Category Archives: The State

Do what Cindi Scoppe says, or I’ll tell her to gossip about you to The Guardian

When Cindi Scoppe joined the editorial board in 1997, I discovered that all of a sudden I didn’t have to write a lot of the state politics editorials that I would have written in the past — because, after the briefest of conversations, she wrote them they way I would have. This freed me up for important stuff — like blogging.

That did not change when I left the paper. I don’t have to write yet another piece urging every thoughtful, conscientious South Carolinian to vote in Saturday’s primary, because she’s already done it, using more or less the very words I would have used. Excerpts:

If you care who our next president is, vote Saturday

Saturday’s Republican presidential primary is our speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment.

Sure, we get to vote in November. But, at the risk of committing civic heresy, how you and I vote then isn’t going to matter. Yes, yes, everyone who’s paying attention and cares about our republic needs to vote, simply because it’s our duty to do so. But we all know that the Republican candidate is going to carry our state. And all of our Electoral College votes are going to him, whether he wins by a landslide or just eight votes.

So if our vote in November isn’t going to make any difference, and the Democratic nominee already has been chosen by default, then our only opportunity to participate in the election of the next president is to vote on Saturday.

This idea makes some partisans nervous. Indignant, even.

Some Upstate Republicans are so opposed to our open primaries that they sued their state in federal court, arguing that South Carolina is violating their right to freedom of assembly by allowing people who won’t take a blood oath to the party to sully their primary; they worry that independents will stymie their efforts to wrest party control from the reasonable officials they dismiss as Republicans in name only…

Such paranoia is not merely a Republican affliction. In 2004 the state Democratic Party announced it would require voters to sign a loyalty oath to vote in its presidential primary, but wisely backed down before primary day. The only reason we won’t hear from paranoid Democrats this year is that they don’t have a presidential primary to keep pure…

(T)he candidates who do better in open primaries tend to be the ones who can appeal to the sensible center of our nation — that is, the ones the partisans would be better off nominating if they want to win the general election. But the partisans are right about one thing: People who look at the world the way they do shouldn’t vote in the other party’s primary…

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

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Yesterday was so busy that I didn’t get around to this. Since then, I hear it was a subject of discussion on Morning Joe, having already appeared on Politico and other places.

You may have already seen it by now:

12.27pm: Our reporter Matt Williams has been on the phone to one of the senior editors at The State newspaper, which as we learned earlier, endorsed Jon Huntsman only yesterday. She was sanguine about his decision.

Cindi Scoppe, associate editor of The State, said Huntsman’s decision has left the newspaper feeling like a spurned lover.

Scoppe, who penned the endorsement piece on the former Utah governor that was published a day before he dropped out, said: “It is rather like having gone through a courtship for some period of time and finally making love with a man, for him to suddenly turn around and say, ‘you know what, I think I’m gay’.”

She said Mitt Romeny enjoyed South Carolina’s largest newspaper’s “implied endorsement”, now that Huntsman had dropped out. “We intended to make clear that Romney was our second choice. But whether we write a formal endorsement or not – we haven’t figured it out yet.”…

What’s really funny about this — painfully so — is that Cindi is not the sort of person to talk about her feelings. She’s all about thought. She’ll rattle off a logical explanation at the drop of a hat, and be perfectly comfortable doing so. But ask her about her feelings, and she’ll look at you with disgust, for bringing up a subject unworthy of discussion.

I guess the reporter from The Guardian caught her at a weak moment. So she gave him both barrels as to how it felt.

You know how Michael Corleone let Kay ask him, just this once, about his business? Well, just this once, Cindi let somebody ask about her feelings. I doubt that she’ll do that again, now that so many have been entertained by it.

Personally, I thought it was a good answer. The situation was SO absurd (Joe Lieberman at least waited until he got crushed in the SC primary before dropping out, three whole days after the endorsement) that you have to wonder: Huntsman has had staff here for months. You pay people all that time, you go to all those chicken dinners, and you don’t even stick it out until the primary?

Scuttlebutt has it that there was a deal. But what sort of deal? What would Romney, or whoever, have offered Huntsman that would be worth such a precipitous exit? And why would it have been worth offering ANYthing to such an adversary? Huntsman was barely registering in the polls, getting less support than Stephen Colbert.

It was all very odd. And Cindi captured well how odd, how disconcerting, it was.

Yo, Lee: David Yepsen says “Hey”

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Above you see David Yepsen and me, looking relieved and happy that we’re done with our panel presentation at the Senate Presidents’ Forum in Key West over the weekend, and that it went well. Funny how those kinds of things — just talking — can take a lot out of you.

It was an honor to meet David, the legend of Iowa political journalism. And of course when we met, he asked after another legend of political journalism, a man whom everyone knows — and, more remarkably, everyone likes and respects — my longtime friend and colleague Lee Bandy.

I’m lucky to have worked with both Lee and the Tennessee legend, John Parish. And while it was brief, I was honored to share the panel with David Yepsen, who is now director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute (he left The Des Moines Register about the same time I left The State), Saturday. And to get to know a couple of political pros I had not met before, who also served on the panel: First, John Marttila, longtime friend and ally of Joe Biden ever since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. John continues to be a senior political adviser to the vice president. From the Republican side, we had Mike DuHaime, who ran Chris Christie’s successful run for governor of New Jersey in 2009.

We had a great discussion, both during the panel and at meals and events before and after.

What did I say during the presentation? Well, not anything I haven’t shared here. I essentially scrapped my prepared remarks, as mentioned previously — which is probably a good thing, because things flow better when I’m winging it. But preparing — not only the writing, but all the conversations I had with top Republicans in SC, right up to a couple of minutes before the program — did help me get my thoughts in order. Hey, if I hadn’t made all those panicked calls Friday night and Saturday morning after seeing those poll numbers, I wouldn’t have known to call Romney a “Plastic Banana Rock ‘n’ Roller,” which still cracks me up — the idea of Romney as ANY kind of rock ‘n’ roller, actually.

Anyway, I’m back from Key West. And it’s going to be a busy week…

Mike DuHaime (or the back of his head, anyway), David Yepsen and John Marttila, during the panel discussion.

In an interesting parallel, Tom Davis backs Ron Paul

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Tom Davis signs on with Ron Paul.

Earlier this evening, Sen. Tom Davis put out this release:

SENATOR TOM DAVIS ENSORSES RON PAUL FOR PRESIDENT“It’s easy to campaign on lower taxes, less spending and fewer regulations – it’s another thing entirely to stand up for these limited government principles when the entire Washington establishment is aligned against you. Yet for more than three decades Ron Paul has cast thousands of lonely votes in our nation’s capital based on the constitutional principles that this country was founded on – and that the Republican Party has promised to protect. Yet while generations of politicians – including far too many Republicans – were losing their way or caving to the status quo, Ron Paul was standing as a Tea Party of one against a towering wave of red ink.”
“2012 marks the fifth consecutive year in which the federal government is going to spend well over $1 trillion in money it doesn’t have. Each and every American taxpayer is now on the hook for $135,000 worth of federal debt – and last year’s debt deal adds another $7 trillion in deficit spending over the coming decade. Meanwhile the U.S. Senate hasn’t passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days.”

“I’m endorsing Ron Paul because enough is enough. Despite this wave of unprecedented government spending, our unemployment rate has remained above 8 percent for the last 34 months and 146.4 million Americans – one out of every two people in this country – are now classified as poor or low-income.”

“Government activism and government intervention clearly hasn’t fixed our economy – which is why the Republican Party needs a nominee who isn’t wedded to that failed approach. We won’t chart a path to fiscal solvency or victory in November by running toward the failed ideas of the left – we will achieve those victories by returning to the principles that the Republican Party once stood for.”

“That is why I am proud to endorse Ron Paul for president.”

“Ron Paul’s record matches his rhetoric, his fiscal plan matches the fiscal challenges that our nation is facing and his movement represents the taxpayers whose interests have been ignored in the political process for far too long.”

“I’m also endorsing him because unlike what the pundits have led you to believe, he is the candidate who gives the Republican Party the best chance to beat Barack Obama in November.”

“We have a choice: We can keep electing candidates who talk about change only during political campaigns as a way to get elected, or we can finally elect a candidate who will walk the walk and make that change a reality – restoring our bottom line, our individual liberties and our national pride in the process.”

To learn more about Senator Tom Davis visit www.senatortomdavis.com

My first thought was “Wow.” I’ve always liked Tom and have a lot of respect for him, and even though he worked for Mark Sanford all those years and was so close to him, I never regarded him as being nearly as much of a radical libertarian as the former governor. But with this move, he has exceeded his friend in that regard.

But you know what? In his own way, he has done much the same thing that The State did in endorsing Jon Huntsman. Yes, in one regard he did the polar opposite — Ron Paul is the last of the GOP candidates that The State, or I, would endorse. As Cindi Scoppe wrote:

Like any libertarian, Ron Paul embraces the worst positions of the far right and the far left: no social safety net, unregulated markets, an isolationist foreign policy and no moral standards. He is the candidate for those who refuse to accept that they are part of a society and can’t see how much their vision of a crippled government would hurt all of us, themselves included.

But in another sense, the two endorsements were alike.

Surely Tom knows that Ron Paul will never be the Republican nominee for president just as well as The State knew that this was not to be for Huntsman this year. But he went with the candidate he thought it should be, rather than the candidate that it would be. So good for him.

Oh, and lucky Tom. As hopeless as his candidate’s cause is, at least he won’t embarrass Tom by suddenly pulling out. Ron Paul’s candidacy is forever.

All in the family now.

Huntsman, the best man for the job, drops out

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I was accustomed over the years to being interviewed by national media on the Sunday morning when a presidential endorsement came out in the paper. Today was no different, as a reporter with NBC called to ask me about The State and and its endorsement, prior to interviewing Jon Huntsman today.

I was happy to explain the Huntsman endorsement within the context of the ongoing consensus of the editorial board. I could well have written many of the words that appeared in the paper today. And I told her to remember the one thing I have said, more often than anything else, in explaining what an endorsement is not, and what it is: It’s about who should win, not who’s going to win. We all knew Huntsman wasn’t going to win, just as we knew Joe Lieberman wasn’t going to be the Democratic nominee in 2004. But he should have been.

And Huntsman was the man who should have won the Republican nomination, as well expressed in the editorial:

We need a president who can work within our poisonous political environment to solve our nation’s problems, not simply score partisan points. Someone who understands that negotiation is essential in a representative democracy, and that there are good ideas across the political spectrum. Someone who has a well-defined set of core values but is not so rigid that he ignores new information and new conditions. Someone who has shown himself to be honest and trustworthy. And competent. Someone whose positions are well-reasoned and based on the world as it is rather than as he pretends it to be. Someone with the temperament and judgment and experience to be taken seriously as the commander in chief and leader of the free world.

We think Mr. Romney could demonstrate those characteristics. Mr. Huntsman already does. And we are proud to endorse him for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

Exactly. And Cindi’s accompanying column (Nina Brook years ago dubbed this sort of pairing “steak and steak”) went on to explain why none of the other candidates would do. All well reasoned.

And The State‘s reward for having done the right thing, and having clearly stated why, will be catcalls from detractors delighted that its chosen candidate quit only hours after the endorsement was published. (This will particularly thrill the ones who truly hate the newspaper, and maintain that its endorsement is the “kiss of death.” So seldom does anything happen to support their erroneous thesis — the newspaper’s chosen candidates win about 75 percent of the time in general elections — that I suppose we must indulge them in having their fun, eh?)

Have you seen the news? It just broke a few minutes ago:

Huntsman Says He’s Quitting G.O.P. Race

By JIM RUTENBERG, JEFF ZELENY AND MICHAEL D. SHEAR

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jon M. Huntsman Jr. informed his advisers on Sunday that he intends to drop out of the Republican presidential race, ending his candidacy a week before he had hoped to revive his campaign in the South Carolina primary.

Mr. Huntsman, who had struggled to live up to the soaring expectations of his candidacy, made plans to make an announcement as early as Monday. He had been set to participate in an evening debate in Myrtle Beach.

Matt David, campaign manager to Mr. Huntsman, confirmed the decision in an interview Sunday evening. “The governor and his family, at this point in the race, decided it was time for Republicans to rally around a candidate who could beat Barack Obama and turn around the economy,” Mr. David said. “That candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

Huntsman was right to back Romney, thereby seconding The State’s point that he would be the second choice.

But the nation is worse off for not having Huntsman as an option.

The legislative agenda? Same as it ever was

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My ex-colleagues at The State did their annual laundry list of what the SC General Assembly should do in the session that convenes tomorrow, and as Cindi Scoppe acknowledged in her accompanying column, there wasn’t much new to see:

IF THE HEADLINE on today’s editorial provokes in you a sense of deja vu, that’s because it’s the same one we used last year to greet the annual return of the General Assembly. And it’s no different in substance from the year before that. In fact, the need to overhaul our tax code and spending policies and restructure our government have been among the top five issues confronting the Legislature for as far back as I can recall.

I’m not particularly fond of writing the same editorials year after year, but what choice is there? Our overarching problems are unchanged because the Legislature keeps tinkering around the edges or, worse, fixating on red-meat issues that satiate cable-news-engorged constituents but do nothing to nurture a state starved for a government that actually works. A government that provides the services that our state needs, in at least a moderately efficient way, and that pays for those services through a tax system that does not unnecessarily burden our citizens or undermine our values or give special favors to favored constituencies.

Yep, our state’s needs don’t change much from year to year. And neither do our lawmakers’ penchant for ignoring those needs.

If you’ll recall, my very last column at The State (“South Carolina’s Unfinished Business,” March 22, 2009) pretty much covered the same ground. That was almost three years ago. And after all that time, I would only need to reword one short passage:

Raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax by a dollar, bringing us (almost) to the national average, and saving thousands of young lives.

Actually, you wouldn’t even have to reword it — you would just have to add a parenthetical acknowledging that our state has taken a tiny baby step in that direction. Other than that, the column could pretty much run as-is.

Little wonder that I don’t get too excited with the new session rolls around each year…

“Chuckles!” Where you been at, man?

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That's "Chuckles" Gidley in the background, during a 2006 editorial board meeting. See how he got his name?

I was delighted to see this passage in the paper this morning:

Santorum will boast of his focus on the Iranian threat to peace while other lawmakers were fixated on Iraq. He will brag that during his 12 years in the U.S. Senate, he never voted for a tax increase and pushed for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

And he will note he did those things while representing Pennsylvania, a sometimes liberal state, without “giving up his conservative principles,” according to Hogan Gidley, Santorum’s national spokesman.“He did not have to morph and change himself to win elections,” Gidley said, a not-so-subtle jab at GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s record while governor of Massachusetts.

Hogan Gidley! Chuckles! Where you been at, man?

My calling him “Chuckles” dates from when he was handling Karen Floyd’s campaign for state superintendent of education. I’ve seldom had a campaign aide glower at me in quite that way before. Karen hated the camera, but at least she smiled for it now and then.

All in good fun. Chuckles likes his nickname. At least, I think he does. Of course, I once forgot that he was executive director of the state Republican Party, so I might have forgotten his opinion of the nickname, too…

Column I: Cindi Scoppe puts Georgia port dredging issue into perspective

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Today, I think I’ll use some columns I read in the papers this morning as conversation-starters. We’ll begin with Cindi Scoppe’s balanced, thoughtful approach to DHEC’s granting of a dredging permit to Georgia.

As is her wont, she skewers weak arguments on all sides:

To those who ask, “Did Gov. Haley pressure her appointees to the DHEC board to approve the permit?,” she explains that it doesn’t matter. The governor says she fully supports the decision. She takes ownership of it. It doesn’t matter whether she pressured anyone. And what pressure can she exert? She appointed these people, but she lacks power to remove them. Who cares? She appointed them, she in no way distances herself from the decision.
Then there’s this red herring: “Why did the DHEC commissioners put Georgia’s economic interests above the economic interests of the state of South Carolina?” It’s not DHEC’s job to decide on the basis of economic interests. It’s their job to protect the environment, which is a separate question.

Here’s the question Cindi urges lawmakers to concentrate on: Did the Corps of Engineers and Georgia grant enough concessions to meet our state’s environmental requirements?

She continues with a discussion of various aspects of that consideration.

Then, in the end, she offers this bit of simple clarity:

We probably wouldn’t have to worry so much about cozying up to our competitors if our own Sen. Jim DeMint hadn’t helped put the Port of Charleston even further behind the Savannah Port, by delaying efforts to dredge Charleston Harbor. But the sad truth is that he has done far more to damage the Port of Charleston than anything DHEC could ever do. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much the Legislature can do about that.

All around, a good, solid column on a difficult issue.

About those parking garages…

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A colleague (not anyone with The State) asked me this morning what I thought about that parking garages story in The State Sunday morning:

Exclusive | USC garages $4 million in the red

Two parking facilities underutilized

By WAYNE WASHINGTON – wwashington@thestate.com

The University of South Carolina has spent $4 million over the last three years to cover deficits at a pair of underutilized parking structures built to serve the school’s Innovista research campus.

And it could be another half-dozen years before the garages break even, bringing in as much money as they cost the university each year in debt payments.

Combined, the Horizon garage on Main Street and the Discovery garage on Park Street bring in roughly $764,000 a year less in parking revenue than they were expected to generate, according to figures provided by the university.

USC contractually is pledged to use its “best efforts” to cover $1.4 million a year in debt payments on the two garages…

I had to confess I hadn’t read past the top of it, because it didn’t tell me anything new. I mean, we’ve been over this ground before, many times, right? I mean, the reason so many of y’all spit on the ground every time “Innovista” gets mentioned is because USC made the mistake of building those buildings right as the economy was about to crash — causing them to be under-occupied, and therefore for the parking garages attached to be underutilized.

I guess the news in this — the “Exclusive” news — is that there are some actual numbers attached to what we already knew. I guess.

I mean, this is the same ground I covered, yet again, in an exchange with Doug this morning. In an effort to rain on the Nephron parade, Doug wrote:

I really hope this doesn’t turn into another Innovista marketing hype venture like so many of the announcements made by USC over the past few years…

Of course, Doug was trying to head off exactly what I DO say about the Nephron deal, which is that it is one small step in the direction of success for Innovista. I responded to him thusly:

Let me say it again:
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
Innovista is not about those buildings.
It just isn’t.

I curse the day those buildings were conceived, because they distracted everyone from what the Innovista concept is. It’s about all sorts of investments that will take place in all sorts of physical locations, mostly centered in an area bounded by the new baseball field and the State Museum along the river, and then up to Assembly Street — but NOT limited by that. It’s about leveraging that proximity to the University to promote high-tech development throughout the Midlands. Some will locate in the Innovista proper; some won’t.

As Innovista succeeds, many large and small investors will invest in all sorts of ways in infrastructure — from existing buildings to new. And the types of investors will include living space, restaurants and retail stores for the people who work in the research-related businesses there.

That’s IF it succeeds. Which is hard to do when so many people spit on the ground every time its name gets mentioned.

This IS a case of Innovista succeeding, by the way — one step in the right direction. A business first got involved with USC through Innovista, and is now expanding its business in our area, producing jobs that pay well. This is one of a number of ways that one would expect Innovista to contribute to our economy.

Back to the garages story. For me, the pertinent part, the real perspective on this, comes at the bottom, when Wayne quotes Don Herriott, the guy hired to clean up the Innovista effort after the last guy got pushed out the door:

… Don Herriott, director of Innovista, said the two 110,000-square-foot buildings already constructed are 40 percent occupied by researchers.

One of those buildings should be 60 percent occupied by early next year, Herriott said. The other should be 100 percent occupied in two to three years.

The economic downturn, which struck as the university was moving forward with Innovista, has made it difficult to get the other two buildings planned constructed, Herriott said.

Those buildings still could be erected at some time in the future, Herriott said. But rather than stick with its original, expansive vision of Innovista, USC officials are moving forward with a stripped-down plan that focuses more on selling the benefits of having a high-tech corridor and moving researchers into existing space.

“ ‘If you build it, they will come’ is not a business strategy,” Herriott said when he was hired last year.

Last week, Herriott said Innovista is coming together.

“It’s prime real estate,” he said. “There are people who want to have close proximity to the university.”

That’s the real perspective. That’s what’s happening here. And for my part, I look forward to Innovista — the real Innovista, not those stupid buildings — continuing to take off, to the point at which the $4 million shortfalls will look like a very small price to have paid.

Yo, GOP: Huntsman may be your man, if you’d calm down and listen for more than 30 seconds

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I was struck by Daniel Henninger’s column in the WSJ this morning. He was decrying the freak show that is this series of GOP presidential debates, and the way they are making our republic stupider by the day.

And then he got to talking about the way Jon Huntsman impressed in an editorial board meeting:

These dark thoughts came forth earlier this week when a group at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page spent some 75 minutes talking to candidate Jon Huntsman. He’s the one they stick on the end of the podium.

Say this: Jon Huntsman may or may not deserve to be the nominee, but he’s better than the back of the line.

After starting with a horrifyingly robotic recitation of his resume (exactly as he’s said in every debate), the former Utah governor took us on an intriguing tour of his thinking on a range of issues.

Mr. Huntsman said the U.S. likely would have to intervene militarily against Iran’s nuclear program in the next four or five years, a remarkable assertion. He said this in an Oct. 10 speech in New Hampshire, but even in our super-saturated media age, trees fall silently in an empty forest.

He supports “regime change in Syria” through diplomatic and covert means. We should try to make Iraq a “buffer” between Iran and Syria.

He supports the details of the Ryan Plan on entitlement reform. Like Rep. Ryan, he says this contest is “not a normal election”; if the Republicans lose, he said, the U.S. could be on course to repeat Japan’s 10 years of moribund economic growth.

There was more, some of it impressive, some not (for ideas on economic policy, he talks to his brother, an entrepreneur). The point is that one left the meeting with a basis to think about Mr. Huntsman as president, rather than the thumbs-down vote he’s gotten from the Roman Colosseum of the TV debates…

You may or may not have noticed that, when Huntsman sat down with The State‘s board recently, he also impressed them as being the guy with the most substance in the field. Or he impressed Cindi, anyway, which takes some doing.

Part of this is that an editorial board meeting is a vastly superior vehicle for assessing what sort of POTUS a candidate might be than the Reality TV formats of the “debates,” especially given what Mr. Henninger called “(t)he assumption that every cat and dog must be in the debate.” If only there were a way to duplicate that experience — sitting down with a candidate for an hour or two or three and really digging into issues, with discussion rather than robotic questions and timed answers.

But maybe there’s also something about Huntsman — something that even the traumatized, extremism-ridden, post 2008 GOP would see if they’d stop sticking him at the far end of the podium, uninvite some of the less-suitable candidates, and give him an extended listen for once.

Great to see Jeff, but I still await that Dole story

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Jeff Miller and Warren Bolton, outside Yesterday's in Five Points.

Yesterday my phone rang, and told me Jeff Miller was calling. This was confirmed when I answered and heard his voice:

“I’ve got that Dole story for you.”

Except that he still didn’t have it. He was just stringing me along…

The background: I pulled Jeff out of The State‘s Newberry bureau in late 1987 to assign him to cover the upcoming Republican presidential primary here — the one that launched George H. W. Bush toward the nomination and the presidency, and did so much to burnish the S.C. primary as the early contest that picked winners.

I had other political reporters — plenty of them, in those days. But Lee Bandy was up in Washington, and my others who could do the job would be busy with the Legislature by the time of the primary. I needed somebody to work this story full-time, and for the duration. We could see it was going to be a big deal, with the nation’s eyes on South Carolina, so I didn’t want to treat it like just another story. Gordon Hirsch, who was then the news editor, suggested Jeff as somebody who, despite lack of political experience, could do the job. I jumped at the offer, and our state editor lost him from then until after the primary. (Actually, the State Desk have lost him permanently — eventually, he joined my governmental affairs staff for good. I just can’t remember whether he went back to Newberry for a while first. It’s been a LONG time.)

He did a great job, and had a great time, I think. I still remember him talking about being on the bus with David Broder, and what a nice guy Broder was. Jeff was young, and new to all this, and he was really impressed that the legendary Broder would just sit and talk with him like a regular person.

But he wasn’t too starry-eyed to do his job well. I was pleased. There’s just this one beef. After the primary was over, I had one more story idea for him. After all these years, I can’t even remember what the specific idea was, but I thought it was a good one — it was an angle about Bob Dole’s defeat here that no one else had done. Jeff wasn’t so sure. He was also pretty exhausted with writing about that stuff, and needed to move on to his other reporting duties. I kept bugging him about it — just this one more story, I kept saying. I was like that as an editor — even when people had been working double-time for a long time, actually even when they were on vacation, truth be told — and I usually got my way, through sheer insufferability. Not this time. Jeff would say, “Yeah, sure…” but I never got it.

So he owed me.

Today, he paid me back by taking Warren Bolton and me to lunch, on his first visit back to Columbia in a decade. We went to Yesterday’s, of course, because I got to pick (see the ad at right). We had a great time talking about the Dole story (neither of us can remember what it was about now — but it was gonna be good). We talked about the Cosmic Ha-Has, the softball team on which both Jeff and I played (I was the last Ha-Ha left at the paper; all gone now). We talked about the county league basketball team that Jeff and Warren played on, and how neither of them plays any more. (I went out to play with them once. For some reason, they never begged me to come back.)

A lot of the intervening years — I was last Jeff’s editor in 1993 — Jeff was still covering politics, but for other papers. Washington became his home base, and when I last saw him, at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 (below), he was in the Washington bureau of the Allentown Morning Call, if I remember correctly. In 2006 he left newspaper work, but has stayed in D.C. Now, he’s the vice president for communications of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

It was great to see him again. Warren, too. But it’s usually not so long between times I get to see Warren.

Jeff and me on the last night of the RNC in NY in '04. The marathon was nearly over (conventions mean 20-hour days for press types). Like my beard? I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here’s a place for you to talk about Spurrier, Morris, Garcia, etc.

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A reader Tweeted, as I was headed to a late lunch (1:46 p.m. EST), “Eager to read your thoughts on Spurrier v. Morris.” I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, but now I do. I’ve seen the video and everything. (Interestingly, I could not find anything about it on the mobile version of thestate.com, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the browser version at the time.)

Of course, by that time, the news that the coach, or Eric Hyman, or somebody, had thrown Stephen Garcia off the team — apparently for real, this time. Hyman explained, “For Stephen to return to and remain with the football squad this fall, we agreed on several established guidelines. Unfortunately, he has not been able to abide by those guidelines and has therefore forfeited his position on the roster.”

I don’t know what the guidelines were, as I don’t follow this stuff. But I did see the Auburn game, and a reasonable guess would be that one of his guidelines involved throwing the football straight. Yes, I’m joking. Sort of.

But Micah apparently wanted to know what I thought about the Ron Morris thing. Gee, I don’t know.

I’m not Ron’s editor; never was. If I were, right now I’d be saying, “What the hell, Ron?” Or perhaps I’d use some other, saltier, newsroom expression. And Ron would tell me what was going on as well as he could, from his perspective. Although, based on the performance I saw on the video, it might not be altogether clear to him what it’s all about (apart from the usual animus that, from what I’ve seen, Ron is accustomed to engendering). Anyway, assuming he had the information available, I would have Ron lay out for me his version of the story. Then, I would check it out as well as I could.

If Coach Spurrier had an ounce of professionalism in him, of course, he would already have communicated to me (as Ron’s theoretical editor) what his beef was. Let’s assume he does, and he did. In that case, I would already have had it out with Ron about it and, given the way Spurrier acted today, probably would have told him I’d decided to back Ron. Hence the public tantrum.

Of course, if the coach did NOT try the normal, civil route first, then his performance today was inexcusable. Perhaps understandable on some level given that his QB was just canned after letting him down, but still not excusable in a man paid $2.8 million a year by a public institution to represent that institution.

Speaking of which, if I were Eric Hyman or Harris Pastides, I’d right now be having a serious talk with the coach about his performance — a sort of mirror of the one I’d be having with Ron as his editor. We’d start by watching his game film. Some of the things I’d be asking him:

What’s this really about, Steve? And don’t give me that nonsense about some column last spring. That was last spring; you blew up today. What’s really going on? (Oh, wait: Maybe THIS is the column Spurrier is referring to, in which Morris wrote, “Spurrier poached Horn’s program.”)
What exactly do you mean when you say it’s “my right as a head coach” not to talk to Ron Morris? Is that some special right we don’t know about? Do assistant coaches, or ordinary mortals walking the streets, not have that right? Because one would think that they do; that any human being walking the planet would have the right not to talk to Ron Morris if they chose not to. (Unless, of course, they were working for us, and we were paying them $2.8 million a year, and we told them to talk to him…) So what’s this imperious “as a head coach” stuff? Have we really made you feel that important?

And so on. That would just be for starters. And I’d be doing that in between fielding phone calls from people over at the newspaper asking me, “What the heck?” Because they use language like that in talking to the public.

So, as I say, if I were charged with taking a position on this, I’d be in fact-finding mode now before making a decision. But if you held the proverbial gun to my head (and I’d much prefer that to a literal one), I’d have to choose Ron on this one. And I might get embarrassed doing so — I might later have to run a full retraction on the challenged column last spring or something if it turned out Ron was wrong. But if you forced me, I’d go with him on this, because I know him. Or at least, I know him better than I do Spurrier, whom I’ve never met.

That means I used to run into Ron in the hallway sometimes, and stop to chat. I never actually worked with him. I don’t think he was in the newsroom when I was (pre-1994), and even if he had been, we’d have had little occasion to deal with each other. But he has always struck me as a pretty thoughtful, careful guy.

I knew people hated him — people of the “Cocky is God” persuasion. And I used to wonder about that, but I’ve often had occasion to wonder about really serious football fans. Sometimes, when one of Ron’s columns caused a splash of some sort, I’d actually turn to the sports pages and read it. And it usually read OK to me — of course, I was judging it outside the context of having any particular knowledge of the subject matter.

So Micah, that’s what I think.

Laurin and Nancy at the social media symposium

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Laurin is presenting, Nancy is going over her notes, and I'm trying to think up some mayhem that will get me sent to the principal's office. Just like school.

Last night, I participated in a symposium on politics and social media at Francis Marion University. Which was great. Trouble is, I was on a panel with Laurin Manning and Nancy Mace. And they were better prepared than I was.

See, I thought it was going to be just a panel discussion, so I had jotted some notes about points I wanted to be sure to hit on, and showed up. Laurin and Nancy had slide shows, and got up and made presentations. So I had to, too. No problem, really, because I can fill any amount of time… I talked about the old blog and why I started it and how it related to my old MSM job, and the new blog and how it’s going, my Twitter feed (dang! I forgot to mention I’m one of the Twitterati!), how I hate Facebook (it’s the AOL of this decade), “Seinfeld,” my Top Five Baseball Movies, and I don’t know what all.

Then at some point, I realized I’d gone on enough, or more than enough, and shut up. Which I think was cool, but it was way less polished than what the other panelists did.

You know how, when you were in school, there were these girls (and sometimes traitor guys) who always showed up with their homework done? And raised their hands and asked for more work, for extra credit? And when the teacher had been out of the room, and came back, they told her what you had been doing while she was gone? It was like that. Laurin and Nancy were good.

But I survived to the actual panel discussion part, and that went well (I think), so all’s well that ends that way. As it happened, I enjoyed it.

I especially enjoyed learning from Laurin and Nancy.

Laurin was sort of a mentor for me when I started blogging in 2005, and she was well established with the legendary Laurinline. She later was part of the unstoppable Obama social media machine of 2008. Recently, she’s blogged at SC Soapbox.

Nancy, the first female to graduate from The Citadel (how’s that for intimidating?), is founder and CEO of The Mace Group, LLC. She’s also partners with Will Folks in FITSNews— she does the technical side, and leaves the content to Will.

I’m not going to share with you all the cool trade secrets they imparted, because knowledge is power, and I want it all to myself. But I will share this anecdote that they told us about:

You know how Will started his blog? By accident. He was actually trying to post a comment on the Laurinline, and got so confused in trying to do so that he inadvertently set up a blog of his own. Really. That’s the way Laurin and Nancy tell it. The site is much more technologically sophisticated now with Nancy involved, and has more than a million page views a month — compared to my measly traffic, which has only broken a quarter of a million a couple of times. (That’s it. That was my display of humility for this month.)

Anyway, that’s why I was in Florence.

Cindi’s good column about Haley’s naivete

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On Tuesday, while still eating breakfast, I sent Cindi Scoppe an email telling her what a good column she had written about Nikki Haley’s ridiculous claim (later retracted) that half the job applicants at SRS had failed drug tests.

I was proud of the fine job she had done. I was also proud of myself, because I told her it was good without any caveats or “yes, buts” or any qualifications of any kind. I mean, I didn’t even tell her that I thought the headline could have been stronger. I was unusually nice, for me. (Dave Moniz, who worked for me as a reporter in the early 90s, used to say the highest praise anyone ever got from me was “pretty good.”)

But was she grateful? No. She complained later that I hadn’t said how good the column was on the blog.

So here goes. Actually, I think I’ll just quote from the piece:

THE EXTRAORDINARY thing about Gov. Nikki Haley’s discredited claim that half the job applicants at the Savannah River Site had failed drug tests — the actual number was less than 1 percent — wasn’t her acknowledgement that she couldn’t back it up. It was her explanation for why she ever would have parroted such an absurd claim to begin with.

Some unidentified someone she talked to told her that during the campaign, she told The Associated Press’ Jim Davenport last week, and she took it at face value and ran with it. “I’ve never felt like I had to back up what people tell me,” she said. “You assume that you’re given good information.”

I used to think the same thing about elected officials.

I don’t mean I believed everything they said. Quite the contrary. As a reporter, the most fun I had — and some of my most important work — was writing “fact check” articles that explained what was untrue or misleading about the claims politicians made in their political ads, speeches and debates.

Typically, this involved sins of omission: Candidates take their opponents’ votes or comments out of context to create an incorrect and unfair impression. And it tended to be confined to the campaign trail. The overwhelming majority of elected officials I’ve dealt with in a quarter century of covering politics could be trusted with the basic facts once the campaign was ended and they were talking about policy instead of their opponents. They didn’t fabricate “facts”; even Mark Sanford just manipulated numbers in convoluted and misleading ways — although he did it more purposefully and masterfully than any of his predecessors.

I took note before last year’s GOP primary of several misleading claims Ms. Haley had made during a meeting with our editorial board. What was striking was that she would stretch the truth so far in a setting where most candidates go out of their way to be extra careful. More striking was that there was no need for any of it. Although it might have meant a bit more work, she could have made legitimate arguments if she had stuck to the facts.

What has remained notable since she took office is that her demonstrably inaccurate claims continue to be unnecessary…

She goes on to give examples. It’s a good piece. You should go read it.

Wait, here’s another good bit:

That sort of carelessness is fairly common among people who aren’t used to being in the public spotlight. But most elected officials I know are actually quite careful about getting the facts right. They footnote their claims. They say they’ll have to get back to you before answering a question — not because they want to figure out how to spin it but because they want to make sure that they know what they’re talking about…

And here’s another:

Now that she has been forced to back off the drug-testing claim that she says convinced her that we need to make laid-off workers pass drug tests before they receive unemployment checks, I’m struck by the fact that she’s still pushing for the mandatory tests.

I don’t find it objectionable to require the tests. Wasteful, yes — since taxpayers would have to foot the bill, and indications are that fewer than 5 percent of applicants would test positive — but not philosophically objectionable.

What I find objectionable is basing an expensive policy position on an unbelievable anecdote that you didn’t even bother to question because it fits so comfortably with your preconceived notions. And then clinging to that position even after the anecdote has been so utterly discredited…

But you should still go read the whole thing.

Welcome new advertiser Palmetto Citizens FCU!

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When I first went to work at The State in 1987, I immediately opened an account with the newspaper’s credit union. In our old building there in the shadow of Williams-Brice Stadium (it now houses part of S.C. ETV) it was located in what I remember as practically a closet in the Human Resources department — a cubby behind a sliding glass door and curtain.

Perhaps my memory exaggerates. In any case, it was small. But it wasn’t there for long. The company credit union soon merged with Columbia Teachers Federal Credit Union — which had been formed in 1936 when 10 individuals all chipped in $5 apiece. Columbia Teachers opened a branch just down the street from us near the intersection of Shop and George Rogers (or is it Assembly there? hard to tell), and put an ATM in the basement of our building.

By this time, the credit union had expanded well beyond just Columbia teachers, and in 2001 changed its name to Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union.

They’ve still got my money — what there is of it — including the account where I put revenues from the blog. Which will, for the next year, include payments from the credit union itself, for the ad you see at right. Which has a neat sort of circularity to it…

In any case, I’m pleased and proud to welcome a very fine community organization, Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union, to bradwarthen.com.

Full engagement, the only viable, effective and moral stance for the U.S. to take toward the world

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Posting that column last night — the one from 9/23/01 — I realized that I had forgotten to post something else a week earlier.

When I shared with you the hasty column I wrote for the “extra” we put out on 9/11, and the one I turned around immediately and wrote for the next day, I had fully intended also to share a more important piece from several days later — the editorial I wrote for that following Sunday. But the 16th of this month came and went, and I failed to do that.

So I share it now. Being an editorial (an institutional, rather than personal opinion) and being a Sunday piece (when newspapers take a step back from immediate events, and also when they tend to express the views they regard as being of greatest import), it’s different from the other pieces. Less of my voice and style, more formalized. But at the same time, for the purposes of this blog, it also has perhaps greater value as a clear expression of my own views of what the nation should do going forward.

In it, I expressed views I had long held, and still hold, but they were sharpened and set into relief by the events of that week.

Spoiler alert: Basically, this piece is about a couple of things. The first is the need for re-engagement in the world, after a growing isolationism that had worried me all through the 90s. With notable exceptions — our involvement in the Balkans, for instance — we had become more insular, more preoccupied with our own amusements as a fat, happy nation. Up to that point, I had objected on the basis that when you are the world’s richest and most powerful nation (indisputable after the fall of the USSR), it is morally wrong to turn your back on the world, like a rich man behind the walls of his gated community. What 9/11 did was add to that the fact that such disengagement was positively dangerous.

The other main point is something I later learned an interesting term for: DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic.” Actually, that’s not quite it, either. The DIME term refers to ways of exerting power, and that it certainly part of it, but not all of it. Another piece of the concept I was talking about was what you often hear referred to as “soft power.” Unfortunately, that is often mistakenly expressed as an alternative to “hard power.” But they complement each other. A unipolar power trying to achieve all of its goals through either alone is doomed to fail, ultimately.

No, I have to go back to the earlier, vaguer term: Engagement. On every level you can think of — diplomatic, cultural, mercantile, humanitarian, and yes, military.

Much of this piece, given the moment in which it was written, is occupied with the military part. That’s natural. That’s the hardest to persuade people of in our peaceful times (if you doubt we live in peaceful times, I plan a post after this one to address that). The rest, people just nod about and say, yes, of course we should do those things. (OK, perhaps I’m being a bit sanguine about that. I’ll just say that the people who need convincing on the military part are likely to say that — others are likely to say ‘Hell, no — let them fend for themselves.” And thus we have the two sides of isolationism.) They take more convincing on the tough stuff. (Some of you will object, “Not after 9/11! People’s blood was boiling!” But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about passions of the moment. I was talking about long-term policy. I’m talking about what happens after people calm down and say, Never mind; let’s just withdraw.)

Reading it now, I wish the piece had been longer, with far more explication of the other elements, and how they were integrated. The following years, we saw constant argument between two views, neither of which saw the value of the whole concept. On the one hand, you had the Bushian — really, more the Rumsfeldian — notion that all you had to do was topple a tyrant and things would be fine. On the other, there was the myopic view that soft power was the only kind that was moral and effective.

These ideas are as relevant now as ever. Now that we have employed hard power to topple a tyrant in Libya, will we engage fully on other fronts to help Libya have a better future, one in which it has a chance of being a long-term friend, ally and trading partner? Or will we turn our attention away now that the loud noises have stopped going off?

Anyway, I’ve explained it enough. Here it is:

IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, September 16, 2001

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words “missile defense shield” to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.

That’s about the only way it might have helped.

Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

Essentially, we have wasted a decade.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.

We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was “It’s the economy, stupid.” Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s “policeman.”

Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.

Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.

In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, “When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general.” That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.

At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.

Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.

We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call “humint” – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.

But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.

We must cease to regard “nation-building” as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.

We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

USA Today plays up SC lawmaker pensions

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Cindi Scoppe just got a little help.

For years, Cindi has been writing at least annually about the outrageous pensions that SC lawmakers give themselves. She just got some reinforcement in that crusade, with a front-page story in USA Today, which begins:

At age 55, South Carolina state Sen. David Thomas began collecting a pension for his legislative service without leaving office.

Most workers must retire from their jobs before getting retirement benefits. But Thomas used a one-sentence law that he and his colleagues passed in 2002 to let legislators receive a taxpayer-funded pension instead of a salary after serving for 30 years.

Thomas’ $32,390 annual retirement benefit — paid for the rest of his life — is more than triple the $10,400 salary he gave up. His pension exceeds the salary because of another perk: Lawmakers voted to count their expenses in the salary used to calculate their pensions.

No other South Carolina state workers get those perks.

Since January 2005, Thomas, a Republican, has made $148,435 more than a legislative salary would have paid, his financial-disclosure records show. At least four other South Carolina lawmakers are getting pensions instead of salaries, netting an extra $292,000 since 2005, records show.

And so forth and so on.

Increasingly, national media are discovering just how wild and wacky South Carolina is. On the one hand, it’s embarrassing. On the other, it’s nice to get the attention.

Who knows? Maybe the added exposure will help here at home. After all, last year, laudatory national coverage got Nikki Haley elected governor.

Expect Cindi to write about it more.

On Jim Clyburn, earmarks, race, and representing a poor district

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I’ve never liked one thing that traditionally has been core to the makeup of members of Congress: bringing home the bacon.

Yes, I know it’s a particularly honored tradition in South Carolina, from Mendel Rivers through Strom Thurmond and on and on. This state was devastated in The Recent Unpleasantness, and it was sort of natural in subsequent generations for folks to want their elected representatives to bring home Yankee bacon whenever possible.

Doesn’t mean that’s the right way to run a government. The federal government should look at the entire country and decide where it needs to build military bases or roads or bridges or place programs of any sort, according to which locations best suit the needs of the whole nation. Or where the greatest need for a particular service might be at a given time — such as disaster services. Largess should not flow according to which lawmakers has the most pull.

Congress has been so bad about this that when we decided we needed to close some military bases the nation no longer needed, we had to set up BRAC to prevent interference by individual members of Congress. It’s been a successful process, but the need for it testifies to a painful failure of our basic system of government.

Congressional pull is not the way to set priorities for our government. This is particularly obvious to a lot of people when we look at spending, but I’ve always been concerned that it’s just a bad policy all-around for making effective decisions for the country. And it disenfranchises Americans whose representatives have less pull.

So it is that I’ve been pleased (in general) with Jim DeMint’s efforts to stop earmarks (which are actually only a small part of the problem), and have never been much of a fan of Jim Clyburn’s more traditional bring-home-the-bacon approach.

But I’m not without sympathy for Clyburn. To explain why, I’ll share a story that at first may seem unrelated. I did not witness this, but I’ve heard about it.

A large part of why Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, as you will recall, was that he proposed to clean up government. No more Watergates. He promised, although we didn’t yet use this word for it back then, transparency. It was a huge deal; he was never going to lie to us. So after the election, there was a meeting in Columbia of people who had worked in his campaign in South Carolina. Probably a pretty big meeting, since back in those days, we actually had some Democrats in this state. And the Carter guy who was conducting the meeting told them that they shouldn’t expect any inside track on getting positions in the new administration. Everything was going to be open and aboveboard and a level playing field, and there was to be no smoke-filled room patronage.

One of the campaign supporters in the room, a local black leader who was then quite young (I’d want to talk to him and refresh my memory of the story’s details before using his name), protested, “But we just got into the room, and we just started smoking.”

Which was true enough. And more than once have I heard such protests from black politicians — now that we have some political influence, you want to weed such influence out of government.

Well, yes, I do. And I’m sorry some folks just got into the room, but we’ve had enough of that kind of politics.

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to Jim Clyburn’s desire to get some federal investment into parts of the state that were bypassed when white politicians were grabbing federal resources for South Carolina. This isn’t about unsavory practices; this is about funds that will be distributed somewhere, so why not in your neglected district? Perfectly understandable. Even admirable. So while I am against, for instance, the bridge he wants to build between Lone Star and Rimini, I understand his desire to get some infrastructure into that area that might help economic development flow in behind it.

Against this background, I was interested in Warren Bolton’s column in The State today. I had actually missed it in a cursory skim through the paper this morning (I was conversing with several people while perusing), so I’m glad that my attention was called back to it by a release from, quite naturally, Jim Clyburn’s office. It was headlined, “Earmarks saving grace for Clyburn’s district.” An excerpt:

Frankly, I think the free-wheeling system that has allowed members of Congress to target pet projects for funding is too loosely monitored and arbitrary and, therefore, can be wasteful. But I don’t think that earmarks in general are bad; they can be used to make sure worthwhile projects are funded. In addition to a lack of transparency, the big problem is that the system doesn’t ensure that those important things get done.

But Mr. Clyburn didn’t invent this system. It was in place eons before he even arrived in Congress. Given that those in his district have grave needs that aren’t being met by the state, which has yet to come up with an effective way to address rural challenges that can’t be met by cash-poor local governments, he’s doing what he can.

It’s amazing to me how so many in this state can criticize Mr. Clyburn’s actions when they should be familiar with the challenge of rural South Carolina. While we get many letters to the editor from writers taking issue with Mr. Clyburn on legitimately debatable grounds, such as his positions on issues, his philosophy and even his use of earmarks, many others make statements and accusations that are just plain unfair, false and — quite frankly — racist….

I, like Warren, have fielded some of those calls — and emails, and letters, and blog comments. And while I may often agree with the person commenting that a particular spending proposal is a bad idea, it is disturbing to hear the undertone, the emotion that underlies the complaining. And Warren is right to use what he calls “the ‘R’ word” to describe this thing we hear. It’s the same undertone that I so often hear in the constant attacks on the very idea of public schools, or of government in general — because so many whites in our state, and in other parts of the country as well, have gotten it into their heads that government exists to take money away from honest, hard-working, moral, thrifty, sensible white people and give it, outright, to lazy, shiftless, no-good black people.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

Anyway, I’ve probably given you enough to discuss, but I’d like to point out another passage in Warren’s column:

I get lots of letters and calls from people who try to suggest that Mr. Clyburn can be a big spender and favor increasing taxes on the rich because he is insulated by voters in his “gerrymandered” majority-black district; some all but suggest that the congressman configured the 6th District himself.

But the truth is that Republicans in the S.C. State House gerrymandered the district in an effort to pack as many of the state’s black people together as possible so they could get as many Republicans as possible elected to Congress. That meant creating a majority-black district that has lots of rural areas that are heavily poor, undereducated and undeveloped. They’re areas that lack infrastructure such as water, sewer and roads — or libraries, theaters and bowling allies.

Amen to that Warren, and I’m glad to see you writing that, since I’m not at the paper to do it anymore.

I would amend his characterization of what happened slightly, though. I recall particularly what happened in the early ’90s in the Legislature: Republicans worked with black Democrats to draft a plan, over the resistance of the white Democrats who ran the SC House, that created several more majority-black districts.

Black lawmakers were frustrated with Speaker Bob Sheheen and other Democratic leaders because they were not willing to draw as many “majority-minority” districts as possible. The motivation of the Republicans was less direct. They had figured out that for every district you make majority black, you remove black voters from several other districts, thereby making those seats safe for Republicans, and unsafe for Democrats of any color. So, a tiny gain for those who wanted a few more black lawmakers, but a HUGE, strategic victory for Republicans who wanted to take over South Carolina.

Once that reapportionment plan was in place, the way to power was paved for the GOP. It put them in striking distance. They had big gains in the 1994 election. That, plus some key defections by white Democrats after the election (indeed, the earlier defection of David Beasley to the GOP had given them the head of their ticket), and we saw the Republicans take over the House in January 1995.

But I’ve reminisced enough. Time for y’all to have your say.

What I wrote later in the day on 9/11/01

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Yesterday, I showed y’all what I wrote in the first hour, more or less, after learning of the attacks in New York and Washington 10 years ago. That raw, stream-of-consciousness piece ran in the “extra” that The State put out that day.

As soon as I had handed that to the folks putting that special edition together, I turned to what we would say for the next day’s paper — for Sept. 12. Then, almost as quickly, but with the benefit of a couple of more hours to let the news sink in, I wrote the following column.

Still nothing I would hold up as one of my best pieces of work, but it has its moments. For me. See what you think. And remember again: This is not a piece written with the benefit of years of reflection:

NOW THAT REALITY EXCEEDS FICTION, WHAT SORT OF ENDING WILL WE WRITE?

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Author: BRAD WARTHEN , Editorial Page Editor

WE’RE IN TOM Clancy’s world now.

Mr. Clancy is derided as a writer by critics for many reasons, one of them being the fact that his plots tend to be so fantastic and contrived. Take his novel Executive Orders. It was too much to be believed. It opened with a 747 having been deliberately flown into the U.S. Capitol, shutting down the government. This is followed by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that result in thousands of civilian deaths on American soil. And for most of the book, no one knows who is doing this to us, or why.

We now know what that’s like. In fact, what we are now facing is worse than Mr. Clancy’s fevered imaginings.

It may seem unbelievably frivolous to be thinking about pulp fiction at a time like this, but my mind keeps returning to it, and partly because this seems so much like something from the realm of fiction – or because I wish it were.

It certainly outstrips anything that’s happened on any one day in this nation’s real-life history.

The comparisons to Pearl Harbor are inevitable. But in so many ways this is different – and worse. The death toll is larger, and the bodies we’re counting – and will continue to count for some time – aren’t wearing uniforms. They didn’t sign up to fight. They were just going to work, in what they thought was a free and peaceful country.

It’s also worse because we don’t know where to go with our grief and our rage. On Dec. 7, 1941, those sailors looking up at the red suns on the wings of the planes that were killing their buddies knew exactly what to do – and so did the rest of the nation.

I wonder if we’ll ever know what to do about this, in the same, ultimately satisfying sense of being able to restore peace and security to our nation and world. Oh, when we find out who did this, there’s no question about what we’ll do in the short term. Give us a target, something to shoot back at, and it will soon be nothing but smoke and ashes.

It will be a very short war. But what will we do when it’s over? How will we deal with the other disaffected, unconnected people around the world who will take inspiration from Tuesday’s events? What can we do, and what will we do, about the fact that there are people who hate us for no better reasons than that we are strong, wealthy and free?

Pearl Harbor isn’t our only comparison. People have mentioned the explosion of the Challenger as being comparable – then, too, the nation watched in helpless horror as fellow human beings died, in real time. But as awful as it was, there were only seven dead. And we figured out how to fix it. It was a simple problem of engineering.

Better O-rings won’t take care of this.

There are no precedents. Nothing in our past was quite like this. Even the Civil War, the most traumatic event in our collective experience, was in a sense less unsettling, in that everyone had a clearer understanding of what was going on.

Just as we can take little comfort from the past, our future offers no solace. It’s certainly not going to be anything like what we expected.

Some of the changes will come only if we’re smart enough to make them happen ourselves. Americans are going to have to start caring more about foreign affairs, if we’re ever going to deal adequately with this challenge. We can’t just fire a few cruise missiles and then hide behind a magical “Star Wars” shield. We’re going to have to engage the world – or at least, we’re going to have to demand that our elected leaders do so. And those political leaders are going to have to set aside a lot of their petty, partisan differences – or we’re going to have to replace them.

In other ways, some kind of change is inevitable, and all we can do is pick between unsavory choices.

From now on, this nation will be either less safe or less free. The openness and the freedom of movement that we take for granted make us enormously vulnerable, a fact that is absurdly obvious today. I suspect that at least in the short term, we’ll choose being a little less free in order to be a little safer. And that’s a sad choice to have to make.

I said we’re in Tom Clancy’s world. That’s true up to a point. The biggest difference is that I know how the book ends – once Jack Ryan and the other fictional protagonists figured out who was attacking the United States, they made war upon them with devastating effectiveness. In the end, the nation emerged stronger than ever.

What will happen in real life? Our capacity to make war is undisputed. But in the long term, how will we ever be the same?

The fact is, we won’t be. Our challenge is to emerge as something better than we were, not something worse.

The first words I wrote after the planes hit

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I think I’ve told this story before, but to recap…

In 2001, the senior staff of The State — the heads of all the newspaper’s divisions (including news, advertising, circulation, HR, finance, production, marketing and of course, editorial) — met with the publisher ever Tuesday morning at 9. On Sept. 11, 2001, we had just sat down when someone from the newsroom came to the door seeking John Drescher, who was then our managing editor. John told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, then left the room.

We had it in our minds that it was a big story, and certainly John needed to get started on it, but we were picturing (at least I was) another confused amateur pilot in a Beechcraft or something. The WTC bombing of several years earlier crossed my mind, but I didn’t take it seriously yet.

It seemed we had just resumed the meeting when Drescher burst back in and told Executive Editor Mark Lett (News and editorial each had two editors who were on Senior Staff. The newsroom was represented by Lett and Drescher, while Associate Editor Warren Bolton joined me in representing editorial) that a second plane had hit the other tower.

Now we knew it was a coordinated attack on the United States.

That was it. Meeting over. Everybody jumped up. A few of us huddled over by the window and discussed putting out an “Extra,” before moving on to putting together the regular paper for the next day. I asked whether they’d like a column from editorial, just to inject a bit of opinion into the special edition. They said “yes,” and I went to get to work.

The first job was to get some sort of sense of what was happened — I mean the total picture, not just the Twin Towers (which probably had not yet collapsed as I began). That wasn’t easy. A lot was happening at once — the Pentagon getting hit, the Capitol evacuated, the president up in the air, somewhere. And then there were some the unconfirmed reports that later proved to be untrue — I don’t even remember the details of them now, some sorts of smaller incidents going on in the streets of Washington. Once they were discounted, I forgot them so my brain could process all the other stuff going on.

Once I turned to my keyboard, it took me about 20 minutes to write the following. That didn’t keep Drescher from sending up messages from the second floor: Where’s the copy? We’ve gotta go. Of course, all news really had to do is grab the stuff coming in and put it on a page. I had to think about what it meant, on the basis of alarmingly incomplete information, and write it.

So you might say this was written in even more of a hurry than a similar number of words on the blog, and amid great confusion and a certain amount of duress. You can read that in these words. There’s some emotion, and some thoughts, there that wouldn’t have been there a day later, or even a few hours later. Very stream-of-consciousness. I wince at some of it now. But it’s a real-time artifact, at least of what was going through my head that morning. See what you think:

AMERICA WILL FIND A WAY TO PREVAIL AGAINST COWARDLY ENEMY

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor

Sometime within the next 24 hours, no doubt, some television talking head somewhere will say, “This doesn’t happen here.”

Yes, it does. It has.

It’s happened before, in fact. It just wasn’t this close to home.

We remember Pearl Harbor. We’ll remember this, too.

The question is, what will we do about it?

Two nights ago, the nation delved back into its history with a celebrated media event, the premiere of the television version of Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers.”

We marvel at how a previous generation responded to an unprecedented crisis – a sudden attack by a ruthless, remorseless enemy. We think of those people as the “greatest generation,” and they deserve that appellation because of the way they came together to settle their own crisis and secure our future.

And we all wondered: Are we like them? Do we have it in us?

We’re about to find out.

We’re about to find out if we can snap out of shock, pull ourselves off the ground, set our petty differences aside, and come together as a nation to deal with our enemies.

For now, there is no question that we have enemies. And these enemies are in many ways different from Imperial Japan. In some ways, they are worse.

Pearl Harbor was an attack upon a distant outpost of American military power. The attack, as sudden and dishonest and vicious as it was, was at least an attack that made strategic sense in traditional military logic. And while there were civilian casualties, the obvious primary target was our fighting men and their machines of war.

This time, there is no pretense of such rudimentary “decency,” if you want to stretch so far as to call it that.

This time, civilians were the target every bit as much – if not more so – as our men and women in uniform.

This was a strike – and a temporarily successful one – at the chief power centers that have given this nation the strength to stand astride the world as its only superpower.

We are the world’s largest economy, so they struck, with devastating effect, at the very symbolic heart of that strength.

We are the undisputed military champion of the world, guarantor of security not only for this nation but for the rest of the globe. And this time they struck not just battleships and sailors, but the nerve center of our military colossus.

The greatest gift this nation has given the world is our form of democracy. And they have shut down and evacuated our Capitol and the White House. The home of the most powerful man in the world stands empty, surrounded by nervous men with automatic weapons and itchy trigger fingers.

The nation that gave the world flight is frozen, earthbound, at a standstill.

We are stunned. This attack has been devastatingly successful. We don’t know who did it, and we don’t know how much there is to come.

Our response will have to be different from the response after Pearl Harbor. This appears to be a different kind of enemy – the worst kind of coward. An enemy who strikes, and ducks and runs and hides.

How to prevail against such an enemy and restore peace and prosperity to the land is not immediately apparent.

But we will find a way. This is the same nation that was laid low 60 years ago, by an enemy who thought we lacked the will or the know-how to stop them. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.

We may not be the greatest generation, but we are their grandchildren. We are Americans. We are shocked, and we will mourn.

But then we’ll dust ourselves off, and find a way.

Later, I briefly attended a newsroom meeting in which they were talking about the next days paper (the only time I remember doing that during my years in editorial), and then turned to directing my own staff and writing stuff for the next day. I’ll show you that tomorrow.