A couple of weeks ago, I came up with the idea of doing something different with endorsements this cycle. Back during the campaigns for the June primaries, I became frustrated that we had so many candidates, and so little time and space, that we didn’t serve readers as well as we should have. After hours and hours and hours of interviews, research and discussion, in some cases our explanations of endorsements were absurdly abbreviated, in extreme cases amounting to less than a sentence. And as I’ve always said, to me the endorsement is ABOUT the explanation, so I was very dissatisfied. All of that work, and so little of it shared with readers.
So I said to my colleagues at the time, we either needed to do better in the future, or quit endorsing altogether. Our staff is too small to spend that much time on something that produces such thin gruel for readers.
Of course, being obsessive, we resolved to keep doing it, but do it better. Fortunately for that purpose, we had far fewer contested races to deal with in the fall. This fact is UNfortunate for democracy — the fact that primary contests are far more numerous than general election ones is a testament to the power of incumbency and partisanship in redistricting. But at least it offered us a chance to be somewhat more thorough in our presentation, to make it more reflective of our preparation.
A couple of weeks ago, I thought of a way to do even better: Do our endorsements earlier. In the past, we’ve held them as long as we can, given the number we have to do — the theory being that that’s when voters are paying the most attention. Also, it meant we had as much information as possible, preventing post-endorsement "surprises" about the candidates.
But I proposed to Warren and Cindi that we start doing them as soon as we can. It keeps them from being jammed up, thereby allowing us more space. It also frees us up as commentators. Increasingly, I have found it hard to write the summaries of interviews without going ahead and saying "this is the guy for us" or "no way on this one." You’ll note that I haven’t written anything from the interviews with the candidates in today’s endorsement of Anton Gunn, because the choice was so clear, and I hate to scoop my colleagues. Now, I’m free to go back and write those blog entries from the interviews — which I will, perhaps today — as well as to write columns. I suspect that Cindi and Warren will find additional things they want to say about their candidates once the ice is broken with an endorsement. Maybe not, but we’ll see.
In any event, I’ve been pleased with the first two endorsements (one running today, the other tomorrow), even if that’s all that is written. They flow better, they’re less cramped and hurried in their style. They’re more thoughtful. And that’s supposed to be the point — provoking thought.
Anyway, here’s the endorsement of Anton Gunn. More commentary on that contest will be forthcoming.
You probably already read in the paper that "Boogie Man," the documentary about Lee Atwater, is coming to the Nickelodeon. A fresh reminder came in via e-mail from Judy Turnipseed:
This movie which starts this week at the Nickelodeon about
the famous Lee Atwater features Tom Turnipseed with a lot of other South
Carolinians. Tom will be on a panel about the movie on Friday night.
Here is a link to a trailer of the movie and how to buy
tickets at the Nick if you want to see the movie.
http://www.boogiemanfilm.com/
Tom, of course, was the object of one of the most outrageously mean things Atwater ever said. Here, from a 1991 story by our own Lee Bandy, is a short version of that bit of history:
Tom Turnipseed, a liberal Democrat who ran for Congress in South Carolina, once accused Atwater of engineering a survey of white voters in which they were pointedly informed of Turnipseed’s membership in the NAACP. Atwater denied the charge, but also said that he did not want to deal with allegations made by someone who had once been "hooked up to jumper cables," referring to shock treatments Turnipseed had received years before as a suicidal teenager.
He said that in 1980, when Turnipseed was running against Floyd Spence.
Just got this release a few minutes ago from Bobby Harrell’s office:
State Needs True Transparency, Not Pandering Governor proves statewide fly around is about headlines, not delivering true reforms
(Columbia, SC) – Today, Governor Sanford embarked on another statewide fly around to hold a series of press conferences. Upon learning that the governor’s intentions were only to make a media splash instead of fighting for real reforms, House Speaker Bobby Harrell gave the following statement:
“I have always supported more transparency and responsibility in government. More transparency is good for our state, and more roll call voting in the General Assembly would be a good idea, but we must be fighting for true transparency and not just pandering to voters and grabbing for headlines. In the House, we believe in working together to accomplish real transparency. That’s why the House has passed earmark reform, spending limits, government restructuring, tax cuts and many other important reforms to our state government.
“Demanding that we should spend taxpayer money to take a roll call vote on a resolution congratulating a state championship high school team is not true transparency, it’s pandering. Real reform in government is fixing the workers comp system, tort reform, and immigration reform, all of which became law because of actions by the General Assembly.
Tom DeLoach, President/CEO of South Carolina Business & Industry Political Education Committee (BIPEC), commented, “Roll Call voting in the South Carolina General Assembly is not uncommon. In fact, over the last 10 years business and industry related roll call votes have increased significantly to the point where a roll call vote when not taken is an exception to the rule. President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell and House Speaker Bobby Harrell have provided a roll call record on business and industry issues that is both plentiful and verifiable.”
Back in the early 90s, I was one of a handful of editors who helped shape a drastic reorganization of The State‘s newsroom, challenging and in some cases throwing out fundamental assumptions about what we covered and how we covered it. (I was also the first one, months later, to say the new system didn’t work, but no one was listening to me at that point.) We came up with some pretty wacky, high-concept beats, but there was one I could never get the others to go for, one that I still think would be a good one — the "driveby beat." Basically, it would involve assigning a reporter to answer the kinds of questions that occur to you driving around the Midlands — What are they building there? How long will I have to take this detour? Whose responsibility is it to fix that pothole? What do all those people waiting for the library to open do the rest of the time? Essentially, just about anything that might occur to you to wonder about when you drive by it, and that normally you would never get an answer to.
For instance, Sunday morning I wanted to know why I couldn’t get anywhere closer than a couple of blocks from the Gervais Starbucks in my truck. It apparently had something to do with people riding around on bicycles in silly outfits, but I had to wait until this morning to get an answer. And I’m still not satisfied, by the way (that is, I’m not satisfied that was worth diverting traffic for, but then I’m a real curmudgeon about these things).
One of the letter writers on our Monday page got me to thinking about another one that I usually forget by the time I get to work. Here’s the letter:
Manholes are hazards around Columbia
Why is it that with the technology to provide a smooth, correctly profiled, beautifully laid asphalt roadway, no one seems able or willing to address the numerous manholes that seem to dot every block of roadway on our main thoroughfares?
When you ask a paving contractor about it, he or she sounds like Freddie Prinz of “Chico and The Man” — “It’s not my job!” How about, at least, a composite disc to raise the low ones to the roadway elevation?
With so many diverse utilities — the water and sewer department, SCE&Grab, Bell South/Southern Bell (whatever), etc. — nobody wants to take the time, expense or effort to raise (or lower) these units to the proper elevation before paving, and they are legion. Ride over to Forest Drive and take a look.
There is one in front of the State Museum (outbound lane) that would knock the treads off an Abrams tank if hit at 30 mph.
BEN BOATWRIGHT Columbia
More specifically, here’s what’s on my mind: I’ve grown accustomed to the periodic indentations along Sunset Blvd. in the left-hand land heading down to the river through West Columbia. It’s been like that for years, and I either stay in the right lane, or dodge the manholes, or put up with my truck being jarred into rattling every few seconds.
But now, on the days I take that route, there’s a new barrier — coming up from the river on Hampton. You know, the part that’s several lanes one-way? It got repaved last month, and apparently it got ground down WAY below the manhole covers before repaving, but was not paved back UP to the manhole covers. The pavers dealt with that by constructing volcano-like slopes around the manholes, creating a sort of slalom situation — particularly right at the top of the hill, at Hampton and Park — if you don’t want to experience the equivalent of multiple speed bumps.
I am as sure as anyone can be of something like this that this situation did not exist BEFORE the repaving. I’m pretty sure I’d remember it if it had been like that.
If I we had created that driveby beat, and if I still worked in the newsroom, and if I were that reporter’s editor, I’d have him or her call around to find out who’s responsible, and whether anyone plans on doing anything about it.
Or if I were an editorial page editor in another state, one where government isn’t impossibly fragmented, I’d just call City Hall and probably get an answer.
Were you as intrigued as I by the fact that Fritz Hollings declined twice to endorse Barack Obama yesterday? Read about it here.
I could imagine Fritz preferring John McCain to Obama purely on the grounds of having served with him. And when you’ve got as much experience as Fritz, you tend to value the commodity.
But what I can’t quite get my head around is why he wouldn’t endorse a ticket that includes one of his best friends in the Senate, Joe Biden.
First, I apologize for the length of this video clip, but I think it gives a pretty fair glimpse of what our interviews were like with the two candidates in S.C. House District 87.
You have newcomer Democrat Edgar Gomez challenging Rep. Nikki Haley. Four years ago, Nikki was the longshot going up against a very Old School incumbent in Larry Koon. If anything, Mr. Gomez is probably a longer shot, if only because Rep. Haley is hardly the symbol of entrenched seniority that Mr. Koon was; hers is still a very fresh face on the S.C. political scene.
On the video, you will see the candidates’ respective remarks about or answers to questions about several issues, starting with an open question about what they consider the top issues to be, then moving on to taxation, school "choice" and payday lending.
And yes, I will still be doing separate posts on these two interviews, just not today. In the meantime, you have the video.
Searching the AP Archives (a dangerous thing to let me do, given that I’m the World’s Most Easily Distracted Man) for a suitable picture of Fritz Hollings for the Sunday op-ed page (which in the end I didn’t use; Robert volunteered a caricature instead), I ran across the one above, which has the following caption:
State Sen. Edgar Brown, D-Barnwell, left, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., center, and Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., leave the Darlington Presbyterian Church, Sept. 20, 1972, after paying their final repects to the late state Sen. James P. Mozingo. (AP Photo/Lou Krasky)
Riffing on that as I am wont to do, just out of curiosity to see what an Edgar Brown search would turn up, I found the one below. I like it as a sort of alternative moment from the convention for which Abbie Hoffman and Richard Daley pere are better remembered. The caption:
South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair, right, listens as he and Sen. Edgar Brown, left, and Gov. John West hold a private conference on the fire escape of their Chicago Hotel on Monday, Aug.26,1968 in Chicago. The three men are part of the South Carolina delegation to the Democratic National Convention which gets underway Monday. (AP Photo)
No, this post doesn’t have any point; I’m just sharing…
Henry Brown is generally not on my radar screen because he’s in a district where we have few readers. (I tend to follow the doings of Clyburn, Wilson and to some extent Spratt.) I still tend to think of him as the rather unimpressive Ways and Means chairman that S.C. House Speaker David Wilkins used to bring to editorial board meetings, years and years ago.
So while I have heard bits and pieces of the saga over the burn on his property and the fine, I haven’t formed a clear opinion of it, beyond the fact that it sounds cheesy and petty as all get-out. I mean, how hard is it to keep your nose clean on something like this? A running, personal dispute with a federal agency when you’re a member of Congress? Who wouldn’t have just paid the fine, long ago, in order to put this behind him?
Today’s story reinforced that impression:
A senior federal official, fearful of incurring a congressman’s wrath, sent subordinates on a mad dash earlier this year to retrieve a certified letter demanding payment of $5,773 for starting a fire that burned 20 acres of a national forest.
Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources, said he didn’t want U.S. Rep. Henry Brown to receive the March 12 letter before he testified before a U.S. House committee on which the South Carolina Republican sits.
If you have other thoughts, or if you agree, or whatever, here’s your chance to sound off.
Jim Foster over at the state Dept. of Ed. drew my attention to this recent report on MSNBC that touches upon the great problem that South Carolina has with No Child Left Behind: That the federal law judges states on how well they meet their own standards, and South Carolina has some of the nation’s highest.
Of course, all of us who had been paying attention knew that already. If the feds want to assess the schools, they need to come up with a uniform standard for the assessments to mean anything. But here’s a better idea: Shut down the U.S. Dept. of Ed., and get the federal gummint out of our schools.
Sept. 11, 1 p.m. — OK, I’m really going to try to keep these endorsement interview posts shorter so that I can get them done and not fall behind the way I did in the last couple of election cycles (resorting to such cheap tricks as running nothing but pictures when I ran out of time).
David Herndon should be a good one for me to practice this new resolution on, since he didn’t have that much to say different from what he said in our primary interview. (And that’s not a bad thing at all, since we ended up endorsing him then.)
An overview of what we talked about:
He said he was better qualified for the House because of his experience in business and in life.
He said opponent Anton Gunn — a "super nice guy" is less qualified because he’s spent his work life out of the private sector, in politics and the community organizer field.
He feels very comfortable with his district. He said that (like Caesar’s Gaul), there are three distinct communities within the Kershaw-Richland district, and at various times he’s lived in all of them.
He thinks the governor’s trying to get the Legislature to come back to prioritize budget cuts is political posturing.
On education, he agrees with most of Jim Rex’s proposals. He sees himself as having a broad perspective on the issue, with one child in military school, another home-schooled, and one in public elementary school.
He sees his job as maintaining his district’s attraction for economic development and as an attractive place to live.
For me, reading the piece by my old friend Joe Darby on today’s op-ed page was another excruciating instance of the apparently unbridgeable cognitive divide between black and white Americans. I always find it very troubling — in fact, I lack words for just how much it troubles me.
Somehow, Joe looked at the fact that Republicans LIKE an inexperienced conservative Republican, but DON’T like an inexperienced liberal Democrat, and saw it as racism. I realize that after my more than half a century of living in this country, I should not be shocked at such things, but I was. Shocked, and very worried.
Remember this post about Bill Moyers’ hyperbole about the stakes in this election. Something one of y’all said caused me to express my worry about what will happen if Barack Obama loses this election: Democrats, who have been VERY charged up about their expectation of winning, and whose hatred of Republicans has reached new depths in the past eight years, will be so bitter that — and I hate even to think this thought aloud — the political polarization will be even WORSE in this country. MoveOn.org, to name but one segment of that alliance, will probably implode to the point of nuclear fusion.
(Republicans, by contrast, have been expecting to lose all year. As recently as last week, when I wrote that earlier post, I would have expected the GOP to accept defeat in November relatively fatalistically. Of course, that was before Sarah Palin got them excited. Now, if they lose, I expect the usual level of bitterness, just not as severe as what I think we’re in store for if Democrats lose.)
And that was without considering race. If you add in the expectations of so many black voters this year, the potential for bitter disappointment is incalculable. This year I’ve noted a potent paradox in the attitude of many black voters: A disbelief that a black man (if you consider Obama to be a black man, which I don’t — another subject for another day) has won a major party nomination, combined incongruously with the notion that if he doesn’t also win the general election, it’s because of racism.
Even though I was aware of that, Joe’s piece was a shock, because it wasn’t just generalized excitement about Obama combined with being prepared to resent it if he loses. It was the logic, or lack thereof, that Joe employed in seeing racism specifically in the fact that Republicans like Sarah Palin and not Barack Obama.
An anxious murmur is rising among black voters as the presidential race tightens: What if Barack Obama loses? Black talk-show hosts and black-themed Web sites are being flooded with callers and bloggers reflecting a nervousness — and anger — over the campaign. Bev Smith, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, devoted her entire three-hour show Monday night to the question: "If Obama doesn’t win, what will you think?"… If Sen. Obama loses, "African-Americans could be disappointed to the point of not engaging in the process anymore," or consider forming a third political party, said Richard McIntire, communications director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
This is not a good place to be.
I first met Joe Darby about 15 years ago. The newspaper sponsored a black-white dialogue group that was coordinated by a reporter I supervised. Joe was one of the panelists, and I was struck by his patience and mildness of manner in explaining his perspective to whites flustered over black citizens’ sense of aggrievement.
I’m sure Joe would have been just as patient with the middle-aged white acquaintance — someone I’ve known for many years, and who I am quite sure is not a racist — who came up to me this morning and said, based on the op-ed piece, "That Joe Darby is a racist." I insisted that I knew Joe Darby well, and he was not, but this was exactly the reaction I had predicted to a colleague when I saw the proof the day before. I had said that what Joe had written was precisely the kind of thing that caused white conservatives to be profoundly alienated by the way many blacks express themselves politically.
Fifteen years after that black-white dialogue experience — and many, many less formal such dialogues later — I find myself close to despair that mutual understanding can be achieved.
It’s become a regular pattern over the past few years: The state Department of Education releases a set of test scores – ACT, SAT, PACT – that shows improvement by South Carolina students, and South Carolinians for Responsible Government follows with a news release that attempts to turn the good news bad.
It happened again this week. State education officials reported that the state showed marked improvement in proficient and advanced scoring across the board in 2008, the final year of PACT administration in the state’s public schools.
South Carolina students scored higher on the tests. More of them met the proficient standard and more met the advanced standard. The numbers of students meeting those standards aren’t as high as we’d like, but the movement is in the right direction.
Sept. 11, 11 a.m. — When he first came to see us during the primaries, Michael Koska made a good impression — an especially good impression given that he was a newcomer to electoral politics. He had made himself expert on the issues that had gotten him involved — especially Richland County road needs — and showed a passion for learning about more.
He made an even better impression this time, and here’s one of the reasons why: As he said himself a couple of times in the interview, he’s learned and grown on the campaign trail. For instance, he expressed a tendency toward supporting vouchers. But it was fairly obvious at the time that he hadn’t really thought the issue through. Now, he doesn’t see himself supporting either vouchers or tax credits (last time he didn’t know the difference between them) "in the foreseeable future." He believes that our first priority should be fixing the public schools that need fixing.
Mr. Koska is the Republican nominee in a district that has long been strongly Democratic. But his views are not inconsistent with those of moderate South Carolina Democrats, and he goes out of his way to praise such Democrats as Joel Lourie and Anton Gunn (regarding a recent op-ed by Mr. Gunn in our paper, he said "ditto.") He maintains that if voters elect him instead of opponent Joe McEachern, he will be more likely to get things done, being a member of the majority party in the Legislature.
About the only other time he said anything about his party affiliation was when he expressed enthusiasm for his party’s vice presidential nominee. Much as Democrats have spoken of an Obama Effect this year, he predicted that Sarah Palin would do a lot of good for down-ticket Republicans such as himself.
But mostly he talked about his passion for better roads and affordable health care. His advocacy for fixing Hard Scrabble Road had won him a position on the citizen’s panel on transportation that recommended the sales tax hike, and he feels betrayed that County Council (led by Mr. McEachern) didn’t put the issue to a referendum. He said he believes the $550,000 spent on the study, not to mention the "valuable time, time spent away from their families" by the volunteers like himself, to have been cavalierly wasted. He is also critical of Mr. McEachern and the council for having bungled the county’s representation on the Council of Governments that doles out what road money there is in the area, allowing Lexington County to get the lion’s share of the funding for the next 10 years.
The council’s decision to borrow $50 million for new parks (including one in his area), and to do so without a referendum, while people are still dying on Hard Scrabble is to him an outrage.
He has a small business owner’s perspective on health care. His own personal experience and that of his acquaintances convinces him that the state must act now to make health care more affordable (he has no patience for waiting for the feds to do anything). It was like deja vu when he told about his daughter’s recent $1,800 x-ray, which sounded an awful lot like the x-rays for MY daughter, the one that ate my "economic stimulus check," if you’re recall. He was particularly incensed that when he asked the folks at the hospital in advance what the x-rays would cost, no one had any idea. Speaking of outrages, he thinks (as do I) that the stimulus checks were "the stupidest thing." If only, he says, that money had been devoted to upgrading the nation’s infrastructure…
Energy is another area where he has no interest in waiting on the federal government to act. He says the state should push to have natural gas filling stations built around the state. Natural gas, he maintains, is "probably going to be our bridge off foreign oil," but you can’t get anywhere without the retail infrastructure.
Michael Koska is a good example of what you get when a regular citizen not only gets worked up about an issue, but goes out of his way to get informed and try to do something about it. That’s why we endorsed him in the spring. Of course, we also endorsed his general election opponent, so that makes this race particularly interesting to us.
Before I left the office last night, I glanced at my stats page in Typepad and noticed something odd: I was getting a lot of hits from Google on a year-old post headlined "Carol Fowler and the Dark Side" (which, now that I look back at it, was an odd headline for the subject).
Later that night, I realized why — the quote from Ms. Fowler on Politico. Sheesh. What a bunch of nothing — my post last year was more interesting.
Folks, compared to the usual overheated rhetoric from Democrats of a certain persuasion about those of
us who oppose abortion, this was nothing. When I heard the quote on TV (my wife watches TV news, even local "if it bleeds it leads" TV news, usually when I’m not in the room; but there I was trapped in my recliner holding a grandbaby and begging somebody to pop in a DVD — I ended up staying up way too late to rewatch "The Graduate"), I thought sure it would be something provocative. When I heard, "Choosing someone whose primary qualification seems to be that she has…," I thought the next thing would be a reference to some distinguishing feature of female anatomy. But when I then heard, "…n’t had an abortion," I could not freaking believe that someone was making an issue of it.
Come on, folks — at least what Don said was offensive, and I was fairly dismissive of that meaning anything, either. As any rational person who knows the way human beings talk with friends would be.
Anyway, that explains the uptick in interest over Carol Fowler. Again, sheesh.
And again, I will urge the partisans: Get over it. Democrats, quit your whining about "Swiftboating," which, I’m sorry to tell you, is not a real word, much less something for you to keep wetting your pants about, expecting the GOP to do it to you at any minute. That "quit picking on me" pose doesn’t work on anybody but your whiniest base. (And Barack, dismissing the GOPpers for acting hurt about "lipstick," then whining yourself about "Swiftboating" is about as petty as I’ve heard you get.)
And Repubicans, get over your crying about the lipstick and the Fowler remark and the mean media and the pregnant daughter and the rest.
And then let’s try to have a grownup election, OK?
Sept. 10, 2 p.m. — Chip Huggins has represented this Irmo-Chapin district since 1999. And folks there must like him pretty well, because in all that time he hasn’t had opposition for re-election. And in that area (think District 5 school board, the battles over development in northwest Richland County), not many officeholders can say that.
Since he’s the Republican in this race, given the district, I suspect he’s about to get elected again.
But perhaps because he hasn’t had occasion to explain or defend his positions on issues in past election years, he doesn’t communicate very well where he stands, or where he is likely to stand in the future. It’s difficult to tell at times for certain whether he’s just not all that good at communication, was having a bad day (nervousness, which is common enough in a first interview, could account for some of the mangled syntax that kept posing a barrier for me) or he just did not want to be pinned down on anything. Unfortunately, by the end of the interview, I felt quite sure that that last explanation was most valid — he seemed to have a tremendous aversion to taking definite stands.
The most definite thing he said to us — the most specific, helpful fact that he provided with regard to his record — had to do with how he voted on Mark Sanford’s video of the cigarette tax increase. He indicated that he favored the tax increase (which contrasted with his general belief, also clearly stated, that he believes South Carolinians are overtaxed), and indeed voted for it. In light of that, I asked him, what were we to make of the charge by his challenger, Jim Nelson, who told us Mr. Huggins had supported the governor’s veto of that legislation? He said quite clearly that what Mr. Nelson said was incorrect — that in fact he had voted to override. He offered to get the clerk’s office to back him up on that, but I said no need. Of course, Cindi will check that out to confirm, but it seems highly unlikely that he would assert that so definitely were it not the case — especially since he was so loathe to be pinned down on much else. (Cindi speculated that this could have been an honest mistake all around, because she had noted that the VoteSmart organization, which she normally swears by, had reported that vote in a confusing way. She noted that she has informed VoteSmart, and they’re supposed to be doing something about it.)
As for the rest of the interview — well, I deeply regret that I was having multiple technical difficulties today. I had lent the camera with which I usually shoot video to one of my daughters; I didn’t realize the memory in my digital sound recorder was full until after the interview started, and after shooting three still photos and three short, low-quality clips with my Treo, it refused to record any more, claiming that it, too, was full. (And my dog ate my homework.) But let me try to give you a sense of what it was like.
Early in the interview, he indicated that he favored Gov. Sanford’s campaign to restructure state government, which was fine by us, of course: The governor’s positions on that subject are almost word-for-word straight out of our "Power Failure" agenda. But later I asked him to be a little more specific, and ran into a wall of reluctance: He had no specific ideas about how the government’s structure could be improved, beyond a vague desire to avoid "duplication." So I asked him to tell me, specifically, which of the constitutional officers did he think should be appointed rather than elected? When none seemed to be forthcoming, I started listing them: The commissioner of agriculture — should that be appointed (that seemed like the easiest on to start with)? How about the adjutant general? The attorney general?
He wasn’t saying. "There’s just a lot of duplication," he said. "Going to continue to look at that. I’m not going to be specific about that." When I looked for this quote in my notes, at first I started to copy from the wrong page, because on the page before that, talking about education, he had said, "I don’t have any direct answer on that… continue to look at that."
Mr. Huggins is hardly alone in his fondness for the phrase "look at that" — it’s a favorite among candidates (especially incumbents) who don’t want to take a position, as in "We’ll continue to look at that." It may be a defensible way to talk about a complex issue that’s just come up and you haven’t had time to study in adequately. But there’s no excuse to answer that way about issues that you yourself cite as important, and which have lain more or less unchanged on the table before you for years on end. And Mr. Huggins did that repeatedly. When candidates do that, I tend to think What do they think this is, a weather report? I don’t want their predictions of what the Legislature will continue to look at, I want to know what they think the Legislature should do.
The more frustrating exchanges, for me, were later in the interview, after my Treo was full. But I think you can get the idea if you watch the phone video clip below (again, I apologize for the quality). About halfway in, we get to the subject of the state’s automobile sales tax cap. Mr. Huggins seems to want the cap changed in some way, a way that would be "fair," but when we try to find out what he believes would be fair (simply tax the full value of cars at the rate at which we currently tax the first $6,000? exempt the first $6,000, but charge the full rate on the value over that? some other approach?), but he avoids answering.
And, as I say, that was the pattern of most of the interview. I came away knowing that he disagrees with his opponent’s politically suicidal assertion that we don’t pay enough taxes, but not much else.
Usually I find these interviews quite helpful in forming an impression of a candidate. This time, not so much. If anyone has any further information to offer regarding Mr. Huggins or his opponent, now would be a good time to bring it to my attention. Because we’re continuing, as one might say, to "look at that…"
Sept. 4, 9:30 a.m. — Our first endorsement interview of the 2008 general election cycle was Jim Nelson, a Democrat who’s opposing Rep. Chip Huggins in this Irmo-Chapin district. This was the first time I’d met Mr. Nelson — and come to think of it, when Mr. Huggins comes in it may be the first time I’ve met him (and I beg his forgiveness if I’m wrong about that), even though he’s been in the House since 1999.
Mr. Nelson is an easy guy to get to know, an affable character of moderate temperament. Speaking of moderate, he was a Republican when he moved here from New York many moons ago, but was turned off by the insistence on some Kulturkampf-style resolutions at a party convention here. (When we asked for specifics, abortion was mentioned.) On another occasion, he saw an anti-tax protester at a polling place — this was the early 90s, I believe he said — and told him that in his opinion, he, Jim Nelson, didn’t pay enough taxes here in South Carolina. (He still hasn’t quite gotten over how low property taxes are here.) Around that time, he went to work for Bud Ferillo, who remarked that he couldn’t be a Republican because they agreed on two many things. (One area of disagreement he chuckled over: Bud is convinced that desegregation launched the economic growth of the South in the 60s; Mr. Nelson insists it was air-conditioning.)
Evidently, Mr. Nelson and I don’t agree on abortion, although he is not necessarily at odds with out editorial board on the subject. But we found many areas of agreement — on his opposition to vouchers, his opposition to the tax swap for school funding from the property tax to sales taxes, his support of a cigarette tax increase and his support for the governor having wider responsibility for the executive branch. He contrasted his views on vouchers and the cigarette tax with what he said were those of Mr. Huggins, but that’s all I know about that at this point.
He presents himself as a business-oriented pragmatist, who thinks South Carolina is undercutting itself by trying to do everything on the cheap: "In business, we would do it the cheap way first, and go back and do it again the right way," which he notes is wasteful. He believes this particularly applies to education. He said he told that tax protester that where he worked at the time (before Ferillo-Gregg), all the South Carolinians worked out on the loading dock. Why not, he posited, educate the S.C. kids properly so they can have the good-paying jobs "so you don’t have to import people like me."
Mr. Nelson says that demographic changes in the district make it viable for a Democrat. We’ll see.
Another thing my Dad mentioned to me yesterday from his watching of 24/7 TV "news" was that the Democratic Party chair had said something insensitive about the expected Gulf Coast hurricane, and then apologized. Dad couldn’t remember the chairman’s name, so I assumed it was Howard Dean. I said something about Howard’s an OK guy; he just gets carried away.
It wasn’t until a few minutes ago that I picked up on the fact that it was Don Fowler. You SEE how outside the spin cycle I live my life?
Anyway, Don and I have been known to exchange unpleasant words, but I feel for him on this one — and I think I can say, with some confidence of being supported by others who know him, that he’s a way better person than one might gather from the video clip. If someone had been following me with a hidden camera back in my newsroom days, you’d think I really was, as Don once suggested, a devil of some sort. Gallows humor goes with the territory. A defense mechanism, or whatever. I probably wouldn’t be aware of it, except I have been guilty of saying similar things in my wife’s presence, and SHE has made sure I know that she is appalled. And when I see it through her eyes, I am chastened, even ashamed.
There’s no explaining things like this afterwards; you just look bad, period. But I’ll say it again — I feel for Don on this. Yes, he’s a partisan, and that causes us to disagree sometimes, but he’s not a bad guy at all.
You know that column I did about the Capital City Club, and how it was started to allow blacks and Jews and women into the halls of power? Don was one of the people who started that club. And it is my impression that things like that are much more representative of who he is than an ironic wisecrack made to a friend in what he evidently supposed was a private moment.
