Category Archives: South Carolina

Flag column

Hey, let’s just get it over with

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
TOMMY MOORE was right to refuse to go to Georgia for the annual meeting of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP. By refusing to go, he sent the message that no one who wants to lead a state should participate in a boycott intended to hurt that state.
Mark Sanford was right to go to Georgia to deliver the message he did — that if you think your boycott is going to get us any closer to moving the Confederate flag off the State House grounds, you’re deluding yourselves.
What neither man said, but what anyone who would lead South Carolina should say — and to all South Carolinians, not just the NAACP — is this:
“Yep, the NAACP should see that they’re going nowhere with this and drop it. But they probably won’t. So what you should do is ignore the boycott, and do what you would do if it didn’t exist, if it had never existed. That shouldn’t be hard; you’re ignoring it now.
“That is, you ignore it until someone says, ‘Hey, why don’t we go ahead and move this flag; it’s got no business here.’ Then a loud bunch of you start howling, ‘No, we’ll never give in to the NAACP!’ As if the NAACP were the reason to remove it. That’s what the NAACP wants everybody to think — that it’s up to them. Well, it isn’t. Never was, never will be. It’s not up to any national organization. It’s up to us, the people of South Carolina — black and white, young and old. Or at least, the sensible ones.
“We came together off and on for six years back in the ’90s to talk about getting the flag off the dome. It was a truly wonderful thing to see, as church after business group after civic organization, black and white, joined the effort. That process culminated in 2000, with a compromise that got the flag off the dome, but that created a new problem. Some think the flag came down because of this boycott, which was started right at the end of the process. But you know what I think? I think we would have come up with a better solution — a permanent solution — if the boycott hadn’t happened.
“Sure, it created an additional urgency. People who already wanted the flag down thought, ‘this is getting crazy; let’s get something done now.’ But in that atmosphere, the only kind of plan that had any chance of passing was one that did not please the NAACP. So better ideas — such as replacing the actual flag with a bronze historical plaque or such — were shoved aside, and we got a nonsolution-solution. This had the desired effect — the NAACP was mad, and stayed mad. And all of the reasonable people walked away, leaving the NAACP and the Sons of Confederate Veterans in possession of the issue.
“Well, we’ve let them have it long enough. Those State House grounds are ours, not theirs, and we have a lot of important issues that we need to come together there to solve. Hear that? Come together. We must do that, or we’ll always be last where we want to be first. A symbol such as this doesn’t bring us together; it achieves the precise opposite.
“You tell me I should be talking about more important things — education, jobs, taxes and spending, reshaping our government, the Two South Carolinas? I agree, which is why those are the things I talk about most of the time. You say the flag is a distraction? You’re right. So let’s get it out of the way. Why not just ignore it? Because if we can’t get together to agree to move past something this pointless, we’ll never solve any of the hard stuff.
“So let’s put this behind us, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.”
Neither of them said that. But someone should have. So I did.

A state of one

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At first, I thought Tommy Moore was expressing a difference of opinion between himself and John Edwards. But then, I find that Mr. Edwards apparently doesn’t go around talking about "Two Americas" any more, but approaches the same theme from a different, more positive, more forward-looking angle. Well, good for him. Good for both of them, I suppose. I never liked Mr. Edwards’ former shtick.

Yes, we write frequently about the "Two South Carolinas," but we define that term very differently. We talk about the profound economic differences that exist between urban and rural, black and white, I-85 vs. I-95, and so forth. Most folks do fine in our state, but we are held back as a people by the large swathes of poverty. Our goal in using such rhetoric — and we’ll be doing so again Sunday — is to get the affluent interested in policies that will help the less fortunate.

When John Edwards talked about "Two Americas" in the 2004 campaign, he meant a few super-rich folks (such as himself) on one side, and the vast majority of Americans on the other. It was about stirring up the resentment of the middle class, and getting it to vote for him. Very different idea, leading to a very different intended result.

Mark Sanford vs. Tommy Moore

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Why must we choose
between vision and effectiveness?
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THIS IS THE election year for complementary pairs. For treasurer we have the Brash Rich Kid vs. Everybody’s Granddaddy. For lieutenant governor, Mr. Mature is challenging Wild Thing.
But the most marked dichotomy is at the top of the ticket. On one side, we have incumbent Gov. Mark Sanford, a policy wonk who has all sorts of ideas, but who can’t get anything done. The fact that he can’t get anything done is both a bad thing and a good thing, because some of his ideas (restructuring state government) are excellent, while others (paying people to abandon public schools) are very, very bad.
Opposing him is veteran state Sen. Tommy Moore, a “git ’er done” kind of guy. He prides himself on bringing together lawmakers from across the spectrum who may be miles apart on a given issue, and getting them to sit down and work something out. He can flat get a bill passed, sometimes in the face of considerable odds.
While he can do what the governor can’t, Sen. Moore is lacking in the very department where the governor is blessed with an overabundance. When I suggested as much to him last week, noting that he seemed to lack as strict and specific an agenda as the governor’s, he said rather grumpily that “I’m glad you didn’t say I didn’t have ideas.”
Well, I didn’t. But by the time the interview was over, he had provided little in the way of specific proposals. If I put all the ideas he set forth in that meeting in my pants pocket, I could turn it inside-out without making much of a mess on the floor.
This is not good. I’ve lived all over the country, and I’ve never seen a state that needed principled, effective leadership as much as my dear native South Carolina.
Some would say I’m asking too much. But people who would fit that bill do exist in our state. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley for one. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for another. They have vision, they see how things are connected, they see what needs to be done, and they have the skills to work with political friend and foe alike to bring about results that represent significant progress.
But they aren’t running for governor. Instead, we get an ideologue who is so into libertarian think-tank theories that he has no idea how to persuade real people — even in his own party — to work with him. That’s been our governor for four years. And our alternative is a very grounded, realistic veteran deal-maker who can work with whatever you bring to the table, but who doesn’t throw much on it himself.
This is not to say Tommy Moore lacks principles. In fact, I’d say his principles — grounded as they are in real-life experiences — are probably closer to those of the average South Carolinian than the hothouse hypotheses of the incumbent. He’s certainly a lot closer to me when it comes to understanding the role that government must play in improving life for all South Carolinians.
“I agree with those folks who are saying, ‘More money isn’t the answer’: More money isn’t necessarily the answer,” Sen. Moore said. “But I can guarantee you that less money over the last three and a half years hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
He said he would want his legacy to be that he made government more efficient in performing its legitimate functions.
“The government can be a partner to people,” he said. “Government isn’t evil. You don’t need to starve government to where it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub.” That’s a reference to the governor’s ideological ally Grover Norquist, who has said that’s his ultimate goal as leader of a national anti-tax group.
“The easiest thing is to come to Columbia and be against something,” said the senator. “The hard thing is to be for something.”
Trouble is, it’s hard to find much that Sen. Moore is for, specifically, when it comes to education. He’s definitely against being against the public schools. But that doesn’t quite add up to being for a substantive agenda for moving the schools forward.
He wants to improve prenatal health care and early childhood education. He wants comprehensive tax reform. He would pursue economic development for rural areas. But when you dig for specifics, they are scarce. He keeps saying he wants to hear other people’s ideas. He’s confident he can then sell the good ones to the Legislature.
The general impression is that he would be a reactive governor who would deal with things as they were brought to him, but would not initiate particular proposals.
By contrast, the current governor is all about throwing out his ideas to see what will happen — which, generally, is nothing, except for a lot of hard feelings.
He claims that his pushing of extreme ideas such as the “Put Parents in Charge” bill has led to accelerating public school choice and the development of charter schools. So should we interpret his advocacy of paying people to abandon public schools as a mere strategy to achieve some more moderate goal?
No, he admits, “because I actually take those extreme positions.” He laughed, and said “I would love to get there if I could.”
Ultimately, he said South Carolina needs someone who believes in fundamental change, not someone who knows how to work the system.
“We come from different vantage points,” the governor said of himself and Sen. Moore. “I come from outside the system; he comes from within.”
“He’s basically said the system ain’t broke…. We say the system is broke.” So if he gets four more years, will we be able to look back and say the system is fixed to any degree? “Nah,” he said. “The political system is such that we all know that you never get the whole bite of any apple.” Nevertheless, he hopes he’d have “a material impact” on government restructuring.
The governor misses the point. It’s not an either/or. South Carolina needs a governor who is not only committed to positive change, but who also has the ability to work with others to make that change come about.
Once again, when we go to the polls Nov. 7, we won’t be offered a candidate who fits that description. We need and deserve better.

Video of treasurer candidates

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These two videos, as short as they are (the maximum my camera will shoot is just under three minutes), are fairly representative of what it’s like talking to these two candidates.

First we have challenger Thomas Ravenel, the Republican, airing his business acumen in his own breezy way during his editorial board endorsement interview on Aug. 28. His point in this discourse to tell us what he knows about investments that, by implication, the incumbent does not.

Then, we have incumbent Treasurer Grady Patterson, talking about his young opponent and explaining — sort of — why he won’t go on live TV to debate him. This is from the Democrat’s interview on Oct. 5. By the way, one of the questioners is reporter John O’Connor, who is not a member of the editorial board. We invite folks from the newsroom to attend our meetings, and sometimes they take us up on it. Every once in a while, the meetings actually produce news.

Sanford video (and it actually WORKS!)

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Finally, I’ve figured out a way to share video with you that seems to work. Please give me feedback on this: Does it work for you? Do you want more? I have several other Sanford clips. Do you want me to go back and post video on other candidates I’ve written about? I have clips on all of them; I’ve just been saving them up for lack of a good way to post them.

Anyway, this one features S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford explaining how he believes he has improved "soil conditions" for economic development. This is from his endorsement interview with The State‘s editorial board on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006.

The gloves go back on

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If you click on the first link on my last post now, you’ll find nothing but, "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria."

That’s because after I posted it, the Rex campaign took down the item in question about Karen Floyd. (See the comment from campaign aide Zeke Stokes.)

Apparently, the Rex campaign is sensitive to y’all’s good opinion. But is it too late for that?

The gloves come off

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Just when you thought you had figured out Jim Rex as the mild-mannered-professor type, this comes out on his blog. Apparently, an alternative paper finally printed the stuff that everybody’s been muttering about Karen Floyd — her three marriages, etc. — and Mr. Rex wants to make sure you don’t miss it. Rex3

Mrs. Floyd has been worried that her personal life would be used against her from the beginning. I
think it was a major consideration she had to overcome in deciding to run. She made it through the five-way primary unscathed — except for all the talk, which didn’t reach most of the voters.

Now it’s out, and I find myself wondering who will be hurt more by it — Karen Floyd, or Jim Rex. I have to say it raises certain chivalrous hackles in me. A gentleman doesn’t speak publicly about a lady’s past. But, trapped in that Jane Austen mode of thinking as I am, I find myself wanting to give Mr. Rex some benefit of doubt. Do you think it’s actually written by him? Do you think he even reads it? Is Zeke Stokes or somebody acting on his own?

Still, Mr. Rex is responsible for it, just as Andre Bauer is responsible for the MySpace site he says he has nothing to do with.

So what do you think? Does this make you think less of Karen? Or of Jim?

A separate reality

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Whoa, what just happened? I felt a disturbance in the universe, an unraveling of the very logic that keeps the celestial spheres spinning. Suddenly, nothing makes sense! What could it…

Oh, yeah. I mentioned the Confederate flag on the State House grounds, and I did so in terms that were almost dismissive rather than worshipful. In the universe in which the Flag is a Big Deal, certain concepts such as proportional response do not exist. It’s sort of like drawing cartoons of Mohammad — expect something that has little to do with what you said or did.

I was reminded of that by this comment on a recent post:

Mr Warthen,

Would you please provide a picture of yourself for my blog. I am in
the habit of crediting those who trash the Confederate Flag for my
readers, and I’d love to make you my newest entry!
http://aint-no-4-letter-word.blogspot.com/
Thanks & God Bless

Posted by: Billy Bearden | Sep 22, 2006 8:43:19 AM

OK, fine, credit away — but what does this have to do with me? Wait — are you suggesting that what I said somehow "trashed" the flag? I suppose if I said the sun went down last night, I’d be disrespecting old Sol, and could expect protests from outraged sun-worshipers.

Bradbeard
Talk about missing the point. But I should know to expect this. After having written about the flag hundreds of times (just not so much lately), I should actually feel the shape of space-time shifting around me as I re-enter the atmo of that loony world.

But hey — a reader request is a reader request. Rather than making poor Billy use that "mean" face above, as suggested by bill, I’ll provide something more directly tailored to the purpose. It’s just as mean, but has more of a period look. In fact, in this picture I was deliberately trying to affect a "Civil War general" scowl. You know how, back in the 19th century, getting your picture taken was such a big deal, and you had to be so still, that people always looked like they were constipated or something? That’s what I was going for.

Anyway, I thought anybody that much into Confederate memorabilia would prefer this gag picture to the other gag picture.

I would have made it sepiatone, but I had some trouble with PhotoShop.

Don’t thank me. I’m all about service.

Boyd and Jim column

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Up close, even the most clear-cut,
polarizing issue turns gray

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LET’S SET aside all the partisanship and polarization and stupid name-calling for a moment to remind ourselves that when you dig into them deeply enough, things aren’t nearly as bad in our politics as they tend to seem. Or at least, not always.
That’s because you have people involved. And people are more complicated, and therefore better, than the boxes we would put them in. God bless them for it.
Look, for instance, at the S.C. House District 75 race in which Richland County Democrat and political newcomer Boyd Summers is challenging Jim Harrison, a 17-year veteran Republican representative and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
In his recent endorsement interview, Mr. Summers said one of the main reasons he was running Summersmug_1
was that Rep. Harrison had swung to the “hard right” on such issues as support for public education. The incumbent has been a prime pusher of the “Put Parents in Charge” bill, which would use tax credits to pay parents to abandon public schools.
The challenger is adamantly against PPIC because “I am firmly in favor of public education,” and he doesn’t want to see finite public resources diverted away from our schools to the private sector.
Mr. Summers brags that he’s supported by the S.C. Education Association, while the Republican is on the side of “South Carolinians for Responsible Government,” an organization that exists only to push PPIC. It doesn’t get more black-and-white than that.
But it does get less so. Mr. Harrison chafes at being painted as anti-public school. “I think you’ve got to look at 17 years, and not just one bill,” he says. And he’s right. Besides, he says, his two children went to public schools all the way through — Rosewood Elementary, Hand Middle and Dreher High.
In fact, Mr. Harrison began his interview by aggressively challenging Mr. Summers’ support of public education, pointing out that his challengers’ two young children do not attend public schools. Of course, one of them is only 3 years old. But the older one, Mr. Harrison says he has heard, is in first grade at Hammond School.
Not true, Mr. Summers says: The older child is in 5-year-old kindergarten at Hammond.
“What my wife and I have made,” he said, “is the decisions we think are best for each child.” OK, so what about the future? “We evaluate it on a year-by-year basis,” he said, and “we haven’t made any decisions yet” about next year.
But, he insists, he is a firm believer in the importance of public education, and voters can rely on him to make policy on that basis — a confidence he says they cannot place in the incumbent in light of his advocacy of an extremely destructive idea.
Has Mr. Harrison caught his opponent in a fatal contradiction? Maybe, maybe not. I understand him. I have always believed in public schools, yet our oldest children started their educations in a Catholic school in Tennessee. We switched to public in 1988.
Still, I wasn’t running for public office on a platform of “I’m for public schools and he isn’t.” The issue is relevant. It gives voters in the district reason to question Mr. Summers’ level of commitment. He may have a good answer, but it gives them a good question.
Harrisonmug_1
Mr. Harrison says it’s especially relevant because parents who live in Mr. Summers’ neighborhood behind the VA hospital worry that the local school, Meadowfield Elementary, hasn’t been doing well on the PACT.
They believe, he says, that if parents in the community would “stick together to work to improve their school rather than bailing out,” it would show improvement.
He said they felt parents turning to the private option were “not giving Meadowfield a chance.”
Not good news for Mr. Summers. But it also complicates things for Rep. Harrison. I couldn’t help pointing out that he had just described very well what was wrong with PPIC — that it would entice the most motivated, most involved parents to leave troubled schools behind, and those schools would only get worse as a result.
He didn’t disagree. In fact, he reminded me that he had talked in his earlier interview about how he had been motivated to champion “choice” only for children “below a certain income level.”
“I could live very easily without that provision in the last bill that gave a thousand-dollar tax credit, no matter where you lived and no matter what your income was,” he had said. “It ought to be focused on failing schools and low-income families.”
Of course, PPIC had included the tax credit for the affluent, which was politically necessary to generate the bill’s only in-state constituency: those who already home-school or send their kids to private schools. And Mr. Harrison had pushed it in that form.
Still, I had to sympathize with his lament that it was unfair to use that as an excuse to call him “hard right,” or anti-education, in light of his record otherwise. He said there was something wrong with a system in which “people in the middle that are trying to find some viable options get labeled as extremists.”
I couldn’t agree more. Of course, I think his advocacy of PPIC is quite a bit more relevant to his public education credentials than where a Summers 5-year-old attends kindergarten.
But I don’t think the issue is as up-or-down as the likes of SCEA and SCRG would have us believe.
Fortunately, they don’t decide elections. In this case, the voters of District 75 do. And they have a lot to consider.

Some quick attaboys

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Sorry to have been absent so much of the week. I’ve been tied up in marathon meetings — I’m about to go into another all-day one (administrative ones, related to the newspaper’s budget and such) — and have had to spend breaks and evenings racing to do the basic tasks involved in getting the editorial pages out.

But until I can get freed up a little, here are a couple of quick items for my dear readers to cogitate over and discuss in my absence. I’d like to offer thanks and congratulations to:

Sens. Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner for having won an apparent victory in favor of the American Way. Sure, they didn’t get every thing, but that’s the way compromise works. And they seem to have held their ground as to the principles that mattered most. Thanks to them, the rule of law is finally being established with regard to the treatment of prisoners, and the legislative branch is a little closer to playing its proper role in the War on Terror.
Sen. Tommy Moore, for having acted with uncharacteristic boldness to make a couple of important points: First, that candidates for governor should not ally themselves with political
actions intended to hurt the state’s economy. Second, that the inconsistent and ineffective NAACP boycott accomplishes nothing at all for South Carolina. I would add that it accomplishes nothing but the opposite of its stated purpose. It puts a solution on the Confederate "battle flag" farther away, not closer. And make no mistake. The only solution is to put dead relics of our most tragic past in museums or bronze monuments, not to fly them as though they were alive and had positive relevance to who we are as a people today.

Back to meetings…

Art restoration

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This is one for you art lovers out there. My roommate from my USC days recently took part in the special pre-demolition reception for former inmates of the Honeycombs. He will remain nameless for now — all I will say is that he was an art major, and that is him at the bottom of the above image.

As you see him, he has just restored a graffiti work from his early Gonzo-minimalist period — or restored it as well as he could, working in a hurried fashion before the university authorities could notice he had slipped away from the group.

By the way, my roommate was the responsible one in our duo — he kept his side of the room spotless, with all his art supplies neatly stacked and categorized, his clothes put away in the closet. He was the one with the short, conservative hair. I think he even used to make his bed.

My side looked like a waste dump, featuring pots with week-old food cooked on with my contraband hotplate, sloppily-hung posters and dirty clothes. The finishing touch was my mountain of State newspapers, not one of which I ever tossed, constantly spilling over to his side, and earning me the sobriquet "Ratso Rizzo" (we had both seen "Midnight Cowboy" over at the Russell House). He still calls me that, even though I’ve cut my hair and shaved.

Connoisseurs of early-1970s, 4th-floor Snowden culture will recognize the above hastily-penned reproduction as only dimly evocative of the original, once-thought-to-be-immortal work that was scratched deeply into the paint that coated the concrete-block wall. It was located over the elevator immediately across from our room, and was still there when I took my bride by there on our honeymoon three years later. I was proud to play the docent and explain to her the history behind this treasure. She was suitably impressed, I think — she was speechless.

Unfortunately, the original was lost to a later renovation of the building — probably about the time they put those sissy dividers in to make separate shower stalls in the floor’s one bathroom.

But all is not lost! My roommate and I are planning a guerrilla revisit to the site in the next few days, and hope to restore the original to its rightful place, so that the building’s boisterous spirits will lie at rest when the Big Crash comes. If you would like to help in bringing about this once-in-a-lifetime testament to the (adolescent) human spirit, your cash gifts can be sent to this blog.

Scooped

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A couple of folks had brought this to my attention in the last few days, but two other bloggers — Tammy of "Seeding Spartanburg" and Laurin Manning — beat me to the blogosphere with it. Make of it what you will. For my part, I won’t be at Karen Floyd’s Dove Shoot, for two reasons. First, I wasn’t invited (unless the invitation’s in my IN box, which needs cleaning out. Second, I’ll be at a Joe Wilson event that just happens to be down the street from me. Besides, near as I can tell, firearms are optional at the thing for Joe.

As long as you’re there, check out Laurin’s next post. It’s about the coolest guy on the statewide ballot in the fall. That’s not an endorsement of Emil DeFelice; I just think his organic, macrobiotic approach is cool, as is the fact that he comments from time to time on this blog — using his full, real name, I might add.

Meanwhile, out in the real world

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Wright_smith_good_to_go72 Wright & Smith — Good to Go

While the rest of us sit around arguing about the war on terror — or worse, ignoring it altogether as we Pci_80lbs_ruck_plus_iba_lbe_m4_kevlar_an_1 dive into our own navels and gripe about our taxes or such — others are fighting it. Or getting ready to.

Rep. James Smith of Columbia was a JAG officer in the National Guard with the rank of captain, but he didn’t think that was doing enough. So a couple of years back, he started agitating for a transfer to the infantry. His entreaties were rebuffed. He bucked it up to Washington before someone told him fine, you can do that — as long as you give up your commission and start over as an enlisted man.

He took the dare, underwent basic, and eventually went to officer school on the way to regaining his former rank. Sleep_weapons_cleaning72 He has spent this summer undergoing specialized, intense infantry training for officers at Fort Benning. He graduates today. His unit is scheduled to go to Afghanistan in a few months.

In celebration, he sent a few folks pictures from his training course. I’m proud to share them with you. I’m even prouder to know James. He’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Here they are:

Waitin_for_sun_to_go_down_before_mission

Waiting for the sun to go down before mission.

Our_ride_to_the_fight72 Ch53_lift_off72 Smith_de_la_garza72 Waitin_on_pizza_at_laaf72

Bubble, bubble, don’t talk trouble

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Jimmy Derrick, president/owner of Century 21 Bob Capes Realtors (that’s a mouthful of a name, which you would think one might have trouble saying over and over, but Jimmy manages it very well) had Health and Happiness duty today at Columbia Rotary.

For you nonRotarians out there, that’s when some poor sap has to stand up before the 300-some members of the club and a) talk about the health of members and their loved ones and b) be funny. I know all about it, because about once a quarter, that poor sap is me (so any clean jokes you know would be appreciated).

Anyway, Jimmy used part of his time to talk about the health of his industry. "Is there a bubble in real estate?" he and his folks are asked constantly. He coaches Realtors to respond, "Thank you, but that’s not part of my vision."

Some of the bad-news-seekers get more specific, asking whether developers haven’t gotten a little carried away and saturated the market for condos near Williams-Brice Stadium. "All I know is," said Jimmy, "they’re selling like crazy."

The real estate business in his part of the world — the South, a little bit inland from the coast — is very good, he said. "If you want to say anything negative, don’t talk to me."

That might sound like salesman bravado, whistling past a graveyard, etc. But actually is seems like a good, practical response to news of bubbles popping (or at least, deflating). The "pop" isn’t anything physical; it’s about mass psychology. If everyone agrees that property in the Midlands is retaining value and appreciating, it will continue to do so. They may be panicking up north and along the coast, and therefore driving their prices down further, but why should we? I don’t see any advantage in it. I don’t how anyone who owns a home (or, like most of us, a mortgage) would.

I can sort of understand why doubters would dismiss my protestations that the newspaper industry is healthier than Wall Street thinks it is. I have a stake in it, so they take what I say with a grain of salt. But most of us have a stake — a pretty big one — in property retaining its value.

So keep thinking lovely thoughts, people. You’ll thank yourself when you go to sell your house.

What’s all this then about immigration?

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It’s not what you think; this was shot in New Jersey.

Greatest threat to U.S.
is immigration? Since when?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WITH CONGRESS on break, U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has been meeting with his 3rd District constituents. So what’s on their minds?
“Immigration” comes in first.
Second, he says, is “immigration.” Third is immigration. It’s also fourth.
And he supposed that “the war” maybe came in fifth. I’m sure our troops over there will appreciate making the Top Ten.
He admitted that he was being “a little facetious.” The war is “a cloud” casting its shadow over everything political. But there are no clouds on the stark immigration landscape. There, you’ll find nothing but a blinding, hot interrogation lamp surrounded by shadows. If you give the wrong answer, there are a lot of GOP voters out there ready to cast you into the everlasting darkness.
“Wrong,” of course, can vary, depending on whether you’re a lobbyist for the big business types who have been the GOP’s bread and butter for generations, or one of the salt-of-the-earth folk who crowded into the Big Tent in recent decades and created the vaunted GOP majority.
The main question I have on the subject is one that neither Rep. Barrett nor anyone else has answered to my satisfaction:
How did this issue become such a big deal all of a sudden? What changed? We’ve had Mexican tiendas in our neighborhoods, even in South Carolina, for much of the past decade. For even longer, it’s been hard to communicate on a construction site without a working knowledge of Spanish. Our last two presidents could hardly put together a Cabinet for all the illegals their nominees had employed as nannies.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, there’s been a huge influx. But what changed in the past 12 or 15 Sombrero months? As near as I can tell, looking at the real world out there, nothing. But in the unreal world of politics, it’s as though, sometime during the summer of 2005 or so, a huge portion of the electorate suddenly woke up from a Rip Van Winkle catnap and said: “Whoa! Why are all these people speaking Spanish?”
There were always a few who considered illegal immigration Issue One. On the left, you had union types concerned about cheap labor depressing wages and working conditions. On the right, you had culture warriors furious at hearing anything other than English spoken in the U.S. of A.
On both sides, drifting amid the high-sounding words about fairness and the rule of law, there was a disturbing whiff of 19th century Know-Nothingism.
I had one or two people who e-mailed me about it regularly, always furious at us for taking the “wrong” position on the issue — even though, until it moved to the front burner back in the spring, we didn’t have a position on it.
Nor did Mr. Barrett consider it a priority, until late 2004. At least, none of the thousands of news outlets whose archives are available on Lexis-Nexis report his having a burning concern.
During the past year, his name and the word “immigration” showed up 53 times. In the previous year, only 20 times. In all previous years, 40 times. Back when he was first running for Congress in 2002, he was talking about keeping out terrorists, mainly from such places as Iran and Iraq. In fact, opponent Jim Klauber blasted him for paying too much attention to countries “where terrorists come from,” while ignoring “the greatest problem in the 3rd Congressional District” — which, to him, was illegal immigration from Mexico.
But now, and for the last couple of years, Mr. Barrett has stood foursquare behind the House’s “enforcement first” approach. He demonstrated his deep concern most recently by visiting the border personally, just before coming home to see constituents. So when he got an earful, he was prepared.
But I wasn’t, probably because I don’t watch TV and therefore haven’t had it explained to me by Bill O’Reilly. I still find myself wondering: Where did all these angry people come from? The ones who weren’t even talking about this issue a year ago, but now promise to toss Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for actually recognizing that this issue is really complicated.
How can anyone see this issue in black-and-white terms? Hey, I want to see the laws enforced, too. But I know that a nation that can’t find one guy in the mountains of Afghanistan isn’t going to round up 10 to 20 million people walking the streets of the freest, least-controlled nation in the world.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to round up most of them. The Nazis probably could have achieved a success rate of 80 or 90 percent. And it’s probably possible to build a 2,000-mile fence that would be more-or-less impassable. China did it.
But at what cost? I’m not even talking moral or spiritual cost, in the sense of “what kind of nation would that make us?” I’ll let somebody else preach that sermon. I’m talking hard cash.
Look at the national debt. Look at our inadequate presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check out the rising power of nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, whom we are making impervious to international pressure with our insatiable thirst for petrol. Note that we don’t have the military assets to make Iran take us seriously when we suggest it should stop working on nukes for terrorists, or else. Or else what?
Let’s talk priorities, folks, not fantasies. The “invasion” that endangers this country isn’t a bunch of people looking to (gasp) sweep our Wal-Marts to feed their families. It’s Londoners getting on a flight at Heathrow with bogus tubes of Prell in their carry-ons.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem, when it gets to where you have 12 million aliens you can’t account for. Having our labor market, wages and working conditions distorted by a huge supply of cheap, illegal labor is also a serious problem. So is the fact that our neighbors suffer such crushing poverty that they will risk their lives coming here just to have their labor exploited.
But not one of these things is the most urgent problem facing this country. Not a year ago, and not now.

Proimmigrant

Blue Marlin shows the way

23 Replies

"I want to be a leader in something that is extremely important," says Bill Dukes.

Well, he is — and God bless him for it.

The local business leader’s decision to ban smoking from his distinctive Vista restaurant, The Blue Marlin, will at the very least provide a healthy haven for workers and patrons. Beyond that, there’s good reason to believe that customers will flood his establishment in a grateful rush, in order to be able to breathe freely while they eat and drink.

And the food’s good, too.

Better yet, it seems inevitable that other bistros and bars will follow.

Given that I have my doubts that state law will let Columbia ban smoking in public accommodations by ordinance, this is particularly encouraging.

You go, Bill.

The Monitor Group

480 Replies

The first thing I wanted to post on this morning was my thoughts on the new study assessing S.C. public schools’ progress. But as usual, I’ve been in one meeting after another up until now, and the conversation started before I could get to it, back on this post.

Here’s what I wanted to say about it: The most interesting thing is that Mack Whittle and the other business leaders involved in this used The Monitor Group quite deliberately — because it is an organization that the governor — our most prominent advocate of giving up on public schools — likes to cite himself. Business leaders said OK, let’s see what this group will say if it actually does a study of what’s really going on in South Carolina.

That’s what makes this a particularly devastating blow to the tax-credit-for-private-schools movement, which depends so heavily on the false catchphrase, "Out public schools are failing."

Obviously, they are not. The kids actually in the system — including those in the grades before one is old enough to drop out — are doing better and better. Now that that’s established, what we need to do is stop talking about abandoning the system and start actually talking about the areas where we still have problems — such as, the horrific dropout rate.

And no, PPIC does not address that. Kids who can’t cut it or don’t want to cut it in public schools are hardly likely to do better if they go to a private one — which they wouldn’t get to do with PPIC anyway, since it does nothing for the kids with the greatest problems.

The dropout rate is an enormous issue. We have to fix it. So let’s start actually talking about whether the new programs that have been instituted to address it are working, and do whatever else is needed to keep borderline kids in school and succeeding. That’s impossible to do when all the oxygen in the State House is being taken up with PPIC and other wastes of time.

The Calculator Showdown

164 Replies

I just received this official release related to my previous post. Sounds like a VERY organized "debate." Or perhaps a well-orchestrated ambush. Depends on your perspective, I suppose. Anyway, it’s unusual:

AGENDA

Informational
Meeting of the Board of Economic Advisors Called by the
Chairman

AGREED MEETING
BETWEEN

Thomas Ravenel,
Candidate for South Carolina Treasurer and

John S. Rainey,
Chairman of the Board of Economic Advisors

August 24,
2006

10:00 am

Governor’s
Conference Room

Wade Hampton
Building

I. Call to Order    Chairman Rainey

II. Welcome and Recognitions   Chairman Rainey

III. Presentation of data that supports a
$27 billion combined unfunded liability of the South Carolina Retirement System
and the state.

     Thomas Ravenel

IV. Presentation of data that supports
contention that “…in just the last three years, the state’s investment plan has
underperformed the median return of the other states by 70%!”           Thomas Ravenel

V. Definition of “mediocrity” in the
context of a number or range of numbers with respect to investment returns,
specifically as related to the investment plans of “other states” or “large
public pension funds”, as appropriate.



Thomas
Ravenel

VI. Source for the proposition that “…the
greatest economic expansion in the history of mankind…” took place between 1980
and 1999.

     Thomas Ravenel

VII. Review of the performance of Richard
Eckstrom in his management of the South Carolina Retirement System’s and the
state’s funds, by illustration with data, during his term as Treasurer of South
Carolina (1995-1999) relative to that of Grady Patterson, as Treasurer, during
the period 1980 – 1994.

Thomas
Ravenel

VIII. Presentation of basis for assertion
that Mr. Patterson’s “…financial strategies haven’t changed since the 1960’s,
resulting in South Carolina once again lagging behind the other 49
states”.

      Thomas Ravenel

IX. Presentation of basis for assertion
that Grady Patterson, during his tenure as Treasurer, has painted “…a rosy, but
misleading, picture for other state officials and the taxpayers”.

     Thomas Ravenel

X. Closing Comments

     Thomas Ravenel

XI. Closing Comments    Chairman Rainey

XII. Adjournment    Chairman Rainey

Agenda Items III through
IX are issues raised by Mr. Ravenel either in his letter to Chairman Rainey of
August 7, 2006 or in an article in The
Greenville News of August 15, 2006.

Questions and comments
will be entertained following each agenda item from those present, including
press representatives.

You can’t tell the players WITH a program

20 Replies

When I read this story in this morning’s paper, my first day back after three busy days out of state, I thought, "What in the world has been going on while I was out? And what does it all mean?"

Some would say it’s about the dispute over whether the unfunded liability on the state pension system is $27 billion or $18 billion. Right. Like ETV would be interested in airing that. Next, we’d have a stirring face-off between a house painter and a chemical engineer from Clemson debating how fast paint dries.

No, what’s interesting about this is how beautifully it illustrates one of my favorite points. In fact, it goes beyond showing how meaningless political parties are; it even crosses and confuses and erases the lines between different factions of the party.

Here are a few of the things that occur to me when I read this:

Republican Thomas Ravenel’s opponent in the Treasurer’s race is incumbent Grady Patterson, a Democrat who disagrees as often as possible with Republican Gov. Mark Sanford on the Budget and Control Board.

One of the points Mr. Ravenel made in support of his candidacy during the primary season was that the governor needed an ally, not an automatic opponent, in that positions. Beyond that, he agrees with the governor that the Budget and Control Board, which gives lesser statewide elected officials and members of the General Assembly equal say to the governor’s over executive functions of government, should not exist. They’re both right on that one, by the way.

John Rainey is a traditional, conservative, country-club-type Republican with a strong sense of noblesse oblige — hardly one to be taking up the cudgels for Mr. Patterson.

Mr. Rainey is widely credited with having persuaded Mr. Sanford to run for governor four years ago.

Mark Sanford is closer to Mr. Ravenel in terms of political philosophy in some ways than either is to most state Republicans. Mr. Sanford is one of those congressional class of ’94 types who thought shutting down the government was a fine idea — which he demonstrated again this year by vetoing the entire state budget. Once could see Mr. Ravenel doing much the same sort of thing — if he had ever served in elective office.

A glimmer of meaning arises when you see that Mr. Sanford, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John McCain are allies, and that Mr. Ravenel’s entire purpose in running for Treasurer is to position himself to try to take down Sen. Graham in two years. But why are Sanford and Graham such allies? The whole reason the extremists that Mr. Ravenel represents want to take out Graham is that he is too rational and bipartisan. The same people despise Sen. McCain for the same reason. The Ravenel folks value their ideology over party loyalty. And when you get down to it, so does Mark Sanford (just ask a legislator).

Well, that’s enough to chew on for now. This thing has more aspects than a cat has hair.

Civility III: The New Blog Order

30 Replies

I admit it: I’m instituting
a double standard

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
SO WHEN AM I going to get off this “civility” kick? Soon. Very soon. After all, electioneering season is almost back upon us in full force; we start endorsement interviews right after Labor Day.
But that only gives greater urgency to an effort to encourage discussions on public policy issues that go beyond trite, partisan name-calling and sloganeering.
As you know if you haven’t just tuned me out altogether, I’ve been worrying about the tone of the discussions taking place on my Weblog. Don’t misunderstand: I get hundreds of comments from thoughtful people from across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, some really hostile partisans from both left and right have been running off the folks who want to have a dialogue.
It’s not that these folks can’t take the heat. They just don’t want to waste their time.
My greater worry is that such partisan, ideological nonsense is the very problem with politics in America today, aggravating reasonable people to the point that they just want to turn away. My column last week celebrating Joe Lieberman’s independent candidacy was about this same subject. I don’t have the authority to play umpire with regard to the national political discourse. But I can call balls and strikes on the blog.
So after an online discussion that drew close to 500 reader comments, I’ve come up with a new system that I hope will work. It’s far from perfect, and will be subject to change if it doesn’t appear to be working, but since I want the site to continue to be a place where people are free to disagree strongly, forget about perfect. I’ll settle for better.
Here’s the plan: I’m implementing a Double Standard (I thought I’d go ahead and call it that before the critics do, seeing as how that’s what it is). Or maybe you’d call it “behavior profiling.”
Some people will be free to post pretty much whatever they want. With them, I will maintain the same hands-off policy that I’ve applied to everyone up to now. But I’ll have a different rule for everyone not in that select group: I will delete at will any comments that I deem harmful to good-faith dialogue.
The good news is that you get to choose whether you’ll be a privileged character or not.
To be among the elect, you just have to give up your anonymity (just as letter-writers on this page do). You won’t have to fill out special forms or show your birth certificate or anything. Just fill out the existing fields that precede comments with your real, full name; your regular, main e-mail address (the one you use for friends or family or co-workers, not something you set up on Yahoo for the purpose of hiding your identity); and if you have a Web site, your URL.
If it seems necessary (either to you or me) to provide more info to establish who you really are, you can do so either in the text of the comment, or by e-mailing me.
When would it be helpful to provide more info? Use your judgment — if your name is John Smith and your e-mail is [email protected], you might want to tell a little more, such as that you’re a Columbia attorney or a student at USC or whatever. And I’ll use my judgment — if you call yourself Mike Cakora (one of my regulars), but write something totally uncharacteristic of him, I’ll start asking questions.
To be in the other group, just keep hiding behind anonymity. I’ll still let you through most of the time, but I’m going to start deleting comments that fit into one of two categories:

Insulting, demeaning personal remarks aimed at delegitimizing, discouraging or intimidating those with whom you disagree. If you don’t know what I mean by that, you’ll soon find out.
Dogmatic, repetitive, sloganeering ideological claptrap that fails to move the conversation forward and just generally wastes the time of anyone who reads through it in search of actual, original thought. If you use partisan buzzwords and labels as a substitute for genuine argument, you’re in this category. Once again, some of you may have trouble understanding exactly what I mean by that (such rhetoric is so reflexive today), but I will do my best to demonstrate.

Between those two categories, I can tell you already that I will act upon the first with greater alacrity than upon the second. It is the greater offense.
But, some of you are by now sputtering, this is so subjective! Yep, and to some of you, that’s just plain shocking. Not to me. I’ve had to make millions of such judgments in my 30-plus-year career. It’s what editors do. Every word I have ever allowed into the paper has required, at the most basic level, an unforgiving yes/no type of decision. Space and time constraints require us to leave out a whole lot more than we’re able to put in. Those considerations don’t apply on the Web, but something at least as important does: The need to have at least one place where people can hear each other think without being drowned out by shouted stupidity.
I expect the number of comments will drop off for awhile. Some will depart in disgust, others in confusion. Still others will be more selective about what they post, which is actually the point of this. I hope we make up in quality what we give up in quantity.
If you don’t understand how to meet the new standards, here’s a hint:
Always try to express your ideas in a way that will actually change the minds of people with whom you disagree. Don’t write in a way calculated to win cheers and attaboys from those who already agree with you, or to give yourself a jolt of vindictive satisfaction.
Oh, and remember: You don’t have to worry about the standards if you have the guts to stand up and identify yourself. Just don’t be a wuss, and you can still be a jerk.
Unfortunately, given the present polarization of political attitudes, some of you will refuse to believe that “those other people” can ever be persuaded. You think there are people like you, and people like those others, and any attempt to reason across the divide is futile.
If that describes you, you’ve come to the wrong place. I believe that good-faith dialogue has the power to bring us together over what we have in common. If all you want to do is shake your fist and shout slogans, there are plenty of other blogs out there that welcome that. Just not mine.
And here’s where you find it: http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

bradwarthen.com

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