Category Archives: South Carolina

NOW DeMint’s making things LESS clear

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Remember last week when Jim DeMint took Mark Sanford’s side in tomorrow’s Senate 23 primary runoff, and I said that helped clarify things a bit on one of those endorsements that I couldn’t possibly feel good about either way?

Well, forget the clarifying part. Now I learn from the Spartanburg paper that in this Upstate race, Jim’s making like Lindsey Graham and supporting the Republican officeholder, rather than joining the gov in trying to do remake the state GOP in his (Sanford’s) image:

     The District 12 race has been the most contentious over the past two weeks. Talley has hit Bright for receiving support from "out-of-state special interest groups" such as the S.C. Club for Growth and South Carolinians for Responsible Government and for having two tax liens — one as yet unresolved — placed against his business, On Time Transportation. Bright has painted Talley, a real estate attorney and the co-owner of three Marble Slab Creamery ice cream shops, as a trial lawyer.
    Both candidates have garnered some high-profile endorsements. U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint came to town Saturday to stump for Talley, while Gov. Mark Sanford gave his nod to Bright on Monday.
    Bright said he wants to go to Columbia to support Sanford’s agenda. That agenda includes using taxpayer money for parents to send their children to private schools and a one-school-district-per-county system. Bright said the consolidation issue is one on which he disagrees with the governor.

Of course, if the gov didn’t come out for this Bright guy until last Monday, that one is nowhere near as important to him as getting rid of Jake Knotts. Sometimes when you whack a guy, it’s just business. Other times, it’s personal, so you have to do it yourself, as Tony had to do with "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero, or Michael with Sollozzo and McCluskey. And you want to make really sure that your capos are with you.

In a way, that’s what makes the Lexington County race so unusually interesting. It’s SO personal for both Jake and the gov, and Republican capos have had to choose sides in a difficult war. And it’s interesting for the rest of us to see how they line up.

More about the ‘good old boy’ system

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My column today may appear to be about our endorsement of a candidate for the state Senate. But that was just an excuse for writing about something I’d been thinking about for 20 years — the meaning of the phrase "good old boy," as used in S.C. politics.

This post is to include some additional stuff that I didn’t have room for in the column, in addition to what I already wrote about the movie I referred to.

First, there was my reference to Billy Carter. Remember that he was the one who tried to define the difference between a "good old boy" and a "redneck." He said a good old boy drives down the road in his pickup truck drinking beer and throwing the empty cans back into the bed of the truck (or into a recycling bag, in another version). A "redneck" throws them out onto the road.

In any case, his point was to make a "good old boy" out to be something not so bad. And indeed, through the 70s and into the 80s, while a Northerner or even a snobbish Southerner might look down on a "good old boy," it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. It was an OK thing to be.

As I said in the column, my first memory of hearing the phrase used politically by a Southerner as a bad thing was after I returned home to South Carolina in 1987. I kept hearing of the way that Carroll Campbell had used it in the 1986 campaign.

As I noted also in the column, when used as Campbell used it ("good old boy system), the phrase seemed a bastardized hybrid of two very different concepts — an uncultured, generally rural, working-class white Southern male on the one hand, and a member of the very upper crust (Old Boy Network) in Britain or the American Northeast, referring to alumni of the poshest schools.

A footnote: Not until after I had written the column, and was looking for links for the blog version, did I learn that someone else had drawn the same contrast, in a letter to the editor in The New York Times in 1991. That writer, a William M. Ringle of McLean, Va., also used Billy Carter in defining one of the phrases, by the way. Finding that made me feel slightly less original, but then also slightly less crazy. The main point is that Mr. Ringle saw the two phrases as just as jarringly incompatible as I did:

According to your report that Yale University’s Skull and Bones club has voted to accept women into its ranks (news article, Oct. 26), the secret society "can no longer rightly be considered just a ‘good old boy,’ network." You make the common mistake of splicing "good ol’ boy" onto "old boy."

An old boy is an alumnus, originally of a British public school, which is of course a private school. Such old grads have been credited with creating the kind of network that Skull and Bones supposedly fosters. Old school ties maintain the bond.

Good ol’ boys, however, are Southern Americans not known for a burning desire to go to Yale. Even if they got there, they wouldn’t be tapped for Skull and Bones. Gregarious, charming and politically wise though they can be, they can’t be imagined swapping stories, between bites of Moon Pie and gulps of R. C. Cola, with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. or President Bush. Billy Carter might epitomize the good ol’ boy.

Despite strained similarities, old boys are old boys, and good ol’ boys are good ol’ boys, and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, back to Carroll Campbell, who had hit upon this odd usage. It was really rather brilliant for a man who would be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction who was not elected by a fluke (the Establishment’s — or shall we say "Old Boy Network’s" successful scuttling of the Pug Ravenel candidacy). Since everyone in power in the state was a Democrat, it was appropriate to evoke the concept of the Old Boy Network in opposing that entrenched power. And "good old boy" was a familiar Southern term by then, giving the concept a particularly South Carolina flavor — one that conveniently evoked the notion that by voting Republican for a change, you would be raising yourself above those rednecks who are running things. This played subtly to the traditional notion that Republicans were in a higher social class than Democrats.

The brilliance of this combination of ideas was that it gave voters an opportunity both to identify subliminally with a higher social class (if you voted for Campbell, you were not a "good old boy"), while at the same time satisfying a populist urge to strike a blow at the Establishment (the "Old Boy Network"). One could hardly find a better psychological formula for encouraging people who weren’t used to doing so to vote Republican.

The phrase worked so well that over the years, people across the political spectrum took it up. You found women and blacks — generally Democratic constituencies — using it to describe the white men who kept them from power. The meaning in those contexts was simpler, because it directly replaced "Old Boy Network."

Cindi Scoppe, in editing my column, said I was full of it. She said there was nothing new or original about Campbell’s use of the phrase "good old boy system." But I believe she thinks that because she doesn’t remember the time before that. Cindi came to work at The State in 1986, fresh out of college (UNC). She didn’t start covering state politics until I recruited her from the metro staff in 1987 or 1988. I, on the other hand, had dealt with politics professionally since 1975, mostly in Tennessee (as likely a place to find good old boys as anywhere).

Nevertheless, she did plant a small seed of doubt. Fortunately, Bob McAlister was able to clear it up for me. I called Bob late Friday just to give him a heads-up that indeed I was about to use the quotes I had dragged out of him a couple of weeks earlier. And Bob insisted that the "good old boy system" WAS original to the 1986 Campbell campaign.

In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced, entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.

But while Bob took credit for the spot, and therefore for the victory, when I asked whether the "good old boy" rhetorical strategy was his, he said no: Carroll Campbell had been using it in the campaign all along, and it was original to him.

The tension between "good old boy" and "Old Boy Network" inherent in "good old boy system" had never consciously occurred to Bob, he said.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

What the Knotts endorsement is really about

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On today’s page, you saw our endorsement of Jake Knotts in the runoff in the Republican nomination in Senate District 23. You also saw Cindi Scoppe’s column that was her way of thinking through, and explaining to readers, what was for the whole board a difficult decision. (And despite the little bit of fun I had about DeMint "clarifying" things, it was and is a difficult one.)

It’s worth reading, if you only get one thing out of it: This isn’t as simple as being about whether this person is for vouchers (or, worse, tax credits) or that one is against them. This is about what video poker was about — whether a group that does not have the state’s best interests at heart is allowed to intimidate the Legislature into doing its will.

It’s easy to say that, but very hard to communicate to readers. It’s hard to understand if you don’t spend as much time as I have, and as Cindi has (and she has a lot more direct experience with this than I do) observing lawmakers up close, and watching the ways they interact, and the way issues play out among them. I know it’s hard for readers to understand, because all these years later, folks still seem to have trouble understanding what the video poker issue was about for the editorial board, and why we took the position we ultimately did (to ban the industry).

I know we’ll be explaining this one for the next 10 years, and possibly longer. It’s just tough to communicate, and made tougher in this case because video poker was at least unsavory on its face. The face of this campaign funded by out-of-state extremists appears to be perfectly nice, ordinary people like Katrina Shealy and Sheri Few.

But it’s not about them. And it’s not about Jake Knotts, either. It’s certainly not about whether one or two candidates who favor (or might favor) vouchers get elected to the Legislature. By themselves, those one or two candidates can’t change the fact that spending public funds on private schools is (quite rightly) an unpopular cause. What this is about is the fact that if Jake Knotts loses, Howard Rich and company win, and that will play in the Legislature this way: Our money took Jake down. We can do the same to you. And at that point, lawmakers who don’t believe in vouchers and know their constituents don’t either can be induced to vote along with those interests anyway.

We saw it happen with video poker — until the industry was put out of business, cutting off the flow of cash that was corrupting the legislative process. We’re seeing a similar dynamic here. And that’s what this is about.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Cindi had a column about that. On Sunday, I’ll have a very different column about this endorsement. At one point in the column, I refer to one of the big differences between our editorial board and Jake Knotts — his populism. So it is that I post the video below, which features Sen. Knotts talking about that.

DeMint helps clarify things

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This has happened twice now, and it was helpful both times.

As is my usual pattern with these either-way-I’m-unhappy endorsements, I came in on the morning of June 4, the day the original Jake Knotts endorsement ran, with my usual now-it’s-too-late sense of buyer’s remorse. Not that I wished we’d endorsed Katrina Shealy (or Mike Sturkie), it was just one of those that I wasn’t going to be happy any way you looked at it.

Fortunately, Gov. Mark Sanford came to the rescue, making me feel so much better, so much more confident that we did the right thing — or as confident as I could be. We had said the governor was too fixated on getting rid of this guy — meaning that if he succeeded, it would intimidate the whole Legislature — that it was best to re-elect him. And right on cue, the governor stops everything, on the day before the end of the legislative session, to write an op-ed about why Jake’s got to go. It was highly vindicating.

Then this morning, after we’ve gone through Round Two of the Jake wars here on the editorial board, and endorsed him again in the runoff (not doing so was actually on the table, yes), and I pick up my paper today wondering whether that really was necessary, and along comes Jim DeMint to the rescue.

Things are so much clearer now. Let’s see:

This makes everything so much clearer. Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know: We endorsed McCain in the GOP primary. That’s one we were utterly sure of. And unlike the governor, we actually did so when the outcome was in doubt.

Nothing like fan mail, is there?

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After spending an inordinate amount of time trying to provide a little extra perspective on the Richland County Council runoff (stuff you couldn’t possibly get elsewhere, for whatever it’s worth), I decided I’d better check and see if there was anything urgent in my e-mail the last couple of days before dragging myself home late as usual. At that point I ran across this:

We can solve the financial problems of the city,
the transit problem, the big dig on Main St., etc.  Just hire relatives of Rep.
Clyburn.  Where is the indignation from the paper on the editorial pages? 
Between naming things for his legacy and money for "relatives of Jim" – seems
rather hypocritical.  Oh wait – he’s a democrat and black – must be
untouchable!  Larry

What do you say to someone that clueless? Basically, I say nothing. I just thought I’d share it with y’all as part of my usual campaign to let y’all know what goes on behind the scenes around here — and "fan mail" such as this is part of the gig.

Of course, if I did answer, it would be along the lines of:

  1. You’re kidding, right? You’re writing this ONE DAY after the news report (less than a day after I read it, since this was sent at 7:39 a.m.), and already all worked up about not seeing an editorial yet?
  2. What newspaper did you read it in? The paper reports it, and YOU think this is evidence that the paper is looking out for Jim Clyburn? It was, in fact, the lead story in Monday’s paper. Bet ol’ Jim appreciated that, huh?
  3. You want to see criticism of black Democrats (and obviously, this is what matters to you)? I don’t suppose the thing I just frickin’ finished typing (with video) counts, huh?

But just so you know, that missive from ol’ Larry wasn’t one of our more hostile or least-well-reasoned bits of fan mail. Here’s one of the bad ones. NOTE: Don’t read this if you’re easily offended — or even moderately sensitive, for that matter:

Sir:
Generic news reader/bureau chief/flesh-colored dildo Tim Russert is dead at 58.
Of all you awful people, he was possibly the most oleaginous — as unctuous to the
likes of Bush, Cheney and Madeline Albright as any human dildo could possibly be
. . . a real Uriah Heep, brought to life and plopped down like a steaming pile of
shit onto our television screens each Sunday to "interview" the powerful.
Good riddance, fathead.
You mediocrities at The State can lower your ass-licking tongues to half-mast.

Ray Bickley

That was sent to me, by the way, at 6:44 p.m. on Friday, the very day Tim Russert died.

You can see why I just love e-mail.

Like pulling teeth: Interviewing Gwen Kennedy

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Trying to get Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy to provide a rationale for her Richland County Council candidacy was like pulling teeth. She basically could not provide any good reason why voters should elect her back to the body she left under a cloud a decade ago.

Ms. Kennedy is best remembered for a taxpayer-funded junket she and another council member took to Hawaii. And that’s about it, really. To get further details, I had to search the database, and came up with this editorial from our editions of Dec. 8, 1997:

We should have known Richland County Councilwoman Gwendolyn Davis Kennedy wouldn’t leave quietly after her failed re-election bid.
    At her last regular meeting, Mrs. Kennedy and three of her children were up for appointments to county boards or commissions. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. This is the same councilwoman who took a $3,000 jaunt to Hawaii on county money to a conference for Western counties only to return with nothing constructive to share. Then, faced with a runoff bid she wouldn’t win, she had a change of heart and admitted the trip wasn’t a good idea.
    Mrs. Kennedy obviously is intent on having a lasting impact on Richland County by getting family members appointed to boards. Sadly, other council members didn’t see the folly in it all and appointed two of Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters to positions. Kim Kennedy and Fay Kennedy were appointed to the Music Festival Commission and the Building Board of Adjustment, respectively.
    The lame duck council, four of whom are on their way out, might have selected Mrs. Kennedy and her son, a Richland County sheriff’s deputy, to a position had the two not withdrawn their nominations after they were challenged. Mrs. Kennedy had applied for a spot on the county Planning Commission and her son, Theodore Kennedy Jr., had applied for a position on the Building Board of Adjustment.
    This was an obvious attempt by Mrs. Kennedy to try to stack county boards with herself and her family members as she leaves the council. Council members should have known better and left all of these appointments to the next council.
    Shame on them all. It’s these sort of shenanigans that have residents angry over the way the county is operated. The new Richland County Council, the membership of which will be completed in tomorrow’s election, can’t be seated soon enough.

The good news is that the new council was somewhat better. No trips to Hawaii, anyway.

But the truth is that bad candidacies are frequently marked by the lack of good qualities as much as bad ones. And the things that strikes me as I review video of our interview back in April with Ms. Kennedy is her utter inability to articulate why anyone should support her.

Please excuse the length of the above interview. I just included a lot of unedited footage (except for transitions between my camera’s three-minute-maximum clips) so you could see — if you were patient enough — just how far you can go in giving a person every possible opportunity, without that person rising to it. It’s tedious, but telling. In fact, some of you who are accustomed to the contrived theater of TV interviews will wonder, "Why were you so patient and easygoing with this woman?" The answer is that, contrary to what many of you believe, we really do try to go the extra mile to allow candidates a chance to make their case in their own way — particularly the candidates who come in with apparently little chance of gaining our endorsement. Some candidates make the most of the opportunity, and are impressive — an example of that would be Sheri Few, who didn’t think we would endorse her but to her credit wasn’t about to make that decision easy on us. Ms. Kennedy made the decision very, very easy.

Unfortunately, Ms. Kennedy managed to squeeze past a couple of more attractive candidates to make it into a runoff next week. One nice thing about runoffs — it gives me time to present you with more info about the candidates that I was able to do during the crowded initial vote.

If you don’t have the patience to make it through the long video above, here’s a shorter and more interesting one. After having given her every opportunity to deal with her checkered past — a simple, "I did wrong when I was in office before, and have learned my lesson" would have been good — we finally had to confront her (politely, of course, that being Warren’s style) about the incident that lost her the position on council.

Basically, once she was specifically asked about "The Trip," she tried lamely to deflect. She tried to allege that the controversy was over her husband going, and that wasn’t at taxpayer expense. She noted that she’s been to Hawaii a number of times, and only once at taxpayer expense — as though that established anything other than the fact that she likes Hawaii. She tries to make us believe that she believes that if elected, we would falsely report that the European trip she’s saving up for was on the taxpaper’s dime.

But what am I doing describing it? Just watch the video.

Desirée Jaimovich, Argentine journalist

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Remember a few months back, when I was visited by Zoe Rachel Usherwood, Foreign Affairs Producer for Sky News in the U.K.? Well, whether you remember or not, it was right after the primaries, when there had been a lot of international attention focused on South Carolina. Well, today the same international program brought Desirée Jaimovich by the office.

Desirée is a writer and editor for the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language publication. Argentina is, as you probably know, one of the more cosmopolitan of South American countries, a lot of people having ethnic roots from across Europe.

We talked about a number of things. She asked in particular about a recent story that recently led our front page, "S.C. first in on-job deaths of Hispanics." I told her that illegal immigration was an extremely hot issue in this country, but that unfortunately, while our lawmakers will demagogue no end about illegality, there is little talk among our politicians about the dangerous conditions that illegals often work in — and there should be.

She of course asked WHY illegal immigration was such a hot issue, and I somewhat glibly told her that it was a matter of xenophobia. A little later, though, I told her not to go by me, that I don’t understand and never have understood the roots of passion over illegal immigration. (And don’t explain to me for the millionth time that it’s because it’s illegal; as I indicated back here, maybe I’ll believe that’s core of it when folks get as stirred up about speeding on the highway.)

Anyway, we had a nice visit. I never did practice my Spanish on her though, because it embarrasses me. When I was a kid living in Ecuador, I was more or less as fluent in Spanish as English. But I’ve been back in this country since 1965, which is a long time. Whenever I try to speak it now, it’s such a struggle that I find it distressing.

Lawmaker to level charges at police chief

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This release struck me as unusual when I got it, but I set it aside because I didn’t have time to blog about it. But when I receive a phone message from a someone making sure I had received the message and knew about the coming news conference, I decided to give y’all a heads-up on this:

SOUTH CAROLINA HOUSE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS
Media advisory for June 16, 2008

REPRESENTATIVE TODD RUTHERFORD TO HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE IN RESPONSE TO THE CLUB LEVEL SHOOTING INCIDENT
    Rep. Todd Rutherford [D-Richland] will hold a press conference in room 305 of the Blatt building.   His remarks will highlight the Club Level shooting incident, and pinpoint precautionary measures that could have been taken by Columbia Police Chief Tandy P. Carter. 

WHO: Representative Todd Rutherford
WHEN:  Tomorrow (Tuesday, June 17, 2007) at 10:00 a.m.
WHERE: 1105 Pendleton Street, Blatt Building Room 305, Columbia, SC 29201

Kelly S. Adams
Director
SC House Democratic Caucus
P.O. Box 12049
Columbia, SC 29211

Maybe it’s not all that unusual for a state lawmaker to poke his nose into a municipal police matter. But to do so under the aegis of his party’s caucus is weird. To go to such lengths to call attention to it makes it sort of weird squared.

Wow. This police chief just got here, and he’s got this much heat coming down already?

Classy response to defeat

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Candidates who lose elections seldom do this sort of thing, so when they do I am favorably impressed. After a fairly bitter campaign that featured mutual character attacks, it struck me that D.J. Carson was moved to send this out:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA ADVISORY

June 15, 2008
    D.J. Carson congratulates Joe McEachern and challenges South Carolina to continue to make public education a priority.…
    Richland Co. – I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Joe McEachern and offer my support to him and all Democrats running for office in November. Though the media has reported our differences on the issues the past three months, we now must come together as a party, a community, and continue to find solutions to the many challenges facing District 77 and South Carolina overall.
    When I started this journey nearly three months ago, I did so on the foundation that our public schools are the single most important factor to making South Carolina a more successful and more productive state. I truly believe there is a direct link between public education, low crime, and economic development. I am pleased to see that through this campaign private school vouchers, tuition tax credits, and home-school tax credits and their negative impact on public education came to the forefront.  These types of misguided solutions would take valuable resources away from our public schools and put our children at a disadvantage. I along with all residents in District 77 challenge Mr. McEachern and the South Carolina General Assembly to champion public schools and public education over the next two years.
    Finally, I offer my sincere appreciation to the educators, parents, volunteers, campaign staff, and most importantly the voters who believe in my message and vision. Though we came short in our ultimate goal, we were able to push the message of supporting public education to the center of the debate. Working together we will bring needed change to District 77 and South Carolina as a whole.

Thank you all and God Bless!

D.J. Carson

Yeah, I know — you can call it just crass "party loyalty" or some such (he doesn’t wish any Republicans or independents well, you’ll notice), or a CYA move to keep his political options open in the future, or both. And yeah, it’s kind of preachy for a congratulatory message.

But when a guy does something more generous than I expected, I tend to want to make note of it. If we don’t encourage good sportsmanship, we can expect it to die out completely.

Nowadays, there are so few classy gestures that I care less about why they are extended; I’m just glad to see them.

Still fired up, 12 months on

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LIKE A ROCK STAR who prefers to do his new stuff, Barack Obama had not played his greatest hit in several weeks.
    At least, Kevin Griffis hadn’t heard it for awhile, not until Sen. Obama “pulled it out” at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D., the week that he sewed up the Democratic nomination.
    He rocked the house. Like besotted boomers doing the “na, na, na, na-na-na-na” part of “Hey Jude” with Paul McCartney, the fans sang right along.
    Mr. Griffis, 34, who spent much of 2007 here in South Carolina handling the press for the Obama campaign, was there when the hit was born.
    You’ve heard the story; Mr. Obama has told it often enough. He went to Greenwood on June 15, 2007 — one year ago today — as a favor to S.C. Rep. Anne Parks. He wasn’t having a great day. As he told the crowd at the Corn Palace:

    I feel terrible…. It is a miserable day. Pouring down rain, looks awful. I stagger over to the door and I pull open the door and pick up the newspaper and start drinking some coffee and there’s a bad story about me in The New York Times.
    I pack up my belongings and go down stairs and as I’m about to get in the car my umbrella blows open and I get soaked. So by the time I’m in the car I am mad, I am sleepy and I’m wet….

    “He really was grumpy there that morning,” said Mr. Griffis. But he did the drill, quietly, doggedly, doing what you do when you’ve promised to show up — working the room, one dutiful handshake at a time. “I wasn’t paying attention,” said Mr. Griffis. Just the usual, numb routine.
    Suddenly, this little lady — Greenwood County councilwoman Edith Childs, whom Obama describes as just over five feet tall, 65 years old, with “a big church hat” — starts her patented chant: “Fired up!” The Greenwood folks, for whom this is habit, echo the call, which she follows with “Ready to go!”
    The senator would later recall being startled: “I jumped.” Mr. Griffis, a quiet, sober-faced young white guy from Atlanta, reacted this way:
    “It really kind of scared me — I didn’t know what was going on.”
    And he had no idea how the thing would become a rallying cry. For a long time, neither did the rest of the country.
    For the next few months, Mr. Griffis recalled last week, the media narrative was all about how Obama wasn’t catching fire, how he was trailing in the polls among black voters in South Carolina — a self-fulfilling perception.
    Then, in the last weeks of the year, the narrative changed. In a Dec. 23 column, David Broder of The Washington Post wrote that “The stump speech he has developed in the closing stages of the pre-Christmas campaign is a thing of beauty… Hillary Clinton has nothing to match it.”
    It was the speech that climaxed each time with “Fired up… Ready to go!” Reality matching perception, Sen. Obama rose quickly in the polls, and won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.
    As the campaign suffered a setback in New Hampshire and moved on to South Carolina, William Safire — former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and ardent student of words and their power — wrote in The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 20 about the speech and its origins: “That local origin of the inspiring chant, and its familiarity to many voters in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary this week, means a lot to the Obama campaign.”
    Jim Davenport of The Associated Press (and formerly of The State) reported that Ms. Childs — who insisted to reporters as her fame grew that she was 59, not 65 — got the “Fired up” routine from Nelson Rivers, NAACP field operations chief, and he got it from the late civil rights activist and Charleston native Jondelle Harris Johnson.
    But however it started, Obama has taken the chant to undreamt-of places: Des Moines, Iowa. The Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. The Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
    Long before he got “fired up,” of course, Barack Obama was a gifted and charismatic speaker, one who could get any Democratic crowd “ready to go.” And he’s going up against a Republican who is not a master of the set-piece speech, as he demonstrated when he tried upstaging Sen. Obama on the night he clinched the nomination, and bombed on national television.
    So it was that John McCain challenged Mr. Obama to meet him on his turf — the “town hall”-style meeting. On Friday, the campaigns were squabbling over whether the events would even take place.
    I hope they do. I had the chance to see how Sen. McCain connected with voters in small venues in South Carolina last year, during the months that his campaign was down and out, according to conventional “wisdom” at the time.
    And as Mr. Griffis said last week in Columbia (where he was getting reacquainted with his 4-year-old daughter, after having been away in Virginia, Ohio, Mississippi, Indiana and South Dakota almost every minute since January), such a format plays to his candidate’s strength as well.
    “He’s a remarkably empathetic person,” he said, “and so fiercely intelligent,” he shines when given “the opportunity to put that on display.”
    I agree. For the first time in many an election cycle, my first choice in both major parties will be on the ballot in the fall. Each of them got to where he is by pulling away from the polarizing force of his respective party.
    The nation deserves to see them interact — repeatedly, if possible — in a setting as free of artifice as possible. That would be something for all of us to get fired up about.

Hey, Lindsey, if you thought THAT guy was a nativist, wait until the fall

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We knew Buddy Witherspoon had his problems with people who are different coming into the country. Yeah, yeah, he said the usual stuff latter-day nativists say, about how it’s just because they broke the law, but he was pretty frank that he was worried these folks would "weaken our common culture and national identity." And we know about his past associations.

But hey, at least ol’ Buddy did limit himself to the illegals. Here’s what Bob Conley, whose thin vote margin over Michael Cone for the Democratic nomination to this very same Senate seat will likely trigger a recount, has to say on his Web site:

The legal
importation of foreign workers is also driving down wages, and placing
Americans in unemployment lines. This is wrong, and must end.

He elaborated on this in our interview. He complained in particular about foreign engineers coming into the country, making it hard for American engineers to get jobs. Mr. Conley describes himself as "a Commercial Pilot and a Flight Instructor as well as a licensed Professional Engineer," so apparently he knows about these things.

Rob Miller’s victory speech

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Sorry I haven’t had time to blog today, folks. Not much to say — or at least, nothing that needs to be said immediately — about the primary results. The overwhelming majority of our endorsees did well, I see. More about that later.

Right now, I’m playing hooky from a meeting (Bob Coble and Charles Austin are talking about Columbia city budget matters with Warren Bolton in our board room) to try to catch up on all sorts of neglected work, such as reading the live page proofs that I have to have to Mike in 18 minutes.

This is e-mail I got last night, and am just now seeing. I can’t stop to read it, but I’m sure it will be of interest:

June 10, 2008
News Release – For Immediate Release

Rob Miller‘s Victory Speech

Victory Speech:
First, let me thank everyone who helped us win our first battle for change tonight, especially my wife Shane and my son Robert.
    Blaine Lotz called me a few minutes ago.  Blain is a good man, and he ran a good campaign.
    Three-and-a-half months ago, I was a Captain in the US Marine Corps.  On February 16, we began our campaign for change.
    Tonight we celebrate this win, but tomorrow the real battle to change Washington begins. 
    The incumbent is a proud card-carrying member of the status quo. He’s been in Washington for years voting for ballooning deficits and out-of-control spending. He took money from and had fundraisers with corrupt and dishonest politicians like Tom DeLay, who he still says is a man of integrity.  Joe Wilson has been in Washington too long. He doesn’t believe in change and is out of touch with the people he is supposed to represent.
    This campaign, our campaign, is all about change. Unlike the incumbent, we understand that times are tough.
    We’ll work for change by developing a sensible exit strategy for Iraq and reinvest those resources here at home to rebuild our infrastructure because we need good jobs, we need safer neighborhoods, and we need more affordable health care here in South Carolina.
    We’ll work for change by pushing Congress to do more to develop alternative forms of energy so we can say goodbye forever gas that’s to $4.00 a gallon.
    We’ll work for change by making the politicians in Washington balance the budget. Families all over South Carolina live within their means and it’s time for Congress to do the same.
    The forces of the Status quo will not stand down without a fight. But, after serving  13 years in the Marine Corps, to include twice in Iraq, I’ve never been afraid of a good fight.
    I understand I can’t win this by myself; I need all of you fighting with me.
    Go to my web site at RobMillerForCongress.com and join our battle for change.
    The battle for change begins tomorrow.
    Thank you.

Noticing the last line, I should point out: "Tomorrow" would be "today" now, since this was sent last night.

Demise of the Executive Institute

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Here’s a veto that I missed last week. I guess I should have noticed it, since it was one of those rare ones that the Legislature actually sustained:

I am very sorry to have to report to you that funding for the Executive Institute was vetoed by the Governor and the veto was sustained by the House of Representatives.  Therefore the Institute will not begin it’s 19th year in August as planned and we will shut down the operation at the end of this fiscal year.

I would like to thank all of you for the friendship, enthusiasm and support you have shown us over the years.  You are the major reason for the success we have had.  Thanks so much for 18 great years. 

Tina

Tina Joseph Hatchell
Director
Executive Institute

Alongside such biggies as the SCHIP program and indigent defense, this one was easy to overlook. But now that I know, I’m sorry to hear it.

I’m an alumnus of the Executive Institute, class of ’94. Back then, the director of the program was Phil Grose. That was thee year that I was getting ready to come up to the editorial department from news (end of ’93, beginning of ’94). My predecessor Tom McLean paid for me to do the program, because back in those days, we had money for such professional development. Primarily, the Institute existed to train up-and-coming managers in state government, although there was always a smattering of private sector folks for leavening — which helped give the government types exposure to the private sector, and vice versa. The interaction itself was educational.

It was particularly useful because of the Institute’s teaching method. It was run in conjunction with the Kennedy School at Harvard, and the instructors led the class through real-life case studies, in which we were asked to put ourselves in the places of the public administrators who had navigated their way through a variety of crises and challenges.

Being the newspaper guy, I had to overcome a great deal of distrust and wariness on the part of my classmates, which was essential to the kind of interaction that the classes called for. Middle managers in government see press types as natural enemies, for a simple reason: Newspapers don’t write about what they do except when there is a problem, consequently we help create the phenomenon we see in the comments on this blog — a lot of folks in the electorate who only see them in terms of the worst mistakes that anyone like them has ever made, because that’s what gets written about.

But we managed to get a good enough rapport going to have some pretty good discussions going. Frequently, my role was to try to convince people that having the problem (in the case study) get into the newspapers was not the end of the world. It was interesting, and I think helpful to having a better-run state government.

Does that mean I think lawmakers should have overridden the veto. No, not if they were going to leave the prisons, mental health, our roads and 4K all underfunded. But if they were going to override either this or their pet "Competitive" Grants Program, they should have overridden this.

So guess which one they overrode — "overwhelmingly"?

Modest hoopla

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This is a subtle thing, but I’ll share it anyway.

I couldn’t help noticing something that this release from Buddy Witherspoon…

Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate
www.BuddyWitherspoon.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  –  June 9th, 2008

The Buddy Witherspoon for U.S. Senate campaign will be hosting an Election Night gathering on June 10th at 7pm.  The event will be held at Sticky Fingers, which is located at 380 Columbiana Blvd., (near Columbiana Mall) Columbia, SC.  Buddy’s supporters and the media are welcome to attend.
            ###

… and this one from Rob Miller…

June 9, 2008
Media Advisory

Rob Miller to Address Supporters Tuesday Night
Rob Miller, Democratic candidate for Congress in the Second Congressional District of South Carolina, will address supporters Tuesday night in Columbia at his campaign’s Primary night celebration.

Miller for Congress Primary Night Celebration
June 10, 2008 – 7:00 PM
The Inn at USC – 1619 Pendleton Street, Columbia (Palmetto Room)
            ###

… had in common. Namely, neither is claiming that this will be a victory celebration, as so many campaigns tend to do.

In Mr. Witherspoon’s case, the lack of hubris is well advised. In the other case, I’ve had the impression that Rob Miller had a pretty good shot at his party’s nomination in the 2nd congressional district. His opponent might have rank on him, but I don’t think that gives him the advantage. We’ll see, though.

Mayor Bob on water restrictions

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Going through my e-mail from the weekend, I see this one came in from Mayor Bob Saturday:

    I wanted to update you on the water restrictions for Northeast Columbia. The restrictions will be the same as last year in terms of the even-odd address watering. Additionally we will limit the number of taps to 1700 until June 2009. Only 50% of the taps were used from the same allotment as last year. Any project that does not need water until June 2009 is not restricted.
    Three projects that will expand our capacity to serve the Northeast will be complete by June 2009. Those projects include a 48 inch line that extends eleven miles from the Lake Murray plant to the Northeast, another tank on Old Reemer Road, and a new pumping station on Monticello Road. The Northeast will not have these distribution problems after June 2009.
    The issue with the Northeast is not a matter of a lack of water. The system can now produce 146 million gallons per day. That is an increase of 20 million from last year. All of Atlanta and Raleigh were under water restrictions last summer with the drought. California is under development restrictions now.
    We are asking all customers to voluntarily conserve water. Our program is called "Conserve Columbia." Material is on our website and has been mailed to customers.  Thanks

Thought I’d better give you a heads-up, seeing as how some of y’all live out that way…

Marking time at the State House

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
IN THE LAST 15 minutes of the 2008 session of the S.C. General Assembly, there were three things going on in the House chamber: The speaker and clerks and others up on the podium were fussing about finishing important paperwork of some sort. All of the other House members were wandering about on the floor, socializing, saying goodbye, slapping backs, shaking hands, sharing stories and so forth.
    All, that is, but two members, Reps. Chris Hart and Walt McLeod. Mr. Hart was at the lectern. Mr. McLeod was at his desk. Their microphoned voices rose indistinctly above the buzz of their milling, meandering colleagues. A sample of their vaudevillian dialogue:

Rep. McLEOD: Is it correct to say that, at the present time, our state prison system is operating at a deficit?
Rep. HART: That’s absolutely correct, and I’m glad you mentioned that, Mr. McLeod…

    They were discussing a two-part proposal made by Attorney General Henry McMaster earlier in the session. He had proposed to do away with what’s left of parole in our state prisons, while simultaneously creating a new “middle court” that would punish first-time, nonviolent wrongdoers in ways other than sending them to prison.
    What Messrs. McLeod and Hart were teaming up to say — between Mr. McLeod’s friendly, leading questions and Mr. Hart’s “thank you for that good question” answers — was that it would be crazy to do the former without first doing the latter. (Their language was more polite; I’m just cutting to the chase.)
    That’s because, as Mr. Hart explained, South Carolina already did away with parole for violent offenders long ago. And since then, we’ve been jamming more and more prisoners (violent and nonviolent) into our prisons, while cutting the budget of the Corrections Department year after year. We now spend less per prisoner than any other state in the union, while locking up more of our population than most. We lock up more prisoners with fewer guards, and make basically no effort to rehabilitate them. So our prisons are increasingly dangerous places — for the guards, for the prisoners and for those of us on the outside who depend on the worst criminals staying inside.
    Some of you will say, Oh, isn’t that just like a couple of liberal Democrats, prattling on about mollycoddling prisoners. If you say that, you’re not paying attention.
    One of Gov. Mark Sanford’s biggest gripes about the budget the Legislature just passed — and remember, this is Mark Sanford, the most fanatical enemy of “growing government” ever to enter the State House — was that it does not spend enough to run our prisons safely and responsibly.
    He is guided in this by his hyper-conservative director of Corrections, Jon Ozmint. (I once toured a prison with Mr. Ozmint, a former prosecutor. He kept striking up chats with the prisoners. He’d ask, “Who sent you here?” The prisoner would name a judge. Mr. Ozmint would say, “Oh, Judge So-and-So! He’s a really good judge! He’s really fair, isn’t he?” The prisoner would gape at Mr. Ozmint as though he were a Martian.) Mr. Ozmint, after years of refusing to complain on the record, wrote an op-ed piece this year to beg lawmakers not to abolish parole, suggesting that if they did, he and his shrunken staff would not be able to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker.
    Everybody who is familiar with these facts knows these things. Henry McMaster knows these things. So why did he propose something that flew in the face of the facts (abolishing parole), at the same time as proposing something that made perfect sense in light of the same facts (alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders, to reserve prison space for the worst criminals)?
    Because he is a political realist. He knows the South Carolina General Assembly. “No parole” was the tooth-rotting sweetener to help the alternative-sentencing medicine go down.
    The good news here is that the Legislature didn’t abolish parole this year. The bad news is that it didn’t provide for alternative sentencing, either. What it did, in the end, was neglect the whole problem as usual, sending more people behind bars while we pay less and less to keep them there.
    It was the same approach lawmakers took to early-childhood education; our crumbling, unsafe roads; our emergency rooms crammed with mental patients; our struggling rural schools — leave it all to fester.
    What did lawmakers do this year besides throw up their hands over the lack of money, after having cut taxes by about a billion dollars over the last few sessions? Well, they passed an “immigration reform” bill that will accomplish two things: force businesses to do a lot of paperwork, and enable lawmakers to tell the voters in this election year that they had “done something” about illegal immigration. And boy did they spend a lot of time and energy on that.
    Back to Mr. Hart and Mr. McLeod. If the whole abolish parole/alternative sentencing thing was already dead for the year, why were they going on so earnestly? Well, they’re just that way; they’re very earnest guys. It was pointless, really — perhaps even a bit priggish of them. They knew they were just marking time and so did everybody else, so you can’t blame anybody for ignoring them. It was just political theater; they were actors in a play with a “what if?” plot, as in, “What if lawmakers realistically and intelligently engaged the actual challenges facing their state?”
    Only an easily distracted fool who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on would have paid attention to them at all.

See the video of Hart and McLeod here.

Our last interview: Phil Black, who’s challenging Joe Wilson

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OK, technically this wasn’t our last interview, but it is that last one from which I have video. As we neared the end (I lost count somewhere around 45 interviews, but there weren’t more than a handful after that), we had to do some of them (Buddy Witherspoon, Joe Wilson and Bob Conley) by phone.

You may not have heard much about Phil Black, who’s running against Joe Wilson in the 2nd congressional district. He’s not one of your big-budget candidates, and by his own account he’s pretty much been treated like "a red-headed stepchild" at party functions.

But I think you’ll like him. I did, when I met him Tuesday. I particularly liked his willingness to think outside his party’s box. He’s a single-payer health care guy, like me, and he actually has an intriguingly creative idea on how to deal with illegal immigration.

So, Doug Ross will say, why didn’t you endorse him? Why did you go with the incumbent, yet again? Doug won’t like my answer, which is this: Yep, I really liked Mr. Black. But I’ve never seen him hold public office (he’s serve on two school boards, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time), so I’ve had no opportunity to observe from experience whether he would really be the smart, down-to-earth regular guy he seems to be, or whether he just makes a good first impression.

With Joe Wilson, you know what you’re going to get. And there’s great truth in what Mr. Black says about him: "Joe Wilson is a fine individual, (but) Joe Wilson is a career politician."

But I’m just not prepared to send a guy as far away as Washington when I’ve never had a chance to observe him on the job.

See, Doug? I told you you wouldn’t like it. Anyway, watch the video. Get to know Phil. Joe you know already. Make up your own mind.