Category Archives: Leadership

Rutherford replaces Ott as SC House minority leader

This just in (OK, so it was an hour ago) from Tyler Jones on behalf of the House Democrats:

House Democrats Elect Todd Rutherford New Minority Leader

Columbia, SC – Members of the House Democratic Caucus met on Tuesday and elected Rep. Todd Rutherford to be its new leader. Former Minority Leader Rep. Harry Ott announced on Saturday he would not be seeking re-election to the leadership post.

Newly-elected Minority Leader Rep. Rutherford released the following statement in response to his election:

“I am honored to be chosen by my colleagues to lead House Democrats in a new, and hopefully more successful direction. I want to personally thank Representative Harry Ott for his many years of service to this caucus. Rep. Ott has done an outstanding job as our leader and will remain an integral part of our decision making process. I look forward to getting down to work to expand our numbers and elect more Democrats to the House.”

House Democrats also elected Reps. Walt McLeod as Assistant Minority Leader, James Smith as Deputy Leader, Laurie Funderburk as Treasurer, David Weeks as Parliamentarian, and Kenneth Hodges as Chaplain.

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Headline writers across the state will undoubtedly miss Harry Ott. First Ard, now this… Why don’t more people with extremely short names run for office?

The hopelessness of discussing school shootings

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OK, so we have another mass shooting in a school, and this one may be a record-breaker, in the K-12 category. Twenty children dead, several adults.

We’ve had the obligatory statement from the president. There’s no reason for the president of the United States to comment on such things, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with his job description. After the Columbine shootings, I wrote about the absurdity of reporters standing outside the White House for hours waiting for the president to say something. But it’s expected now. People don’t think about what the president’s job is and isn’t; he’s expected to be emoter in chief.

So he said something, and he shed tears. He might as well. I mean, what do we expect him to do? He indicated his intention to do something:

President Obama, in one of his most emotional speeches as president, wiped away tears as he spoke about the shooting from the White House’s briefing room. “Our hearts are broken today,” Obama said. He promised “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but did not say specifically what he might do….

What would he do, indeed?

I don’t normally post about stuff like this because there’s really nothing helpful to say. These things fill me with hopelessness. The only thing that would do anything to prevent such events in the future would be a level of gun control that would mean changing unshakable reality in this country by 180 degrees.

Understand me — I’m not proposing anything, because I don’t know of anything that would both solve the problem and also be achievable.

Here’s why it’s so hopeless: Even if, by some miracle, we bypassed or reinterpreted the Second Amendment so as to allow for the strictest laws in the world regarding gun ownership, we still would not have solved anything. Which is why you don’t see me going around advocating gun control.

That’s because the guns would still exist. And the gun-rights people are right: If you outlaw guns, outlaws will still have guns. The problem is that there are just so many firearms out there in this country. Even in the most repressive, worst jackbooted nightmare for the gun rights people, with police rounding up all the guns they can lay their hands on, there would still be so many left that you would see incidents such as this school shooting still happening from time to time.

It’s an economic problem — too many guns chasing too many potential shooting victims. There are at least a couple of hundred million guns in the country — I’ve seen statistics suggesting there are 90 for every 100 people. And of households that have one firearm, more than 60 percent have multiple guns.

You know what this situation reminds me of? Slavery before 1860, and why it was such an intractable problem for the country. No, gun lovers, I’m not saying it’s the moral equivalent or anything like that. I’m saying the dynamics of the political challenge are similar.

There were about 4 million slaves in the country when South Carolina seceded. Here in SC, there were more slaves than free people. Slaveholders were so invested in the institution that there was no possible political or legal solution that would have induced them to give up their slaves. The position of white elites in this and other states (but most especially this one; SC had always been the most extreme on the issue) was essentially that you’d have to pry their slaves from their cold, dead hands. And that’s what happened. It took a war that killed more Americans than ALL of our other wars, from the Revolution through Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, to end slavery. And we’re still wrestling over the repercussions.

For Barack Obama, if he wanted to address the gun issue meaningfully, the political obstacles are very similar to those that faced Lincoln dealing with slavery. Lincoln had to spend the early months of his administration, the early months of the war, insisting to the world that he was NOT the abolitionist that the Southerners depicted him as. It’s not that he was pro-slavery; he was always opposed to it. But even well into the war itself, he saw abolition as a political impossibility. He and others saw the fact of those 4 million slaves as something they didn’t know how to deal with. It seemed unimaginable to many anti-slavery pols then that former slaves could just co-exist with former slaveholders in the future.

Obama is to gun-rights people, in a way, what Lincoln was to the slaveholders. He didn’t run on a gun-control platform, and has never made any serious proposals to limit gun rights, that I can recall. And yet I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there has NEVER been a president of the United States as distrusted by gun-rights people — and I mean serious gun-rights people, the sort who would list the 2nd Amendment as a top concern.

For Barack Obama to step out and advocate anything that would put a serious crimp in gun availability in this country would create a political backlash that — while it wouldn’t be the same as secession (and the reaction would be more individualized than a state-by-state thing) — would probably outstrip anything sense, in terms of the sheer passion of the response.

It would be the most politically (and, frankly personally — the Secret Service would have a horrific new challenge on its hands) risky thing I’ve ever seen a president do in my adult lifetime.

Which is why I kind of doubt we’ll see it.

Which is why waiting for the president to say something about such things seems so hopelessly pointless…

Joan Brady, SC House District 78

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Joan Brady is the kind of Republican (a traditional one) that a certain other kind of Republican (the Johnny-Come-Lately extremist variety) likes to call a RINO. She serves her swing district in much the same pragmatic way Sen. John Courson does his — serving Democratic and Republican constituents equally, and keeping the ideology to a minimum.

The issues she has concentrated on aren’t exactly out of the GOP playbook, as The State noted in endorsing her:

That means pushing through legislation to require state government buildings to be more energy-efficient, to prohibit insurance companies from dropping coverage for victims of criminal domestic violence, to outlaw teen sexting, to make it easier for foster parents to adopt abused or abandoned children. It means championing proposals to increase childhood immunizations and fight childhood obesity. These aren’t the macro issues that we like to talk about — tax and education policy, governmental structure — but they’re important measures that need someone who can promote them effectively…

So it is that she has the backing of organizations ranging from the S.C. Education Association and the Conservation Voters of South Carolina to the S.C. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Quite an across-the-spectrum, left-to-right set of endorsements.

To independents and Democrats, Rep. Brady’s re-election pitch is this: She can get things done on some of the issues that they care about as much as she does, whereas a Democrat — especially a freshman Democrat — could not.

She considers the issues she cares about most as neither Democratic or Republican, but she sees her party identity as an asset in getting the Republican majority to pass her initiatives. For instance, she notes that most of her GOP colleagues were less than thrilled with the idea of making state buildings greener, until she explained that in addition to helping the planet, it would save money.

“We’re in a Republican-dominated Legislature, like it or not… Democrats have basically been rendered inconsequential in the General Assembly,” she says, so her district needs a Republican to sell good ideas that may not be in the GOP playbook to other Republicans.

So it is that she resents the fact that Democrats have targeted her, as she sees it, purely because she is a Republican, disregarding the good she does that they should be able to appreciate.

She sees her opponent, Beth Bernstein, as “hand-picked” by the state Democratic Party, as someone who hasn’t shown interest in public affairs before (“In 16 years, I haven’t seen her at a committee meeting.”). Rep. Brady, a full-time legislator, dismisses her opponent in the same terms Nikki Haley used against Vincent Sheheen, calling her a “trial lawyer,” and suggesting she isn’t the small businesswoman she poses as.

She also says she’s unprepared to address issues, pointing to the trouble Ms. Bernstein had answering questions at a Sierra Club forum — video of which Rep. Brady has posted on her Facebook page.

(I’ll give Ms. Bernstein’s responses to all that in a separate post about her.)

Again questioning how effective Ms. Bernstein could be, Rep. Brady says that in the General Assembly in 2012, there’s “nothing lower on the totem pole than a freshman Democratic trial lawyer.”

Meanwhile, she sees herself as being what her district needs and wants. She says that as she goes door-to-door, at every third house voters will say that what they want most is someone who will “work across party lines” to get things done.

She says that is exactly what she does, and she sees no reason for her constituents to change horses at this point. She sees that as unlikely — she notes that the district got a little more Republican in the recent reapportionment — but she’s running as hard as she ever has against this challenge.

Haley promises government will take care of you (or at least your credit) for the rest of your life

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We now have an answer to the question of what happens after the year of free credit protection the Haley administration is offering to those compromised by the massive Department of Revenue data breach:

COLUMBIA, SC — South Carolina taxpayers and their children who were victims of a massive data breach at the Department of Revenue will receive free lifetime credit fraud resolution, Gov. Nikki Haley announced Tuesday….

Now that the governor is promising free cradle-to-grave coverage, I find myself wondering about something that should have occurred to me before… where does the governor get the authority to promise all of this?

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or that it’s not necessary; I’m just wondering from whence the power derives to do it. It’s her remark yesterday about it being up to the General Assembly to decide how to pay for it that planted the germ of this idea, which for some reason just now sprouted: If the Legislature has to determine how (or for that matter, whether) to pay for this emergency step, does it not have to pass legislation to let her do it to begin with?

Has anyone seen anything anywhere addressing that? I’m curious…

Haley: Blame the hacker, not the government

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When I heard Nikki Haley was going to hold a presser this morning to call about most of our tax returns being stolen from the Department of Revenue, my first thought was to wonder whom she would blame for a failure at her agency.

As it happened, she said that no one was to blame except the hacker — whom she portrayed as some sort of unstoppable super-villain.

She could be right as far as my knowledge of such things extends, although perhaps some of y’all may have other thoughts.

Anyway, here are some highlights of what she said:

More than 150,000 people have signed up now for the protection being offered by the state.
We have until the end of January to sign up for the credit protection that the state is offering, and the protection will be retroactive. (I don’t know how that works, but that’s what she said.)
If you don’t have a computer or Internet access, call DOR and someone will do it for you while you’re on the phone. (Someone noted that people were having trouble getting through. Nikki said she and her husband got right through on Saturday, but then, they called during the Gamecocks’ game. She noted that for most people, it’s taking about 12 minutes to get through.)
“We don’t know whose information was compromised.” SLED Chief Mark Keel, to whom the governor deferred repeatedly during the event, said it could be weeks before that is known.
No one knows yet how much it will cost for the state to provide the ID protection it is offering to citizens free of charge. “We are in negotiations with Experian” on that, she said. The cost depends on how many sign up. All she could say was that the state will get a wholesale rate.
How will it be paid for? She said that would be up to the General Assembly; the money will have to be appropriated.
Why not just go ahead and enroll everybody in the protection? she was asked. Because tax records are confidential, and the state is not allowed to sign someone up for something that they might not want, she said.
Most Social Security numbers are not encrypted, she said, either in the private or public sector. “This is not just a DOR problem; it’s an industry problem.” She said it was “the industry standard” that such information would not be encrypted.
How will minors be covered? In the coming weeks, people who signed up for protection will get the opportunity to sign up for family plans to cover the children associated with their accounts.

When asked whether anyone in her administration has been disciplined over this, she said, “The person I hope will be disciplined is this international criminal that came in and hacked.”

“This wasn’t an issue where anyone in the agency could have avoided it. This wasn’t an issue where anyone in state government could have done something to avoid it. This is a situation that a sophisticated, intelligent criminal got into a database, that is unbelievably creative on how he did it, and now we’re having to deal with it,” she said. Earlier, she had said, “You know, it’s amazing, because when you are dealing with international hackers, you are dealing with a new, sophisticated type of intelligence that a lot of us have not dealt with.” She said if the CIA can be hacked into, anyone can.

“It’s the new world in which we live in,” she said.

As for the point on which she is most vulnerable to criticism, she pointedly did deflect responsibility. She insisted that citizens were not notified earlier because she deferred to the judgment of law enforcement professionals, and said that was the appropriate thing to do in such a situation. In fact, emphasizing that she doesn’t accept blame for that, she had Mark Keel start off the press conference.

“I know that much has been made about the timing of making this public,” said Keel. “The timing of notifying the public… was dictated by law enforcement. It was done because we were conducting an investigation. We were trying to … protect this information as much as we possibly could, and by allowing us the time that we had to conduct our investigation, we believe that this information was better protected than it would have been otherwise.”

“It was done because we asked the administration to allow us time…,” he said.

Nikki Haley’s summary on it all? “It’s not the crisis itself; it’s how you handle it.” And she insisted over and over that the protection being offered to citizens after this breach is second-to-none. She said her family’s information was hacked several years ago, and “I wish we’d had what we are offering today.”

More Democrats reject Harpootlian’s party line on John Courson’s Senate re-election

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Today I had an advisory saying the following would be at a press conference today at 2:

Leon Lott, Richland County Sheriff
Joel Lourie, S.C. Senator
Darrell Jackson, S.C. Senator
John Courson, S.C. Senator

… and that they would “make an unusual announcement concerning the campaign for S.C. Senate District 20.”

Joel Lourie

I wasn’t able to make it, so I called Joel Lourie a few minutes ago to see what I had missed, and it was as I thought: More Democrats coming out for John Courson in his re-election race against Democrat Robert Rikard, who increasingly seems to have little backing beyond Dick Harpootlian. I’m starting to feel a little bad for Rikard, whom Lourie says “seems like a nice guy… nothing against Robert.”

“We need John Courson in the Senate,” Lourie said. “He’s one of the very few guys who knows how to build bridges and work across party lines. We need more people like John Courson.”

He added that he and Sen. Jackson were among the first to urge Courson to run for Senate president pro tem, so how could they not back him now?

Furthermore, “As a state senator, I think we’re better off having John Courson as president pro tem, following a moderate course, than picking up one more seat.”

And there’s a personal element, as there so often is in the Senate: “My Dad was a mentor to him, and now he is a mentor to me. One of those who can give me advice.”

What about the increasingly isolated Democratic Party Chair Dick Harpootlian? He called Lourie after the press conference. “We had a pretty harsh conversation afterwards,” he said, and decided to go no further. “We had some very harsh words with each other.”

“I’m not sure what Dick’s infatuation with this race is,” he said. But it’s obvious he didn’t check with the Democrats in the Senate before making such a big deal about trying to turn Courson out of office. “The Senate Democratic caucus’ focus is on helping our incumbents, and providing as much assistance as possible for Thomas McElveen in Sumter.”

Is Mitt Romney a bad CEO? No, says this writer

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Over at Bloomberg Businessweek, Joshua Green insists that the chaos in Mitt Romney’s campaign does NOT mean that he’s a bad CEO:

Romney’s problem is not that he’s brought too little executive rigor to the job of running for president. It’s that he’s brought too much. He’s behaved too much like a businessman (or a consultant) and not enough like a politician. His campaign has all the hallmarks of being run by someone looking only at the numbers, someone who lacks a true politician’s appreciation for the other dimensions of a race—a feel for the electorate, a convincing long-term plan for the country. Were he forced to defend himself before a board of directors, Romney would actually have a pretty solid case for doing what he has done….

… Romney has scrupulously avoided committing to anything that is remotely unpopular, such as naming which tax loopholes he’d close to pay for his agenda. That is to say, he is doing just about everything a close reading of the polls says you should do, and he’s trying hard not to do anything the polls say you shouldn’t do. If a team of Bain consultants were hustled in to pore over the data and devise a strategy, I doubt they would have devised a meaningfully different campaign.

The problem is that politics is about much more than a tactical, short-term reading of the numbers. Candidate skills matter, and the audience in a presidential election is much more variegated than a board of directors. There isn’t much, frankly, that a stiff guy can do to make himself warm and approachable. (Earth tones, anyone?) The glaring weaknesses in Romney’s campaign—the fuzzy details, the inability to convincingly articulate plan for growth, and above all the weird tics and gaffes—are not ones that a businessman’s skills can rectify.

In other words, he’s more a bad politician than a bad CEO. We are left to conclude what we like about what sort of president he would be.

Something to consider, for all those who still think the silly phrase “run government like a business” makes sense.

Harvey Peeler on road funding priorities

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I received this oped by Harvey Peeler, the best Tweeter in the SC Senate, from the Senate Republicans. It contains some thoughts worth considering:

Force-feeding asphalt to Charleston while the rest of S.C. starves
by Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler

When a conservative think tank and the environmentalists team up to criticize the same state agency, you can bet they’re probably on to something.

Our entire system of funding road and transportation needs in our state is just about as broken as it gets, with a recent decision by State Transportation Infrastructure Bank (SIB) being the prime example.

Last month, the SIB took a vote to build an eight mile extension of the Mark Clark Expressway in Charleston, despite the fact that their bonding capacity is used up and the project is wildly unpopular locally.

Or to put in language folks outside the Statehouse might use, they spent money we don’t have on a project we don’t need and the people don’t want.

But the bigger problem is that the SIB is force feeding asphalt to Charleston, while the rest of our state is on a starvation diet.

Seeing this, the conservative South Carolina Policy Council and the environmentalist Coastal Conservation League – two groups who are rarely singing off of the same sheet of music – teamed up to point out just how corrupt our system for funding infrastructure has become.

I think they’re on to something.

Anybody who drives has seen the sorry shape of our roads first hand. In my neck of the woods, we have “see-through” bridges just miles from our homes with more holes than Swiss cheese. In Cowpens on Exit 83, the exit is in such bad disrepair that you have to drive through the parking lot of Mountain View Baptist Church to get back onto the Interstate. Or how I-26 becomes a parking lot on many weekends between Charleston and Columbia.

Meanwhile, since the SIB was created in 1997, they’ve doled out about $4 billion for road projects, with about half of it, a little over $2 billion, going to just two counties – Charleston and Horry. In fact, only 11 of our 46 counties have ever even gotten a penny of SIB funding.

The state Department of Transportation estimates that to bring all the roads and bridges in this state just up what is considered “adequate” level, it would take $20 billion.

Let’s think about that for a second – we need $20 billion to make our existing roads safe, and the SIB is busy spending another $4 billion on NEW roads in the backyards of politically connected legislators and the tourism lobby.

That latest Charleston boondoggle – which, it’s worth remembering, was built with promised money above and beyond what we’re already authorized to borrow – has never even been ranked by the state DOT as a funding priority. It even ranked 15th on a list in Charleston for priorities.

The question I have is, why do we even have a board separate and apart from the DOT, buying bells and whistles for our road system? It’s like a farmer borrowing money to buy a new Corvette when the wheels of his tractor are falling off.

Of course, it’s not like the DOT is any better. What is the DOT’s top priority right now? An interstate that hasn’t even been built yet, and may never wind up being built. I-73, which is supposed to go from Detroit to Myrtle Beach, will cost our state more than $1 billion just to reach the North Carolina line.

Now I’m no expert, but the times I’ve been to Myrtle Beach and looked around at the license plates, it didn’t seem to me like folks from Michigan and Ohio are having any trouble getting here.

The seven-member DOT and the seven-member SIB are driving our state into a ditch. Fourteen people making road-funding decisions. As the old saying goes, “When everybody is in charge, no one is in charge.”

It’s true in business, it’s true in government. We have a rogue Infrastructure Bank committing money that doesn’t exist to a project we don’t need, on top of a state Department of Transportation, where an unaccountable commission controls everything from traffic lights to curb cuts.

If we’re going to move our state forward, we’ve got to stop funding infrastructure based on favor swapping and horse trading. We’ve got to put first things first, fix the roads we have, and stop building new ones based on which legislator has the most pull or which special interest screams the loudest.

I pledge to work with the Policy Council, the Coastal Conservation League and any other group that wants to make this the reality for South Carolina.

Looks like Nikki will stay away from SC even more

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This is bound to create mixed feelings in people who care about South Carolina:

Gov. Nikki Haley will balance her time between governing South Carolina and stumping for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney over the next two months.

Haley’s target audience? Women voters, a critical voting bloc for Romney because of polls that show women favor incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama by a double-digit margin.

“Governor Haley has a very full schedule of job creation and economic development meetings and events in the next two months,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman. “But as much as her schedule permits, she does plan on helping the Romney-Ryan ticket. …

“Mixed feelings” in that our state could use some leadership in trying to pull out of, not only a recession, but our historic near-last ranking in by so many measures. On the other hand, if the only governor we’ve got is Nikki Haley, well… maybe she might as well run off and have her picture made some more, and leave us alone.

I find myself torn between the two ways of looking at it.

Bill Clinton just gave the best political speech of this century, thus far

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Earlier today I wrote something about the contrast that was expected between Elizabeth Warren’s speech and Bill Clinton’s. That was certainly dead on. She gave one of those speeches full of resentments and blame, the kind that makes me dislike political parties so much.

And then Bill Clinton gave a speech that, while lifting the crowd in the arena to their feet, talked right on through them and to all of America, making the case for Barack Obama as no one has ever made it before, in a way that was a feel-good celebration of politics and democracy and this country and the things that make it great.

I can’t remember the last time I heard a political speech this good. Here are my thoughts, via Twitter, as it unfolded. You can see my enthusiasm build from the moment the former president started talking. The Tweets that follow, starting at 9:29 p.m., are mine, except where otherwise indicated:

The most warmly positive, uplifting speech I’ve heard tonight so far was from the sister from Nuns on the Bus. It was beatific…
Back in the day, when there were 3 networks covering gavel to gavel, I seem to recall less gab and more voting; less show, more action.
Wow, they weren’t kidding about this woman [Warren]. Who wrote her speech? Huey Long? https://bradwarthen.com/?p=17980
amhistorymuseum ‏@amhistorymuseum Abraham Lincoln was the first presidential candidate to distribute his campaign portrait all over the country. #campaigncollecting
… Which you wouldn’t automatically assume would have been to his advantage…
Billy’s doing his duty, actually talking about Obama rather than himself. How about that?
Good line about “cool on the inside”…
“Business and government working together… ” That’s a welcome contrast to Warren’s anti-biz, populist rant…
He’s giving the Third Way a hard sell, and doing it well…
They’re not quite sure what to make of Clinton’s lauding of Republicans for the good things they’ve done…
The speech Bill Clinton is giving fulfills the Democrats’ best hopes (and stills their worst loose-cannon fears). This is impressive.
Bill Clinton is reminding American what it’s like to be a Democrat, a winning Democrat, whose politics aren’t based in resentment…
Maybe President Obama should let Bill Clinton do the speech TOMMOROW night, too…
He may have lost weight, but he hasn’t lost his touch. The Comeback Kid still has it. Maybe some of it will rub off.
No, Bill! Don’t say “listen to me…” Shades of the Lewinsky denial. You’re on a roll! Don’t go off course…
When Bill Clinton’s talking, it almost sounds like it would be fun to be a Democrat…
Warren Bolton ‏@BoltonWarren If nothing else, this will have Obama juiced for tomorrow for sure. Can he deliver?
I don’t know, but Bill sure is teeing it up for him. The key to what he’s doing is the confidence, and the sheer joy.
He [Obama] just needs to come out cool on the outside, and burning inside for America…
Bill is the first person speaking positively to independents tonight — except for maybe Sister Simone…
I’ve never heard anyone make the case for Barack Obama this well.
The thing about Clinton is, he convinces you he really understands the wonkish details (mainly because he does), and is really INTO them.
“It takes some brass.” His second best line of the speech. The best was the “cool on the outside” thing…
He knows he’s got them. He can feel it. He can slow it down, or speed it up, and they’re right there with him every second…
John O’Connor ‏@johnroconnor I really only needed Clinton 101, not 201 and 315
This is the graduate seminar course. This is Bill Clinton under a yellow sun, with all his powers.
One of the many things Bill Clinton understands is the importance of talking to the millions of us who are NOT in that room.
Bill knows how to tear the Republicans a new one — or two — without making you think he hates them…
Warren Bolton ‏@BoltonWarren This is where the preacher, with the congregation firmly in his hands, says “I’ about to take my seat.” Then 15 minutes later …
Now he’s schoolin’ ’em on ‘rithmetic…
No, don’t shake your finger at us, Bill. It evokes bad stuff. Stick with the good stuff…
This speech is the most generous and selfless thing that Bill Clinton has done in his whole life.
Bet on America… we always come back… Man, he’s hitting every note, and hitting it just right…

It was amazing. He’s just that good. And I say that as the editor who presided over an editorial board that was tied as first in the country to call on him to resign after he admitted lying to us. But he was always really, really good at this, and I don’t just mean in ways that were good for him. It’s actually good for the country to hear a speech like this. So much of politics these days is depressing, dispiriting. We all needed a lift like this.

Some were complaining that the speech was too long. No. Bill Clinton has given some of the longest, most tedious speeches most of us can remember. But tonight he wasn’t indulging himself. Tonight he was giving.

SC DOT: One example of how SC constantly underfunds basic functions of government

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This post should be seen as the background to this little drama over the governor’s vetoes, to provide some perspective. What seems to have been missing on most, but not all, of Nikki Haley’s vetoes has been a clear explanation of what she would spend the money on instead.

Her ideology prevents her from setting out powerful arguments for alternative spending plans, because she, like the governor before her, lives in a fantasy land in which the government of South Carolina simply spends too much in the aggregate. That South Carolina bears no resemblance to the one in this universe.

The truth is that South Carolina appropriates far too little for some of the most fundamental functions for which we rightly look to the public sector. And the deficit between what we spend on those functions and what we should in order to have the quality of service other states take for granted is sometimes quite vast, involving sums that dwarf the amounts involved in these vetoes that you hear so much fuss about.

What is needed is a fundamental reassessment of what state government does and what it needs to do, to be followed by the drafting of a completely new system of taxation to pay for those things. Our elected officials never come close to undertaking these admittedly Herculean tasks. But they should. The way we fund state government needs a complete overhaul, and spending time arguing about, say, the “Darlington Watershed Project” doesn’t get us there.

This is something I’ve long understood, and often tried to communicate. I was reminded of it again at the Columbia Rotary Club meeting on Monday.

Our speaker was SC Secretary of Transportation Robert C. St. Onge Jr. He’s a former Army major general, having retired in 2003 — until Nikki Haley asked him to take on DOT in January 2011. Some of his friends congratulated him at the time. Those were the naive ones. The savvy would have offered condolences.

Normally, public speakers like to inspire with phrases such as “From Good to Great.” Sec. St. Onge’s talk was far more down-to-Earth, far more realistic. He entitled it “Getting to Good.” And once he laid out what it would take for SC to get to “good enough” — to get all of the roads we have NOW up to snuff, much less building any roads we don’t have but may need for our economy to grow — it was obvious that we aren’t likely to get there any time soon.

The secretary started out with some background on how we have the fourth-largest state-maintained highway system in the country, after Texas, North Carolina and Virginia. He didn’t have time to explain why that is, but I will: It’s because until 1975, county government did not exist in South Carolina. Local needs were seen to by the county legislative delegation, one of the more stunning examples of how our Legislature has appropriated to itself functions that are not properly those of a state legislature. When we got Home Rule, supposedly, in 1975 and county councils were formed, many functions that had been done on the state level stayed there. So it is that roads that would have been maintained by county road departments in other states are handled by the state here. It’s not that we have more roads, you see — it’s that more of them are the state’s responsibility.

He also noted how woefully underfunded our system is. Georgia, for instance, has less road surface to maintain, but twice the funding to get the job done — and three times as many employees per mile. He alluded to why that is, and I’ll explain: We have the most penny-pinching state government I’ve ever seen, with lawmakers who (contrary to the fantasies you hear from the likes of Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley) would rather be tortured than raise adequate money to fund a decent state government. OK, so the retired general didn’t explain it that way. He just mentioned the fact that we haven’t raised the inadequate gasoline tax that funds his department since 1987 (the year I arrived back in SC to work at The State). Add to that the fact that the tax is levied per gallon rather than per dollar spent, and you have a recipe for a crumbling road system.

Here’s the secretary’s full PowerPoint presentation if you want to look at it. If you don’t, at least look these representative slides, which sketch out the basic challenges…

Above compares us to neighboring states. Note that only North Carolina has our bizarre problem owning responsibility for most of the roads.

This is a breakdown of the categories of roads SC maintains at the state level. Note that almost half are secondary roads for which the state gets no federal funds. This is where the state is squeezed the hardest.

Above is what it would take to get just the interstates in SC up to “good” condition, and keep them there.

This is what it would cost to fix up and maintain all those secondary roads, which make up most of the state’s responsibility.

This is the most important slide. This is what South Carolina needs to spend, and has no plans to spend, to get the roads it has NOW up to good condition, and maintain them in that condition.

Gov. Haley could arguably justify ALL of her vetoes by saying, “We need to put it all into our crumbling roads.” Then, after she had eviscerated all of those agencies as being less important than our basic infrastructure, she would have to turn around and call for a significant increase in the state gasoline tax, to come up with the rest of what is needed.

But our elected state leaders never go there. They either don’t understand this state’s basic needs, or aren’t honest enough to level with us about them. They’d rather truckle to populist, unfocused, unthinking resentment of taxes, and government in general, than be responsible stewards of our state’s basic resources.

That’s the money picture. Beyond that, here are some small things that in the aggregate add up to a big problem. If our governor won’t take on fully funding our state roads system, maybe she could work with the Legislature to get rid of some of the worst white elephants that DOT is saddled with:

This is a parking lot in Fairfield County that DOT is required to maintain. Sec. St. Onge would like to get rid of it, but can’t.

Ignore the dirt road, and look at the cemetery that DOT is required to maintain in Saluda County. Sec. St. Onge would like to get rid of that, too, but he can’t.

Here’s a road leading to a church in Florence County, which DOT is also required to maintain. The church is the only thing that the road leads to. Sec. St. Onge would like to give it to the church, and the church’s pastor would like to have it. But guess what? They can’t make it happen.

So… I’ve given you examples here from but ONE agency illustrating how we tolerate the intolerable, and refuse to fund the necessary, in our state government. THIS is the sort of thing we should be discussing, instead of having unnecessary culture wars over the Arts Commission.

A couple of last thoughts: Before any of you who think like Nikki Haley’s base start trying to dismiss all this by quibbling about what “good” means, or going on a rant about how these government bureaucrats just always exaggerate the need for funds in order to pad their fiefdoms, consider the following:

This is Nikki Haley’s chosen guy to run DOT, not some “career bureaucrat” she inherited.
This is a retired general officer — a guy with a very comfortable, generous retirement package — who did not have to take this job, and does not need it to improve his lot or to define himself. He’s about as objective and practical a source you can find for leveling with you about such things as this.

An example of an op-ed rebuttal: Answering Glenn McConnell in 2007

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During the discussion on a previous post, I noted that “I have been known, on one or two occasions, to allow a source space for a full op-ed piece, even when the piece is almost 100 percent nonsense… and run a piece of my own, right across from it, demolishing it. That way the reader/voter has a chance to see that party’s full case, as well as the arguments against it.”

Bud, quite reasonably, asked, “An example would be good. Sometimes people think they demolish something but it turns out not to be the case. Let the bloggers be the judge.”

Fine. Except I could only think of a couple of cases (as I said, there were “one or two”), but I couldn’t immediately lay my hands on either one of them.

I’ve now located one of my examples. It’s not a perfect one. In this case, for instance, I didn’t rebut the op-ed piece until days later — either because I didn’t have column space until then, or because something that happened later in the week got my dander up, and caused me to recall the previous piece. I don’t know; it’s been almost five years now.

Anyway, the piece that (eventually) set me off was by Glenn McConnell, and I ran it in The State on Friday, Oct. 19, 2007. Here it is:

By Glenn F. McConnell Guest Columnist

South Carolina can only have an orderly, predictable and consistent growth rate in state spending by constitutionally mandating it. It cannot be accomplished on a reliable basis by hanging onto slim majorities in the Legislature and having the right governor. The political pressures are too great unless there is a constitutional bridle on the process.

That is the reason I created a task force to consider a constitutional amendment that would cap the growth in spending by the state. The first meeting of the Senate study committee on constitutionally capping state government spending is scheduled for 1 p.m. Wednesday in Room 105 of the Gressette Senate office building in Columbia.

There will always be more needs than revenue no matter what the economic times and the amount of available new funds. Government must, therefore, temper its conduct to spend so that over the highs and lows in revenue forecasts, the necessary revenue will be there to fund essential needs without the pressure for new taxes.

When government is flush with money, the spending goes up to fund many new initiatives — some good, some questionable and some not good. In other words, projects get funded not so much out of merit but merely because the money was available. Some one-time expenditures also occur the same way. In the face of a bountiful taxpayer buffet, government cannot control its appetite, so its stomach must be stapled.

At stake is the need to at least control the rate of growth in the recurring base. So I have introduced a constitutional amendment to cap the rate of spending of our state government. Government would be limited to growth at an amount that would not exceed the rate of population growth plus the growth in personal income. Basically, government should not grow any bigger than it needs to be or any faster than people’s ability to pay for it.

I have been an ardent supporter of both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and I believe that government is best which governs least. I also believe that as much money as possible is best left in the hands of people if we are to economically advance. If people keep more, they have greater opportunities to invest and spend so our economy will expand. It is a matter of fairness.

If there are surpluses in Columbia, these should not expand the obligation to fund a growing government but instead should be used to reduce long-term debt and obligations, fund capital projects to avoid issuing costly bonds, cover one-time costs, save and carry forward for a rainy day, and/or fund tax refunds and tax cuts.

The constitutional amendment would foster growth in the private sector, challenge legislators to prioritize spending better, seek better efficiencies in the operation of government and privatize operations where it is in the state’s best interest. This will present new opportunities to create rainy-day funds, to create a more debt-free South Carolina and to replenish trust funds that too often have been tapped in lean times to fuel the insatiable appetite of government created by overspending in good times.

Finally, we all must realize that our state government, just as much as any business, has to be competitive in order to attract and retain jobs. We need to provide essential services, but we need to do it in a way that ensures excellence, efficiency and long-term cost control. Throwing dollars at an agency does not ensure that it will be better. Limiting the growth in spending ensures that the challenge for each budgeting year is to do more with what we have available rather than to spend more to get the job done.

Working together, we can give the people of South Carolina an opportunity to vote on whether they want this limitation on the growth of spending. As I said, the limitation, if adopted, would ensure our future is not one of ups and downs based on political fortunes but instead one of predictability and orderliness in the growth of South Carolina.

Mr. McConnell, a Charleston attorney and businessman, is president pro tempore of the Senate and chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As I said, that ran on Friday, so I’m beginning to see what probably happened. I generally wrote my Sunday columns on Fridays. I would have read the senator’s piece — most likely for the first time — on the page proof Thursday afternoon, so it would have been quite fresh in my mind. I might have even ripped out a few grafs of my response right then, and polished them somewhat the next morning.

You’ll note, though, that my column wasn’t just a response to McConnell. I didn’t even get to him until about halfway through. This column was of a certain type, the type that puts me in mind of a line Mark Twain wrote: “And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.” I always liked that line because it describes a mood that is very familiar to me.

Here’s my column that ran on Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007:
IN SOUTH CAROLINA, WE KEEP TALKING ABOUT THE WRONG THINGS

By Brad Warthen Editorial Page Editor

We always seem to be having the wrong conversations in South Carolina. Sometimes, we don’t even talk at all about the things that cry out for focused, urgent debate.

Look at this joke of a commission that was assigned to examine whether the city of Columbia should ditch its ineffective, unaccountable, “don’t ask me” form of government. It was supposed to report something two years ago. And here we are, still waiting, with a city that can’t even close its books at the end of the year. Whether its that fiscal fiasco, or the failure to justify what it did with millions in special tax revenues, or the rehiring of a cop who was said to be found drunk, naked and armed in public, there is no one who works directly for the voters who has control over those things.

But as bad as it is to have no one to blame, there is no one to look to for a vision of positive action. A city that says it wants to leap forward into the knowledge economy with Innovista really, really needs somebody accountable driving the process.

Columbia needed a strong-mayor form of government yesterday, and what have we done? Sat around two years waiting for a panel that didn’t want to reach that conclusion to start with to come back and tell us so.

It’s worse on the state level.

What does South Carolina need? It needs to get up and off its duff and start catching up with the rest of the country. There are many elements involved in doing that, but one that everybody knows must be included is bringing up the level of educational achievement throughout our population.

There are all sorts of obvious reforms that should be enacted immediately to improve our public schools. Just to name one that no one can mount a credible argument against, and which the Legislature could enact at any time it chooses, we need to eliminate waste and channel expertise by drastically reducing the number of school districts in the state.

So each time the Legislature meets, it debates how to get that done, right? No way. For the last several years, every time any suggestion of any kind for improving our public schools has come up, the General Assembly has been paralyzed by a minority of lawmakers who say no, instead of fixing the public schools, let’s take funding away from them and give it to private schools — you know, the only kind of schools that we can’t possibly hold accountable.

As long as we’re talking about money, take a look at what the most powerful man in the Legislature, Sen. Glenn McConnell, had to say on our op-ed page Friday (to read the full piece, follow the link at the end of this column):

South Carolina can only have an orderly, predictable and consistent growth rate in state spending by constitutionally mandating it. It cannot be accomplished on a reliable basis by hanging onto slim majorities in the Legislature and having the right governor. The political pressures are too great unless there is a constitutional bridle on the process.

The people of South Carolina elect 170 people to the Legislature. In this most legislative of states, those 170 people have complete power to do whatever they want with regard to taxing and spending, with one caveat — they are already prevented by the constitution from spending more than they take in.

But they could raise taxes, right? Only in theory. The State House is filled with people who’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than ever raise our taxes, whether it would be a good idea to do so or not.

All of this is true, and of all those 170 people, there is no one with more power to affect the general course of legislation than Glenn McConnell.

And yet he tells us that it’s impossible for him and his colleagues to prevent spending from getting out of hand.

What’s he saying here? He’s saying that he’s afraid that the people of South Carolina may someday elect a majority of legislators who think they need to spend more than Glenn McConnell thinks we ought to spend. Therefore, we should take away the Legislature’s power to make that most fundamental of legislative decisions. We should rig the rules so that spending never exceeds an amount that he and those who agree with him prefer, even if most South Carolinians (and that, by the way, is what “political pressures” means — the will of the voters) disagree.

Is there a problem with how the Legislature spends our money? You betcha. We don’t spend nearly enough on state troopers, prisons, roads or mental health services. And we spend too much on festivals and museums and various other sorts of folderol that help lawmakers get re-elected, but do little for the state overall.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s have a conversation about the fact that South Carolinians aren’t as safe or healthy or well-educated as folks in other parts of the country because lawmakers choose to spend on the wrong things.

But that’s not the kind of conversation we have at our State House. Instead, the people with the bulliest pulpits, from the governor to the most powerful man in the Senate, want most of all to make sure lawmakers spend less than they otherwise might, whether they spend wisely or not.

The McConnell proposal would make sure that approach always wins all future arguments.

For Sen. McConnell, this thing we call representative democracy is just a little too risky. Elections might produce people who disagree with him. And he’s just not willing to put up with that.

As you can see, that was a very South Carolina column. Everything addressed in it, everything that was getting my temper up, was something that one could just as well be said today. Because in South Carolina, very little that ought to change ever changes.

Yes, “trackers” HAVE gone wild, and then some

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A shot from video footage taken outside the home of a candidate.

Earlier today, Politico posed the question on Twitter, “Democratic trackers gone wild?”

While most serious campaigns on both sides use campaign trackers — staffers whose job is to record on video every public appearance and statement by an opponent — House Democrats are taking it to another level. They’re now recording video of the homes of GOP congressmen and candidates and posting the raw footage on the Internet for all to see.

That ratcheting up of the video surveillance game is unnerving Republicans who insist that even by political standards, it’s a gross invasion of privacy. Worse, they say, it creates a safety risk for members of Congress and their families at a time when they are already on edge after a deranged gunman shot former Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords 18 months ago.

Wisconsin GOP Rep. Reid Ribble, who said he’s also been followed by a cameraman when shopping for groceries, said the home videos cross a line.

“I feel it’s totally inappropriate,” said Ribble, a freshman facing a competitive race for reelection. “It was disturbing to me that they would put that online. I don’t understand any political benefit that can be achieved with that.”…

Yes, indeed, say I. They’ve gone too far. But then, I think the whole phenomenon went overboard, across the spectrum, years ago. I have a low threshold with this kind of stuff.

There’s nothing illegal, certainly, about following one’s opponent around with a video camera. And everyone does it, right? One can even argue that a conscientious candidate should be fully aware of what his opponent has to say.

But in this era of saturation communication, stalking one’s opponent with a camera hoping for a slipup, a gotcha! moment, is not only unnecessary, there’s something low about it. And I confess that when I’m at a political event, and I spot the opposition’s tracker, I can’t help looking upon that person with something akin to disdain.

I don’t expect many people to agree with me on this. Certainly not many journalists today, since so much of their material comes from this sort of thing.

But I was always a different sort of journalist. I always wanted to know what a candidate has to say after he thinks for a minute, not what he says when he misspeaks. Some pop-Freudians believe the slip is the truth. Sometimes it is, sadly. But I’ve always valued more what the candidate says when you give him or her a chance to think a little harder about it. When a candidate says, “That’s not what I meant,” the gotcha folks snicker. Me, I start paying closer attention to find out what he or she did mean. And I flatter myself that I can tell, usually, if the further explanation is just blowing smoke.

Maybe I look for the second thought because that’s how I hope (idealist that I am) that they will govern — in a deliberative manner, with their ideas morphing and growing and getting better in a ferment with other ideas. I want to be governed by what people think upon further reflection, not the first thing that pops into their heads.

And even if they never achieve that, I want to give them every opportunity to do so. I want to hear the “yes, but…,” the second and third and fourth thoughts. I want depth of consideration. Deliberation, the thing upon which republican government relies.

But the “tracker” is a manifestation of a political culture that does not value further reflection. And therefore is a sign of a political culture in decline.

And that would make it less “political” HOW?

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I was a bit surprised by this move by Joan Brady:

A Midlands lawmaker says the investigation into Gov. Nikki Haley has gotten too political and is encouraging it be investigated by the state Attorney General’s Office instead of a legislative committee.

“The State Attorney General’s Office has the experienced investigators and staff necessary to address this matter in a fair and timely manner,” wrote Rep. Joan Brady, R-Richland, a member of the House Ethics Committee that is looking into charges that Haley illegally lobbied while a member of the House.

In a letter to the committee’s chairman, Brady continued the committee is “not positioned to hire the criminal investigators and lawyers necessary to fully investigate this complaint.”…

On the one hand, the attorney general should be someone who could credibly do this. That is the one great advantage, theoretically, to having the A.G. elected separately from the governor.

On the other hand, what’s our experience been? The A.G.’s office was much criticized for supposedly dragging its feet on the Ken Ard investigation. I’m not saying Alan Wilson DID delay dealing with that sticky wicket; I’m saying he was accused of it. And I think it fair to say that criticism was… political. In the end, the thing was handled properly, but along the way there were plenty of recriminations. Political recriminations.

Does an investigation by lawmakers of one of their own have a political dimension? You bet. But so does an investigation by an elected official from outside the General Assembly.

And as it happens, the way the law is set up, it’s the Legislature’s job to investigate this. Rep. Brady not wanting to do so comes across as little more than wanting to ditch a hot potato.

Maybe it is more than that. If so, Rep. Brady should present clear evidence that the process has been compromised. That is to say, more compromised than that party-line vote to dismiss the charges the first time around.

The innuendo here — raised by Nikki Haley (who would never seek to influence an investigation of herself — would she?) — is that Bobby Harrell has improperly influenced the investigation by urging the panel to DO something this time.

I suppose you could see that two ways — as Harrell out to get Nikki, or as the speaker wanting a trustworthy ethics panel that won’t punt at the first whiff of public scrutiny.

If Rep. Brady has evidence that Harrell has crossed a line, let’s hear it when the panel meets on Wednesday. If not, if it’s just that the members are in an uncomfortable position here — well, Alan Wilson would be, too, if you dumped it on him.

Obama definitely deserves bin Laden credit

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President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

OK, my Corleone metaphor aside, let’s address the actual political question before us: Does Barack Obama deserve any particular credit for “getting” Osama bin Laden, or would “anyone have done what he did?”

This is actually a very important question. When deciding who should be one’s president going forward, there is no more important question than whether he would be an effective commander in chief (or in the case of the incumbent, whether he is an effective commander in chief).

Republicans, including some who should know better, are essentially saying Obama did nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. They are wrong. I initially thought as they did — not that I wanted to take anything away from the president, but because I thought it was true — but as I read and learned more about the decision-making process leading to the raid on Abbottabad, I changed my mind.

Last night, I inadvertently saw a few seconds of TV “news.” John McCain was saying that of course Mitt Romney would have done the same thing, or something along those lines.

For his part, outrageously, Mitt Romney has said that “even Jimmy Carter” would have ordered the SEALs into the bin Laden compound. I’m going to pause and count to 10 before proceeding after this latest reflexive GOP expression of contempt toward my man Jimmy. (And while I’m counting, I’ll just share with you this HuffPost headline, “Jimmy Carter, Seven Years as Navy Officer; Mitt Romney, 0 Years in Military, 0 Years Foreign Policy Experience.” Effin’ A.)

Well, as it happens, we have strong reason to believe that Jimmy Carter would have ordered such an operation. He actually did order a roughly comparable one. It failed, as military operations sometimes do. (The one Obama ordered could have failed, too, at a number of critical points. That’s one reason he deserves credit for having the guts to give the order.) But he ordered it. It was a big deal that he ordered it. His secretary of state resigned over it.

But would “anyone else” have done the same? There is little reason to think so. It would have been Bill Clinton’s M.O., for instance, to have flipped a couple of cruise missiles in that direction. And as we saw in Kosovo, he had a predilection for air power rather than boots on the ground. But… and this is a huge “but”… is it fair to make the assumption that the real-life Bill Clinton of the 1990s would have been as reticent, as cautious, post-9/11? It’s impossible to say.

What we do know is that in real life, there was sharp disagreement and debate in the Obama administration over how to proceed — whether to believe the assumptions based on incomplete intelligence (for doing that, George W. Bush earned the never-ending “Bush lied” canard), whether to act on them at all, whether to send in troops at all or simply bomb the compound, whether to send a joint force or a coherent Navy team, whether to notify the Pakistanis or just go in, whether to try to capture bin Laden or go in intending to kill him, whether to bring back his body or send it to sleep with the fishes.

And when I say debate within the administration, I don’t mean between what the Republicans would characterized as the Democratic sissy politicos, but among the professionals — the generals and admirals and Sec. Gates.

And at critical stages, the president and the president alone seems to have made very tough calls. And the right ones. Most importantly, he decided to send in men rather than just bombs. That way, he could make sure, he could minimize collateral damage — and the U.S. could reap an intelligence bonanza.

That took nerves not everyone would have. So many things could have gone wrong doing it this way — and nearly did. In what had to feel like a replay of Jimmy Carter’s debacle, we lost a helicopter. But having learned that lesson, we had backups.

Some Republicans would have you believe that giving Obama credit would take away somehow from the superb, almost superhuman job that the SEALs and the rest of the military and CIA team did. Nothing could be further from the truth. It stands as one of the most amazing coup de main operations of the past century. They performed as brilliantly as the Israelis did at Entebbe, for instance. But they had their roles to play, and the commander in chief had his. And all involved did their jobs remarkably well.

I refer you to two posts I wrote last year, as I came to the conclusion that Barack Obama personally deserved credit for the leadership calls that led to our killing bin Laden. Here they are:

In invite you to go back and read them, to see how I reached a conclusion very different from the line we’re hearing from Republicans now.

There is no way of knowing whether Mitt Romney would have made the same calls. I suspect that he might have erred on the side of caution, but I could be completely wrong about that. He might have acted in exactly the same manner. But what I know is that Barack Obama did — and that what he did is not just “what anyone would have done.”

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Oh, get over yourself, governor

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Again, our governor seems to have been Facebooking under the influence… of something. Strong emotion, perhaps.

Did you see this in the paper today?

The Senate approved a constitutional amendment that would have gubernatorial candidates and candidates for lieutenant governor elected on the same ticket, just as the president and vice president are elected now. Voters would have to approve the change in November.

But senators made sure the change would not take effect until 2018, when Haley’s term as governor, if she is re-elected in 2014, will expire.

Haley immediately took to her Facebook page to criticize the Senate, asking voters to call lawmakers and pressure them to change the effective date.

“I’m not the one taking it personally, they are,” Haley said Thursday in an interview with The State. “This is a reform I pushed for all through the campaign. … To have it go in front of the Senate, and then have them push it through, because they know it’s the will of the people, only to say, ‘Oh, no, we don’t want the girl to have it. We want to wait until 2018’ – they are the ones taking it personally.”…

Which raises a couple of points:

First, why would she care? What possible difference could it make to her whether this goes into effect in 2014 or 2018? Did she have some sort of grand scheme in mind, and this messes it up, or what? She’s going to have enough trouble gaining re-election (if she even seeks it) without worrying about who the lieutenant governor is.
Second… “This is a reform I pushed for all through the campaign…” Well, whoop-te-do. Some of us have been pushing it a lot longer than that — like since you were in school. I’ve been pushing this for more than 20 years. (As have a lot of other people.) But you don’t see me getting bent out of shape because I’m not given credit for it.

Maybe I should. Maybe this is what one does now. Maybe I should run over the Facebook and throw a total snit…

Rawl defends Georgia dredging decision

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South Carolina Chamber of Commerce President Otis Rawl — who two years ago led his organization to make the unprecedented move of endorsing Vincent Sheheen for governor — today stuck up for Nikki Haley for something virtually no one at the State House will defend her on.

Speaking to the Columbia Rotary Club, he said the DHEC decision allowing Georgia to deepen the way to the port of Savannah was not a game-changer, and not a problem, for South Carolina in the long term.

In saying this, he was partly reflecting the wishes of multistate members who like the idea of competition between ports to keep costs down. But he also said it was a competition that Charleston, and South Carolina, would win.

To start with, he said, the proposed work would only deepen the Georgia port to 48 feet, compared to Charleston’s 52 — and that those four feet made a big difference. Further, he said that if South Carolina makes the right moves (always a huge caveat, but he seemed optimistic) we are well-positioned to become the entry point for the world to the Southeast, and an ever-greater distribution hub. One of the things SC has to get right — opening up the “parking lot” that I-26 has become at key times between Charleston and Columbia.

Otis agreed with me that this stance makes him a lonely guy over at the State House, where both houses almost unanimously rebuked the governor for, as many members would have it, selling out South Carolina to Georgia. Aside from Otis, only Cindi Scoppe has raised questions that challenge that conventional wisdom.

Now, lest you think ol’ Otie has gone soft on the Sanford/Haley wing of the GOP, he went on to say that one of the things business and political leaders must do to help build the SC economy is to refute, challenge and combat the Big Lie that our public schools are among the worst in the country. Because who in the world would want to invest in a state like that?

Not that we’re where we want to be, but as Otie pointed out, on realistic measures of quality, SC is more likely to rank in the low 30s. Which may not be fantastic, but is a far cry from “Thank God for Mississippi.”

On the whole, a fine set of assumption-challenging points from today’s Rotary speaker…

Protesters take aim at leadership

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The other night at the 100th episode of “Pub Politics,” Corey Hutchins was brandishing a wad of bills like the one you see above. He gave me one, which I stuck in my pocket. (I didn’t need cash right then, on account of the beer being free at this shindig.)

I thought at the time that he said he’d gotten it at an Occupy Columbia event (the room was noisy, so it’s hard to tell exactly what he said). But it’s more complicated than that. Here’s an excerpt from what he later wrote about it:

John Crangle stood on a Sumter Street sidewalk in the rain and pointed at some of the most powerful people in state government as they got out of nice cars and hurried toward the entrance of a tall building where a large political action committee was holding a fundraiser on the 20th floor.

He was part of a small protest group – about six people – holding signs and questioning the politicos as they arrived for the party. At issue was the nature of the fundraising group, the Palmetto Leadership Council, a non-candidate committee tied to S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell.

Crangle is the director of Common Cause of South Carolina, and his government watchdog group was partnering with members of Occupy Columbia and the South Carolina Progressive Network in picketing the affair.

They accused the PAC of shaking down corporations with interests before the Legislature at the tacit behest of the House Speaker, one of South Carolina’s most powerful politicians.

The PAC has raised nearly $1 million since it was created in 2004. That money has gone to fund candidates – mostly incumbents – and it also gave the state Republican Party $100,000.

The demonstrators argued that politicians like Harrell are using PACs such as the Palmetto Leadership Council as a way to skirt campaign finance limits. A corporation or individual or entity is only allowed to donate $1,000 to a candidate running for the S.C. House or Senate because of finance rules. If they want to donate more, though, they can donate to the PAC and the PAC can turn around and donate to the candidate…

Corey told me today that we should expect to hear more about this issue in the coming days. He said it looked like the MSM was getting interested.

Statement from “Lt. Governor McConnell” (might as well get used to hearing that, if you can)

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This came in a few minutes ago:

Statement by Lt. Governor McConnell

(COLUMBIA) In response to questions that have been raised about whether Lt. Governor Glenn McConnell might offer as a candidate for re-election to the South Carolina Senate, Lt. Governor McConnell issued the following statement:

“My heart has been touched by the hundreds of citizens in the Charleston area, from all walks of life, who have urged me to launch a campaign to regain my seat in the State Senate. I have dedicated the last thirty-one years of my life to serving as a Senator. Selfishly speaking, I would love to return to that position of honor. And no mere words can express how deeply grateful I am to the good people from my District for the trust they have placed in me.

However, I cannot in good conscience offer for re-election to the Senate this year. The timing of this constitutional succession makes it impossible for me to consider any other course.

On Tuesday, I took an oath of office to discharge the duties of Lt. Governor. The task of executing an orderly transition in that office and making certain its duties and responsibilities are properly organized requires a major effort over a considerable period of time. To regain my seat in the Senate, I would have to file for re-election literally within a few days and launch a campaign immediately. I cannot do that.

It is vitally important for those of us engaged in public service to keep our promises, uphold the rule of law, and honor the oaths we take. I vacated my Senate seat because the oath I took as President Pro Tempore required me to do so, Now I believe the oath I took as Lt. Governor requires me to make a good faith effort for a reasonable period of time to fulfill the duties of that office. Therefore, I will not offer as a candidate for election for Senate District 41 this year.

I know not what the future holds. All I can say for sure is that I have loved serving the people of Senate District 41. It is an honor that has occupied most of my adult life. With all my heart, I thank my neighbors for allowing me to represent them in the South Carolina Senate. And beginning immediately, I will do all I can to serve the people of South Carolina well as their new Lt. Governor.”

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So even though it means giving up the chance to “return” to a “position of honor,” he’s now committed to making the most of the Gov Lite post. I suppose we’ll now see what can be done with that position by someone who knows how.

But I just can’t get over seeing his name after that title…