FYI, Mark Sanford will be making his first live broadcast appearance since the fateful press conference on Keven Cohen’s show today at 5 on WVOC.
You can listen to it here if you don’t have a radio. If you do, it’s at 560 AM.
Y’all know I like Joe Biden, but he does tend to say things without a lot of forethought. Such as this:
(AP) Trumpeting economic progress to a skeptical nation, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden says the massive government program intended to stimulate and reshape the economy is reaching and exceeding goals.
Nearly 200 days into the effort, Biden says it is more effective “than we had hoped.”
Biden’s upbeat report card, to be delivered Thursday in a speech at the Brookings Institution, comes as economists say the United States is slowly breaking free of the most crippling recession in decades. Yet public angst is also deepening about the cost of government intervention, and millions of people remain out of work.
Of course, that may have had lots of forethought. He might be the designated guy in the administration to go a bit further than POTUS himself can go, and see if it gets saluted. It’s certainly a role to which Joe is suited, and a typical one for the Veep.
But it goes too far for me. I get turned off by either those who are too quick to say the stimulus has failed, or those who overstate its positive effect. Truth is, we don’t know yet. And may never know. Aren’t we still debating whether the New Deal pulled us out of the Great Depression?
Of course, my own situation may cause me to be a bit jaded on the subject. But I think I’m looking at it realistically.
Speaking of reality, here’s a cold dose of it: I ran into Sen. Hugh Leatherman at breakfast this morning. He was in town for a Budget and Control Board meeting, which I think he tends to dread these days because it always means another fruitless argument with the governor. (Here’s something interesting to watch: How much longer will Rich Eckstrom continue to back the gov, with re-election coming up next year?)
Anyway, I said something about my worry that prospective employers are hesitant to hire me, or anyone, until the economy warms back up, and the Senate Finance Chair said he doubted that would happen in S.C. until another year has passed. Or maybe two. He may be right, but I know I can’t wait that long. Nor can a lot of other people.
On that subject, Sen. Leatherman said he was recently talking to an economic development prospect, and the head of the company asked him, Isn’t South Carolina the state where a business prospect wanted to talk to the governor, but the governor ditched the meeting to go see his mistress in Argentina? Is that what doing business in South Carolina is like?
The senator said no, that’s not what South Carolina is like. But he hears that sort of thing a lot, unfortunately.
If you wonder whether our governor can hit new lows, you should depend on him. He can, and will:
Gov. Mark Sanford says he told “a little white lie” to his staff to conceal his secret trip to Argentina in June to visit his lover. The governor also says God is on his side, and he has no intentions of resigning…
That is drawn from an interview in The Washington Times. Goldang them pointy-headed liberal newspapers!
The governor’s narcissistic, never-failing willingness to excuse himself boggled the minds even of the Times‘ editors; their headline was “S.C. Gov. Sanford says God on his side.” He also, in the piece, claims to know how Sarah Palin feels. At least he doesn’t claim Sarah is his “soulmate,” for which we are thankful.
You see, our governor apologizes, and lightly flogs himself publicly (in rituals less convincing that that of Henry II), but he doesn’t mean it, because his life experience has not given him understanding of consequences. In his mind, anyone who thinks he should resign (which should be the minimal consequence, given his actions) has something wrong with him (or her) — ulterior political motivation or whatever. In his mind, surely no fair-minded person would want him, Mark Sanford, to suffer consequences. Not a tall, rich white guy who hasn’t had to do any actual work this decade (or most of the decade before, near as I can tell) … not him…
I don’t know how far Dwight Drake‘s going to make it in his gubernatorial bid, but he seems to have made up his mind to have a good time along the way.
Check out his video above. If the imbed doesn’t work, here’s a link…
Hmmm… After taking up the cudgels for John O’Connor and others in the media whom my friend Peter Hamby says the governor “lashed out” at and “blasted” today, I saw the video clip above.
What I saw, and what you will probably see as well, is the usual, casual, lollygaggin’ Mark Sangfroid delivery, delivered complete with little chuckles thrown in — not exactly a foaming rant. (Which means that, while I hear the guy really has a temper, I still have never really seen it fully on display.) More of a passive-aggressive sort of delivery.
Missing is what in text seems like the worst part of the session, which is what really set me off (everyone knows I have a temper), and which Peter describes thusly:
Sanford singled out John O’Connor — a political reporter for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The State — and accused the newspaper of covering the political back-and-forth over the travel controversy while skimming over Sanford’s arguments defending himself.
Sanford took one question, but refused several others. But when O’Connor asked a question about private flights that Sanford failed to report on public disclosures, the governor became irritable.
“John, we’re not going to play your game,” he said, jabbing his finger in the reporter’s direction. “I don’t work for you.”
Wish that part was on the video.
Now, I just think Sanford was taking unfair advantage of his bully pulpit to make the press the issue rather than his own misconduct. But he did it without the ill grace of a Spiro Agnew. He was affable about it. Which means he still has his equanimity. Which you can see as good or bad. Personally, I’d like to see a guy who was feeling that pressure and moving a little closer to changing his mind about himself. But I don’t see that, either.
What do y’all think?
Today, our governor, increasingly detached from reality, lashed out at the media. At least, he did according to CNN’s Peter Hamby:
(CNN) – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford lashed out at the media on Friday, admonishing reporters at a press conference for their coverage of the multiple investigations into his travel expenses.
“One of the frankly disappointing things I’ve seen in several instances here over the last 60 days of my life since I’ve been through this thing is that in some cases it’s not been about objective journalism, its been about advocacy journalism with an agenda,” he said.
Sanford was in the town of Conway revealing his plans to waive confidentiality in a state Ethics Commission investigation into his use of state airplanes and taxpayer-funded travel, a move that will allow to the public to view the results of the probe.
But the governor, who has adopted an increasingly combative tone in recent days, also blasted members of the state legislature for being hypocritical, accusing them of spending state money on travel as well. He called on members of Senate and House to make their travel documents public.
Then he turned his sights on the South Carolina press corps, with whom he had a largely cordial relationship before he turned the state’s political world upside down in June by copping to an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. He chided the media for its coverage of his travel record and said he has been an excellent steward of taxpayer money, unlike previous administrations…
… and I trust Peter’s account. He’s young, but steady.
The nerve of this guy Mark Sanford. With all of this insanity that he’s dragged us through because of his own narcissistic little drama, and which he keeps dragging us through, he has the unmitigated gall to lash out at the hard-working people who are merely reporting it to the people of South Carolina. Every day, he amazes me a little more.
I call your attention in particular to this passage:
Sanford singled out John O’Connor — a political reporter for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The State — and accused the newspaper of covering the political back-and-forth over the travel controversy while skimming over Sanford’s arguments defending himself.
Sanford took one question, but refused several others. But when O’Connor asked a question about private flights that Sanford failed to report on public disclosures, the governor became irritable.
“John, we’re not going to play your game,” he said, jabbing his finger in the reporter’s direction. “I don’t work for you.”
Ah, but see, governor, that’s the thing — you do work for John. And you also work for the other four million-plus people of this state, which includes Andre Bauer, and most emphatically includes the many, many of us who believe your one great remaining chance to perform a service for this state is to take Andre up on his offer and resign. If you do that, we no longer have to be subjected to this farce of having you as governor, and will be spared the risk of having Andre elected in 2010.
But as each day goes by, with each outburst from you that we witness or hear of, our hope that you will come to your senses and do the right thing fades.
We deserve better than this.
It occurs to me that maybe too much of my energy that could go into making my blog better is going into Twitter.
Traditionally, I get a lot of my blog ideas when I’m reading the papers over breakfast in the morning. That first cup of coffee coinciding with the reading generally leads to far more ideas than I have time for. I used to stew through the morning meeting, which came right after breakfast, when I was at the paper because I was anxious to get to the computer and start putting some of the ideas on the blog before my enthusiasm (or the coffee, whichever you want to think of it as) wore off.
Now, since I started Twittering, I just go ahead and post a lot of the ideas as they occur to me, on my Blackberry, while eating. Which is great, I guess. Except that this gets each of those ideas out of my system, and by the time I’m at my laptop (It’s possible to blog on the Blackberry, but it’s a LOT harder), my mind has moved on.
So they don’t go totally to waste, bleeding off into the Twitter void, I decided to reproduce this morning’s tweets here, improved with links to the original sources of these brief comments.
You’ll see that only one was developed into a full-fledged blog post. The others I share for whatever minimal value they have:
And as a bonus, here’s one I just posted:
Check it out — I have a new Webcam. And so today, I decided to go with some video commentary rather than do all that tedious typing.
But to add a little something to this clip, here are some links to what I’m talking about:
Andre Bauer’s press conference today was pretty much as advertised. I dropped by to check it out on my way to the job fair today at the State Museum.
Above is some sketchy video from my Blackberry. (And just to show how good I am to y’all, here is much higher-quality video at thestate.com.) You can see me shooting it, my arm obscuring my face, in the photo below by Tim Dominick of The State. You may be able to tell that the turnout on the part of media types was somewhat sparser than for the now-infamous Sanford press conference that started all this rolling.
No, excuse me: What started it rolling was Gina Smith catching the gov at the Atlanta airport getting off the plane from Argentina. Had that not happened, there would have been no confession, and we’d probably still be in the dark. Gina was at today’s press confab, and I was able to congratulate her for the S.C. Scoop of the Century. I’ve had some pretty good stories in my lengthy career, and put one over on the competition a few times in my reporting days. But rare is the reporter who can say that something this broke purely because she was on the spot in the right place at the right time. Sure, the credit goes to teamwork — someone else got the tip that the governor had been seen in Argentina, and the folks at The State determined that there was a chance he’d be on this flight — but the glory goes to Gina.
Anyway, the Andre thing told us pretty much what we knew. In essence:
So, if ANYBODY has any influence over Mark Sanford (something which I doubt, unless his “soulmate” chooses to weigh in; this guy is singularly immune to what other people think), now would be a really good time to try to get him to quit.
How about it, Gov? (2006 file photo by Brad Warthen)
The State is trumpeting the latest word from Gov Lite Andre Bauer that he would NOT run for governor in 2010 if only we’ll let him serve in the job as a temp between now and then:
EXCLUSIVE – Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer plans to call on embattled Gov. Mark Sanford to step down during a noon news conference today. Bauer will also renew his pledge to bow out of the 2010 gubernatorial race should Sanford resign within a month or so. By early October Bauer will formally announce his intentions to seek the GOP nomination for governor in 2010.
Bauer is the first constitutional officer to join a growing chorus of lawmakers pushing for Sanford to resign, including a majority of Republican state senators.
Today’s announcement, according to a source close to Bauer, is intended to send a message to State House leadership that Sanford needs to step down and Bauer won’t stand in the way. Some lawmakers have been hesitant to push for Sanford’s resignation because it would give Bauer an unfair advantage in the 2010 race, as he would be running for governor as an incumbent.
There are several points to make about this development:
What do y’all think?
Not really.
That’s just the punch line that my old buddy Michael Feldman is using on current promo spots for his show on public radio.
I pass it on because it provides a measurement of just how much of an automatic laughingstock we have become in South Carolina, thanks to the tireless exertions of our governor. You don’t even have to say “Mark Sanford.” You can just refer to him indirectly, at a step or two remove (in this case, the only connection is that he was until recently a fellow member of the same group to which ex-Gov. Palin still belongs, which I suppose we could describe as “marginal people whom the national media have inexplicably decided to regard as serious contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination”), and still get a laugh.
So this is what we’ve come to.
Just when you thought there weren’t any ways left to look at the Sanford scandal, along comes the Vogue treatment of Jenny Sanford as the wronged woman America loves and admires most.
The glamour shot above is just the beginning. An excerpt:
Early this past summer, just as the world was savoring the news that yet another conservative Republican politician had tumbled from grace in a manner worthy of the best French farce—“hiking the Appalachian Trail” will never have the same meaning—there emerged an unlikely hero in the mess down in South Carolina. Petite, clear-eyed, strong-willed, pious without being smug, smart without being caustic, Jenny Sanford became an unlikely heroine by telling the simple truth. Her children were the most important thing in the world to her. She had kicked the lying bum out of the house when he refused to give up his mistress, but marriage is complex, life is hard, and if he wanted to try and make the marriage work, the door was open.
Her one-page statement saying as much was written without the help of spin doctors or media consultants. It came from her heart and her head. It mentioned God without making you squirm. The world took note. Newsweek dubbed her a “media genius”; The Washington Post hailed her as “a new role model for wronged spouses.” On television, Diane Sawyer called her classy, praising her “grace in the glare.” While her husband was giving overly emotional press conferences about soul mates and impossible love, Sanford kept her mouth shut and her head down. Just as the scandal was finally dying down, she agreed to sit with Vogue and set the record straight about what really happened in the low country of South Carolina….
… to which I can only say, which is it, Vogue — “hero” or “heroine?” (I would recommend the latter, but then I’m such an unreconstructed language chauvinist.) I knew that newspapers were short on editors, but Vogue?…
Anyway, more power to Jenny, say I. I’m still waiting for someone to start cranking out those special “WWJD” bracelets…
So we learned the following about our governor in this morning’s paper:
The governor made his first actual public appearance since he started putting out his weekly schedule. It was a staged event to dramatize a political point he wanted to make, but hey, at least people got to see him being governor.
The governor used his first public appearance, in part, to ask to change the subject. Yes, this from the guy who did the two-parter with AP to talk unnecessarily about his “soulmate.”
As of this morning, the governor had worked only 14 of the last 24 “workdays.”
And then this afternoon, we learned that the governor is leaving tomorrow on a two week European vacation with the fam. Yes, I hear you that it was planned in advance and the kids had saved up for it, but still. This is, like, his third vacation since all the craziness started — or since we learned about it. (Or is it fourth? I lose count.)
So, when he gets back from this one, that will be like what — 15 out of 34 working days on the job? I need more details to get the count right.
“Obviously, critics will criticize,” says the gov. Yes, they will. As previously noted, every day that this guy technically holds onto his office is like Christmas to the state’s Democrats.
The governor also said that one nice thing about this vacation is that it will get the kids away from reading about the scandal.
You know what? I have some advice: Governor, if you want to change the subject, then change the subject. You’re the governor. Do something. Make some news. Do your freaking job for a change, instead of all this constant wallowing.
Instead, the governor is as usual absent when other public officials are trying to move our state forward. The State, in noting that the governor had extended his most recent vacation by a day, mentioned his absence from a huge announcement earlier this week:
Sanford was notably absent Monday from a press conference the University of South Carolina held to announce an agreement to lease space in its Moore School of Business to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The agreement will provide resources for USC to build a $90 million new business school building, something university and local officials have been working on for years.
Monday’s news conference included much of Columbia’s powerful — USC President Harris Pastides, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and state Sen. John Courson.
But no Sanford.
But what would have been shocking is if the governor had been there. He doesn’t have the time of day for the university and its doings. Had he been there, he probably would have grumbled, seeing as how he doesn’t think government should be promoting the economy. He just believes in “soil conditions,” which does not, as you might think, mean creating an educated workforce or having the kinds of amenities that make people want to do business in your state. He just means “tax cuts.”
It would never occur to the governor to change the subject by positively engaging issues that are important to our state. He doesn’t believe in that stuff.
That's Joel at right, with his hand on the governor's arm.
Looks like I’ll have to contact somebody else to add me to the e-mail distribution list for the gov’s weekly schedules. Press spokesman Joel Sawyer, whom the governor left high and dry with no hint of where he actually was when he went AWOL, is leaving that increasingly thankless job, according to The State:
Gov. Mark Sanford’s communications director, Joel Sawyer, said today he is leaving for an unspecified private-sector job, effective Aug. 5.
Sawyer said his decision to leave his $65,000-a-year job had nothing to do with Sanford’s recent six-day disappearance and the Republican governor’s subsequent disclosure of an affair with an Argentine woman.
“I want to be crystal clear that my departure is purely about what’s best for me and my family on a personal and financial level,” Sawyer said in a statement. “I wish Mark and the rest of my talented and dedicated colleagues the best.”
I’d like to take this opportunity to say that, while we may have disagreed about some things, Joel Sawyer was always thoroughly professional in my dealings with him. I would trust him with my life — in fact, I have. I hope he found a great new job.
This morning, The State continued to mine the e-mails and phone records it has FOIed from the governor’s office. We learned among other things that Commerce Secretary Joe Taylor was hunting for Sanford when he went MIA last year with his girlfriend.
My former paper also had a story about what I wrote about yesterday — the fact that the governor is taking time off from work yet again. I particularly liked what Boyd Brown had to say:
“I thought he was going to focus on getting the state back on track,” said state Rep. Boyd Brown, D-Fairfield. “It doesn’t sound like he’s with the program.”
Sanford canceled a meeting with John Rainey, chairman of the Board of Economic Advisors, to discuss state revenue data. Sawyer said Sanford’s canceled meetings will be rescheduled….
Another concern is the state’s 12.1 percent jobless rate, tied for third-highest in the nation. New jobless numbers are expected Friday. E-mails released by the governor’s office show Sanford declined at least one meeting with a company looking to expand its S.C. operations because he was in Argentina.“It might be a wise idea for the governor to be out of town when the new unemployment numbers come out,” Brown said.
You can say that again.
But the most meaningful part of the story, to me, was this:
Since June 18, when he left for Argentina, Sanford has spent 12 of 28 calendar days in Columbia or on the road on gubernatorial duties, according to his governor’s office. Sanford did not work on six of 19 business days during that period.
The rest of Sanford’s time has been spent at his Sullivan’s Island home or on family retreats.
Twelve out of the last 28 days actually on the job… Folks, I’ve been unemployed since March, and I haven’t had the spare time to so much as go to the beach for a day. I’m busy on a freelance job today (which I’m about to get back to), and I’ll be busy tomorrow, and I’ll continue to stay busy until I land a full-time job, and will be busy for a long time after that.
But I’ve always had trouble understanding the governor’s work ethic. When he first started running for governor, he had been out of Congress for a couple of years. I asked him then what he had been doing. “Nothing,” he said, adding something about hanging out with the boys, changing diapers.
I think it’s great for a man to spend time with his family. A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man. And Mark Sanford right now really needs to be working on that. But at some point, we have to talk about the fact that the man is being paid to do a job, and he wasn’t doing it very well to start with …
Just a quick note about the latest header picture on my Home page.
This was taken by Jim Hammond of SCBiz (formerly of The State) during the gov’s confessional press conference on June 24. I’m there representing The New York Post. Around me you can see Temple Ligon of the Columbia Star (to my right, your left), Tim Smith with The Greenville News (cowboy hat), Peter Hamby of CNN, John O’Connor of The State (on crutches) and Mary Ann Chastain with The Associated Press (photographer, far right of photo).
You know the rest of the story.
A working journalist friend has been forwarding me the governor’s public schedule, and she’s tired of doing it, and says I should just ask Joel (Sawyer, the gov’s press guy) to send them straight to me, and I haven’t asked him yet. Do you think he’ll send me one? Am I, as a blogger, sufficiently legit? We’ll see. When I get around to it. I’m kinda busy job-hunting and stuff.
But if he’s going to refuse to send one to anybody, it will be the folks over at the state Democratic Party. I mean, the poor guy tries to take a few days with the wife (he just sent out a new schedule postponing the rest of the week’s appointments so he can have some time with Jenny) under extremely trying circumstances, and they get all over his case:
SC Dems Outraged By Sanford Second Summer Vacation
Columbia, SC – South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler released the following statement today in response to Governor Mark Sanford taking another vacation after being back on the job for less than a month. Sanford canceled pending work for the rest of the week.
“A good many South Carolina families with out-of-work breadwinners had been hoping their governor would stick around and look for ways to bring more jobs to the state. He’s essentially been off the job for a month, and now he’s off again for a week’s vacation.
“Of course, unlike most South Carolinians, Mark Sanford gets paid whether he shows up for work or not. Once again it’s clear that there is one set of rules for Sanford and another set of rules for everyone else,” said Fowler.
Now, you see, Sanford’s thinking about now, this is why I didn’t put out public schedules before now…
I strongly suspect that — apart from when he was doing his executive budgets, which he was very obsessive about, and I mean that in a good way — one reason the gov never put out schedules before was because they would have looked kinda thin. I don’t know that; I just infer it from all the complaints I got from people who said this governor wouldn’t meet with them, unlike previous governors. Such as the folks over at Employment Security, who can be seen complaining about that very thing on this video.
So unless the governor starts doing a lot of gubernatorial stuff he didn’t used to do, his public schedules are going to give his critics lots of ammo. Which is why South Carolina’s Democrats are so thrilled that he keeps saying he’s not going to resign. They really, really want this state of affairs to continue through the 2010 election. It’s like Christmas every day for them.
Here’s Mark Sanford’s second-ever public schedule. Still no actual public events, but there’s no news in that — he never has been much of one for such events. One of the minor complaints I’ve gotten about this guy since Day One was that he has a tendency not to go to the kind of schoozing events that most politicians love.
One reason I predicted a couple of weeks back to ETV that he would decide soon to resign was because he has NEVER liked the “being on display” thing. This is a guy who would MUCH rather be digging holes on the “farm” than interacting with humans. Since a governor of South Carolina can get away with doing very little, it wasn’t so hard on him, until the Argentina trip. I predicted that it wouldn’t take long before, with all this new scrutiny, he would decide it wasn’t worth it. Not because of people demanding he resign or anything, but just because it wasn’t worth it to him. Perhaps, if he ever starts having actual public events, my prediction will turn out to be correct. But so far, I missed the call. (If you want to see actual video of me getting it wrong, click here.)
I’ve always figured that the reason his office didn’t put out a public schedule was that they didn’t want anyone to notice just how little he did in public — or worse, how little he did in private, either.
But with the new “openness,” he’s putting them out — sort of. Here is his list of chores for the week, without days or times — just stuff he says he’ll do sometime this week:
Gov. Sanford’s Public Schedule – Mon., July 13 – Fri., July 17, 2009
Columbia, S.C. – July 13, 2009 – No public events are currently scheduled for this week, but we will advise individually for any event added. Gov. Sanford will be working in Columbia for the week, with intermittent trips to Sullivan’s Island.
Meetings and briefings Gov. Sanford will take part in this week include:
– Meeting with staff and First Steps Director Susan DeVenny regarding the potential transfer of the Baby Net program from DHEC to First Steps
– Meeting with new Emergency Management Division Director Ricky Platt, who was named recently to succeed retiring director Ron Osborne
– Briefing by Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom regarding the work of the Stimulus Oversight Task Force
– Briefing by Board of Economic Advisors Chairman John Rainey regarding revenue forecasts in advance of the following week’s BEA meeting
– Receive a revenue update from state Department of Revenue Director Ray Stevens
– Receive an economic development briefing from Secretary of Commerce Joe Taylor and Deputy Secretary for New Investment Jack Ellenberg
– Briefing by Department of Social Services Director Kathleen Hayes regarding the upcoming release of an LAC audit of DSS.
-###-
… my high school classmate Burl Burlingame, who actually still has a newspaper job (30 years with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin), is taking note of our governor’s doings (and what I’ve been saying about them):
Fascinating Apathy
Written by Burl on July 10th, 2009
Brad Warthen may not be a classic good ol’ boy, but he’s a good ol’ Brad. Headlong in the blogging game after being riffed by South Carolina’s The State newspaper, he’s keeping us up to date on the resident weirdness of Gov. Mark Sanford. Naturally, The State never needed him more these days.
Yesterday, the folks who want Sanford to abdicate held a rally, and pretty much no one came. Now, we have our own governor who’s acting oddly — so much so it’s a topic of discussion — but Sanford is something else.
I don’t care that Sanford is having an affair. Even if he’s a complete hypocrite about it, having viciously chastised President Clinton in the past. These Type A politicians seem to always be having something on the side. President Kennedy was boinking a different bimbo every night, Wilbur Mills was bouncing stripper Fanne Fox, Grover Cleveland was busy siring little Clevelands elsewhere, and we all know who Thomas Jefferson was galloping.
Deal is, despite all the tut-tut, affairs are a fact of life. Sometimes they might even be necessary.
The ew-ew-ew thing about Sanford is not that he’s been thrown for a loop by his heart, but that, as far as affairs go, the guy is wildly incompetent. We want our leaders to be human beings, but we also want them to be smarter and more accomplished than we are. There are meth-addict doorway dwellers who poop in public who are more capable of keeping their affairs discreet than this governor.
Sanford is acting like he needs to be wearing a helmet and a leash. His mistress is in Argentina, for cripes sake. No one would have ever figured it out if he’d had a lick of smartness. The only thing the South Carolina legislature should be debating is whether they need road signs up in Columbia that say SLOW GOVERNOR AT PLAY.
To which I felt compelled to reply:
July 10, 2009 at 9:02 am
Hey, and Burl, don’t forget to tell your readers in Hawaii that ol’ Brad is a graduate of Radford High School, class of ’71.
One thing about our governor… yes, he’s incompetent. Those meth-addicts you mention would probably put forth a more credible effort at getting the Legislature to enact their agenda. But with this governor, that’s comforting to know.
There was a time when I was distressed that he was so incompetent, because it meant he not only wasn’t getting the GOOD things he advocated done — such as badly needed government restructuring — but he was so off-putting to lawmakers that he was actually setting those causes BACK several years.
But I’ve adjusted to that, and now take more comfort from the fact that he is just as bad at getting his BAD ideas acted upon — such as private school vouchers, and trying to turn down the stimulus money that we’d be paying for anyway.
Ya gotta look at the bright side.
And Burl, if I can ever help you out with your governor, just let me know…
First, I have to say that I didn’t stay for the whole thing. I was going to, but I got an emergency call from my youngest daughter just after 6 — she was on the side of the road on I-26 between the I-20 and St. Andrew’s exits with an overheated engine — so Daddy had to run.
And the “rally” proper had just begun. A 19-year-old kid named Zach (I’d have gotten his full name if I’d stayed) was giving a speech about why Mark Sanford should no longer be governor, and not doing a bad job for his age. He was getting a smattering of applause and cheers from the handful of watchers there (and jeers from one of the two counter-protesters I saw). And I see that Phil Noble spoke later. But I had already spoken with Phil — he came up and tapped me on the shoulder just seconds after I finished shooting the above video. He had expressed his disgust that more people had not shown up, which he attributed to apathy. Citing a poll showing 60 percent of South Carolinians wanted Sanford gone, he indignantly wondered where they all were.
But the fact that I was able to shoot the video at 5:55 of a “rally” that was supposed to have started at 5:30 testifies to there being more wrong with this rally than public apathy. It’s rather telling that in the mercifully brief account in The State today, SC Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler made a point of saying that she didn’t organize this.
Folks, I’ve been to a lot of demonstrations at the State House over the years — from the stunning first “King Day at the Dome” in 2000 with its 60,000 marchers to more modest, yet still-respectable, affairs, such as the recent one in favor of the stimulus (which featured FAR more people demanding Sanford be impeached than showed up for this one) to the “Tea Party” shortly thereafter), and this was the saddest one I’ve actually witnessed.
One of the actual organizers, my Facebook friend Catherine Fleming Bruce (who posted this picture of me from the event; you’ll note that I don’t exactly have a crowd around me), tried hard to get things rolling when she started the rally proper, introducing Zach at about 6. She rattled off an impressive list of folks who had suggested the governor resign, Democrats and Republicans both (prompting the heckler to say “all liberals!” which was almost as pathetic as the rally itself — Glenn McConnell a liberal? please…). But that merely raised the painful question — so where were all those prominent people? Catherine and Phil were the only two on the steps I recognized.
So, try as Catherine and Phil (and Zach) might, this was a bust. By the way, here are my Tweets on the subject yesterday in real time, up to the moment I got the urgent call from my daughter:
As I arrive, late, for the anti-Sanford “rally,” it looks like a pathetic bust…
The neo-nazis had a better-attended (and better-organized) State House rally than this sad little anti-Sanford affair…
There are a couple of stolid Sanford-supporting counter-protester, who must be thinking “Why bother?”…
Catherine Fleming-Bruce is up there trying, but it’s time to face the fact: this rally ain’t happening…
Catherine cites list of leaders of both parties who have called for resignation — but they’re not here…
A 19-year-old kid is addressing the crowd, and making a brave effort. Smattering of applause…
Did I say “crowd?” Sorry… I meant the, um, assemblage…
If you were there after I left, and would like to contradict me — hey, that’s what the comments function is for. Good luck…
