Following up on this conversation from last week, I had lunch with Chad Walldorf today. And I pulled Cindi Scoppe along with us, so that someone would remember the details of the conversation. (I’m a, you know, Big Picture kind of guy. And as I’ve said before, I don’t take notes and converse normally at the same time.)
I pretty much came away from it with the same impression I had of Chad before, which is that he is a really earnest guy who wants to be a force for positive change and truly believes he is going about it the right way.
He thought I had some other impression of him, based on the things I’ve said about movements and entities with which he has been associated — school choice, Gov. Mark Sanford, the Club for Growth and ReformSC. Of all those, the most relevant one for discussion here is ReformSC.
Chad wanted to get across to me that ReformSC is first and foremost about government restructuring, and it’s hard to find anything nearer and dearer to my wonkish heart than that. I have no doubt that as far as he is concerned, that is completely true. My problem is with things that are outside the purview of what Chad can control or what ReformSC may or may not intend.
Chad was really upset at the reaction I had to this fund-raising letter, written by one of my favorite people in the Sanford administration. That was one of my problems with it — the person who wrote it. If Tom Davis, of all people, wrote a fund-raising letter for ReformSC that ignored government restructuring and emphasized the whacky anti-government stuff that Sanford is for, that group is going to have a big hole to climb out of to get my trust. In other words, if Tom Davis has gone over to the Dark Side, all Jedi are in danger.
I figured that if Tom wrote that, somebody must have deeply impressed upon him the idea that he needed to push the anti-government stuff, rather than the good-government stuff. For Tom to forget to talk about restructuring in selling ReformSC, it would have to have been crowded out of his head by an awful lot of talk about the other stuff.
Furthermore, even if that was just a mistake on Tom’s part, if people gave money to the organization as a result of that letter, it would be reasonable to believe that they fully expected the group to use their money to push its anti-government planks (from the Web site: a Newt Gingrich video on "Why can the private sector accomplish what government can’t?"), not the restructuring. And what is that likely to make me think the group will eventually do, no matter what its original intentions may have been? Money talks, and that other stuff walks, you know. From what I’ve seen, people who give money for anti-government reasons generally don’t want to see good government. First, they don’t believe there’s any such thing, and second, if government got better, fewer people would hate it, and their cause would lose ground.
Finally, there is the record of the last few years. Here we have a group that is unabashed about its desire to remake the Legislature in the governor’ image, and what is our experience with that? SCRG and CIA, which have spent remarkable amounts of out-of-state money in an effort to replace some of the best and brightest in the Legislature with pretty much any doofus who promises not to stand in the way of tuition tax credits.
All of that made Tom’s letter very ominous.
The upshot? I believe Chad is a fine fellow. I don’t think he wants to destroy public schools, even though he favors a policy that I firmly believe would profoundly undermine the already-weakened consensus in our society that supports universal education. And I don’t believe he wants to arbitrarily shrink government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, even though he is a leading member of the local Club for Growth.
And I believe he fully intends for ReformSC to be an instrument for restructuring state government to make it a better servant to the people of South Carolina. As to whether I believe that will be the outcome … I will have to see something positive that I haven’t seen since Mark Sanford was elected in 2002 before I am convinced.
Marc Wilson, frequent contributor to The State‘s op-ed page.
