Category Archives: The State

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.

Once, we had a “young lady” reporter at the paper, and a governor wanted to SPANK her. No, really.

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Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors,  they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:

CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer

If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.

The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?

Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.

But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.

This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.

At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”

A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.

It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .

A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.

Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.

The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.

Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”

Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”

No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.

At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.

Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.

Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?

Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?

Of course, the late Gov.  Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.

I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.

“Let them sue.” Amen to that, Warren

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Meant to post this yesterday, before the city council’s action. But I’m going to post it anyway, because I agree so strongly with what Warren Bolton had to say in his column Tuesday morning:

Let them sue

By Warren Bolton – Associate Editor

WHILE SOME Columbia officials understandably are concerned about a possible legal challenge, that’s not reason enough for City Council to shun a permanent teen curfew in Five Points.

There’s too much at stake in terms of controlling violence and ensuring overall community safety, particularly the safety and welfare of our children. It would be disappointing for City Council to allow the temporary curfew that’s been in place for about two months to sunset as if all is well. It is not.

This community needs to make a clear, strong statement that it is not acceptable for youngsters to hang out late at night and into the wee hours in bar districts that cater to adults. Nothing good happens there — or anywhere else — for children out during those hours. Children out late at night are just as likely to be victims as perpetrators…

The NAACP and ACLU have threatened to sue if a curfew is enacted.

Let them sue.

… (A) lawsuit might be the best thing that could happen, because this community needs a curfew, and once and for all, we would get a definitive answer…

Amen to that, Warren. Yes, there are those who may sue. Let them bring it on.

If an elected official or administrator is to refrain from responsible action whenever the ACLU threatens to sue, then he or she should resign and let someone with some sand take over. That’s what the ACLU does (I’m not sure what the NAACP does these does other than pursue a boycott that seems designed to have the opposite of the stated effect). That’s what the ACLU will always do. You have to go ahead and govern responsibly anyway.

To extend this point a bit: I also get frustrated when legislative bodies shrink back from doing the right thing because someone may filibuster. Whenever that happens, I say, “Let them.” Allow the filibustering party to make a spectacle of itself. Allow the issues to be aired completely, openly. Let it become obvious who is obstructing effective action. And then, man up and invoke cloture (something senators tend to have a horror of). But if you can’t get the votes to do that, just let the spectacle continue, until either you eventually prevail or the opposing party has burned up every grain of public goodwill it may once have enjoyed. And then try again.

The obstructionists will always do what they do. When you’re trying to do the right and responsible thing, it is your job, your obligation, to overcome their opposition — not be intimidated by it.

I receive a welcome Elvis Day invitation

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One of the doughnuts Chris left me back when some of the King's loyal subjects still worked at newspapers.

This rubble used to be the Krispy Kreme Chris went to in Tuscaloosa. Took a direct hit...

When we worked together at The State, Chris Roberts used to bring me a jelly doughnut every Aug. 16 in honor of the King.

He’s not in a position to do that now — he’s in Alabama — but he did show he was thinking of me by sending this:

He went on to say that he would have tried to get a doughnut to me, but the local Krispy Kreme got knocked down by a tornado back in April.

So I sent him a picture of one.

Chris knows how special this day is to me, because I was one of the first people in the world to hear the awful news in 1977:

MY GOOD FRIEND Les Seago was the man who told the world that the King was dead. But before he told the world, he told me.
I’ve always appreciated that, even though it didn’t do me much practical good at the time.
On Aug. 16, 1977, Les was the chief Memphis correspondent for The Associated Press. I was the slot man on the copy desk of The Jackson Sun, which meant I had been at work since 5:30 a.m. By early afternoon, the paper was on its way to readers. I had also been a stringer for Les for years, and I was used to his calls to see what was going on in our area. But he didn’t have time for that this day.
Was it too late to get something in? he demanded. Well, yeah, it was, just barely, but why…?
It looks like Elvis is dead, he said, explaining quickly that he had a source, an ambulance driver from Baptist Hospital, who told him he had just brought Elvis in, and he was pretty sure that his passenger had been beyond help. Gotta go now, ‘bye.
He must have broken all speed records getting it confirmed, because I had just begun to tell my co-workers when the “bulletin” bell went off on the wire machine as it hammered out the news.

Les himself was found dead at his home two years ago [this column ran on this day in 2006], at age 61. Though his career had spanned many years and he had covered Martin Luther King’s assassination, The Associated Press identified him in his obituaryas the man “who filed the bulletin on the death of Elvis Presley.” His ex-wife Nancy said “He wasn’t wild about Elvis, but he was glad that he did break the story.” That was Les…

Long live the King.

Cameron Runyan, candidate for city council

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It all starts with a good breakfast. Cameron Runyan keeps to a strict diet, which he told me about while I was eating my grits and corned beef hash (with ketchup). Then, when he started going on about his exercise regimen, I almost walked out in protest.

If anybody else is going to run against Cameron Runyan for the at-large Columbia City Council position being vacated by Daniel Rickenmann, he or she will have to get started soon. Because Cameron is already running hard, with the election not until April 2012.

To hear him talk about it, you’d think it was tomorrow. But he took a bit of time out of this busy week of fund-raising to chat with me this morning.

Before I get to that, here’s the first release he sent out about his campaign, just as a beginning point of reference:

RUNYAN TO RUN FOR CITY COUNCIL

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Columbia businessman Cameron Runyan on Thursday announced that he will run for Columbia City Council in the April 2012 municipal election.
“After a great deal of thought and prayer, and after discussing it with my wife Jenni and my family, I have decided to offer myself as a candidate for City Council,” Runyan said. “I believe my experience as a private business person and as an engaged member of the community makes me uniquely qualified to serve all of Columbia.”
Runyan, 34, will seek the at-large Council seat currently held by two-term Councilman Daniel Rickenmann, who will not run for re-election.
Runyan enters the race with a fresh perspective on the challenges facing the city.
“I want to help build a clean, safe, strong city that my daughter is proud to call home for her entire life,” Runyan said. “We can make Columbia great, and I feel that I can play an important role in doing that as a member of council.”
Runyan’s platform will center on public safety, job creation and leadership.
“There is so much potential for our city, but there’s a lot of work to be done,” said Runyan. “We’ve got to crack down on crime, grow our city’s economy, and get our unemployed residents back to work.”
Added Runyan, “We also face environmental concerns, education concerns, and transportation concerns. It will take strong leadership to address these and other important issues. It will take strong leadership to move our city forward. I am ready to lead.”
Runyan plans to hold an official campaign kick-off in the coming weeks.
###

You’ll recall that Cameron ran for this seat several years back. Or you may not. The way I remember it, all the available oxygen in that election got sucked up by the District 3 race between Belinda Gergel and Brian Boyer. That one was a corker. A lot of money was spent, and heat generated. Which was weird, because it was just a district election.

Cameron doesn’t quite remember it that way. He thinks he got enough attention, he just didn’t have the resources. He remembers doing well in District 3, which he hopes to do again, while doing better than he did in District 4. He says “I got my clock cleaned” in 1 & 2. He’s determined not to let that happen again.

You know what? Rather than take the time to try to weave this into an elegant narrative, with all the necessary transitions, I’m going to throw some bullets at you — in the interest of getting this post done:

  • Cameron thinks one disadvantage he had in 2008 was that he was so young (and inexperienced), at 30, compared to Daniel. That made me smile. I had this habit, back at The State, of asking a certain question of candidates I thought seemed barely old enough to vote, much less presuming to run for office and run things: “How old are you?” I asked it of young Mr. Rickenmann when he first ran. But we endorsed him anyway. Over my grumblings. It was one of those occasions when I let the rest of the board override me. I tended to remember things like that so I could hold it over my colleagues’ heads when they claimed that I always had my way. “Oh, yeah?” I’d ask. “How about when you made me endorse that Rickenmann kid?” But I digress.
  • Daniel also had the advantage of incumbency, which will not be a factor this time, conveniently for Cameron.
  • If you do the math, you realize that Cameron is now 34. Yep, the age of one of my kids. But he seems older because I’m used to seeing him around now — he’s at the Cap City Club most mornings, which was where we spoke today. He’s also somewhat calmer. After his endorsement interview last time around, I did something I seldom do — give the candidate feedback on the interview. I told him he seemed unusually… intense… in his criticism of his opponent. I mentioned that because I had a concern: Could he get along with other people on the council if elected, or would he always be at war with somebody. He assured me then that he would be cool. And he does seem a good bit cooler now.
  • When I first met him, Cameron was in the nonprofit world. He was working on the private side of the guardian ad litem program. Now he’s a financial planner. Interesting contrast there.
  • Economic development will be a key message in his campaign. I asked what he meant by that. He mentioned having a “structured incentive plan,” getting the council and mayor more involved in ecodevo, and taking better care of the businesses we already have. On that last point — he said the city needs to get more business-friendly in its permitting processes.
  • He grew up in Hampton County, where his father was an attorney. His Dad, incidentally, was raised in Nigeria. His father was a Baptist missionary.
  • He’s being helped in this campaign by Heyward Bannister, Adam Fogle (who, as you know, may be the funniest South Carolinian on Twitter) and the Quinns.
  • Most morning, you can see him sitting at his table at Cap City, reading his iPad. Which was how I found him this morning (see below).
  • He has disgustingly healthy habits. While I consumed my grits and corned beef hash, with ketchup, he broke his fast with fruit and oatmeal. He only eats meat once or twice a week. He engages in some sort of intense morning workout that was painful to hear about.
  • He says that government on the local level exists for only one reason: because “collectively, we can get more done than we can individually.” I think that sounded more collectivist than he intended. Later, he said he thought it was important to “balance collective responsibility and individual responsibility.” That sounded sufficiently communitarian (official battle cry: “Rights and Responsibilities“) that I asked it he had studied that school of thought. Like most people, he had not heard of it. Amitai Etzioni needs to get a better press agent.

On that last bit: I had lunch with Ashley Landess, head of the S.C. Policy Council, the other day, and mentioned communitarianism to her as well. You will not be shocked to hear that she had not heard of it either (neither, by the way, has the spellchecker on WordPress). But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to tell her about it. Yeah, I know — I am indeed the eternal optimist.

I thought this was a fairly cool image, even though you can see me in the reflection. Or maybe BECAUSE you can see me in the reflection.

Lee Bandy was at Rotary today!

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I was blessed with a pleasant surprise today at the Columbia Rotary Club meeting — Lee Bandy! He was there as a guest of member Joe Jones.

It was awesome to get to see Lee, my good friend and longtime colleague — tanned, rested and ready. More than two decades ago, the guy had to put up with me as his editor, and he’s never held it against me.

For you youngsters, Lee was the dean of SC political journalism until his retirement four or five years ago. Who replaced him as dean? Well, they retired the position.

Good column by Warren about Jim Manning

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I’ve never been a fan of Jim Manning’s short career as a Richland County councilman. In fact, on the day after the 2008 election, I saw Manning’s election as the biggest disappointment of the night. At the time, I was mostly upset that Manning had replaced an excellent incumbent, despite offering no good reasons as to why he would do a better job.It was a monument to party line voting over merit, the starkest that I saw in the 2008 election.

Mr. Manning is a nice, friendly guy, and I’ve only had pleasant interactions with him. But little that he has done since Election Night has caused me to feel better about his election.

Friday, Warren Bolton had a good column on the subject, inspired most immediately by a shocking action by Richland County Council in June:

IT SHOULDN’T come as a shock that Richland County Councilman Jim Manning insisted on raising property taxes in Richland 2 to the maximum allowed under state law against the school board’s wishes.

It’s the kind of thing for which he’s become known. While Mr. Manning characterizes himself as one who’s willing to make bold proposals and stand by them, at times his efforts are misguided, lack sound judgment and trample the tenets of good stewardship and sound policy making…

Jim Manning

Mr. Manning utterly failed to justify his action. It was apparently based in vague notions that more should be spent on education (without regard to whether there is any sort of plan for spending it). Some of you — Doug, for instance — probably think I would do just what the councilman did. I wouldn’t. Oh, I might fight for the district’s request, if it seemed justified within the context in which it was presented. But I would never dream of saying, “Oh, here’s some more money you didn’t ask for.”

Of course, the really shocking thing here is that the council went along with him on it. We wouldn’t be talking about this at all if he had not.  I don’t know all the dynamics of that; I haven’t spoken with the other council members and for some reason I don’t see the minutes of that meeting on the county website. Here are the minutes of the previous meeting, at which the matter was apparently discussed. They are a bit hard to follow. There were procedural votes that split along party lines, but in the end the vote was unanimous. Under such circumstances, I would have to have been there and heard what was said to fully understand the way it unfolded. But as Warren points out, with Mr. Manning, we have a pattern emerging:

This isn’t the first time Mr. Manning has left people scratching their heads.

He led a misguided effort to weaken the county’s smoking ban by allowing any establishment to operate “a portion of its workplace” as a “designated smoking area” if it is separate from the nonsmoking area and has its own outside entrance and a separate heating and air system; that would have required some employees to work in smoking areas. While the change was sold as an attempt to address concerns of a single bingo operator along Decker Boulevard in Mr. Manning’s district, it would have opened the door to all businesses, including bars and restaurants. The council wisely nixed the measure.

Prior to Mr. Manning taking office, County Council — worried about clutter, among other things — had banned new billboards in unincorporated areas. It later reaffirmed that stance by rebuffing attempts to expand the use of electronic billboards, which many worried would distract drivers. Once Mr. Manning joined the council, he teamed with Councilwoman Gwendolyn Kennedy to revive the electronic billboard issue and turn what once was a slim majority against them into a decided majority in favor….

Warren also cited Mr. Manning’s odd feud with County Administrator Milton Pope. He forgot one memorable incident, though — one I wrote about here, when he tried to get a high-stakes bingo on Decker Boulevard, before backing down in the face of strong community opposition (including from his own pastor).

Warren speculated that thanks to what the Council has done at Mr. Manning’s behest, “Even though it’s not at fault, Richland 2 could feel some backlash from the business community.” Oh, I think you can count on it. Since the Legislature in its “wisdom” relieved homeowners entirely from supporting school with their property taxes, the burden of supporting this whimsy falls heavily on business. And “business” in this case includes owners of rental property — which generally means rents going up for those who can’t afford to own a home.

According to Warren, Mr. Manning has a response when people criticize him, because he’s used to it:

“People have been reacting to me like that since I was in kindergarten,” he said.

I recently asked him what he meant by that.

“Kindergarten is the first time that I remember that I had to interact with an organized institution,” he said. “Ever since I’ve had to interact with organized institutions I have not toed the line.”

Set aside that he has been elected to represent real people in an organized institution. As Warren points out in the headline, this isn’t kindergarten. And nobody legitimately expects an elected official to “toe the line.” He’s there to use his best judgment in representing the people who elected him.

The key word there is “judgment.”

Warren’s column accompanied an editorial in which The State said:

Mr. Manning acknowledges that he didn’t scour the district’s budget and find holes that needed to be plugged or valuable programs that needed funding. He said district officials didn’t ask him to intervene. He also said he doesn’t care what the money is spent on; he just wants the district to have the money and is sure it will find something worthwhile to spend it on.

Richland 2 officials said they intend to spend the money forced upon them wisely, but they have gone to great pains to make it clear that they didn’t want the increased budget. Over the years, officials in the largest and fastest growing Midlands district have proven responsible and adept at handling their budget — and at asking for what’s needed to operate schools.

With the economy in the state it’s in and only businesses and automobiles being charged school operating taxes, District 2’s elected board — not unlike other conscientious elected officials — understands that keeping businesses open and people employed is crucial. So the board sought to balance the district’s needs with those of taxpaying constituents. But County Council, in its flawed wisdom and for no defensible or even clearly articulable reason, overruled the district.

Indeed.

O’Connor to explore new journalistic frontier

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John O'Connor, looking all self-conscious at the Capital City Club this morning, on account of someone taking his picture. I need to come up with a sneakier way to do that.

More than 2,200 Twitter followers have been sorry to hear that John O’Connor is leaving The State. But they needn’t worry. He’ll keep Tweeting. He just might have to change his avatar.

John is moving to Tampa to work for NPR. The really cool thing about this is that it’s a new initiative. Not many journalists get to plow new ground. Oh, sure, there are thousands of us blogging and Tweeting away out here. What I mean is, not many of us get to try something new and get a steady paycheck for it.

NPR is hiring people to cover specific issues on the state level. John will be covering education in Florida. The emphasis will be on computer-assisted reporting — lots of number-crunching, to measure what is working and what isn’t. Florida has the reputation nationally of being willing to try anything, and it has: vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations (which may or may not be connected to merit pay; I’m not sure), and so forth. Currently, it’s doing all these things under one of the most unpopular governors in the country, so it’s quite a political stew. Although John will be concentrating more on the policy and the numbers than on the politics.

This will mean a lot of people (even more, he hopes) will continue to follow his Tweets, since the nation watches Florida on education policy. He will probably still have something to say occasionally about SC, since he’s been here for eight years and has been at the middle of so much here, covering the State House.

John will supplement his radio reports with a blog, which I will make sure to add to my blogroll as soon as it’s up and running.

He’s really pumped about the new opportunity, not least because the Orioles train in Sarasota (John’s from Baltimore). I look forward to watching him have great success in this cool new endeavor.

In case you wondered — Adam Beam (another of The State’s most aggressive users of social media) is moving from City Hall to cover John’s State House beat. And veteran Clif LeBlanc is taking Adam’s place covering the city.

Recalling the national overreaction to that Edwards column

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A few days ago, Mike Fitts posted this on Facebook:

This seems like a good day to re-post my former boss’ column, written not all that long ago in the summer of 2007, about his gut feeling that John Edwards was “a big phony.” Got Brad Warthen national attention then, but all too obvious now.

Which I thought was nice of him to remember. I suppose it was because a certain person was back in the news…

Mike linked to the version at thestate.com, which is appropriate because that’s the one that got all the page views — 190,000 the first day, as I recall. Totally screwed up the stats for the paper’s website for the next year. Whenever the online folks presented stats at senior staff meetings, they had to explain, “We’re actually doing well, it’s just that is looks down because we’re up against that Edwards column of Brad’s…”

I was jealous of that traffic; it certainly would have been cool if it had gone to my blog. That would have been a huge hit — like months worth in a day. (Back then, I only got about 20,000 or 30,000 page views a month. You may be surprised to know that today, my traffic is closer to 200,000 a month — sometimes more, sometimes less.) Also, the version I had posted on my blog was better. I had written the column at home on my laptop and didn’t realize how long it was, and had to chop it down much more than I would have liked to get it into the paper. The version on my blog — the “director’s cut” — was shorter than the original, but quite a bit longer than the paper version. My point came across better in the blog version, because the anecdotes weren’t quite as truncated.

But still, the lesser version created a weird sort of splash. Still does. I got a letter just a week or two ago from a reader who says that he was an Edwards supporter and gave me grief in a letter at the time (I don’t recall), and is sorry now. But a lot of smart people didn’t see the problems with this guy at the time. In fact… I’ve told y’all before how I talked myself hoarse in a three-hour meeting to get the board to endorse Lieberman in the 2004 primary, right? What I may not have mentioned was that a couple of my colleagues wanted to back Edwards, and I was determined not to let that happen — so determined that I just won my point by exhausting everyone. I’m very glad not to have an Edwards endorsement on my record. (By the way, when people give me a hard time for how horribly Joe did in that primary, I have a ready answer: “Yeah, the voters went with Edwards. I’m more satisfied than ever that I was right.”)

I was shocked at the reaction the column got. It was just something I had had on a back burner for months. I had said something on my old blog about Edwards being a phony, and readers demanded to know what I meant, and when I realized how many words it would take to explain (being based on several encounters with the guy), I told them I would do a column sometime. I had been on vacation the week before I wrote this, and for one reason or another decided to take one more day — the following Monday — off as well. Feeling guilty, I told my colleagues that to make up for it, I’d whip out a column over the weekend, so nobody else would have to write one for Tuesday. This was an easy one to do, the “legwork” for it having been done inadvertently years before. So I dropped by the office Sunday just to check my memory on a couple of dates and such, wrote it that night at home, and turned it in on Monday morning — and didn’t think about it any more.

Then, the next morning, two people stopped me on the way into the building to talk about the column, and the reaction that was already manifest. I think Drudge had already picked it up. Later in the day, the column — or rather, the Edwards campaign’s reaction to it — was the LEDE political story on the Fox News site. As the week wore on, I was about worn out with media interview requests. I did as many as I could, including Dennis Miller’s show, which was fun. It was a day or so before I had any actual contact with the Edwards campaign (it led to no more than a lunch with the lovely Teresa Wells, in which she told me how wrong I was and I told her that no, I wasn’t). But I had heard that Mrs. Edwards, among others, had gone somewhat ballistic.

The media reaction surprised me. I hadn’t thought much of the column myself, and it was some time later before I figured out why the reaction was so much bigger than anything I could have imagined: The thing is, I had SO completely dismissed Edwards in my mind by that time. I had decided years earlier that I didn’t take him seriously, in spite of his having won the primary here in 2004. So who cared what I thought of him at that point, right? I mean, the column was still worth doing on a day when I just needed a column because he WAS still in the news. But I was convinced the nominee was going to be Obama or Clinton. And I just wasn’t seeing the enthusiasm for him in SC that had so alarmed me in 2004.

But a lot of folks, including national media, were very much taking him seriously still. Hence the reaction… And when I saw how the news stories about it were written, I realized: Oh. Everybody’s thinking, the editorial page editor of the largest newspaper in a state where Edwards HAS to win has just totally dismissed him. That’s the deal. The situation reminded me of that Mark Twain quote: “I was born modest; not all over, but in spots; and this was one of the spots.” It was one of those rare occasions when other people thought my opinion was a bigger deal than I thought it was. Doesn’t happen much.

I was reminded of this when the Mark Sanford Argentina thing broke. Sure it was a big story here, and pretty big nationally as well. I got that. But there’s a difference between a big story that everybody talks about, and something important enough to be the lede story in The New York Times. I’ve written before how the NYT has a VERY conservative, old school idea about its lede position — which I respect. As a front-page editor back in the 80s, I’m kind of old-school myself. There is a huge difference between the most interesting story of the day and  the most important. Sometimes, the same story is both. This was not one of those times. I expected it to be a big story above the fold in The Times — maybe with a picture. But no, it was a simple, sober, one-column lede story. Which startled me.

Remember, I was helping out The New York Post on that one. (By the way, my first interaction with the Post had been when they asked to reprint the Edwards column. Dig the headline they put on it.) A story under my byline led that paper. But that was to be expected. That was the Post. I thought the NYT would have a greater sense of perspective — yes, interesting scandal, but not that earth-shattering, I thought they’d harrumph.

Here’s why I was wrong: Again, the national media were overestimating a South Carolina political figure. Since I knew Mark Sanford well, I didn’t take any of that “presidential contender” garbage seriously. The NYT did. Hence this wasn’t just a juicy scandal to them. It was a contender’s White House chances being dashed.

It’s interesting when you suddenly see things from another editor’s perspective…

Doug Nye, and the things we remember…

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A few days ago, I saw on Facebook where a mutual friend had visited Doug Nye, and he wasn’t doing well. And I thought, “I need to check on him,” and now he’s gone. My mom called me last night to say it was announced at the USC baseball game…

It’s funny the things you remember about people. Doug was a great guy to talk to about all sorts of things, and not just westerns. To many people he will be remembered as the Father of the Chicken Curse, in terms of having popularized the concept. There are complex permutations on the Curse beyond what Bill Starr wrote about this morning that I could get into, but that’s not what I remember best about Doug.

Here’s what I remember best, and most fondly: Doug and I had a number of conversations sharing our childhood memories of watching “Spaceship C-8,” a kiddie show on WBTW out of Florence, hosted by the late “Captain Ashby” Ward, who was also the news anchor. I really didn’t have all that many specific memories about the show (Doug, being older, remembered more), despite having spent many an hour watching it during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Bennettsville. (Doug watched it from another end of the coverage area — I want to say Sumter.) But I enjoyed talking about it with Doug on multiple occasions.

It was about way more than one kid’s show; it was about remembering an era, a time before media saturation. A time when WBTW was the only station you could reliably get clearly in B’ville with a home antenna (WIS also came in, depending on the weather). Then, in the late 60s, along came cable to small town America, LONG before it came to cities. That way, you could get all three networks, plus some duplicates from different cities. There was less demand in cities, because they could already get three or four channels.

Consequently, we spent an awful lot of time doing stuff other than watching TV, or engaging any other mass medium. A time that in many ways was about as close as Huck Finn’s fictional existence as it was to what kids experience today.

Odd, I suppose, that the thing I would remember best from knowing the longtime TV writer was talking about days that were practically pre-TV. But that’s what I remember. It won’t really mean anything to you, I suppose, but I’m confident it would make Doug smile.

I remember that, and the fact that, as I said, Doug was a great guy to talk to about anything. Always a ready grin (that’s why I know he’d smile at my trivial remembrance), the kind of naturally affable guy who you took a moment to chat with rather than just rushing past in the course of getting through a day’s deadlines. He stood out among newspapermen that way. Not that newspapermen were so awful; I just mean Doug stood out. Which is why so many will remember him fondly.

Scooped by The State on my own danged story

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Our late, lamented AC units, right after the deed was done.

Some of y’all were disparaging The State on a previous post. Well, I’ll say this for them: They just scooped me on my own blasted story.

Of course, I let them. Remember that list of posts I’ve been MEANING to get to, which I wrote about back here? Well, one of them was about copper theft:

Metal fabricator Stanley Bradham delivered two 300-pound concrete slabs to a Pickens Street business Tuesday, then lowered a couple of 2- to 3-ton heating and air-conditioning units on top.

But it is what Bradham did next that theft-weary business and church leaders are hoping will finally slow the alarming rate of vandalism aimed at removing copper wiring – a trend that not only inconveniences victims, but also drives up their insurance rates.

Bradham bolted a lockable, customized, 350-gauge unibody steel cage over each of the units and welded the cages to the cement pads, which are secured by 12-inch anchors in the ground.

“It stops your access to the top of the unit, so you can’t get in,” said Bradham, of the newly formed Carolina Copper Protection company in Hopkins. “For the cost factor, it’s a very visual deterrence.”

That Pickens Street business was ADCO.

This is a story that goes under the heading of the Jerry Ratts dictum, “News is whatever happens to, or interests, an editor.” Or former editor, in this case. Jerry was a bit of a cynic, but he had a point. I mean, you know, this copper theft was a serious problem and all, but it only became dire quite recently, and suddenly…

Several weeks back, copper thieves destroyed both of our AC units to get a few coils of copper. We’re talking $8,000-$10,000 worth of damage for maybe, maybe $400 worth of metal.

Actually, that’s the high estimate. Back right after this happened, when I was in full fury over it, I interviewed Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott about it, and he said it was probably more like between $30 and $100. Which is… mind-boggling to me. I mean, it seems way easier to actually to out and work for that amount of money. I mean, mow a lawn or something — way less risk.

But apparently, it’s not as much trouble as I thought to tear up an AC unit that way. Chief Scott says they’re in and out in 3-5 minutes. Otherwise, he’d catch more of them.

It started with empty or abandoned commercial buildings. Now, he says, they’re hitting everything — churches, law offices, even private homes. Having your unit on a roof is no defense. Thieves destroyed 17 units from the top of the Dream Center at Bible Way Church on Atlas Road. Then, after the units were replaced, they hit again.

In fact, as Roddie Burriss reports:

In 2009, Southern Mutual wrote checks for $365,000 worth of losses due to copper thefts, according to Robert Bates, executive vice president.

In 2010, the company paid $1.2 million in copper theft losses to 174 member churches. Because most of the churches it covers are located in the Palmetto State, 109 of the 174 copper theft claims were in South Carolina, accounting for losses totaling $839,000, Bates said.

Through March 2011, Bates said the company already had paid churches $552,000 in copper loss claims, putting it well on the way to a $2 million payout for the year in these thefts…

I ran into Roddie and photographer Tim Dominick in the alley outside our building yesterday — and realizing they were doing MY story, I lapsed back into editor mode. Let the reporters and photographers do the work, then comment it. It feels natural.

So here’s the commentary part… Obviously, Something Must Be Done about this problem. Back when we were without AC, I had a suggestion, which I posted on Twitter. It was on a particularly warm day last month (I told you I’d been sitting on this for awhile):

Can’t breathe. No air-conditioning all week. Thieves stole copper. We need to bring back flogging. Or keelhauling. Something painful…

Sonny Corleone would say it’s just business, but I was taking it very, very personally. Chief Scott has a more constructive, and constitutional idea than my sweaty rantings: Make it harder to fence the stuff.

He’s backing, and testified in favor of, legislation sponsored by Rep. Todd Rutherford that would stiffen penalties (although, I’m sorry to say, no flogging), and make the businesses that buy scrap metal get legitimate ID from the people who sell them copper. Which would seem sort of like a no-brainer. As the chief said, “When you ride up on a bicycle, and you have two air-conditioning coils, you’re probably not a legitimate air-conditioning repair man.”

Chief Scott, and other law enforcement professionals, have enough problems, what with people coming at them with AK-47s. And yet they are spending more and more of their time fighting this rising tide of copper theft, and it’s pretty overwhelming — and not only to the angry, sweaty victims.

During our interview (which, like so many of my interviews, took place at the Capital City Club), the Chief looked out over the city and said, wondering, “Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners…”

Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott: "Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners..."

It’s a pretty big alumni club

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Behind and to the right of Lindsey Graham -- Jim Hammond, Page Ivey, Jeff Wilkinson.

At the energy conference the other day at USC with the UK Minister of Energy and Climate Change and Lindsey Graham and Steve Benjamin and a bunch of other folks (that thing I haven’t written about yet, except in passing), I found myself standing with some other scribes, and one of them — Page Ivey of the AP, I think — noted that all of us were formerly of The State. That is, except for Jeff Wilkinson, who actually still has a job there. Which makes him the rarity. (That Wilkinson’s a survivor. He used to work at The Nashville Banner, which doesn’t even exist anymore.)

But this sort of thing happens a lot, you know. It’s a big alumni club. Hey, at least Page and Jim Hammond of SCBiz still have actual paying news media jobs. Unlike some people I could name.

See? I can find time for this kind of nonsense, but not for an actual, serious post on the thing we were covering. Hey, I’ll get to it, OK…?

Well, we did it — we have the nation’s lowest taxes. Can we stop now?

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Cindi Scoppe continues in her lonely quest to inject some reason, and actual facts, into state tax policy. Today, she cites the Tax Foundation, the group that dreamed up the silly “Tax Freedom Day,” in reporting that what our lawmakers have so long sought is now fact — we have the lowest taxes in the nation:

THE TAX Foundation’s latest rankings of state taxes are out, and we’re No. 50. As in, no state collects less in taxes per resident than South Carolina does.

If that surprises you, then you’ve come to the right place. Much of what we think we know about taxes in our state is simply wrong. And while people are entitled to whatever opinion they want about whether taxes are too high or too low or just right, those opinions ought to be based on facts.

Of course, No. 50 isn’t the whole story. Anyone who tries to tell you that a single number sums up tax rankings is misleading you. This particular ranking, for instance, doesn’t include taxes collected by local government, which makes it not quite but nearly meaningless, since the division between state and local duties varies so much from state to state.

In the more useful ranking, which counts both state and local taxes, we’re No. 49.

And both of those rankings just compare total taxes collected to the state’s population. That means they are telling us as much about how poor we are as about how low our taxes are.

Our tax rate — which is the percentage of our total income that we pay in taxes — ranks 43rd. That means seven states have a lower tax rate than we do. (Our income, by the way, is $33,954 per capita, which ranks 46th nationally. Not something to celebrate no matter what you think about taxes.)…

So, all that constant ratcheting-down of taxes over the past couple of decades “worked” — if having the lowest taxes was the goal.

Now, could we stop, please? And stop also having the most poorly funded essential services in the nation? And stop lagging behind the nation in pretty much every measure of economic health you can name? Please?

As we say in the Grownup Party — enough, already.

Do you see yourself as a CONSUMER, or a CITIZEN? That makes all the difference

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Back on a previous post, we got off on a tangent about vouchers (and, by implication, tax credits and other devices for draining funding from public education). Bud said,

I’ve always thought it ironic that opponents of public education complain of “throwing money” at a problem, then turn around and advocate sending the money to private entities that will be completely unaccountable for it. Now THAT’s “throwing money” — up into the air, at random.
-Brad

I’m generally in support of Brad on this issue and usually don’t write about education issues. But this statement is pretty easy to refute. The accountability aspect of the vouchers is left to the parents who will pull their kids out if the schools don’t perform…

This prompted me to say, rather vehemently,

No, no, NO! Public education is not a consumer transaction between individual parents and the schools. Public education exists for the WHOLE community, and must be accountable to it. And that includes any money that is pulled out of the system and spent on something else.

I need to dig around and see if I can find the column I did several years ago explaining the difference between approaching public affairs as a consumer, and approaching the same from the perspective of a citizen…

Well, I’ve now laid hands on that column (which originally ran on Friday, March 4, 2005), and here’s the relevant part of it. Enjoy:

But the main way in which a tuition tax credit is worse than a voucher is that it promotes the insidiously false notion that taxes paid for public schools are some sort of user fee.

Whether you agree with me here depends upon your concept of your place in society: Do you see yourself as a consumer, or as a citizen?

If you look upon public schools narrowly as a consumer, and you send your kids to private schools or home-school them, then you might think, “Hey, why should I be paying money to this provider, when I’m buying the service from someone else?” If that’s your view, a tuition tax credit makes perfect sense to you. Why shouldn’t you get a refund?

But if you look at it as a citizen, it makes no sense at all. Public schools have never been about selling a commodity; they have always been about the greatest benefits and highest demands of citizenship.

A citizen understands that parents and their children are not the only “consumers” of public school services — not by a long shot. That individual children and families benefit from education is only one important part of the whole picture of what public schools do for society. The rest of us voters and taxpayers have a huge stake, too.

Public schools exist for the entire community — for people with kids in public schools and private schools, people whose kids are grown, people who’ve never had kids and those who never will. (Note that, by the logic of the tax credit advocates, those last three groups should get tax breaks, too. In fact, if only the one-third or so of households who have children in public schools at a given time paid taxes to support them, we wouldn’t be able to keep the schools open.)

Public schools exist to provide businesses with trained workers, and to attract industries that just won’t locate in a place without good public schools. They exist to give our property value. If you doubt the correlation between good public schools and property values, just ask a Realtor.

They exist to create an informed electorate — a critical ingredient to a successful representative democracy. (In fact, if I were inclined to argue that public schools have failed, I would point out just how many people we have walking around without a clear understanding of their responsibilities as citizens. But I don’t expect public education critics to use that one.)

Public schools exist to make sure we live in a decent society full of people able to live productive lives, instead of roaming the streets with no legitimate means of support. In terms of cost-effectiveness on this score, spending roughly $4,400 per pupil for public schools (the state’s actual share, not the inflated figure the bill’s advocates use, which includes local and federal funds) is quite a bargain set against the $13,000 it costs to keep one young person in prison. And South Carolina has the cheapest prisons in the nation.

Consider the taxes we pay to provide fire protection. It doesn’t matter if we never call the fire department personally. We still benefit (say, by having lower insurance rates) because the fire department exists. More importantly, our neighbors who do have an immediate need for the fire department — as many do each day — depend upon its being there, and being fully funded.

All of us have the obligation to pay the taxes that support public schools, just as we do for roads and law enforcement and the other more essential services that government provides. And remember, those of you who think of “government” as some wicked entity that has nothing to do with you: Government provides only those things that we, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should provide. You might disagree with some of those decisions, but you know, you’re not always going to be in the majority in a democracy.

If, as a consumer, you wish to pay for an alternative form of education for your child, you are free to do that. But that decision does not relieve you of the responsibility as a citizen to support the basic infrastructure of the society in which you live.

Radical libertarians — people who see themselves primarily as consumers, who want to know exactly what they are personally, directly receiving for each dollar that leaves their hands — don’t understand the role of government in society because they simply don’t understand how human beings are interconnected. I’m not just saying that we should be interconnected; I’m saying that we are, whether we like it or not. And if we want society to work so that we have a decent place in which to dwell, we have to adopt policies that recognize that stark fact.

That’s why we have public schools. And that’s why we all are obliged to support them.

NYT Mag: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

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Of course, we knew that — I’ve noted it before (most recently with regard to the Darla Moore affair). But it’s interesting that any national media have noticed it, given the hagiographic coverage she usually receives outside the state.

The State took note of the New York Times Magazine article several weeks back. They saw the “Comet” headline, and noted her wildly hubristic statement that “I don’t lose.”

But they apparently missed the subhead — probably because whoever was doing The Buzz for that edition looked at the piece online, rather than in print.

And that was the best part.

Above is a shot from a PDF of the print edition, which an alert reader shared.

By the way, that little pun — Haley the Comet — reminds me of something I saw in Oxford during my recent visit.

It seems that when Edmond Halley, famous for having first charted the path of the comet, was at Oxford (The Queen’s College), he decided to knock a hole in the roof of his top-floor flat so that he could watch the stars from there. The landlord was VERY accommodating — even though he wasn’t yet the famous Halley of the Comet — and a little observatory structure was built onto the roof.

At least, that’s the way our guide on the walking tour told it. The story may be apocryphal (a few minutes on Google just now failed to confirm it).

But if it’s true, it occurs to me that Halley didn’t care what people thought, either. With him, it turned out all right in the end. With our own Haley, the Comet… that definitely remains to be seen.

Below is the picture I took on Jan. 4 of the building where Halley lived:

Interesting letter from Eleanor Kitzman today

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I don’t read the letters to the editor as closely as I used to. OK, to be perfectly honest, I hardly read them at ALL now that I’m not paid to do so, unless someone brings one to my attention.

Today was an exception, though. As my eye ran over the page, something in the last letter jumped out at me. I saw the words, “As a former Democratic candidate for state superintendent of education,” and scanned to the bottom to see the writer’s name was “Carlos W. Gibbons.” Hmmm. I do not know a Carlos W. Gibbons, which made me curious, and I sent out an e-mail to someone who knows stuff I don’t know, and learned that apparently he is a veteran educator who ran for the office in the early 1970s — and the father of Leeza Gibbons of TV fame.

In any case, he was right to advocate that the state superintendent post be appointed by the governor.

But it turns out that, until a few minutes ago, I had missed today’s really interesting letter — the one at the top of the stack. Alert reader “Tim” brought it to my attention moments ago. I’m just going to go ahead and put the whole thing here, and hope I don’t run afoul of Fair Use. Because this was an unusual letter:

Keep ignoring reality, governor

I have known Gov. Haley for many years, and she is one of my five bosses on the Budget and Control Board. If the governor is ignoring reality as Roger Hawkins contends (“Haley can’t continue to ignore realities,” March 3), my advice to her is to keep it up; it has served her well.

Moreover, I’d suggest that others follow her excellent example. Rather than ignoring reality, however, I believe Gov. Haley has wisely rejected the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority.

There’s never any shortage of people telling you that you can’t do something.

Perhaps more insidious are those who maintain that we need their “help” to overcome adversity because not everyone has the governor’s abilities to plow through the impediments of life or navigate around diversity issues. I couldn’t disagree more and would ask why not.

We may not all become governors, but we can achieve our goals if we stop seeing ourselves as victims.

We must be fearless and willing to work hard, make good choices and, most importantly, never give up in pursuit of a dream. (Don’t even get me started on yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works to an ethnic woman.)

Eleanor Kitzman

Columbia

Now, the thing that was unusual about this may not be immediately apparent to you. But if you had known any of Ms. Kitzman’s predecessors as chief of the Budget and Control Board, you’d know. It’s sort of hard to imagine — actually, impossible to imagine — Frank Fusco, or Fred Carter, writing (or even thinking) words that would be anything like those that Ms. Kitzman put in that letter. Whether you think of them as faceless bureaucrats, or as the very models of professional discretion that they were, it’s difficult to imagine them expressing their views in such a manner.

If you don’t know those guys, and don’t have that background, my reaction to Ms. Kitzman’s letter probably won’t make much sense to you.

Under those guys, the B&C Board (which should not exist at all, but you know that once I get started on that subject I can be all day) was a lot of things, but one thing it was not was a forum for expressing personal sentiments about particular politicians — the governor, or anyone else. There was a reason for that — the director worked for five bosses with five different egos and agendas. What was the point of being too closely identified with any of them?

I mean, forgive me for sounding like “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works,” but gee whiz, folks… (I thought, as exclamations do, that “gee whiz” sounded appropriately whitebread and old fashioned, didn’t you? I’m trying to play my assigned part as well as I can, and these small touches mean so much.)

The letter was so… emotional. So indignant. So partisan, in the sense of taking one person’s side against another. There are other terms I could use, but you know what? I just keep coming back to emotional — which I suppose will just expose me to, um, passionate condemnation for gender stereotyping, but hey, leave gender out of it (isn’t that what the brutes always say — “leave gender out of it?” the cads…). Think that I’m saying it the way Lee Marvin said it to Robert Ryan, “I owe you an apology, Colonel. I always thought that you were a cold, unimaginative, tight lipped officer. But you’re really … quite emotional. Aren’t you?” (The way I look at it, you can’t get any further away from gender politics than by quoting “The Dirty Dozen.” Am I right or am I right?)

I read something like that, and I think, what possessed her to write that? Yes, she owes her $174,000-a-year position to the governor as a matter of political fact, but why call attention to that in such a dramatic way? Did the governor know she was writing that letter? Does the governor approve of her having written that letter? She certainly didn’t need such a defense; she would have been fine without it.

For my part, I hadn’t even read the piece she was referring to (remember, I’m no longer paid to), but I can bet you I went and read it after seeing that letter. It was… unremarkable, really. Kind of unfocused. Seemed like the writer was trying to make some strong points, but trying to be kind and gentle with it, and swinging back and forth between commending the governor for being a determined “don’t let anything stand in your way” type and admonishing her for engaging in “magical thinking.”

Was the op-ed from this Hawkins fella somehow an example of White Male Oppressor insensitivity? Did he show a lack of appreciation for the governor’s inspiring story of ethnic pluck that we’ve heard so… much… about…? Was he trying to brutally impose on her “the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority?” Hardly. He had, on his own initiative, shown due deference to the obligatory talking points in that regard. In fact, he went on about it as much as Ms. Kitzman did:

Haley’s success to this point in her life has been built around navigating diversity, not letting it get in her way or positioning herself as just a diversity hire. She was born into Sikhism, an Indian religion that adopts elements from both Hinduism and Islam, and later converted to the Methodist faith.

Haley earned a degree in accounting — a profession dominated by men — and began her career at a waste-management and recycling company. Throughout her formative years, she never interacted with large numbers of people who looked like her. Her political career is also based on being an outsider. She recently told an audience that Sanford told her the state wasn’t ready for a female governor.

OK, wait a minute; here’s the trouble. Seems Mr. Hawkins was, rather than being too indifferent, a bit too CONCERNED about matters of Identity Politics, for he had just said:

What Haley has done that is troubling is appoint nine white men, three white women and one African-American woman to her Cabinet. None of her 16 executive staff members is African-American.

Hey, you know what I think about all that I.D. stuff — if you wanted a “diverse” Cabinet and staff in the superficial demographic sense, you should have elected the White Guy. (And if you ARE someone who cares deeply about such things, you probably DID vote for the White Guy, and Nikki Haley knows that, so quit your bellyaching. Whoops, I’m being insensitive again…) But this guy apparently DID care about it, and said so. And for this, he’s condemned as… what was it again… “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works….” Yeah, that was it — no wait, I forgot the part about “to an ethnic woman.” Mustn’t leave that off.

Anyway, it just wasn’t the kind of letter I’m used to reading from B&C Board chiefs. This is going to be interesting going forward, folks.

Just to say something you don’t hear all that often

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The quixotic demonstration at the State House yesterday by citizens sick of seeing our state’s infrastructure rapidly eroding under the stewardship of shortsighted politicians was of course an exercise in futility.

But I’m no stranger to that. A few minutes ago, looking for a link for a previous post that needed one, I went back to the last week of posts on my old blog I had at the paper, and ran across this forgotten item — which, as it happens, was day after the post in which I announced that I had been laid off:

Good job rejecting the tuition caps

This might sound strange coming from a guy who was already counting pennies (or quarters, anyway — I miscounted how many I had this morning in my truck, and ended up with a parking ticket because I didn’t have enough for the meter), with my two youngest daughters still in college. And now I’m about to be unemployed.

But I’m glad the House rejected tuition caps at S.C. colleges and universities. I have an anecdote to share about that.

Remember the recent day when college students wandered the State House lobbying lawmakers on behalf of their institutions. They wanted the state to invest in higher education the way North Carolina and Georgia have. Either that day, or the day after, I had lunch with Clemson President James Barker, and he told me an anecdote he had witnessed: He said the students were pressing a lawmaker NOT to support the tuition caps, because they were worried about their institutions being even more underfunded — they hardly get anything from the state — some are down below 20 percent funding by the state, and the rest has to come from such sources as tuition, federal research grants and private gifts. Eliminate the ability to raise tuition, and the institution’s ability to provide an excellent education is significantly curtailed. If we want lower tuitions, the state should go back to funding higher percentages of the schools’ budgets, the way our neighboring states with better higher ed systems do.

The lawmaker listened to the kids, and then said with great condescension, maybe you kids don’t care if tuition goes up, but I’ll bet your parents would like a cap. He thought he had them there, but the kids set him straight: None of their parents were paying the bills. These kids were working their way through schools and paying for it all themselves. And they didn’t want to see the quality of what they were working so hard to pay for be degraded by an artificial cap on tuition. The lawmaker had not counted on getting that answer.

I wish I had been there to see it, because I’ve been in a similar place before. Back in 95 or 96, Speaker Wilkins had brought his committee chairs to see us, and I started challenging the wisdom of their massive rollback of property taxes paid for school.One of them allowed as how he bet I was glad to get that couple of hundred dollars I didn’t have to pay. And I answered him that I was ashamed that I was paying so little through my property tax to support schools that I knew needed more resources. He said smugly that he was sure I wouldn’t want to give it back. I told him I didn’t see as how there was any channel for doing that, but if he could point me to the right person who would take my money and see it gets to the right place, I would pay the difference. He didn’t have a good answer for that.

It would be great if our lawmakers would stop assuming that all of us in South Carolina are so greedily shortsighted that we can’t see past our personal desire to pay less money, and that we are corruptible by a scheme to starve colleges of reasonable support.

Reading that now, with all that’s happened since — the rise of the Tea Party, the eagerness of Republicans, demoralized after their 2008 defeat, to embrace destructive extremism (and of course, what happens to the Republican Party as happens to South Carolina, which it dominates), the election of Nikki Haley over more experienced, less extreme candidates of both parties — it reads like thoughts from another century. And, of course, another place.

Imagine, even dreaming of our state caring enough about education to invest in it the way our neighboring states have, much less suggesting that we do so. How anachronistic can one get? All that’s happened since then is that South Carolina has run, faster every day, in the opposite direction — with out elected leaders firmly convinced that that is not only the right direction in which to run, but the only one.

Sheheen (and Knotts — yeah, Jake) going after “leadership PACs”)

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Got this yesterday, thought I’d pass it on:

Dear Brad —

People say that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

It seems that no matter how many rules we put into place to regulate the flood of money and influence in our elections, politicians too often find ways around these rules.  Here in South Carolina, one vehicle for getting around campaign contribution limits imposed by law is through entities called leadership political action committees or “leadership PACs.”  Some politicians operate “leadership PACs,” which enable them to accept larger contributions from their cronies and then, in turn, dole out money to other candidates.  This creates a culture of politicians whose coffers are flush with money being able to exert influence over others through their “leadership PACs.”

The end result?  Corruption and unfair influence.  I’m writing today to for your help in putting a stop to this practice.

It has not been the custom in the South Carolina Senate for members to operate “leadership PACs,” but recently Sen. Jake Knotts and I proposed and passed a new rule explicitly banning the practice among senators.  We are hoping that this will put pressure on our colleagues in the South Carolina House of Representatives to follow suit.

I’ve sponsored a bill this session that, if passed, would ban PACs organized by or on behalf of any statewide officeholder or member of the General Assembly.

Will you call or email your legislators today and urge them to support S. 633? You can look up your members of the South Carolina House and Senate by clicking here.

The editorial board of The State newspaper published an editorial this week urging members of the legislature to pass this bill.  I’ve included this editorial below.

Not sure how the Sheheen/Knotts team-up happened. I guess it’s just a coalition of the willing. In any case, 38 other senators have signed on. Of course, as Cindi noted in the edit, that’s probably because “leadership PACs” are a House, not a Senate, phenomenon. You probably know that historically, the divide between House and Senate has been much sharper than that between Democrat and Republican. As the edit noted:

For the record, the only ones we’re aware of are controlled by House Speaker Bobby Harrell, House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper, House Labor, Commerce and Industry Chairman Bill Sandifer, House Democratic Leader Harry Ott and Reps. Jim Merrill, Alan Clemmons and Gilda Cobb-Hunter.

Our young governor’s presumption apparently knows no bounds (and it’s kinda freaking me out)

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Been feeling the need to write this ever since I read the paper early this morning. I haven’t had time before now…

Nikki Haley kind of blew my mind on three fronts this morning, which caused me to go on a bit of a rant at breakfast (Wesley isn’t the only ranter in Columbia), along these lines:

  1. “Haley to grade legislators.” Did you see that headline this morning? I normally eschew text-speak, but WTF? None of the lawmakers quite came out and said this, but I’ll tell you what they were thinking: “This little girl couldn’t even get called on when she raised her hand at the back of the class a year ago, and now she’s going to grade US?” This would be followed by the aforementioned “WTF?” Yep, lawmakers really think like that, the insensitive brutes. Now, before you think this is just a question of whom you like — with reactions divided between Haley fans who cheer, “Go get ’em, Nikki!” and the harrumphers who do not and never will be Haley fans — allow me to point something out to you. It would be presumptuous for anyone to do this. Back when I worked in Tennessee, some writers at one of the Nashville papers would grade all the legislators at the end of the session each year. I thought it presumptuous as all get-out, but… it was still within the bounds of acceptable commentary. And it would certainly be permissible for me to do something like that on my blog, although you would be equally free to tell me to what extent I was full of it. Just an exchange of views among citizens. But here’s the problem with Nikki doing it, in case you didn’t make it through Civics 101: She’s the governor, which means she’s the closest thing to a head of the executive branch that we’ve got (in another state, she’d be the head of the executive branch, but this is South Carolina). For the chief executive to use whatever political influence she has to harass and bully and threaten lawmakers, even in as silly a manner as this (do my will, or I’ll give you a bad grade!), smacks of bossism. Ben Tillman would have loved a device like that for keeping lawmakers in line, and Boss Crump as well. Folks, the best virtue Nikki Haley has going for her is that she advocates restructuring that would make the executive branch more accountable to the governor (and in fact, it’s their positions on reforms like that that she plans to “grade” lawmakers on). But this kind of behavior gives executive power a bad name, and gives lawmakers — who don’t want to give the governor power anyway — an excuse to blow her off, just as Mark Sanford did with his defecating piglets. And that’s what takes this beyond silly, practically to the realm of outrage. The very modest restructuring legislation that just passed the House will have tough-enough sledding in the Senate (where all such reforms go to die) without this nonsense.
  2. “Governor takes aim at state employee benefits.” Wow. Poor Nikki. Last year, she was the darling of the national media (which is how she won the election), making the cover of Newsweek twice. Now, she feels forgotten. Through the lens of this story, you can see the little wheels turning in her head: Look at all the attention that governor in Wisconsin is getting! That’s so unfair? What’s he doing? Oh, he’s trying to take away state employees collective bargaining power. What an awesome idea! I’ll do that too, and then I can get some attention? What? Oh, drat! We don’t HAVE public employee unions in South Carolina, so I can’t strike dramatic poses fighting against them! That’s really, REALLY unfair! What, oh what am I going to do? There must be SOMETHING I can do to state employees here that will draw attention… but what? I know! I’ll go after their BENEFITS…
  3. “The mystery man on Haley’s staff.” THIS one is so weird, that I suspect there’s a typo in it somewhere. So… Nikki has a guy on her staff who supposedly is only being paid $1 a year. He’s supposedly a government-efficiency expert who’s gonna help the gov straighten out waste and inefficiency in our gummint. He uprooted his family and moved here from Pennsylvania for the job — for the $1-a-year job. OK, this causes a lot of people to suspect there’s something else going on, and speculate that he’s waiting around for a real job that could come open soon. This he denies, or at least says he hasn’t been promised anything. But that wouldn’t be my theory anyway, given those facts. MY theory is that he’s being paid by one of those national ideological groups that flock around the Mark Sanfords of the world. Howie Rich, or Grover Norquist or some such. But he says no, that he’s living off his state employee pension from Pennsylvania. Got that? OK… The story also says he’s 32 years old. Twice. In the main body of the story, and in a graphic. After someone suggested it was a double-typo, I Tweeted John O’Connor to ask him. He Tweeted back that “No, that’s his age according to the governor’s office.” So maybe the governor’s office is wrong about his age. But if not — this guy’s able to live on a state pension (and I went back to look again, and yes, the only jobs listed in the published summary of his resume sound like state jobs) at the age of 32 — and he’s here as an expert on government efficiency? That ought to make state employees breath a sigh of relief. No way he’ll have the nerve to urge the governor to reduce their pensions, huh? Unless he’s the nerviest guy in two states. Somewhere, there’s gotta be something inaccurate in this picture, because the “facts” we have definitely don’t add up.

OK, I got all that off my chest. Now, to shift gears on you, and praise our governor for her pushiness — in that same story about state employee benefits, she promised to present lawmakers with a comprehensive tax reform plan. THAT’S the kind of presumption I can cheer for. But I’m going to hold my applause until I see whether it’s comprehensive, and whether it’s reform. The first sign will be whether she steps up and proposes to undo the execrable Act 388.

And… now that I’m cooled down a bit… I’ll go further in that backtracking direction: I still haven’t made up my mind about what I think of the bill I wrote about earlier that would do essentially what Nikki’s saying with state pensions. (Mainly because I haven’t yet seen enough about it — on something that complex and that financial, I sort of need some broad input to make up my mind.) But the truth is, I read items 2 and 3 right after reading item 1 this morning, so it all looked bad while I was in that mood.

And now that I’m looking at them again before hitting “Publish,” I’m still kinda freaked out…