acts. It’s just that, if you take his whole life — and his whole adult life pretty much was devoted to getting this country started, being the most eloquent advocate for independence, getting backing from abroad (the French, the Dutch) for the revolution, suggesting Washington to head the Continental Army, (and suggesting Jefferson do the final writing on the Declaration), and on and on — it’s hard to imagine one guy contributing so much to a new country. But he did. I guess I’m putting him on here as a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award.
  4. George Washington — Back when I was in college, it wasn’t fashionable to emphasize Washington as much as some of the other Founders. You know, because he was so obvious, it was uncool. (We were like Barry, in other words.) I tended to focus on the idea guys — Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton. But over time, I’ve come to understand better the importance of his leadership — both in terms of being an inspirational leader that the country could rally around (something he cultivated consciously, which would make some dismiss him, but I think he saw what the country needed and provided it), and in terms of his self-effacing refusal to become a king or a facsimile of one. In other words, my understanding and appreciation has progressed beyond the cherry-tree myth.
  5. Theodore Roosevelt — I used to think that Teddy was on Mount Rushmore for the same reason that people tend to put W. and Obama on their best and worst lists (depending on their inclinations): He was the president at the time, so they put him up there. But having read the first book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy (I need to get to the second; it’s sitting on my bookshelf waiting), I’m far more convinced of the role he played in transitioning the nation from what had been since 1776 and taking it to what it would be in the 20th century. His building up of the Navy would have been enough to get him on a Top Ten list. But then you look at his Progressive initiatives, his passion for reform, and that takes you much further. A lot of detractors would dismiss his imperialism, but I think that’s another sort of temporal chauvinism — applying today’s standards to a man of another time. I would look at the positive side of that — he saw the importance of the United States taking its place alongside the “Great Nations of Europe,” and saw aggressive posture as essential to that. In other words, you can take his “Bully!” a couple of ways. But in my book, as you know, I think the world is better off with the United States in the leading role, rather than some of those “Great Nations,” as they were then. And I worry about a future time when a nation that would never, ever produce a TR is in that role. Roosevelt personified American vigor, optimism, innovation and industry, making him a sort of archetype, an embodiment of the nation at that point in history — much the way JFK did later.

Wow. Barry would really be dismissive of MY list. It’s like, Mount Rushmore minus Jefferson, plus two. But I can’t help it; the “name” presidents do tend to be among the best, if you’re honest about it. (And I was going to put Jefferson on there, crediting him for the Louisiana Purchase and dealing with the Barbary Pirates — both flying in the face of his own ideology, and I love it when politicians rise above their party lines — but I wanted the other five on there more.

Go ahead, argue with me.

Promise to Egypt: All your dreams will come true

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Since it’s way historic and all, I thought I’d put something here about the news that’s been breaking in recent minutes (you’d have seen it earlier if you followed me on Twitter), so y’all can talk about it even though I don’t have time to say much right now:

Military says Mubarak will meet protesters demands

By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press

CAIRO (AP) — President Hosni Mubarak will meet the demands of protesters, military and ruling party officials said Thursday in the strongest indication yet that Egypt’s longtime president may be about to give up power and that the armed forces were seizing control.

Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, told thousands of protesters in central Tahrir Square, “All your demands will be met today.” Some in the crowd held up their hands in V-for-victory signs, shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” a victory cry used by secular and religious people alike.

The military’s supreme council was meeting Thursday, without the commander in chief Mubarak, and announced on state TV its “support of the legitimate demands of the people.” A spokesman read a statement that the council was in permanent session “to explore “what measures and arrangements could be made to safeguard the nation, its achievements and the ambitions of its great people.”

The statement was labelled “communique number 1,” a phrasing that suggests a military coup…

OK, the military coup part may give us pause — more about that later when we know more — but what a heady moment for all those folks who’ve taken to the streets.

How about that quote?

“All your demands will be met today.”

Reminds me of Pedro’s extreme, over-the-top, meant-to-be-seen-as-ridiculously-hyperbolic campaign pledge (which was recommended to him by campaign consultant Napoleon Dynamite): “Vote for me, and all your wildest dreams will come true.”

Perhaps the general is overselling as well — and again, it remains to be seen how the people would feel about a junta (you might say that, like Pedro, the military is offering Egypt its “protection” — but if Mubarak is stepping down, that’s something Egyptians had hardly dared dream a month ago.

So, wow. This is quite a moment.

My uncomfortable “yeah, but…” about Nikki’s (apparently) illegal meeting

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I started my career in a state with a real Sunshine Law… Tennessee.

The expectation was clear there, back in the heady post-Watergate 1970s, that the people’s business would be done in public, and that government documents belonged to the people as well.

This led to a lot of awkwardness. For instance… I well remember a school board meeting I attended in Humboldt when I was covering several rural counties for The Jackson Sun. Humboldt was the closest sizable town to Jackson, and I knew my predecessor (who was now my editor) had regularly covered that body’s meetings. Trouble was, they were regularly scheduled on the same night as several other important public bodies’ meetings in my coverage area, and for the first few months I was on that beat, they always had something going on that demanded my attention.

Mondays were brutal. There were regularly several meetings I needed to go to across two or three counties, plus other breaking news. It was not unusual for me to start work early Monday morning, work through regular day hours, cover two or three meetings that night, spend the whole night writing five or six or more stories, get some final questions answered in the morning, make calls on another breaking story or two, and then file my copy at midmorning. Actually, I had a secretary in my Trenton office who laboriously transmitted each of my stories, a character at a time, on an ancient teletype machine while I finished the next story. If I was lucky, I could grab a nap in the afternoon. But Tuesdays were often busy as well.

I think the Humboldt school board meetings were on a Monday, but perhaps my memory fails me.

Anyway, I finally managed to make it to one of their meetings — and almost felt apologetic for not having been before. I sort of hated for the good folks of Humboldt to think the Gibson County Bureau Chief didn’t think them important. I didn’t know what was on the agenda; I had just been meaning to come, and finally, here I was.

Often, when I’d show up to cover meetings in these small towns, the chair would recognize me in a gracious manner, which tended to embarrass me. I mean, I wasn’t their house guest, I was a hard-bitten newspaper reporter there to keep a jaded eye on them. Of course, this graciousness was also a handy way of the chair warning all present that there was a reporter in the room.

But at this one, it would have been nicer to be formally welcomed than to experience what happened.

It was a singularly boring meeting — I kept wanting to kick myself for having chosen THIS one to finally make an appearance. They were approving annual contracts for teachers (you know, the kind of thing reporters would be excluded from in SC, as a “personnel matter”), one at a time, and it went on and on and on. There was NOTHING at the meeting worth reporting, and as I rose to leave I was regretting the waste of time.

Then this one member comes up to me with a swagger, and I smiled and started to introduce myself, and with a tone dripping vitriol, he sneered, “Bet you’re sorry you came to this meeting. We didn’t give you any controversy for you to splash all over the paper.” I mean, I’d never met this guy, and he frickin’ HATED me for some reason I could not imagine. What the hell? I thought: I come to your stupid boring meeting, sit all the way through it, and this is the reward I get? I didn’t know what to say to the guy.

It took me a day or so to figure out that the year before, my predecessor had covered a nasty fight over a teacher’s contract — one I had either not focused on or forgotten, since that wasn’t my turf then. It had been a HUGE deal in that town, and left a lot of raw feelings — many of them caused by board members’ deep resentment of having to have personnel discussions in public. This bitter guy assumed that the only reason I had come to the meeting, when I usually didn’t, was because teacher contracts were being discussed. When, in actuality, if I’d known it, I’d have found something to do that night in another county.

But I digress.

All that is to say, I came up with certain expectations of openness in government. Which means I was in for a shock when I came home to South Carolina to lead the governmental affairs team at The State. Barriers everywhere. An FOI law full of exceptions. A Legislature that cherished its right to go into executive session at will. Anything but a culture of openness.

I’m afraid I was rather insufferable toward Jay Bender — the newspaper’s lawyer and advocate for press issues before the Legislature — the first time he met me back in 1987. He had come to brief editors on the improvements he had helped get in state law in the recent session. My reaction to his presentation was “WHAT? You call that an Open Meetings law? You settled for THAT?” I was like that.

And I saw it as my job to fight all that, and crack things open at every opportunity. I was sometimes a bit insufferable about it. One day, I went to the State House (I was an unusual sort of assigning editor in that I escaped from my desk into the field as often as possible) to check on things, and learned that there was a committee meeting going on somewhere that wasn’t being covered (there are a LOT of those these days). I thought it was behind a closed door leading off the lobby. I charged, ostentatiously (I was going to show these complacent folks how a real newspaper ripped aside the veil of secrecy), with a photographer in tow, and reached resolutely for the doorknob.

One of the many folks loitering in the lobby — many of whom had turned to watch my bold assault on that door — said, “There’s a meeting going on in there,” in an admonitory tone. I said, right out loud for all to hear, “I know there is. That’s why I’m going in there.”

And I threw open the door, and there were two people sitting having a quiet conversation, suddenly staring at me in considerable surprise. No meeting. No quorum of anything. I murmured something like “excuse me; I thought this was something else” and backed out — to the considerable enjoyment of the small crowd outside.

Anyway, I take a backseat to no one when it comes to championing open government, and so it is that I say that Nikki Haley should not have met with two fellow members of the Budget and Control Board without the participation or knowledge of the other two officials. Curtis Loftis was right to protest, and Nikki’s chief of staff was entirely out of line to scoff at his protest.

That said, I had to nod my head when my colleagues at The State said this about the breach:

But here’s the thing: This was a meeting, and a conversation, that we want Ms. Haley to have with Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman and House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper. After what we’ve been through for the past eight years, having these three officials even on speaking terms, much less meeting to talk through our budget problems, is a breath of fresh air.

Amen. That was indeed my first reaction: Nikki’s having a heart-to-heart with some key lawmakers? Good. At least, it offers me hope.

Maybe it wasn’t kosher. OK, it wasn’t, period. Totally against the rules as I understand them. And yeah, it’s easy to characterize it as hypocritical for Ms. Transparency to do something like this. But hey, Nikki persuaded me some time ago that she wasn’t serious about transparency when applied to her. That was a huge part of my discomfort with her as a candidate, and no shock now. But… at least MAYBE she made some progress toward overcoming another serious deficit in her qualifications to lead our state — her penchant for going out of her way not to get along with the leadership.

Maybe. I don’t know; I wasn’t in the room — which brings us back to the problem with closed meetings. Which is why I oppose them. But you know, the older I get, the more certain I am that stuff like that is way more complicated than it seemed when I was a young reporter.

The irony in the Lexington Medical/Duke deal

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Something about this development perplexes me:

Now after a 10-year struggle to receive a certificate of need from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to provide heart surgeries, Lexington Medical has signed an agreement with Duke Medicine to provide cardiovascular services at the hospital.

Lexington Medical Center will affiliate with Duke’s internationally recognized heart program to begin procedures including open heart surgery and elective angioplasty at Lexington Medical Center in 2011.

Through its affiliation, Lexington Medical will benefit from Duke’s clinical expertise and services to build a comprehensive heart program. Duke University Hospital, recognized as one of the top 10 heart hospitals in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, will help recruit cardiovascular surgeons and cardiac anesthesiologists to work at Lexington Medical Center.

Duke will assist with the recruitment and training of nurses and staff, design of the open heart surgery operating room, implementation of policies and procedures as well as comprehensive oversight of quality and development for all cardiovascular services at Lexington Medical.

Marti Taylor, associate vice president of cardiovascular serviced at Duke University Health System, said Duke had been in discussions with Lexington for about six months. It currently has affiliations with 11 other hospitals from Florida to Virginia.

She said Duke comes into a collaboration with three objectives: to expand its cardiovascular services; expand the Duke brand; and to provide patients access to tertiary services available at university hospitals.

Dr. Peter Smith, professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Duke University, is charged with getting the heart program up and running. He has been involved with opening six other heart surgery programs, he said…

That sounds great and all, and I wish everyone concerned the best, but I can’t help remembering… all those years that LexMed was arguing, fussing and fighting with Providence, Palmetto Health, DHEC and the editorial board of The State over whether it would be allowed to do open-heart, there was a consistent refrain we heard from folks in Lexington County, which went something like this:

Lexington Medical is a great hospital. We have the expertise to do open-heart. We’re ready to do open-heart. You people on the other side of the river are acting like we in Lexington County aren’t good enough, or smart enough, to run a heart hospital. You’re dissing us, and we’ve had enough of it.

This sentiment, oft expressed, packed the full weight of the painful identity divide that runs down the middle of our community.

Of course, we were doing nothing of the kind. We (at the newspaper, anyway, and I had no indications anyone else thought anything different) that LexMed was indeed a wonderful hospital. It wasn’t about good enough or smart enough or being ready. It was about the fact that with such procedures, a team needs to be able to do a certain number of them to be and stay proficient, and if open-heart got spread and scattered across THREE local hospitals (when it really shouldn’t even have been spread across two), NONE of those facilities are likely to be doing enough procedures to be as good as they should be.

So now that Providence quit fighting this, now that LexMed is poised to move forward… it has to call in the Pros from Dover to take the next steps?

Very ironic, it seems to me.

Cindi’s column on our epic struggle for accountable, rational government in SC

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“It don’t make no difference how foolish it is, it’s the RIGHT way — and it’s the regular way. And there ain’t no OTHER way, that ever I heard of, and I’ve read all the books that gives any information about these things. They always dig out with a case-knife — and not through dirt, mind you; generly it’s through solid rock. And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever. Why, look at one of them prisoners in the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in the harbor of Marseilles, that dug himself out that way; how long was HE at it, you reckon?”

“I don’t know.”
“Well, guess.”
“I don’t know. A month and a half.”
“THIRTY-SEVEN YEAR — and he come out in China. THAT’S the kind. I wish the bottom of THIS fortress was solid rock.”

For some reason, I thought of that exchange between Tom Sawyer (the first speaker) and Huck Finn when I read Cindi Scoppe’s column Sunday about our long, Sisyphean struggle to get our state to adopt a more rational, accountable form of government.

Actually, it wasn’t a column exactly, but a repurposing of remarks she delivered upon accepting Governing magazine’s Hal Hovey-Peter Harkness Award for public service journalism. Remember, I mentioned this the other day.

Whatever you call the piece, it summarized our TWENTY-YEAR effort to change South Carolina government — one in which we’ve made some progress, although it would be pretty fair to say it’s the kind of progress you’d expect to make, digging your way out of a stone dungeon with a case-knife.

One thing I liked about the piece was that Cindi took the trouble to list the bad craziness that was going on in that summer of 1990, when it all started:

Twenty years ago, I had been out of college less than five years, and covering the S.C. Legislature as a reporter for less than two years, when my colleagues and I realized that we were in the midst of a governmental crisis:

•  A tenth of the Legislature was or soon would be under indictment on federal corruption charges.

•  Among the dozen other officials under investigation was the governor’s closest political ally.

•  A separate FBI investigation was looking into bid-rigging at the Highway Department.

•  The director of that agency had forced underlings to cover up a wreck he had in his state vehicle — and his bosses gave him only a gentle reprimand.

•  That same director had himself refused to fire the Highway Patrol commander for personally intervening to get the top FBI official in the state out of a DUI charge.

•  The larger-than-life president of the state’s flagship university had used public funds to secretly purchase lavish gifts for legislators for years while university trustees looked the other way.

I was the governmental affairs editor at the time, and I’ve told the story of what led us to do Power Failure over and over, but I always have trouble remembering all that stuff that was going on. All of those scandals were on my team’s turf, and we were doing a great job of staying ahead of the competition on all of them that summer (going nuts doing it, but still doing it), when one day Gil Thelen, doing his management-by-walking-around thing, plopped into a chair next to my desk and asked a blue-sky question about what it all meant? Was there a way to explain it all to readers, and give them some hope that the underlying problems could be reached. I said I didn’t know, but I’d think about it.

The result was the Power Failure series. The central insight was that NO ONE was in charge. And the thing that caused me to pull it all together was a series of three op-ed pieces written by Walter Edgar and Blease Graham. After reading that, I could see the direction we would need to take in explaining it to readers — something that eventually took well over 100 stories split into 17 installments in 1991.

Of all the reporters I had working with me on that opus, Cindi was the one who took it most to heart and was most dedicated to the ideas the project set out. Which was a large reason why I brought her up to editorial in 1997 — so we could continue the mission.

Cindi’s boiled-down version of the project’s conclusions:

•  Consolidate agencies, and let the governor control them.

•  Write real ethics laws.

•  Dismantle the special purpose districts, and empower local governments.

•  Release the judiciary from its legislative stranglehold.

•  Adopt a rational budgeting process.

•  And make the government more open to the public.

I enjoyed Cindi’s ending, which to me was reminiscent of the last graf of the introductory piece I wrote for the project. Here’s Cindi’s ending:

There’s a little state down South where we’re experts at putting the “dys” into dysfunctional government, and there’s an editorial writer down there who’s been struggling for practically her entire career to get people to buy into a few simple and obvious reforms. And she’s not gonna stop until they do it.

And here’s mine, from the spring of 1991:

South Carolina is becoming less like its old self. An increasingly wary public is tired of being ripped off. Things that weren’t expected to happen under the old way of doing things — such as judges and senators getting indicted — are happening, because law enforcement agencies won’t play ball anymore.

And neither will the newspapers.

What makes them alike? That braggadocio, that personal statement of “I’m on your case now, and I’m not backing down.” (in my mind, I wanted something that would sound to the readers’ ear like the schwing! of a sword being drawn from a scabbard.) Some of the old hands at The State took exception to that language, and other stuff I wrote at about that time, seeing it as too “arrogant.” Yeah, well — I felt like it was time somebody got out of their comfort zone. I felt like it was going to take a lot to blast the state loose from the deathgrip of the status quo.

And I was right.

Trying to muster enthusiasm about Dems gathering just up the road

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Phil Noble found an unusual way to celebrate the fact that the Democratic National Convention will be in Charlotte next year:

“This is the best news for South Carolina Democrats since our native son Andy Jackson was elected President in 1828. With tens of thousands of Democrats, and the global media converging just a stone’s throw away from President Jackson’s birthplace, South Carolina Democrats will have their voices heard on the national and international stage.”

“The Convention will be the rallying point we need to strengthen and build our party throughout the state. It will give us our first real opportunity in a generation to launch the kind of root-and-branch reform movement that could make South Carolina a truly competitive two-party state again. This is just the first of many ‘big things’ ahead for Democrats in our state.”

I’ve just got to say, what does that have to do Andrew Jackson? Personally, I think the fewer reminders that Jackson came from here, the better, but I’m kind of an unreconstructed Federalist. And I don’t even mind a Democratic Republican now and then, if he’s qualified, like Jefferson and Madison. But Jackson? Shudder… And the suggestion that we’ve had no news better than Jackson’s election in 183 years. Well, that’s just depressing. I mean, I know it’s been a long good news drought for SC Democrats, but come on — y’all were pretty happy when Obama was elected, weren’t you? And personally, I’d count that as WAY better than Ol’ Hickory.

Anyway, in the second graf Phil got to the main business, which was to try to get SC Dems pumped about a city that’s almost in our red state hosting the convention. Nice try, there, Phil.

Me, when I heard it, my first thought was “Maybe the paper will let me go there and cover the frickin’ thing THIS time, since the travel cost would be minimal.” But then I remembered. Oh, yeah…

Maybe I’ll find an excuse to wander up that way sometime during that week. Although I gotta tell ya, it can’t possibly be as much fun as the one I went to in New York in 2004 — the last time I managed to con a publisher into paying for it. There’s nothing like closely observing SC politicos partying in unfamiliar surroundings. Charlotte… well, how much fun can you have in Charlotte, really? I mean, what’s it known for? Banking?

Then, of course, there’s the fact that with an incumbent president, there won’t be a heckuva a lot of news to cover. So, no party. No news. I don’t know. I might have to think long and hard about whether to take time away from my real job for this…

Joe’s alternative to the alternative to the GOP response

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I got bushed and went to bed last night before getting this video, which is Joe Wilson’s response to the State of the Union.

So… since some guy named Paul Ryan gave the “official” Republican response, and Michele Bachman (another nonentity to me, but I’ve vaguely aware she’s one of those fringe people the shouting heads on TV go on and on about, like Sarah Palin) delivered a sort of self-appointed alternative response as a way of playing directly to the Tea Party, that means Joe’s clip is sort of the alternative to the alternative. Or maybe, since the “official” GOP response is in itself offered as an alternative to the actual State of the Union, Joe’s is an alternative-alternative-alternative. Which sounds way more avant-garde than the way I think of Joe Wilson.

Speaking of Joe… I ran into his guy Butch Wallace this morning at breakfast and told him — sort of joshing, sort of serious — that I appreciated that Joe had behaved himself last night, adding that I suppose it was hard to do otherwise sitting with those Democratic ladies. Butch smiled politely. Then I added, quite seriously, that I appreciated that Joe had wanted to make that gesture — which others in our delegation refused to do, even though it would have taken them so little trouble. Butch said Joe wanted to work with all kinds of people, regardless of party, and I said that’s good — because the more folks you’re willing to work with, the more you’re likely to get done.

As for Joe’s message — it sure beats “You Lie!” (which, if you’ll recall, was NOT during a SOTU), although in his hurry, he sort of flubbed a couple of the lines. And the overall message is rather thin and lacking in substance. But these things always tend to be that way. There’s a formula: 1.) Due respect to the president (no name-calling); 2) A brief reference to something that was in the president’s speech, a cursory effort to give the impression that the responder actually read or heard it and thought about it before responding; 3) A rather trite and general statement of ideological difference with the president that may or may not bear relevance to the president’s points; 4) Some sort of statement of civic piety such as asking the deity to bless the troops, or America, or the taxpayers, or whatever.

So much for Joe and his message. Now to the larger issue: This nonsense of opposition-party “responses” to the State of the Union, which I have always found offensive. I thought this writer put it well: “The very idea of a rebuttal is asinine.”

Or at least, the idea of some sort of formal response with an “official” status is asinine. Of course, we’re all entitled and encouraged in this free country to share what we think of the president’s speech. But over the years, something really weird and insidious has happened, and like so many other media/political phenomena in the modern age, it has done much to solidify in the average voter’s mind the nasty notion that there is something good and right and natural about everything in our politics being couched in partisan terms.

First, just to give the broadest possible perspective, the State of the Union is a constitutional responsibility of the president of the United States — not of a party, or of an individual, but of the chief executive. It’s right there in black and white in Article II, Section 3:

He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

Note that it doesn’t say he has to do it every year, much less in January just before the Super Bowl. Nor is he even required to give a speech of any kind: Before Woodrow Wilson, presidents took care of this requirement in writing.

So, no one has to give a speech. But the president is required to make a report (including recommendations, if he judges such to be necessary and expedient, which you know he always will). It’s his job. It’s not a campaign speech (even though no politician yet born would pass up such an intro once it’s handed to him). It’s not something that he does on behalf of his execrable party. It’s something he is required to do.

In other words, the “equal time” requirement placed on purely political TV face time doesn’t apply. No member of the opposite party is in any way obliged to offer a “response,” and no broadcast outlet is obliged to run it — not by law, and not by any sense of journalistic obligation. Sure, you might cover it — you ought to cover it, and any other politically relevant response. (Just as you ought to cover the SOTU itself, if you know what’s news.) But the idea of a formal, ritualistic response is completely unnecessary.

And harmful. Because it instills in the public’s mind the notion that this is just some guy giving a political speech, rather than the president of the United States fulfilling the requirements of his job. And it inflates the ceremonial, institutional importance of parties to our system of government, putting the prerogatives of a party on the same level as the most fundamental requirements of our Constitution.

My reaction to the GOP response last night — that is to say, my reaction to the idea of a GOP response, because as usual, I didn’t watch it (when the pres was done, I ran upstairs to plug in my laptop because the battery was nearly dead and giving me warning messages) — was exactly the same as to Democratic responses to a Republican president: You want to give a free-media speech to the whole nation on this particular night, you go out and get elected president. We don’t have a president of one party and a “shadow” president as in a parliamentary system — we have one person elected to that position, and in delivering the SOTU (whether aloud or in writing), he’s fulfilling a specific responsibility that we elected HIM (and not some eager up-and-comer in the opposition party) to perform.

So share your thoughts all you want, folks. But spare me the “official” responses.

Dick Winters is gone, and I never did shake his hand…

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Dick Winters has died. “Captain Winters,” I think of him as, from the time when he commanded Easy Company of the 506th PIR,101st Airborne Division — although on D-Day, the day on which his actions should have earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, he was still a lieutenant, and by the time the company had captured Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest he was a major, and battalion commander.

Yes, the guy who was the main character in “Band of Brothers.”

He was a peaceful, modest man who, when war was thrust upon him and the rest of the world, discovered talents and personal resources that would otherwise likely have gone unsuspected. The video clips above and below, with actor Damien Lewis in the role of Winters, perfectly illustrates the qualities that Stephen Ambrose described in the book that inspired the series: Mainly, an uncanny coolness under fire, and certain, unhesitating knowledge of exactly what to do in a given situation — knowledge which he quickly and effectively communicated to his men in real time, with a minimum of fuss. The video clips show how Winters led a tiny remnant of Easy Company (of which he was only acting commander, since the CO was missing, later found to be dead) to take several well-defended, entrenched guns trained on Utah Beach — saving untold numbers of GIs — with only a couple of casualties among his own men. This was on his very first day in combat. The action is used today at West Point as an illustration of how to take a fixed position.

This guy has long been associated in my mind with the definition of the word, “hero.”

In later years, when he was interviewed in old age about the things that happened in 1944-45, you could still see the manner of man he was. His manner was that of a man you’d be confident to follow, a man you’d want to follow if you had to go to war, while at the same time being perfectly modest and soft-spoken about it. And on this link you’ll see what some of his men thought of him.

As I wrote about him last year:

Over the last few years I had occasion to visit central Pennsylvania multiple times, while my daughter was attending a ballet school up there. Almost every time I went there, I thought about going over to Hershey to try to talk to Dick Winters, the legendary commander of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. He was the leader — one of several leaders, but the one everyone remembers as the best — of the company immortalized in Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same name (the best series ever made for television).

But I never did. As much as I wanted just to meet him, to shake his hand once, I never did. And there’s a reason for that. A little while ago, I was reminded of that reason. The History Channel showed a special about D-Day, and one of the narrators was Winters, speaking on camera about 60 years after the events. He spoke in that calm, understated way he’s always had about his heroics that day — he should have received the Medal of Honor for taking out those 105mm pieces aimed at Utah Beach, but an arbitrary cap of one per division had been place on them, so he “only” received the Distinguished Service Cross.

Then, he got a little choked up about what he did that night, having been up for two days, and fighting since midnight. He got down on his knees and thanked God for getting him through that day. Then he promised that, if only he could get home again, he would find a quiet place to live, and live out the rest of his life in peace.

I figure a guy who’s done what he did — that day and during the months after, through the fighting around Bastogne and beyond into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest itself — deserved to get his wish. He should be left in peace, and not bothered by me or anyone else.

So I’ve never tried to interview him.

Well, I never did impose upon him to get that handshake, even though I’ve been to his general neighborhood again since I wrote that. And that causes me now a mixture of satisfaction and regret.

Is celebrating secession offensive? Yeah. Duh. And so much more than that…

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Today I retweeted something that I got from Chris Haire, who got it from @skirtCharleston:

someone shouted “you lie” at mayor riley when he said secession was caused by a defense of slavery at sesquicentennial event this am.

Did that actually happen? Apparently so:

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley was interrupted by an audience member who yelled out, “You’re a liar!” as Riley talked about the direct relationship between slavery and secession during the unveiling of a historical marker Monday.

About 100 people crowded along a Meeting Street sidewalk at the site of the former Institute Hall — where South Carolinians signed the Ordinance of Secession exactly 150 years before.

“That the cause of this disastrous secession was an expressed need to protect the inhumane and immoral institution of slavery is undeniable,” Riley said, prompting the outburst. “The statement of causes mentions slavery 31 times.”…

Where else in the world, I ask you, would such a simple, mild and OBVIOUS statement (few historical documents make fewer bones about motives than the document Mayor Joe alludes to) elicit such a response? Wherever it is, I don’t want to go there. We’ve got our hands full dealing with our homegrown madness.

Earlier, I got this come-on to an online survey:

POLL – Celebrating Secession: Do you find it offensive to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the signing of  the…http://bit.ly/dNLi1h

Sigh. OK, I’ll answer the question which doesn’t seem worth asking: Yes. Duh. The operative word being “celebrate.”

As for the word “offensive,” well, that seems rather inadequate. I suppose in our PC times, it’s the highest opprobrium that most folks in the MSM seem capable of coming up with. “Appalling” would work. “Insupportable” would, too. “Unconscionable” would be another. Then there’s always “embarrassing.”

My point is not that someone somewhere — say, to oversimplify, the descendants of slaves — would be “offended.” That’s too easily dismissed by too many. (As the surly whites who resent blacks’ resentment over slavery would point out, everybody’s offended by something. They would say this as though such moral equivalence were valid, as though black folks’ being touchy about celebrations of secession were like my being offended by Reality TV.) My point is that the very notion that anyone would even conceive of celebrating — rather than “commemorating,” or “marking,” or “mourning,” or “ritualistically regretting” — the very worst moment in South Carolina history, is a slap in the face to anyone who hopes in general for the human species (one would hope it could make some progress) or specifically for South Carolina.

It’s awful enough that this one act stands as the single indisputably biggest impact that South Carolina has ever had on U.S., or world, history. But what does one say about a people, a population, that — 150 years after this Greatest Error of All Time, which led directly to our bloodiest war and to a century and a half of South Carolina trailing the rest of the world economically — they would think it cute, or fun, or a lark, or what have you, to mark the episode by dressing up and dancing the Virginia Reel?

I mean, seriously, what is WRONG with such a people, such an organism, that would celebrate something so harmful to itself, much less to others?

Lonnie Randolph of the NAACP calls it “nothing more than a celebration of slavery.” Well, yeah. Duh again. But that pretty much goes without saying. The point I’d like to add to the obvious is that it is also a celebration of stupidity, of dysfunction, of never, ever learning.

In fact, what we’ve done, from the time of Wade Hampton to the time of Glenn McConnell, is devolve. We’ve slipped backwards. The guys who signed the Ordinance of Secession were acting in their rational self-interest, something even the merchants of the North probably understood. Be morally appalled at that if you’re so inclined (and most people living in the West in this century would be), but it made some kind of sense. But for anyone today to look back on that act and celebrate it, seek to identify with it, get jollies from dressing up and in any way trying to re-enact that occurrence, makes NO sense of any kind, beyond a sort of self-destructive perversity.

And don’t give me that about the act of secession being an assertion of freedom-loving SC whites throwing off the oppressive gummint yoke, because it just proves my point. That attitude — that “Goldang it, but ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live MAH LAHF” or make me pay taxes or whatever — is probably the single pathological manifestation most responsible for the fact that we have been unable to get it together in this state and climb out from under the shadow of the conflict that we insisted upon precipitating. The far more refined forms of this — Sanfordism, and other ways of asserting that we do NOT need to work together as a society to solve common problems, because we are free individuals who don’t need each other — have done just as much to hold us back as the old racist creeds of Tillman and the like.

It is, indeed, a pathology. And parties that “celebrate” secession are a manifestation of it.

John Parish, dean of Tennessee journalism

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That’s John in the foreground, preparing to take a picture at The Jackson Sun reunion of 2005.

Today, my friend Kevin Dietrich brought this obit to my attention:

Mr. John M. Parish, age 87, retired newsman and former press secretary to Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, died December 10, 2010….

I had not read it, but I must have received a telepathic message of some sort. Because one day this past week, for no reason, I thought of this unfinished blog post from June 28, 2007. I had started writing it after reading that David Broder piece that it mentions at the start. Then after typing away for awhile, I got sidetracked and never finished it.

But for some reason the other day, I got to thinking about John Parish. And I thought, one of these days I’ll finish it. I had no idea as I thought that that “the Bear” was already gone.

Here’s my belated remembrance of John Parish. Tennessee journalism is unlikely to see his like again…

David Broder’s column on today’s op-ed page begins with this thought:

Years ago, Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, told me of a lesson he had learned as a young man on the White House staff: It is always useful for the president to have at least one aide who has had a successful career already, who does not need the job, and therefore can offer candid advice. When he was governor of Tennessee, Alexander made sure he had such a man on his staff.

That brought back the memories, even more than seeing fellow Memphis State grad Fred Thompson yesterday.

The man on Gov. Lamar Alexander’s staff who best fits that description is John “The Bear” Parish, who became the new governor’s press secretary in January 1979, after having long established himself as the Dean of Tennessee political journalism. It was a very unusual appointment, since new governors seldom turn to such people. (Although Mark Sanford did in picking Fred Carter as his chief of staff. Mr. Carter left the office early in the Sanford administration to return to his job as president of Francis Marion University in Florence. Just as well, since as near as I could tell the governor wouldn’t listen to him anyway.)

Unlike Lee Bandy, John did not work for the state’s largest newspaper. He wrote for The Jackson Sun. The photograph above is from a 2005 reunion of folks who worked at that paper when I was there, from 1975-85. John is stepping forward to take a picture on his own camera. (That’s me in the striped shirt just over his shoulder. To my left is Richard Crowson, now editorial cartoonist with The Wichita Eagle. [But, since I wrote this, laid off like me.] On the other side of Richard is Mark Humphrey, the photographer who took the shot of me at the bottom of this post back when we were covering the Iowa Caucuses in 1980, and who is now with The Associated Press in Nashville. To my right is Bob Lewis, the former center for the Ole Miss football team who is now with the AP in Richmond. Of course, I could tell a story about each person in the picture, but what do you care, right? Well, it’s my blog, so I’ll wax nostalgic if I choose.)

John was a legend, a uniquely gifted, hard-working journalist who made a big impression on me at an early point in my own career. Frankly, I have never seen his like since. A few points from the rich mine of Parish lore:

  • He got his nickname, “The Bear,” from his days as The Sun‘s city editor, which predates me by a year or two. Office scuttlebutt was that John had been a bit too gruff to all the newbies hired right out of the University of Missouri’s excellent journalism program shortly after the Des Moines Register Co. bought the paper in the early ’70s. By the time I was there, he had definitely found his niche as the associate editor at the newspaper, and the paper was making the most of his exhaustive knowledge of state politics.
  • He wrote four or five news stories in the course of a typical day, plus — and this is the amazing thing — a daily political column on the editorial page.
  • Despite that volume of copy, he never made mistakes. I’m not talking about not having to run a correction in the paper. His copy was the cleanest I’ve ever seen. And in those days, nobody had clean copy. We’re talking IBM Selectric typewriters, not word processors. Not one strikeout or correction. After the first couple of times I read (I had joined the paper as a copy editor) raw copy from John, I asked someone whether he wrote rough drafts first. No. And there was no way he could have, producing a volume like that.
  • He couldn’t type, at least not in the way it’s taught at school. He produced all of that copy hunting and pecking, at blinding speed. It sounded like a machine gun coming from his office (John was the only person in the newsroom who had an office other than the executive editor and managing editor).
  • Sen. Thompson made a passing reference Wednesday to the case that launched his screen career — he represented a whistle-blower who helped bring down the fabulously corrupt Gov. Ray Blanton. But before, during and after that incident, the bane of the Blanton administration was John Parish. Day after day, outrage after outrage, John documented the governor’s gross abuse of power.
  • John’s wife worked for a state agency. The governor went after her to get even with John. He didn’t fire her; he transferred her job to the other end of the state. Her new commute would have been a little less than Tennessee’s full 450-mile length, but not by all that much. So she had to resign. But that didn’t stop John. Nothing stopped John.
  • In 1978, I was working in The Sun‘s Gibson County Bureau — quite a responsibility for a kid three years out of school. I covered everything that happened in several counties, including the one where The Sun had its second-highest circulation, by myself. (Well, actually, I had a secretary, which was my first taste of management.) But what I really wanted to do was cover state politics. That year I got my first chance to do that. Because of John and the high standard he set, the paper — small as it was — covered politics in a big way. The last month of the general election, we had a reporter full-time with each of the gubernatorial (and if I’m remembering correctly, U.S. senatorial) candidates. John no doubt would have preferred to be in four places at once, but since he couldn’t, that meant a big opportunity for me and a couple of other junior people. “Full-time” coverage, by the way, means traveling with them on the plane, in the car, eating meals with them — a kind of up-close-and-personal man-to-man coverage that is unimaginable today (papers don’t spend the money, and candidates don’t let the press that close). 20 hour days, because after the candidates were done, we had to write. Calling in stories and updates to stories from the road (in those days before laptops, we dictated). I spent a week each with Alexander and Jake Butcher, and I learned a great deal. The height of the experience came when John praised one of the stories I wrote from that time (and it WAS a good one).
  • Another point that year, I finagled the chance to help John cover the Democratic Mid-Term National Convention in Memphis. A conversation we had during that has stuck with me. I mentioned that some of our colleagues were in Nashville that weekend to pick up their awards at the annual state press association convention. I may have expressed my disappointment that I couldn’t be there (although I definitely preferred being at the Memphis event, working). John harrumphed. I asked what was wrong. He said he had no use for such awards, or the approval of other journalists. He only cared about the approval of the readers, and the best award they could give him was to buy the paper and read what he wrote with interest. It amuses me now to think how shocked I was at the time at this attitude. Readers? What did readers know? They weren’t professional journalists! They didn’t know what made a story good! (Mind you, I was not long out of journalism school, which fosters such silly, insular notions.) This was the first time I ever distrusted John’s judgment. But of course, he was completely and absolutely right.
  • Of course, Lamar Alexander won that gubernatorial election we had been covering. At Christmastime of that year, I brought my family to South Carolina for the holidays. When I got back, I got a call from my editor, who told me the stunning news — John Parish was leaving journalism to be Alexander’s press secretary. It was a really unusual move for someone of his advanced skill, experience and stature. I don’t remember ever hearing John explaining in my hearing why he made this move. But I guess he wanted to make a difference, and actually help run government instead of just writing about it. Whatever the reason, I immediately spoke up — I wanted the job covering Nashville for the paper. My editor said, “I sort of thought you would.” So I took my shot, went through the interviews. But… I didn’t get it. It went to Jeff Wilson instead (who was about the only person at the paper who maybe wanted it more than I did). Fortunately, my stock was high enough with our executive editor that he did an extraordinary thing, rather than lose me: He created a special position for me. He brought me in from the bureau and basically told me to go out and write about whatever I wanted to. I was my own assigning editor, and went covered every special assignment that interested me, from Tennessee to the Iowa Caucuses at the end of 1979. That was during the week. On Saturdays I became the editor in charge of the paper. This led to my giving up reporting for good and becoming the paper’s news editor (what most papers would call a metro editor, the editor supervising all the news reporters) the following year.

That editor gig worked out well, there and at two other papers, until The State decided it didn’t need me any more last year. In the last years, especially after Lee Bandy retired, I got to thinking that I was finally getting there, I was finally on the verge of becoming that gray eminence that would make me to SC politics what John Parish was to Tennessee’s. But that was wishful thinking. I never came close to being John Parish. No one could.

Another shot from the reunion. John, at right, is chatting with Kevin Barnard of The Tampa Tribune and Mark Humphrey. Mary Reed and Joel Wood are in the background.

So why NOT repeal the 17th Amendment?

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So this morning Stan Dubinsky brought my attention to this piece by Christopher Hitchens, which in turn led me to this piece by Ross Douthat, in which he is defending the Tea Party from the charge of being a reincarnation of the John Birch Society thusly:

These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never found a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits. Which is why, for now at least, it’s winning over independents in a way that movements like the Birchers rarely did…

I’m with Hitchens in that I grow weary of normal conservatives making excuses for the Tea Party. But that’s not why I bring this up. I bring it up to ask, why would repealing the 17th Amendment be considered a “fringe concern”? I actually consider it one of the more defensible TP positions. (I suspect that the TPers hold this position for reasons different from my own, but why be overcritical of a gift horse?)

The Framers created the House and Senate to be very different institutions, on a fundamental level. Actually, on a number of fundamental levels.

First, they wanted the constituencies to be different. That’s an essential element in making checks and balances work. The president is elected by the electoral college, which in turn is more or less selected by popular vote (although not originally, but hey, one fight at a time), and can only serve four years at a time (let’s also set aside the newfangled term limit). Judges are chosen by the president, with advice and consent of the Senate. The House of Representatives is the People’s House, and consists of directly, popularly elected delegates who have to run for election every five minutes (or two years, which amounts to the same thing), and are therefore particularly attuned to popular whims, ripples and twitches, in real time. Senators, by contrast, are supposed to be somewhat above that fray, and are supposed to represent STATES, not groups of individual voters.

Also, in connection with the idea that senators represent states rather than aggregations of individuals, each state has two, and only two. The idea being that we have the House for the sake of more populous states, and the senate to even things out a bit for the smallest states. At least, thank goodness, in all the “reforms” since the late 18th century, we haven’t done to the U.S. Senate what we’ve done here in South Carolina — utterly destroying the very notion of the senate as a thing apart by imposing single-member districts on it, just as we did to the House.

Nevertheless, what we have done is turn the U.S. Senate into another House, only with longer terms. Which sort of defeats the purpose of a bicameral legislature.

Yeah, I know the reasons why we made the change, and they will be shouted at me in response to this — but they are all arguments more suitable to a democracy than a republic. And the latter is what our founders rightly intended.

And… I also understand by “serious” conservatives would regard this as a “fringe concern,” so perhaps I was being a bit disingenuous above. It’s … esoteric. And for people who have lived their whole lives with the present state of affairs, there seems to be something actually unAmerican about letting legislatures choose senators. And I’m sure that I’ll hear emotional arguments that unfairly conflate the original arrangement with slavery. But what it actually was was an elegant part of a delicate balance, and that balance has been lost, as every member of both of the political branches runs about with his wet finger in the air.

Anyway, I raise the question in case someone has an argument, pro or con, that I haven’t heard yet. And also because, you know, I can’t leave well enough alone…

Green Zone: good flick, if you take it for what it is

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Just in case I haven’t provoked my anti-war friends on the blog enough lately…

I saw”Green Zone” over the weekend, and it was a corking good thriller. Just as long as you don’t take the premise seriously.

No, wait — I need to refine that: As long as you don’t take too seriously the one spectacular conceit that does the most to drive the action, which is this… There’s this Iraqi general who is sort of the movie’s Great White Whale, only there’s no one Ahab — EVERY character is frantically pursuing him, with each character having a different motive for doing so. Matt Damon’s character wants him because he thinks he knows where the WMD are, and it’s his (Damon’s) job to find them  (he plays a chief warrant officer named Miller). An idealistic one-legged Iraqi (his other leg is in Iran) wants to find him because of what the general and his ilk have done to his country. A CIA officer wants to find him because he believes the Army is the key to preventing the insurgency. A Wall Street Journal reporter wants to find him because he is the mysterious source Magellan that a Pentagon official has told her has provided intel on where the WMD are — reports that she has passed on uncritically in the paper. The Pentagon official, played by Greg Kinnear, want to find him and kill him before he tells everybody the truth.

What truth? This “truth” (SPOILER ALERT!): We eventually learn that before the war, Poundstone (Kinnear’s character) had secretly met the general in Jordan, where the general told him there WERE no WMD. And Poundstone returned to Washington and told everyone that the general had told him the exact opposite, even telling him where to find the weapons. So we invade Iraq, and Miller’s unit risks their lives going to these supposed WMD sites and coming up empty.

This makes Poundstone the Great White Whale of all those antiwar folks who believe “Bush lied” — the perfect representation of the supposed great misrepresentation. He, Poundstone, KNEW the truth and deliberately lied. No mere wishful thinking. No making a mistake (the mistake made by pretty much the whole world — the debate about the invasion wasn’t over whether the WMD existed, but about the best way to get them out of Saddam’s hands). A big, fat, montrous lie.

Which, of course, didn’t happen. If something like that had happened, someone of the millions of people who would love to find out such a thing and tell the world — from the antiwar Democrats who now control our government and have access to all its secrets, to Julian Assange, to the director of this movie — would have let us know by now.

So…  the bad news is that people will see Green Zone and think that such a thing happened. And that’s bad even if you are deeply opposed to the war and want to avoid such conflicts in the future, because it keeps you from confronting whatever REALLY happened and realistically assessing how to keep it from happening again. Politically attractive fantasies are just dangerous all around — as the antiwar folks would no doubt say about the delusion that there were WMD.

The good news, though, is that it’s a great action flick. And the other questions the movie raises — including some serious ones that deserve answers — are intelligently, provocatively and even realistically portrayed. Where the movie falls down is wherever it touches upon the Poundstone character. And I mean this in an artistic, esthetic sense as well as political: Kinnear’s character is cartoonish, the portayal more suited to low farce than to serious drama. When he’s on screen, the quality drops. NO ONE would believe this guy; if he told you your mother loved you, you’d say “What’s his angle?” He’s just ridiculous. He might as well be wearing a black cape, stovepipe hat and Snidely Whiplash mustache.

Everybody else is credible; everybody else feels real. While comparisons to the Bourne movies are inevitable (with Damon and the director of the second and third films in that trilogy on board), this film is far more believable, in that there are no superheroes like Bourne in it. (The flaw that it shares with those films is the aforementioned fantasy plotline about a vicious government conspiracy — a great plot device, as long as you don’t start thinking stuff like that really happens.) In fact, the closest thing to Jason Bourne is the Special Forces guy who promptly beats the stuffing out of Damon’s character when he fails to give him what he’s after. And that violence is realistic, not balletic.

Other things that are good, and deserve more explication, are such things as the issue of whether we should have worked with the Iraqi army rather than banishing it into insurgency. If the director wanted a political point, that would have been an excellent one to stick with.

Perhaps the most provocative questions raised surround the frantically earnest one-legged Iraqi, “Freddy.” He tries to approach harried soldiers to give them critical information, and gets knocked around for his trouble. He is forced into suicidally dangerous (for a guy who has to live there) situations in order to help the Americans. In the end, (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT) he raises the film’s most provocative question when he takes matters into his own hands with deadly force. Damon’s character, persuaded by the CIA that the general must be found so we can work with him to prevent the insurgency (I REALLY MEAN IT — MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!), manages to get to him before the Special Forces guys who have been sent to kill him. You think Damon has won the day. Then out of nowhere comes Freddy with a pistol and blows the general away. Freddy then says to Damon — and I don’t have it in front of me, so this might not be verbatim — “YOU don’t get to decide what happens here.”

If you want a good antiwar message, one you can chew over productively, that would be it. But the whole Poundstone thing is offensively ridiculous. You want to talk about a Big Lie, suggesting that anything that clearly duplicitous happened qualifies.

That’s particularly insidious since we are told this story is based in nonfiction. Oh, and if you don’t want to believe me, believe Richard “Monty” Gonzales, upon whom Damon’s character Miller was based, and who acted as technical adviser on the film:

“Green Zone” contains several messages, an unavoidable consequence of making a film of this genre. Critical blunders preceding the invasion, chiefly the bad intelligence that led us to war, made certain that no quick victory would be achieved and certainly undermined U.S. credibility around the world. Later, the U.S. directed a de-Bathification policy which disenfranchised a massive section of the population and helped fuel an insurgency. Consequently, any hope of victory in Iraq was made vastly more complicated and costly — as the last 7 years have proven. I believe this is true.
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However, “Green Zone” also suggests that we were lied into the war in Iraq; a subtext that is unfortunately being twisted by some in order to give credence to a bumper sticker I deplore, the mantra which has become the left’s version of the war — which is well on its way to becoming the Iraq conflict’s official history — “They lied; people died.” As intriguing as that idea may be, it’s simply not true.

“Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail on his hat…”

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A reader this week reminded me of something that I may have known, but had forgotten — that long before he was the funniest deadpan comic actor in America, Leslie Nielsen was … “The Swamp Fox” on TV. She wrote:

I occasionally post on your blog as Abba.  Would you consider posting this clip from YouTube showing Leslie Nielsen, who died this week, as South Carolina’s Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in Disney’s series from the early 1960s – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vvQJ7ZDg1Y.  Here’s a longer version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGN1pDzYAY&feature=related.  Leslie Nielsen never looked so good!  This clip has the catchy theme song that I remember so well from my childhood.  We used to play the Swamp Fox on the playground at school, and many of the boys in my class had tri-cornered hats with fox tails attached.  Hear the song once, and you’ll be humming it all day long!  A fitting tribute to Leslie Nielsen from our corner of the world, I think.

I loved that show, which ran from October 23, 1959 (right after my 6th birthday) to January 15, 1961 — hardly more than a year.

Like the far, far more successful “Davy Crockett” series and generally forgotten “Gray Ghost,” these shows inspired me and other very young kids to run out and play at being actual figures from history. (Anyone remember that goofy, overly elaborate way Col. Mosby saluted? I thought it was cool, and used to go around imitating it. Wouldn’t you like to see video of that?)

Actually, to take that a bit farther… to this day, whenever I hear the words “Tory” and “Patriot,” I think of first hearing them used on “The Swamp Fox.” So while my understanding of the term was to grow and expand later, I actually had a minimal working knowledge of what a “Tory” was at the age of 6. If I ran into a 6-year-old who used a term like that today, I’d be shocked. But it was common currency among fans of “The Swamp Fox.”

I can also remember a conversation I had with my uncle about “The Gray Ghost.” I was confused about the whole blue-vs.-gray thing (especially since I was watching it in black-and-white), and I asked him during one show, “Are those the good guys or the bad guys?” My uncle, who was only a kid himself (six years older than I) could have given me a simplistic answer, but instead, he said, “Well, they’re both Americans…” and went on to suggest that a case could be made for both being good guys. That sort of rocked my world. There was no such ambiguity on the Westerns I watched. This was my introduction to the concept that in war, in politics, in life, things can be complicated, that there are many shades of gray. Perhaps the track that set mind on has something to do with why I don’t buy into the whole Democrat-vs.-Republican, left-vs.-right dichotomy that drives our politics. After all, they’re all Americans. And in the wider world, they’re all humans. Even the Nazis. (Of course, this doesn’t keep me from understanding that when humans’ actions go beyond the pale — as with Nazis, or terrorists — they must be opposed, with force if necessary.)

Also, while at first I didn’t think I remembered the “Swamp Fox” theme song, as I listened to it repeated over and over on that clip above, I had a dim memory of being struck by the odd syntax of that second line, “no one knows where the Swamp Fox at” — I didn’t know WHY it sounded odd (I was just learning to read, and hadn’t gotten to grammar yet), it just did.

In other words, these shows — which presented very simplistic, often inaccurate glimpses of history — not only helped feed a lifelong interest in history, but helped foster the ability to think.

So… TV doesn’t actually have to be junk, although it’s often hard to remember that these days.

What IF China had a WikiLeaks?

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Earlier this week, Tom Friedman had a column in which he “couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker…?”

It was a good column as far as it went, because it highlighted the way self-destructive American partisan gridlock prevents us as a nation from facing the future wisely and pragmatically — unlike the Chinese. So it was that he imagined a leaked Chinese diplomatic message that said in part:

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them….

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up…

Very good points — the kinds of smart points that you expect Tom Friedman to make, which is why he’s one of my favorite columnists. But I was still disappointed on a gut level, because I had expected the column to answer the rhetorical question with an even blunter, simpler, more obvious truth.

As it happened, WSJ columnist Daniel Henninger today provided the straightforward three-word answer that Friedman did not (the boldfacing is mine):

China’s security solution is to suppress the flow of information, let creativity be damned, and steal from us. (The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman yesterday asked: “What if China had a WikiLeaker?” The three-word answer: They’d execute him.)

Henninger is not usually one of my faves, but this was a pretty decent column about how tough it is, bordering on futility, to prevent such leaks in the Internet age.

And my disappointment aside, Mr. Friedman’s column was excellent as well, because it, too, said things that need to be said over and over.

But it occurred to me that, whether you’re concerned that our nation isn’t pursuing the right priorities for our future competitiveness, or just outraged that the U.S. government hasn’t taken serious action to find, apprehend and lock up that sleazebag Julian Assange for the rest of his life and then some, the roots of the problem are the same.

I’ll put it this simply: The lack of national consensus. Or another way, a perverse refusal to acknowledge that we’re all in this together, and act accordingly.

I try to imagine someone like Julian Assange wandering free anywhere in the world controlled by allies of this country back, say, in the 1940s. And I can’t. There would have been such a powerful sense of a shared national interest, and instantaneous consensus that someone leaking classified military data and confidential diplomatic communications was the enemy of this country that effective action would have been taken to stop him.

Today, a creep like Assange exploits the HUGE division in our country over our role in the world. (We can’t even decide whether we’re fighting one or two wars.) Now before my antiwar friends loudly protest that I’m blaming them for not getting with the program, note that I am NOT. I’m not blaming either doves or hawks. It’s the GAP between us itself that I blame. That’s the No Man’s Land in which Assange walks with impunity. Only after diplomatic communications were compromised this week did we achieve anything like a consensus of outrage between left and right, and thus far even that is too tepid to lead to effective action. (Oh, and by the way, I’m not suggesting we be as ruthless as the Chinese. But somewhere between the harshness of that system and the utterly helpless fecklessness of ours today lies a rational medium, an effective course of action for liberal democracies that hope to survive.)

As for Mr. Friedman’s concerns… go back to that same time — the war years, and just after — and look at the way we formed consensus to do profoundly bold and intelligent things to provide for a better future for our own country and the rest of the world that we suddenly dominated: the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, the interstate highway system, the policies that boosted homeownership, and on and on.

Today, we find it impossible to come up with a coherent, rational energy policy or keep our infrastructure up to date or deal with the deficit or accomplish anything else requiring bold action because ANY bold action envisioned by the right or the left will be fought, vilified, trashed and frustrated to the utmost of the opposition’s ability (and they’ll do so not because of any merit or lack of merit in the idea, but because the other side came up with it). And again, I’m not blaming either the right or the left, but the GAP, and the insane tit-for-tat game that BOTH sides think is more important than the real needs of the nation.

So whatever you think about the implications of a hypothetical Chinese WikiLeaker, the problem is the same.

It’s a problem that has so integrated itself into our public life that it’s hard even to think of a way out. It’s like a tumor with tentacles slithering to wrap themselves around every fold of the victim’s brain — very tough to remove. I don’t really know how to get to where we need to be. Except, of course, to vote UnParty (if ever given the chance).

Why can’t I sell my truly AWESOME ad ideas?

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This is me (or rather, a reasonable facsimile) making a pitch to an unappreciative client.

You know, I’ve been trying hard to learn to be an ad man. I watch the TV show religiously. I try to dress sharp (even if my sartorial style is a bit more Bert Cooper than Don Draper). I don’t get home until late because I stop at any gathering where free highballs are served. I’ve thought of changing my name to Dick Whitman.

So why is it I have so much trouble pitching my truly awesome ad ideas? Here are some of my recent rejects:

I’m particularly proud of the sensitive way I addressed a delicate public health problem in that last one…

OK, seriously, folks — Kathryn Fenner shared with me this post — “TOP 48 ADS THAT WOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TODAY” — knowing I’d be interested. Some of the examples were pretty cringe-inducing, such as this one. Others… well, others weren’t bad at all. In fact, I don’t think this one below should have been on the list at all: I don’t know about you, but my most memorable Christmas present ever was the Daisy 1894-model air rifle, which I found tucked into my new sleeping bag spread out in front of the tree…

McCain has a point comparing Palin, Reagan

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Since I don’t watch those Sunday talk shows, I’m always reading the reactions, and reactions to reactions, on Monday (which is quite soon enough to suit me). Today I’m reading what Chris Cillizza has to say about what John McCain said on Sunday:

The Arizona Republican, responding to a question from CNN’s Candy Crowley about Palin being “divisive,” noted that Ronald Reagan was often seen as divisive as well.

It wasn’t a direct comparison to Reagan (McCain never said Palin is similar to Reagan), but it was a comparison nonetheless. And the reaction was swift, as it often is when it comes to Palin.

So the big question follows: Is it a valid comparison? The answer: In many ways, yes.

The fact is that Reagan has benefited tremendously from the years since his presidency, and people look back on him in a much favorable light than they did during his presidency.

According to Gallup polling data, Reagan’s average approval rating during his presidency was 53 percent — lower than John F. Kennedy,Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush andBill Clinton.

As for the operative word here — “divisiveness” — Reagan had a claim to it. Many more Republicans approved of him than Democrats, and even at his peak, just 68 percent of Americans approved of him, a number lower than everyone but Richard Nixon over the last 65 years.

The reason Reagan couldn’t get higher than that was because there was a segment of the population, about one-third, that was dead-set against him. Reagan is often listed in polls of people’s favorite presidents, but because of that one-third, he’s also among the leaders for people’s least favorite presidents. His detractors often feel just as strongly as his supporters about Reagan’s legacy.

Recent polling shows Palin is on par with all of that…

Hey, it works for me. I, for the record, was among that one-third. And probably one of the more adamant members of that segment. My attitude has softened somewhat over the years, but that may be due to the 1984-style revisionism to which I’ve been subjected in media for more than two decades. You know, Ronald Reagan was a great president; he was always a great president — and we have always been at war with Eastasia. (Or would a better analogy be the sleep-teaching in Brave New World? Discuss.)

To the extent that I can clearly recall the past, I remember seeing Reagan — when he emerged on the national scene in 1976, then again in 1980 — as a destructive, negative, insurgent, dumbing-down force in the GOP. So yeah, a comparison to Sarah Palin is valid on those grounds.

Of course, after all these years of hearing what a great job he did, it seems a disservice to him to compare him to Mrs. Palin. One thing’s for sure, though — as a thoroughly professional actor, Reagan played the role of president with far greater dignity than I can imagine the ex-governor of Alaska managing to project.

November 22nd in Dallas, 47 years on

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Elections oracle Larry Sabato Tweeted this morning:

Eerie to be in Dallas on a November 22. Weather (early rain, clearing,sunny 70s) similar to 47 yrs ago. No formal commemoration.

So consider this your opportunity to share your memories of the day. And if you’re too young to have memories of day, well then who cares what you think? (Aw, now don’t go crying to your mommies about how mean the old man was to you…)

My favorite “Where were you?” story was the experience of Richard Nixon, which I read about once in a book about the 60s compiled by Rolling Stone. On this day 47 years ago, he was being driven through a residential neighborhood in an unfamiliar city, when suddenly a woman ran out of her house and looked around her desperately. She had just heard the news. Nixon, who had NOT heard the news, told his driver to stop. He got out of the car and walked toward the woman, asking whether he could be of any assistance.

The woman took one look at him, and then she really freaked out.

My own experience was atypical. I was out of the country, my Dad being stationed in Ecuador on U.S. Navy business.

We didn’t learn about it until later in the day. I was in the 5th grade at the Colegio Americano, which was way the other side of town. My bus ride home on Don Enrique (buses had names, and personalities) took about an hour. I was one of the last ones on the route. My best buddy Tony Wessler was dropped off six blocks before I was.

When I got home, I rang the doorbell at the security door at the foot of the stairs (we lived in the upstairs of a large duplex). My mom hit the buzzer, and as I started up the stairs I was startled to see Tony standing at the head of the stairs with Mom. What’s up? I asked. “The president’s been shot!” I kept walking up, and asked, “The president of what?” Mind you, I had already lived through one coup in Ecuador that year. So maybe there had been another, more violent, overthrow in a neighboring country.

“The president of the United States,” came the answer. So that was what had caused Tony to outrun the bus…

That hit hard. It was particularly strange to be in another country, as the dependent of a representative of the United States, and know that back home our president had just been killed, and we didn’t know why or by whom or what might happen next. (And mind you, since I was personally familiar with the potential instability of governments in a way that few Americans were, the feeling was intensified. “Seven Days in May” didn’t seem like such wild fiction to me.) It felt like being abandoned to fend for oneself. Wild thoughts went through my head. I thought of the .38-cal. revolver that my Dad kept on a shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet, which had been issued to him just in case. (I don’t think my Dad knew I knew it was there, but you can’t hide anything from kids.)

Then there was Kennedy himself, who personified the youthful strength, the can-do attitude, of my home country. If he could die, just like that… I had not been a big Kennedy supporter initially. For reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, I had been for Nixon in 1960, at the age of 7. But after that I had been fully co-opted into the whole P.T. 109/Camelot mystique, and was proud that JFK had various initiatives going on (to counter Castro, but I didn’t know that) to help Latin America, such as Alliance for Progress.

But not just expatriate Americans were shaken. I witnessed a generous mourning from Ecuadoreans, who identified with this Catholic president as they had no other. Our school yearbook for that year would have a dedicated page with the headline, “Kennedy Ha Muerto,” and a picture of the president and his bride and kids outside a church before or after Mass — Jackie wearing the obligatory veil on her head.

That was reassuring.

Anyway, that was my experience 47 years ago today.

“On Armistice Day, the philharmonic will play…”

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… but I won’t have a lot to say, even though I should.

I’ve always been terrible about these annual observances. I feel like I shouldn’t say anything unless I have something really new, really interesting, to say.

And I don’t have anything really impressive to say about Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, the 11th day of the 11th month, etc.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. Bud would accuse me (and frequently does) of making a sort of fetish of veteran worship. I am profoundly bowled over by the sacrifices of anyone who has served in combat for this country. Or served at all, even in rear areas. Interrupting one’s life to don the uniform and go where you are sent, perhaps for years on end, is a profound thing to do. Something we could use a lot more of. This is something that I think about, and read about, a LOT, and sometimes write about.

Unfortunately, except for the very few, too few, who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan — or Kuwait or Somalia or Bosnia or wherever — Veterans Day is about honoring previous generations. I mean, it’s great that we honor them, but it’s a shame that we associate “veteran” with old age as much as we do. The draft ended when I turned 19, the year I would have been called if I had been, and far too few people my age and younger have the experience of uniformed service. And that’s a loss — to our politics, to our civic life, to anything that depends upon a large portion of our society having the experience of having contributed to something larger than themselves. So our society, and our politics, have gotten meaner, pettier, more inward.

But this isn’t the day for that kind of talk. Earlier today, my son-in-law called to ask whether I was at the parade. I wasn’t. I was at work, where I’m trying to get my head above water on some ADCO projects now that the election is over. Which is why I haven’t posted much the last few days. And why I haven’t said anything, until now, about Veterans Day. Or the Marine Corps birthday yesterday.

Hang down your head, candidate

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A piece I read in the WSJ this morning reminded me of a picture I shot with my phone while at a stoplight in Birmingham Friday. The story was about candidates with unusual names, such as Young Boozer, Krystal Ball and Isaac Hayes:

It might come as no surprise in these tumultuous times that a Young Boozer is running for Alabama state treasurer.

Young Boozer introduces himself on the stump as, “Young Boozer and yes, that’s my real name.” He says each audience is made up of three parts. The first wonders, “Is that the guy’s real name?” The second says, “‘What’s his father’s name, Old Boozer?”‘ The rest already know him.

Mr. Boozer, 61 years old, is the third consecutive Young Boozer in his family. He coined the motto, “funny name, serious leadership,” after realizing on the campaign trail the political advantage the elder Young Boozers had passed along. Previously, the Boozers were associated mostly with sports. Mr. Boozer’s father, Young Boozer, Jr., was a football star at the University of Alabama, where he faced off in the Rose Bowl against a Stanford player named Tom Collins.

“I’ve always been a Boozer,” jokes the candidate. The family name is so unusual that “once you hear it, you never forget it,” he says. Still, “I didn’t think it was funny when I was growing up because my dad was so well known.”…

I’m sorry if you can’t make out the blurry image above, but it urges people to vote for Tom Dooley for Alabama state board of education. (So yes, in Alabama, voters have the opportunity to vote for both a famous name from an iconic folk song, and Young Boozer.)

This sparked a conversation between my wife and me — one of those kinds of conversations that are rare in this era of Google. I couldn’t consult the Blackberry while driving, and so we tried to remember… we both knew about the folk song, and to the great regret of the other occupants of the car, I was able to sing four lines of it, repeatedly, before I got stuck:

Hang down your head, Tom Doo-ley.

Hang down your head and cry.

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.

Poor boy, you’re gonna die…

Beyond that, we didn’t know much. I was thinking the song was about a man condemned some notorious, long-forgotten murder. My wife said yes, but the defendant was a doctor. I said I didn’t know about that, but I did know… and launched into my four lines again.

Well, now that Wikipedia is at hand, I can report that:

  • The song was about the 1866 murder in North Carolina of a woman named Laura Foster.
  • Tom Dula was hanged for the murder in 1868, after two trials.
  • Dula was pronounced “Dooley” in Appalachian dialect, as a result of the same linguistic quirk that led to the current pronunciation and spelling of Grand Ole Opry.
  • Several versions of the song, first sung shortly after Dula’s execution, were recorded in the first half of the 20th century. By far the most famous was by The Kingston Trio in 1958, which was a huge crossover hit and is widely credited with launching the folk boom of the early 60s.
  • At the time that hit recording came out, a Dr. Tom Dooley (Thomas Anthony Dooley III) was famous as an international humanitarian. (Since he was an American Catholic, I’m guessing my wife heard a lot about him from the nuns at school.)
  • It’s not “gonna die,” but “bound to die.”

Oh, finally — turns out the Tom Dooley running for school board is also “Dr. Tom Dooley,” according to his Web site.

And that’s all I know about Tom Dooley.

Aren’t you glad you weren’t stuck in a car with me driving for 20 hours over the weekend? I won’t even get into the thoughts I had when I saw in Memphis a sign telling me that Ned Ray McWherter’s boy is running for governor…

Tucker Eskew remembers when governors governed

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Tucker Eskew at the Summit Club Tuesday.

Yesterday at the Summit Club, Tucker Eskew spoke to a luncheon meeting of the local chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. (And OMG, I just committed one of the cardinal sins of Newswriting 101. I just wrote what is termed a “The Ladies Auxiliary met on Wednesday” lede! Which is to say, a lede that tells you a scheduled event occurred, but doesn’t tell you what happened, or why you should care. Well, so what? I don’t have an editor or anyone else to get on me about it. Perhaps you’ve noticed.)

The first thing that interested me about this was how many former staffers from The State were there — Michael Sponhour, Jan Easterling, Jeff Stensland, Preston McLaurin and others, all there to represent their various clients. It was Old Home Week. And I think I was a bit of a curiosity at the gathering, because it was the first time many of them had seen me NOT as an editor at the paper. But perhaps I’m just thinking of myself as the center of the universe again. My wife says I do that.

Anyway, the interesting thing was hearing Tucker ramble about his experiences with the politicos he’s worked for. Some of it was familiar ground — stuff I lived through as well, but experiencing it from a different vantage point — but other parts told me something new. In case you don’t know Tucker, here’s the promo the IABC put out before the event:

High-stakes strategist and high-visibility spokesman Tucker Eskew will share some stories and lessons from his time in the South Carolina State House, the White House, No. 10 Downing Street and his consulting firm, Vianovo. Tucker is a spokesman and strategist whose career began with Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater and Carroll Campbell. It then continued with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Drawing on these experiences, Tucker will reflect on the statecraft and stagecraft he’s witnessed and practiced over 25 years as a communicator. Register now for this inside look into the politics of media and communications from a man who’s been there and done that.

Tucker has come a long way since he was that punk kid we had to joust with when I headed the governmental affairs staff (10 reporters, back in the day) at The State and he was Carroll Campbell’s press secretary. He’s been behind the scenes at a number of interesting moments in history, and I enjoyed hearing his stories about:

His biggest mistake ever. This one made me smile, because it had nothing to do with handling Sarah Palin or anything you might expect. It was when we caught him, the governor’s press secretary, parking in a handicapped space in front of the Capitol Newsstand on Sunday mornings to pick up the papers. As he noted, the item ran in the “Earsay” column, a feature I started as a place to put all those interesting tidbits that reporters always avidly told their colleagues when they got back to the newsroom, but seldom got around to writing for the paper.

The BMW announcement. Probably the high point of the Campbell administration. Tucker sort of lost his temper at the time with reporters who reported cautiously on the announcement rather than playing it as being as big as it would eventually be — reporting just the initial employment, for instance, instead of the likely (and the predictions were borne out over time) economic impact over the long run. Of course, the reporters were just being the kind of healthy skeptics they were trained to be, in keeping with the rule, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I mean, you certainly don’t give her any points from promising to love you at some point in the misty future. I got the sense Tucker understands that now. But he also takes satisfaction in knowing that BMW was as big a BFD as he maintained at the time.

Then and now. The hardest part of his job in the days before the BMW announcement was keeping the lid on the deal until it could be completed. He said he learned to say “no comment” 150 ways. When it was all done and he met the head guy from BWM, the German said, “So you’re the man who says nothing so much.” He urged us to remember that “This was an era when newspapers were large, well-staffed and aggressive.” That was indeed a long time ago.

The 2000 South Carolina Presidential Primary. This is the one part of his speech I had a real beef with. At some point — I didn’t write down the exact quote — he said something about being proud of the Bush victory. McCain supporter that I was, I would have found such pride distinctly out of place. Tucker had been on the Bush team so long — Campbell had been instrumental in getting Bush pere elected in 1988 — that he could see it no other way, I suppose.

The Long Count in Florida. At the point at which the campaign should have been done, he was asked to pack his bags to spend two or three days in Palm Beach. A week later, his wife mailed him a full suitcase. This was shortly after they had had a baby, and as he and an expectant world stood on one side of a glass wall looking into a room where the chads were being counted and obsessed over, it struck him how like standing outside the hospital nursery the experience was. And all he could think was, “That was one ugly baby” he was looking at in Palm Beach.

September 11, 2001. He was working in the White House press office. As everyone was still reeling from the impact of the first three planes, Whit Ayres called to ask him if he was all right. Sure I am, he said. Ayres said that on TV it looked like his building (the Eisenhower Office Building) was on fire. That was an optical illusion caused by the angle from which a network camera located downtown was shooting the smoke rising from the Pentagon. At around that time, some staffers asked whether they were supposed to be evacuating the building. No sooner had he said “no” than alarms went off. Everyone had been trained to walk, not run, to the exits in an emergency. So they were particularly alarmed to see and hear Secret Service agents yelling at women — including nice, soft-spoken women from South Carolina — to “Take off your shoes and RUN!” That’s because the agents had heard there was another plane headed toward them. Later in the day, he would advocate for the president to come back to the House and be seen leading. And he would write some of the first words released publicly from the administration, by Karen Hughes.

The great missed opportunity. He spoke of how writers right after 9/11 were hailing “the end of irony and cynicism.” Of course, it was just a pause before intensifying, as the partisan bitterness from both sides later exceeded our worst imaginings.

London during the media blitz. It was decided that in the War on Terror, London was the world media center, particularly for the Arabic press. So Tucker was sent there to represent the administration in liaison with Tony Blair’s staff at No. 10. He said it was “the most corrosive, cynical media environment that I’d ever been exposed to.” And he had thought we were bad back in Columbia. At least we didn’t Photoshop pictures of his boss with blood dripping from his fangs. (Tucker urged us to read Tony Blair’s new book. I certainly will, since I just asked for and got it for my birthday.)

Sarah Palin on SNL — In 2008, he was sent from the McCain campaign to become one of the handlers of someone he had known nothing about — the surprise running mate. A high point of that experience was accompanying her backstage when she went on “Saturday Night Live” — something Tucker had urged her to do. He actually had fun for once. But there was work to do as well. He had a role in nixing some bits of the script, such as a line that rhymed “filth” with “MILF.” And the bit that had McCain being “hot for teacher.”

South Carolina’s national image. “We were a shiny piece of trash on the side of the road for awhile,” he said of our time in the “Daily Show” limelight, but he thinks our image is better now. Nevertheless, he knows that South Carolina business people and others who have to travel outside the state pick up on a distinct impression of South Carolina, and “it’s not a good impression.” Someone had asked him whether we just had too many “characters.” He suggested that “it’s not about the characters, but it is about character.” After all, Thurmond and Hollings managed to be characters without reflecting too badly on our state’s character. That is less the case today.

Back in the day, Tucker used to get on my nerves, mostly because he advocated so tenaciously for his boss, whom at the time I saw as more of a partisan warrior than a guy interested in governing. (This was due in part to the fact that he was building his party, and doing so quite successfully. I kept comparing him unfavorably to Lamar Alexander, whom I had covered in Tennessee. Alexander had worked with Democratic lawmakers as full partners and accomplished a lot as a result. Campbell had more of an in-your-face style, doing such things as holding press conferences to rub it in when a Democratic lawmaker switched parties.) Now, I look back on the Campbell administration as halcyon days, a time when a real governor got things done, a state of affairs we haven’t been so fortunate to experience since.

Time matures our perspective. And it’s certainly matured Tucker. My Democratic friends will no doubt see him as anathema because of the names with which he has been associated. But I see him as that brash kid who has grown into a Man of Respect among people who do communications from that side of the wall — the side I’m now on, by the way.

And why is it so easy for me to see him that way now? Because he harks back to a time when we had a governor more interested in governing than posturing. A couple of times he proudly quoted someone — I missed who — calling Campbell an “exemplar of governing conservatism,” with emphasis on the “governing.” Campbell believed in it.

Tucker is too professional to put it this way, but he was obviously appalled at having to work for someone as insubstantial as Sarah Palin — the exemplar of the sort of Republican politician that dominates the scene today. He was at pains to explain her appeal in positive terms, describing her as an unaffected person who causes crowds to think approvingly, “She doesn’t talk down to me.”

He was asked whether he was the one who said Ms. Palin had “gone rogue.” No. But he marveled at being charged with promoting a candidate who was so startling unprepared to run for such a high office. He spoke of the kinds of experience and knowledge that one took for granted in a candidate at that level, and said, “We had never worked with someone who had never done those things.” As far as seasoning experiences were concerned, “Almost none of that had ever transpired.” But he didn’t call her a rogue. “I didn’t say it, but I observed it and was charged with dealing with it.”

And deal with it he must, because, as he realized after a time on the campaign, “She doesn’t have a lot of people who have been around her a long time.”

It was interesting, in light of these observations, to think back on what he had said a few minutes before, in a different context, about how amazing it is to see Nikki Haley “rise, in relative terms, from nowhere…” He had meant it in a good way. But the comparison to Palin is rather unavoidable.

Asked what he thought of the state’s two U.S. senators, he diplomatically spoke of his respect for both, but emphasized that they are very different. DeMint is about the “principle,” and Graham “stands on principle, but still gets things done” — making him another “exemplar of governing conservatism.” With distinct understatement, he noted that “DeMint has made himself a lot of friends around the country, and probably some opponents within” the Senate — the place where one has to work with people to get anything one believes in done.

A longtime Republican operative in the audience asked whether President Reagan could even get elected in today’s political environment. She — Christy Cox, longtime aide to David Wilkins — seemed to doubt it. Tucker said he would hope Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan could “change the climate.”

But the point was made. The climate would indeed have to be changed for the Great Communicator to be successful today.

So that’s why I can appreciate Tucker better today. Once, I saw him as a sort of partisan guerrilla warrior, part of the problem. Now, he joins me in harking back to a time when those who called themselves conservatives ran for, and served as, governor because they believed in governing. And as I said earlier, that was a long time ago…