Just saw this e-mail that Joe Azar sent out to his list:
Today The State editorial board endorsed Cameron Runyan over incumbent Daniel Rickenmann. Read it below. From all I can hear and see, Runyan should become our next city councilman. But don’t sit back and wait, forward this to everyone, call all your friends, and make sure to get everyone out to vote Tuesday, April 1. That is the only way to win, so do it!…
As foreshadowed in a previous post, we met this afternoon with Garrison Walters, the new (new to us, anyway) head of the state Commission on Higher Education.
Once upon a time, that post was filled by Fred Sheheen — Vincent’s Daddy, for those keeping up with political genealogy — who had an active, aggressive notion of the role the CHE should play in marshaling this poor state’s limited higher education resources to greatest effect. The powers that be, such as those who revere the prerogatives of the godlike boards of trustees of the respective institutions, did not like his style. They moved not only to get rid of him, but to restructure the CHE to make it kinder, gentler and less likely to say "nay" to anything they wished to do — or to have any authority even if it did say so.
Since then, the organization has been a lot more studious and polite — content with a "coordinating" rather than "governing" role. Mr. Walters is aware that our board has long favored a Board of Regents that would treat our collection of public, post-secondary institutions as a system rather than islands. He maintains, as do many who cast doubt on our restructuring fervor (say, the Senate on doing away with the "long ballot," or defenders of the council-manager system in Columbia), that some states with such boards do well, and others do not, while some states without overall governance do fine (he cites Michigan, Illinois and Texas).
My position, as always, is that given a choice between a structure intended to facilitate efficiency and accountability on the one hand, and a structure that one can succeed in those regards in spite of, I prefer the former.
As previously noted, of course, we temporarily have a condition in which our three research institutions, motivated in part by such inducements as the endowed chairs, are pulling at their oars as though they understand that we’re all in the same boat. Mr. Walters made note of that. Our position is to applaud our current state, but to worry about what happens when the current individuals in leadership move on, as Andrew Sorensen is about to do. Below that level cooperation and coordination is less evident, although there are encouraging exceptions to that trend.
Anyway, Mr. Walters held out hope that once a study committee finishes its work in September, we might see a new focus and purpose toward focusing our higher ed efforts. Let’s hope he’s right. In the meantime, I provide a video clip in which I ask our guest what he thinks it will take for South Carolina to get where it needs to go, and what CHE’s role is in that…
By BRAD WARTHEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR MY BEST CONTACT in the governor’s office left Mark Sanford’s employ last week, which is bad news for me. The jury is still out on whether it’s a good thing for South Carolina. The jury in this case will be the voters of S.C. Senate District 46 in Beaufort County. Tom Davis, formerly chief of staff to Mr. Sanford, will oppose Sen. Catherine Ceips in the Republican primary in June. I have no idea which should win; we’ll have our hands full on the editorial board just trying to endorse in primaries for Midlands districts. But Tom dropped by our offices on his way out of town last week, and I thought I’d share with you some observations from what one might term this “exit interview” — less for the light it sheds on a Senate contest, and more for what they tell us about the guy who’s been the governor’s point man for most of his time in office. You will have gathered from previous columns that I am, shall we say, disappointed in this governor. But Tom Davis has always impressed me with his passionate support of his boss. He is so earnest and so insistent in his faithful advocacy — from taking flak from lawmakers without resentment to sending me e-mails so intensely detailed in their rebuttal of criticism that I have to set them aside until I can find the time — that you can’t help but respect and like the guy, even when you disagree. The five issues he says he most wants to address distill some of the best things the governor has at least theoretically stood for (with a hint here and there of the worst). They also remind us how little has been achieved under this governor, despite Tom’s efforts:
1. Education funding. He would take all the money from the bewildering array of sources we have now — the EIA, the EFA, the whole EIEIO — and put it all into one stream, “so you can see where the money’s going and what it’s doing.” He’d have the money follow each child rather than districts and programs. This, of course, brings to mind the governor’s voucher and tax credits crusade. But it also points to the work that Tom has done reaching out to Education Superintendent Jim Rex. I’ve often been frustrated at the governor’s slowness to work personally with Mr. Rex on reforms they agree about, but Tom has definitely been the good cop on this one. Tom praises Mr. Rex’s efforts at public school choice, and says what’s needed to make the plan work is the funding reform he advocates. 2. “The way we tax.” Rather than get bogged down with the governor’s obsession with the income tax, Tom clearly advocates the comprehensive tax reform that our board has pushed for what seems like forever. 3. Government restructuring. The main reason we endorsed Mr. Sanford in 2002 was his embrace of our restructuring agenda — and his fecklessness on the issue played a role in our not endorsing him in 2006. Tom wants to try working for these crucial reforms from the very citadel of resistance, the S.C. Senate. And he understands that the state’s systemic problems extend far beyond just reducing fragmentation at the state level — he would stress prying the state’s fingers from the throat of local governments (my terminology, not his) so that the governments closest to the people can do their jobs. 4. Quality of life. One purpose of restoring the promise of Home Rule would be empowering local governments to fight sprawl. This is a natural outgrowth of the uncontrolled growth he’s seen in the Lowcountry, and an area where he and the governor have a lot more in common with Theodore Roosevelt than too many modern Republicans. 5. “The Ports.” One of the subjects of some of Tom’s most recent e-mails has been his fierce insistence that I am wrong when I say the governor hasn’t accomplished much. His evidence is the deal that he, Tom Davis, has helped engineer between our governor and Georgia’s over a new Jasper County port. He acknowledges this has been his “silo” at the governor’s office and perhaps looms larger in his mind than other people’s. But he maintains, with some justice, that there are few things more important to South Carolina’s economy than the health of its ports.
Tom argued a bit with us about vouchers. He says that movement has led to such promising developments as Mr. Rex’s open enrollment initiative. I say it’s brought any efforts to improve public schools to a grinding halt, consuming all the political oxygen that could be going to fight for such things as merit pay for teachers and district consolidation — things the governor has said he favors, but has done little to promote. Tom said that if elected, he would actively push those things. That would be good. It would be even better if Mark Sanford would.
Warren Bolton sent me this earlier today, and I was going to try to watch the links myself before post it, but it’s going to be so many hours — and probably tomorrow — before I can get to that, I’ll let y’all go ahead and get a head start:
Brad, thought I’d forward to you what someone shared with me. They are video clips of Wright. The first is a longer version of the "God Damn America" sermon. It won’t change your mind, but it puts more context around his comments.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RvMbeVQj6Lw
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8pedwsGGGp0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8pedwsGGGp0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9HjSoMZ7y7A
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-w5I1MR1NBg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4ThIdzzb0zc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6yOR_srOUI0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ckz6H3IbYzc
Warren, as you’ll recall, had a column on the subject this week — with a different take from mine.
Speaking of Mayor Bob, as we were earlier… A few days ago, he sent us an op-ed submission. Then he resent it with an additional byline on it — that of Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine. It was about the recent city council retreat.
Trouble is, we had run a piece from him just days earlier — last Friday, as a matter of fact. And that piece wasn’t long after another one from him. We can’t just turn over the space we have for local guest columns to the mayor every time there’s something he wants to respond to — he’s a very responsive guy. We have space most days for one local, nonstaff column. There’s a lot of competition for that slot, most days. So we have a guideline — no more than one piece for the same person within 30 days. And we had already stretched that rule once for the mayor, since his earlier piece had been on Feb. 20. We couldn’t give him yet another pass and still face all the other folks we’ve said "no" to. We’d made the first exception because he was responding to an editorial that had been critical of the city. We could have made another for the same reason, but chose not to.
Instead, I offered to put it on the blog. Here’s the cover note that came with the most recent version of his latest submission:
In light of today’s editorial I wanted to submit again the op ed from myself and Tameika Isaac Devine. The editorial was based on Adam Beam’s story about our retreat. While the editorial and Adam’s story certainly describe legitimate issues, I believe the op ed addresses one issue that has been corrected. The City Council partly as a result of the study cited in the editorial has set specific goals and a specific strategic action plan to implement those goals. Both the goals and the plan will be on our website after the plan is updated from the comments at the retreat.
The editorial specifically addresses the report and lack of goals when the writer says: "The report, based on interviews with dozens of managers in city government, said the City Council set no vision or goals…" The editorial goes on to say: "Council members told the study commission that the 2001 report was accurate. But they declared things had changed under Mr. Austin. Mayor Bob Coble said he thought members followed state law in terms of how they interact with city employees. But the events at the recent retreat say things have gotten no better. The council remains a major culprit in ensuring the city’s government struggles."
Clearly the main thrust of the editorial is the "interferance" (the writer’s term in the opening paragraph) of City Council and the form of government and not the lack of planning. While City Manager Austin would be the one to say what improvements have been made in how City Council interacts with him, I would note that the lack of formal goal setting and planning has been addressed, I believe in fairness the op ed adds an important perspective on whether the City Council took steps to formally address that criticism (instead of using the State of the City for the last six years as the primary vehicle for setting goals as would be the common practice under a strong mayor form of government). Of course the op ed discusses the major issues that were addressed at the retreat in addition to the one that Adam addressed in his story. As always I appreciate your consideration.
City Council Retreat Friday March 7, 2008 I wanted to give a report on the Columbia City Council Retreat that was held Friday March 7th at the Convention Center. The bulk of the day was spent reviewing the four broad goals that City Council adopted last year. Those goals were: 1. To enhance the quality of life in the City of Columbia for all citizens, customers and visitors. 2. To enhance and protect our natural and built infrastructure. 3. To enhance Columbia’s future role as the flagship municipality in South Carolina through the use of best practices for local government operations. 4. To grow the City’s tax base by facilitating opportunities for citizens and future generations to reach their full economic, social, and cultural potential. Those broad goals are being implemented through Columbia’s Strategic Operational Plan that staff has developed, and that City Council reviewed at the retreat. Both the goals and strategic plan will be on our website www.columbiasc.net. While a number of specific issues were discussed at the retreat, I think four were particularly important. First, City Council affirmed our plan for safety and security in Columbia. We established as our top funding priority, the police and fire retention plan to increase salaries by $2.5 million over a three year period. We reaffirmed our commitment to fund a security camera system and the goal of 375 police officers (an increase of 19 officers). Additionally, we are committed to fighting gang and youth violence with the implementation of the recommendations of our gang assessment. Secondly, we reviewed the progress we are making in correcting the deficiencies in our Finance Department that were outlined in the September 2007 Management Letter. We have retained the Municipal Association of South Carolina to help us establish best practices and online financial reporting. Thirdly, the City has made a real commitment to climate protection. Implementation of our energy audit, which will be released this month, will be a top priority for the coming year. Columbia must do our part to reduce global warming and protect our environment. Fourth, we reviewed the implementation of the disparity study that was adopted by Council in August of 2006. City Council reaffirmed our strong commitment to the study’s implementation and the need for accountability in reaching our goal of economic fairness and inclusion for our diverse community. Columbia City Council established last year our broad goals and the strategic operational plan to implement those goals. This year’s retreat was an important opportunity to review progress and take corrective steps where needed. Columbia is going through the greatest renaissance in our history. Innovista will transform our economy and create high wage jobs. The Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center and Hilton Hotel are bringing in tourists and conventions. We are creating new attractions such as EdVenture, the Three Rivers Greenway, and the historic Bethel AME Church Museum. The heart of Columbia, from the Riverfront, Downtown, Five Points, North Columbia, Two Notch Road to Read Street, has been revitalized. Private investment, both residential and commercial, has exploded. We have stronger neighborhoods with more residents, more homeowners, and greater home values in Columbia. We have achieved this growth with a commitment to diversity and inclusion. We have launched a new effort “Together We Can” to improve our public schools through greater community partnerships. This coming year will be an exciting though challenging time. Clear goals and our strategic plan will help us achieve success.
Thank you,
Mayor Bob Coble 3333 Heyward Street Columbia, South Carolina
Forgot to mention this yesterday, but as one who has worked at the south end of Assembly for over 20 years, about three or four years of which (by my highly scientific estimate) have been spent waiting for trains to move — and mind you, I long ago learned every trick for getting around them, but sometimes it’s impossible — I was deeply grateful to Mayor Bob for setting forth a vision for ridding us of this curse.
I’m not sure the city can afford it, and I’m not necessarily convinced that if it had the money it shouldn’t spend it on other things, but I do appreciate the thought.
Don’t think there was anything particularly rare about the language that trooper used in the notorious video.
Warren Bolton says he’s gotten "some pretty interesting feedback on my trooper column" in today’s paper. He shared this "gem" with me a little while ago:
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 2:47 PM To: Bolton, Warren Subject: Re: Trooper’s actions
Bolton;
The only thing that trooper did wrong was in not shooting the bastard down. At least that would have put one less nigger crimmal [sic] out of business.
Val Green
Warren gets this sort of thing all too often. So perhaps you can see why he worries that, as he said in his column today, "we’re not there yet" in the year 2008.
As previously noted, City Council candidate Brian Boyer was in the news today for his precedent-setting $50,000 media buy. He tried to place the expenditure in perspective by saying, "TV is a great way to reinforce the door-to-door campaigning I’ve done."
I can back him up on the door-to-door thing. On Saturday, March 1, I was at my daughter’s home visiting grandchildren. My wife and I were at the front of the house with the babies, and my daughter and her husband (the only ones present who could vote in this thing) were at the back, when somebody knocked at the front door. "Come in," we said. The knock came again. "Come in!" But the knocker allowed as how he’d better not: "It’s a stranger," he said.
But it wasn’t. When my wife opened the door I recognized Mr. Boyer and he recognized me back where I was sitting on the couch, so I got up and we all stood on the porch (he had a buddy with him) for awhile talking about the election.
Anyway, that Wednesday he came in for his actual interview. We talked about his growing up in the district, and his schooling at Hand, Dreher and West Point. Once he got his commission, he went to Ranger School, did his airborne training, then tried out for the Ranger Regiment itself. He made it, and was sent to Savannah to join the 1st Ranger Battalion. He was just beginning to settle into the routine of being a peacetime Army officer (albeit in a crack regiment) in the summer of 2001. You know what happened then — he went to war as a rifle company commander. The battalion "lost a good many men" in Afghanistan during service on the Pakistan border, part of that in the Hindu Kush. The unit got back stateside in January 2003, figuring they’d done their bit. Two months later, the battalion joined the invasion of Iraq. He says he only served there for a couple of months. He was awarded the Bronze Star.
His career as a civilian is less dramatic. He went back to school to get an MBA, worked for awhile in Charlotte, then came home and started a homebuilding company (he is vice president of Hallmark Homes International, Inc., where he "supervises all aspects of land acquisition, design, marketing, and sales"). He bought "the ugliest house in Shandon," which had been split up into three apartments, and started fixing it up as a single-family residence. A year after he moved in, he heard Anne Sinclair would not be running for re-election to the 3rd District.
His community involvement has included service on the board of the Columbia Chamber. He takes pride in his service on the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force, and notes that he built 10 townhomes in the Historic Arsenal Hill neighborhood which appraised at $161K apiece and were sold at cost for $99K. He says he’s in the process of getting certified as a "green builder."
He would want to stress three issues on council:
Crime and Public Safety. He said adequate funding of this had not been a top priority of the city and should. He cited his military experience as being helpful in this area. He wants to get better technology in patrol cars so officers can file their reports from the field and stay out on the street more, something he called a "force multiplier." He’s distressed at the city’s and county’s inability to coordinate on youth gangs, and would want to be a bridge-builder on that.
Financial accountability. He criticized the lack of openness as well as competence, citing not only the failure to close books on time, but the secrecy about the former financial director’s severance.
General leadership. He said politicians "talk about I want to do this, I want to do that," but he has demonstrated the ability to follow through — both in the military, and with affordable housing.
He talked at some length about the failure to have an evaluation system in place for the city manager until recently. In the Army, he noted, you don’t go more than six months without a fitness report.
He would change the form of city government to a strong-mayor form, or the hybrid that’s been suggested.
When I asked him about the "factions" thing (see the elaboration on the Belinda Gergel entry), he said he couldn’t help the fact that his sister is married to Don Tomlin. "I’m about as independent as they come." As for the folks who are supposedly behind him, "none of them were there in the mountains of Afghanistan" or the "deserts of Iraq."
"I sort of feel that I’ve proved myself, and proved my decision-making ability, long before I knew those guys." At the same time, he’s proud to have their support.
When Belinda Gergel was an 18-year-old freshman at Columbia College, she first saw a house that she decided she must live in one day. Now, retired from chairing the history and political science departments at that college, she does. And her experience as a vocal community leader in the University Hill neighborhood shapes her campaign to represent it on Columbia City Council.
As president of the Historic Columbia Foundation, she led the fight to keep USC from demolishing the historic Black House and Kirkland Apartments, and sponsored some remarkably well-attended symposiums (symposia?) on the burning of Columbia and the assassination of N.G. Gonzales by the coward James Tillman. She’s currently a member of the board of Columbia Green, and is helping lead an effort to create a 22-acre Garden District in downtown Columbia.
But her interests hardly stop there. She is intensely interested in public safety — her home was burglarized the first night she was in it (not for the last time, either), and gang members shot a federal prosecutor on the same block within a month of that. "If our neighborhoods are not safe, nothing else matters," she said in our editorial board endorsement interview on March 5.
She has also reached out beyond residential concerns to form alliances with business people. She’s been endorsed by Five Points leader Jack Van Loan, who had not known her previously. (Full disclosure: Jack asked me to join him and Ms. Gergel for lunch one day in February, and I took Warren Bolton along — but all of our substantive discussion of her candidacy took place in our formal interview.)
As a member of the commission that studied Columbia’s form of government, she went in as an advocate of switching to a strong-mayor form. But she came out of that outrageously strung-out experienced convinced that such a change is not politically viable, and that we "need to fix the system we have now." A key element of that is developing a far more professional relationship between the city manager and the council. That would happen within the context of strategic planning — she says the council must set a vision, and the manager must be held accountable for implementing it, two things that have utterly failed to happen up to now.
She served on the metro-area committee that drafted a plan for a comprehensive approach to homelessness, and was "very disappointed" at the way the city went off on its own and essentially demolished the regional process. She would be determined as a council member to pick up the pieces, involve faith-based providers and all local governments in resurrecting the comprehensive approach.
She and Columbia College President Caroline Whitson rode the metro area buses last fall, and learned how hard it was to find out how to get where you want to go on that system. "When I was a student, the bus was how you got around," she said. Now, it was hard to figure out the schedule. She believes the city ought to be doing all it could to encourage people to take the bus, and get them the information to make that practical.
Probably the most interesting part of our interview was when Ms. Gergel directly confronted (she is direct and to-the-point on all issues) the talk about opponent Brian Boyer and her representing different factions in the city, despite the election being nonpartisan (the short version of that "conventional wisdom" — she is allegedly aligned with Mayor Bob Coble and other Democrats, and Mr. Boyer with his brother-in-law Don Tomlin, Daniel Rickenmann, Kirkman Finley III et al.).
"I am not in a camp," she said. "I believe in the nonpartisanship of this election, and I will not be seeking the endorsement of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I think that there’s a good reason for council membership to be nonpartisan."
"As far as this camps thing — I don’t know where this is coming from, and I have no idea why someone would focus on what camp Belinda would be in. I am a strong, independent woman; that is what Columbia College did for me as a student, and what we worked on as faculty to encourage in our students. I have no permanent enemies and no personal friends on council, that’s how I see it, but issues that need to be addressed, and I will work with each member of council to address those issues."
"And I know that’s what the residents of District 3 expect. They don’t want a factionalized, ‘camped,’ partisan city council. They want us working together, and moving the city ahead."
When asked at the end if there were any issues we had failed to cover, she brought up the fact that she had "sensed" that some people assumed that, because of her work in historic preservation, she was "anti-development." She said nothing could be further from the truth. As the daughter of a developer, "I have great appreciation of what development, and developers and homebuilders are all about" — a growing and vibrant economy. "That’s how we were brought up."
"We want great development," the sort that enhances a community, "and expect nothing less."
I don’t know what I just typed out all those quotes when I have those parts on video (which is how I checked the quotes). Here’s the video:
Well, you’ll be gratified to know that I’ve had my comeuppance.
Just a few minutes ago, I opened a manila envelope addressed to me that contained what looked like a flattened sheet of bloody pulp. This, of course, is always the sign of a carefully considered observation regarding the offerings on our daily pages.
This one was unusual in that the expansive thoughts of the writer demanded use of the entire page, even though the item being addressed occupied only a small portion of it. To make sure I didn’t miss what the writer was referring to, two bold red Xes were placed tastefully on either side of the editorial’s headline, and that part of the page (and only that part of the page) was left free of red ink.
All was not as it appeared, however. Although it would seem to the untutored eye to be the work of a single hand and a singular mind, the reader is boldly assured that it expresses the views of
"AVERY LARGE GROUP OF Gov. MARK SANFORD SUPPORTERS."
Just so you know. The message is, beyond that, unattributed, which unfortunately bars me from sending a "thank you" note.
Anyway, the writer(s) maintain(s) that Mr. Sanford would make a wonderful running mate for the GOP nominee, and that rather than running down such an idea, we should instead spend our ink criticizing "some of the bad hoodlum-type individuals," because after all, "there are many of them."
There’s also some stuff about the Real ID that I can’t fully make out (on account of it being written over a lot of type and all), but which seems based in an incomplete understanding of our position on the issue, as expressed in an editorial the day before the Sanford/veep piece.
But our message in the Sanford piece seems to have gotten across quite clearly. I can at least take satisfaction from that.
The Governor and Republican legislators have made South Carolina a better place to live, work and raise a family. Not surprisingly, leaders and lawmakers across the country have taken notice of Governor Sanford’s leadership -– as they have taken notice of other great leaders in South Carolina like our U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint and the entire Republican team in Columbia.
Katon does his best, as a good party chairman should, to paint a picture of Republicans in South Carolina as one big family, with the gov and GOP lawmakers pulling in the same direction and things like that. And he does it as well as anyone might. Be sure to check it out.
Folks, the last couple of days things have been too hectic for blogging, and the next few might be as well.
Part of the problem (and you don’t want to know all the reasons) is that dilemma I’ve cited over and over again in the past (but please don’t make me look it up to link to it right now): It’s hard both to have experiences worth blogging about, and blog. A cake and eat it too sort of thing.
Yesterday, we had three city council candidates come through on a day that would have been long, stressful and overloaded without a single one of them. The interviews were very interesting, though, and I think I have some good video, but haven’t had time to look at it. If at all possible, I’ll post something on them this weekend.
We talked to Belinda Gergel, Brian Boyer and Cameron Runyan (whom I referred to this morning yet again as Damon Runyon, but was corrected; sorry about that, Cameron). We have two council candidates (both at large) left, to whom we’ll be speaking on Tuesday. Eventually, I’ll post about all of them.
Right now, I’ll just make the overall comment that this is an unusually strong set of candidates so far, given what we’ve sometime seen in Cola city elections. More later.
This video also comes from the very start of our interview, this time with Daniel Rickenmann, the incumbent at-large member of Columbia City Council who is up for re-election April 1.
Mr. Rickenmann stressed some highlights of what he’s done and tried to do in the four years since he was first elected. We’ll be talking with his opponents over the next few days…
I always devote the first few minutes of these meetings to letting the candidate summarize the high points of what he wants us to know about him and his candidacy. Mr. Swearingen chose to use that time to explain how his biography plays into his concept of what he’s like Columbia to be, based on what he’s seen in other cities he’s lived in.
In editing this material down to YouTube’s five-minute limit (which I find is generally good discipline, and produces a more watchable clip), I left out some details — such as his brief sojourn in Los Angeles (a city he didn’t like living in), and a period he spent back in Columbia, teaching at Midlands Tech, after California and before Austin, Texas. My goal was to keep to the points that spoke to his particular vision of a good city.
Anyway, as it begins, he has just explained being originally from Florence, and going to Francis Marion University, and he is just starting to tell about moving to San Francisco…
As regular readers know, I’ve written a lot over the last few years on the topic of the newspaper’s endorsements — from the high-altitude stuff like why we do them and how we do them, to the nitty-gritty of how we came to decide on a particular endorsement, and the party affiliations and won-lost record of candidates we’ve backed, and plenty of other stuff that’s probably way more than you ever wanted to know.
But there is a significant anti-endorsement faction in the news trade that simply doesn’t want us to do them at all. That’s a tempting proposition when I’ve just been through something like these presidential primaries, and when starting next week I’ll be resuming the gantlet with city elections, then county and state primaries, and then the general elections themselves, with scarcely a moment to breathe. Nevertheless, I find the arguments of the "don’t do ’em" crowd unmoving. I’ve run across two such arguments in the past week.
The first was in TIME magazine, which basically doesn’t have a dog in the fight, not even being a newspaper. A longtime thoughtful reader brought the piece to Cindi’s attention, and she brought it to mine. It’s called "Should Newspapers Still Be Taking Sides?" An excerpt:
I confess that I’ve never quite understood why newspapers endorse
presidential candidates. Sure, I know the history and the tradition,
the fact that newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries were often
affiliated with political parties, but why do they do it now? Why do it
at a time when the credibility and viability of the press are at
all-time lows? More important, why do it at a time when readers,
especially young readers, question the objectivity of newspapers in
particular and the media in general?
This guy’s argument reminds me of one that Tony Ridder, the top dog of the now-defunct Knight Ridder, made to a roomful of KR editorial page editors in the waning days of the empire (early 2005). Never mind why there was such a gathering of EPEs when corporate had zero say in the running or content of our editorial pages, but they use to hold such meetings about once every five years whether I wanted them to or not. Anyway, Tony’s argument didn’t go as far as this guy’s, he just didn’t want us endorsing in presidential elections any more. His spiel sort of amounted to, "Golly, folks, why do this when it just makes a lot of folks mad at us?" In fairness, he saw it as a distraction to our main missions, which is writing about our respective local communities. We mostly just stared at him blankly. If anyone in the room took his advice to heart, I don’t know about it — and in any case, by the time of the next presidential election (this one), there was no more Knight Ridder.
Then, there was this piece in The New York Observer about the NYT‘s policy against its op-ed columnists endorsing candidates. An excerpt:
Unlike the board that puts together TheTimes’ endorsements, they can say whatever they want. They can even court an R rating. They cannot, however, endorse a candidate.
“I came here in 1995 and Howell Raines told me
about it,” said Gail Collins, the former editorial director, who is now
herself a columnist. “His thought, as I understood it, was that it
would confuse people. Columnists could hint, and could make it clear,
but we couldn’t explicitly say it.” The logic goes like this: If Gail
Collins endorses Barack Obama, then a reader might confuse it for the New York Times newspaper endorsing Barack Obama.
This makes no sense to me, but then I’ve never been in the position of having staff op-ed columnists who were not members of the editorial board, so it’s hard for me to imagine. Personally, I wish they’d go ahead an overtly state the preferences that some of them so obviously have, instead of hiding behind this absurdly small, thin fig leaf of impartiality. I mean, come on — do you really doubt whom Paul Krugman preferred in the last two presidential elections?
As David Brook was quoted as saying in the piece, such obfuscation is a great challenge to a writer: "It’s like a two-year process of deliberation without reading the verdict."
Of course, we write personal columns on the editorial page of The State (not op-ed), and those columns are intentionally separate from editorials, which express consensus opinions. And no, we never write "I endorse so-and-so" in columns, but for slightly different reasons. One, there’s the word itself — endorsement is reserved for the newspaper itself, not for individual writers. Also, however many good things we might say about one candidate or bad things about another, there’s always a little bit of hanging back from a final, total commitment because we know we can get embarrassed by having the real endorsement go against us when we get around to it as a board.
Of course, readers of my work will note that as time goes by, I worry less and less about that. I’m more interested in being completely candid with readers as to what I think here and now, and less concerned with the potential embarrassment of losing the endorsement debate. My mania for disclosure even extends to publicly wallowing in my humiliation and mortification at losing the argument so spectacularly in 2000. But not everyone is that weird; others prefer to keep their dignity, and I respect that.
Anyway, I thought I’d share these pieces with you. You decide what you think. And I know you will. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so dismissive of one of the lamest arguments mounted against endorsements — which the TIME guy dusts off and trots out yet again: That we shouldn’t tell people how to vote.
Brad, I’m going to start scheduling the folks running for (Columbia) city council. I believe there are seven. Would you share some dates you’re available next week and the week after so I can try to get firm commitments when I first talk with these folks? Thanks.
Warren
How unfair is this? We just got done with endorsements in the presidential primaries, what — five seconds ago? Now we’re starting on those seeking Columbia city council seats on April 1.
And here’s the killer — we have to start on state and county offices (the real biggie, in terms of volume) immediately after that, because those primaries are coming June 12 — just days after legislative adjournment. (Extra fun: This is the year that we do the Senate as well as House.) And as soon as those are over, we plunge into endorsement hyperspeed to make runoff selections within the fortnight, then we go through those weeks when we’re extremely shorthanded while we take turns taking some time off, then Labor Day starts us on our general election round of interviews.
Somewhere in all that, we’ll give some thought to choosing between McCain and (I hope) Obama — but given this schedule, not a whole lot of time.
Oh, yeah, I just realized that there’s an editorial point in all of the above. City elections should happen at the same time as the others, rather than having "stealth" elections in April, wedged between higher-profile races, when voters’ guard is likely to be down. April elections depress turnout.
Have you noticed that it was a little lonesome on the blog the last couple of days? I did. Last night, I figured out why — my latest posts weren’t showing up as links on the main and opinion pages of thestate.com.
Consequently, there’s been nobody here but you regulars who come to the blog to see what’s here, rather than being pulled straight in to fresh posts. That’s one reason why there have hardly been any comments — or, more telling, page views — on any posts after this one, way back on Tuesday.
Apparently, it was a systemwide problem that, I’m happy to say, seems to be fixed.
But I’m still worried about a message I got from one of the tech gurus ‘splaining the problem: "not sure what’s happening but the rss feeds from the blogs is choking the rss
feed grabber that constructs those headline lists on thestate.com."
I don’t who was or wasn’t grabbing my rss, or choking my feeder, but I’m glad they quit doing it.
But I’d never had such a frustrating conversation with someone as well
educated and experienced as Don, his party’s former national chairman.
He kept clinging to this notion that we would never endorse anyone with
the name Clinton — which made no sense to me — what’s in a name; are
we Montagues and Capulets here? I mean, if he knows that, he
knows something I don’t know. He said he based his absolute conclusion
on a visit he made to the editorial board on Bill Clinton’s behalf in
1996. Not remembering the specifics of that meeting, I didn’t get into
it, but I pointed out that of the five current members of the board,
I’m the only one who was on the board then. No matter. He suggested
that the fix was in, that we would endorse the Republican no matter
what, and that it must hold just as true today as then.
Now I can say I do recall the specifics of that meeting, because I ran across a forgotten column that was inspired by it. Here it is, in its entirety:
So what does this tell us? It tells me that Dr. Fowler read my statement that "There never was much chance of" our endorsing Clinton-Gore in 1996, and extrapolated it to mean that this editorial board, even with turnover that left me as the only surviving member of the 1996 board, would never endorse anyone named "Clinton."
This seems like a stretch to me for several reasons. First, this wasn’t even a column about not endorsing Clinton. Our endorsement of Bob Dole had run two days earlier. Here’s a copy of it. That editorial was written not by me, but by my predecessor, who retired in 1997. A little historical footnote here: I would have written the editorial except that by that point in the campaign, I could no longer do so in good conscience. Dole had run such a disastrous campaign that I could not be the one to tell voters (even anonymously) that he was better able to run the White House. So my editor, who still preferred Dole, wrote it instead. Dr. Fowler had no way of knowing any of that. But the context of the statement was clear: We had just endorsed Dole, and all that we had written about the race up to that point led naturally to such a conclusion — including editorials I had written myself, earlier in the campaign. I still thought Dole was a better man than Bill Clinton; I just no longer thought he’d be a better president. It was also clear I wasn’t going to win any argument on that point — hence my wording in that column.
Second, anyone who read past that perfectly factual, supportable observation (that there was no way the board would endorse Clinton), would get to the other points I made, which took either a balanced, or even positive, view of Mr. Clinton. For instance, just to repeat myself:
… The most responsible thing Bill Clinton tried to do in his first year
in office was to present a deficit-reduction plan that was a model of
nonpartisan sobriety, and which was destined to actually improve the
situation. So, of course, not one Republican in either house of
Congress voted for it. Not only did they vote against it, they’ve spent
the past three years misrepresenting it to the people.
But that pales in comparison to the disinformation campaign the GOP
conducted over the Clinton health plan. The plan never had a chance,
which in a way was too bad, seeing as how most Americans wanted
something done about health-care costs and availability, but what was
that next to the need for the GOP to achieve its strategic objectives?…
Again, remember: I am the only editorial board member left from those days. And could a reasonable person conclude that the guy who wrote that passage would never, ever endorse Bill Clinton — much less "a Clinton?" I would say not. I would say that this was a guy I had a chance of winning over. But that’s just me.
Anyway, all that aside, the point of the column was, as the headline suggests, to decry the disastrous effect that the political parties have on our politics. This has been a recurring theme in my work ever since, and I have never wavered from it. If you’ve read the paper on anything like a regular basis, there’s really no excuse for misunderstanding me on this point.
The villain of the piece was not Bill Clinton, or even Newt Gingrich, but the Democratic and Republican parties.
Just got off the phone with an anonymous caller angered by newspaper’s coverage of police testing scandal. This man is apparently in local law enforcement….
In short: He says the newspaper has greatly overestimated the importance of the testing scandal. More of "a prank," he says. He says the test only existed to ensure that people had watched the 4-hour video online. If they went to watch the video in person, no test was required. He says that the online training was a mess, and this should have been mentioned in the report.
He says that such help to one another is natural among police, and basically goes back to the academy days as a part of police culture. Many of the recruits aren’t great test-takers, but good at solving problems.
He says that naming the officers went overboard and damaged the integrity of the whole force.
To which my response is: And if the test were a joke and unimportant, that would be yet ANOTHER thing that the city administration should have communicated clearly to the public…
Here I must apologize for falling behind reporting on the meetings we have with folks pushing various points of view. It was one of the reasons I started this blog, but pulling my notes, video and all together to fairly summarize such meetings is very time-consuming. Yesterday, I had two very interesting such meetings — one with Jay Moskowitz, president of Health Sciences South Carolina in Columbia, who is an example of the kind of classy talent our governor would prefer that we NOT attract; another with some guys from the Air Force on a host of issues from the strategic to the logistical (so wide-ranging that I can’t summarize it just in passing). Unfortunately, yesterday was so busy I didn’t get to digesting those, and probably won’t today or tomorrow.
But I will keep the backlog from stacking up any higher by telling you about a meeting we had today:
Thornton Kirby — pictured above — president and CEO of the S.C. Hospital Association, came in to talk to us about two issues:
But in Mr. Kirby’s behalf, I will cede his excellent point that my sort of comprehensive solutions can only be implemented nationally, leaving the states to do what little they can. (Which is why I was happy to see what Joel Lourie has been trying to do, just to mention something I meant to say earlier.)
