Category Archives: The State

Privacy, schmeivacy

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Our editorial board is a carefully constructed balancing act; we tend to be all over the place on a lot of issues, and the key to coming up with a position is to prove daily that we can work together — despite our differences — in ways that legislative bodies seem to find impossible. (Back when he was speaker, David Wilkins once said I couldn’t understand how hard it is to get people to rally around a bill — I scoffed because every morning, we go into a meeting and can’t leave the room until we’ve passed out several bills, so he does not have my sympathy.)

One of our widest divides is between me and Cindi Scoppe on privacy. She is always concerned about protecting it; my own attitude can be represented, with only slight exaggeration, as "privacy, schmeivacy."

So it was that, in an effort to probe the bounds of my extremism, Cindi copied a news story to me, topped with her question, "too un-private even for you?" An excerpt from the news story:

A COMPANY WILL MONITOR PHONE CALLS AND DEVISE ADS TO SUIT
{By LOUISE STORY}=<=
   (This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS. It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times.)<
{c.2007 New York Times News Service}=<
   Companies like Google scan their e-mail users’ in-boxes to deliver ads related to those messages. Will people be as willing to let a company listen in on their phone conversations to do the same?<
   Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., is introducing an Internet phone service on Monday that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service _ consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.<
   The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.<
   A conversation about movies, for example, will elicit movie reviews and ads for new films that the caller will see during the conversation….

My reply to Cindi, kept brief because it was sent from my Treo, was:

No, it’s too PRIVATE for me. I prefer to leave such things to Big Brother.

You just can’t give an inch to these privacy freaks, you know.

Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern

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Huckabee1
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THERE’S A PRINCIPLE that I long thought was a given in American politics. As long as it held true, it didn’t matter so much if the “wrong” candidate won an election. No matter what sort of nonsense he had spouted on the stump, this stark truth would take him in its unforgiving grip, set him down and moderate him.
    Mike Huckabee, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, made reference to this principle when he met with our editorial board Thursday:
    “One of the tough jobs of governing is, you actually have to do it.” That may sound so obvious that it’s foolish, like “One thing about water is, it’s wet.” But it can come as a cold shock.
    Think of the congressional class of 1994. Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwers were full of radical notions when they gained power. But once they had it, and used it, however briefly, to shut down the government, they quickly realized that was not what they were elected to do.
    Or some of them realized it. More about that in a moment. Back to Mr. Huckabee.
    Mr. Huckabee is a conservative — the old-fashioned kind that believes in traditional values, and wants strong, effective institutions in our society to support and promote those values.
    Many newfangled “conservatives” seem just as likely to want to tear down as build up.
    If Mr. Huckabee was ever that way, being the governor of Arkansas made him less so. “As a governor, I’ve seen a different level of human life, maybe, than the folks who live in the protected bubble of Washington see,” he said. And as a governor who believed he must govern, he was appalled when he saw government fail to do its job. He points to the aftermath of Katrina: “It was one of the more, to me, disgusting moments of American history…. It made my blood boil….”
   Perhaps I should pause again now to remind you that Gov. Huckabee is a conservative: “I’m 100 percent pure and orthodox when it comes to the issues that matter to the evangelical or faith voter, if you will,” he says.
    “But as a governor, I spent most of my time improving education, rebuilding the highway system, reforming health care in Arkansas” — things that are not inconsistent with conservatism.
    “And for that I had the right — had earned the right, if you will — to pass some pro-life legislation,Huckabee2
and strong pro-marriage and pro-family legislation. But I didn’t spend 90 percent of my time pushing that….”
    OK, let’s review: As a conservative, he has a certain set of ideals. But he knows that being governor isn’t just about promoting an ideology, whatever it might be. Being governor, if the job is properly understood, is the most pragmatic form of life in our solar system — except for being mayor.
    People expect certain things of you, and you’ve got to do them. Successful governors realize that, whether you’re promoting ideals or paving the roads, “The wrong thing to do is to go and to try to stick your fist in the face of the Legislature that you know is not necessarily with you, and create a fight.” (Gov. Huckabee had to deal with a Democratic assembly.)
    So what’s the right way?
    “You positively share your message, you communicate it… . If you can’t do that, I don’t think you can lead. Just… quite frankly, I don’t think you have a shot at it.”
    I know someone who needs to hear that. Remember the class of ’94? The only lesson Mark Sanford learned from shutting down the federal government was that it was worth trying again. So last year, he vetoed the entire state budget when lawmakers failed to hold spending to the artificial limits he had decreed.
    Of course, they overrode him. And he knew they would. For him, it was about the gesture, not about governing. It’s about ungoverning. It’s about the agenda of the Club for Growth.
    Gov. Huckabee, being conservative fiscally as well as otherwise, has been known to turn down taxes, but that’s an area where pragmatism can outweigh ideals:
“… We had a Supreme Court case where we were forced to deal with both equity and adequacy in education,” said Mr. Huckabee. “There was no way to do that without additional revenue.”
    Still, he refused to sign the tax bill Democrats gave him.
    “I didn’t think we were getting enough reform for the amount of money. It wasn’t that I didn’t support additional revenue, because I did, so I’ll be honest about that. But… we weren’t pushing for enough efficiency out of the system.” What sort of efficiency?
    “I wanted a greater level of school consolidation in order to fund the efficiency, which was a very unpopular thing.”
    Our governor has said he’s for school district consolidation (as am I), but he’s never done anything effective to achieve it. That would require building a constructive relationship with the Legislature.
    Another time, Gov. Huckabee actually opposed a tax cut. Why? That governing thing again: “Well, I supported the elimination of the grocery tax, but not the timing, and the timing would have meant we literally would have closed nursing homes, had to slash Medicaid. I mean, it’s one thing to trim the fat off the bone, it’s another thing, you know, to start going into the bone itself.”
    That wouldn’t worry the Club for Growth, about which Gov. Huckabee says, “They hate me. I call ’em the Club for Greed. That’s part of why they don’t like me… If people don’t have the courage to run for office, they can just give money to them and they’ll do the dirty work for you.”
    “I think it’s a sleazy way to do politics.”
    The Club for Growth loves Mark Sanford.
    I don’t know what sort of president Mike Huckabee would make, but I wonder whether he’d do another stint as governor….

For video, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Huckabee3

Sunday column video preview

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This video is an amalgam of clips that contain pretty much all of the quotes from Mike Huckabee that you will find in my Sunday column, which is headlined "Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern." You’ll also find some context for the quotes — as much as I could jam into YouTube’s 5-minute limit.

Please excuse the spots where I didn’t have video, and had to use sound from my little digital recorder. The quality isn’t as good as what I have on the video footage, and the splicing is a little rough — OK, really rough.

Bear with me; I’m self-taught. As Ferris Bueller said about the clarinet — "Never had one lesson."

Huckabee: The quick-and-dirty video

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You can either wait until I’ve had time to go through more than an hour of video clips and find the highlights, or you can have it fast. For those who want it fast, here’s a quick, unedited (except for splicing two pieces together) clip from the opening moments of our interview today with the former Arkansas governor seeking the GOP nod for the presidency. (You can tell he’s a Republican, in case you didn’t know, by the fact that he thinks "Democrat" is an adjective.)

Which way does the op-ed page ‘lean?’

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There are a number of groups out there that presume to be "watchdogs" over media, and pretty much all of these dogs are watching for one reason only — so they can complain that media reports don’t slant in their direction. You can recognize which side they are on immediately — it’s the opposite side of the one that they are certain the media are not on.

Today, we received this report from a group calling itself "MediaMatters for America." I’ll let you guess which "side" they’re on. But what was intriguing this time was that the subject was the op-ed page, and the thing being measured was the one thing that (theoretically) you could use as a quick-and-dirty measurement as to whether an op-ed page "leans" one way or the other — the incidence of "liberal" vs. "conservative" syndicated columnists. Or, in the language of this report, "progressive" vs. "conservative" … oh, dang! I gave away the ideological underpinnings of this report, and I had promised to let you work it out. Sorry.

Anyway, the report concludes that (surprise!) "conservative" columnists predominate. The report is entitled "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over." A sample of the findings:

  • In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.
  • The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.

This naturally raises the question, "Who is a conservative columnist, and who is a "progressive?" And if you can answer that one to everyone’s satisfaction, I’m going to ask you to start answering my phone for me. But all that matters here is how MediaMatters defines the columnists.

Here’s how they break down those "top 10:"

"Progressive"

  1. Ellen Goodman
  2. Leonard Pitts
  3. Maureen Dowd

"Centrist"

  1. David Broder
  2. Tom Friedman

"Conservative"

  1. George Will
  2. Kathleen Parker
  3. Cal Thomas
  4. Charles Krauthammer
  5. David Brooks

Oooh. Way conservative, right? And this is particularly interesting because The State runs all of the above columnists, except Ellen Goodman (whom we dropped about 10 years ago, largely because I thought she was past her prime and seemed to writing the same column over and over). So that means we’re really conservative, right?

But let’s look at the list again. Using the popular definitions (and in some cases, the way the syndicates market these people) are these folks correctly categorized? I don’t think so. If you’re going to force everybody who even leans "conservative" into the "red" category, then you need to put Broder and Friedman into the "progressive." That makes their list even. And if you’re going to have a "centrist" category, I would balance it by including a couple of center-right types — specifically, Kathleen Parker and David Brooks — along with the two center-left writers.

Either way, you end up with a balanced top 10.

That said, I don’t think the organization’s scale is that far off, nationally speaking. It’s just not adjusted to South Carolina standards.

But even if you take my objections (and I can easily think of objections to my objections, but I’ll let y’all do that) to heart, The State still leans rightward since we don’t run Goodman, right?

Scroll down a bit in the report, and you’ll find that we don’t run ANY of the top 10 conservative writers beyond the five who show up in the top 10 overall. But we do run two of the lesser "progressives" — Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert — from time to time.

So does that balance out? You tell me — it’s always going to depend on the eye of the beholder, in any case. But let me leave you with three points. First is the fact that Mike Fitts does the op-ed page — I see the page each day after his selections are made, and I try not to second-guess him — and he would probably place some of the above columnists differently from the way I do, so my impressions don’t count for as much as you might think.

Second is the fact that our local contributors play just as big a role on the page as the syndicated columnists, and they are all over the place. If you want to try to keep score there, more power to you; I’ve never tried.

Finally, there is this: "Op-ed" is short for "opposite editorial." The idea is that it provides alternative views that complement, rather than matching, the views of the editorial board. So if left-vs.-right meant as much as MediaMatters seem to think, in a perfect world, liberal editorial pages would face conservative op-ed pages. It doesn’t work like that, but then neither does the world. It’s always more complicated.

Maybe Fred’ll wave as he goes by

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Fred Thompson’s coming by the newspaper today — quite literally, in that he’ll pass right by us to go to Doc’s Barbecue:

Fredheadergeneric
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: Jeff Sadosky 
September 7, 2007    

***MEDIA ADVISORY***
Thompson To Tour South Carolina

McLEAN, VA – Friends of Fred Thompson Committee announces campaign schedule and logistics for South Carolina events for September 10th, 2007. 

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10th
GREENVILLE, SC
WHAT:   Town Hall with Fred Thompson
WHEN:   9:30 am, please preset all equipment by 9:00 am
WHERE: Greenville Marriott
             1 Parkway East
             Greenville, SC 29615

NOTE:    TV Quality Lighting and Sound, Press Riser, Mult Box Available, 35ft throw

COLUMBIA, SC
WHAT:   Meet Fred Thompson
WHEN:   1:30 PM, please preset all equipment by 1:00 PM
WHERE: Doc’s Barbeque & Southern Buffet
             1601 Shop Road, Columbia, SC 29201
NOTE:    TV Quality Lighting, Press Riser, Outdoor Amplified Sound, Mult Box Available, 35ft throw

ALL TIMES LOCAL AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Doc’s is really, really close to our offices. I was guessing Friday, when this release arrived, that it was within 200 yards. Mike allowed as how it was closer, maybe a 5 iron — which was OK until he added "150 yards," which opened him to all kinds of scorn, enabling me to say, "That’s a 7 iron for me," and other such zingers.

Now mind you, it’s not like we’ve invited Fred to come by and say "Hey." We would have, but Mike (he of the short game) said he doesn’t know of a contact for Fred here in S.C. (Perhaps we’ll hear from one as a result of this post; I find a blog is a wonderful form of passive information gathering.)

Not that he has to be invited. He invited himself back in 2000, when he was here to tell us we should have endorsed — ahem! — John McCain. (And he was right.)

But this time, he’s going to go right past us. Now mind you, Doc’s has an excellent reputation. My parents go there regularly. But there’s "good barbecue" and there’s good barbecue, and if Fred thinks he’s going to find Memphis-style there — the sort that he and I are accustomed to as the standard — he’s in for a shock.

Anyway, there’s something interestingly symbolic about his going to the people (the ones his campaign autodialed over the weekend) rather than coming to kiss our rings. It’s indicative of the state of things on this belated honeymoon that Fred will enjoy for, oh, the next week or two. He doesn’t have to show up for debates or answer newspaper editors’ questions. He can coast on free media that concentrates on him and him alone — and what better than an event staged at a barbecue stand, where he can go "mmm-MMM" (think "Andy Griffith eating a Ritz cracker") and say it’s the best barbecue ever, and be believed.

But at some point, this will be over, and the hard part will start.

Scooped by the newsroom

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Yesterday, Zeke Stokes sent me the above video, with the following terse comment:

Just when you think we’re making progress.

Once again, this was Zeke Stokes, not some guy who gets his jollies making fun of the S.C. public education system.

I looked at it and thought, "the poor kid," yet resolved to put it up on the blog as inherently interesting — but only after I put up several other things that had more substance. I didn’t get around to posting those things yesterday, and since Jon Ozmint is coming in in a few minutes to talk about all this, and we still have pages to produce, I’m probably not going to get to those things today, either.

Meanwhile, the blasted newsroom scooped me on this. They even blogged about it. Ah, well.

I don’t know how to break it to you, but you got scooped on this one

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Just got an op-ed submission,  and the e-mail containing it had this heading: "Timely op-ed on Diana’s death."

That would be Diana Spencer, who used to be married to the royal Brit with the ears. The proffered piece was titled,"What I learned from the Death of Princess Diana and the Life of Mother Teresa," and was authored by one Les T. Csorba.

Gosh, Lester, you got scooped by about 10 years. The competition totally spanked you on this one. Maybe you should drop the "timely" bit. Sorry, pal.

Well, not all that sorry. I’ve about had it with my e-mail slot being overwhelmed with unsolicited pooge.

John McCain videos

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Here are clips from portions of the editorial board’s meeting with John McCain on Monday. These, as usual on this blog, were shot by me with my little Canon digital still camera that also shoots short video clips.  You can find some higher-quality video from the meeting, shot by Andy Haworth of thestate.com, by following this link.

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"The Surge is Winning:"
McCain on Iraq

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"They didn’t believe us:"
Why the immigration bill failed

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Why we don’t need a draft:
McCain on the military

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"Look at the Region:"
The War on Terror, beyond Iraq

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"I’m prepared:"
Why he can, and should, win in 2008

  

Sam Brownback of Kansas: The Beatific Conservative

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Brownback_028

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
TO SAM BROWNBACK of Kansas, a “kinder, gentler” America is more than just a line from a speech by Peggy Noonan. It’s about who he is, what he believes. It’s about the kind of America he would like to lead.
    The bumper-sticker take on Mr. Brownback is that he’s the Christian Conservative in the GOP presidential field — or one of them, anyway. But in his case, we’re talking actual Christianity, as in the Beatitudes.
    Or maybe we’re talking Micah 6:8 — as president, he says he would act justly, love mercy and walk humbly.
    That’s what drew Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson, a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, to the Brownback camp. He was disillusioned by “some of the so-called ‘Christian Right… I was looking for someone who exhibits, and walks the walk that they talk, and that’s a rare thing in politics.”
    When Sen. Brownback met with our editorial board Wednesday, I was impressed as well. I was struck by how interesting things can be when you get off the path beaten by national TV news and the covers of slick magazines. You find a guy who brings “Christian” and “conservative” together in ways that belie our common political vocabulary.
    Sure, he’s adamantly pro-life. But for him, that means being “whole life” as well — “Life’s sacred in the womb, but I think it’s also sacred in Darfur.” He’s just as concerned about genocide or starvation or slave traffic in Africa or North Korea as about abortion clinics in Peoria. Did he get there, as a Catholic convert, via the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life?” No — he explains that initially, he was more influenced by “the great theologian Bono.”
    This sort of atypical association plays out again and again. His plan for Iraq is the same as Joe Biden’s, quite literally. (You know Joe Biden — the Democrat who has campaigned in South Carolina the longest and hardest, the one who’s arguably the best-qualified candidate in that field, but you don’t hear about him much on TV? Yeah, that Joe Biden….) Their bill would partition the country more along the lines of the old Ottoman Empire.
    I have some doubts about that plan, but let’s suppose it worked, and we achieved some sort of stasis in Iraq. What about the next crisis, and the next one after that? What about Sudan, Iran, North Korea? What is America’s proper stance toward the world?
    “I think we’ve got to walk around the world wiser and more humble,” he said. It’s an answer you might expect from Jimmy Carter, or a flower-bedecked pacifist at an antiwar vigil. Sure, the true conservative position, from Pat Buchanan to George Will, has been one of aversion to international hubris. But Sam Brownback carries it off without a tinge of either fascism or pomposity, and that sets him apart.
    “Africa’s moving. Latin America is moving,” he said. “That’s where I’m talking about walking wiser and humbler. The first step in Latin America is going to be to go there and just listen.” Why is it, we should ask ourselves, “that a Chavez can come forward with his old, bad ideas, and win elections?”
“People in Latin America are saying, my quality of life has not improved.” And as a result, they’re willing to go with a dictator. “I think we need to go there and say, what is it we can do to help these economies grow…. It’s our big problem with Mexico and immigration.”
    Back to Africa: “This is a place where America’s goodness can really make a big difference to a lot of people in the world, and it would be in our long-term vital and strategic interest.”
    Asked about domestic issues, he cites “rebuilding the family” as his top concern. That may sound like standard, right-off-the-shelf Christian Right talk. But he comes to it more via Daniel Patrick Moynihan than James Dobson. He said he’s had it with beating his head against the brick hearts of Hollywood producers, and draws an analogy to smoking: Sure, people knew there was a connection between cigarettes and their nagging coughs, but Big Tobacco had room to dissemble until a direct, scientific line was drawn between their product and lung cancer.
    Just as the government now puts out unemployment statistics, he would have it gather and release data on out-of-wedlock childbirth, marriages ending in divorce, and the empirically demonstrable connections between ubiquitous pornography and a variety of social pathologies. He’d put the data out there, and let society decide from there how to react. But first, you need the data.
    His second domestic issue is energy (push electric cars) and his third is health care (he would “end deaths to cancer in 10 years”). He’s a conservative, but by no means one who wants government to butt out of our lives.
    “Humility, as a nation or as individuals, is an effective thing,” Mr. Stevenson said in explaining his support for Sen. Brownback. “It’s the right thing, and it’s also a Christian principle.”
    But that doesn’t mean you don’t take action. The Kansan summed up his attitude on many issues, foreign and domestic, in describing his reaction to Darfur: “Well you look at that, and you know that’s something that ought to be addressed… I mean, you’re the most powerful nation in the world… you can’t learn about these things and then say, well, I guess I’m just not going to do anything about it.”
    Well, some could. But it reflects to Sam Brownback’s credit that he says he could not.

Brownback_037

McCain videos, and much better than the ones I shoot

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Mccain_starbucks

We’ve initiated something new for The State‘s editorial board. We’ve been tiptoeing up to it for a year or so, with my relatively unobtrusive gathering of video snippets from our meetings with newsmakers. But on Monday, when the board met with John McCain, Andy Haworth of thestate.com shot the whole thing on a real video camera — he’s got a tripod and everything — which is a far step beyond the low-res, no more than 180-second clips I’m able to grab with my little digital still camera.

I haven’t gotten around to posting anything yet from that meeting — too much to digest during the busy days that have ensued — but Andy’s put up some of his gleanings on thestate.com. You can find links to them here.

While I’ve been running around having lunch with a representative of the Edwards campaign, dropping by a Giuliani town-hall confab, posting video from that, meeting with Sam Brownback and writing a column for tomorrow about that, I have managed to get one key question answered regarding the McCain meeting Monday: Andy was curious about the Starbucks cup that played such a prominent role, looking almost like a Hollywood-style product placement. What sort of drink was it, and why did it have "Buzz" written on the side of it?

I had not noticed the "Buzz," but it was obviously a reference to Buzz Jacobs. So when I couldn’t reachBj_boling
him, I asked B.J. Boling (that’s him at left, listening to the senator’s speech to the Columbia Rotary Club) to find out for me what sort of drink it was. After a reader recently unjustly accused me of being a latte-drinker, seemingly attaching importance to such a choice, I was concerned about what the senator’s choice might reveal that was heretofore unknown. As a longtime McCain admirer, I worried about the "Buzz" — in my experience, they don’t write customers’ names on cups unless they ordered something fancy, if not something downright effete.

I asked him late Monday, and had still not heard back Tuesday morning, which had me doubly worried: What were they hiding? Please, please, tell me it wasn’t a caramel frapuccino!

B.J.’s response:

I left a message for you on your cell phone last night [which I had not yet played]. It was
regular coffee from Starbucks in the Vista.

… and the world resumed its accustomed shape.

Listen to Zeke Stokes

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For a whole other perspective on John Edwards, be sure to read Zeke Stokes’ letter on today’s editorial page. For you lazy types, I reproduce it here:

John Edwards
is genuine, caring

During the first half of this year, I was privileged to work with Sen. John Edwards, traveling throughout the United States as he and his wife, Elizabeth, began this campaign for the White House. I have spent hours in cars and on planes with him. I have witnessed him in front of crowds and behind closed doors. And I can tell you without reservation that Brad Warthen misjudged him and painted an inaccurate picture of him in his column Tuesday (“Why I see John Edwards as a big phony”).
    John and Elizabeth Edwards are two of the most caring and genuine people I have met in public life, and they have made it their life’s mission to improve the lives of people like so many of those in rural Lee County, where I grew up, and all across South Carolina and the country.
    While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are seizing the limelight, John Edwards is seizing the hearts and minds of the people of this country who have been forgotten: those in poverty, without adequate heath care, without good jobs, without hope. Our nation would be blessed to have him in the White House.

ZEKE STOKES
Columbia

I wrote my column to explain the subjective impression I had formed of John Edwards from my experience, and it was what it was. Zeke — who is a good, trustworthy young man of respect, an up-and-comer in Democratic campaign circles who helped guide Jim Rex to victory last year — formed an entirely different perspective.

I urge you to pay every bit as much attention to his opinion as to mine. That’s why we have letters to the editor — to foster productive dialogue, from which we can all learn.

He doesn’t change my mind about my experiences, but he does give me another perspective to think about. And that’s the point of it all.

Snapshot from Edwards’ ‘Strike Two’

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Dean04

Scroll down through this post from last night, and you’ll find one of my e-mails about the Edwards column was from a J-school prof who used something from one of my anecdotes ("Strike Two: Jan. 23, 2004") as a sort of illustrative case study on his own blog.

I’m certainly flattered, as uncomfortable as I might be at being held up, for good or ill, as an object lesson for shaping young journalist-wannabes’ minds — particularly when we’re talking about Cindi Scoppe’s alma mater.

When I read Andy Bechtel‘s post this morning, I felt obliged to enlarge upon the lesson by adding some details missing from the column itself (because they were details that would only matter to a J-school prof).

If you’re interested in such academic matters, here’s the post and my comment is below it.

Anyway, as I was typing the comment, I remembered something that was in my desk drawer, and I dug it out — a snapshot, taken by the copy editor in question, on the way down in the elevator. That’s Dean, former editorial administrative assistant Sandra Brown, and me. I’m the tall one (I don’t get to say that all that often).

Audio of Edwards getting folksy with the editorial board

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Going back to the point that Aaron raised about the context in which John Edwards got all folksy with us by showing off his boots back in 2004: I can now add some perspective to both his memory and mine — that is, if hearing is believing.

First, let me share with you a passage that I wrote in the very first draft of the piece, a version I KNEW was too long. (The "Director’s Cut" version was one I thought would fit, until Cindi Scoppe told me it was 32 inches, of which I cut six for the print version.) It went like this:

… And we’re talking impressions and memories here. None of these events or observations struck me as anything worth noting in detail at the time, so my notes are sparse. But over time, without my intending it, an impression is formed. Human nature, I guess. But even without all the notes and details, I know exactly how he caused me to think of him as I do…

I had tried to reconstruct as much as I could from notes and the data trail of stories and editorials from the time. I was on vacation, and it was Sunday, but I dragged by daughter and granddaughter to the office with me after Mass to get my notes from the 2004 presidential primaries. I even listened to the beginning of a recording of the endorsement interview with Edwards, but decided after a minute of listening that I must have turned on the recorder after the crack about the boots.

So I searched my notes. No direct quote. I asked Cindi Scoppe, and she said without looking that she didn’t have it. She takes better notes than I do, but she’s a serious journalist — she doesn’t bother with the frivolous remarks that I often think are revelatory of character.

So I went with my best memory of what he said: “How do y’all like my boots?” And Aaron offered his perspective. Today, I decided to listen further in the hope of finding something to add to the record — seeing as how there was so much interest in this column.

And guess what I found at one minute and seven seconds, right at the point at which I was trying to get everybody to settle down from the opening pleasantries and get serious (apparently, tomfoolery had gone on longer than I had recalled)? Yep, it was the actual audio of the "boots" remark, which went like this:

ME: "Well, welcome."

EDWARDS: "Thank you. Have you noticed my shoes?" (general laughter as he props one on the table) "These are my boots that I wear in New Hampshire ’cause you can clomp aroun’ in ‘at snow an’ mess (inaudible), but it don’t exactly fit in Sou’ Calahna."

So right away I noticed two things: One, my memory wasn’t exactly right on the precise words he spoke. That’s embarrassing. But I feel much reinforced in terms of my characterization of the way he said it, and the exaggerated folksiness of it — which, of course, was my point. It sounds even more like an impersonation of early Andy Griffith than I had remembered. And mind you, this was right after he had breezed by the regular folks down in the lobby without giving them the time of day.

There is no sign on my recording of Aaron prompting the remark, but Aaron could well have said something just before that my recorder did not pick up. I trust Aaron’s memory on that.

As for the rest, click on this and give it a listen. I’ll be interested to see how it struck you.

My exchange about the governor with ‘Pollyanna’ Scoppe

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Yesterday my uncle brought a copy of The State from Florence and let me look at it. When he saw me looking at this story, he asked whether I had expected that. I said certainly not, and started launching into a tirade on the subject before reminding myself I was on vacation and shutting up.

Cindi Scoppe also brought it to my attention, and we had the following exchange. To put it in language that young folk can understand, she was like:

—–Original Message—–
From: Scoppe, Cindi
Sent: Mon 7/30/2007 5:14 PM
To: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Subject: FW: E-Release – Gov. Sanford Names Buck Limehouse to ContinueLeading DOT

interesting …

—–Original Message—–
From: Joel Sawyer [mailto:jsawyer@gov.sc.gov]
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 4:03 PM
To: Joel Sawyer
Subject: E-Release – Gov. Sanford Names Buck Limehouse to
ContinueLeading DOT

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNORe
MARK SANFORD, GOVERNOR

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:        Joel Sawyer

Gov. Sanford Names Buck Limehouse to Continue Leading DOT
LIMEHOUSE TO SERVE AS FIRST SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION

Columbia, S.C. – July 30, 2007 – Gov. Mark Sanford today nominated Buck Limehouse as his Secretary of Transportation under the new authority given by recent Department of Transportation restructuring legislation.

Limehouse, 68, is a former chairman of the DOT board and currently serves as director of the agency. Limehouse will run the day-to-day operations of the agency. Gov. Sanford said Limehouse’s wealth of institutional knowledge of the agency made him the right person for the job while the DOT transitions from its previous management structure to the new restructured model.

"First off, I want to thank Buck for being willing to continue his service to the state as this agency transitions to a more accountable structure," Gov. Sanford said. "Whether it’s been his time as chairman or in his current role as director, I think Buck brings a unique skill set and perspective to this job as we sort out what works and what doesn’t under this new management model. This appointment will give us through the next legislative session to not only see what works and doesn’t work within the agency, but to clearly determine whether or not Buck is the right fit with this administration to bring those changes. Our administration will work closely with the DOT and with Buck to make that agency more accountable and a better steward of taxpayer dollars."

Gov. Sanford signed a DOT reform bill last month that in addition to creating an at-will director appointed by the governor, is also aimed at encouraging sound infrastructure investments by requiring that decisions be made in the context of a statewide plan. It also gives the new Secretary of Transportation the ability to hire and fire down to the deputy director level. The legislation was passed in response to an audit that found a number of problems at the state DOT, including overpaying by tens of millions of dollars for contracts, purposefully manipulating account balances, and violating state law on hiring practices for temporary employees. All told, the report found more than $60 million wasted by the agency that could have been used for infrastructure needs in South Carolina.

Limehouse will be officially named the state’s first Secretary of Transportation upon Senate confirmation.

"It’s an honor to be named the state’s first Secretary of Transportation, and I appreciate the governor picking me for the job," Limehouse said. "I think this legislation is a step forward, but at the same time there are clearly some unworkable components that need to get addressed. In addition to continuing to focus on accountability and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars, part of my role will be to continue looking for ways to improve upon this new legislation, and to work with the legislature toward that goal."

Joel Sawyer
Office of Gov. Mark Sanford

And then I was like:

—–Original Message—–
From: Warthen, Brad – Internal Email
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 8:54 AM
To: Scoppe, Cindi
Subject: RE: E-Release – Gov. Sanford Names Buck Limehouse to
ContinueLeading DOT

Actually, it’s just plain weird. First — at the very moment when he had leverage to reform an agency that badly needed it, and had just been re-elected saying that THIS time, he really MEANT it about restructuring — he goes in with an inadequate compromise as his demand, and comes out with next to nothing.

Now he not only capitulates to, but positively affirms, the status quo by naming the official Commission Man to the only position he has any kind of say over.

It’s nothing short of perverse.

And then she was like:

Or perhaps he’s trying to be pragmatic.

1. He has to get the Senate to confirm his choice for secretary, and Limehouse is popular in the Senate.

2. He wants the law changed to give the secretary more power, and Limehouse is saying the law needs to be changed to give the secretary more power, and he has pull in the Legislature.

So why not keep Limehouse in place to see if HE can get the Legislature to improve the law (we know the Legislature isn’t going to FIX the law) to give the secretary more power and the commission  less. If it turns out that Limehouse really is a status quo guy, Sanford can replace him after he gets the law changed (or after it becomes clear that the Legislature won’t change it). If, on the other hand, it turns out that Limehouse is merely someone who does the bidding of whoever he works for, and that now that he works for the governor he actually works to reform the agency to the extent that the secretary can, then Sanford can keep him, and it’s a win-win.

So, is it a good thing or a bad thing that we discuss stuff before we do editorials about it, rather than going with our respective individual guts?

The consensus is that I’m wrong

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When the debate came up at this morning’s editorial staff meeting, pretty much everybody in the room said they liked the format, thought it was a refreshing, an improvement on the previous cattle calls, yadda-yadda.

Even Robert Ariail, who hates technology and has probably never gone to YouTube in his life, said he enjoyed it.

In the old days, this sort of general disagreement with my opinion would have been stifling, because we make editorial judgments for the newspaper by consensus, and the consensus was against me.

But nowadays, I have a blog, and they don’t. So there.

Touchy Catholics

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Confession

We generally don’t run letters from non-readers, from out-of-state, or from professional advocates. But if any of the above is outweighed by good reasons to run it, any or all can be overcome. This is intentional. I think it’s stupid to have a rule that "we will never" run a letter that has this or that characteristic. You can end up poorly serving readers.

So sometimes the colleague who sifts through letter submissions asks me about one that has two or even three strikes against it. That happened today, with this one:

Do we want to consider this as a letter to the editor?

—–Original Message—–
From: Ken Foye [mailto:dn@catholicleague.org]
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 3:51 PM
To: StateEditor, Columbia
Subject: Robert Ariail cartoon June 19

Dear Editor,
Criticizing the Catholic Church in the wake of the recent sex-abuse settlement in Los Angeles is fair game. But associating the sacrament of reconciliation with this sordid scandal, as Robert Ariail did in his July 19 cartoon, is out of bounds.

This sacrament is a key element of our faith, administered by a group of fine men whose rate of sexual abuse of minors is no higher than that of the general population. There are legitimate ways to object to the Church’s handling of sexual misconduct by priests, but demeaning and trivializing one of our sacraments is not one of them.

Ken Foye
Senior Editor
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
450 Seventh Ave.
New York, NY  10123

The answer for me was pretty easy:

No.

But I could say more. The person double-checking with me is Catholic, as am I. I haven’t asked why she asked, but I know why I would have: The tendency with me would be to want to ditch such a letter, so I would want somebody to back me up on the fact there it was out of bounds on the basis of several objective criteria. In other words, when there’s a letter you don’t like, and you know you don’t like it on personal grounds, and you know you could bend over backwards and run it if you really wanted to stretch the boundaries, do you make yourself go through those gymnastics, or just do the normal thing and ditch it?

This is what it’s really like in this world. I know all you cynics out there think it’s just the opposite of that, that we twist and manipulate things to advance personal agendas, yadda-yadda. But the truth is that we are so obsessive about avoiding even the appearance of doing that that we often hesitate to make the simplest, most open-and-shut decisions. And of course, no one can obsess like a Catholic.

It helps to pretend to be someone who doesn’t have a conflict or the appearance of a conflict, and act accordingly. And move on, because you have lots of tougher decisions to make today… In this case, it’s fairly easy for me to pretend I’m a Protestant editor, because once upon a time I was a Protestant editor. And that Protestant editor says, "Aw, come on. Talk about your oversensitive mackerel-snappers. If this were one of our readers, that’s one thing. But this professional complainer? Are you kidding me?"

But since I’m no longer a Protestant editor (and haven’t been for about 26 years), there’s an emotional response I have to set aside:  As a Catholic, this people who go around looking to be offended as Catholics really gripe me. I don’t feel like a member of an aggrieved group, and I think the Catholics who do — especially when they form associations that exist just to gripe about being aggrieved — are a pain. They give me the dry gripes. To start with, I’ve got that sort of general White Guy sense of discomfort with the whole Identity Politics thing to start with; I certainly don’t want anybody being all whiny on behalf of any group I belong to, or am perceived as belonging to.

But never mind that. This letter does not offer reasons to run it that make it worth ditching a perfectly in-bounds letter from an actual reader expressing his actual opinion that he’s not paid to have. And that’s the choice for us. We can’t run them all, so we have guidelines to give a leg up to our actual readers.

So I ditch the one from the guy who says I ran a cartoon that mocks the sacrament (which I don’t think it does). My question is, do I have to go to confession about this? Or does this post count? As a convert, I’m still not clear on a lot of stuff like that.

Our Valerie gets Thomas Ravenel onto the front of the Wall Street Journal

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Here’s a link to the front page story in the Wall Street Journal today about Thomas Ravenel and his troubles, written by our own Valerie Bauerlein, late of The State.

I’m proud for Valerie whenever she gets a front-page byline at the WSJ, and I’m almost as proud for Thomas for being honored with one of those patented line drawings of his very own mug. Here’s hoping you can actually link to it. (Unless you’re a subscriber, you probably can’t, but don’t whine to me; I don’t run the WSJ.)

Anyway, as a recounting of the Ravenel saga to folks elsewhere who don’t know about it, the story’s fine. Trouble is, the WSJ is big-time, and editors there don’t put you on the front page if all you’ve got is an interesting story about what’s going on back in South Carolina. No, you’ve got to stick in some stuff about Vitter, and Gov. Perdue, make it look like a regional story, which makes it almost as important as something going on in New York. And then it has to have a nut graf. All God’s stories got to have a nut graf, or else they’re never, ever going onto the front page of a self-respecting newspaper like the WSJ.

And that’s where I have to quibble. Trouble is, the Ravenel tale doesn’t have a nut graf, in WSJ terms. So when you force one onto it, it sounds kind of funky. Here’s the one on Valerie’s story:

    The indictment is just one of the political headaches across the South that are making Republicans look more vulnerable than they have in years to losing ground in the region’s legislatures and statehouses. Though there isn’t any sign of them losing their dominance in the region, the once-formidable "Solid South" coalitions they forged in the 1980s and 1990s to end a century of Democratic dominion have given way to messy schisms and infighting. Today, they look a lot like the bitterly divided Democrats of three decades ago.

Well, OK, yeah — in the sense that it’s pretty much the same people, or their kids, or the people they would have been today (however you want to look at it). In the South, the GOP is the White Man’s Party. Everybody knows that. And white guys used to run the Democratic Party, because it was the only party around, and white guys ran everything there was.

Add to that the fact that historically, there hasn’t been much of a gender gap in the South Carolina electorate (compared to nationally), and you get a situation in which most voters (since more than two-thirds of the voters are white) identify themselves as Republican — that is, among voters who identify themselves with a party.

Majority parties (and by the way, Republicans are not an actual majority of the electorate, but just a plurality, but that tends to work much the same) tend not to be monolithic. The Democratic Party wasn’t, and isn’t. Nor is the GOP, now that’s it’s no longer a bunch of ideologues satisfied to be in the minority, so long as they’re "right" as they define "right." (You know, like the Libertarian Party today.) So you get "messy schisms and infighting," but that’s not newsworthy. That’s life. Actually, it’s probably more likely to be par for the course in a party that party as white as the GOP.

After 53 years of life, I’ve learned that white guys tend to have one thing in common: They don’t see themselves as having anything in common. They don’t see being white guys as a cause per se. They certainly don’t feel any particular loyalty to other white guys because they are white guys; nor do they feel any particular reason to agree with other white guys because they are white guys. In fact, one reason they probably aren’t Democrats is because they’re put off by Identity Politics; it’s not their thing. They don’t get it. This is one of the things that makes some Republicans sound so racist or sexist. (You know how they’re always griping about black people talking about race, or women talking about gender. Feminists say they "just don’t get it," and that’s true, because women know from white guys. Of course, some of them ARE racist and sexist, but a lot of it is just being cursed with a White Guy cognitive style.)

So basically, if you’re a white guy in the White Man’s Party and your name is, say Thomas Ravenel (or Mark Sanford or Lindsey Graham or any other name you care to pick out of the air), you’re kidding yourself if you think the other white guys in the party are going to agree with you or stick up for you just because you’re one of them. Once enough of these chaps get together to form a majority, look for lots of messy schisms. And infighting.

So it’s not news. And it certainly doesn’t mean the GOP in S.C. is going the way of the Democratic Party of 30 years ago — that is to say, out of power. No party is going the way of the Democratic Party of 30 (or perhaps we should say 40, or 50, years ago, to take us to the days when a South Carolinian was about as likely to be a Republican as he was a Buddhist) years ago, because that only happens if there is only one party.

Of course, come to think of it, the White Guys in the Republican Party mostly think that theirs IS the only party, in that they’d rather open a main vein than be a Democrat, but we’re quibbling here with our own quibbling…

Anyway, Valerie knows what she’s about, so she sets things right by the end of the story. Mind you, the nut graf didn’t say the GOP was actually in trouble in the South (as much as I may wish it, and all other parties, were about to be Gone With The Wind). But if not to suggest that, why have a nut graf? Cause all God’s stories got to have a nut graf, fool, which takes us back to where we were, which was where?

Oh, yeah. Valerie makes it all right in the end, correcting any misconceptions you may have inadvertently formed as a result of reading the nut graf. And for those of you who think party means anything, she introduced a delicious irony by having Don Fowler debunk your worries about the GOP:

    The Republican turmoil has raised some Democratic
hopes that parts of the South may no longer be as lockstep in support
of the Republican Party. But Donald L. Fowler, a former chairman of the
Democratic National Committee and the husband of Carol Khare Fowler,
South Carolina’s Democratic Party chairwoman, cautions that Republican
fatigue doesn’t yet necessarily portend broad Democratic comebacks,
particularly in South Carolina.

    He says it would require a major demographic shift,
such as an influx of people from other parts of the country, and a
major economic change, such as a depression, to change the landscape.

    "At least where we are now, Democrats don’t have the
wherewithal to take advantage of the split in the Republican Party,"
Mr. Fowler said.

I like the standard Mr. Fowler set, because it was hyperbolic while being no exaggeration — saying that it would take a change such as, say "a depression" for Dems to be able to take decisive advantage of this "schism." That’s cool because that sums up Southern politics so beautifully: hyperbolic, without being an exaggeration.

Dig the fractals

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So I just finished doing the pagination on the last of the six pages that will get us through the weekend,
and I’m just starting to read the proofs, and it’s 6:10 p.m. (no matter what the stupid Left-Coast Time on the blog says), and I was here past midnight last night, and I’m getting just a little bit tired, and this is what I’m thinking about:

Check out the fractals on this Ohman cartoon I put on the Saturday edit page. Do you suppose he meant to do that on purpose? Just like little airplanes, like subsets of the big airplane…

You do see them, don’t you?

Back to the proofs…

Ohman14

If you’re here because of that box on the op-ed page…

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… that promised "other opinions, the chance to register your thoughts, plus video from Tommy Moore’s endorsement interview with The State’s editorial board," then you’re at the right place.

  • First, in case you haven’t read Tommy Moore’s op-ed piece that the box went with, "Why I left the Senate for the payday lending industry," please go do so.
  • Then, check out Warren Bolton’s column on Mr. Moore’s decision, which takes a decidedly different view.
  • Here’s a video clip from our editorial board’s endorsement interview with Mr. Moore, back when he was running for governor last year.
  • Here’s our endorsement of then-Sen. Moore. (Hey, you should have seen the other guy. Some choice.)
  • Here’s a release about, and a link to, an ETV interview with Mr. Moore after his announcement this week.
  • Check out the press release from Mr. Moore’s new employer, CFSA, announcing his new job.
  • Finally, here’s my own initial, rather visceral reaction to that news. Something you might find more interesting is the way some of my readers responded.

If you have thoughts of your own to share, or requests for further information or resources, this is the place.