Category Archives: South Carolina

Blast from the past

Biden vs. Dodd in S.C.

As you know, while the national media falls all over itself recording each breath, each blink of Barack and Hillary (do we really need last names; we know them too well for formality), some other Democratic candidates, largely ignored, have been working their posteriors off here in South Carolina.

As readers of this blog know, no one of that ilk has been working the state harder than Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. Well, last week, on MLK Day, he and brother aspirant Chris Dodd of Connecticut were both working the same crowds in Columbia.

As I review some of my video from that day (sorry to be so far behind), I thought I might share with you something that struck me that day.

You’ll remember Mr. Biden’s over-the-top performance before the Columbia Rotary in November. I wrote about it at the time, in addition to providing some very low-quality video from 35my phone.

Welcome to another edition of Bad Cinema, as I present the same candidate speaking in a room with insufficient lighting last week.

Here’s what struck me: Before the Rotary, a group that he perceived to be largely Republican, he waxed populist on that nasty Mexico down there sending us all their poor and their drugs. I’d never seen him like this before. He had given a spirited performance at the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting back in May, but it was nothing like the energy he poured into Rotary.

But in front of the Columbia Urban League and the NAACP and related groups, he was completely — if you’ll excuse the phrase — vanilla. Bland as they come. Like a high school kid trying to win a Daughters of the American Revolution oratory contest or something. Quotes from JFK’s inaugural speech and the like. Very safe.

By contrast, Chris Dodd went the red-meat route, including a headline-grabber about the Confederate flag delivered on the State House steps.

Now, admittedly, I missed some of the Biden speech at the Dome. But I heard all of it at the Urban League breakfast, and the low energy he displayed was notable. So I’m noting it.

I’m not sure what it means.

None of this is meant to express a preference for Chris Dodd because he chose to be more interesting or anything. He’ll have to do a lot more than that before I forget how he chose his party over my boy Joe back during the campaign.

Closing the process

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So that you’ll know where to direct your ire — or your appreciation, in some cases — here’s how S.C. House members voted on whether to close Republican (and other) Caucus meetings to the public:

{BC-SC-Closed Meetings-Roll Call,0384}
{By The Associated Press}=
The 59-52 roll call by which the South Carolina House adopted a Republican-backed plan to allow caucuses to meet behind closed doors.
On this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote to adopt the change.
Voting "yes" were 2 Democrats and 57 Republicans.
Voting "no" were 42 Democrats and 10 Republicans.
Not voting were 6 Democrats and 7 Republicans.

{Democrats Voting Yes}
Bales, Eastover; Neilson, Darlington;

{Republicans Voting Yes}
Ballentine, Irmo; Bannister, Greenville; Barfield, Conway; Bedingfield, Mauldin; Bingham, West Columbia; Bowen, Anderson; Brady, Columbia; Cato, Travelers Rest; Ceips, Beaufort; Chalk, Hilton Head Island; Chellis, Summerville; Clemmons, Myrtle Beach; Cooper, Piedmont; Dantzler, Goose Creek; Delleney, Chester; Gambrell, Honea Path; Gullick, Lake Wylie; Haley, Lexington; Hardwick, Surfside Beach; Harrell, Charleston; Harrison, Columbia; Haskins, Greenville; Herbkersman, Bluffton; Hinson, Goose Creek; Hiott, Pickens; Kelly, Woodruff; Leach, Greer; Limehouse, Charleston; Littlejohn, Spartanburg; Loftis, Greenville; Lowe, Florence; Lucas, Hartsville; Mahaffey, Lyman; Merrill, Daniel Island; Mulvaney, Indian Land; Owens, Pickens; Pinson, Greenwood; M.A. Pitts, Laurens; Rice, Easley; Sandifer, Seneca; Scarborough, Charleston; Shoopman, Greer; D.C. Smith, North Augusta; G.M. Smith, Sumter; G.R. Smith, Simpsonville; J.R. Smith, Langley; W.D. Smith, Spartanburg; Spires, Pelion; Taylor, Laurens; Thompson, Anderson; Umphlett, Moncks Corner; Viers, Myrtle Beach; Walker, Landrum; White, Anderson; Whitmire, Walhalla; Witherspoon, Conway; Young, Summerville;

{Democrats Voting No}
Alexander, Florence; Anderson, Georgetown; Battle, Nichols; Bowers, Brunson; Branham, Lake City; Brantley, Ridgeland; Breeland, Charleston; G. Brown, Bishopville; R. Brown, Hollywood; Clyburn, Aiken; Cobb-Hunter, Orangeburg; Funderburk, Camden; Govan, Orangeburg; Hart, Columbia; Harvin, Summerton; Hayes, Hamer; Hodges, Green Pond; Hosey, Barnwell; Howard, Columbia; Jefferson, Pineville; Jennings, Bennettsville; Kennedy, Greeleyville; Kirsh, Clover; Knight, St. George; Mack, North Charleston; McLeod, Little Mountain; Miller, Pawleys Island; Mitchell, Spartanburg; Moss, Gaffney; J.H. Neal, Hopkins; J.M. Neal, Kershaw; Ott, St. Matthews; Parks, Greenwood; Rutherford, Columbia; Scott, Columbia; Sellers, Denmark; F.N. Smith, Greenville; Stavrinakis, Charleston; Vick, Chesterfield; Weeks, Sumter; Whipper, North Charleston; Williams, Darlington;

{Republicans Voting No}
Agnew, Abbeville; Edge, North Myrtle Beach; Frye, Batesburg-Leesville; Hamilton, Taylors; Huggins, Columbia; Perry, Aiken; E.H. Pitts, Lexington; Simrill, Rock Hill; Talley, Spartanburg; Toole, West Columbia;

{Those Not Voting}
Democrats: Allen, Greenville; Anthony, Union; Coleman, Winnsboro; Moody-Lawrence, Rock Hill; Phillips, Gaffney; J.E. Smith, Columbia;
Republicans: Cotty, Columbia; Crawford, Florence; Davenport, Boiling Springs; Duncan, Clinton; Hagood, Mt. Pleasant; Skelton, Six Mile; Stewart, Aiken;

Asking the governor

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This is the audio of my effort to get the governor talking about the reform ideas that he and new Superintendent of Education Jim Rex have in common. I wrote about this in today’s column.

It was interesting for me to go back and listen to it. I had forgotten how long and hard I had pressed to get a few seconds of response from the governor — and what he did say was remarkably noncommital even by his standards. (My question took a minute-and-a-half to set up and ask; the governor answered vaguely for 15 seconds.)

Poor Tom Davis jumped in and talked and talked (for more than two minutes) after the governor stopped, and I had the impression he was consciously trying to make up for the governor’s apparent lack of interest in what is really a remarkable opportunity to achieve some dramatic reforms by reaching across party lines.

I remain hopeful, though. If the governor does decide to seize this chance, he should find a willing partner in Mr. Rex, who pretty much jumps at any opportunity to build bridges on these issues. For a little corroboration of that, check out this video from after the State of the State address. You can fast-forward through it; Mr. Rex is the last person interviewed by my sometime TV sidekick Andy Gobeil.

Sanford and Rex column

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Sanford, Rex should work together
on common reform goals

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
“I think there is a lot of common ground, and hopefully we’ll find it.”
— Jim Rex,
superintendent of education,
on reform ideas that both he
and Gov. Mark Sanford support

Gov. Mark Sanford is the most prominent advocate of converting South Carolina’s separately elected constitutional offices into Cabinet posts. He is also probably the biggest political impediment to such essential reform.
One day after Sen. Glenn McConnell delivered
on his promise to get constitutional officers legislation out of committee, a Democratic senator said what so many have said before: He sees the merit in consolidating the executive branch, but the idea of giving the governor power to appoint the superintendent of education really gives him heartburn.
And no wonder. This governor showed virtually no interest in our schools in his first term, beyond leading an all-out campaign to undermine taxpayer confidence in the very idea of public education, and pay parents to desert it.
But that was then. Now, with a new term, and a new superintendent, there’s an opportunity for progress — if the governor (and the superintendent of education, but I’m less worried about him) will seize it.
Based on what Mr. Sanford has said over the past four years, and what Jim Rex said during the 2006 campaign, there are significant reform ideas that both of them favor.
If they are serious about these ideas, they should get behind them with all their might:

Merit pay for teachers. Mr. Rex has told teachers they’d better get used to the idea of being paid according to their performance, rather than just by the old standards of degrees and longevity. The governor has proposed that.
More educational “choice.” Mr. Rex, who has the support of the very forces who have most resisted the governor’s “choice” advocacy (which has unfortunately focused primarily on promoting private schools), wants parents to be able to choose the public schools their children attend.
Comprehensive tax reform. This would help beyond education, but it is essential to fixing the inequitable way schools are funded across the state.
School district consolidation. The governor would reduce the state’s wasteful, duplicative archipelago of 85 districts to one per county. Mr. Rex wouldn’t go that far — he suspects that some counties, such as Horry, are too big for a single administration — but he sees the need for some consolidation of districts, and certainly sharing services across district lines. There seems room for an alliance between them on at least the concept.

The concept is simple common sense. Some of the worst schools in the state are in some of the tiniest, least rationally conceived, districts. There is a crying need for consolidation, and a fierce resistance that has kept the Legislature deaf to it.
Ditto with the other ideas, which have been mightily resisted by what detractors call the “education establishment” — a constituency that lawmakers have been loathe to offend.
But if both of these statewide elected officials really poured their considerable political capital — the governor was re-elected by the greatest margin in 16 years, and Mr. Rex has the almost total support of the most critical constituencies — into these fundamental reforms, our state could be transformed.
That would, incidentally, also advance the idea of putting the state Department of Education — which presides over nearly half of state spending — where it should be, under the authority of future governors. Ironically, Mr. Rex actually opposes that. But if education advocates could for once see this governor publicly backing serious proposals for positive change, and see Mr. Rex behind those same ideas, they could be reassured that maybe the governor’s office isn’t an inherently destructive force.
Can it happen? I don’t know. The governor has expended little energy on pushing these ideas in the past. For that matter, we’ve yet to confirm whether Mr. Rex is more than talk — and senior Sanford adviser Tom Davis has expressed doubts that the superintendent will be able to stand firm in the face of opposition within his own party.
But so far Mr. Rex has been the guy pushing. He initiated a meeting with the governor several weeks ago. He says both “talked candidly about the belief that we had a lot of common ground.”
“Yeah,” said the governor when I asked him about it. “We’ve had a couple of visits, and they’ve been pleasant, and um, I think productive. I like his style; he seems to be very matter of fact. Ummm. So, yeah.”
When the governor went no further, Mr. Davis jumped in to say there was “tremendous opportunity” to work together on these issues. But the governor’s staff still seems to wonder how far Mr. Rex would go with them.
If I were Mr. Rex, I’d be wondering to what degree the governor’s commitment exceeds lip service. But there’s one way for everyone to be sure: Come out together on these issues in a huge, public way, each binding the other with his unmistakable commitment.
The governor was also friendly, in a noncommittal way, with Inez Tenenbaum at the start of his first term. But all that evaporated when he and well-funded out-of-state allies started attacking public schools outright in pushing his tax credit idea. “It was just all-out war after that,” Mrs. Tenenbaum recalls.
If both the governor and the new superintendent would seize the chance to have a much more positive relationship than that, it would be good for Mark Sanford, good for Jim Rex, and very good for South Carolina.

How about testing the teachers?

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The author of this op-ed piece in today’s editions of The State
has a point when he says we can’t have open enrollment without providing transportation for all children whose parents want to take advantage of it.

And he’s completely right when he notes the rather obvious fact that income levels are a major predictor of student performance. In fact, it’s the one great objective measurement we have, in terms of finding correlations between measurable factors.

But he’s wrong, I believe, when he says open enrollment is a bad idea. And I suspect he takes the poverty factor, as important as it is, a little too far.

People who want to destroy public schools by paying the middle class to desert them like to lump us at the paper in with the "defenders of the status quo." But here’s where we depart from them. They say it’s purely a matter of poverty, and suggest that there’s nothing a teacher can do to change that. This is why they resisted so strongly the PACT and accountability, which we strongly supported.

As critical as poverty is, we believe good teachers and well-run schools can do a far better job of educating poor kids. The point of accountability for us is to point out, beyond a shadow of a doubt, where those good teachers and administrators are most needed. The true "defenders of the status quo" blanch at the thought of suggesting that some teachers are better than others, which in turn suggests that some teachers are, well, not up to snuff.

But it struck me in reading this piece that there’s a way to settle this dispute: Test the teachers. If their students’ scores are an imperfect indicator of the job their doing because they don’t control what the kids bring to the classroom — and that’s true enough, to a point, we just don’t know to what point — let’s come up with a PACT for teachers. Then we could see how much of the problem in rural schools comes from the students’ poverty, and how much from the fact that good teachers choose to work under better conditions, and they have the skills to get jobs in the suburbs.

This would be extremely useful. We could address the task of improving the quality of education available to all students much more effectively. We could even — gasp — use it as a factor in instituting merit pay. You want to see the system push back, try that. Or for that matter, try testing teachers to begin with.

The argument against it would be that the quality of a teacher lies in many things, many of them unmeasurable in a test. I would agree. But the test would give us some information we don’t have, and it would be helpful. As for taking it as far as using it in calculating merit pay — it wouldn’t be the ONLY factor. Along with the performance of their students (weighted by income levels plus the student’s performance under other teachers), you would have to consider subjective assessments — mainly the principal’s judgment, but you might want to toss in parent surveys.

That would really send those who resist reform through the roof. Subjective judgment, oh my! But what do you think those of us out in the private sector have to deal with, every working day of our lives?

Patterson on “Homeboy” Clyburn

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In Washington and all over South Carolina, everybody is falling all over themselves so talk about what a big shot Jim Clyburn is, now that he’s the U.S. House majority whip.

But not Kay Patterson, who has a few home truths to share about his "Homeboy" Jim. He provides an excellent example of the quotation he cites from a prophet having no honor among his own. Of course, it’s all in fun…

This was at the Urban League‘s annual MLK Day breakfast, which is sponsored by the former BellSouth, and hosted this year at Brookland Baptist‘s new banquet and convention facility in West Columbia. It’s a very nice facility, although the lighting is sort of low for videographic purposes…

Paul! Laurin!

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Once again, we run into our intrepid correspondent, Dr. Paul DeMarco, at a political event (in this case, Wednesday’s inauguration ceremonies).

But Paul wasn’t just slumming. As usual, he had come down from Marion on a mission to help South Carolina. He had just attended the last meeting of Jim Rex’s transition team. I asked him to write us something about the experience — either for the paper or the blog — and I think he will.

Meanwhile, I had the privilege of meeting our good friend Laurin Manning for the first and second times Wednesday. She introduced herself at a post inaugural reception for 2nd-term Attorney General Henry McMaster. Then, that night, I ran into her again at the governor’s barbecue. That’s her friend Rebecca Dulin with her at the party. These two lovely young ladies will be featured in my barbecue video, which is in post-production, and which you can expect to see tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime between now and Sunday. I’m going to go get dinner now…

Laurin

Empty seats

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Back in this comment, Dave noted that the inaugural ceremony looked sparsely attended in my little teaser video.

That’s very perceptive on his part, because that particular little clip showed the most crowded part of the assembly — the choice seats up front.

Here’s what it looked like from the back. (And no, this is not from before or after the event — I shot this 12 minutes and 42 seconds after the even had begun, according to my camera, which means this is probably the peak of attendance.) I have never been to an event on the Statehouse grounds — certainly not an inauguration — that had this many empty seats. It was a very subdued event (relatively speaking), as was the barbecue that night.

In fairness, I must say that I didn’t get to the barbecue until late — after 8 or so — but the fact that the crowd was thin at that point in the evening is telling.

It wasn’t anything like that four years ago. There was an air of excited anticipation. I mean, it was considerably more sedate than the SERIOUS party that Samuel Tenenbaum had thrown for Jim Hodges four years earlier (Democrats were SO thrilled to be back in power that night), but it was upbeat, and pretty much everybody was there.

Last night was a letdown by comparison.

By the way, here’s the closest I can come to a picture from the 2002 inaugural to compare to what I have above. It’s not the same angle, but it conveys pretty much what I remember: Standing room only:

Inaugurationtd04

Low expectations column

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Living with low expectations
in the Palmetto State

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SHORTLY AFTER midnight, at the weary outset of Friday morning, a heavy-set woman stood outside the elaborate revolving doors of the Palmetto Health Richland emergency department, smoking a cigarette.
She tilted her head at the sound of a distant siren, the volume and Doppler effect indicating its rapid approach.
“Here they come again,” she said with resignation. “They bring in another one, we go to the back of the line.”
I was standing nearby, preferring the mists of the night to the unwholesome miasma of the packed waiting room. A few moments earlier, I had used the last few drops of energy in my PDA to post this brief comment on my blog (hey, as a distraction it beats ragged old copies of People):
I’m standing outside a hospital ER at 11:52 p.m., waiting for MY turn to go in and see my daughter, hoping they’ve started the IV that I’m pretty sure she needs (you know how it is in a state that refuses to adequately fund mental health or other essential services — if you have an emergency, you’ll be treated in a hallway if you’re lucky enough to get treated at all)….
In the hallway, she could only have one visitor at a time. She eventually got into a room, receiving about four liters of fluid, and got stronger. I’ve got no complaints at this point about her treatment — certainly not against Palmetto Richland. The crowding at Lexington Medical had been worse. It was the worst I’d ever seen it, and with five mostly grown kids, I’ve seen it a few times. So we were at Richland.
It’s not the fault of either hospital. It’s just a fact of life in South Carolina. Like the woman with the cigarette, we’ve come to accept it. Go to an emergency room on a typical evening, and if you’re not bleeding out your eyeballs, you’ll generally have a long wait. My experience tells me that if, for instance, you need some stitches and a tetanus shot but don’t have anything life-threatening, you should not be surprised to wait as long as four hours. It’s not always that long, but you’re no longer surprised if it is.
(My daughter was “lucky” in that she obviously needed quick treatment for dehydration caused by a two-day stomach bug.)
I don’t know, specifically, what caused the backlogs of Friday’s wee hours. I suppose if I had about a month and could get around the HIPAA privacy rules and track down every patient and interview them, I could give you a reliable answer.
But I do know that there is a constant, underlying condition in this state that causes ER waiting rooms to overflow whenever other human variables — a rash of wrecks on a slippery night, a stomach virus going around — collide with it: Hospital beds are occupied by the mentally ill, who are often found on the streets, off their meds, and police have no other place to put them, their jail cells being full of actual criminals.
The variables may be hard to pin down in a specific instance, but that one constant is not.
“It’ll happen the same way tomorrow night and the night after that,” says Thornton Kirby, president and CEO of the S.C. Hospital Association. But there are two constants, not one, he reminded me. The second is the fact that so many uninsured people go to the emergency room for their basic medical care, not just when they’re in crisis. As the sign behind the desk at the Richland ER proclaims, in both English and Spanish, the hospital is forbidden by law to turn you away if you need medical care. Regardless of your ability to pay, the medicos have to do what they can for you.
That second constant is a national problem, although the responsibility for it is shared by the states, via Medicaid funding and administration. The first one seems to be particularly acute in South Carolina. It’s related to the underfunding of the state Department of Mental Health over the last few years. People with brain problems who formerly would have received greater attention and care from the state now wander our cities, seriously strung out, a danger to themselves and others.
So eventually they end up in an ER — quite likely at a comprehensive indigent care facility such as Richland — where they wait for someone to figure out something else to do with them. That can take a while.
So the rest of us, when we have a situation that won’t wait until regular doctors open shop in the morning, find ourselves waiting much of the night, and accepting it, because that’s the way things are in South Carolina.
We accept it the way we accept people whizzing past us at 90 miles an hour on the interstate (or faster, in the case of the lieutenant governor), secure in the knowledge that they will not be ticketed. There simply aren’t nearly enough troopers on the road to enforce the speed limits, and everybody who didn’t just fall out of the stupid tree knows it. This is because the folks who make up our state budget haven’t stepped up to pay for such enforcement.
But hey, rest assured that when a loud minority of homeowners whose McMansions are appreciating too rapidly squeal about it, our state lawmakers take quick action to slash their taxes radically — by raising the sales tax on all of us, but refusing as usual to reform the overall tax system comprehensively, to make it fair and effective for a change.
They can’t assess the state’s actual needs, set priorities and address them, but they can surely lubricate a squeaky wheel in one quick hurry — just in time for elections, in fact.
With our elected followers set to come back and do their thing for another half-year starting Tuesday, I stand out in the misty night, thinking about stuff like that.

When last we saw them…

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With the Legislature coming back Tuesday, you may want to take a look at our lawmakers as we last saw them.

Basically, they were furious. Gov. Mark Sanford had just vetoed the entire state budget. This was his way of complaining that the Legislature had not stuck to the entirely arbitrary numerical cap that he proposes to place, permanently, on state spending. Rather than make line-item vetoes to get down to the number he likes — that would have made him very unpopular in an election year — he vetoed the whole thing, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Legislature would override him.

Here’s footage from the House debate on the subject on June 14, 2006. The man doing most of the talking is Rep. Doug Jennings, the Democrat from my home town of Bennettsville (his daddy used to be my doctor). No one of either party was arguing with his characterization of the governor’s action. In fact, the members of both parties laughed when he challenged Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper to say whether he thought the governor was showing "leadership" by vetoing the budget.

The longer clip that follows is from the Senate. It starts with my own senator Sen. Nikki Setzler, D-Lexington, essentially saying the same sorts of things Rep. Jennings had said in the other chamber. Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence (at the podium), is not at all shy about showing his agreement with the Democrat’s complaint. Then Lexington Republican Jake Knotts gets in a few licks on the governor as well. Finally, we see Sen. Greg Ryberg rise and take the podium to defend the governor. He’s wrong, but he is showing the courage of his convictions, which is one reason we endorsed him in his failed bid for S.C. Treasurer. By the way, at the VERY end we see Sen. Bill Mescher playing freecell during the debate.

The governor’s veto was a moment of revelation. We knew that the governor was into empty ideological gestures that had nothing to do with governing South Carolina, but he at least had been a conscientious, detail-oriented grind when it came to the budget. This trashed his reputation for that particular virtue.

This is relevant now because the governor has already indicated that he wants to play the same game again this year — putting together a DOA budget that meets his capricious limit, so that he can say, "See, it can be done." Never mind the fact that it can only be done by cutting the good (the state’s endowed chair fund, higher ed in general) along with the bad (pork projects).

He’s already ticked off legislative leaders with this behavior, despite his re-election promises to try to work with them to actually get things done rather than devoting his energy to gestures that please his out-of-state libertarian admirers.

Yet another reason to like McCain

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While The State is chronicling the rather comprehensive S.C. support that John McCain has garnered (something mentioned on this blog in the past), Vanity Fair offers the following:

In the 2000 campaign, (McCain) waded straight into the hottest controversy in South Carolina, not long before his crucial primary showdown with George W. Bush, by offering his unvarnished opinion on whether the Confederate battle flag — the Stars and Bars — should continue to fly over the state capitol. "As we all know, it’s a symbol of racism and slavery," McCain said. After John Weaver and others did more than whisper in his ear, McCain took to reading aloud from a piece of paper with a statement that began, "As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides," and went downhill from there.
For better or worse, McCain’s campaign was never the same again. And no one is more aware of this than John McCain himself. In Worth the Fighting For, his second memoir, written with his longtime aide Mark Salter in 2002, McCain reflected on what he had done:

By the time I was asked the question for the fourth or fifth time, I could have delivered the response from memory. But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph to reporters that I really didn’t mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president.
I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn’t make it less a lie. It compounded the offense by revealing how willful it had been. You either have the guts to tell the truth or you don’t. You don’t get any dispensation for lying in a way that suggests your dishonesty.

Everyone has sinned; everyone has fallen short of the mark. McCain gets my admiration by setting forth his faults in an unvarnished manner, and telling us — in a way that we can hold him accountable — that he considers them to be totally unacceptable.

Here’s your chance to help

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Our own Paul DeMarco is a member of the Equity Funding committee of Jim Rex‘s transition team. He wants our help. He’s looking for ideas — not arguments, not recriminations, but specific, practical ideas for how we should fund education going forward.

This is our chance to make a contribution to South Carolina, and along the way transform this blog into something more than a place to blow off hot air. To quote Elliott Ness in the movie, "let’s do some good." Here’s Paul’s request:

All,

The Rex transition team Equitable Funding Committee is considering three basic questions:

1) How do you define an adequate education?
(actually the state supreme court set "minimally adequate" as the
benchmark, but let’s shoot a little higher). Only by defining what an
adequate education is can we address what an adequate funding level is.

2) What is the best way to collect money for education? HR 4449
passed in the last session shifted some of the burden from property tax
to sales tax. Is this wise? Are there other funding mechanisms the
state should consider?

3) What is the best way to distribute the dollars collected to fund
education? Is the current system in which funding varies widely from
district to district based on the tax base the best one? Some states
(i.e. Vermont) put all their education dollars in one pot and then
divides it so that every student receives the same amount of state
funding. Would a system like Vermont’s be better than what we have?

What I’m hoping for is ideas rather than commentary. Concentrate on
looking forward rather than into the past. One of our members said that
our committee would have to "give up all hope on creating a better
yesterday."

I don’t expect you to research your answers, but be as specific as
you can in the solutions you propose. If it’s a good idea, the
committee will research it for you.

So the focus is on adequacy, collection and distribution. Comment on
any or all. Also, there are four other committees 1) Choice (sorry,
Karen Floyd fans, but I suspect that’s primarily public school choice)
2) Innovation 3) Accountability (the focus is on PACT testing)
4)Teachers. If you have any great ideas for Rex in these areas I will pass them along.

Thanks for your help.

Karen Floyd concedes

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Well, we asked her to give it up, and she did. Not that I think the two had anything to do with each other.

I spoke yesterday to Scott Malyerck over at GOP headquarters, and while he said there were folks still out there beating the bushes for excuses to protest the outcome (actually, he didn’t quite put it that way; I’m paraphrasing), it didn’t sound like they were coming up with much.

That’s not surprising. Last week when I called both Zeke Stokes with Jim Rex and Hogan Gidley with Mrs. Floyd, Zeke was all charged up and optimistic and looking forward to the results of the recount, Hogan was more like, Who’s Karen Floyd. OK, I’m paraphrasing again. What I mean is, he sounded like a guy who had put the whole campaign behind him and moved on with his life. In short, disengaged and uninterested.

But it took Karen Floyd being lady enough to stand up and say the other guy won to put an end to speculation, and I appreciate her doing that.

Speaking of the other guy, it sounds like Mr. Rex has put together a pretty good, bipartisan transition team. Here’s hoping he lives up to his promises.

Never give up column

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We can’t cut and run from
our public schools (or Iraq, either)

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE CRITICS SEE themselves as realists, and can’t imagine why those of us who believe we must continue to slog on refuse to see things as they are.
The whole thing is futile, they say, and it would be madness to keep sacrificing billions of dollars, much less all those fine young people, on our stubborn hubris.
Don’t we know that “those people” will never embrace the opportunity we’ve sacrificed so much in order to give them? Chalk it up to DNA, or simply growing up in horrific poverty and having never known any other way. Either way, we’re wasting our time.
Karenpost
Look at the generations — the centuries — of culture and tragic history that we’re presuming to overturn.
It would be better, they say, to begin a phased withdrawal.
The more sensible among us over in the “never say die” camp — those of us who believe we would be sacrificing our society’s future to cut and run — agree that mistakes were made. But rather than put it in such passive, Reaganesque terms, we know whom to blame. We are appalled at the “stay the course” fanatics who dig in their heels against new tactics.
We want new approaches — but in the pursuit of success, not surrender. The odds are long, we know. Progress is slow, and sometimes — such as in recent weeks — it doesn’t look like progress at all. We see how it could look to some as though our best efforts have led to nothing but ruined lives and wasted money.
To keep going takes determination, resolve, and a practically Churchillian refusal to give up.
Of course, we’re talking about public education in South Carolina. Oh, you thought this was about the war in Iraq? Fine, because it is. I see both struggles in the same terms:

It’s not optional. South Carolina has no choice but to provide the opportunity for a good education to all of its young people. We know we can do education well; just look at the public schools in our affluent suburbs. More relevantly, look at how successful Richland 2 is at educating even the disadvantaged. We must duplicate that kind of success throughout the state, particularly in the most stubborn pockets of resistance — the poor, rural areas.
Invading Iraq was optional. We once had the choice of other ways and other places to insert the lever of change in the Mideast (our strategic objective; 9/11 taught us that our old strategy of promoting stability in the region was suicidal). But we didn’t, and now the choices are success, or handing a titanic victory to Islamist terrorists, tribalists and totalitarian thugs. Success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve at this point, but failure is unthinkable.
The I-95 corridor is South Carolina’s Sunni Triangle. We have to figure out how to succeed there, or we fail.

If we don’t do it, no one will. No one’s going to help in Iraq; that much has been made quite clear over the last three years. Certainly not the feckless Europeans. Even the Brits are just barely hanging in there with us, thanks to the courage and vision of Tony Blair. The only other entities with a motivation to stabilize any portion of Iraq are people we would not want to see doing so — Iran’s mullahs, or the Ba’athists in both Iraq and Syria.
Universal education can only be achieved by pooling our resources as a society and doing it, in Soldieriraq
spite of the odds and the cost. The fantasy that the private sector would create wonderful schools in communities that can’t even attract a McDonald’s is dangerously delusional. The amazing thing is that this approach is espoused by people who insist they believe in markets, when market forces are precisely why those areas have fallen so far behind. The state has to do the job — the market lacks the motive.
The appointment of a new secretary of defense may not get the job done, but it’s a very encouraging sign. So is the election of a state superintendent of education committed to real reform.

We can win, but it’s going to take a long, long time. We’re talking about a generational (at least) struggle here, both in Iraq and S.C. public schools. Anyone who expects us to either win quickly or pull out simply doesn’t understand either the odds or the consequences of failure.

We can’t quit. South Carolina has too many problems — we are at the bottom of too many rankings — to give up on educating our people so that they can attract, get and hold good jobs.
In this profoundly dangerous post-Cold War world, history’s most powerful and essential republic cannot be weakened by another Vietnam. After three years of horrific mistakes, President Bush has now done two things worthy of praise: He dumped Donald Rumsfeld, and he went to Vietnam (finally) and drew this distinction between the two conflicts: “We’ll succeed,” he said, “unless we quit.” Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but there’s a sure-fire way to change that fact: Give up.
We could pull out of Vietnam in the middle of the Cold War, and the Russians still knew we had all those nukes pointed at them. So the world didn’t fall apart, even though our nation’s ability to affect world events atrophied for many years.
Today, too many forces of chaos, from al-Qaida to totalitarians with nukes, are poised to fill any vacuum we leave behind.
So we can’t quit — either here or over there.

Rexpost

The Godfather on Pelosi

11 Replies

Pelosione

No, this is not another movie reference. I’m serious.

It turns out that prominent Columbia attorney Jim Leventis is the godfather of the youngest of Nancy Pelosi’s five children, Alexandra. The Leventises and the Pelosis have been good friends for 40 years. Here’s how that happened:

After he graduated from USC law school, someone said, "Go north, young man," or something along those lines, so the Columbia Leventisjim
native went to New York for a stint with Citibank. The guy at the desk next to his was Paul Pelosi, who had married a Baltimore girl name of Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro. (Her father had been mayor of that city, as her brother would later be.)

The couples became close friends, and the Leventises, who at that time had no kids of their own, felt a bond with the Pelosi children. When the youngest came along, Jim was asked to stand as godfather.

"She was just a good mom," is the way Mr. Leventis remembers the lady the Republicans just did so much to demonize (unsuccessfully, as it turns out).

Paul Pelosi was from California, and eventually the family moved back to his home in San Francisco, where his brother was on the local council. Mrs. Pelosi got involved in politics, but on a part-time, peripheral, grass-roots kind of way. That was the extent of her involvement because, as Mr. Leventis recalls, she "had too many children to raise."

Eventually, they grew up. (Goddaughter Alexandra, who is a brand-new mom herself as of this week, is a filmmaker known, ironically enough, for a documentary about George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, "Journeys with George.") From then on, Mrs. Pelosi went at politics full-bore.

Jim Leventis, you may recall, has had his own foray into electoral politics. He was the Democratic nominee for the 2nd Congressional District in 1988. He did pretty well, too. He won in every county in the district save one. Unfortunately for him, that one was Lexington, incumbent Floyd Spence‘s home turf. It went so big for its homeboy that it overcame the Democrat’s advantage elsewhere.

Speaker-to-be Pelosi actually came down and helped with that campaign, which was Mr. Spence’s toughest re-election fight to date.

Mr. Leventis remains involved — more peripherally, as Mrs. Pelosi once was — in politics. He helped Jim Rex in his (apparently) successful bid for S.C. superintendent of education. But he acknowledges, in the nicest possible way, that his politics are somewhat different from those of his long-time friend. "I think hers are more extreme, so to speak," he said. "My style is more, let’s get together and get things done." But he hastens to add that she "does a good job at what she does."

The Leventises and the Pelosis remain friends. "Paul and I talk pretty frequently," he said. As for Paul’s wife, this is the bottom line for Jim Leventis: "As a person, she’s just a wonderful mom and just a wonderful friend."

Thus spake the godfather.

Pelositwo

Election stats column

38 Replies

How did ‘our’ candidates do
last week? Very well, as always

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
IT IS WIDELY believed that, like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather II,” I have the power to administer the “kiss of death.” This is not true. In order to administer this kiss, I must first consult with my consiglieri — I mean, my fellow members of the editorial board of The State.
Actually, it is even less true than that. There is no “kiss of death.”
It is popular — among people we have not endorsed, and particularly those whom we will never endorse, for political office — to say they are glad not to get our nod, because our endorsement is the “kiss of death.” Our candidates always lose. There is truth in this, yes?
No. Of course, if there were a correlation between candidates we anoint and those who suffer humiliation at the polls, it would not matter, because we are not trying to make predictions. We are saying whom we believe should win, not who will win.
OK, so maybe it would matter a little. That might be taken as our being seriously out of sync with the people of South Carolina.
But it doesn’t matter at all because it isn’t true. I knew “our” candidates usually did pretty well, but it wasn’t until two years ago that I went back and studied 10 years worth
of endorsements versus actual election results. The people we endorsed won about three-fourths of the time in general elections. From 1994 through 2004, we endorsed 85 candidates, and 64 won, for a 75.29 percentage.
I found out something else.
Certainly you know that we always endorse Republicans. That is, you know that if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a Republican, you are just as certain that we always endorse Democrats. Obviously, one of you is wrong. Less obviously, both of you are.
Here’s the skinny:
It turns out that over that same decade ending in 2004, our candidates split almost perfectly down the middle — 43 Democrats, 41 Republicans and one independent. This was a surprise, and completely unintentional. Party being unimportant to us, we are just as likely to endorse mostly Democrats or mostly Republicans in a given election year.
It was encouraging to realize how it worked out over time.
So enough with the history. How did our candidates do this year?
I was sort of hoping for a big Republican year to make the overall figures perfectly even. No such luck. The Democrats fielded some good candidates, there were a number of Republican incumbents who seriously needed tossing out, and most of our favorite Republicans had no opposition — hence no endorsement.
The result? As I realized the day before the election, we had endorsed 12 Democrats and five Republicans. Yikes.
That was setting us up for a really bad year on the won-loss score (not that it matters, but I’d like to see them win).
Or so I thought. At this point, if you count Jim Rex as a win (and admittedly that’s still a significant if), then 12 of our candidates won, and five lost.
How is that? Every one of the five Republicans we backed (Thomas Ravenel, Hugh Weathers, Mark Hammond, Joe Wilson and Bill Cotty) won, and only five of “our” Democrats (Tommy Moore, Drew Theodore, Robert Barber, Boyd Summers and Sadie Wannamaker) lost.
So every time we picked a Republican, the voters agreed with us. They also agreed on seven out of the 12 Democrats.
If we had been trying to pick winners (which we weren’t), we would have done pretty well. Although it’s not really anything to brag about. Since 12 is less than three-fourths of 17, our running “win” average has now dropped
to 74.5 percent (sigh).
Separately from the whole endorsement business, I (and I alone) did try to pick winners a few days before the election.
Tempted by an e-mail invitation, I tried my hand at predicting. To keep myself honest, I posted my prognostications on my blog.
I was only asked specifically about the eight statewide races on the ballot. I picked six Republicans and two Democrats to win. How did I come out? I was right on five, wrong on three. Both of the Democrats I had picked to win (Grady Patterson, whom we had not endorsed, and Mr. Theodore, whom we had) lost, and so did one of my Republicans (Karen Floyd, whom we had not endorsed).
That’s a batting average of .625, which would be good in baseball, but is not nearly as good as the success rate of the candidates that our editorial board picks as the best without regard to whether they will win or lose.
Sure, I did it just off the top of my head, whereas we had spent months choosing our preferred candidates — as had the voters. And they came up with pretty much the same results we did. Smart voters. Smart us, too.
But I don’t think I’d better give up my day job for predicting the weather. Or anything else, for that matter.

Thursday election roundup column

59 Replies

Mandates: From Sanford
to Pelosi to Lieberman

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

ANYBODY WHO thinks there was any one theme, message or lesson from Tuesday’s elections has a few more thinks coming. Let’s start with these:

The Sanford Mandate. Gov. Mark Sanford’s victory statement Tuesday night was the best speech I’ve ever heard him give. I’m hoping to hear more of the same. He talked about a mandate, but with a tone of humility. He said it was a mandate for “change,” and I think he was right. What he did not mention was the plan to privatize public education, and with good reason, given the results in certain other races across the state. That still leaves us with government restructuring, and if the governor pushes as hard on that in the next four years as he has said he would, I’ll be cheering him every step of the way.

Real education reform. Despite her long head start as the governor’s anointed “choice” standard-bearer, despite all those tens of thousands in campaign cash from out-of-state ideologues, despite having that crucial “R” after her name, Karen Floyd was slightly trailing Jim Rex in the superintendent of education race. It could still go either way. Does that mean the voters sent an uncertain message as to whether they want education reform? Absolutely not. The wisest course for the winner of this race, the governor and lawmakers would be to embrace the common-sense reforms that both of these candidates talked about, such as merit pay for teachers.

Bill Cotty survives. They tried to do him in in the GOP primary. When that didn’t work, they tried to take him down in the general by running an independent candidate to split the Republican vote. They flooded his state House district with one slick mailing after another, accusing him of everything they could think of short of having WMD. But the most obvious House Republican opponent to private school vouchers and tax credits withstood everything they could throw at him, and prevailed. And consider this: His Democratic opponent, Anton Gunn, was just as strongly against their agenda as Mr. Cotty was. That means that in spite of all that out-of-state money and effort, 87 percent of the voters utterly rejected their agenda. The people of District 79 love and appreciate their public schools. And they are far from alone.

Eckstrom’s vindication. So how does a guy who calls himself a fiscal watchdog (which is just what a comptroller ought to be), then takes a long family vacation in a state vehicle on a state gas card, then dares to run for re-election as a fiscal watchdog again manage to win? Here’s how: He got voters to believe his whining that he was being picked on, that the criticism of his Minnesota road trip was just the pettiest kind of political nit-picking. Well, it wasn’t. He broke faith with the voters, he never thought it was wrong, and now that he’s gotten away with it, he seems less likely than ever to learn anything from the incident.

The national picture. Everyone says the Democrats’ congressional victories are about Iraq — but what does that mean? Those of us who have backed the war from the start have demanded changes in the way the war has been prosecuted since early on. We’ve been demanding, for instance, that the president dump Donald Rumsfeld. (Mr. Bush got that message right away — three years late, but he got it.)
After all that talk about the war, I’ve yet to hear specifically what Democrats think the voters want them to do. I heard Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha on the radio Wednesday morning. Pretty nonspecific. They want “change.” Nobody’s saying pull the troops out. The party’s most agitated wing will be flapping for that, but wiser heads know better: If that was what the people wanted, Ned Lamont would have won in Connecticut.
I think the country was rejecting the bitter partisanship of the last few years, of which the president and Speaker Dennis Hastert are prime examples. Voters want people who will work across ideological lines to the betterment of the country, both at home and abroad. They reject the Ned Lamonts on the left and the Rick Santorums on the right. They want common sense, not MoveOn.org or Rush Limbaugh.
Who were the Democrats who won? Pro-life candidate Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. Fiscal moderate John Spratt right here in South Carolina. The extremists need to take heed, or prepare to lose the House again in the next election — or the one after.

Joementum! Yes! I practically shouted it out during the live election-night broadcast on S.C. ETV. Joe Lieberman did it! He showed that the right man with the right ideas (including the will to win in Iraq, take note) doesn’t need a political party to win high office.
This is a start. All the U.S. Senate needs now is 50 more like him. Then you’ll see me jumping up and down the way the Democrats are doing nationally, and (most) Republicans are doing in South Carolina. Why? Because for the first time ever, my party will have its chance. I promise you here and now, given that opportunity, we will not let the American people down.

Joewins4

Signing off for a few hours

6 Replies

This blog is hereby signing off for the night. Be sure to tune in at 9 a.m. EST to hear sidekick Andy
Gobeil and me on "The Big Picture on the Radio."

We’ll be further slicing and dicing the election results. And perhaps we’ll know a little more now than we did then. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’d going to see if I can grab about a five-hour nap and then a really big breakfast before we’re back out on the air.

Goodnight, Chet. Good night, David. And goodnight, Uncle Walter. We TV types miss you the most.

World Premiere: “Election Day 2006”