Category Archives: South Carolina

Jim DeMint meeting

I’ve had trouble this summer keeping up with my commitment, stated back when I started this blog, to let you know about meetings the editorial board has with newsmakers and other guests — although I have reported the main ones. I did mention Gresham Barrett the other day, and today I’ll catch up by telling you about Sen. Jim DeMint’s meeting with us back on Tuesday. (And by the way, Demint_2 the picture is not from our meeting. It’s an AP photo of the senator talking about bringing a new nuclear power facility to the Savannah River Site during a press conference in Aiken a week earlier.)

It was fairly uneventful — Lee Bandy, who was there as an observer representing the newsroom, didn’t write anything live off of it — but there were a few items of interest worth sharing:

First, he was fairly proud of having held the federal highway bill’s gargantuan total down to something close to what the White House had wanted, while managing to help South Carolina out in some significant ways. Since Cindi Scoppe is going to address that S.C. impact in the paper in the next few days, I’ll leave elaboration on that point to her.
Rest assured, Gov. Sanford — this is one Republican who is not coming after your job. Rather than criticize the governor’s performance on ecodevo, or complain that he’s hard to work with in that area, Sen. DeMint said, "We work well with him." He added that "I feel we’re poised for incredible growth in the state." Besides, "We’re not easy to reach, either."
He said he thought it strange that Majority Leader Bill Frist, who generally keeps a low profile on issues and works for consensus within the caucus, should choose to get out in front on stem cells, of all things. He also noted that folks keep defining the issue inaccurately: "The issue isn’t whether we do research; it’s whether the federal government pays for it." Good point, that.
It was good to hear him say that he’s learned a lot from traveling to the world’s hot spots and learning about foreign affairs. "You’re expected as a senator to be involved with that," he said. I’m glad he realizes that now. Last year, when I asked him to talk about America’s role in the world, he sort of blinked and said something along the lines of, "You mean, besides trade?"
He talked for a while about his health plan, which he said stresses "individual ownership" and portability. But the most interesting thing he said on the subject — and somehow we got onto another subject before following up with questions (something I need to do the next time I talk to him) — was this: "We’ve got to go there (meaning something like his plan), or we’re going to go to national health care relatively soon, because where we are is not going to work." At this morning’s board meeting, we were discussing that, and sort of kicking ourselves that we didn’t get him to elaborate.
Scared me no end by suggesting it would be possible to draw down U.S. troops somewhat in 2006. I continue to believe that would be suicidal; we need to go the other way, if anything.

I’ve been getting comments from anti-war folks upset because in my Wednesday column I said that withdrawing from Iraq now would be like "spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives." Well, I stand by that statement, and I add a corollary: If Republicans pull us out of Iraq in order to help themselves get re-elected, they’ll be doing something even worse than that.

A glimmer of hope

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OK, now that you think — based on my last few posts — that I’m piling on with the bad news about Mark Sanford, let me throw you a curve. The governor said something the other day that made a very good impression on me, and I hope it will make an impression on some others over at the State House.

Cindi Scoppe’s column today, and this news story, may not make much of any impression on you because unlike me, most people live real lives and don’t sit around thinking about comprehensive tax reform the way my colleagues on the editorial board and I do. (And if so, good for you.) But please go back and read those items before we proceed. Pretend you’re listening to that "waiting for the answer" music from "Jeopardy" while I wait for you to finish reading (the column and the news story, I mean, not the "Jeopardy" link — stay on task, please).

Don’t want to read them? OK, here’s what they’re about: At a Kiwanis Club meeting in Columbia, reported the Associated Press, "Gov. Mark Sanford said Wednesday he thinks lawmakers should study how to fund education in South Carolina before they start to tweak property taxes."

This was astounding news. The governor who is all about cutting taxes, and whose principal interest in education has been in offering tax cuts to people if they will abandon the public schools, was saying Sanford_tax school funding should come before an extremely popular tax cut. And he was saying it to a mostly retired crowd (click on the picture), the very sort of crowd that tends to love to hear about property tax cuts.

And he’s RIGHT! He’s absolutely right! This is what public school advocates have been saying for years — particularly those of us who care about the biggest problem with public education in our state: the gross inequity in funding between affluent suburban school districts and their poor, rural counterparts. (More specifically, and comprehensively, what we have been saying on the editorial page is that the governor and the Legislature should look at ALL state needs — schools, roads, public safety, the whole shebang — then figure out what it would cost to address them adequately, and build a fair, sensible tax system that pays for it all. In other words, when we talk about "comprehensive tax reform," we are simultaneously talking about comprehensive spending reform.)

"If you want relief," the governor said, "then how are we going to do it in a way that still provides adequate funding for the education process?" He even mentioned the equity issue!

Another interesting thing about this story is that the lawmakers the AP contacted for reaction — some of the very ones who have been a voice of reason, putting the brakes on Mr. Sanford’s tuition tax credits and broad income tax cuts — came across as thoughtless "let’s cut taxes because it’s popular, and who cares if the state falls apart in the meantime" types.

I don’t want to pin too much on this one account of a speech. I wasn’t there, and I need to dig into this a bit before I get too excited. Mr. Sanford has expressed concern about education equity in the past, only to turn around and, absurdly, offer his tuition tax credit as the solution. (A reminder for the reality-challenged: Poor, rural families would be the last people in the state to benefit from the tuition tax credit. Why? Because they don’t pay enough income tax to qualify for the tax cut, and because even if they DID qualify for the refund, they can’t afford to come up with the tuition on the front end, and in any case there are no private schools nearby that would enroll their kids.)

But with lawmakers mindlessly determined to cut one tax in a vacuum yet again (a tax they don’t even collect, by the way; a huge part of this is lawmakers loving to meddle in local government affairs, where they don’t have to clean up the mess they create), any spark of hope that somebody out there is actually thinking about how all these issues are connected is worth fanning into a flame, if at all possible.

The well-heeled natives are restless

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Have you read this story in today’s paper? If not, go ahead and read it now; I’ll wait.

OK, ready?

Well, there’s nothing surprising about this. Practical people in our state — and business types are nothing if not practical — have been murmuring about the governor for some time. Either they think he’s got his head in the clouds and his ideas aren’t grounded in reality, or they like his ideas, but are turned off by his ineffectiveness in putting them into action. Either way, it’s the theory-versus-real-world disconnect that turns them off.

What IS remarkable is that the situation — particularly the state’s economy — has gotten bad enough that they’re talking about it publicly.

This puts a number of things into an interesting framework. Take the recent comments by both Bobby Harrell and Gresham Barrett — two Republicans who are well positioned to run for governor, assuming it all of a sudden becomes fashionable to take on an incumbent of their own party. They have not been deaf to the murmuring. And while he protests vehemently that he is NOT trying to challenge the governor, Mr. Harrell has turned his "the governor’s not doing enough to grow jobs" theme into a regular Rotary Club speech. Or dare I say, "stump speech?"

Note also that these two Republicans are attacking (and not all that gently, given the circumstances) the governor in the one area that’s likely to get business types nodding their heads in agreement, particularly after the recent loss of the state’s AAA bond rating.

This will bear watching. As the governor himself is fond of saying, "To be continued…"

Mark Sanford on Will Folks

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My Sunday column makes the case that Will Folks’ op-ed was worth running because it gave insight into his character and judgment, and therefore into the judgment of his boss, Gov. Mark Sanford. So what does the governor himself have to say about that?

Before asking the governor Friday about Rep. Gresham Barrett’s comments, I asked him one other question:

"Why was Will Folks your press secretary for four years?"

His answer was too involved to just slip into my column without ditching several of the comments from readers that were the reason for the column. And I sure don’t want to write another column on this subject. But I just had to share it, so here goes:

The governor began by noting that Will Folks hadn’t been his spokesman as governor for four years. That period started with the campaign, and that’s when he and Mr. Folks forged their bond, such as it is.

"You start out with a grass-roots campaign, you have very little in the way of resources," the governor said. "You’re working out of the basement of your house…. You can’t afford all the bells and whistles" of a full-blown, professional campaign with experienced people in all the key positions. In any case, he added, that kind of uptight, do-it-by-the-book campaign wasn’t his style.

So, he said, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." (We all knew that’s what he did, but it meant a little more having the governor just say it that way.)

"Given the pressures he was under and the challenges he faced that he had never faced before, I think he did a pretty good job," during the campaign, Mr. Sanford said.

So after the election, he decided to give the young man the same job in the governor’s office. There, as we all saw, Mr. Folks moved from gaffe to gaffe — the Corvette thing, the comments about the Commission on Women, the alleged threats to the Chamber in Anderson.

The governor doesn’t deny that. But, he said, "For the most part, he did a pretty good job."

Bottom line as to why he kept him on so long? "I did it because he was competent," said the governor.

That’s pretty much all he would say for the record. Make of it what you will.

August 7 column, with links

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Folks op-ed sparks lively
discussion in blogosphere
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LAST WEEK we ran an op-ed piece from former gubernatorial press secretary Will Folks headlined, “My side of the domestic violence story.”
As you most likely know, Gov. Mark Sanford’s ex-spokesman was charged with criminal domestic violence after he allegedly kicked open the door of the home he shared with his now-former fiancee and pushed her into furniture, bruising her back.
When, to my surprise, he called Tuesday to offer a column on the subject, I was quite interested. Folks_mug_2 Of course, I could not decide whether to run it until I had seen it. And I had to make the decision quickly, because he had indicated his intention to share it with other papers. That meant running it, if at all, the next day. We don’t knowingly run local op-eds that have run elsewhere.
We ended up running it pretty much as it was, with one exception: I removed a passage in which he quoted what he claimed was an e-mail from his ex to his mother. Before making that decision, I asked to see the e-mail, and he forwarded it. Important context was missing from his citation of it. Besides, this was supposed to be his account of what he did, not his version of her account.
I wrote an item for my blog about the piece. I included the part I had cut, followed by a fuller quotation from the e-mail he had forwarded. The way he had selectively quoted the e-mail to his advantage was striking.
There was high reader interest. That day, the story about the new “four-strikes” rule at USC got the third-highest number of page views on thestate.com. My blog item and Mr. Folks’ op-ed came in first and second.
Most interesting to me were the comments readers left on my blog. In keeping with my ongoing quest to make clear to readers why we do what we do, I thought I’d quote some of those comments, and answer them. I only know these correspondents by the names or nicknames they gave on the blog. But their identities are less important to me than the substance of their comments.
I begin with “Lisa Turner’s” comment for an obvious reason: “You’re becoming a pretty good blogger. While I am intrigued by all the behind-the-scenes iterations of this story, I do not think it should have been run. You say that it was an opportunity The State shouldn’t pass up, but do you really think that Will Folks was going to do anything but try to help himself out?”
Mr. Folks probably was trying to help himself out. But that’s not what he did. He defied legal (and his father’s) counsel in doing so. I knew I wasn’t helping him a bit by running it. But I wasn’t trying to hurt him, either. It wasn’t about how it affected him. My reasoning was the same as with anything we choose to publish: I ran it for my readers, who had a legitimate interest in knowing more about the man whom the governor had kept for years as his spokesman, despite his obvious liabilities.
“Bob Steel” wrote: “I think it is irresponsible to allow Mr. Folks the opportunity to give his side of the story without hearing from the victim. It is very apparent Mr. Folks has friends at The State and was able to call in some favors.”
If Mr. Folks has friends at The State, they certainly weren’t involved in this decision. And again, no favor was done here, as I suspect any attorney would tell you. As to the “other side” angle: I won’t solicit a point/counterpoint on a domestic dispute. The op-ed page is not “The Jerry Springer Show.” If the former fiancee, or anyone else, offers me a relevant, publishable piece rebutting Mr. Folks, I’ll run it. But I am not going to harass someone who (unlike Mr. Folks) is not a public figure during a horrible time in her life by calling and saying: “Your ex-boyfriend has written something trying to defend his actions. You want to respond? By the way, you’ve got about an hour.”
“Elsa Green” wrote that “The State Newspaper has made a poor decision in allowing Will Folks to write an op-ed about his own personal problems.” But she went on to make my argument for me as to why to run it: “What is particularly frightening about this case is that Will has been an adviser to the top executive of our state.” Exactly. If the column had been simply about a man’s “personal problems,” I would have had no interest. It had value because of what it revealed about that man’s character and judgment, and therefore about the judgment of the governor.
“Randy O’Toole” understood: “I think that Mr. Folks has a serious problem and it reflects poorly not only on him but the Governor and the State of South Carolina.”
Not everyone saw it that way. “John Smith” wrote: “The real winner in all of this is, of course, Mark Sanford. After running headlong into a brick wall in terms of ‘taking on’ the governmental status quo, the Governor has now gotten rid of the ‘pit bull’: the very voice and symbol of his renegade attitude towards dealing with the legislature. Perhaps we will see a more cooperative effort from the executive branch as re-election time nears. After all, the voters like to see results.”
“Deaver Traywick” thought I was unfair to the author: “My only suggestion is that you might have given Mr. Folks the option of running the piece as edited or not at all. As a writer and editor, I am concerned about the editorial policy of publishing changes or truncations without the writer’s consent.” As I regularly do when I make such a substantive change, I called Mr. Folks and told him of it. I half expected him to withdraw the piece, but he didn’t.
“Thomas McElveen” came to my defense on that point: “Based on my personal experience, Mr. Warthen is extremely fair in his editing, and very graciously allows op-ed contributors input and even critique of his editing.” I wouldn’t dare try to
say it better.
Finally, “Robert Trout” wrote, “I don’t get Mr. Warthen’s decision to not run an unedited op-ed piece in the newspaper, and yet run it in his blog. I don’t see the differenceæ.æ.æ..” Personally, I see a big difference.
One of the reasons I took on the demanding additional work of a blog is that it gave me a chance to say things I couldn’t say in the newspaper for lack of space, or because it was unsuitable. The blogosphere, as you may have noticed, is a very different place from a family newspaper. One way I make use of that different forum is to give behind-the-scenes looks at the paper itself. For instance, I recently posted a Robert Ariail cartoon that we had judged too salacious for the paper, and asked readers whether they would have made the same decision. Most said we made the wrong call. Such is life.

Et tu, Gresham

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Rep. Gresham Barrett came by our offices to visit with the editorial board this afternoon. It was the first time I’d met him (as near as I can remember), so I felt pretty bad about entering the room late and leaving early. But Friday is our hardest day of the week, and I was hours behind already.

He had come by prepared in particular to talk about the plan he’s pushing to produce nuclear power at the Savannah River Site. He expressed optimism that he’s making progress on that front.

But before I left the board room, we made sure to ask him about his comments published that day in The Greenville News.

His criticism of the governor’s performance on economic development was of course familiar, since new S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell had said similar things last month. (And Mr. Harrell, it should be noted, has taken that act on the road. He said the very same things at my Rotary Club recently.)

But like Mr. Harrell, Mr. Barrett downplays any notions that there’s some sort of internecine spat going on among the state’s leading Republicans. Also like Mr. Harrell, he stressed that he wants to work with the governor, not against him, on ecodevo.

"I’m not here to pick a fight with the governor," he said. "He and I agree on so many different things." Nevertheless, "This is an area that we can improve." And he stressed that he himself, and others, could do more.

Still, this is an interesting trend.

For his part, when I asked him about it on Friday, Gov. Mark Sanford had little that he wanted to say — on the record. As far as what he was willing to be quoted on, he pretty much said the same things he said before, when Mr. Harrell’s comments were in the news.

WIS follow-up on Folks op-ed

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Thanks to all who took time today to comment on my last posting. It was a bit overwhelming. I believe 15 comments in a 12-hour period is a record for this blog.

Since there is so much interest in the subject, you might want to click on this link to see the rather lengthy story WIS did, apparently prompted by our op-ed piece this morning.

If that link doesn’t work (it doesn’t seem to function as smoothly as most URLs), just go to the WIS home page and click on "Kara Gormley interviews Will Folks on CDV charge," under "Featured videos," just to the right of the center of the page.

Ms. Gormley interviewed me about this Wednesday afternoon via phone. Apparently I didn’t say anything interesting enough to make the report, which is probably a good thing, I suppose. By the way, I found her quite professional and intelligent, so once again, John Graham Altman and I disagree.

July 31 column, with links

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State House needs to get real
about local government — and taxes
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
A MEMBER of my Rotary club last week asked new House Speaker Bobby Harrell a question about property taxes.
Unfortunately, in answering the question, he did not say anything that sounded like "comprehensive tax reform."
This is worrisome, because after a buildup of two or three years in which it has looked constantly as though lawmakers were on the verge of getting serious about tackling the entire problem of how we fund essential services in this state, I’m starting to hear a lot of talk that sounds disturbingly like we’re in for another populist, Band-Aid round of property tax cutting without regard for anything else. (See above editorial.)
Take, for instance, what Mr. Harrell’s Senate counterpart had to say on our July 17 op-ed page.
This column, by the way, will make more sense if you read that column, from Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell. For stark contrast, also check out the July 26 piece by the Municipal Association‘s Howard Duvall.
Mr. McConnell’s piece is remarkable for its lack of grounding in reality; Mr. Duvall’s for the precise opposite.
In case you don’t have access to the Web at the moment, let me offer a few excerpts from Mr. McConnell’s piece, with a little commentary of my own:
"As long as we have property taxes, we are in effect paying rent to the government for the use of our property…." No, we’re not. What we are doing is paying our fair share for services that benefit us enormously as property owners. Those of us who own property are ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of services that make our communities worth living in: police and fire protection, libraries and, yes, public schools.
"Local governments can charge us as much as they want and feed their need to spend our money like they have a blank check." Local governments are run by officials who are elected with just as much legitimacy as Mr. McConnell, and who are caught between their mandate to provide everyday, essential services in their communities; state and federal mandates that they do certain things whether they want to or not; and the state Legislature’s never-ending efforts to prevent them from paying what it costs to do these things. If legislators, in their callous disregard , force local governments to raise property taxes beyond what voters find tolerable, it is the local officials who get voted out of office.
"Their (local governments’) presumption for reform has always been more sources of revenue but fewer and fewer restriction on how and how much they can spend." Well, duh. When costs are increasing, and everybody’s beating you up over the property tax, of course you’re going to seek other sources of revenue. And where in the world do state legislators get off placing restrictions on how local council members spend the revenues that they take full responsibility (and the political risk) for raising? Here’s how this works: When lawmakers passed a bill spelling out how local governments could charge impact fees for new residential development, they forbade the locals to spend the money on the one greatest cost such development generates — public schools. So the locals have to go back to the property tax, and they — not the guilty parties up in the State House — get strung up at the polls for it.
"Reform must be fair and, at the very least, must not produce a net increase for government in collected taxes." Oh, no. We wouldn’t want to provide rural kids with the same quality education that city kids get, or put enough troopers on the road, or make our prisons secure, or get the mentally ill out of jails and emergency rooms, or any of those other frills we can’t seem to afford with the present tax structure.
"I hope that then the voices of the people from the mountains to the coast can drown out those of the paid lobbyists." Translation: I hope that rising dissatisfaction with the problem the Legislature created gives me the political license I need to utterly ignore the realistic counsel of the governments closest to the people.
Local governments deal with the public at the most intimate level, where basic services are provided. They know what the public really wants from government because the public lets them know immediately when they’re failing to provide it. And they know what it costs, and they know what it’s like to be caught between the people they live among and the ideologues in Columbia who keep trying to make their jobs harder.
I finally understand why Mark Sanford is the first governor I’ve seen Sen. McConnell get along with: Both are passionately, pedantically libertarian. And neither of them allows the reality of what happens at the business end of government — where essential services are provided to real people — interfere with them as they sit in the State House and endlessly spin their anti-government theories.
Both of them starkly displayed this disconnect on the seat belt issue. But it matters so much more when the governor maligns public schools, or the senator trashes local government, with no regard for what’s actually happening out here in the world.

Ideas for change

A South Carolina story

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What happened to me today was such a quintessential South Carolina experience, I just had to share it.

I bring in my paper this morning, put it on the table, gather up the makings of breakfast, and start reading. When I got to the story about the interim superintendent for Lexington/Richland District 5, I focused first on his name, wondering whether it was a typo. As I skimmed the story, I stopped at this sentence, which explained the name thing:

A native South Carolinian, his given name is Thomas Edward Calhoun Dowling. Colleagues and close friends simply refer to him as “TEC.”

Well, duh. Like anyone named Thomas Edward Calhoun Dowling could be anything but a South Carolina native.

Then, as I looked at his picture, I thought for some reason of my uncle, Woody Collins. I didn’t know why I thought of Woody, except that he is a (former) career educator — a retired principal, now a Tecdowling municipal judge in Bennettsville — and they are almost exactly the same age (my uncle is only six years older than I am). They don’t look alike — beyond both having mustaches — and from his picture I doubt TEC Dowling has a personality anything like my uncle’s. Not many people have a personality anything like my uncle’s, as any acquaintance of Woody’s can tell you. (When my brother got married last year, his bride’s family — mostly from New York and Canada — couldn’t stop talking about the colorful toast Woody offered at the reception — even though for him it was little more than an everyday dinner-table monologue. They kept talking about how impressed they were by "The Judge." They seemed to think he was a character out of Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor or something.)

Basically, we’re talking two white guys of about the same age, both native South Carolinians, both having committed all or most of their adult lives to public education, and that’s about as far as the association went in my mind.

And then I forgot about it.

A couple of hours later, I’m in the middle of the weekly senior staff meeting (when all the heads of the divisions of the newspaper — news, advertising, circulation, finance, and various others, including little old editorial — meet with the publisher; think of it as being like when all the dons get together in "The Godfather"), and my mobile starts to vibrate. I step out of the room, and it’s my mother calling to share an observation on today’s paper.

"You know that fella who was named to run District Five?" she asks. Sure, I say, remembering reading about "TEC."

"Well, he’s your cousin." Apparently, he’s the son of one of my mother’s first cousins — she didn’t mention which one — which makes us … what … second cousins? (I’m never sure how you calculate that.) Of course, this state is chockful of my first and second cousins to various removes, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

So no wonder he had made me think of someone in my family. Probably some atavistic cell-memory thing that enables our species to recognize others who carry our DNA. Or something.

But whatever it was, the only place I’ve every lived — and I’ve lived all over — where stuff like this happens is South Carolina. And not just to me. It just seems like everybody is related to everybody else here.

When I first moved back to my native state in 1987, I was just getting used to the newsroom of The State, a place where every other editor had come up through the ranks — I had "outsider" stamped all over me in a place that back then didn’t quite know what to make of outsiders — when one day I marveled out loud at an odd name I ran across in a story I was editing. I offered one or two ironic remarks along the lines of "What kind of name is that; it sounds made up." (I’m not sharing what I actually said because I’m trying to be delicate and not identify the object of my bemusement.)

"Yeah, he’s my cousin," said an editor sitting next to me.

Well, I learned a lesson that day, one that has been reinforced over and over. Basically, you can’t swing a cat, or a "smart" remark, or anything in this state without hitting a relation of someone you know. And if, like me, you’re from around here, that someone might be you.

July 22 column, with links

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Folks in high office keep getting
younger — in more ways than one
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
I’M NOT USUALLY inclined to help partisans and ideologues, but the Democrats and “liberal groups” who yearn to stop President Bush’s choice for the Supreme Court obviously aren’t trying very hard.
John Glover Roberts Jr. is flawed in a way that is so obvious, so irrefutable, that the seven Democrats in the “Gang of 14” should have no trouble citing this failing as an “extraordinary circumstance” that frees them from their promise not to filibuster:
He’s too young.
I don’t mean “too young in that he would be in a position to steer the court in a conservative direction for a generation.” Mr. Bush’s political opponents would mean it that way, but I don’t care about any of that “liberal vs. conservative” mumbo-jumbo. I mean he’s just plain too young. This is Roberts not opinion. It is based upon an indisputably objective standard, to wit:
At 50, he is the first person nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime who is younger than I am.
Obviously, this is an intolerable situation, and those inclined toward intolerance of all things Bush should seize it with both hands (especially since I doubt they’ll find any other good excuses to oppose him).
Now, let me help out the Republicans and “conservative groups” that are going to support this mere pup no matter what their opponents say, do or dig up:
I’m being facetious.
I spell that out — obvious as it may be to you, dear reader — because the ideologues of the right are as utterly lacking in a sense of irony as their counterparts on the left. And I get enough sputtering e-mail as things stand.
I will now confuse everyone by not only getting serious, but changing the subject entirely.
My purpose is not to pass judgment on that callow youth the president introduced Tuesday night (note to “conservatives” —being facetious again there).
The thing is, my own shock at his youth reminds me of an earlier experience, one that has more substantial implications right here at home in South Carolina.
In 1994, my first year on this newspaper’s editorial board, we interviewed David Beasley, who was seeking our endorsement (which he didn’t get) for governor.
At one point, the late Bill Rone asked the candidate of the Christian Right about his reputed past Sc_senate_beasley as a Good-Time Charlie.
Mr. Beasley looked at him with an expression of sincere, chastened, candid innocence and said, “Yessir, I’ve had good times….” I have never before or since seen anyone seeking public office look quite so much like a once-wayward cherub who was humbly grateful to be back in the heavenly fold. It was not the sort of thing that your everyday man of the world can carry off.
So as the meeting was breaking up I had to ask: How old are you, anyway? He told me, I nodded, and said wonderingly, “You’re the first gubernatorial candidate I’ve ever interviewed who was younger than I am.”
I didn’t attach all that much importance to it at the time. Yes, I did detect a certain “What, me worry?” callowness in the candidate, a lack of gravitas that always made it hard for me to take him as seriously as one would like to take a governor of one’s state. But my main thought was that I was getting older, and I might as well get used to this sort of thing.
And boy, was I right.
Every governor we’ve had since that day has been younger than I. Jim Hodges didn’t look like it, but it’s true.
Mr. Hodges, who had been a competent and even admirable legislator, regressed somehow from the moment he began to seek the state’s highest office. He allowed himself to be led by the nose by a self-deluding, 34-year-old political consultant whose awful advice helped him become, like Mr. Hodgeslose Beasley, a one-termer.
Mark Sanford seems a little older than his two immediate predecessors. He seems more like, say, a graduate student. But his ideas, and his ability to translate them into policy, seem stuck in that stage of development. However good some of them are (and however bad others are), they seem unable to find their way out of the seminar.
It’s not really a matter of age. Mr. Sanford was five years older than Fritz Hollings was when he became governor, and Mr. Hollings accomplished a lot.
My concern has more to do with certain attributes we tend to associate with age, and which have been lacking in South Carolina. Our last few governors haven’t been terribly accomplished, either at the time of their election or at the time of their departure.
Mr. Sanford has yet to depart, but he hasn’t broken the string yet, and his resume in 2002 — six years in Congress with a singular lack of achievements — is consistent with the trend. (Mr. Hodges Sanford_budget had more to show when he ran, but you wouldn’t have known it watching him as governor.)
Not just to pick on these three, the same can be said of almost everyone who’s sought the office during this time — Joe Riley, who failed to be nominated in 1994, being the noteworthy exception.
And South Carolina needs more than that. It needs someone who can get things done, because we’ve got a lot that needs doing. Yet the kinds of accomplished men and women who might be able to lead us where we need to go just don’t seek public office. Perhaps it’s that their dignity won’t allow them to run that often degrading gantlet. Perhaps it’s something else.
But whatever it is, it continues to hold our state back.

July 17 column, with links

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Has South Carolina lost its way on job creation?
STANDARD & Poor’s dramatically highlighted just how bad off our state is economically when it downgraded our bond rating (see editorial above).
On Wednesday, new House Speaker Bobby Harrell publicly opined that South Carolina has dropped the ball on job creation and economic development.
Former Gov. Carroll Campbell “set the standard for economic development (results) and created the model that David Beasley followed, and by following that, our unemployment rate became the third best in the country. Today, we’re third or fourth worst,” the speaker told The Greenville News.
“My frustration,” he told The Associated Press, “is that I don’t think we’ve been focused on that Harrell since Carroll Campbell and David Beasley were governors. I don’t mean to pick on Mark, and I don’t mean to pick on Jim Hodges.”
On Friday, he expressed frustration that anyone would think he was trying to pick a fight with his fellow Republican in the governor’s office. “I think it is a total waste of time to talk about blame and who is at fault,” he said. “I think we need to recognize where we are and prepare a road map for where we want to be, and then do it.”
When I noted that it was inevitable that many would see his remarks as a challenge to the governor, he said: “I’m not interested in challenging anybody. I’m interested in lowering the unemployment rate and raising incomes.”
Gov. Mark Sanford’s official reaction to the loss of the AAA credit rating was to issue a press release asserting his promise “to continue his efforts to grow South Carolina’s economy, not South Carolina’s government.” It’s tempting to dismiss that as standard libertarian/populist boilerplate, intended to win votes without saying anything.
But it actually goes to the heart of what Mr. Sanford really believes about how he and other state leaders should go about their jobs. And that’s a problem.
Am I saying it’s a problem that he doesn’t want to “grow government”? No. I’m saying it’s a problem that the governor fixates too much on the size and shape of government, and too little on what government needs to do and how well it does it.
That may sound odd coming from someone as passionate about government restructuring as I am. The governor’s proposals in that regard happen to be the ones I had been pushing for more than a decade before he embraced them. But our motives are different: I want government to be more efficient and accountable because it has a huge job to do helping this state catch up with the rest of the country, and it can’t afford waste and lack of direction.
The governor wants government to be smaller as an end in itself. He essentially doesn’t believe there’s all that much that government needs to do — just get government out of the way, and the market will take care of all.
But the market has little interest in South Carolina, in large part because our fragmented and visionless government has neglected our roads, our health, public safety and especially the schools that strive to educate our labor force. Other states have done a far better job of keeping up the neighborhood, which encourages capital to want to move in there and not here.
The governor’s answer is to replenish trust accounts (fine), cut income taxes (again, see above editorial) and implement an arbitrary spending cap keyed to inflation that sounds good: “(Y)ou shouldn’t grow government faster than the taxpayers’ ability to pay for it,” he says reasonably. But what he says is divorced from reality. To him, restoring funding to prior levels after years of (in some cases) double-digit cuts is “growing government.” Never mind that some of these agencies weren’t adequately funded to do their jobs before the cuts.
(Note that I say “some.” We have praised Mr. Sanford for trying to trim or eliminate overfunded or unnecessary programs. But when lawmakers fail to go along with his targeted cuts, he wants across-the-board caps, which would further undercut the essential agencies.)
“I don’t want to grow government, either,” Speaker Harrell said Friday. Nor is he necessarily talking about spending more money when he complains that we’re not doing enough to promote job growth. “The conversation ought to be, what is it we need to do? And then talk about what it costs to do that.” (Which is precisely how we ought to approach all government spending.)
He suspects there’s one area where more is needed: “I think Commerce could use a little help. We’ve made Commerce a lot smaller…. We don’t want to waste any money, but we ought to look at our current level of activity and see if it’s being effective. And the results suggest it’s not.” He’d like to get past blaming and discuss this with the Sanford folks.
Interestingly, the governor had earlier defended his administration’s efforts by boasting about how Commerce Secretary Bob Faith has restructured, streamlined and redirected the Commerce Department. In other words, he takes particular pride in Commerce being smaller. It’s one part of government he’s managed to restructure to his liking.
As for results, “It is not just the number” of jobs, “but the quality.” Gov. Sanford said the new jobs that have been created pay 30 percent more than the state average. That’s great, if there are enough of them to pull up the state overall. But that’s not the case, which is what makes Mr. Harrell’s observations ring true.

Background on school buses

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A lot of folks may think editorials are merely a matter of the way something strikes us at a given moment, or our personal preferences or prejudices, or whatever. I hope not too many people have such misconceptions, but I can understand what might lead some folks to leap to such erroneous conclusions. After all, unlike news stories — which strive to tell you every relevant thing a reporter could learn about an event or issue — editorials tend to be like icebergs: You only see a fraction of their substance. Editorials aren’t very long, and what space they do take up is largely used for argument — rhetoric, if you will — leaving little room for the many facts that went into the conclusion being presented. Most of that remains below the water line.

So it is that I thought I’d use my blog today to show you some of the raw material that went into our editorial today on our state’s school bus problem. For some, this will strengthen the point we’re making. Others will remain unmoved. In fact, some of the more ardent despisers of our public school system and all who sail in her will object to the fact that most of the information I’m showing you came from the state Department of Education. To these fantasists, that impeaches the testimony right off the bat. Well, let me start by telling you, and them, three critical facts:

I went to the Department of Education for a reason similar to the one that (allegedly) motivated Willie Sutton to rob banks: Because that’s where the information is. These are the folks who know the bus system, and the finances involved, far more intimately than anyone else.
And this one is going to shock the anti-school crowd: No one at the Department of Education has ever lied to me. If they have, they certainly haven’t been caught, despite the legions of people out there who would like to catch them. In fact, they are obsessive about making sure I get each fact exactly right. If they tell me something wrong, they’re on the phone setting it straight before I realize the error — and well before I’ve published it.
They didn’t "put me up" to this. In fact, to the contrary. Jim Foster and Betsy Carpentier — especially Ms. Carpentier — kept telling me how happy they were with the level of funding they got this year, because it will enable them to operate the buses, something that looked in doubt at some points in the budgeting process. They’re satisfied, for the moment, though they know that there’s a day of reckoning coming if we don’t get on a regular bus replacement schedule. My colleagues on the editorial board and I are the ones who are disgusted at the situation.

Anyway, all that said, here are some things I learned in the course of researching and writing the editorial, with links to the raw source material:

It all started with an Associated Press story that ran in the paper, in part, on Tuesday, July 5. I wrote a blog item about it that very morning. We learned more on Wednesday from a story by The State‘s own Bill Robinson, which confirmed that the sale of the used buses had taken place, and added other details, including political reaction.
On Friday of that week, a colleague shared with me another story from the Charleston paper that added this point of interest: South Carolina runs the oldest buses in the nation. This was attributed not only to those "educrats" over at the state department, but to a group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. This group has a thing about old school buses, so it’s kind of embarrassing to see them single out S.C. for yet another such dubious distinction.
I felt like this would be a pretty easy editorial. A few numbers to check out, nothing more. I certainly knew the background: It’s been years since the General Assembly has provided sufficient funds to replace buses on a reasonable schedule that keeps them safe and reliable. Then, alerted by an e-mail from SCHotline, I ran across this item. It was the usual ranting you get from right-wing talk radio, but since this guy was directly challenging things I had assumed were fact, I decided to throw his piece at the DOE and see how it reacted.
Jim Foster reacted by saying, "I’ve been dealing with that claptrap for several days. It’s a crock." He backed that up with this point-by-point rebuttal.
He also sent along this spreadsheet showing what the Legislature had appropriated for buses, and how it had appropriated it — basically, in a way that pretended to fund new bus purchases, but actually only provided a total amount that matched what was needed to fuel and operate existing buses, except for about $3 million in unclaimed lottery prize money.

To sort of walk you through that last document: The key line is line 25 (row 6 in the Excel file), entitled OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES. This refers to just about everything it takes to operate and maintain the current fleet of buses, from fuel to parts. Follow that out to the right, and you’ll see (column L) that it cost $40.7 million to operate the buses this past year. The state education department estimated that with rising costs, it would take $47.75 million (column M) in fiscal year 2006 to do no more than it did in 2005. This was of course a moving target. Diesel fuel had cost a lot less when the department had put in its initial request at the required time — last September. Since then, Inez Tenenbaum had been updating lawmakers on the changing situation. So what did the department actually get for operating expenses under this item? Check row 6, column C, and you’ll find it was about $9.5 million. Kind of short, right?

This is where it gets tricky. Rows 12, 14, 15, 16 and 18 provide more funds for operation. Lines 12, 14 and 18 appear to provide funds for purchasing buses, but the provisos allow the department to use the money for current bus operations if it needs to — which it does, since it only got $9.5 million for that purpose when it needed $47.75 million. Lastly, in columns G and H you’ll see the state department is authorized to collect $7.3 million from local districts for bus operations — if the districts have it (Ms. Carpentier said she was sure the department would get its money).

I’m just going to hurry through the rest. I’m also throwing in:

A spreadsheet that shows how, while diesel costs have gone up over the past three years, the General Assembly has appropriated less and less for fuel and other operating expenses (Row 11, OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES.)
Another that details diesel price averages over the last few years.
Another chart that shows how many buses and what type of buses the state has bought each year since 1979.

I also had a rather lengthy study of what the state should do regarding replacing buses, and a handy chart that showed bus purchases over time a little more simply than the spreadsheet above. But I can’t seem to find the PDF of that study at the moment, and there’s nobody here at 10 p.m. to show me how to turn the handy chart (which came as a fax) into a PDF. I’ll add those to this posting Monday, if anyone’s that interested.

Republican Leaders Hail Student Achievement Gains

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Did that headline grab you? I thought it might. It seems pretty bizarre from a recent South Carolina perspective. But I promise, I did not make this up.

I can certainly understand your suspicion to the contrary. For the last couple of years, I’ve been marveling at the way some S.C. Republican leaders (yes, that means you, governor — and some of your ideological kin) have been badmouthing our schools. This has amazed me because:

Our state has actually been making remarkable educational progress by most objective measurements; and
Much of this progress is thanks to Republicans having pushed the Education Accountability Act into law over the objections of many Democrats and "educrats," to use the patois of the anti-school crowd.

Why, I have wondered, don’t they just take credit, rather than trying to paint the situation as worse than it is, and blame a Democrat? The credit is there to be taken — or at the very least shared (and that might be the problem, it not being in the nature of partisans of any stripe to share credit). Why don’t they get that?

Well, at least some Republican leaders in Washington get it (something you won’t see me say often). I got an e-mail today from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce bearing the exact same headline as this posting: "Republican Leaders Hail Student Achievement Gains."

If you don’t believe me, go read it yourself. If you don’t have the time, here’s an excerpt:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Republican education leaders today highlighted improving student test scores on mathematics and reading based on 2004 long-term data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as "the Nation’s report card." The results reveal significant improvements in overall student achievement, with noteworthy gains among minority students. Gains in student achievement are particularly striking over the last five years, and student achievement is up overall within the three decade comparison.

…"I’m encouraged to see the progress being made in our nation’s schools on improving student academic achievement and closing achievement gaps. This is a credit to the hard work of parents, teachers, and school personnel who are committed to student academic success," said Education Reform Subcommittee Chairman Mike Castle (R-DE). "We’ve injected accountability into America’s schools, and students are making academic gains as a result. We still have work to do to finally rid our schools of achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and their peers, but these results are a promising sign that we’re on the right track."

The great irony here is that No Child Left Behind isn’t nearly as good at promoting accountability and good outcomes as the EAA. So why is it that more Republicans in South Carolina don’t step up and take credit? It remains a mystery.

Oh, and by the way: You know the test that is prompting the boasting by the GOP congressmen. That’s one of the measures South Carolina has done quite well on. So why not brag about it?

S.C. goes dumpster-diving

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Did you see this today? Have you ever seen anything more pathetic? In case the hypertext didn’t work, here’s the lead of the story:

State education officials have recently begun trying to buy used buses because the state doesn’t have enough money to buy new ones. Last week, officials bid on 73 buses from 1993 that were being sent to the junkyard by a district in Louisville, Ky.

This is what we’re reduced to, thanks to our refusal to fund the most elementary infrastructure needed to get kids to school. Just to get them there, much less providing adequate educational opportunity after they get there.

We’re reduced to dumpster-diving. We’re rummaging through junkyards for school buses. When I say "we," of course, I’m not talking you and me. Who are the people performing this degrading service in our behalf so that we won’t have to soil our dainty hands? Why, it’s those fat "educrats" that the "pro-choice" crowd is always castigating — the people who get up every morning and go to work trying to provide decent schools for the state’s children with insufficient resources.

What the rest of us should do every morning is hang our heads in shame for allowing this state of affairs to continue.

Oh, and by the way, don’t fixate on the fact that South Carolina is the only state that owns all of school buses in the state, rather than letting local entities pay for them. As odd as that is — a vestige of the Legislative State, which once controlled all aspects of local affairs as well as state — it would not work simply to say, "turn it over to the districts." Our single largest problem in providing an adequate education to all children in the state is the wide disparity between the abilities of rich and poor districts to provide schools, much less take on the bus burden.

South Carolina must come up with an equitable way to fund all essential aspects of funding education in every corner of our state — and that includes a safe, reliable way of getting the kids to school to begin with.

Sanford: Airbus not a “setback”

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The governor called me a few minutes ago to belatedly take issue, in his mild way, with a short editorial we ran last Saturday. I drew a blank at first on the subject, since it had been over a week since I had read it, but it came back to me when I called up a PDF of that day’s page as we were talking.

The only thing that seemed to bother him was the word "setback."

"I don’t think it was a ‘setback,’" he said. "Some things are possible, some things are probable, and some things are impossible."

He said Gov. Bob Riley had told him he had thought Alabama had it sewn up from the start, and Gov. Sanford was not inclined to disagree.

He said Alabama had already shown Airbus they could take a wing off a ship and swing it into its destination inside of an hour. In South Carolina, that would have been a six-hour process, necessitating traveling a much greater distance. "We just didn’t have the infrastructure."

Still, he thought it was worth taking a shot at it. "We had a good site, but… we didn’t have anything right there at dockside."

And he didn’t consider it worthwhile to try to compensate for that (even assuming it would be possible) by offering a bigger incentive package than Alabama.

"We ain’t gonna do what, in all due respect, the last administration did, which was buy jobs."

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: South Carolina

Jim DeMint meeting

A glimmer of hope

The well-heeled natives are restless

Mark Sanford on Will Folks

August 7 column, with links

Et tu, Gresham

WIS follow-up on Folks op-ed

July 31 column, with links

Ideas for change

A South Carolina story

July 22 column, with links

July 17 column, with links

Background on school buses

Republican Leaders Hail Student Achievement Gains

S.C. goes dumpster-diving

Sanford: Airbus not a “setback”