Category Archives: Democrats

Liberals like to laugh; conservatives dig cars (but here’s the kicker: both are big fans of PBS)

That, at least, is one conclusion to be drawn from research that supposedly delineates the TV preferences of “liberal Democrats” and “conservative Republicans.” You can see the top 25 of each here, but I’m more of a Top Five guy. Here are the Top Five for Democrats:

1. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central)

2. The Colbert Report (Comedy Central)

3. Masterpiece (PBS)

4. 30 Rock (NBC)

5. Parks and Recreation (NBC)

And here are the Top Five for Republicans:

1. Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction(Speed)
2. This Old House (PBS)
3. The 700 Club (syndicated)
4. Swamp Loggers (Discovery)
5. Top Shot (History)

“Swamp Loggers?” So now we see who is watching all that “Redneck TV,” huh? And on the other side, I know whom to blame for the fact that it’s increasingly hard to tell news from satire.

But if there is anything of significance here, anything with policy implications, it’s that both left and right depend on PBS for some of their favorites shows. (Meanwhile, the liberals are so busy pursuing laughs that they have time for only two PBS faves, “Masterpiece” and “American Masters.” Apparently, as long as it’s got “Master” in it, they like it.)

How about that?

Maybe next time Republican lawmakers go to reflexively deep-six public broadcasting, they’ll stop and think how they’re go to explain to their base what they’re doing to “This Old House,” “New Yankee Workshop,” and “Antiques Roadshow.”

Speaking of Harpootlian, now I’m REALLY confused

1 Reply

Right after I got the weird Colbert thing that purportedly involves Dick Harpootlian, I got this other release that I think refers to an actual, serious case pertaining to the SC Republican Presidential Primary:

South Carolina Democratic Party Petitions State Supreme Court for Re-hearing

Columbia, SC – Today, Dick Harpootlian, Chair of the S.C. Democratic Party, petitioned the South Carolina Supreme Court for a re-hearing of their ruling in Buford County v. S.C. Election Commission. See petition here.

The issue is the court’s decision to remove advisory questions from the upcoming Presidential Preference Primary Ballots.

As advisory questions were not included on the statement of issues, they were never properly submitted to the court. Therefore, we believe the court lacked jurisdiction to rule on them, said Harpootlian.

The people of South Carolina deserve to have their voices heard on these issues. The Democratic Party is particularly interested in Ballot Question 4, which addresses the issue of corporate personhood.

The question, which has already been printed and included on sample ballots and some military absentee ballots, asks the people of South Carolina to choose between two options: “Corporations are people” and “Only people are people.” You can view the sample ballot here.

“It is important that we all know how the Palmetto State feels about this defining issue,” said Harpootlian.

The South Carolina Presidential Preference Primary will be held on January 21, 2012.

###

Trouble is, I’ve never heard of a “Buford County” in South Carolina. You?

Oh, wait — this IS the same thing as what Colbert is on about. At least the “corporate personhood” part.

I’m so confused…

Obama to Pakistan: I’ve got your ‘sorry’ right here

25 Replies

OK, so it wasn’t that dismissive.

Still, it’s interesting that the administration — which apologized for killing that other American (Samir Khan, from North Carolina) who was with Anwar al-Awlaki — doesn’t want to say “sorry” on this one:

WASHINGTON — The White House has decided that President Obama will not offer formal condolences — at least for now — toPakistan for the deaths of two dozen soldiers in NATO airstrikes last week, overruling State Department officials who argued for such a show of remorse to help salvage America’s relationship with Pakistan, administration officials said.

On Monday, Cameron Munter, the United States ambassador to Pakistan, told a group of White House officials that a formal video statement from Mr. Obama was needed to help prevent the rapidly deteriorating relations between Islamabad and Washington from cratering, administration officials said. The ambassador, speaking by videoconference from Islamabad, said that anger in Pakistan had reached a fever pitch, and that the United States needed to move to defuse it as quickly as possible, the officials recounted.

Defense Department officials balked. While they did not deny some American culpability in the episode, they said expressions of remorse offered by senior department officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were enough, at least until the completion of a United States military investigation establishing what went wrong…

Increasingly, we see signs of the U.S. just writing off Pakistan. This appears to be another such sign.

Or, you could go with this explanation, I suppose:

Some administration aides also worried that if Mr. Obama were to overrule the military and apologize to Pakistan, such a step could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign, according to several officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly…

Clyburn might excuse signing pledges, but I don’t

15 Replies

Over the weekend — before the wretched, useless “supercommittee” had failed completely to do its job — Jim Clyburn had a piece in The Washington Post setting out his views as a member of that panel. This bit jumped out at me:

I understand signing pledges and suspect that all of us have agreed to them at one time or another. But it is beyond me how one defines eliminating a preference or closing a tax-code loophole as a tax increase. Loopholes that allow extremely wealthy and sophisticated Americans to avoid paying any, or an appropriate amount of, taxes while the middle class gets squeezed and working people struggle to pay their bills are fundamentally unfair. That is the big issue and the main obstacles to accomplishing something of which we can be proud and by which our nation will be strengthened.

What Clyburn seems to be saying there is, I understand the games we all play as partisans, the ways we trade away our freedom to be intellectually honest, good-faith participants in the deliberative process, but I think I see the way around it for y’all…

Well, Clyburn might understand it, and even excuse it, but I don’t. Signing pledges preventing yourself from being open-minded and able to make decisions as an elected representatives in the future is completely inexcusable.

And so is this committee’s failure.

On the one hand, I feel a tad guilty getting on Clyburn for trying to see the other fella’s point of view, instead of just bashing Republicans as usual. But he’s seeing their point of view on partisanship itself. And for me, THAT is the “other side,” the enemy, the force to be opposed.

It’s touching that Clyburn also says in the piece, “My reply remains the motto of the great state of South Carolina: ‘Dum Spiro Spero.’ ‘While I breathe, I hope.'” I love my state’s motto. But I have practically no hope in that crowd up there.

America is disgusted, and right to be. And in next year’s election, you’ll see candidates of both parties try to run as outsiders, as a solution to the problem. But if electing them means sending more Democrats and more Republicans, how can that be a solution?

There has never been a better moment for the UnParty. Who wants to run?

‘The Hillary Moment?’ Really? Y’all think THAT is a smart move for Democrats at this juncture?

6 Replies

There was a startling op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal today by Pat Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen. I had to look at the bottom to see who Schoen was, but Pat Caddell was Jimmy Carter’s pollster, a member of the team that brought him from obscurity to the White House in 1976. (Schoen was Bill Clinton’s pollster.)

They were urging President Obama to step aside and let Hillary Clinton replace him on the Democratic ticket next year.

It was bizarre. And perhaps no passage in the piece was more bizarre than when they compared the current situation with LBJ’s in 1968, to which I can only say, “Say what?”

I was in the ninth grade at the time, so my political perception was nowhere near what it would be later, but these guys write as though they didn’t live through that time at all.

The convulsions the Democratic Party was going through in ’68, the highs and lows both, were titanic by comparison to what’s happening intraparty now. Everything was bigger. LBJ had had much, much greater success early in his tenure — historic success – but then his re-election ran into the greatest internal conflict that party has suffered in the past century: Vietnam.

Yeah, today Barack Obama presides over an economic situation that is upside-down from the 60s, the worst economy since what FDR faced. But how many Democrats — as opposed to Republicans — actually blame him for that the way the McCarthy faction blamed Lyndon “How Many Kids Did You Kill Today” Johnson? LBJ was blamed specifically for what he had done (escalate the war), not for what he had failed to do (rescue us from the crash that started during the previous administration).

LBJ pulled out after suffering actual primary setbacks (a strong showing by McCarthy in New Hampshire, the decision by Bobby Kennedy to jump in) at the hands of insurgents in his own party. If Obama stepped aside, he’d be doing it because Caddell and Schoen and whoever else they speak for were dissatisfied with him. Which is pretty thin stuff, by comparison.

Finally, let’s look at how that turned out for the Democrats — with the election of Richard “He’s Back!” Nixon.

Caddell should think harder about another example from history: The challenge mounted by Teddy Kennedy to his man Carter in 1980. That insurrection was put down, but it weakened Carter further, and we know how that turned out.

Finally, it gets weirdest of all when the authors twice offer the argument that Barack Obama is… too partisan… and that the cure to that ailment is… and here the mind reels… Hillary Clinton. See this excerpt:

One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be “guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it.” The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline….

What? A year ago was way before Obama turned partisan. Less than a year ago was when he, at least temporarily, gave Republicans what they wanted on continuing tax cuts. I’m really missing something here.

And then there’s this part:

By going down the re-election road and into partisan mode, the president has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength. If he continues on this course it is certain that the 2012 campaign will exacerbate the divisions in our country and weaken our national identity to such a degree that the scorched-earth campaign that President George W. Bush ran in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election will pale in comparison…

Just to review how we got to where we are today… In 2008, Barack Obama was the cure to the hyper, bitter, partisanship of the Clintonistas. The most partisan Democrats didn’t like his conciliatory tone, which is one reason the Clinton campaign was as long-lived as it was: The partisans didn’t want to settle for the nice, reasonable guy.

Those same people have griped about, and undermined, the Obama presidency since Day One. Finally (and I can remember Jimmy Carter doing something similar to please the red-meat crowd in his party), he’s gone on the attack, after extremists in the Republican Party have led us to a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. So the partisans in his own party are cheering, and these guys pick this moment to turn against their president, and moan about him being too partisan?

These guys can fret over their numbers all day, but the one individual who is actually running for president who has the best chance of being elected right now is Barack Obama. As much dissension as there has been among Democrats, it’s nothing compared to the lurching fragmentation going on in the GOP, which looks good in a poll against the president except when you substitute any of the actual people running for a hypothetical Republican.

Does that mean America is itching to jump on his bandwagon? No. America isn’t itching to jump on anybody’s bandwagon these days. America is bummed out. And the answer to that is to substitute him with one of the most polarizing Democrats of the last 20 years? Really?

Yes, she polls well. People approve of the job she’s doing as secretary of state. And they’re right to. I’ll go further: Hillary Clinton, in my opinion, has never deserved either the hatred of the right, nor the adulation of the most partisan elements of the left. I’ve always seen her as more of a pragmatist, someone who will work hard to get the job done. And people like those qualities in her current job, just as her constituents liked them when she was their senator.

But let her run for president, and you’ll give the hapless opposition something to rally against, something that awakens some of their more atavistic passions. Of course, Obama does that, too. But if you made me bet, I’d bet on the incumbent being better able to push past all that. This is the guy who got Osama bin Laden, and in a subtle piece of maneuvering brought down Qaddafi in Libya. Today, as we speak, he is taking the smart road on the failure of the “supercommittee” to do its job, taking the hard line, refusing to allow any backsliding on the sequester process. All things that only the incumbent can point to.

Obama’s failures are not failures of partisanship, but failures arising from passivity — the partisan Democrats are right about that, and so are the Republicans who accuse him of failing to lead. He let the stimulus package happen without doing enough to shape it, and then he did the same with his chance to make history on healthcare. Both of those grand schemes required a guiding intelligence to render them coherent, and he left the job to… Congress, of all unlikely suspects.

But no one running against him can point to any greater achievements (and poor Mitt Romney has to run from his). The GOP is lost and wandering right now; you can feel the lack of energy and enthusiasm about their field. And they have no one that independents like me can get excited about — well, they do, but they refuse to pay attention to him.

The one great advantage that Democrats have is they don’t have to go through this upheaval; they’ve got their candidate. It’s bizarre that veterans such as these would want to throw away that advantage.

Entire DHEC board elected by Haley

19 Replies

OK, here’s a piece of the puzzle that was missing for me when I read Vincent Sheheen’s release demanding that the whole DHEC board resign for having approved a permit for Georgia…

The whole board was appointed by Nikki Haley:

Chairman and Member-at-large — Allen Amsler

1st District — Mark Lutz

2nd District — Robert Kenyon Wells

4th District — L. Clarence Batts, Jr.

5th District — Ann B. Kirol, DDS

6th District — John O. Hutto, Sr., MD

Make of that what you will, but you can begin to see why the senator just might be holding the governor responsible for what he regards as a sellout of South Carolina’s environment and its economy.

They lack lust, they’re so lacklustre…

4 Replies

“… is that all the strength you can muster?”

(Elvis Costello reference.)

Anyway, that was my reaction to this list from the WashPost’s The Fix of 11 best and worst political lines of the year. As zingers or pithy observations go, they leave much to be desired. But I think it’s been that sort of political year so far:

11. “I don’t even know who this woman is.” — Businessman Herman Cain on Sharon Bialek, the woman accusing him of sexual harassment.

10. “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” — Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman via Twitter on the debate over climate change within the GOP presidential primary field.

9. “I am the government.” — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on being the government.

8. “Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.” — Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin responding via Facebook to the attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

7. “When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?” — Herman Cain on foreign policy.

6. “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann…..in New Hampshire.

5. “Corporations are people, my friend.” — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in response to hecklers at the Iowa State Fair.

4. “Get the hell off the beach…you’ve maximized your tan.” — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) warning sunbathers to flee Hurricane Irene.

3. “His remark was not intended to be a factual statement.” — Spokesman for Sen. Jon Kyl(R-Ariz.) regarding the senator’s claim that abortions accounted for more than 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

2. “I can’t say with certitude.” — Then Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) on whether a lewd picture was, in fact, him.

1. “Oops”. — Texas Governor Rick Perry at the end of a 50-plus second (unsuccessful) attempt to remember the third federal agency he would eliminate if elected president.

See what I mean? When “Oops” is No. 1, the quality of political rhetoric, even of gaffes, has gone down…

You want to see something good? Here’s the song my headline came from:

For me, the survey says Obama, then Huntsman

27 Replies

I refuse to attach much importance to this, but it’s an interesting exercise nonetheless.

Project VoteSmart has long been a wonkish thing, an organization that gets answers to issue-related questions from candidates for all sorts of political offices, and posts them for voters to see. Of all my friends and acquaintances who care deeply about politics, my one friend who is really, really into Project VoteSmart is Cindi Scoppe. This proves my point. About the wonkishness.

But now they have a little toy that might bring in a broader group. Just in time, too, because it seems that all the candidates for president are blowing off Project VoteSmart and refusing to answer its questions. Which is a shame, because it actually was a good source, if you’re the issue-oriented type.

I am not, relatively speaking. As I’ve gotten older, character and judgment have come to mean more. You might think that “judgment” is the same as positions on issues, but not really. The “issues” that tend to end up on surveys often have little to do either with what I’m looking for in a candidate, or what that person might actually face in office. And even when it’s an issue I care about, in order to get simple “yes/no” answers (which are rare in real life, in terms of the decisions leaders have to make), the issue is dumbed-down to where a completely honest and accurate answer is impossible.

Take, for instance, one of the questions on VoteSmart’s new “VoteEasy” mechanism: “Do you support restrictions on the purchase and possession of guns?” That’s a tough one for me. Do I advocate further restrictions on the sale of rifles, shotguns and handguns? Not really, but mainly because I see it as a political impossibility. And I believe that even if you restricted the sales, there would still be way too many millions of guns already in circulation to lessen much the ill effects of their presence among us. (Also, I’m more ambivalent about guns than unequivocal gun controllers. I don’t hunt, but I enjoy shooting at targets from time to time.) I believe that any operable gun that exists is quite likely to someday fall into the hands of someone who will not handle it responsibly. That seems almost inevitable to me. And I know we’ll never go out and round them up, however much the more extreme 2nd Amendment defenders may fear that. So I’m not inclined to spend political capital on the issue — there are so many other things to be done in our society. But… I think the question is asking me philosophically, do I believe restricting the sale of guns is a permissible thing to do under our Consitution? And I believe it is; the Framers wouldn’t have put in that language about “militia” otherwise. So, keeping it simple, I said “yes.”

I can quibble that way over every other question on the survey. And many I can answer any way. Say, take “Do you support federal spending as a means of promoting economic growth?” I don’t know. When do you mean? Now, or two years ago? What kind of spending — tax rebates, filling gaps in agency budgets, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, what? But because I assumed it meant “ever, under any circumstances, I said “yes.” But you see how misleading that is, right?

And you can see how my willingness to leave things on the table for consideration would tend to push me toward the pragmatic Barack Obama, seeing as so many of his opponents are of the “never, ever” persuasion (or so they say, now, while not in office).

But it didn’t start out that way, as I took the survey. The first question was about abortion, and that pushed Obama way to the background, while every Republican was with me 100 percent. At one point it appeared that Gingrich was moving to the front of the pack. Obama stayed to the background until about halfway through, after which he pulled steadily to the fore and stayed there. And sometimes for reasons that are counterintuitive to people who follow government and politics only casually. For instance, Obama and I both say a big, emphatic “yes” to “Do you support targeting suspected terrorists outside of official theaters of conflict?” Some still, against all reason, see Obama as a dove. Yet he is far more aggressive in this regard than George W. Bush.

Anyway, here’s how it ended up:

Obama — 69
Huntsman — 58
Bachmann — 47
Perry — 47
Roemer — 47
Romney — 47
Santorum — 47
Gingrich — 42
Cain — 39
Johnson — 33
Paul — 31

Notice how the differences aren’t all that stark. I’m not a 100 percent this guy, 0 percent that guy kind of voter. That the candidate I agree with the most only gets 69 percent, and the one I disagree with least gets a 31 (and five of them tie for just under 50 percent) says a lot about why I can’t subscribe to either political party. Parties perpetuate the notion that everything is one way or the other, and act accordingly. That worldview is not me.

I’ll be curious to see where y’all end up. You can to try it at this address. Click on the “VoteEasy” box at the right.

Since I look at candidates more holistically, I don’t expect something like this to predict how I will vote. I’m not a check-off box kind of voter. And yet, my own mushy methods have reached similar conclusions up to now — Obama’s looking better to me than he did when I voted for McCain in 2008, and out of a weak Republican field only Huntsman has stood out positively to me, while no one is less likely to get my vote than Ron Paul.

So I found it interesting. Perhaps you will, too.

Dems, don’t repeat GOP’s Tea Party mistake

1 Reply

When I saw this Tweet this morning,

@postpoliticsPostPolitics

How the Occupy Wall Street movement could help Democratshttp://wapo.st/vIrMv8

My first thought was hopeful: By… making them look moderate by contrast?

But I was whistling past a political graveyard. I knew that’s not what I would find when I followed the link:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is very much in its infancy, and many Americans still don’t know what to think of it. But there is also growing evidence that it could become a boon to Democrats.

A new CBS News-New York Times poll shows 43 percent of people agree with the aims of the movement, while just 27 percent say they disagree.

Set aside the unanswerable question, “agree and disagree with what?” Read on…

This is ominous. Expect Democrats to start sounding much more like populist class warriors than they already do. Expect them to go gaga over this movement the way Republicans did the Tea Party in 2010. Expect there to be no candidates out there trying to appeal to sensible independents who just go to work every day and try to earn a living and hope and pray, often in vain, that their political leaders might approach things as seriously as they do.

Think I’m wrong? Well, Phil Noble — who seems determined to turn the old Third Way movement (in SC, at least) into a vanguard of the populist left — is now using his SC New Democrats as a megaphone for OWS. From his Facebook page:

OCCUPY IN SC NEWS 10/26…TOP STORY: ‘Meet Rick Perry” in Cola and Occupy media http://bit.ly/sP332P … STATEWIDE – Occupy Your State Capital, National event, Oct 29, 12 -3, Columbia http://bit.ly/nSYBGD … Occupy the Streets / Occupy the World Nov 11, http://on.fb.me/nkgtw6 … COLA – 10 days, State House Occupation continues, Site with daily schedule http://bit.ly/nVmW80 Media on Occupy at Rick Perry event http://bit.ly/sP332P …CHAS – GA will be at the ILA Hall on Morrison Dr at 6pm on ThursdayOct 27 …G’VILLE – Sunday Oct 30, McPherson Park at 2, Main Street march at 4 http://grnol.co/pCBBlQ Nov 7 Occupy Concert 7pm, The Handelbar http://bit.ly/rufODV media: http://bit.ly/tBbyuL … S’BURG – pix from recent events http://on.fb.me/nrgPgz … MYRTLE BEACH – GA Sat, October 29 • 2:00pm – 5:00pm Chapin Park http://bit.ly/usVR88 … GREER – March Nov 5, N Main & College 12am http://bit.ly/psITUI … CLEMSON – Event Oct 27, 12pm Bowman Field http://bit.ly/roRWaD NEW Facebook pagehttp://on.fb.me/r85P0d … AIKEN – 1st GA meeting, Sun Oct 30, 2:30- 4:30 at Odell Weeks Park http://bit.ly/vLXk7Y new Facebook pagehttp://on.fb.me/nD18hp … Cache of good Occupy designs http://bit.ly/pLV62r … SEND INFO to [email protected]

Yeah, I couldn’t make much out of that, either, but I get the general idea. He’s all for OWS, or at least wants to persuade them that he is.

Dang. There’s just not going to be anyplace for the rest of us to go, is there?

OK, DCCC, I agree with you on this one

31 Replies

Another of those fund-raising appeals that never stop coming arrived this morning, ostensibly from Donna Brazile. It starts out,

Brad —

If President Obama found a cure for the common cold, Republicans would oppose it.

I’ll ignore the laughably transparent attempt to pretend you know me (“Hey, Donna!”), when you obviously don’t if you think I’d give you money, and move on to the first full sentence.

You’re absolutely right. Now, will you agree with me on the following statement, which is just as obviously true?

Brad —

If President Bush had found a cure for the common cold, Democrats would have opposed it.

You can’t agree, Donna? Oh, well. Perhaps I don’t know you that well, either.

Too bad. Because you had hit on a punchy, terse way of expressing how pointlessly partisan Congress has become, and how destructive it is to the country for anyone to give you money for your cause, or to do the same for your Republican counterparts.

Vote UnParty, y’all.

SC Dem spoof of bizarre Herman Cain advert

6 Replies

I’m not going to tell you which is the real Cain thing and which is the spoof… OK, if you see them both, I guess you can tell. But if I just showed you the Cain video alone, and asked you whether it was real or a spoof, you’d have trouble getting it right.

In fact, I’m still having trouble with it. I’m still thinking Herman Cain might be sending us up. Look at that grin.

The WashPost suspected the same thing:

A few questions come to mind….

1. Why is Mark Block, Cain’s campaign manager, smoking a cigarette?

2. Why is Mark Block blowing cigarette smoke into the camera?

3. Why is Mark Block on camera?

4. Who is holding the camera?

5. Why did anyone think this was a good idea?

6. Why is Herman Cain smiling?

7. Are we being punked?

Anyway, enjoy. And don’t y’all be smoking anything, OK? It’s all bad for your lungs.

(The spoof, by the way, is the best-executed video yet from Tyler Jones, who posts on YouTube under the handle, SCForwardProgress. Or at least, I assume he’s the one doing them, since he’s the one who always calls them to my attention.)

Do Lieberman and McCain have a new best bud?

Just for the record, I am not mad at Boyd

2 Replies

Rep. Boyd Brown at Yesterday's.

About an hour after Kevin Fisher called me to set the record straight on whether he had called me, I met Boyd Brown for a beer at Yesterday’s.

We had a fine time getting acquainted — I don’t believe we’d every had a conversation before — although it was unnecessary from my point of view. Boyd had suggested the meeting because he thought I was mad at him or something, and I went along because, as my readers know, I’m always glad to spend time at Yesterday’s (see the ad at right).

It was a very South Carolina kind of conversation. We talked about Boyd’s experiences with his Daddy (who is probably younger than I, since Boyd is younger than my fourth child) being on county council in Fairfield County, and about when his grandfather was a high official in state government, and about the people he’s related to in Bennettsville (my birthplace), and partisan politics, and race, and… just a little of everything.

And, more to the point… Boyd says he did not realize until after he had said it that in the case of our governor, his remark could be construed on yet a third level that, he agreed, is inappropriate. So we had a total meeting of the minds. Except, to some extent, when we got on the subject of upcoming legislation that he’s planning to push, but more about that later…

Obama swamps would-be opponents in fund-raising — in SC, of all places!

2 Replies

Maybe it’s always this way. I don’t recall having looked at fund-raising numbers in quite this way before, at this point, in a campaign shaped like this one. Cindi Scoppe probably has — she compiled The State‘s first campaign-contribution website if I recall correctly. She’s into stuff like that. As for me — well, it’s about money, so MEGO.

But this got my attention:

Rick Perry is the leading Republican presidential fundraiser in South Carolina, and he did most of it on one day in August.

The Texas governor took in $55,000 of the $103,000 that he has raised in South Carolina on Aug. 25. Katon Dawson, who is advising Perry’s S.C. campaign, confirmed Perry held an S.C. fundraiser that day but told a reporter, “I can’t tell you anything about it.”

While languishing in the polls, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania also is popular among S.C. donors. Santorum has raised $80,080 in the state, the second-highest of any Republican candidate, just ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who raised $75,230.

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, actually was the top fundraiser in South Carolina, collecting $238,291. However, Obama is not expected to carry South Carolina, which last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976.

Say what? Repeat that last?

Yeah, I get it. He’s the incumbent. But he raised way over twice as much money as the richest fund-raiser among all GOP candidates, and he raised it in South Carolina — a state he doesn’t have a prayer of winning in 2012. Which is why his bus tour somehow magically appeared in North Carolina on a trip northward without having passed through South Carolina, far as we could tell. (Did you hear his teleprompter got stolen in Virginia?)

He’s raised $238,291 in our state — more than 90 grand of it in Richland County (three times as much as all Republicans combined in the capital city) — and has spent… $2,385 (that’s according to a graphic in The State that I couldn’t find online). Yep, 1 percent.

You realize this makes South Carolina a Democratic Party donor state? So much for Democrats being all about what Washington can send to them… I guess this is payback time, huh?

Who are these rich Columbians? And how come they aren’t buying ads on bradwarthen.com? (If I were still at the paper, I’d get Cindi to go find out for me. I didn’t find names in a cursory Web glance at the data Adam drew his story from. Of course, if I were still at the paper, I wouldn’t get to sell ads and keep the money, so… Anyway, more as I know more. I just wanted to go ahead and get something up on this before the day was out.)

Meanwhile, over on the fiscally conservative side, Jon Huntsman has raised $2,550 here, and spent $277,744 in SC. According to the FEC’s website, which is where Adam’s numbers come from. Michelle Bachmann has raised $23,197 and spent $83,156. Others, such as Perry and Santorum, are staying within their SC-raised means in SC.

All told, if young Adam did his sums right, presidential candidates have raised $382,902 from SC sources and spent $719,276 here. So on the GOP side, SC is a beneficiary of political welfare — which makes sense, we being an earlier-primary state than the places where their money likely came from.

Which depends. For Perry, it’s Texas. For Obama, it’s California and the Northeast. For Romney — well, the map looks kind of the way it does for Obama, except the Republican is getting a larger proportion from Florida. Here’s where you can look all that up. Now you don’t need me. Let me know if you find the names of those donors. Get their contact info…

My seventh Pub Politics appearance

4 Replies

Pub Politics Episode 77: Brad Warthen’s 7th Visit from Wesley Donehue on Vimeo.

CORRECTION: At some time during the above video — I haven’t gone back through it to find out where — I say that Kevin Fisher did not call me ahead of time to warn me he had written a column critical of me. THAT IS NOT TRUE. Kevin called me after seeing this to tell me that he DID call me. I didn’t hear the message, but I know Kevin wouldn’t tell me that if it weren’t true. Let me add that it wasn’t important for him to have called me. I don’t call people to warn them I’ve been critical of them in something coming out. If I did, I’d be on the phone all day. I had just noted that it seemed ironic that he HAD called to warn me when he had written something noncritical about me previously, but (I thought) had not done so this time.

Above you see the embed of my last-minute, emergency appearance on Pub Politics last week. I was a replacement for Joel Lourie. Guest-hosting with Phil Bailey was Joel Sawyer.

It was my historic seventh appearance on the show. Nobody else comes close.

It’s like the Pub Politics guys are Jimmy Olson, and I’m Clark Kent, and they’ve got a signal watch. And it starts beeping (at a frequency only Kryptonians can here), and I’m like all, “Why can’t Jimmy just stay out of trouble,” but I head for a phone booth (or a reasonable facsimile, since those are getting really, really hard to find outside London, where they keep them because they’re picturesque), and then it’s up, up and away time.

I love one of his children, but not the other

20 Replies

My sons gave me birthday gift cards for Barnes and Noble, my favorite place for hanging out aimlessly and browsing, and I’m there now, contemplating a dilemma.

A couple of days ago, I saw the review in the WSJ about this new biography of James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, and they have it here. Since college — when I took so many electives (to some extent concentrating on that period) that I ended up getting a second major in history when I hadn’t planned to — I’ve been drawn to that period, and the Founders. Particularly the Framers.

But do I really want to use one of my cards for that? The publisher overpriced it a bit, for a book with such large type and so few pages. Nowhere near the heft of McCullough’s John Adams. I could get several paperbacks for this price.

Also… I’m still reading, and fascinated by, Charles Mann’s exploration of the Americas and the world pre- and post-1492.

Do I really want to delve into my mixed attitudes toward Madison right now (I inadvertently typed “Jefferson” just then, a pre-Freudian slip)?

The thing is, I revere the man as the Father of our Constitution, a political achievement I honor as much as any in human history.

But… he’s also the father (note the lower case) of a bastard child — American partisan politics. Or one of the main fathers, anyway (the mother was indiscriminate). Certainly the most successful one. The Federalists (which, if I had to pick a party, would have been my preference then) faded away, but Madison’s Democratic Republicans remain vital, although in different form, under truncated name. (And no, for those who don’t follow such things, it’s not the Republicans, a later invention.)

I love one of his children, but the other is the bane of my life as a political writer.

Another reason to hesitate, and wait until this, too, is marked down or in paperback… I have yet to read the book about his chief rival, the one by Ron Chernow, that Fritz Hollings recommended to me several years ago. Fritz thought it was great, and I asked one of my kids for it for birthday or Christmas, and it sits on my shelf yet.

Of course, if anything, my attitudes toward Hamilton lean even more toward the jaded. Despite my Federalist leanings (which is really more of a reaction to the Democratic Republicans than a love of the Federalists), and despite my great admiration for the role that he, too, played in the Constitution, there’s that nasty partisanship thing.

While Adams and Jefferson were conducting themselves more or less above the fray, Hamilton and Madison were carrying out the nastiest sort of partisan warfare in their behalfs. But at least Madison served Jefferson well in so doing. One thing I respect about Adams is that he truly hated party politics, as much as I do, and his own party worked against him perhaps more than it supported him (to name but one example, there’s the way they blackened his legacy with the Alien and Sedition Acts). Jefferson was more affected in his nonpartisanship, and carried it off well, while Madison more smoothly conducted his dirty work.

As for my decision — oh, I’ll have to read the book at some point. I just haven’t decided whether to get it now. I’ll browse a bit more first…

Some SC Democrats getting excited about Cain

20 Replies

In a previous post, I derided the widespread notion among Republicans that Democrats will work to try to praise and promote the weakest Republican candidates.

That doesn’t mean it never happens.

Today, a couple of young SC Democratic wise guys have been having fun with Herman Cain’s rise in the polls. First, Lachlan McIntosh Tweeted this:

Herman Can for President? Where do we donate? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmdexAKLuw New SC Forward Progress video

Then, Tyler Jones echoed that on Facebook…

Endorsements that don’t help Huntsman, but should

10 Replies

Last night on Pub Politics, since Joel Sawyer was co-hosting, I brought up this Tweet from the day before in which Nicholas Kristof mentioned Joel’s candidate:

It’s odd to see Republicans struggling to find an electable candidate.They have 1: Jon Huntsman.They just don’t like him.

To me, that’s a fine thought with which I agree completely. I greatly respect Nicholas Kristof. But of course, with the great mass of GOP voters who seem determined in 2012 to run off a cliff together with the most Out There candidate they can find, it’s an invitation to like Huntsman even less. Because Kristof is a liberal. A very thoughtful, iconoclastic liberal (a guy who, for instance, persuaded me to have a big problem with Obama’s lack of support for the Colombian Trade Agreement in 2008) who is in no way like the ranting partisans of the left.

But that doesn’t matter. He’s a liberal, and that’s that. The kinds of Republicans who don’t like Huntsman — and there are a great many of them — are of the sort (and you find far too many such people in both parties) who are convinced that a person who leans the other way would only say good things about a candidate of their party as some sort of dirty trick meant to promote the weakest candidate.

That, of course, is extremely foolish in this context. If Kristof is up to anything underhanded in this instance (which he isn’t), it would be a sort of double-reverse move — I’ll praise the best candidate in their party so they’ll be sure not to like him.

This huge mass of post-2008 Republicans seem bound and determined not to nominate anyone who might win the general election. Which is very odd, given that they seem to dislike Barack Obama so much.

In 2008, a wonderful thing happened: Both parties actually chose the candidate most likely to appeal to the political center. I do not recall any time when that happened before in my adult life (or at least, I don’t remember the last time my own favorite candidates in both parties won their respective nominations).

At the time, of course, there was a faction that utterly rejected this approach, and for the longest time waged an “anybody but McCain” quest. (Ironically, the choice of the Right — such as Jim DeMint — was Mitt Romney, who this year is considered Mr. Moderate. Which shows you what’s happened since 2008.) Just as the more vehement partisans of the left insisted their party had to nominate Hillary Clinton.

Tragically, the conclusion that far too many Republicans have drawn from 2008 is that they were not extreme enough. (They fail to understand that McCain was defeated mainly by two factors: the collapse of the economy in mid-September, and his having chosen Sarah Palin as an attempt to please the very faction that didn’t like him.)

So they flit from Bachmann to Perry to, now, Cain. And in the polls, Romney remains bridesmaid to them all.

And they utterly ignore that there’s another moderate choice, one without Romney’s baggage: Huntsman.

Last night, when I brought of the Kristof Tweet on the show, co-host Phil Bailey (who works for the SC Senate Democrats) weighed in with how much he, too, liked Huntsman.

I don’t think that thrilled Joel, either.

Phil, I believe, really was employing the strategy of saying nice things about a strong candidate on the other side so that the other side wouldn’t like him. But don’t let that blind you to the fact that Huntsman is the candidate most likely to appeal to the center, and even to disaffected Democrats.

That’s more like it, Boyd. Good lad!

12 Replies

Last night, Phil Bailey called me with five minutes to go and asked me to be a last-minute replacement for Joel Lourie on Pub Politics, so of course I said yes, and they held the show for a few minutes to give me time to get there.

That’s seven times now, people. No one else comes close. The Five-Timer Club long ago became passé for me. I’m the standard fill-in guest. The one sad thing is that I can never be a stand-in guest co-host, because you have to be a Democrat or Republican. That’s the format. Speaking of which, Wesley Donehue was out of town again (China was mentioned), and Joel Sawyer filled in for him. You know, the former press secretary to Mark Sanford, now state campaign director for Jon Huntsman. He did great.

One of our topics, as it happened, was Kevin Fisher’s column about my post about Boyd Brown’s inappropriate little witticism. (When I entered The Whig, I saw Corey Hutchins seated at a table, went over and stood over him, cocked a fist back and said, “Look out — I’m liable to attack you…”) Our discussion — during which both Phil took the position that Boyd’s comment was great, and Joel held that it was Corey’s journalistic obligation to report it — led me to an ironic observation: While one of them represented the left and the other the right, I was the only real conservative at the table. They would only agree that I was the grouchy old guy upholding outdated notions of civility and propriety. (Which is basically what conservatism is, properly understood.)

We also discussed other, more interesting stuff. I’ll post the show when it’s available.

But that’s not why I come to you today in this post. I wanted to share with you this op-ed from the aforementioned young Mr. Brown, in which he expresses his thoughts regarding the “F” the governor gave him in a far more mature and appropriate manner. An excerpt:

Recently, as you may have heard, Gov. Nikki Haley released her legislative report cards for 2011. I will not venture into the sheer pettiness of this nonsense, although it is just that – petty nonsense. Instead, I’ll explain why I got the grade I received, and why, for the first time in my life, I’ll ignore the “teacher’s” advice on how to improve my grade.

According to her standards, I was given an “F.” Not since my first year of Carolina have I been awarded an “F,” and now that I’m in law school, I hope it’s not a recurring theme. I was ashamed of the “F” I received on my first test in freshman philosophy, but I recovered and did well in the course. I can’t say the same for the “F” I was awarded by Nikki Haley; instead, I am proud of it.

Some would argue that since she is our governor, she knows what the people of South Carolina want. Those who are really drunk on her Kool-Aid would probably argue that point loudly and irrationally. Here is my argument:

The “F” I received stands for Fairfield, for your family. In last year’s election, Senator Vincent Sheheen won our county with overwhelming numbers. Nikki Haley and her platform (or lack thereof) were soundly rejected. She is clearly out of touch and out of step with our community – just look at the election returns.

It is offensive to me for her to think that her agenda for our state trumps the agenda of those who I represent. For her to think otherwise shows her skyrocketing level of arrogance, which only rises higher with every national news show she visits, and every out of state fundraiser she attends….

And so forth.

This is good. This is right. Far better that you express clearly why you are offended by her actions (and you have every reason to be offended by her presumption) that for you to be offensive yourself.

That’s it. That’s my fatherly, or at least avuncular, advice for today.

‘Obama: A disaster for civil liberties’… Really?

28 Replies

On my way back to the office from Rotary today, I heard this guy Jonathan Turley on NPR going on and on about how Barack Obama is — gasp — “worse than Bush” on civil liberties (or words to that effect; I wasn’t taking notes while driving).

Conveniently, he wrote out his thoughts on this in an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times recently. An excerpt:

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama’s personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured…

As you know, I have commented upon the same phenomenon myself, only not as a bad thing. From my endorsement of his tough talk about Pakistan in 2007 to my praise of his national security continuity right after the election, through my noting the end of the “Kent State Syndrome,” I’ve been pretty laudatory.

What’s really amazing about Obama is that he managed to persuade people before the election, and many after, that he’s this antiwar guy who was going to undo all the supposedly wicked deeds of the Bush administration. I wasn’t hearing that.

But even I was unprepared for how much further Obama would take things than Bush. I guess he’s able to do it because he has the political permission within his own party. Sort of like it took Nixon to go to China, Obama is allowed the latitude to more aggressively pursue the (I’m going to use the term that his base avoids) global War on Terror. As you recall, I made the analogy earlier that Bush was like Sonny Corleone (the blusterer who had trouble getting the job done), and Obama is Michael (who speaks softly and convinces everyone he’s the peaceful don, but wipes out his enemies efficiently without a word of warning). Of course, I don’t see them as heading a criminal enterprise. Others disagree.

It really does put Democrats in a weird place. Some of my most reasonable Democratic friends used to make these extravagant claims about how George W. Bush had trashed the Constitution. They really seemed to believe it. They are quieter now.