One last word on the subject of the District 5 referendum. Now, on the eve of the vote, is a good time to revisit my video clip in which the unanimous board explains, in their words, what’s different about this bond proposal, as opposed to the ones in the past that divided the trustees.
A reader noted that he saw no Republicans in the photos or videos from the Stephen Colbert brunch, and he’s absolutely right.
The invitations to the event were sent out by Dwight Drake, and seemed to include a lot of his friends. Beyond that, it was staged as though "Candidate" Colbert were making a pitch to S.C. Democrats to let him onto the ballot for the state’s presidential primary.
Dwight had hinted ahead of time that one Republican would be there for a special presentation, but it didn’t work out because the GOP token had a family emergency.
See the above video as a partial guide to who was there. At bottom, you’ll see a clip that shows Colbert making his "pitch" to the party honchos.
Yesterday was an historic occasion for this blog — and I’m not talking about the Stephen Colbert endorsement that has helped drive my traffic today to an all-time high for a Monday. It was the first time someone besides me was behind the camera. I enlisted the aid of a colleague from our newsroom whom I found standing around, not being sufficiently useful in my opinion. Just a little tidbit there for you extreme trivia buffs.
Anyway, here is my encounter with the "candidate" in its entirety. As you can see, I was shameless in my self-promotion. I didn’t even bother chatting about the weather, just straight into what Stephen Colbert could do for me, not what I could do for Stephen Colbert.
Eventually, everybody will be on YouTube. I think Andy Warhol said that. Or maybe Marshall McLuhan.
Anyway, whoever said it was right, because here we have a remarkable little bit of video.
You may think there’s nothing remarkable about it — just the usual civic luncheon with folks talking about how to be good citizens — but that’s because you don’t know Cindi Scoppe.
This may be her greatest movie roll ever. Not because she gets a lot of screen time, but because she plays so strongly against type. She manages a convincing portrayal of someone who:
Kidding aside, Cindi’s a good public speaker, whenever you can pry her from her word processor. If you’d like her to speak to your group, just let me know.
Heh-heh-heh…
Key Energy Party think-tanker Samuel Tenenbaum, originator of our 55-mph plank, e-mailed me yesterday just before we met with Joe Biden to make sure that I would ask him The Question.
You see his answer on this video. Basically, it’s fine by him, but he wouldn’t be the one to push for it.
Sorry, Samuel.
OK, in all fairness to the man, he did qualify the statement. He said, "If I come out of New Hampshire viable… I will win South Carolina."
This is a follow-up to the clip I posted a few minutes ago. The Broder and Rich columns referenced on the last post are actually not mentioned until this clip. Sorry about that. I have to edit things down to make them fit onto YouTube.
Anyway, this clip follows the other directly in time, only this one concentrates on how South Carolina figures into his plans.
Here’s video from our meeting today with Joe Biden. Obviously, we spent most of the time on issues — particularly talking about his "federalist" plan for Iraq, which got a big boost in the Senate last week — but I’ll have to pore through all that footage later.
In the meantime, I want to put up a couple of clips in which the candidate talks about his viability, despite his currently dismal showing in the polls.
On the clip, Sen. Biden cites three recent articles about him. Here are links to them:
You can either wait until I’ve had time to go through more than an hour of video clips and find the highlights, or you can have it fast. For those who want it fast, here’s a quick, unedited (except for splicing two pieces together) clip from the opening moments of our interview today with the former Arkansas governor seeking the GOP nod for the presidency. (You can tell he’s a Republican, in case you didn’t know, by the fact that he thinks "Democrat" is an adjective.)
Can I call ’em or can I call ’em? P.T. Barnum’s got nothing on me when it comes to knowing what the public wants. On Aug. 25, I predicted the following:
But wait — my Hillary’s Heckler video is moving up at an unprecedented
speed, having passed 6,000 views in only 3 weeks. (What’s faster than Blitzkrieg?)
I’m thinking that within a month, that clip of Mrs. Clinton and her
detractor at the recent College Democrats’ confab will outpace
everything, and put the Nazis in its shadow.
And here we are on September 19th, and my heckler video, shot during the College Democrats’ confab at the end of July, is now my most-watched video clip ever. It’s also the first ever to surpass the 8,000-view threshold — and it shows no signs of slowing down. (Yesterday, it was in third place.)
This is a good sign for the public’s tastes, as it finally eclipsed the previous favorite, which shows a Nazi leader talking about the Confederate flag on our State House steps. (OK, maybe a heckler isn’t the height of good taste, but it’s an improvement.) I’m also proud that my critically acclaimed "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" — probably my finest use ever of my celebrated voice-over technique, not to mention its social relevance — is holding firm at third place. Indeed, until the heckler’s last-minute surge since yesterday, it was in second place.
Yeah, I know — nobody cares about this except me. But it takes a lot of work to produce these babies, and so I care a lot. That is, I care enough to bring you once again my Top Five Most-Watched Videos:
OK, go ahead — ask the man something…
We were driving out of Lexington and about to get on the highway for Aiken, with B.J. Boling at the wheel, when it occurred to me that I was in a situation that felt familiar, though I had not encountered it for a long time. I thought back, and it was even longer than it felt:
1980 — that was the last time I found myself riding around with a candidate for public office, or his campaign. That last time was with Howard Baker (see photo at bottom), who was also running for the GOP nomination for president, and we were in Iowa in January of that year. It was the last year that I was a reporter. Before that, most of my experience along this line had been traveling with the candidates for governor of Tennessee, 24 hours a day, in the last weeks of the 1978 general election. In those days, we did things like that — travel, live, eat with the candidates. Few journalists do it to that extent today.
B.J. had asked if I wanted to ride along with John McCain on the famous bus, and I said sure, after a glance at my calendar. It would take me away from the office for half a day, which seemed doable. He was driving me and some colleagues to Aiken, and we were riding the bus back.
The ride to Aiken had been pretty much as I expected, as had the event at the VFW hall there. Things shifted a bit when I got onto the bus.
There were, of course, two buses. One held most of the media herd, the other held the candidate and his inner circle — in this case the candidates’ wife, his press secretary, a camera crew, and several of his old buddies from Vietnam War days. There were only about eight seats in the main compartment — those big, plush captain’s chairs that turn around. But we were put in the little room at the back, with one continuous, curved seat that shaped itself around a table, perfect for private meetings — or interviews.
I had not counted on an interview. I had just interviewed John McCain. I had no new questions to ask. I
thought being "on the bus" would be a matter of passively soaking up the ambience, collecting some color, and maybe exchanging a word or two with the candidate as he walked up and down the aisle. (Truth be told, this is my main reporting technique, when out in the field — the fly on the wall. I like to go into a situation, look and listen, and then write about what I saw and heard. I don’t like interacting with the subject out in the field, because it changes the reality of what I’m there to write about. In the office, that’s cool. I expect to conduct an interview in the office. But in the field, I like to blend into the woodwork.) I figured a guy running for president had stuff to do other than talk yet again to me.
But it wasn’t like that. I was to be jammed into that little room with the main guy, with him expecting questions, and a press secretary standing in the door as a witness. I had the feeling that the press secretary would crack me on the head if I didn’t keep coming up with questions: "Bradley, don’t be such a dunce! Ask a question!" And for all I know, she might have.
Worse, if you admit to being at a loss for questions when you have a golden opportunity like this — an hour with a guy who might become president, just waiting for your questions — you draw the ire and disgust of your friends and your readers (especially your blog readers; just watch the way I get nailed for this). To increase the pressure, I had a bad record pitching to this guy. That’s why most journalists just go ahead and ask questions, any damn questions, even foolish ones, in an effort to provoke the guy to say something, anything that you can write about.
So I asked questions. In fact, I probably asked the most questions, despite two reporters being in there with us, because that’s my habit in interview mode: I’m accustomed to directing the conversation when I preside over editorial board meetings, acting as a sort of host. One must keep the guest entertained. So I tried, lamely.
At one point I was tempted — and I’m very embarrassed to admit this — to ask him the Spin Cycle Question of the Day, which that day happened to be the "controversy" over whether he was an Episcopalian or a Baptist. But the veterans at the front of the bus had specifically razzed me in advance on that — You’re not going to ask him about that Baptist stuff, are you? — and that helped keep me in line. The thing is, I hate the Buzz Question of the Day; it’s one of the most idiotic things about modern political reporting. In fact, I avoid such things so assiduously that I didn’t even know about "the Baptist stuff" until they mentioned it and I looked it up on my Treo. (Even as I was looking it up, poor Jim Davenport was having to ask him about it. That’s the curse of being the AP guy on the spot — you have to ask the Question of the Day while your local colleagues are able to cover the actual event. I’ve written about this before.)
But in my desperation not to ask him some variant of a question I had asked him before, I almost stooped to ask about that one, and for once I had sympathy for the desperation of the traveling press corps, who grab desperately at any new wrinkle, however inane or irrelevant.
Fortunately, I was NOT in the traveling corp. I was Local Media, which means I was not expected to be hip to the latest. I could ask about anything in my ignorance, and it would be forgiven. At one point the candidate misunderstood me and thought I had asked a question that — coming from me and directed at John McCain — would have been particularly idiotic. I asked him whether he thought the U.S. had made a mistake in not going in and toppling Saddam in 1991. He thought I had asked whether we had made a mistake to go in and topple Saddam in 2003. (It was noisy, as you can see on the video.) So he started patiently offering his boilerplate defense of that, before I corrected him and gave him another chance at it.
Several thoughts ran through my head: Does he think I would ask that, when I have written in defense of our going into Iraq so many times? But he doesn’t know that… but he is aware that I’m the guy from The State, and he always seems to remember my name, and … oh, man! I hope he doesn’t think that I’m doing the reporter thing of getting him to say what I want to say, so I can quote it — editorialists don’t have to do that; we just say what we think…
In any case, it was disorienting, and I didn’t do a very good job. So I think I went away with John McCain thinking I’m an idiot who can’t come to an interview with some good questions. And I guess he’s right. But at least he probably didn’t expect any better. After all, I’m just Local Media.
Aw, geez, I just remembered — I went blank almost exactly that same way (worse, even, since I was a rookie then) during an interview op with Howard Baker on his campaign plane over frozen Iowa, the last time I was in this situation. I should just leave the campaign trail to the reporters.
But I probably won’t.
Today, I was "on the bus," as Ken Kesey would put it, with John McCain, attending events in Aiken and Lexington, and riding with the senator on his "No Surrender Tour" bus in between.
I have a lot more material than I can go through today, but in order not to keep my readers waiting entirely, here’s some fairly representative footage from the Lexington event — formally, the "Veterans Appreciation Lunch and No Surrender Rally," at 11:45 a.m. at the American Legion Post 7, just off just off Harmon Street.
The theme for the tour, which ends tonight in Charleston, was the war in Iraq, with McCain presenting points he’s been stressing — well, forever, really, but particularly since the Petraeus testimony last week. His message was pitched as an advance of what’s likely to happen next in the Senate, with Democrats and the president resuming the monotony of putting up an amendment with a withdrawal date, having it knocked down, putting up another one, etc.
Turnout was good at both events. You can see the SRO crowd at this one; the one in Aiken was much the same.
That’s all for now.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FOR MONTHS NOW, “conservative” Republicans have waited for their hounddog-faced Godot, Fred Thompson, to bring something to the presidential contest that was missing.
So it was that quite a few of us left our cool offices and moseyed down to Doc’s Barbecue Monday with a mind to learning what that something was.
The star of screen, lobby and courtroom swaggered onto the riser in the parking lot and launched into a hickory-smoked litany of what he had been talking about since his previous foray into electoral politics back in the ’90s. His delivery had a poetic — or perhaps “lyrical,” in a country-song-lyrics sense — quality:
OK, so maybe it got a trifle less lyrical there for a moment, but he got his rhythm back right quick:
OK, Fred, all that’s great, but who said they were — documents to be cast aside, I mean? Who’s the bad guy here? Certainly not the men who’ve been running their fannies off seeking the GOP nomination while you were playing Hamlet all these months.
Sure, Rudy Giuliani might have a bit of trouble on the abortion thing, and so might Mitt Romney — depending which Mitt Romney you chose to believe from the assortment available on “YouTube.”
But that other stuff? Come, on, this is boilerplate, par for the course, warming-up exercises, the kind of stuff Republican babies cut their teeth on.
So what sets you apart, aside from the fact that you are obviously way-up-yonder tall? (I would have said “Rocky-Top tall,” but Fred and I are both Memphis State grads — from back when they called it Memphis State — so I can’t hang a U.T. image on him).
One thing, as far as I can see — and it goes back to the predicate in the first sentence of my third paragraph: swaggered.
That ol’ boy’s got more swagger on him than John Wayne in a roomful of Maureen O’Haras. It’s in his voice, and in everything he chooses of his own by-God free will to say with it. It’s in his accent; it’s in those jowls sliding off his face like McMansions on a muddy California hillside.
I’d say it was literally in his walk, if I could ever see how he walks, but he always has a crowd around
him, with his craggy head poking up above it.
Those crowds respond to him: The ladies like a man who sounds like he durn-well knows what he’s talking ’bout and don’t mind saying so, and the men can tell right off that he’s one-a them — or what they like to think of themselves as, from the swagger itself right down to that hot-dang wife a-his that smiles so purty when he brags about sirin’ them babies on her.
All of this can disguise the fact that this is a very smart man of rather broad-ranging sophistication (I mentioned he went to Memphis State, right?), but nobody holds that against him.
And so it was that he came a-ridin’ into town on that bus a-his with Johnny Cash boomin’ out of it, ridin’ to the rescue of… of what?
Once again, what was lacking? Who had to be saved from what?
Last month, ol’ Fred told David Broder that he only considered getting into the race because his friend John McCain had stumbled along the way. Before that, “I expected to support John, just as I did in 2000,” he said.
I remember him supporting McCain back then, because he came to see me at the time, and said we were wrong to have endorsed George W. Bush in the S.C. primary. And he was right.
So I found myself puzzled last week, a week in which the biggest political news was the resurgence of John McCain. A few days after a well-reviewed debate performance in New Hampshire, the Arizonan was back in Washington to hear Gen. David Petraeus — who might as well have had a “McCain in ’08” button wedged among those rows of ribbons on his chest — tell the world that the strategy Sen. McCain had advocated for the last four years had succeeded. Suddenly the guy who was supposed to have fallen on his sword over Iraq looked “prescient and courageous on the campaign’s most vital issue,” according to The Associated Press.
Sure, there are those Republicans who are still hot because Sen. McCain isn’t mean enough to Mexicans, whereas ol’ Fred leaves little doubt that he’d kick their Rio-moistened behinds clear back to Juarez.
But while I grant you the man sure can swagger, I still find myself wondering: Why’s he swaggering into town now?
For video and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.
Well, it turns out that you don’t have to wait for tomorrow for video of, or at least about, Democrats:
I haven’t had time today to read or digest any of this stuff today — I was offered the chance to join a conference call with Obama on the subject, but was too tied up with previous commitments — so why don’t y’all dig into it and offer your thoughts? (A quick skim of the Obama statement wasn’t promising, I’m sorry to say. The "plan" part was stuff I’ve heard before, and it mostly looked like a vehicle for repeating over and over, in case you missed it before, that OBAMA OPPOSED THE WAR IN IRAQ FROM THE BEGINNING.
Finally — still mining the rich vein of e-mail I don’t have time to read, much less think about — here we have Chris Dodd (remember him?) taking shots at both Clinton and Obama (and why? because they actually have a chance of winning the nomination, unlike a certain white-haired gentleman I could name). Just click on the headline to get the full release text:
DODD BLASTS OBAMA AND CLINTON FOR TAKING STEP BACKWARD, LACK OF CLARITY ON IRAQ
That’s all for now.
Everybody seems to be sending me video links as I go through my e-mail today:
That’s all. Maybe I’ll get video from some Democrats tomorrow.
This morning, when I said something about going to Doc’s Barbecue today to see what Fred Thompson had to say, a colleague tried to save me the trouble by telling me ahead of time: "I’m for good things, and against bad things."
Sure enough, it was just about that broad and elemental. Ol’ Fred trotted out everything but Mom and Apple Pie. Not a lot of specifics, mind you, but a whole lot of empathizin’ with the folks on stuff that may not be all that fancy or original, but dadgummit, just needs to be said again and again, with fierce conviction. And he’s just the fella to say it.
The video below features the following values mantra, plus another snippet or two that give you the flavor of the kind of skate-by-on-good-feelings-and-free-media campaign that ol’ Fred is apparently gonna run just as long as we’ll all let him. Nobody asking hard questions, such as exactly how these statements separate him from the rest of the GOP pack.
But before the nit-picking begins, enjoy Fred Thompson at what I suspect is going to be his campaignin’ best. I’m glad I was there for it, even though I had to park my pickup — my actual pickup that is my actual primary means of transportation, not a lease — far enough away that I should have just walked over…
And here’s the Mantra in text so you can listen to it again, and follow along:
talkin’ about the value of being pro-life
talkin’ about the value of standing strong for the second amendment
talkin’ about the rule of law
talkin’ about the value and the rightness of lower taxes
talkin’ about a market economy; talking about the ingenuity and the inventiveness of the American people and the value of competitiveness and how we would fare well in the international marketplace. We do more things better than anybody in the world, and it works for us.We’re talking about first principles, things this country was founded upon
the idea that there’s some things in this changing world that don’t change.
Certain things,
certain things such as human nature
and the wisdom of the Ages that led us to the declaration of independence
and led us to the Constitution of the United States,
and they are not outmoded documents to be cast asideThe Declaration reminds us that our basic rights come from God
and not from government.
The constitution of the United States tells us that government ought to be set up with divided power,
not too much power any way
not just at the federal level,
between the federal and the state level;
it’s called Federalism,
and it’s the idea that not every answer comes from Washington, D.C.It’s all based on the concept of that universal principle and desire on which we were founded,
and that is,
Free People.
Free Markets.
and the appreciation of the things that made us great,
and the understanding that a government powerful enough to give everything to yuh,
is powerful enough to take anything from yuh.
Thank yuh. Thank yuh very much. Now go get yerself some barbecue whilst we turn up the Johnny Cash on the loudspeakers…
Sorry, Doug, but I have to dig back into my video to rebut something you said in a comment back here:
It was the school board member/real estate agent in the video who
talked about lake real estate (including his own) appreciating. The
appreciation has nothing to do with the quality of schools… it has to
do with the limited supply of lake property.
There’s no way for you to know this, but in editing my hour or so of video down to less than five minutes to fit it on YouTube, I left out this elaboration by Jerry Fowler:
Clearly, he believes — as do most Realtors, from what I’ve seen — that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between good schools and rising property values.
This is both a follow-up on this Tuesday post, and a preview of tomorrow’s column. Here we have members of the unanimous Lexington/Richland District 5 school board talking about what’s different about this referendum proposal, and why they think the community Irmo/Chapin community will support it.
Alternative candidates are always griping that we in the MSM don’t give space or time to "alternative" candidates. Well, perish the thought!
Here, entirely unfiltered (I had intended to watch it all the way through before posting/commenting, but haven’t gotten to it, and it’s been sitting around and I need to clean out my save e-mail sometime), is video of a speech by Tim Carnes, who is challenging Lindsey Graham for the U.S. Senate.
Make of it what you will. Let me know if I need to go back and watch the rest of it. I’ve got to go read proofs now, and then I’ve got to put out tomorrow’s pages (Mike has to go home early today).
I’ll say one quick thing for him — he’s apparently learned how to do subtitles in Windows Movie Maker, a trick that I have not yet mastered.
Have you seen the new Romney TV ad that was written about in The State today? What did you think?
I still don’t know what to think. I mean, it proves he can jog without tripping over his shoelaces, and he’s got a good resume, but I’m going to take a wait-and-see attitude on these issues. Who’s to say that next week we won’t be looking at a clip on YouTube from four years ago in which Gov. Romney claims that he’s not a leader, or says something like, "Jogging’s for sissies."
Experience has taught us to be cautious about video.
Sorry, William; I couldn’t help it. (William is a very nice young man who is representing Mr. Romney among the graceless wretches of the press in South Carolina. William Holley. That’s yet another person I’ve had a get-acquainted lunch with, although it was prior to August.)