Allegations highlight main difference
between Sanford and Moore

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

EVERYBODY likes Tom Davis. He’s open, sincere, hard-working and honest as the day is long. That makes him a good emissary for Gov. Mark Sanford.
    As legislative liaison during the session, Tom (I can’t call such an approachable guy “Mr. Davis”) is the one bright, warm spot in the governor’s four-year Cold War with the General Assembly. Lawmakers may sometimes use him as a whipping boy because he’s handy and the governor isn’t (that’s him above standing at the back of the House above, watching lawmakers rip into the governor’s veto of the budget this year), but no one stays mad at Tom for long. He’s too nice a guy.
    Sen. Tommy Moore calls Tom Davis a “hired gun.” Not by name. That’s just how he refers to the person responsible for a “white paper” released by the Sanford campaign that attacks his performance in the Senate.
    Tom’s no hired gun; he wouldn’t wear the black hat in anybody’s Western. He’s the faithful sidekick. He has neglected his law practice in Beaufort — and, more importantly to him, his family — for the past four years to help his friend Mark Sanford.
    But he is the guy going around and peddling a set of detailed allegations against Sen. Moore. (You can find a link to Cindi Scoppe’s column on the subject Friday, and to the entire “white paper,” on my blog.)
    The allegations go back to 1988. Sen. Moore is accused of letting a bribery-tainted tax cut slip by him; of watering down ethics legislation after the Lost Trust scandals in the early ’90s; of continuing to hamper efforts to plug ethics loopholes since then; and of supporting a bill that would benefit a company that contributed to his campaigns and was proposing a development in his district. With supporting documents (mostly old news stories from The State and other papers), the handout runs to 45 pages.
    And this is only the beginning. “This isn’t exhaustive,” Tom says. He plans additional “white papers” on the environment, education and possibly other issues.
    Tom’s been working at this since the June 13 primary — poring through Lexis-Nexis, digging articles out of newspapers’ electronic archives. He seems to have enjoyed the change of pace after months of standing at the back of the House and Senate chambers and watching fellow Republicans roll right over his boss on issue after issue: “To me, it was like reading a very, very detailed historical novel.”
    But why would a governor who is 30 points ahead in the polls (according to Tom) go to this kind of trouble to dig up such detailed allegations? Was it, as some speculated at first, a sign of how nervous Mr. Sanford was about a Jake Knotts candidacy that didn’t materialize? No, says Tom; polls showed Sen. Moore losing more votes to Sen. Knotts than the governor would have.
    “Desperate people employ desperate tactics,” says Sen. Moore. “It sounds to me like some people have looked at some poll numbers” and that they weren’t as favorable as Tom lets on. He doesn’t know this, though, as he has yet to get out there with a baseline poll himself — a measure of how far behind he is in fund-raising. It reminds him of former Gov. Jim Hodges’ decision to attack challenger Sanford practically from the day after the primary four years ago. “I thought it was ill-conceived and unwise,” said Sen. Moore. “He must have the Hodges playbook.”
    But Tom’s “white paper” is actually of great value to the voters, for one reason: It highlights the main difference between the two candidates.
    “I don’t think he’s a bad man,” says Tom. “I don’t think he took bribes. I think it (the 1988 tax break) got in the budget because he didn’t read the budget.”
    Note this from the first line of the release: “Sen. Moore’s legislative record shows that he was inattentive to details, easily misled and unconcerned about (providing) legislative due diligence in reviewing legislation….”
    Time and time again, what you see and hear is this contrast:
    Mark Sanford is a stickler for detail. In preparing his executive budget, he challenges every line in an excruciating process that lasts months. (“Every line,” complains Tom. “It’s hell for me.”) Then, when lawmakers pass a budget that he doesn’t like, he vetoes the entire thing rather than work with them to come up with something mutually acceptable. His six-year career in Congress was marked by an utter lack of achievement; he’s remembered for sleeping on a futon, and talking endlessly about Social Security reform that never materialized. He is admired for being uncompromising, even though that means he gets little done.
    Tommy Moore (below, with long-time Senate Chaplain George Meetze) is respected as the “go-to” guy in the Senate. He is regularly appointed to conference committees because he is known for rescuing legislation by getting people of differing views to find something they can agree on and take action. As a result, his 28-year career in the Senate offers much to praise, and much to criticize. Of the 1991 Ethics Reform Act, he says, “You had a lot of people working together,” from the governor and other ardent reformers to lawmakers who didn’t want to pass anything. “You could have had everybody stand firm on their own positions, and then you would have gotten nothing done, and that would have been the absolute worst of all scenarios.”
    To him it would, but not necessarily to Gov. Sanford. There’s the contrast. Tom’s whole point in his 45-page broadside is that “there are bad sides to being the insider who gets things done.”
    But as Sen. Moore points out, there are good things as well.
    Which do you prefer? You have to decide by November.

    More on the subject.

To kill a theoretical gnat,
Sanford drops the Big One

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

FACED WITH global terrorism, the United States, in keeping with its values, drops smart bombs — doing as much as advanced technology will allow to kill mass murderers, and not the noncombatants they hide among.
    Straining at a gnat of his own invention, Gov. Mark Sanford — in keeping with his values — drops the Big One on all of South Carolina.
    Sure, he knew the Legislature had the power to disarm the bomb before it did away with the entire state government. But whether legislators wanted to save the day was up to them. If they had neglected to do their duty the way he abdicated his (if even a third of either the House or the Senate had called his bluff), it would have gone off.
    Not that the governor expected for a moment that they would do that. He counted on them overriding his veto of the entire budget. He’s not insane; he’s just willing to place demagoguery ahead of responsibility.
    The governor knows there must be a government for there to be a civilization in which he is free to engage in politics as a hobby. What he disagrees with the Legislature about is the size of government. Nothing wrong with that, right? We’re dealing with that question every time we argue whether the government should do this, or not do that.
    But that’s not what the governor did. He decided that the government, as measured by expenditures, should grow by no more than this precise percentage.
    The number he picks has nothing to do with the essential demands that a civilization places on government. It’s not based on the number of children to educate, or the number of miles to be paved and patrolled, or the number of prisoners that we decide to lock up, or the number of mentally ill people wandering about.
    No, it’s based on an esoteric calculation involving the functions of inflation and population. He says his growth number is based on “the people’s ability to sustain it.” Never mind that some populations need more cops because they have more criminals per capita, or that a population whose pay is trailing the nation has a greater need to invest in education. Never mind a thousand other ways that the illogic of his proposition can be illustrated. He says you, the taxpayer, shouldn’t have to pay out more than what he says you can afford.
    Sound good? Oh, yeah. On the hustings, it plays much better than actually using your line-item veto power to get as close as you can to your arbitrary number. That would upset voters, because each cut you made would be into something that some of them deem essential. Why not just veto the whole thing, knowing the Legislature will override you, and go into the fall talking about how those people grew government faster than your ability to pay.
    This way, essential functions get sort-of funded (if you think they’re fully funded, count the number of cars ignoring the speed limit in full knowledge there aren’t enough troopers). Legislators still get their pork, rather than anybody forcing them to take a straight-up vote on whether the money would have been better spent on essentials. The governor gets re-elected as the guy who would save you from high taxes and overspending, if only those people would let him.
    Win-win, for everyone but the 4 million people who live in a state that has never gotten it together and set priorities so that it can catch up to the rest of the nation.
    I’ve now blown off enough steam that I can give the governor credit for a couple of things.
He did do the hard work, before the session, of going through state programs dollar-by-dollar — something the Legislature ought to do — and presented a theoretical budget that met his arbitrary figure. A governor should set out his statewide vision, and he did.
    And the Legislature built the budget the way it always does, in big chunks, which meant the governor could not veto some of the specific programs he didn’t like without vetoing others he did like.
    There’s no bigger advocate in this state than I for putting the executive functions of government in the hands of the elected chief executive. Mark Sanford is a slacker on that, compared to me.
    But in any rational republican system, it’s the Legislature’s job to draft a budget. Assuming that lawmakers should simply adopt the governor’s spending vision and go home, without speaking up for the voters who sent them, is to go far beyond the limits of even the most fervid advocates of executive power. It would take us to the point of monarchy.
    To say that the legislative branch had to do it his way or not at all is outrageous. To say that if the government isn’t precisely the size that Mark Sanford wants it to be, there should be no government at all, is horrific.
    You say he expected the Legislature to override him? But in terms of raw, calculating political hypocrisy, that’s even worse than being a head-in-the-sky ideologue who doesn’t know the real-life consequences of his actions.
    Consider this sequence: The governor spent the last days of the primary campaign ignoring his opponent, and running against the General Assembly. His beef was that legislators did not break precedent and stay in town so that he could give them his vetoes, so their votes to sustain or override would be there before the voters on election day. He pontificated mightily on their failure to be accountable.
    Then, when they chose instead to go home and actually face the voters before election day instead of doing his bidding, he took full advantage of the extra time that gave him. He waited until after the polls were closed and the votes counted, and he was safely renominated, before dropping his Big One. He had to do it by midnight that night, so he did it between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. And so Republican primary voters had no opportunity to hold him accountable for what he did with his veto power.
    I thought Mark Sanford was better than this. I really did. Now I don’t.