Category Archives: Working

Hey, guys! Did you (or do you) have “mentors”?

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Yesterday, I heard heard a discussion on the radio about the apparently shocking news that, according to LinkedIn, 19 percent of women (nearly one out of every five!) have never had a workplace mentor.

Which, of course, means that more than 80 percent have had a mentor.

I found myself groping for a place to grab ahold of that and decide whether it meant anything at all. I mean, that sounded to me like a lot of women having mentors. How, for instance, does it compare to guys? I didn’t hear any number relating to that, but Nicole Williams of LinkedIn said this:

we found two different surveys that confirmed that, in fact, men are more likely to get workplace guidance than women. They’re more likely to have a mentor. They’re more likely to be asked to be a mentor. They’re more likely to have asked someone to be a mentor.

Yeah, OK, but I’d sort of like to see those surveys.

Because… and I may be way off-base here… I always thought that mentoring was kind of a, well, a chick thing. In my worklife, I’ve mostly only heard women even talking about it. And I’ve heard them talk about it a lot, and to place great importance on it. And I’ve seen female executives go out of their way to act as a mentor to women below them, and to encourage those women to turn about and do the same for another person of the female persuasion. And I chalked that up to women being more into doing things collaboratively, and helping each other out, while guys tend to be antisocial jerks who wouldn’t go out of their way to help another guy (a competitor!) if their lives depended on it. Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but those are the trends I have noticed, anecdotally speaking.

There’s a feminist assumption underlying all the “mentor” talk I hear from women that goes like this: Guys have their Old Boy Network, so we have to come up with these constructs to counteract that. And so they do. And it’s very overt: Will you be my mentor? Yes, I will. Then there are meetings, and lectures, and goals set, etc.

But maybe guys are “mentoring” (another one of those maddening cases of turning a noun into a verb) each other like crazy without even knowing it, or at least without calling it that.

So I thought back, have I ever had a mentor? Not overtly, to the best of my knowledge. I was regularly encouraged by my boss at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, right out of college. I can think of two things in particular Reid Ashe said to me. Once he said, “You’re a superstar around here — you know that, don’t you?” Which was kind of a boost. And when I applied to replace John Parish as our state political writer in 1979, and didn’t get it, he created a new position for me (so I wouldn’t quit) in which I worked on special reporting assignments that I pretty much chose myself. Which was cool. The next year, he promoted me to be the editor over all the paper’s news reporters. And one time after that, when I wanted to try some experimental program or other, he told me I didn’t have to ask: “You have the authority to do anything you want to do — as long as you do the right thing.” Some would have found that intimidating, because of the implication that you’d better not foul up (in the sense of being given enough rope to hang yourself), but I was a pretty cocky kid, and I didn’t think anything I wanted to do could possibly be wrong, so I found it empowering. To use another one of those touchy-feely H.R. words.

So there’s no doubt he did a lot go encourage me early in my career. But was that being a mentor — or just having a boss who encouraged me and promoted me (which I don’t think is quite the same thing)? I don’t know. We didn’t call it that. We didn’t have regular meetings. He didn’t give me lectures, or goals. He was more like, “Keep up the good work!” Which I certainly found encouraging. But there was no formal relationship.

Anyway, I just got to wondering: How many of y’all, male and female, have had people you would call “mentors”?

Tell Her Majesty that I just don’t KNOW…

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Yesterday, two representatives from Her Majesty’s Government came to see me to talk politics, as they periodically do.

It can be fun to play the local expert, whether for national or foreign media, or in service of the Special Relationship — especially if you’re an Anglophile like me. Maybe I can’t see “Tinker, Tailor” where I live (yet), but I can contribute to a report that might, just might, cross a latter-day George Smiley’s desk. OK, so it’s not very likely, but hey, I can dream…

The temptation is to sound like you really know what’s going on, even if you don’t — like The Tailor of Panama, or Our Man in Havana. But I’m not the type to mislead HMG. Perish the thought.

So yesterday, I had to tell my visitors that I just can’t explain what’s happening in the South Carolina primary, and therefore can’t predict anything. And that’s the unfortunate truth.

I don’t know why Newt Gingrich is suddenly leading by double digits in polls in South Carolina, other than it’s his turn. I don’t know whether that trend will continue, because I don’t understand the dynamics that led her to this point.

And one of the problems is this: I’m not hearing from people who are Gingrich fans. I have to acknowledge that maybe there are things I don’t hear, or am not exposed to, because I’m no longer the editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Maybe that’s why I feel like I understand what’s happening now less than I understood the situation four years ago.

But you know what? So much of what I was hearing and seeing then was through my blog. I wrote relatively little about national politics in the paper, so most of my interactions in that area were online. And to the extent that I was seen as someone engaged in writing about the presidential race, it was online. For instance, a number of the national and international media types who were interviewing me initially didn’t even know I worked at the newspaper; they had come to me as a widely-read blogger.

And I’m more widely read online now than I was then. My monthly page views are at least four times what they were then. And yet…

  • My traffic hasn’t been steadily climbing in the months leading up to the primary, the way it did four years ago. It hit a peak in August, then dropped a bit.
  • I  haven’t had a request for an interview from national or international sources since I spoke with E.J. Dionne at the start of November, which would be weird anytime, but especially with a primary coming up.
  • I just don’t run into people who are excited about the upcoming primary, either online or in person. Think about it — beyond Doug’s perpetual support for Ron Paul, who have you seen here who is pumped about a candidate? Well, it’s like that in the wider world. Quick — name five people you know who are eager to vote for Newt? You probably can’t. I know I can’t. People may be saying they’ll support Newt when a pollster asks, but they’re not going around bubbling with public excitement about it.
  • There were several national and international advocacy groups that had set up SC offices for the duration four years ago — and they had done it months before now. By the summer of 2007, they were up and running. This time, I know of one such group that has started a local office in recent months — One, the Bono group. I know a lot of nonprofits are far less flush with money than they were then, but it’s still remarkable.

Yes, I know that the buzz in SC should only be half of what it was four years ago, since only one party is having a primary. But it’s really much less than half. Things just feel dead by comparison.

I think one reason for that is expressed in that same Winthrop poll I referenced above. It also shows that 59 percent of those polled — and that includes Republicans — believe that Obama’s going to be elected. That, combined with a lower energy level (compared to last year) among Tea Partiers, has led to a really subdued campaign.

In a normal campaign, the fact that Newt is so far ahead, this late, would mean that he had it more or less locked up. This year, I don’t know. The polls give so easily this year, and can so easily take away. And this is Newt Gingrich — a guy with a well-known talent for self-destruction.

Normally, at this point, South Carolinians would be coalescing around the Republican most likely to with the nomination — usually, the establishment. A Bush. Bob Dole. John McCain. Now, the very definition of what it is to be a Republican — much less a South Carolina Republican — is more up in the air than at any time I remember.

So it seems to me there’s a better-than-even chance that SC won’t pick the eventual winner this time. The whole process is too wobbly, and less susceptible to steadying factors than in the past. And if that happens, there will be even less energy, and much less national attention, focused on the SC GOP primary four years from now.

But I just don’t know. When it’s hard to explain why what is already happening is happening, it’s very hard to predict what will happen next.

NLRB to SC, Boeing: Never mind…

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Have you seen this?

NLRB Withdraws Boeing Complaint

The National Labor Relations Board dropped a high-profile complaint against Boeing Co., a move that was expected after the aerospace company’s 31,000-member machinists union approved a sweeping contract extension earlier this week.

The NLRB said Friday that it withdrew the April complaint, which charged the aerospace company with illegally retaliating against the union for previous strikes by opening an aircraft-production line at a non-union plant in South Carolina.

The agency had filed the complaint on behalf of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers after siding with the union’s allegations. Boeing contested the charges, saying it had made a business decision and didn’t retaliate against the union. The case drew heavy criticism from the business community and some Republican lawmakers, who said the NLRB should not be interfering with companies’ choices about where to open factories….

The action makes sense — certainly a lot more sense than the agency’s previous position. I kept wondering where NLRB thought it was going with that. I mean, try to imagine the agency actually making Boeing pull back out of South Carolina. A federal agency telling a major corporation where it can do business within the United States? It would have been like nothing that I can recall in U.S. labor history. It would have required a complete rethinking of the role of government in the economy. It would have been way more radical than what GOP politicians seem to think Obamacare is.

Speaking of Republican politicians, this decision has left some of them off-balance. There they were in full outrage mode, and now, “Huh?” They’re like Wile E. Coyote, who suddenly realizes there’s no mesa beneath him.

Lindsey Graham is demanding an investigation:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is calling for a congressional investigation into collaboration between the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union against The Boeing Company’s decision to build a second 787 Dreamliner production facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Graham’s announcement comes after the NLRB announced it will drop its complaint against Boeing.

Graham also reaffirmed today he will continue to place an indefinite Senate hold on nominations to the NLRB Board.  Beginning in January 2012, the NLRB will have just two members.  The Supreme Court last year ruled that an agency board with just two members lacks the authority to issue case rulings.

More to the point, the senator said, “For the sake of the Boeing South Carolina workers, I’m pleased to hear the frivolous complaint that has put a cloud over their operations has been lifted.  However, it’s hard to celebrate an event which never should have happened…”

By the way, I THINK this is the new Boeing plant. I shot this in North Charleston yesterday, near the airport. There were no signs to confirm, that I saw...

How does this happen? I’ll tell ya…

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This being a family blog, one doesn’t usually find this sort of thing here. But since I’m told that it actually appeared in a South Carolina newspaper — it was all the talk at the round table of regulars at the Capital City Club this morning — I suppose I should deal with it.

The above image is purportedly from The Greenville News, and The Village Voice wonders about it:

How does that even happen?

We’ve reached out to the Greenville News copy desk, who hopefully will be able to chime in on how the most hilarious copy editing mistake of the year came to be.

Jim Romenesko spoke to a reporter there who said that the paper was getting complaints already (from people who are apparently no fun) and apologizing to them.

Well, I’ll tell ya…

  • First, someone appears to have violated a cardinal rule — don’t put anything, in any way, shape or form, into copy, however temporarily or intended for internal consumption, that you wouldn’t want to see in the paper. Ever. It’s tempting to share sarcastic asides between reporters and editors, but get up and walk across the room to do it. Don’t ever put it in the copy, because the chance of this happening is too great. (When I supervised reporters, I told them not even to make the slugs — the internal names — of their stories — anything embarrassing. Because, back in the pre-pagination days, it was way too easy for that stray piece of type at the top to get stuck to the page after it was trimmed off in the composing room.)
  • Second, the page didn’t get proofed. At all. By anyone. There are a lot of ways this can happen in understaffed newsrooms, but here’s the most merciful scenario: The page was proofed, and “corrected” type was sent through, and somehow had this word in it (perhaps it was the initial response of a stressed editor who had thought that page was gone already), and no one looked at the page again after it was put on there.

But basically, there is no excuse that serves.

It’s easy to blame this, as Romenesko does, on the extreme practice at newspaper companies of having copyediting done off-site. But basically, with this sort of error, if it’s going to happen, it could happen anywhere. The reason having copyediting done off-site is phenomenally stupid is that it increases the chance of an error that no local person would make, and only a local person would notice. And if mid-size to small papers are not locally authoritative, they are nothing.

By the way, something like this happened at The Jackson (TN) Sun when I worked there back in the 70s. We were in that interim stage between linotype machines and front-end computer systems. Copy would be edited and then output onto a rolled-up strip of punchtape. The tape would be fed into a typesetting machine that would roll out the copy on photographic paper. Occasionally, the tape would hang up while being fed through the machine. The result would be a stutter, and a letter would be repeated over and over until the kink worked its way through.

The initial error would not be human. But it was up to humans to catch it and correct it before the page was let go.

One day, that failed. The punch tape on an obit — an obit, of all things, the holy of holies — snagged briefly while going through the machine. Instead of saying that services would be held at the funeral home, it came out, “services will be held at the fukkkkkkkkkk home.”

It was caught partly through the press run, but some papers had already gone out. Including the one that went to the bereaved family.

Our publisher — or was it the executive editor? — personally delivered a corrected copy to that family, along with the most abject of apologies.

Here’s what the future looks like (and yes, Doc Brown, we’ll still need roads in 2015)

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Last night, I saw “Back to the Future” for the first time in many a year. And I had to smile at the end. In 1985, it was still credible that we’d have flying cars in 2015. The shocking thing is that that leaves us only four years now. Well, at least it doesn’t take laying down much infrastructure, so I suppose it is conceivable (especially if we’re fueled by a Mr. Fusion).

But today, I saw something that is more likely to be our future — a plug-in electric car. In routine use.

I was visiting Mike Couick over at the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina in Cayce. As it happens, we were talking about sustainable energy (ADCO is working with the Central Midlands Council of Governments and a couple of private partners on a project for local governments). And when we walked outside after the interview, there was some right in front of us.

This Nissan Leaf belongs to ECSC, and is used to drive around the state on co-op business, which surprised me — I assumed it was for local use. How does it manage that sort of range? Mike said all the co-ops have charging stations.

Very cool, I thought.

Mike reminded me that this was really sort of retro, since the original automobiles were electric, before the internal combustion engine decided to eat the world (my wording, not his).

With that in mind, I can’t wait to get back to the future and drive one of these myself. And I’ll pass on the gullwing doors, Mr. DeLorean.

Happy Thanksgiving, Richard — and everyone

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Once upon a time there was a thing called newspapers, and Richard Crowson is my oldest newspaper friend. One of his first published editorial cartoons illustrated a column I wrote for the editorial page of the journalism department lab paper at Memphis State University in 1975. I already knew Richard from working with him at the MSU library.

A couple of years later, Richard joined me at The Jackson Sun, where we worked together for close to a decade, Richard as the editorial cartoonist.

Then, in 1985, I persuaded him to come out to Kansas, where he eventually became editorial cartoonist of The Wichita Eagle. A couple of years after that, I left to come here. Richard stayed.

Richard, being a talented editorial cartoonist, was laid off from his job about six months before Robert Ariail and I were.

Anyway, I only possess a copy of one of his cartoons, the one above from 1982. It’s my favorite. Sorry that the perspective is a bit askew. It’s too big for my scanner, and I had to shoot it with my camera at an angle to get the reflection off the glass of the frame.

Enjoy.

Oh, another thing about Richard. He’s not only a great cartoonist; he’s probably the most talented picker I know — of any stringed instrument you care to name, as long as it’s used in the production of Bluegrass. The first thing Richard did when he arrived in Wichita was go out and buy several second-hand kitchen chairs for his apartment, for his fellow pickers to sit on once he found some. Which he promptly did.

Below, you see him at left with the rest of The Home Rangers, “Kansas’ Premier Cowboy Band.”

On the spot while it’s hot, ‘bogging’ away

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Note the camera held high in the right hand. Note the digital recorder with Moleskine notebook held in left hand. Note the dramatic profile. Note the bow tie. That's my Hound Dog tie. It's my favorite.

My friend Kristine Hartvigsen shared this photo on Facebook last night, with the simple caption, “On the job. Read about this in his blog.”

Jack Gerstner responded, “i wonder what brad does now, other than bog?”

I do indeed have boggy days, but yesterday was fairly dry.

But occasionally, I suppose it’s good to remind y’all that the reason I don’t post a tenth as much as I’d like is that I’m also director of communications and public relations at ADCO.

What does that mean? Well, different things.

Yesterday, for instance — hours before the Occupy Columbia thing pictured above — I attended a meeting over at 2020 Hampton with Richland County Administrator Milton Pope and a number of his department heads. ADCO is working with a couple of consulting companies, Cadmus and Genesis Consulting, to help Central Midlands Council of Governments come up with a sustainable energy plan for the Midlands. We were briefing the Richland folks on where the project stands, and seeking their input on the next stage of it.

This morning at 11, I have a phone conference about that project. Before and after that, I’m working on copy for web pages for another client, intended to tell parents what to look for in a good childcare center.

This afternoon, I’ll be over at Bobby Hitt’s shop. Commerce has asked a number of firms in the advertising/marketing/PR world to work together to help Commerce with a branding project, something that promises to be pretty exciting, and which I hope to learn more about today.

And when I get a minute — between ADCO stuff, nights, weekends — I bog.

What I saw at the revolution, such as it was

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After the warning and before the arrests, these were the few chosen to be arrested, waiting as the rain began to fall.

There were about 100 apparent protesters milling about in the dark as the 6 p.m. deadline arrived. People in pools of harsh TV lights being interviewed, others talking on cellphones, others just waiting.

Walid Hakim was, as he has been, a center of attention. He told me — and maybe if I can get it uploaded, I’ll put up video later — that he had just learned that his great-great-great-great-great grandfather had owned the land on which the State House was located. So he said he was just hanging out on the family homestead, waiting to be arrested. He made dramatic statements about how the rights to speak and peaceably assembly that he had defended in the Marines were about to be denied him.

Brett Bursey was there, as he had been earlier in the day. “Do they take credit cards at the jail now?” he asked me. I said they certainly should, this being the 21st century and all. Then he slouched off to confer with others here and there. A few minutes later, I asked how many times he had been arrested, counting this time. He expressed doubt that he would get arrested, and acted a bit like he was being cheated. I didn’t really follow what he was saying was happening. Then he wandered off again.

The cops still hadn’t shown.

Walid and a dozen or 15 others grouped themselves around the Confederate soldier monument, with that “I’m going to be arrested” look in their eyes. At this point, I Tweeted out:

They’re so pumped up, chanting “WE. ARE. THE 99 PERCENT!” It would be rotten of Nikki not to arrest any of them. They’d feel so let down…

Eventually, some of the State House security guys showed up and announced that pursuant to the governor’s announcement, those who did not vacate would be arrested.

By then it had started drizzling. Walid and the other designated martyrs sat around the little fence enclosing the flagpole, and waited. My iPhone and camera started getting pretty wet. I went to stand under a tree. Didn’t help much.

Finally, the officers who had made the announcement came back out onto the grounds with reinforcements — maybe 20 uniformed officers. They formed a skirmish line, donning gloves, and started walking slowly toward Gervais.

I found myself walking backwards with the protesters who would NOT be arrested toward the sidewalk along the street. I realized the working media had stayed behind with those who were to be arrested. The police had simply walked past them, parting around them like a stream around a rock. I thought about standing on ceremony and demanding to be allowed back in with the other media, but a number of disconnected thoughts were running through my mind, such as:

  • I have no credentials, and this didn’t seem like a good moment, standing in the rain with everyone a little tense, to have a debate with the authorities about how I was, too still a member of the Fourth Estate, even though all I had to show was a bradwarthen.com business card. A damp one.
  • While I had bought the insurance on my iPhone, that meant I would “only” have to pay $175 to replace it if it were ruined by the rain.
  • My little Canon with which I was trying to shoot video was likely to suffer the same fate as the one before it, which was splashed by surf and never worked again. No one would reimburse me.
  • This was all moving WAY too slowly. At this rate, no one would get any cuffs before another half hour had passed.
  • What are the long-term effects of rain upon a silk bow tie?

What the line of cops wasn’t blocking, the media types still within the perimeter were. I couldn’t see what was going on with Walid and the rest.

I went ahead and crossed the street. As I did, I saw a group of protesters had gathered on the far side of Gervais under a blue tarp. I envied them their shelter as the wind suddenly picked up dramatically.

Then, it came down in buckets. I was entirely drenched by the time I made the door of 1201 Main.

I rode the elevator up, in my soaked blazer and black (formerly gray) pants and drooping bow tie and mop of thoroughly sopping hair. Everyone looked at me as though I were a lunatic. I got up to the Capital City Club and went to the bathroom to try to dry off some with the little terry cloth towels in there.

I went to a window to look back down at the scene I had left. I couldn’t see a thing. The TV lights seemed to be gone, even.

I went on into the Membership Committee meeting from which I was playing hooky. My appearance excited comment. One member asked me whether I was ignorant of the fact that there was an attached parking garage. I mumbled some explanations, sat down, and did my best to act normal.

Here’s a report from reporters who were paid to stay behind and witness the final tedious act of the drama:

Acting at the behest of Gov. Nikki Haley, S.C. Bureau of Protective Services troopers took 19 Occupy Columbia protesters in front of the State House into custody in a driving rainstorm around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Officers escorted small groups of those taken into custody back towards the State House. Officers placed band-type handcuffs behind their back. Protesters did not resist; there was no violence.

“At least you don’t have to be in rain now,” one officer said to a protester as he led a man. Protesters arrested included both men and women.

It was not known what, if any, charges those taken into custody will face.

Haley’s directive was aimed at keeping the demonstrators off State House grounds during the night. She apparently will not order state troopers to formally remove them during daylight hours.

“We the people shall never be defeated!” protesters chanted immediately before being detained…

And so forth…

Portrait of the Artist as an Arrogant Old Guy

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Jim Hammond sent this to me today, from the Nephron announcement Friday.

I don’t know what I’m smirking at as I line up that shot on the iPhone. Perhaps I think I’m catching someone in a compromising attitude. Or maybe it’s that I realized Jim was shooting me as I made that shot. Who knows why I smirk? The Cartesian take on it would be, I think, therefore I smirk.

And I’m not turning up my nose at anyone. I mean, I do turn up my nose, sir, but not at you, sir. It’s just that I wear bifocals, so I do that a lot.

I’m kind of jealous of the quality of Jim’s camera. It does a good job with a backlit subject.  I have a really good camera, too — really good — but it uses film. And that’s just too much trouble and expense these days for everyday use.

Oh, and here’s a picture from way back of me biting my thumb — I mean, turning up my nose — at Dan Quayle. It’s from a chance encounter at a banquet years and years ago …

ME: "I'll have you know, sir, that in South Carolina, we DRESS for dinner!" QUAYLE: "All I want is a potatoe."

Yo, GOP: Huntsman may be your man, if you’d calm down and listen for more than 30 seconds

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I was struck by Daniel Henninger’s column in the WSJ this morning. He was decrying the freak show that is this series of GOP presidential debates, and the way they are making our republic stupider by the day.

And then he got to talking about the way Jon Huntsman impressed in an editorial board meeting:

These dark thoughts came forth earlier this week when a group at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page spent some 75 minutes talking to candidate Jon Huntsman. He’s the one they stick on the end of the podium.

Say this: Jon Huntsman may or may not deserve to be the nominee, but he’s better than the back of the line.

After starting with a horrifyingly robotic recitation of his resume (exactly as he’s said in every debate), the former Utah governor took us on an intriguing tour of his thinking on a range of issues.

Mr. Huntsman said the U.S. likely would have to intervene militarily against Iran’s nuclear program in the next four or five years, a remarkable assertion. He said this in an Oct. 10 speech in New Hampshire, but even in our super-saturated media age, trees fall silently in an empty forest.

He supports “regime change in Syria” through diplomatic and covert means. We should try to make Iraq a “buffer” between Iran and Syria.

He supports the details of the Ryan Plan on entitlement reform. Like Rep. Ryan, he says this contest is “not a normal election”; if the Republicans lose, he said, the U.S. could be on course to repeat Japan’s 10 years of moribund economic growth.

There was more, some of it impressive, some not (for ideas on economic policy, he talks to his brother, an entrepreneur). The point is that one left the meeting with a basis to think about Mr. Huntsman as president, rather than the thumbs-down vote he’s gotten from the Roman Colosseum of the TV debates…

You may or may not have noticed that, when Huntsman sat down with The State‘s board recently, he also impressed them as being the guy with the most substance in the field. Or he impressed Cindi, anyway, which takes some doing.

Part of this is that an editorial board meeting is a vastly superior vehicle for assessing what sort of POTUS a candidate might be than the Reality TV formats of the “debates,” especially given what Mr. Henninger called “(t)he assumption that every cat and dog must be in the debate.” If only there were a way to duplicate that experience — sitting down with a candidate for an hour or two or three and really digging into issues, with discussion rather than robotic questions and timed answers.

But maybe there’s also something about Huntsman — something that even the traumatized, extremism-ridden, post 2008 GOP would see if they’d stop sticking him at the far end of the podium, uninvite some of the less-suitable candidates, and give him an extended listen for once.

Great to see Jeff, but I still await that Dole story

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Jeff Miller and Warren Bolton, outside Yesterday's in Five Points.

Yesterday my phone rang, and told me Jeff Miller was calling. This was confirmed when I answered and heard his voice:

“I’ve got that Dole story for you.”

Except that he still didn’t have it. He was just stringing me along…

The background: I pulled Jeff out of The State‘s Newberry bureau in late 1987 to assign him to cover the upcoming Republican presidential primary here — the one that launched George H. W. Bush toward the nomination and the presidency, and did so much to burnish the S.C. primary as the early contest that picked winners.

I had other political reporters — plenty of them, in those days. But Lee Bandy was up in Washington, and my others who could do the job would be busy with the Legislature by the time of the primary. I needed somebody to work this story full-time, and for the duration. We could see it was going to be a big deal, with the nation’s eyes on South Carolina, so I didn’t want to treat it like just another story. Gordon Hirsch, who was then the news editor, suggested Jeff as somebody who, despite lack of political experience, could do the job. I jumped at the offer, and our state editor lost him from then until after the primary. (Actually, the State Desk have lost him permanently — eventually, he joined my governmental affairs staff for good. I just can’t remember whether he went back to Newberry for a while first. It’s been a LONG time.)

He did a great job, and had a great time, I think. I still remember him talking about being on the bus with David Broder, and what a nice guy Broder was. Jeff was young, and new to all this, and he was really impressed that the legendary Broder would just sit and talk with him like a regular person.

But he wasn’t too starry-eyed to do his job well. I was pleased. There’s just this one beef. After the primary was over, I had one more story idea for him. After all these years, I can’t even remember what the specific idea was, but I thought it was a good one — it was an angle about Bob Dole’s defeat here that no one else had done. Jeff wasn’t so sure. He was also pretty exhausted with writing about that stuff, and needed to move on to his other reporting duties. I kept bugging him about it — just this one more story, I kept saying. I was like that as an editor — even when people had been working double-time for a long time, actually even when they were on vacation, truth be told — and I usually got my way, through sheer insufferability. Not this time. Jeff would say, “Yeah, sure…” but I never got it.

So he owed me.

Today, he paid me back by taking Warren Bolton and me to lunch, on his first visit back to Columbia in a decade. We went to Yesterday’s, of course, because I got to pick (see the ad at right). We had a great time talking about the Dole story (neither of us can remember what it was about now — but it was gonna be good). We talked about the Cosmic Ha-Has, the softball team on which both Jeff and I played (I was the last Ha-Ha left at the paper; all gone now).  We talked about the county league basketball team that Jeff and Warren played on, and how neither of them plays any more. (I went out to play with them once. For some reason, they never begged me to come back.)

A lot of the intervening years — I was last Jeff’s editor in 1993 — Jeff was still covering politics, but for other papers. Washington became his home base, and when I last saw him, at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 (below), he was in the Washington bureau of the Allentown Morning Call, if I remember correctly. In 2006 he left newspaper work, but has stayed in D.C. Now, he’s the vice president for communications of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

It was great to see him again. Warren, too. But it’s usually not so long between times I get to see Warren.

Jeff and me on the last night of the RNC in NY in '04. The marathon was nearly over (conventions mean 20-hour days for press types). Like my beard? I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here’s a place for you to talk about Spurrier, Morris, Garcia, etc.

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A reader Tweeted, as I was headed to a late lunch (1:46 p.m. EST), “Eager to read your thoughts on Spurrier v. Morris.” I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, but now I do. I’ve seen the video and everything. (Interestingly, I could not find anything about it on the mobile version of thestate.com, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the browser version at the time.)

Of course, by that time, the news that the coach, or Eric Hyman, or somebody, had thrown Stephen Garcia off the team — apparently for real, this time. Hyman explained, “For Stephen to return to and remain with the football squad this fall, we agreed on several established guidelines. Unfortunately, he has not been able to abide by those guidelines and has therefore forfeited his position on the roster.”

I don’t know what the guidelines were, as I don’t follow this stuff. But I did see the Auburn game, and a reasonable guess would be that one of his guidelines involved throwing the football straight. Yes, I’m joking. Sort of.

But Micah apparently wanted to know what I thought about the Ron Morris thing. Gee, I don’t know.

I’m not Ron’s editor; never was. If I were, right now I’d be saying, “What the hell, Ron?” Or perhaps I’d use some other, saltier, newsroom expression. And Ron would tell me what was going on as well as he could, from his perspective. Although, based on the performance I saw on the video, it might not be altogether clear to him what it’s all about (apart from the usual animus that, from what I’ve seen, Ron is accustomed to engendering). Anyway, assuming he had the information available, I would have Ron lay out for me his version of the story. Then, I would check it out as well as I could.

If Coach Spurrier had an ounce of professionalism in him, of course, he would already have communicated to me (as Ron’s theoretical editor) what his beef was. Let’s assume he does, and he did. In that case, I would already have had it out with Ron about it and, given the way Spurrier acted today, probably would have told him I’d decided to back Ron. Hence the public tantrum.

Of course, if the coach did NOT try the normal, civil route first, then his performance today was inexcusable. Perhaps understandable on some level given that his QB was just canned after letting him down, but still not excusable in a man paid $2.8 million a year by a public institution to represent that institution.

Speaking of which, if I were Eric Hyman or Harris Pastides, I’d right now be having a serious talk with the coach about his performance — a sort of mirror of the one I’d be having with Ron as his editor. We’d start by watching his game film. Some of the things I’d be asking him:

  • What’s this really about, Steve? And don’t give me that nonsense about some column last spring. That was last spring; you blew up today. What’s really going on? (Oh, wait: Maybe THIS is the column Spurrier is referring to, in which Morris wrote, “Spurrier poached Horn’s program.”)
  • What exactly do you mean when you say it’s “my right as a head coach” not to talk to Ron Morris? Is that some special right we don’t know about? Do assistant coaches, or ordinary mortals walking the streets, not have that right? Because one would think that they do; that any human being walking the planet would have the right not to talk to Ron Morris if they chose not to. (Unless, of course, they were working for us, and we were paying them $2.8 million a year, and we told them to talk to him…) So what’s this imperious “as a head coach” stuff? Have we really made you feel that important?

And so on. That would just be for starters. And I’d be doing that in between fielding phone calls from people over at the newspaper asking me, “What the heck?” Because they use language like that in talking to the public.

So, as I say, if I were charged with taking a position on this, I’d be in fact-finding mode now before making a decision. But if you held the proverbial gun to my head (and I’d much prefer that to a literal one), I’d have to choose Ron on this one. And I might get embarrassed doing so — I might later have to run a full retraction on the challenged column last spring or something if it turned out Ron was wrong. But if you forced me, I’d go with him on this, because I know him. Or at least, I know him better than I do Spurrier, whom I’ve never met.

That means I used to run into Ron in the hallway sometimes, and stop to chat. I never actually worked with him. I don’t think he was in the newsroom when I was (pre-1994), and even if he had been, we’d have had little occasion to deal with each other. But he has always struck me as a pretty thoughtful, careful guy.

I knew people hated him — people of the “Cocky is God” persuasion. And I used to wonder about that, but I’ve often had occasion to wonder about really serious football fans. Sometimes, when one of Ron’s columns caused a splash of some sort, I’d actually turn to the sports pages and read it. And it usually read OK to me — of course, I was judging it outside the context of having any particular knowledge of the subject matter.

So Micah, that’s what I think.

Bobby Hitt on media, unions and other stuff

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SC Commerce Secretary Bobby Hitt speaking to the Columbia Rotary Club on Monday.

Here’s a post I’ve been meaning to get to all week…

Fellow Rotarian Jimmy Covington asked my long-ago managing editor, Bobby Hitt, what he thought of the news media today. Bobby, who is now SC Commerce secretary, said:

I think that it’s as good as it can be.

That was followed by a long pause, with Bobby regarding the crowd with one of those patented Hitt wiseguy grins as they laughed with appreciation, before he added:

… but not as good as it was.

That said more succinctly what I say so often in answer to the same question. My more wordy answer goes something like, “You have to understand that my friends who still have jobs in the MSM are working heroically in the face of a really horrific lack of resources, yadda yadda….” Bobby put it more cleverly.

Here are some other things he said to the Columbia Rotary Club Monday…

  • Between the newspaper and Commerce, Bobby spent 18 years at BMW. So it was with some authority that he said that whatever you may think about the government providing economic incentives to attract jobs — however much you may want markets to take care of everything — the truth is that “BMW has never built an Interstate highway, and has no plans to do so in the future.” But without them, no BMWs would get delivered, and there would be no BMW plant in Greer.
  • A core strength of South Carolina in economic development is that “We’re good at making stuff.” When’s the last time, he asked, that a manufacturing company located here and then left? That’s why, aside from the new Bridgestone plant, Michelin has just expanded. Those are jobs that are here to stay, he said: Our grandchildren will be working at those plants. “The world gets us, maybe better sometimes than we get ourselves.”
  • Tensions between one part of the state and another are “foolish.” A great advantage we have is that we are a small state, and it’s possible for us to work together statewide. “I look at South Carolina as one big county” in promoting economic development.
  • “I would like to see a time when South Carolinians are not just on the plant floor; they’re in the front office.”
  • Staying a right-to-work state is key to economic development, and in any event it’s not up to him. He just doesn’t see any political chance of it changing. He said he doesn’t see South Carolinians as interested in third-party representation: “Most people in South Carolina don’t want to be told what to do by anyone other than the one that pays them.”

Laurin and Nancy at the social media symposium

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Laurin is presenting, Nancy is going over her notes, and I'm trying to think up some mayhem that will get me sent to the principal's office. Just like school.

Last night, I participated in a symposium on politics and social media at Francis Marion University. Which was great. Trouble is, I was on a panel with Laurin Manning and Nancy Mace. And they were better prepared than I was.

See, I thought it was going to be just a panel discussion, so I had jotted some notes about points I wanted to be sure to hit on, and showed up. Laurin and Nancy had slide shows, and got up and made presentations. So I had to, too. No problem, really, because I can fill any amount of time… I talked about the old blog and why I started it and how it related to my old MSM job, and the new blog and how it’s going, my Twitter feed (dang! I forgot to mention I’m one of the Twitterati!), how I hate Facebook (it’s the AOL of this decade), “Seinfeld,” my Top Five Baseball Movies, and I don’t know what all.

Then at some point, I realized I’d gone on enough, or more than enough, and shut up. Which I think was cool, but it was way less polished than what the other panelists did.

You know how, when you were in school, there were these girls (and sometimes traitor guys) who always showed up with their homework done? And raised their hands and asked for more work, for extra credit? And when the teacher had been out of the room, and came back, they told her what you had been doing while she was gone? It was like that. Laurin and Nancy were good.

But I survived to the actual panel discussion part, and that went well (I think), so all’s well that ends that way. As it happened, I enjoyed it.

I especially enjoyed learning from Laurin and Nancy.

Laurin was sort of a mentor for me when I started blogging in 2005, and she was well established with the legendary Laurinline. She later was part of the unstoppable Obama social media machine of 2008. Recently, she’s blogged at SC Soapbox.

Nancy, the first female to graduate from The Citadel (how’s that for intimidating?), is founder and CEO of The Mace Group, LLC. She’s also partners with Will Folks in FITSNews— she does the technical side, and leaves the content to Will.

I’m not going to share with you all the cool trade secrets they imparted, because knowledge is power, and I want it all to myself. But I will share this anecdote that they told us about:

You know how Will started his blog? By accident. He was actually trying to post a comment on the Laurinline, and got so confused in trying to do so that he inadvertently set up a blog of his own. Really. That’s the way Laurin and Nancy tell it. The site is much more technologically sophisticated now with Nancy involved, and has more than a million page views a month — compared to my measly traffic, which has only broken a quarter of a million a couple of times. (That’s it. That was my display of humility for this month.)

Anyway, that’s why I was in Florence.

Fan suggests Spurrier take pay cut for Saturday

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I mentioned breakfast at the Cap City Club back on my last post, which reminds me… Some of the guys at the regular round table this morning were talking about the Gamecocks-Auburn thing on Saturday, and one of them said, “I didn’t see any football over the weekend.”

What he meant was, he was there at Williams-Brice. He just didn’t see any football.

He’s not bitter or anything. He blames Coach Steve Spurrier for it, but he’s willing to forgive — if the Old Ball Coach will take a 1/12th cut in his pay for that one.

Intriguing. Since his salary is $2.8 million, that would mean a reduction of … $233,333.33.

Someone else at the table suggested that he could donate the amount to academics.

I am neither endorsing nor rejecting the idea. It’s one thing to deal in political controversy here on the blog without making suggestions about other people’s religion.

As for the rest of you… discuss.

Welcome new advertiser Palmetto Citizens FCU!

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When I first went to work at The State in 1987, I immediately opened an account with the newspaper’s credit union. In our old building there in the shadow of Williams-Brice Stadium (it now houses part of S.C. ETV) it was located in what I remember as practically a closet in the Human Resources department — a cubby behind a sliding glass door and curtain.

Perhaps my memory exaggerates. In any case, it was small. But it wasn’t there for long. The company credit union soon merged with Columbia Teachers Federal Credit Union — which had been formed in 1936 when 10 individuals all chipped in $5 apiece. Columbia Teachers opened a branch just down the street from us near the intersection of Shop and George Rogers (or is it Assembly there? hard to tell), and put an ATM in the basement of our building.

By this time, the credit union had expanded well beyond just Columbia teachers, and in 2001 changed its name to Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union.

They’ve still got my money — what there is of it — including the account where I put revenues from the blog. Which will, for the next year, include payments from the credit union itself, for the ad you see at right. Which has a neat sort of circularity to it…

In any case, I’m pleased and proud to welcome a very fine community organization, Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union, to bradwarthen.com.

The worst thing about Haley’s chirpy greeting order is the insulting assumption that underlies it

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The worst thing about the “It’s a great day in South Carolina!” order isn’t the fact that it is so grating and insulting to the caller. Callers can shrug that off; if they really need to do business with the state, they’ll take a breath and go ahead (even while filing a mental note that they now think less of SC government than they did before).

The worst thing is the attitude that underlies the order, which was ably set out in the newspaper this morning by Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey:

“While the press focuses on the negative, the governor is changing the culture of our state.. She is proud of South Carolina, and while we have challenges, we are making great progress every day. The focus of this greeting is to have state employees pass along a positive attitude and ask the caller, ‘How can I help you?’ so that they remember – and the people know – that they work for the taxpayers. The governor has always said that it’s time for government to work for the people, and this is the first step.”

She’s changing the culture of our state…. It’s time for government to work for the people…

This is the first step.

Because, you see, that never happened before. It’s never occurred to any state employee that they serve the people of South Carolina. Ever. Nikki Haley invented it. Thank God for Nikki Haley, because not one single state employee in the history of South Carolina has ever considered serving the public, even for a moment. If any had, this would not be the “first step” in implementing this wonderful new day. And this is the first step.

Again, we are seeing what we get when a person who does not have a clue about an organization — what it’s for, whom it serves, what its personnel are like, how it works, how it should work — is placed in charge of that organization.

Tragically for all of us, that organization is our state government — an institution that the people of our state, perhaps more than the people of any other state in the union, badly need to be well-led.

But there’s more to it than that. Nikki Haley is merely a symptom of a sickness in the politics of our state. The sickness is a nasty attitude of despising those who serve the public — and despising them more and more as their jobs become more difficult.

She is now engaged in the process of tearing down that workforce. And the first step is humiliation.

Full engagement, the only viable, effective and moral stance for the U.S. to take toward the world

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Posting that column last night — the one from 9/23/01 — I realized that I had forgotten to post something else a week earlier.

When I shared with you the hasty column I wrote for the “extra” we put out on 9/11, and the one I turned around immediately and wrote for the next day, I had fully intended also to share a more important piece from several days later — the editorial I wrote for that following Sunday. But the 16th of this month came and went, and I failed to do that.

So I share it now. Being an editorial (an institutional, rather than personal opinion) and being a Sunday piece (when newspapers take a step back from immediate events, and also when they tend to express the views they regard as being of greatest import), it’s different from the other pieces. Less of my voice and style, more formalized. But at the same time, for the purposes of this blog, it also has perhaps greater value as a clear expression of my own views of what the nation should do going forward.

In it, I expressed views I had long held, and still hold, but they were sharpened and set into relief by the events of that week.

Spoiler alert: Basically, this piece is about a couple of things. The first is the need for re-engagement in the world, after a growing isolationism that had worried me all through the 90s. With notable exceptions — our involvement in the Balkans, for instance — we had become more insular, more preoccupied with our own amusements as a fat, happy nation. Up to that point, I had objected on the basis that when you are the world’s richest and most powerful nation (indisputable after the fall of the USSR), it is morally wrong to turn your back on the world, like a rich man behind the walls of his gated community. What 9/11 did was add to that the fact that such disengagement was positively dangerous.

The other main point is something I later learned an interesting term for: DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic.” Actually, that’s not quite it, either. The DIME term refers to ways of exerting power, and that it certainly part of it, but not all of it. Another piece of the concept I was talking about was what you often hear referred to as “soft power.” Unfortunately, that is often mistakenly expressed as an alternative to “hard power.” But they complement each other. A unipolar power trying to achieve all of its goals through either alone is doomed to fail, ultimately.

No, I have to go back to the earlier, vaguer term: Engagement. On every level you can think of — diplomatic, cultural, mercantile, humanitarian, and yes, military.

Much of this piece, given the moment in which it was written, is occupied with the military part. That’s natural. That’s the hardest to persuade people of in our peaceful times (if you doubt we live in peaceful times, I plan a post after this one to address that). The rest, people just nod about and say, yes, of course we should do those things. (OK, perhaps I’m being a bit sanguine about that. I’ll just say that the people who need convincing on the military part are likely to say that — others are likely to say ‘Hell, no — let them fend for themselves.” And thus we have the two sides of isolationism.) They take more convincing on the tough stuff. (Some of you will object, “Not after 9/11! People’s blood was boiling!” But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about passions of the moment. I was talking about long-term policy. I’m talking about what happens after people calm down and say, Never mind; let’s just withdraw.)

Reading it now, I wish the piece had been longer, with far more explication of the other elements, and how they were integrated. The following years, we saw constant argument between two views, neither of which saw the value of the whole concept. On the one hand, you had the Bushian — really, more the Rumsfeldian — notion that all you had to do was topple a tyrant and things would be fine. On the other, there was the myopic view that soft power was the only kind that was moral and effective.

These ideas are as relevant now as ever. Now that we have employed hard power to topple a tyrant in Libya, will we engage fully on other fronts to help Libya have a better future, one in which it has a chance of being a long-term friend, ally and trading partner? Or will we turn our attention away now that the loud noises have stopped going off?

Anyway, I’ve explained it enough. Here it is:

IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD

State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, September 16, 2001

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words “missile defense shield” to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.

That’s about the only way it might have helped.

Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

Essentially, we have wasted a decade.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.

We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was “It’s the economy, stupid.” Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s “policeman.”

Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.

Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.

In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, “When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general.” That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.

At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.

Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.

We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call “humint” – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.

But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.

We must cease to regard “nation-building” as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.

We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.