Category Archives: The State

A closer look at Nikki’s idea of fiscal responsibility

Turning from Nikki Haley’s foot-dragging on transparency regarding her taxpayer-issued computer and e-mails, let’s take another look at her problems with paying her taxes on time.

This is particularly relevant because of her oft-stated wish that government be run like a business, and her touting of her proven skills as an accountant.

Let’s take a look at Cindi Scoppe’s column Sunday. Cindi, a meticulous reporter if ever I’ve met one, didn’t think much one way or the other about Nikki’s failure to pay her taxes on time until she looked into it further herself. Here’s an excerpt from what she found, going well beyond what had been previously reported:

The problem wasn’t that the Haleys sought and received extensions. It is in fact quite common for people to get a six-month extension to file their tax returns. But as the IRS makes clear, the extension applies only to the return, not to the tax payment itself. Taxes are always due by April 15 — at the latest. The Haleys have not paid their taxes by April 15 in any of the past five years…

Even more significantly, the extension gives people only until Oct. 15 to file. The Haleys filed their 2005 tax returns on July 30, 2007 — eight months after the extended deadline. They filed their 2006 tax returns on July 23, 2008 — also eight months after the extended deadline. Their 2007 returns were filed Nov. 5, 2008, just a few days after the extended deadline. (Their 2004, 2008 and 2009 returns were filed after April 15, but before Oct. 15, so the IRS doesn’t consider them late.)

Now, in my book, anytime you have to pay the government a penalty, you’ve done something wrong, and the Haleys have paid the IRS $4,452 in penalties in the past five years — $2,853 for filing late, and $1,599 for paying late…

Still, the idea that paying your taxes late, and waiting eight months after the extended deadline to file a return, is doing “nothing wrong” is more of a stretch.

But the biggest stretch is the way Ms. Haley has sought to spin her income tax problem into a virtue. She talks about how she and her husband fell upon tough economic times and cut back on their spending and learned to live within their means, which she says demonstrates what a fiscally responsible governor she would be. It seems to me that her actions demonstrate just the opposite.

The Haleys didn’t pay their taxes late once or twice, when things were bad; they paid their taxes late in every one of the past five years — not just in 2006, when their income dropped by half, but also in 2005 when it was going up, and in 2007, 2008 and 2009, when it was going up substantially, topping out at nearly $200,000 last year….

… the fact is that part of her strategy was to avoid paying her bills on time, by essentially giving herself a loan from those of us who paid our taxes on time. A bailout if you will, albeit temporary, for the candidate who deplores federal bailouts. And since she failed to pay her taxes on time five years in a row, it raises questions about her stewardship of money….

I questioned Ms. Haley’s campaign several times to make absolutely sure that the Haleys had not somehow managed to get an additional extension, and her spokesman never attempted to give any sort of justification for their missing the extended deadlines. I’m not sure what the repeated delinquent tax filings suggest: Poor organizational skills? Inability to delegate authority — or, if delegated, to choose trustworthy people to whom to delegate? A disregard for the laws the rest of us have to obey? What I am sure of is that if it were me, I wouldn’t be bragging about it.

Nikki Haley’s ‘limited hangout’ (This is what she means by ‘transparency,’ when it’s applied to her)

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First, for you youngsters who’ve only been alive for five minutes or so, here’s a definition of “limited hangout.” Or perhaps we should refer to what Nikki has done as a “modified limited hangout,” the extra-special version invented by Richard Nixon and his droogs.

In any case, this passage from The State‘s story today pretty much tells you all you need to know about what Nikki means by the word “transparency” when it is applied to her. To be helpful, I’ve boldfaced the most important parts, in this passage and subsequent ones:

Sheheen released his legislative e-mails, copies of his hard drives and campaign receipts two weeks ago in response to identical open records requests The State sent to both campaigns. Haley released her e-mails, but said she would not release any other documents or allow reporters to review her state-issued computer hard drives. A hard drive keeps a permanent record of e-mails.

Then there’s this little elaboration, which I suppose Nikki put out for the benefit of the technological Neanderthals among the electorate:

“I think 10,000 sheets of paper is a lot,” Haley said, referring to the volume of e-mails in defending the decision not to match Sheheen’s disclosure. “I’m comfortable with how transparent we have been. I’m not going to get into this tit for tat about whether that’s enough sheets of paper.”

Ahem. Nikki, if you’d just go ahead and release the hard drives — you know, the public hard drives that belong to us, the taxpayers whom you allegedly love so much — nobody’s asking for so much as ONE “sheet of paper.” This is the 21st century. Give us the frickin’ hard drives, and we’ll have all that we need. Your good faith will have been demonstrated. Those “sheets of paper” you’re touting are the emblem of your refusal to just go ahead and be transparent, the physical manifestations of your selectivity. And you say there are 10,000 of them. Ten thousand documents attesting to your refusal to simply open up access to a public resource.

Then there’s this:

The Haley campaign emphasized she is exempt from state open records laws as a lawmaker, and all compliance is voluntary.

Wow. Yeah, Nikki, lawmakers ARE exempt, because they write the laws, and refuse to abide by the openness they have statutorily imposed on the rest of government, from the governor to the guy who sweeps up in the offices of our bureaucracy. This is an exemption they carved out for themselves, and themselves alone. This is the very cult of stonewalling that someone we know constantly berates her fellow legislators about. That someone’s initials, in the spirit of limited hangout, are N.H. And I’m not talking New Hampshire.

And you want to hide behind THAT? Really?

Amazing.

Is that the best Haley can do? Bring up Obama? Wow, that is truly lame…

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There wasn’t much new in The State‘s recap Sunday of how Vincent Sheheen is pretty much thrashing Nikki Haley on her signature issues (transparency and business savvy) — nothing much you couldn’t have read here the middle of last week.

But I was struck by the unbelievably lame response recorded from the Haley campaign:

For its part, Haley’s campaign has argued Sheheen, a state senator from Camden, is ducking questions about whether the Democrat supports recently approved national health insurance law and the Obama administration’s lawsuit challenging Arizona’s immigration law, two issues Sheheen could have to deal with if elected governor.

Really? That’s the best you can do? He’s totally crushing you on transparency, and making a mockery of your desire to run government the way you run your business, and that’s your response? You retreat to the current GOP playbook? That book only has one play these days, you know. It goes something like this:

When cornered, talk about Obama. Don’t worry that it has nothing to do with the office you’re running for. Just cry, “Obama! Obama! Obama! We hate Obama! Do you hate Obama? If you don’t, you’re not one of us, because we really, really hate him…” Yadda-yadda. Just keep going; don’t worry about repeating yourself or not making the slightest bit of logical sense, because your base will eat this up…

As for the last phrase in that excerpt from The State — “two issues Sheheen could have to deal with if elected governor” — it’s hard to imagine a more transparent case of news people bending over backwards to act like a source is saying something rational when he or she is not. Yeah, you stretch a point and sure, health care reform affects every state (just as it does business and many other aspects of life) and a governor will govern in an environment in which a lot of people insist that immigration is a huge state issue. But you could say that about almost any hot-button national issue, from Afghanistan to the BP oil spill — it still wouldn’t be central. Everyone, but everyone, knows that the Haley campaign putting out that response has absolutely ZERO to do with what faces the next governor, and everything to do with the fact that if it isn’t in the Sarah Palin songbook, they can’t sing it.

Anyway, we are left waiting for a substantive response actually bearing on the two things that are allegedly Nikki’s strong suits, and why we should believe anything she says about them. And Vincent didn’t pick these issues — Nikki did.

“Graham’s courageous stand for the republic”

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After I got done stewing about having screwed up on the Biden thing, I remembered that I owed Cindi Scoppe a phone call. Speaking to her reminded me that I meant to call your attention to The State‘s editorial yesterday, “Graham’s courageous stand for the republic.”

It was really, really good. So good that after I read it at breakfast yesterday, I e-mailed Cindi to say:

Excellent lede today. Did you write that, or did I?

It needs to be said loudly and often.

OK, so maybe that wouldn’t be a compliment to you, but I think Cindi saw it as such. You know, knowing my ego as she does.

But it really did say pretty much everything I would have said — of course, one of the great things about working with Cindi over the years was that she could do that. There was a time when I felt like I had to write any important edit about state government or politics to get the message just right, and the right tone and feel into it (to please me, anyway). But I realized shortly after I brought Cindi up from the newsroom that if I just spent a few minutes explaining to her what I wanted, in a few minutes she’d turn it around into an edit that was everything I had wanted, and just as good as if I’d written it — and several hours faster.

The great thing about this was that I didn’t have occasion to tell her what I wanted (you may have heard, I don’t word there any more), and yet I got it anyway. But more important than it being what I wanted, it’s what South Carolina needed to hear about Graham’s decision to vote for Elena Kagan’s nomination, and his cogent explanation of his reasoning.

An excerpt:

THROUGHOUT the first two centuries or so of our nation’s history, what Sen. Lindsay Graham did on Wednesday when he voted to confirm President Obama’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court would have been thoroughly unremarkable. What would have been remarkable would have been for a senator to do otherwise — to vote against confirming a nominee who did not have serious ethical, legal, mental or intellectual problems.

But as Sen. Graham told the Judiciary Committee, things are changing…. What matters today are individual agendas, and punishing anyone who doesn’t agree with their every opinion.

That’s a threat not just to the independence of the judiciary but to the republic itself…

As when he voted to confirm Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment a year ago, Sen. Graham said Wednesday that Ms. Kagan was not someone he would have appointed, but Mr. Obama won the election; the job of the Senate is merely to stop a president from appointing people who are objectively unfit to be judges.

Will Ms. Kagan join the liberal wing of the court? Probably. Just as President Bush’s appointments joined the conservative wing. We wish there weren’t such clearly defined wings…. But that’s a political preference we have; not a constitutional standard appropriate for senators to consider. As far as confirmation goes, there’s nothing wrong with Ms. Kagan. Just as there was nothing wrong with Sonia Sotomayor. Or with John Roberts. Or with Samuel Alito. And any senator who votes or voted against any of them was simply wrong.

But go read the whole thing. And share it with every South Carolinian you know.

Cindi’s column on Lost Trust, 20 years on

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I missed Cindi Scoppe’s column over the weekend reminiscing about Lost Trust (which broke 20 years ago Sunday) until a reader mentioned Cindi’s “shout-out” to me:

If anything happened in the next year that wasn’t related to the sting, I can’t remember it. While I dissected the ethics proposals, my editor Brad Warthen led the newsroom on a yearlong examination of how the Legislative State produced not only corruption but a hapless government that answered to no one — laying the groundwork for one of the primary focuses of our later work on this editorial board.

Pushed along by Lost Trust, Gov. Carroll Campbell and Brad’s “Power Failure” series, the Legislature voted two years later to hand a third of the government over to the governor. Lawmakers unleashed the powerful State Grand Jury to investigate political corruption cases. They passed a reporter shield law after a judge ordered me and three other reporters held in federal custody for two days for refusing to testify in a corruption trial.

It was interesting to read Cindi’s memory of that from her perspective. I had forgotten a lot of the intrigue that my reporters — particularly Cindi — had to go through to find out what was going on. But then, I was mostly experiencing it second-hand, being the desk man that I was. Cindi and the others would come in with this stuff they had garnered in encounters reminiscent of Bob Woodward’s meetings with Deep Throat in the parking garage, and we’d figure out which outrageous items were worth pursuing to try to confirm immediately and which ones to set aside. And then, how in the world to nail down the relevant ones.

For me, at the epicenter of The State‘s coverage, it was a time for keeping a couple of dozen plates spinning, and was a daily challenge to an editor managing finite resources in the midst of stories that seemed to have an infinite number of branches, each one of which was a hot story in itself.

Mind you, Lost Trust wasn’t the only government scandal breaking that summer. We had the final act of the Jim Holderman collapse, a purchasing scandal involving a major agency (I don’t even remember which one now), the head of the Highway Patrol directly personally interfering with the DUI of the head of the local FBI office, and those are just the things that I remember sitting here. There was more. Fortunately, the governmental affairs staff in those days amounted to something (I may have been slightly down from my 1988 high of 10 reporters, but not by much), but there’s only so much that even that many people can do when so much is popping at the same time — and during the time of year when things are usually quiet.

And Lost Trust itself, alone, without those other scandals, would have totally consumed us days, nights and weekends. A full 10 percent of the Legislature indicted? Heady stuff.

We were well out ahead of the competition most days, and I felt proud of my team — Cindi and the others. Then the executive editor, who was new in the job (Gil Thelen), one busy day stopped by my desk to say it was all very well and good that we were staying ahead of the story and beating everybody on it, but what about the future? What, out of all this mess, might we be able to offer readers to give them the sense that something could be done about the dysfunction of SC government? I probably stared at him like he was a lunatic for wanting me to think about anything ELSE on top of the mad juggling I was doing at the moment, but I did think about it. And the result was the Power Failure series. I spent a year on it, supervising reporters from across the newsroom in producing a 17-installment opus that explained just how SC government was designed to fail.

And as Cindi notes, the themes developed at that time resonated through my work, and hers, for my entire 15 years on the editorial board.

Show us transparency, Nikki: Release the e-mails

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Did you see the strong editorial in The State Sunday, challenging Nikki “Transparency” Haley for hiding behind a loophole in FOI specifically carved out to protect legislators, and legislators alone, from transparency in order to keep her state-issued e-mail secret?

I was very glad to see it. As the edit pointed out, this isn’t about Will Folks or disgusting sex allegations. Neither The State‘s editorial board nor I expect to find anything about that if we ever see those e-mails. But the fact that this started with such accusations creates a smoke screen that lets Nikki get away with a flagrant flouting of the principles she lets on to hold most dear. From the heart of the editorial:

Ms. Haley, after all, is not just someone who thinks government transparency is a nice thing. Her one claim to fame as a legislator is her crusade to bring sunlight to a legislative process that for too long has protected lawmakers from accountability rather than giving the voters information they deserve. Her entire campaign for governor is built on that push for openness, for letting the public in on the Legislature’s secrets, for eliminating the special perks and privileges legislators give themselves and their friends.

Does that apply only to the direct expenditure of public money?

Does it apply only to other people?

Imagine if the blogger had claimed that he helped Rep. Haley secretly funnel millions of tax dollars into a green-bean museum and steer tens of millions more in cushy no-bid contracts to her campaign donors, and that messages on her government e-mail account would back up his claim. Is there anyone who would not be demanding that she make the correspondence public?

What is she hiding? Why doesn’t she want us to see the messages she has been sending as she juggled her campaign for governor with doing her job as a legislator?

It is not Ms. Haley’s job to disprove unsubstantiated allegations. It is, however, her job to prove that her commitment to ushering in government transparency and ushering out special legislative privileges is sincere — even more since it has been called into question before. She still hasn’t explained what she did to earn more than $40,000 in consulting fees from a government contractor that hired her for her “good contacts.”

If Ms. Haley were governor, we already would have seen her e-mails, because what governors write on their government e-mail accounts is public record. In fact, Gov. Mark Sanford’s attorney saw fit to turn over some e-mails from his personal account, because she determined that he was using it to discuss public business.

If Ms. Haley were the president of the University of South Carolina, we already would have seen her e-mails. Ditto if she were a $30,000-a-year clerk in the bowels of the bureaucracy, because what nearly all state employees write on their government e-mail accounts is public record.

The only reason her public e-mail correspondence has remained hidden is that she is a legislator, and legislators have written themselves a special exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.

This exemption is the very epitome of the secrecy that Ms. Haley vows to eliminate.

I’m glad to see this now. Because at some point, someone was going to point out this obvious inconsistency and raise a stink about it. My concern has been that it would happen in late October, thereby engendering another tidal wave of protective emotion that would sweep Rep. Haley to victory.

The time to address this is now, when there’s time to be calm. Time to see that she cannot possibly have any legitimate excuse not to share these state-sponsored communications.

What is she hiding, indeed? For all I know, absolutely nothing. But then I don’t know, because she’s hiding it, in a stunning display of contempt for the ideals she says she stands for.

Blast from the newspaper past

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Bob Ford shared this old newspaper page with me over the weekend. How old? So old that it’s from before I even worked at any newspaper, much less The State. My career starting in 1974 as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal. But this is from Nov. 3 1972 — the Friday before I voted for the first time.

And yet — there are several people pictured here whom I would later work with, or at least come to know in the community after I arrived at The State in 1987 — Levona Page, Kent Krell, Margaret O’Shea and others. In fact, when I became governmental affairs editor in ’87, one of them was still on the beat and working for me: that hepcat Lee Bandy (dig the hair!).

This ad boasts of the resources devoted to covering politics, and indeed, back then newspapers had reporters spilling out the windows, and newshole to burn. It was still that way when I started covering politics myself in ’78. But then the long decline began, and finally newspaper finances went over the cliff this past decade.

One might also reflect on how different the SC political scene was in those days. First of all, there were no Republicans, except Strom Thurmond and Floyd Spence. So the Democratic primary was usually the election. Then there was the fact that the color barrier had just been broken in the Legislature, with a handful of black House members (but none in the Senate yet). This was two whole years before the legendary Pug Ravenel campaign, which idealistic then-young Democrats speak of today as though it occurred in the misty time of Camelot, or of King Elendil who wielded the sword Narsil before it was broken.

Anyway, I thought some of y’all would enjoy looking at it, too.

Nikki Haley, Vincent Sheheen offer clear choice on Confederate flag

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The contrast between Vincent Sheheen and Nikki Haley will be sharp on a lot of issues, and we’ll get to them over the coming months.

But today, I want to highlight the difference between them on the Confederate flag flying on our State House grounds, as a window into broader differences. (And why that issue today? Because today is the 10th anniversary of the day it moved from the dome to the spot behind the soldier monument.)

Gina Smith in The State provided the following vignettes showing the difference. From Vincent Sheheen:

If elected governor in November, Sheheen said he is open to discussing the removal of the flag from the State House grounds. He was elected to the S.C. House a year after the compromise.

“We must develop an environment that creates jobs,” Sheheen said. “We cannot give up any edge that South Carolina has in attracting a large employer coming to South Carolina. After the last eight years, we must be proactive in creating a positive image of our state to the world.”

Sheheen offers no details, though, including locations where he would consider having the flag relocated.

“I have no predetermined proposal on the flag, but would like to work with legislative leaders, business leaders and community leaders to finally reach consensus. My job as governor will be to bring people together to reach consensus on how best to heal any divisions, including the flag,” he said.

It is unclear whether Sheheen supports the NAACP’s boycott.

And from Nikki Haley:

Haley wasn’t elected to the House until 2004. Haley believes a compromise was reached and the issue resolved.

“It was settled and it has been put away. And I don’t have any intentions of bringing it back up or making it an issue,” she said in a recent interview with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Instead, Haley said her focus is on making state government more transparent and more business-friendly. “If the people aren’t focused on the flag, it’s hard to see why the governor and General Assembly should be,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman.

Haley implied in the Sons of Confederate Veterans interview that she would work with the NAACP and others who want the flag removed from the State House grounds to address the NAACP boycott. “I’m the perfect person to deal with the boycott. Because, as a minority female, I’m going to go and talk to them and I’m going to go and let them know that every state has their traditions. … But we need to talk about business. And we need to talk about having (businesses) come into our state …”

As you see, Vincent understands that the time must come when we stop portraying our state to the world as a haven for neo-Confederate extremists who insist upon continuing to embrace the worst moments of our history. He’s just too diplomatic to put it in quite those terms. If he had the chance, he’d get it down. By the way, his Uncle Bob, the former speaker, had the best idea of all about what to do about the flag: Replace it with a bronze plaque noting that it once flew here. That’s a solution that would enable us to move on. But the GOP leadership refused to seriously consider that or any other reasonable solution on the ONE DAY they allowed for debate before rushing to embrace this “compromise” that settled nothing.

Nikki, however, promises not to touch it, which is the standard South Carolina Republican response. And now that she’s promised it to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, that’s that. Which is a real shame, given that since she wasn’t in the Legislature at the time, no one could legitimately pretend that she is in any way bound by the “compromise” of 2000. She wasn’t a party to it.

She’s come a long way from being the inspiring emblem for tolerance that she truly was when she ran in 2004, when I took up the cudgels for her against the forces of ugly nativism. I’d like to see the national media folks who are SO EXCITED, in their superficial way, that an Indian-American woman might be elected in South Carolina take a moment to consider this. They also might want to watch her cozying up to the neo-Confederates in these video clips. Just something that should go into the calculation…

Note also the HUGE difference in their understanding of the impact of the flag on economic development. Vincent understands that if we want the rest of the world to take us seriously, the flag needs to come down. Nikki thinks the only obstacle to economic development here is the rather sad, ineffective boycott by the NAACP, which is weird on several levels.

The Benjamin inaugural breakfast

How many budget vetoes did they deal with? Zero

Where was The State on Alvin Greene TODAY?

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As I’ve been saying to anyone who asks, the nomination of Alvin Greene is a failure with enough blame to go around to everyone. The voters, of course (as politically incorrect, as anti-democratic, as it is to blame the precious voter). The Democratic Party. And definitely the media — both MSM and the vaunted, tell-you-everything (according to the hype) blogosphere. Apparently, bloggers were too busy telling you who they’d slept with to check out who the hell this guy was. (And yes, I include myself — not on the kiss-and-tell part, but on the not-checking-out-Alvin part.)

As for the MSM — well, it’s awfully easy to beat up on them on this. And they deserve it. That is NOT to blame the reporters and editors who are busting their butts trying to get the job done with grossly inadequate resources. It’s to blame the media as institutions that have failed as businesses to stay viable enough to do their jobs properly. Sound self-interested, since the failure of newspapers is why I don’t have a job with them any more? Well, yeah. But as a former newspaper exec, and an editor for three decades, I know whereof I speak.

True, newspapers have long ignored noncandidates. And they have long ignored, to a lesser extent, primary races to nominate a sacrificial lamb to go up against an invulnerable incumbent. Not because that was the right thing to do, but because when you’re covering scores of races, you have to set priorities, and the hotly contested ones get most of the ink.

But that traditional bias against the boring has been exponentially exacerbated by the emptying of newsrooms via the layoffs of recent years. Now, it’s not a choice; some important races simply are not going to be covered.

This year, you pretty much had to be in the governor’s race to get the media’s attention. And even then, if your name wasn’t Nikki Haley, it was hard to get free media. After he withdrew from the race several months ago, Dwight Drake told me that he had expected it to be hard to raise money (and it was so hard for him that that’s why he quit). But what surprised him was that the media was not to be found. As an old political hand, he was stunned at the lack of coverage.

But still. For none of us — not even people like me, who TRY (but often fail) to keep up with as much of it as possible — to know anything about this Alvin Greene guy is just outrageous. At the very least, even if this noncandidate was ignored, Vic Rawl should have gotten the minimal coverage necessary to give him the name recognition to win. But he didn’t.

OK, so at any rate, at least the media has jumped all over this story now, right? Mr. Greene has TV crews chasing

Finally, I found it -- at the bottom of Page B3.

him. Mother Jones had a story about him on Tuesday (a day earlier would have been nice, but then it’s not Mother Jones responsibility to inform SC about its own candidates). Everywhere I go, people are asking about him. “All Things Considered” called me this morning to get my thoughts on how all this happened.

Well, yes and no. Yes, he’s getting a lot of coverage now. But… and I really hate to say this about my old paper, because I love it and wish my friends still there all the success in the world … The State was weirdly negligent on the story in today’s paper.

When I read my paper this morning, it was the first thing I looked for. On the front page, of course — that’s where I put it. But it wasn’t on the front page. OK, on the Metro front — nope, not there. OK, so it’s packaged with the jump of another election story… nope. All right, back to the front page, to read the cutesie “winners and losers” story that I had initially bypassed about all the quirky little water-cooler talker stuff from the primary. I mean, it’s weird that this didn’t TOP that story if it was in it, but maybe it’s down farther… nope.

I gave up at that point, because I needed to leave to keep my appointment at ETV. But bewildered, I searched the paper again after lunch… and finally found it as a brief on page B3. Not in a roundup of election briefs, but just generic Metro & State briefs. It wasn’t even the first item. It was below a crime brief. As for the content, it was essentially the same brief I had seen on the Web site the day before.

I’m sure the paper will have more complete coverage of this tomorrow, and play it better. Even in the good old days of full staffs, things tended to be disorganized on the day after all-out election day coverage. I see Clyburn’s intimation that it’s all a foul GOP plot is getting some play at thestate.com now.

But I was really disappointed this morning.

I disenfranchised myself for ONE positive vote, and it was worth it

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On the day of the Republican presidential primary in January 2008, I dropped by the office to check on things, and wandered through the newsroom to see what they knew, if anything.

I was wearing one of those “I Voted” stickers that the Palmetto Project gives out to encourage civic engagement. I’ve always proudly worn one on election days as a visible symbol of being one who cares enough to make the effort, without revealing anything inappropriate (for a newspaper editor) about how I voted.

But John Monk remarked upon it, saying, “I see you voted Republican.” Dang! I had completely forgotten the insane fact that the parties had insisted upon having separate primaries a week apart (yet another reason to hate parties). Flustered, I just said, “Well, of course I did.” If I had thought there was any danger of Barack Obama losing the Democratic primary, I would have had a dilemma on my hands. But while I thought McCain would win the GOP contest, I wasn’t sure of it, and I was damned if I was going to fail to do my bit to prevent my state from committing the travesty it had in 2000, when it gave George W. Bush to the world. It just had never occurred to me not to vote in that primary.

Of course, if you live in the Quail Hollow precinct in Lexington County, you’re accustomed to voting in Republican primaries, if only because that’s the only way you get any choices at all. This morning when I asked for a Democratic ballot, I could not remember ever having done so before since I’ve lived there.

And of course, as a result of taking that ballot, I was disenfranchised in terms of who will be my congressman, my lieutenant governor, my treasurer, my attorney general, my SC House member, and my county councilman. In every one of those, there was no Democratic contest, and in two of them (treasurer and county council) no Democrat at all; in those two this WAS the election (and in several of the others it might as well be).

But it was worth it to cast a positive vote. Yeah, I guess I could have held my nose and hoped that Henry McMaster would govern the way he has served as attorney general, rather than the way he has run as a candidate, and thereby minimized Nikki’s margin of victory. But by taking a Democratic ballot, I actually got to vote for someone I actually want to be my governor, without any reservations. And as I’ve said over and over again, electing the right governor is FAR more important than what happens with any other office. We have got to turn this state around, and as weak as the office of governor is, it’s the one office with a bully enough pulpit to make a difference. No matter how perfect my House member may be, he’s just one vote out of 170, and can’t make news (and thereby influence policy) with a mere word.

And I feel good about it. After all the slime we’ve been dragged through over on the Republican side, from talk about who’s bedding whom to “Vultures” to … well, I just don’t even want to think about it. After all that, to vote positively, without reservation, was a great relief.

OK, now The State paper has gone too far…

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All right, I didn’t take it personally when you laid me off. After all, as a vice president of the company, I had been looking at those horrific numbers like all other senior staffers. There was no way the paper could keep paying all of us; no way at all. Some of us had to go; and my salary made me a very attractive target.

And yeah, I was kind of ticked off when you wouldn’t let me take my old blog with me, after all the nights and weekends I poured into it for four years, building it from nothing. That was a classic case of corporate lawyer B.S., insisting upon retaining the rights to content even though something called “Brad Warthen’s Blog” could have pretty close to zero value to you going forward. (I would say “zero,” but it continues to get a surprising number of page views — 15,000 last month — considering that I haven’t posted anything since March 2009. Possibly because I regularly send readers back to it. So that’s of SOME value to your advertisers, I suppose.) But I went out that day and bought the rights to “bradwarthen.com,” and never looked back. It had 132,000 page views in April, and I’m now actually getting income from it. (See the latest ad, from Vincent Sheheen?) So I’m over that.

But now, The State has gone TOO FAR. This I cannot forgive. After we’ve been drip-tortured for months by the GOP candidates with their conservative-this, conservative-that ideological monomania, the same moldy cliches over and over and over and over, to the point that I did something yesterday that I’ve never done before in my career — told my readers that NO GOP candidate is fit to be our governor for the next four years, because I for one just can’t take it any more…

… after all that, The State actually poses this question to the GOP candidates, in print:

There are voters who accuse elected Republicans of abandoning their conservative principles. What makes you the Republican most capable of representing the party in the fall election?

Imagine that! PROVOKING them to give it to us with both barrels! Just setting it right up on a TEE for them!

So of course we were treated to an absolute orgy of… As I’ve said from Day One I’m a conservative a true conservative my daddy was a conservative daddy my mama was a conservative mama I’m a bidnessman meet a payroll don’t take bailouts lazy shiftless welfare takers the key is to starve ’em before they reproduce 100 percent rating from conservative conservatives of America my dog is a conservative dog I don’t have a cat because cats are effete I eat conservative I sleep conservative I excrete conservative I got conservative principles a conservative house and conservative clothes take back our government from the socialists even though we don’t really want it because who needs government anyway they don’t have government in Somalia and they’re doing alright aren’t they National Rifle Association Charlton Heston is my president and Ronald Reagan is my God I will have no gods before him I go Arizona-style all the way that’s the way I roll I will keep their cold dead government hands off your Medicare so help me Ronald Reagan…

And on and on. That’s just to give you the flavor; I’m just reciting from memory. Read the actual stuff if you prefer, but my version has more life to it, while in no way being a disservice to the original.

You know what would have endeared me so much that I would have dropped all my objections and endorsed one of these candidates on the spot? If he or she had had the sense of perspective, the sense of the absurd, the appreciation of irony to say something like:

Actually, I’m a liberal. A liberal all the way. I drive a Prius, I love wine and cheese parties with the faculty, I think America is a big bully in the world and no wonder people hate us (I’d be a terrorist, too, if I didn’t abhor violence so), and I never saw an abortion I didn’t like. My spouse and I have an open marriage, so scandal can’t touch us, because to each his or her own. I’m a white, male heterosexual and the guilt just eats me alive; I wish I belonged to a group that was more GENUINE, you know? The first thing I’d do if elected is raise taxes through the roof, and spend every penny on public education, except for a portion set aside for re-education camps for people who now home-school their kids. Then, if we needed more money for excessive regulation of business and other essential government services, we’d raise taxes again, but only on the rich, which is defined as YOU or anybody who makes more than you. Probably the best word to describe my overall tax plan would be “confiscatory.” And my spending (OH, my spending! You’ve never seen spending until you see my spending!) would best be termed “redistributive.” If elected, my inaugural party will have music by the Dixie Chicks and the Indigo Girls, and then we’ll all bow down to a gigantic image of Barack (did you know it means “blessed”?) Obama, the savior of us all, and chant in some language other than the ultimate oppressor language, English. French, perhaps. Or Kiswahili.

Or something along those lines. And if The State ran a response like that, all would be forgiven…

The non-impression Gresham Barrett makes

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Remember what I wrote about Gresham Barrett in my last column for The State? Actually, it wasn’t the last column that ran in the paper, but it was the last I wrote. I’d already written the piece about Robert Ariail, who was leaving with me, and my “unfinished business” piece that ran the Sunday after we left.

But I was determined to get a Gresham Barrett column written, if only because I’d been frustrated trying to get ahold of the guy. I had decided to do a column on each gubernatorial candidate as he or she announced, and Barrett was the second to come along (I’d already written about Vincent Sheheen). I was doing this because I regarded the choice that voters would have to make in 2010 to be so important that I wanted to help the conversation along as much as I could — even if I weren’t around to do columns on any of the rest of the candidates.

The weird thing about this one was that I had been trying to get Barrett on the phone to interview him for a couple of weeks. That may not sound weird to you, but it was a unique experience for me in the 12 years that I served as editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. I couldn’t remember when it took more than a few hours to reach anyone who was serious about wanting to be governor. It’s not that I was so special; it’s that they were that eager for the free media.

But I don’t think I’d ever have gotten Barrett if I hadn’t made a nuisance of myself. On that Wednesday morning, I told his aide B.J. Boling — who had always been so helpful when he handled media for the McCain campaign in 2008 — that this was it. I didn’t want this to be the last piece of mine ever to run in the state — I wanted it to be one of the other two previously mentioned. Which meant I had to reach him that day, and write it the same day for Thursday’s paper. Even then, B.J. was unable to get him on the horn until 5 p.m., which meant I had to make Cindi Scoppe stay late to read behind me. But I got it into the paper.

Since I was writing it in such a rush, I was wary of my own irritation with the candidate. So I held back from fully expressing just how unsatisfying that interview was, beyond noting that he was “light on details,” and that his “crowning achievement” from his time as a legislator in Columbia was a partial-birth abortion plan. That was the biggest thing he did, “absolutely, without a doubt.” Being a pro-life kind of guy, I’m all for such bans. But I would not list the need for one as being among the burning issues of South Carolina. Against the blank backdrop that his career seemed to me to be, that was pretty disappointing.

Beyond that, I dutifully listed each fact I was able to draw out of him, thin as it all was.

Anyway, I have since referred to just how blank a slate Mr. Barrett seems to me, and been taken to task by B.J. And I accepted service. He’s right; I haven’t interviewed the guy since. And with that in mind, I called B.J. the other day hoping to get some time with his candidate. But B.J. hasn’t called me back. He probably thinks I’m calling about something else.

Bottom line, since I haven’t talked with the guy for a year, I’m not qualified to judge. But I read with particular interest Cindi’s column last week in which she describes the results of a 90-minute interview with the guy:

I HAVE A HUGE problem with Gresham Barrett.

It’s not his political positions or his rhetoric. It’s not even that frenetic thing he does with his hands in his TV commercial, though if I watched more TV ….

It’s that I can’t figure out what I think about him.

I can’t get a clear impression of what distinguishes him from his opponents. Even after he spent nearly an hour and a half with our editorial board earlier this month, answering every question I could think of to try to help me and my colleagues form some opinion, I came away empty. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

This is both disappointing and bizarre.

Disappointing because I had such high hopes for him. It’s no secret that I’ve been impressed with the job Henry McMaster has done as attorney general, and came into this campaign thinking he would be my favorite Republican. But when he went over the top on tax policy and I had that whole bizarre conversation wherein I couldn’t get him to give me a clear answer, and then he started blurring the line between candidate and attorney general, I started hoping for a better choice. Since I have had the least interaction with Mr. Barrett, and since the main thing I could recall his having done in the past few years was to change his mind and act like a grown-up by taking the least evil of the two horribly horrible positions on the TARP, he was the obvious place to pin my hopes.

Bizarre because usually I get the most out of meetings with the candidates I know the least about. First impressions and all that.

So it’s not just me.

With me, you could chalk up a lack of results from an interview to my loose, let’s-see-where-this-goes style. But Cindi is a high-organized, task-oriented interrogator. She goes in determined to get answers to questions X, Y and Z, and woe to the subject that stands in her way.

So this struck me as interesting. Is Gresham Barrettt the Zelig of this campaign, the “curiously nondescript enigma” of 2010?

Military’s impact on the Midlands

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Just got this note from Mayor Bob Coble:

Great article by Jeff Wilkinson in The State on the impact of Fort Jackson, Shaw and McEntire on our economy. Ike McLeese has done a tremendous job leading the effort locally, as has Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom on the State level. The Rhoads Group has done an outstanding job for us making sure the Pentagon has all the information about the strengths of Fort Jackson. The BRAC decision in 2005 was a big win economically for the Midlands and South Carolina.

The piece does make an important point, and I know Ike McLeese has done yeoman’s work over the past decade keeping the military engaged in the Midlands.

Chamber goes 100% for incumbents in House races

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This just in from the state Chamber of Commerce:

SOUTH CAROLINA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ENDORSES HOUSE CANDIDATES AHEAD OF PRIMARIES

Columbia, S.C. – The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, the state’s largest broad-based business organization, is pleased to announce the endorsements of the following House of Representative candidates who have primary challengers.

District 2 – Bill Sandifer, (Oconee)

District 10 – Dan Cooper, (Anderson)

District 17 – Harry Cato, (Greenville)

District 26 – Henry Wilson, (Pickens)

District 35 – Keith Kelly, (Spartanburg)

District 36 – Rita Allison, (Spartanburg)

District 38 – Joey Millwood, (Spartanburg)

District 39 – Marion Frye, (Saluda)

District 41 – Boyd Brown, (Fairfield)

District 55 – Jackie Hayes, (Dillon)

District 61 – Lester Branham, (Florence)

District 62 – Robert Williams, (Darlington)

District 75 – Jim Harrison, (Richland)

District 80 – Jimmy Bales, (Richland)

District 83 – Bill Hixon, (Aiken)

District 84 – Roland Smith, (Aiken)

District 86 – Jim Stewart, (Aiken)

District 87 – Todd Atwater, (Lexington)

District 98 – Chris Murphy, (Dorchester)

District 106 – Nelson Hardwick, (Horry)

District 112 – Mike Sottile, (Charleston)

District 123 – Richard Chalk, (Beaufort)

“South Carolinians who want good jobs and a strong economy should proactively support pro-business candidates,” said Otis Rawl, president and chief executive officer of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. “Candidates endorsed by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce have demonstrated their support for priorities that support a strong economy and a competitive Palmetto State. These House candidates are committed to representing the people in their respective districts who each need good jobs, a competitive state economy and a pro-prosperity working environment to ultimately raise their individual incomes.”

The Chamber will issue further House endorsements after the primaries on June 8. In the race for governor, the Chamber has endorsed Gresham Barrett (R) and Vincent Sheheen (D). Visit www.scchamber.net for more information.

What do all of these candidates have in common? They’re all incumbents, or running in races without an incumbent. In District 26, incumbent Rex Rice is running for Congress; in District 87, Nikki Haley is running for governor; and in District 98, Annette Young is not seeking re-election.

It’s a shame the Chamber didn’t dig a little harder to make some real discernments (or at least give us some reasoning for its choices in the cases where there was no incumbent), because endorsements such as this WOULD mean more than usual this year, if they’d only put some thought into it. That’s because we won’t be getting an such fodder for thought from The State. This year, my former paper is only endorsing for governor, attorney general and 5th circuit solicitor, near as I can tell. And that leaves a big vacuum. I wish I could fill it, but I’m only one guy. And despite what that Lois Lane keeps saying, I am NOT Superman.

Cindi’s column: ‘The two sides of Nikki Haley’

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Just thought I’d bring to your attention Cindi Scoppe’s calm, rational, even-handed take on the Nikki Haleys we have come to know — the appealing, breath-of-fresh-air neophyte lawmaker (vestiges of whom we still see today) and the demagogic ideologue seeking to carry the Mark Sanford banner into South Carolina’s future (which we see far too much of these days).

The value in reading Cindi’s column is that it is rich in specifics, listing Nikki’s positions on quite a number of issues. That’s something you don’t get so much from me. I form a holistic impression of a candidate or an issue, and hold forth on the conclusions I’ve reached. Cindi shares her reporting, point by point. When we went into an editorial board meeting with a candidate, Cindi would have a list of specific questions, so that she could test the candidate against specific positions that we held. I would ask the candidate to start talking (telling us whatever he or she deemed most important), and I would ask questions suggested by what I heard. It made for good teamwork. Cindi made sure we touched all the important bases; I explored unanticipated territory to learn things we would not have learned taking the purely task-oriented approach.

So it is that I think it’s valuable for you, the wise reader, to set my own rambling gestalten observations beside Cindi’s businesslike approach as you move along your own journey in making up your mind about Nikki Haley.

So, without violating Fair Use (I hope), I invite you to go read Cindi’s entire column, which goes from the good…

… She is charming, engaging and smart. She is refreshingly passionate and energetic and not about to put up with the games at the State House. She can explain problems in a way to get voters fired up (“It’s just wrong; it’s wrong all day long,” she says of school administrators’ opposition to a bill that would cost them money by jerking the junk food out of schools). That’s no small thing in a state as apathetic as ours.

She’s all about comprehensive reform — of the tax code, of the executive branch of government, of the school funding system — and her support for those vital changes predates her campaign, and seems far more heartfelt than her GOP opponents….

… to the bad…

… These relatively minor misrepresentations are merely the ones that jumped out at me in a single meeting with our board, and this pattern is disturbingly similar to Mr. Sanford’s signature approach: Take a legitimate problem that’s a bit too complicated or wonky to appeal to the masses, and tart it up to make it look like something it’s not.

Ms. Haley is rigidly ideological. All the Republican candidates support taxpayer-funded “choice” for private schools, but only she would veto a bill expanding public school choice if it didn’t help prop up private schools. All opposed the federal stimulus, but only she opposed accepting the money that we’re on the hook to pay for regardless, because doing so blew the “opportunity” to force the Legislature to make structural reforms….

… to this conclusion:

…When I first met Ms. Haley in 2004, I found her a bit green. But she clearly had a good head on her shoulders and was one of the best new candidates we met that year. As I wrote in our first endorsement of her, she was “so focused on keeping an open mind and being persuaded by facts rather than personality, preconceived notions and party dogma that she’s bound to make smart choices,” and “what she calls a business-like approach strikes us as merely a commonsense, proactive approach that people of any political persuasion should be able to take for granted.”

I wish the Nikki Haley who’s running for governor reminded me more of that person and less of Mark Sanford….

Meanwhile, from the soon-to-be-FORMER mayor…

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I received this from Bob Coble over the weekend:

I am attaching the City’s current Budget and Investment Reconciliation Statement that shows all of the City’s bank and
investment accounts are reconciled and balanced.

I am attaching the link to the City’s current financial that is on our website. The statement is through April. http://www.columbiasc.net/depts/finance/downloads/April%202010%20Report%20Cover%20Memo%20and%20Revenue-Exp%20Report%20Preliminary.pdf

Also, attached is the link to our current check register that is through April 30th. The register shows all the checks written by the City this fiscal year. http://www.columbiasc.net/depts/finance/downloads/Truth%20in%20Spending%20April%202010.pdf

I wanted to give you a budget update. We are continuing to make progress in bringing in a budget. The current budget’s expenses are $5.7 million under budget. General fund revenues are above target. Next year’s proposed budget includes, through greater efficiencies, an additional $500,000 for police overtime. We will add 15 police officers
from stimulus funding. The fire department budget fully funds all fire suppression and prevention responsibilities, and fully funds all firefighter staffing levels. Additionally, we have eliminated over 30 unfilled positions saving over $1.4 million.

Columbia’s financial statements are current and on the City’s website. The City’s check register is current and online. All City bank accounts and investment accounts are reconciled. The City’s general fund rainy day fund and GASB 45 reserves are above $30 million. Moody’s reaffirmed in 2009 the City’s excellent credit rating for the general fund and the water and sewer fund. I will continue to keep you posted.

I also received a copy of an op-ed he sent The State. Last time he sent me one of those I posted it here before The State could consider it, and I worried that I was hurting his chances of being published. Makes me hesitate this time…

How many Palin/Haley fans WERE there Friday?

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Since the event on Friday, a number of people have raised the following question: How many people showed up for the Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley rally?

Well, gee, I don’t know. But I do think the published reports were off.

Here’s an e-mail I received from a reader:

Dear Brad,

It was good to read your post after you attended the Haley/Palin rally. At a party tonight we were discussing the fact that the majority of us had heard on WIS TV and other TV news programs that 150 people attended the rally – none of us had. But the State newspaper today said there were over 1,000 people at the rally – now that is a rather large discrepancy in the numbers. Since you attended I am hoping you can clear up this question – the larger or smaller crowd? I looked on Youtube but no video from the rally and The State’s video only shows a close up of Palin without a crowd shot. Thanks for your time reading my e-mail.

Hope you are well.

We miss you at The State – we miss a lot from The State now. Monday’s paper is laughable.

Here’s how I responded to that:

Thanks for reading. I think it was between those two numbers. I think 1,000 is too high, and I’m pretty sure 150 is too low. But I’ve learned from long experience that crowds are notoriously hard to estimate.

I told my wife last night that it was 300 or 400, but that was just a guess…

And that’s about as much as I know. All I know is that it was a very enthusiastic crowd. And from where I was standing, I couldn’t even see the protesters that featured so prominently in news reports. Others who were there were certainly aware of them, to the extent that Sarah Palin addressed them — but I couldn’t tell whether that was because they were actually so noticeable, or because she thrives on persecution by political opponents; it’s part of her idiom. Perspective — where one stands or sits and what can be seen or heard from there — is everything. I failed to do what I usually do at such events — get up on the steps and look down for an overview — partly because the people I was wedged behind had indicated that they would DEEPLY resent anyone who squeezed in front of them (some folks who had brought lawn chairs and camped out, and had a profound sense of entitlement as a result — they were, as Tea Partiers tend to be, very cranky about it).

Fortunately, Anne McQuary, a former photographer with the state, had done the usual thing, and had gotten a shot of a significant portion of the crowd. You can see it above. I asked Anne whether I could use it here, and she said yes, but only if I posted something else with it, because she regarded the crowd picture as boring. Hence the picture below. But for a better sense of Anne’s talents, check out her blog. I really liked some of the shots she got on the periphery of the crowd (including some of those protesters). Also, there’s her main business website.

By the way, Anne said she and her husband — whom she described as a “huge Palin fan” — estimated the crowd at between 300 and 500. I think they were right.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: The State

A closer look at Nikki’s idea of fiscal responsibility

Nikki Haley’s ‘limited hangout’ (This is what she means by ‘transparency,’ when it’s applied to her)

Is that the best Haley can do? Bring up Obama? Wow, that is truly lame…

“Graham’s courageous stand for the republic”

Cindi’s column on Lost Trust, 20 years on

Show us transparency, Nikki: Release the e-mails

Blast from the newspaper past

Nikki Haley, Vincent Sheheen offer clear choice on Confederate flag

The Benjamin inaugural breakfast

How many budget vetoes did they deal with? Zero

“The State” Newspaper Prints Incorrect Budget Amount for Museum

Where was The State on Alvin Greene TODAY?

I disenfranchised myself for ONE positive vote, and it was worth it

OK, now The State paper has gone too far…

The non-impression Gresham Barrett makes

Military’s impact on the Midlands

Chamber goes 100% for incumbents in House races

Cindi’s column: ‘The two sides of Nikki Haley’

Meanwhile, from the soon-to-be-FORMER mayor…

How many Palin/Haley fans WERE there Friday?