Speaking of economic development news, I haven’t known quite what to make of this report, which one of our regulars has shared with me:
Employees say they faced brutal heat at Amazon warehouse
Twenty current and former employees at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania say they were forced to work in brutal heat at a breakneck pace while hired paramedics waited outside in case anyone became dangerously dehydrated.
Spencer Soper has published an exhaustive investigation into the massive online retailer’s Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania operation. Soper reports that a local doctor treated employees at the facility for heat-related health problems, and wound up filing a complaint about conditions there with federal regulators. Many of the warehouse’s employees were temporary and hired through a staffing company; if they did not meet packing quotas, they faced daily threats of termination, Soper writes.
He also notes that a corps of other temporary workers were poised to replace any freshly fired Amazon employee. “The safety and welfare of our employees is our No. 1 priority at Amazon, and as the general manager, I take that responsibility seriously,” Amazon warehouse manager Vickie Mortimer told the paper.
Our regular contributor sent that to me via email, so I’m guessing he meant to be an anonymous messenger. As for me, I just say I have great hopes for Amazon, and hope even more fervently that this description will in no way apply to the new facility here that will employ so many of our neighbors.
I doubt that it will. In this day and age, such stories are a bit hard to believe. But I pass it on for you to decide what you think.
The no. 3 Republican in the Senate will step down from his leadership position early next year, despite having no plans to retire from Congress.
Lamar Alexander informed his fellow GOP colleagues of his rather surprising decision on Tuesday morning in a letter obtained byPolitico, saying that the move was the best decision for him and the Senate.
“Stepping down from leadership will liberate me to spend more time working for results on the issues I care most about,” the 71-year-old former Tennessee governor wrote. “I want to do more to make the Senate a more effective institution so that it can deal better with serious issues. There are different ways to provide leadership within the Senate. After nine years here, this is how I believe I can now make my greatest contribution. For these same reasons I do not plan to seek a leadership position in the next Congress.”…
I’ve respected Lamar Alexander since I covered him in his first successful run for governor in 1978, spending a good bit of time with him on the road (OK, so I was on the road with him 24/7 for one week before switching over to cover his opponent, but it was enough time to form a positive impression).
Lamar was never a guy you get particularly excited about. He was… bland. One of the most striking things about him was how much his speaking voice sounded like Pat Boone’s. (Once, I heard a PSA on the radio by Boone, and I thought it was the governor until he identified himself at the end — or was it the other way around?) His much-publicized walk across Tennessee in the trademark red-and-black shirt was SO contrived, such an earnest bid to be interesting, that I would joke about it, while at the same time appreciating his seriousness. He was what Tennessee needed after the rollicking corruption of Ray Blanton (who had defeated him four years earlier, on the very first election night of my newspaper career, when I was a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal). I would joke that Lamar’s main appeal to the voters was to subliminally project, “I won’t steal the silverware from the governor’s mansion.” But after Blanton, that was progress.
Turned out that there was a lot more progress to come with Alexander. He was different from any Republican governor I have seen since. He started out appointing Democrats to his Cabinet (his chief political adviser was someone who had worked for Democrats), and he reached out to the Democratic majority in the legislature to get his agenda passed, including significant movement toward merit pay for teachers. From day one, he was about raising the incomes of the average Tennessean, and he was for working with whomever it took to get that done. He worked particularly productively with the iconic speaker of the House (and later governor) Ned Ray McWherter.
He has served his state, and now his country, with pragmatic dedication and moderate sensibilities. So I’m sorry to see him leave leadership.
And puzzled. What does he mean he can be more effective outside that role? There’s a hint in the original Politico story:
Alexander says the decision was rooted in his desire to foster consensus in the gridlocked Senate, a role he felt constrained playing while spearheading the partisan Senate GOP messaging machine.
That sounds very cool — and even, despite this being Lamar Alexander, exciting. In an UnParty sense. I’d love to hear an elaboration on that. It would be nice to have back about 15 minutes of that time I spent riding around with him in cars and planes back in the day. I think I’d have more interesting questions now…
On the campaign plane with Alexander, back in the day./Brad Warthen
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Monday she can’t back up claims that half of the people wanting work at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site failed drug tests and half of the remainder couldn’t pass reading and writing tests.
Haley said in an interview with The Associated Press that she’s learned a lesson and is going to be more careful.
“I’ve never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you’re given good information,” Haley said. “And now I’m learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something.”
Haley said she’d probably repeated “a million times” the story that about the test failures before being questioned about the assertions after a Lexington Rotary Club on Sept. 8. Her spokesman has been asked almost daily since then whether the claim could be substantiated…
Hey, if she has truly “learned a lesson,” I think that’s wonderful. And if she’s going to be more careful (and, dare we hope, thoughtful), that would be even better.
Don’t know whether you’ll be able to actually read this Greenville News editorial online (they make it hard), but here are excerpts:
Stop bashing state’s unemployed
The state’s more than 236,000 unemployed workers deserve better treatment than they have gotten in recent days from Gov. Nikki Haley. In her rush to score points with voters who mistakenly believe the unemployed have done something to earn their unkind fate, Haley used careless language to push a fundamentally flawed idea.
“I so want drug testing,” Haley was quoted as saying last week when discussing South Carolina’s stubbornly high unemployment rate that has gotten worse on her watch. “It’s something I’ve been wanting since the first day I walked into office.”…
Haley’s campaign mirrors those being run in a couple dozen states where some politicians are trying to convince people that drug-testing of the unemployed is needed to improve the nation’s wretched unemployment numbers. It’s an approach that simply defies the reality of what has happened over the past few years as the worst economy since the Great Depression has resulted in unemployment stuck near double digits.
This politically driven campaign ignores an important fact. Until the day they were handed their pink slip by companies looking to shore up their bottom lines, unemployed people actually had a job. And in much of America, those jobs came with a mandatory drug test before the job was filled and with other opportunities for random or for-cause drug tests during employment….
… Drugs were a factor in only about 1,000 of more than 400,000 unemployment claims, according to an Associated Press story from earlier this year.
Gov. Haley and other state leaders should focus on bringing more jobs to South Carolina and nurturing a system that better matches employers with workers. And they should stop this unseemly crusade of beating up on unemployed people just to score political points.
I’ll add a thought to that…
Who ARE these people with whom you can make political points by saying stuff like this? Who ARE these people who think of the unemployed as the undeserving “other”? It’s unimaginable to me. Well before I lost my 35-year newspaper career, I knew plenty of people who were out of work, across the economy, and plenty of others who were worried, and with good reason? Who lives in such a bubble that they don’t know all of these worthy, smart, hard-working people?
Oh, I know the answer to those questions. But I’m still incredulous that anyone could be so lacking in perception, and so mean-spirited. And I continue to be stunned that people such as Nikki Haley can appeal to such lowest common impulses and succeed in elections. And I’m sick and tired of this being the case. I want to live in a rational world.
And that’s the bottom line, really. I suppose it’s entirely about compassion in the case of people who are way nicer than I am. But I’m more about recognizing the things that are actually wrong with our economy, seeing how they affect us all, and seeing how even rational self-interest (altruism aside) requires us to address these problems realistically instead of acting like hermit crabs and reaching desperately for stupid excuses to dismiss what’s actually happening.
I didn’t have much to say about South Carolina’s 11.1 percent unemployment rate, beyond these two thoughts: 1) I really hope this isn’t a double-dip recession (and if we actually got out of the first one, which I can’t tell; can you?), and 2) boyohboy am I sick of this stuff.
The disorienting thing for me about all this is that I can’t tell what’s happening. Outside of the newspaper business, I have trouble telling how things are going. I understood the economics of that, so I could tell as we went along: I can see things are bad. OK, now they’re worse. Now they’re WAY worse. Uh-oh, the PACE of getting worse just accelerated, dramatically. Whoa! The bottom just dropped out!
Not so much a roller-coaster ride as a fall down a well.
But out here in the world, where I’m immersed in the thing I was held away from, as a matter of policy — the thing called business — I’m disoriented, and have trouble telling what’s going on. Because it’s going on all around me, above me and below me and inside of me. It’s like… I read once that each man’s experience was totally different on Omaha Beach in the early hours, trapped on a limited scrap of sand that was all pre-sighted by the Germans, as death of various kinds rained down. You would experience one battle, and a guy 15 feet from you would experience something dramatically different.
This is like that, in the business world. Since I wasn’t supposed to touch business in the newspaper world, I could see it unfolding in front of me — like watching it on a screen. Now, I’m in it, and it’s much harder to see the real picture.
So some days I think things are going well, and the economy as a whole is picking up (based on what I see at ADCO and through the lenses of our various clients), and other days… not well at all. And it’s hard to make out the trend, the pattern.
Is it that way for you? Whether it is or not, I can tell that the unemployment rate climbing further is not one of the good signs. Not for any of us.
So that’s what I have to say about it. Someone writing in Salon decided to dig into the numbers, and this is what he had to say:
But a look inside the numbers, at the five worst and five best states, is unhappily revealing. The states with the five highest unemployment rates are Nevada (13.4 percent), California (12.1 percent), Michigan (11.2 percent), South Carolina (11.1 percent) and Florida (10.7 percent.) Nevada, California, Michigan and South Carolina all registered unemployment increases in August, compared to July. Florida held even.
The states with the lowest unemployment rates are North Dakota (3.5 percent), Nebraska (4.2 percent), South Dakota (4.7 percent), New Hampshire (5.3 percent) and Oklahoma (5.6 percent.)…
What does the geographical distribution of the hardest hit areas tell us? Again, not a whole lot that’s new. California, Florida and Nevada were among the three states hit hardest by the housing collapse, with Nevada getting the extra negative bonus of depressed Las Vegas tourism. Michigan, battered by globalization and the woes of the auto industry, has long been near the top of the unemployment charts. (Although the state had been improving quickly until about four months ago, when unemployment started rising again.) South Carolina’s high unemployment rate hasbeen something of a mystery for years. Perhaps the most that can be said is that as a relatively low-tax state dominated by some of the most conservative Republican politicians in the country, it is certainly no advertisement for conservative orthodoxy, at least as far as boosting employment goes.
Of course, that’s about what you’d expect to read in Salon. Next time I see Salon saying anything positive about Republicans, it will be my first time.
They do have a point, though. We have pursued a certain course in South Carolina, in rather dramatic contrast to neighboring states such as Georgia and North Carolina, which decided to build up the kind of infrastructure — especially human infrastructure — that has made their economies stronger than ours.
I’ve lived all over in my life. And in my adult life, I’ve worked — and closely observed politics — in three states (the other two being Tennessee and Kansas). And I’ve never seen any place in this country more afflicted by self-destructive ideology than my home state of South Carolina.
So, you’ve heard what I think, and what some guy writing for Salon thinks. What do you think?
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wants thejobless to pass a drug test before they can receive benefits, but she seems to have an exaggerated sense of drug use among the unemployed…
Haley said scads of job applicants flunked a drug test at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation along the Savannah River.
“Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them — this was back before the campaign — when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn’t read and write properly,” Haley said….
Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.
“Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test,” Giusti said. “At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive.”
The River Site doesn’t even test applicants. “We only test them when they have been accepted,” Giusti said.
A spokesman for Gov. Haley did not respond to requests for comment…
That’s some good reporting by HuffPo, although the headline was weak. If the body type was right, this was more than an “exaggeration.” Also, I’ve never heard SRS referred to on second reference as “River Site,” but whatever.
Gee, maybe if I’d given up some of those really heavy-duty drugs, I wouldn’t have been out of work for most of 2009, huh?
Yesterday, I showed y’all what I wrote in the first hour, more or less, after learning of the attacks in New York and Washington 10 years ago. That raw, stream-of-consciousness piece ran in the “extra” that The State put out that day.
As soon as I had handed that to the folks putting that special edition together, I turned to what we would say for the next day’s paper — for Sept. 12. Then, almost as quickly, but with the benefit of a couple of more hours to let the news sink in, I wrote the following column.
Still nothing I would hold up as one of my best pieces of work, but it has its moments. For me. See what you think. And remember again: This is not a piece written with the benefit of years of reflection:
NOW THAT REALITY EXCEEDS FICTION, WHAT SORT OF ENDING WILL WE WRITE?
State, The (Columbia, SC) – Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Author: BRAD WARTHEN , Editorial Page Editor
WE’RE IN TOM Clancy’s world now.
Mr. Clancy is derided as a writer by critics for many reasons, one of them being the fact that his plots tend to be so fantastic and contrived. Take his novel Executive Orders. It was too much to be believed. It opened with a 747 having been deliberately flown into the U.S. Capitol, shutting down the government. This is followed by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that result in thousands of civilian deaths on American soil. And for most of the book, no one knows who is doing this to us, or why.
We now know what that’s like. In fact, what we are now facing is worse than Mr. Clancy’s fevered imaginings.
It may seem unbelievably frivolous to be thinking about pulp fiction at a time like this, but my mind keeps returning to it, and partly because this seems so much like something from the realm of fiction – or because I wish it were.
It certainly outstrips anything that’s happened on any one day in this nation’s real-life history.
The comparisons to Pearl Harbor are inevitable. But in so many ways this is different – and worse. The death toll is larger, and the bodies we’re counting – and will continue to count for some time – aren’t wearing uniforms. They didn’t sign up to fight. They were just going to work, in what they thought was a free and peaceful country.
It’s also worse because we don’t know where to go with our grief and our rage. On Dec. 7, 1941, those sailors looking up at the red suns on the wings of the planes that were killing their buddies knew exactly what to do – and so did the rest of the nation.
I wonder if we’ll ever know what to do about this, in the same, ultimately satisfying sense of being able to restore peace and security to our nation and world. Oh, when we find out who did this, there’s no question about what we’ll do in the short term. Give us a target, something to shoot back at, and it will soon be nothing but smoke and ashes.
It will be a very short war. But what will we do when it’s over? How will we deal with the other disaffected, unconnected people around the world who will take inspiration from Tuesday’s events? What can we do, and what will we do, about the fact that there are people who hate us for no better reasons than that we are strong, wealthy and free?
Pearl Harbor isn’t our only comparison. People have mentioned the explosion of the Challenger as being comparable – then, too, the nation watched in helpless horror as fellow human beings died, in real time. But as awful as it was, there were only seven dead. And we figured out how to fix it. It was a simple problem of engineering.
Better O-rings won’t take care of this.
There are no precedents. Nothing in our past was quite like this. Even the Civil War, the most traumatic event in our collective experience, was in a sense less unsettling, in that everyone had a clearer understanding of what was going on.
Just as we can take little comfort from the past, our future offers no solace. It’s certainly not going to be anything like what we expected.
Some of the changes will come only if we’re smart enough to make them happen ourselves. Americans are going to have to start caring more about foreign affairs, if we’re ever going to deal adequately with this challenge. We can’t just fire a few cruise missiles and then hide behind a magical “Star Wars” shield. We’re going to have to engage the world – or at least, we’re going to have to demand that our elected leaders do so. And those political leaders are going to have to set aside a lot of their petty, partisan differences – or we’re going to have to replace them.
In other ways, some kind of change is inevitable, and all we can do is pick between unsavory choices.
From now on, this nation will be either less safe or less free. The openness and the freedom of movement that we take for granted make us enormously vulnerable, a fact that is absurdly obvious today. I suspect that at least in the short term, we’ll choose being a little less free in order to be a little safer. And that’s a sad choice to have to make.
I said we’re in Tom Clancy’s world. That’s true up to a point. The biggest difference is that I know how the book ends – once Jack Ryan and the other fictional protagonists figured out who was attacking the United States, they made war upon them with devastating effectiveness. In the end, the nation emerged stronger than ever.
What will happen in real life? Our capacity to make war is undisputed. But in the long term, how will we ever be the same?
The fact is, we won’t be. Our challenge is to emerge as something better than we were, not something worse.
I think I’ve told this story before, but to recap…
In 2001, the senior staff of The State — the heads of all the newspaper’s divisions (including news, advertising, circulation, HR, finance, production, marketing and of course, editorial) — met with the publisher ever Tuesday morning at 9. On Sept. 11, 2001, we had just sat down when someone from the newsroom came to the door seeking John Drescher, who was then our managing editor. John told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, then left the room.
We had it in our minds that it was a big story, and certainly John needed to get started on it, but we were picturing (at least I was) another confused amateur pilot in a Beechcraft or something. The WTC bombing of several years earlier crossed my mind, but I didn’t take it seriously yet.
It seemed we had just resumed the meeting when Drescher burst back in and told Executive Editor Mark Lett (News and editorial each had two editors who were on Senior Staff. The newsroom was represented by Lett and Drescher, while Associate Editor Warren Bolton joined me in representing editorial) that a second plane had hit the other tower.
Now we knew it was a coordinated attack on the United States.
That was it. Meeting over. Everybody jumped up. A few of us huddled over by the window and discussed putting out an “Extra,” before moving on to putting together the regular paper for the next day. I asked whether they’d like a column from editorial, just to inject a bit of opinion into the special edition. They said “yes,” and I went to get to work.
The first job was to get some sort of sense of what was happened — I mean the total picture, not just the Twin Towers (which probably had not yet collapsed as I began). That wasn’t easy. A lot was happening at once — the Pentagon getting hit, the Capitol evacuated, the president up in the air, somewhere. And then there were some the unconfirmed reports that later proved to be untrue — I don’t even remember the details of them now, some sorts of smaller incidents going on in the streets of Washington. Once they were discounted, I forgot them so my brain could process all the other stuff going on.
Once I turned to my keyboard, it took me about 20 minutes to write the following. That didn’t keep Drescher from sending up messages from the second floor: Where’s the copy? We’ve gotta go. Of course, all news really had to do is grab the stuff coming in and put it on a page. I had to think about what it meant, on the basis of alarmingly incomplete information, and write it.
So you might say this was written in even more of a hurry than a similar number of words on the blog, and amid great confusion and a certain amount of duress. You can read that in these words. There’s some emotion, and some thoughts, there that wouldn’t have been there a day later, or even a few hours later. Very stream-of-consciousness. I wince at some of it now. But it’s a real-time artifact, at least of what was going through my head that morning. See what you think:
AMERICA WILL FIND A WAY TO PREVAIL AGAINST COWARDLY ENEMY
State, The (Columbia, SC) – Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor
Sometime within the next 24 hours, no doubt, some television talking head somewhere will say, “This doesn’t happen here.”
Yes, it does. It has.
It’s happened before, in fact. It just wasn’t this close to home.
We remember Pearl Harbor. We’ll remember this, too.
The question is, what will we do about it?
Two nights ago, the nation delved back into its history with a celebrated media event, the premiere of the television version of Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers.”
We marvel at how a previous generation responded to an unprecedented crisis – a sudden attack by a ruthless, remorseless enemy. We think of those people as the “greatest generation,” and they deserve that appellation because of the way they came together to settle their own crisis and secure our future.
And we all wondered: Are we like them? Do we have it in us?
We’re about to find out.
We’re about to find out if we can snap out of shock, pull ourselves off the ground, set our petty differences aside, and come together as a nation to deal with our enemies.
For now, there is no question that we have enemies. And these enemies are in many ways different from Imperial Japan. In some ways, they are worse.
Pearl Harbor was an attack upon a distant outpost of American military power. The attack, as sudden and dishonest and vicious as it was, was at least an attack that made strategic sense in traditional military logic. And while there were civilian casualties, the obvious primary target was our fighting men and their machines of war.
This time, there is no pretense of such rudimentary “decency,” if you want to stretch so far as to call it that.
This time, civilians were the target every bit as much – if not more so – as our men and women in uniform.
This was a strike – and a temporarily successful one – at the chief power centers that have given this nation the strength to stand astride the world as its only superpower.
We are the world’s largest economy, so they struck, with devastating effect, at the very symbolic heart of that strength.
We are the undisputed military champion of the world, guarantor of security not only for this nation but for the rest of the globe. And this time they struck not just battleships and sailors, but the nerve center of our military colossus.
The greatest gift this nation has given the world is our form of democracy. And they have shut down and evacuated our Capitol and the White House. The home of the most powerful man in the world stands empty, surrounded by nervous men with automatic weapons and itchy trigger fingers.
The nation that gave the world flight is frozen, earthbound, at a standstill.
We are stunned. This attack has been devastatingly successful. We don’t know who did it, and we don’t know how much there is to come.
Our response will have to be different from the response after Pearl Harbor. This appears to be a different kind of enemy – the worst kind of coward. An enemy who strikes, and ducks and runs and hides.
How to prevail against such an enemy and restore peace and prosperity to the land is not immediately apparent.
But we will find a way. This is the same nation that was laid low 60 years ago, by an enemy who thought we lacked the will or the know-how to stop them. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.
We may not be the greatest generation, but we are their grandchildren. We are Americans. We are shocked, and we will mourn.
But then we’ll dust ourselves off, and find a way.
Later, I briefly attended a newsroom meeting in which they were talking about the next days paper (the only time I remember doing that during my years in editorial), and then turned to directing my own staff and writing stuff for the next day. I’ll show you that tomorrow.
When I told Robert Ariail I had cartoon for Sunday from Bill Day and asked for one from him, he was glad to share, as always.
He decided to go back to black-and-white for this one, which I (and I think he) both prefer. I think color looks great on a lot of things, but this medium is stronger, has more gravitas, in black and white.
He mentioned that this was one he had thought of several years ago, and when he described it over the phone, I remembered it from when we were at the paper. So often, Robert had strong cartoon ideas (usually, several in a day), but came up with something he liked better for that day and set the first ones aside. I’m glad this isn’t one that ended up thrown away.
Which makes me think of something. Ten years ago, Robert, and Bill, and my old friend Richard Crowson, all had steady, good jobs at newspapers. So did I, for that matter, although I didn’t have their sort of talent.
Nowadays, we have our young lady governor calling a reporter a “little girl.” In the olden days, when men were men and so were governors, they were somewhat more polite toward the youthful and female. But if they weren’t careful, they also came across as a bit kinky. I refer you to this column I wrote in 1994:
CARROLL CAMPBELL MUST LEARN HOW TO TAKE THE HEAT
State, The (Columbia, SC) – Sunday, April 10, 1994
Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Writer
If Carroll Campbell really wants to run for President of the United States, he will have to grow a much tougher hide.
The Governor is regularly mentioned as a top contender by some of the most respected political writers in America, including The Washington Post’s David Broder. But Broder and company are missing something. To use a baseball analogy, the top sportswriters have taken only a cursory look at this rookie. They’ve seen him field, throw and bunt. They’ve yet to determine if he can hit a curve ball. Or as Harry Truman might have asked, can he take the heat?
Mr. Campbell is an extraordinarily thin-skinned man for a politician. The general public doesn’t know this because Campbell manages his public exposure with an artful care reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon was handled in 1968. He stays above the fray.
But when he can’t do that — say, when someone surprises him with a tough question, off-camera — the image can fall apart. Experienced reporters have seen that carefully groomed mask shift, with remarkable speed, into a visage of suspicion and hostility. His eyes flash, and his answers, if he responds, are highly defensive. The motives of questioners are questioned.
This flaw isn’t fatal. People can change and, in fact, over the last couple of years, Mr. Campbell has mellowed. He’s become more statesmanlike and less confrontational. In seven years as governor, he has polished some of his rough edges.
At a luncheon briefing for editorial writers at the Governor’s Mansion in January, I saw the Carroll Campbell that Dave Broder sees. He was open, talkative and articulate, exhibiting an easy command of any topic that came up. In the next day’s editorial on his State of the State speech, I wrote about the “New Carroll Campbell .”
A month later, the Old Carroll Campbell was back.
It started with the effort by former state Rep. Luther Taylor to get his Lost Trust conviction thrown out. One of the tactics his lawyer used was to say the federal investigators had backed off investigating charges that could have implicated Mr. Campbell .
A little background: In 1990, when I was The State’s governmental affairs editor, we looked into these same charges and found an interesting story about how the Legislature gave 21 people an $8.6 million tax break. But we never found any evidence that Mr. Campbell was involved. And neither did the feds, with their far superior investigative powers.
Taylor alleged that the federal agents hadn’t gone far enough. The new U.S. attorney, a Democrat, agreed to investigate. The State’s federal court reporter,Twila Decker , concluded that the only way to check the course of the previous investigation was to gain access to Mr. Campbell ‘s FBI files, and she needed his permission. So she asked.
The Governor went ballistic. He requested a meeting with The State’s publisher and senior editors. This led to an extraordinary session on Feb. 17. Assembled in a conference room at The State were the various members of the editorial board and three people from the newsroom: Managing Editor Paula Ellis, chief political writer Lee Bandy and Ms. Decker . Mr. Campbell had a small entourage. Most of us wondered what the Governor wanted.
Over the next hour or so, we found out — sort of. Mr. Campbell had brought files with him, and between denunciations of those raising these charges anew, he read sporadically from the files. Each time Ms. Decker tried to ask a question, he cut her off, usually with a dismissive “young lady.”
Throughout the session, rhetorical chips fell from his shoulder: “This young lady had given me a deadline. . . . You’re smarter than the court. . . . I will not even be baited. . . . May I finish. . . . Now wait a minute, young lady; you’re mixing apples and oranges. . . . I really don’t care what you have, young lady. . . . You seem to be obsessed with ‘lists.’. . .”
No one in the room thought Mr. Campbell had done anything wrong, and everyone wanted him to have the chance to clear the air. But we were all riveted by his agitation, particularly as it was directed at the reporter. At one point, Editorial Page Editor Tom McLean felt compelled to explain to the Governor that Ms. Decker wasn’t imputing wrongdoing on his part by simply asking questions. It did little good.
At the end, the Governor stormed out, without the usual handshakes around the table — without even eye contact.
Later that afternoon, Consulting Editor Bill Rone, who had missed the meeting, stuck his head into my office to ask what had happened with Mr.Campbell . Bill said he had run into the Governor in the parking lot, and that he had been upset about Twila Decker . He told Bill he had been so mad he had wanted to “spank” her.
Repeatedly during the interview, Mr. Campbell had expressed indignation that he was being questioned by someone who wasn’t “here at the time.” Is that what he will say when the national press corps starts taking him really seriously, and somewhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Georgia someone in the pack asks him about that capital gains thing in South Carolina? Or the 1978 congressional campaign against Max Heller? Or fighting busing in 1970? Or the Confederate flag?
Mr. Campbell has gotten altogether too accustomed to the relative politeness of the South Carolina press corps. Our group was throwing him softballs — real melons — and he went down swinging. What will he do when he faces major league pitching?
Of course, the late Gov. Campbell didn’t mean anything kinky about it. He just wanted to punish her somehow. Putting Twila in the pillory would probably have satisfied him.
I remember one of the newsroom editors — someone who has not worked there for a long time — saying after he read my column, “Hey, I’d like to spank her, too.” He meant it the other way.
Occasionally, I get asked here whether I ever change my mind about anything. I don’t know why I get asked that; probably because of the very definite manner in which I present opinions that I have examined and tested over and over again. I have a certain tone, people tell me.
Well, yes — sometimes I do change my mind. Here’s something I changed my mind about some time ago…
On an earlier post, “Tim” changed the subject and brought up Trey Walker’s departure to become a lobbyist for USC:
Wasn’t one of [Gov. Haley’s] points in the State of the State to eliminate state employee lobbyists?
http://www.thestate.com/2011/09/02/1955609/haley-deputy-taking-usc-job.html
And that reminded me… Back when we I led the “Power Failure” project at The State in 1991, I was convinced that state agency lobbyists were a bad idea. And I described the badness of the idea in the same terms the libertarians use: It was wrong for the taxpayers to have to pay someone to lobby the Legislature to spend more tax money in their area. Of course, that was a gross oversimplification of what lobbyists do, but it seemed convincing at the time. In those days, I was occasionally guilty of thinking about issues not much more deeply than Nikki Haley does.
Speaking of which… most of the actual good ideas that Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley espouse — and they have advocated some good one — can be found in a reprint of the “Power Failure” project. In fact, in Sanford’s case, a lot of them seem to have come directly from just such a reprint that I sent him when he was first starting to run for governor. Then, for some time, I heard my own words out on the stump and then coming from the governor’s office (and some of you still wonder why I endorsed the guy in 2002).
Anyway, back to the topic…
Over time, I changed my mind about the state agency lobbyists. About lobbyists in general, but especially state agency ones. I changed my mind about a number of things after I moved from news to editorial. I thought I was a pretty thoughtful guy when I was in news. But after I had to write opinions every day that would be read by more than 100,000 people, people who would challenge every word, every concept, who would tear into any weakness in my thinking, I thought about things on a deeper level than I had before, taking more factors into consideration than I ever had before.
One of the factors was that, as I observed the Legislature more and more, I came to value more the input that only someone with intimate knowledge of an agency could offer to the legislative process. Let’s just say that the more I knew about our lawmakers, and the harder I looked into issues before taking a position, the less impressed I was with our solons’ understanding of what was going on. Having someone there who could say, “Here’s how this works” before they make a change affecting an agency is immensely valuable. And folks, it’s not always about spending. Often, it’s about whether the policies put into law help or hurt the agency’s ability to deliver its assigned service to the people of South Carolina.
Those guys over in the State House need all the relevant, well-informed input they can get. And if the lobbyists are any good, they are worth their salaries and then some.
Even Nikki Haley thinks so, since she said about Trey’s move, “He’s a talented, loyal and committed guy — and the University of South Carolina is lucky to have him.” Which I take to mean that she agrees with me that he’ll be worth his $135,000 salary there.
Once Trey gets on board, maybe when he makes his visits to the State House, he can drop by his former boss’s office and fill her in on what USC is all about, and how important it is to this state.
After receiving yet another of these from Michele Bachmann:
Dear Fellow Conservative,
It’s hard to believe that September is already upon us. As the summer comes to an end, I hope that you are able to spend and enjoy this long Labor Day weekend with your friends and family.
It has been just over 70 days since we announced our campaign for President, and the days have flown by. Although the seasons and months may be changing, one thing remains certain in the United States: Americans are tired of President Obama’s failed leadership and policies….
Below, I’ve included some informative articles about the past week, and some great ways for you to get involved with our campaign. After reading them, I hope that you will consider making a contribution of $25, $50, $100, or any amount up to the legal limit to help spread us our message of growth and prosperity in this busy time.
Sincerely,
Michele Bachmann
Well… at least she didn’t call me “Brad,” the way those grasping missives from the Democrats do. I wrote this note in response:
I seem to have ended up on the wrong email list. I’m a journalist, a 35-year newspaper veteran. I’m now covering the campaign for my own blog, bradwarthen.com. What I need to receive are press releases and media advisories. Yet somehow I’ve gotten on the fund-raiser mailing list.
I assure you, I will not be giving to this or any other campaign. I just need the info necessary to COVER the campaign. Anything you can do for me would be appreciated.
— Brad Warthen
I have no idea whether this note will do any good. It’s one of those “info@” addresses, and those are generally not read by humans, right? But one must try.
I think I got on this list by requesting via Twitter to be included in campaign communications. I need to be more specific in the future, I guess.
The other day, I was at the presser at which Jon Huntsman announced that Attorney General Alan Wilson was supporting him (which I still intend to write a post about, but haven’t had time to go back through all my notes), and at one point I happened to look around and think how very, very young most of the media people were.
When I stood in that same place two years ago representing The New York Post, in front of that same (I think) lectern, listening to Mark Sanford tell about his surprise vacation in Argentina, I didn’t think that. I saw mostly usual suspects I had known for years. (Although I did notice in photos of the gaggle later that I had the grayest hair in the bunch. It was one of those “Who’s that old guy? … oh!” moments.)
But the biggest difference between this group and the media mob scenes I experienced when I was as young as these kids were was that the TV crews are so much smaller. As I saw Ali Weinberg of NBC packing up her stuff after, I mentioned to her that back in the day, her network would have a four-person crew covering a presidential candidate: the talent, (at this point she started saying it along with me), the camera guy, the sound guy (and back then those two jobs usually were filled by guys), and the field producer. Now, it’s just her. And she’s in front of the camera, behind the camera, carrying the equipment, handling her own arrangements, Tweeting, and I don’t know what all.
Of course, it’s been this way for several years now. I remember Peter Hamby and others doing the same thing four years ago.
But seeing someone as petite as Ali getting ready to carry all that stuff kind of dramatized the situation. Yes, Ali agreed with me, all told it probably did weigh as much as she does. And no, she didn’t need any help.
Her affiliation reminds me of the NBC crew I kept running across in Iowa in 1980 when I was following Howard Baker, who was running in the caucuses that year. I rode with Jim and Flash (the sound and camera guys, respectively) through an ice storm in a four-seater plane between Des Moines and Dubuque. Just the two of them, the pilot and me. The pilot kept squirting alcohol on the outside of his windshield to make a clear space in the ice about the size of his hand to see through to fly. When we got out on the tarmac — which was covered in ice — I went to put my overcoat back on, and the wind caught it and I started gliding across the runway like a ship on the sea. (I only realized later — after the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac in 1982 — how dangerous that trip was.)
On another occasion, the producer of that crew — a pretty young woman who reminded me of the actress Paula Prentiss — overheard my photographer, Mark, and me discussing where we were going to stay the night and holding open our wallets to see what was left inside. She offered to put us up if we were in a bind. Producers had that kind of cash to throw around in those days. Like Ali today, we said no, thanks.
People who reach conclusions rapidly, intuitively — the way I do — may have confidence in their conclusions. Which I generally do, because when the conclusions are testable, I’m wrong seldom enough that my confidence is preserved. But I know this faculty is (like all decision-making processes) fallible, and there is a certain insecurity caused by the perceptions of others, particularly the concrete thinkers, the materialists, the folks who test as an S on the Myers Briggs scale, as opposed to my extreme N. The people who view holistic, Gestalten perception with utter contempt.
This habit of thought is extremely useful in arriving at opinions on complex, controversial issues in time to write about them on deadline. It’s why I was extremely adept at being an editorial page editor, if at nothing else (something that didn’t matter in the end, since it all came down to money). Not only for the purposes of writing opinions myself, but (much more to the point, since I was the editor) for guiding the board quickly to a conclusion. We’d be arguing, and then I would say something that paid due consideration to everyone’s seemingly disparate views, but which was coherent and followed logically and made all the people who had been arguing nod and say Yes, that’s our position.
It sounds like I’m bragging about how brilliant I am, but not really. (In fact, to doubters I’m confessing what an idiot I am.) Frankly, I suspect most people look at me and wonder whether I’m good at anything. Well, I am, and that’s the thing. The one thing that seems to impress people most when they witness it, and when they are disposed to be impressed. The rest of the time, I think they’re more inclined to wonder who let the incompetent doofus into the room.
Conveniently, it’s a talent that also occasionally comes in handy working as a Mad Man. Much of what we do at ADCO still bewilders me, but when it comes time to sum up a message that the client has been struggling to express, I am able to contribute.
This works great, when people are impressed — such as yesterday, when a client called some modest flicker of insight of mine “brilliant.” (Which it wasn’t — I later looked at it written and there was a glaring grammatical error in what I’d said. But fixable.)
It’s more of a problem when people don’t think I’m brilliant — in fact, quite the opposite — and challenge my conclusions. You know, the way Bud and Doug always do. With those guys, I get frustrated because most of my firm assertions cannot be supported by a mathematical proof that will satisfy them, so they conclude that I’m just making it all up or something. And they assert it with sufficient vehemence — being as confident in their conclusions as I am in mine — that sometimes, like a dust mote drifting into a gleaming clean room, a tiny bit of doubt surfaces in my own mind: If I’m so right, why can’t I prove it to everyone’s satisfaction? Which I knew I couldn’t do, even before meeting Bud and Doug. Anyone who thinks his beliefs are self-evident to all (however he arrives at them) will be quickly disabused by even a short stint as editorial page editor. (Yes, Virginia, before blogs and Twitter and email there was the telephone, and snail mail, and running into detractors at social occasions. All designed to take you down a notch.)
So, I find it reassuring to read something like this, in an article in Slate about the uncertainties entertained by identical twins about whether they are identical:
As science looked for more cost-effective ways to divine zygotic history, blood tests and other lab work gave way to surveys that combined objective measurements—height, weight, tone of voice, etc.—with questions about how the pairs were perceived. Were they confused for each other by teachers and friends? Parents? Strangers? But even that proved more in-depth than necessary. In a 1961 study by a Swedish scientist named Rune Cederlof, the whole exam hinged upon a single, probing question: “When growing up, were you and your twin ‘as like as two peas’ or of ordinary family likeness only?”
It turned out that whether twins thought they’d been “as like as two peas” could predict the results of every other available test with surprising accuracy. Cederlof found that the twins’ answers to this one item on the questionnaire matched overwhelmingly with five independent measures of blood type. After nearly 100 years, our finest scientists realized that discerning a man’s zygotic origin was about as easy as discerning whether he was ill by asking if he had a runny nose.
The examination of DNA, then, may be an entirely superfluous reassurance: like searching for witnesses to a murder when the act itself was caught on tape.
Yes! All right! Go, intuitive perception!
By the way, you may enjoy taking the quiz at the bottom of the first installment of that article. It will cause you to be skeptical about your own skepticism. (Oops. Maybe I should have said “spoiler alert” first…)
I continue to believe Twin B and Twin A are identical, despite their pronounced differences. Such as the contrasting ways they habitually pose for pictures (one makes faces; the other instinctively goes for glamour). Don't be fooled by the fact that one has shorter hair.
Occasionally, I have reason to open one of the many boxes containing the roomfuls of files I brought home from The State when I left (in my last two weeks, there was barely time to load it up, and practically no time to go through it, although I did throw out a few things), and sometimes I post one of the finds here.
Looks like cartoonist Bill Day, formerly of The Commercial Appeal, has been doing something similar. He sent me this picture today, taken in the mid-90s, with this commentary:
I thought you might enjoy this photo. This was at the Detroit Free Press. He was a great sport posing and loved talking about cartooning. His staff told me that he was looking forward to talking to me because he’s a big fan. About a month later I received a White House photo of him showing it to everyone in the Oval Office. He signed it: ”To Bill Day, Thanks for the laughs! Bill Clinton”
Bill’s the kind of cartoonist who would get a kick out of meeting Clinton. Robert Ariail is more of a Bush guy — although Robert had so much fun with Clinton when he was in office (Clinton was a large part of his inspiration both times Robert was a Pulitzer finalist, if I recall correctly) that he would have enjoyed meeting him, too — to thank him for providing so much fodder.
That reminds me of a picture I need to show you that involved Bush — and Tony Blair. I’ll try to track it down tonight or over the weekend.
One of the doughnuts Chris left me back when some of the King's loyal subjects still worked at newspapers.
This rubble used to be the Krispy Kreme Chris went to in Tuscaloosa. Took a direct hit...
When we worked together at The State, Chris Roberts used to bring me a jelly doughnut every Aug. 16 in honor of the King.
He’s not in a position to do that now — he’s in Alabama — but he did show he was thinking of me by sending this:
He went on to say that he would have tried to get a doughnut to me, but the local Krispy Kreme got knocked down by a tornado back in April.
So I sent him a picture of one.
Chris knows how special this day is to me, because I was one of the first people in the world to hear the awful news in 1977:
MY GOOD FRIEND Les Seago was the man who told the world that the King was dead. But before he told the world, he told me.
I’ve always appreciated that, even though it didn’t do me much practical good at the time.
On Aug. 16, 1977, Les was the chief Memphis correspondent for The Associated Press. I was the slot man on the copy desk of The Jackson Sun, which meant I had been at work since 5:30 a.m. By early afternoon, the paper was on its way to readers. I had also been a stringer for Les for years, and I was used to his calls to see what was going on in our area. But he didn’t have time for that this day.
Was it too late to get something in? he demanded. Well, yeah, it was, just barely, but why…?
It looks like Elvis is dead, he said, explaining quickly that he had a source, an ambulance driver from Baptist Hospital, who told him he had just brought Elvis in, and he was pretty sure that his passenger had been beyond help. Gotta go now, ‘bye.
He must have broken all speed records getting it confirmed, because I had just begun to tell my co-workers when the “bulletin” bell went off on the wire machine as it hammered out the news.
Les himself was found dead at his home two years ago [this column ran on this day in 2006], at age 61. Though his career had spanned many years and he had covered Martin Luther King’s assassination, The Associated Press identified him in his obituaryas the man “who filed the bulletin on the death of Elvis Presley.” His ex-wife Nancy said “He wasn’t wild about Elvis, but he was glad that he did break the story.” That was Les…
A packed house watches "Page One" at the Nickelodeon last night.
Last night, I went to see “Page One: Inside The New York Times” at the Nickelodeon. I had been asked to watch the movie, a 2010 documentary, and then stay to be a panelist for a discussion — along with Charles Bierbauer of USC and Dan Cook of the Free Times.
As I arrived, I felt a pang of guilt that yet again, I was making a public appearance and forgetting to tell you, my readers, in advance, in the remote chance you’d like to attend. But I needn’t have worried. The show was sold out. The audience included a lot of familiar faces, such as my old boss Tom McLean, who hired me at The State and was my predecessor as EPE, and the paper’s long-time attorney Jay Bender.
On the way in, I ran into Bill Rogers, head of the state Press Association. He said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to hear me, because the show was sold out. I told him they had given me two tickets, and my wife was at a book club meeting instead, so he could be my guest. When he sat next to me at the back of the theater (I couldn’t sit at the front because of my neck thing, for which I’m going to get another shot next to my spine today), I took advantage of his slightly owing me to make a pitch: Look Bill, I see that the Press Association is offering online, multi-publication ad packages, and advocacy-ad packages as well. Why not throw come blogs in? It might add some value for the buyer, and I need somebody to sell ads for me.
Shameless, huh? Well, that’s the state of news media in America today.
In fact, one of the most meaningful lines in the film, to me, was spoken by David Carr, who was essentially the star. He’s a great character. A former crack addict, he’s now a media columnist for the NYT — a brilliant reporter, and an awesome bark-off spokesman for why a dying industry matters. (Favorite momentThe movie wasn’t so much about the Times as it was about the horrific troubles of the MSM, using the media desk of the NYT as a window on that world.
Great Carr moment: He’s interviewing the founder of Vice, and said founder is going through the usual mantra about how the MSM don’t cover the real story, so you need the gutsy, edgy fringe guys to tell you what’s really going on and Carr interrupts:
Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.
Excuse the language, but one of the things this movie does is show the way people talk in newsrooms. And Carr was talking to a guy who pumped that up to the nth degree to show how hip and edgy he is, so Carr used his own terminology to put him in his place. By the way, here’s the story Carr wrote from that interview.
But that wasn’t his most meaningful line to me. That came when he had been researching an in-depth story about how the boorish Sam Zell had run the Chicago Tribune the rest of the way into the ground, and had done the obligatory interview with the Trib’s spokesman in which you say, Here’s what I’ve got; what’s your reaction? After the ritual comments about “hatchet job” and “I’ll get back to you,” Carr hangs up the phone. Sometime later, after communications from the Trib’s lawyers, he says,
The muscles of the institution are going to kick in at some point. It’s not up to me.
Exactly. And that’s one of the virtues of working in the MSM. There’s somebody to sell the ads, and you’re not even supposed to talk to them (usually, you don’t know them). There’s somebody else to worry about threats of legal action. You just worry about getting your story, and getting it right. And people who’ve never worked at such an institution — or even the somewhat smaller ones like it, across the country — have no idea how liberating and empowering that is.
Frequently, people ask me today whether I find I have greater freedom as a blogger than I did as editorial page editor of the state’s then-largest newspaper. That’s a really stupid question, although I don’t say that, because the asker has no way of knowing that.
Part of the stupidity of the question is based in the notion that when you work at a newspaper, “They tell you what to write.” I’m not entirely clear on who “they” are, but I suppose it’s the owners of the paper. I suppose, and I’ve heard, that when you work at a locally-owned paper where your masters are intricately tied into the community you cover, there are sacred cows, and positions you are told to take and others you are told not to take. But that doesn’t happen when you’re a part of a publicly-traded corporation. In all my years as editorial page editor, only once did anyone at corporate made even a suggestion about editorial content: Tony Ridder tried to make the case to Knight Ridder editorial page editors that the company’s papers should not endorse in presidential elections. His reasons for saying that appeared to be a) that we needed to concentrate on local issues; b) that what we said on our local levels about national politics didn’t matter; and c) that such endorsements only made about half of our readers furious at us. That last reason was, as I recall, more implied and stated; he really concentrated on reason a).
I thought that was a fine theory for a guy who lived and worked in California, but a pretty silly one for an editor in the home of the first-in-the-south primaries. For months before a primary, I had media from all over the country, and from abroad, contacting me to know what I, and we, thought about the candidates. I wasn’t going to tell our readers what we thought? How absurd. I ignored Tony’s suggestion. So did most of the other editors, to the best of my knowledge — I didn’t check, because I didn’t care what they did.
There’s another comment I used to get from people a lot, when I was at the paper. They used to commend me for my “courage” for taking a certain stand. That, too, was ridiculous. I got paid no matter what I wrote. I wasn’t taking any risk, beyond the inconvenience of maybe a source not talking to me any more. So I might as well take stands that mean something rather than write pap, right? I had that whole institution standing behind me, that warm blanket of security.
Here’s what I wrote a while back about the “liberating” effect of no longer working for the MSM:
The first casualty of unemployment is the truth.
OK, maybe not the first. First there’s the blow to one’s bank account. Then the loss of self-confidence. But truth is right up there. Especially for me. Until I was laid off in March, I was editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper. A colleague once said to me, accusingly, “You don’t think this is the opinion page. You think it’s the truth page.” I just looked at her blankly. Of course it was the truth page.
Readers expected me to tell everything I knew, and plenty that I only thought I knew – about South Carolina’s feckless politicians (Mark Sanford, Joe Wilson – need I say more?), or whatever struck me, without reservation. And I delivered.
My reputation survives my career. Recently, a friend warned me that people feel constrained in talking to me, because their confidences might turn up on my blog. After all, bloggers tell all, right? Ask Monica Lewinsky. Ask ACORN.
“HAH!” say I.
As a blogger who answers to no one, I am not nearly as frank and open as I was as a newspaper editor who thought he had a secure job.
I haven’t disclosed whom I have worked for on consulting gigs since leaving the paper, because my clients haven’t been crazy about the exposure. Every word I write, I think: Might this put off a prospective employer? And I know it has, despite my caution.
There are things I have not written – pithy, witty, dead-on observations on the passing parade, I assure you – because I think, “Do you have to write that and run the risk of offending this person who MIGHT point you to a job? Can’t you just write about something else?”
And where am I applying for jobs? Well, I’m not going to tell YOU, am I?
People used to praise me for my courage for taking on powerful people at the paper. But I was taking no risk whatsoever. As long as I was supported by advertising, a transaction I was ethically barred from even thinking about, I had impunity.
But an unaligned blogger still trying to function as a journalist stands naked and alone, and is not nearly as free and honest as he was writing from the once-impregnable citadel of an editorial page. At least, this one isn’t. Keep that in mind, citizen, as newspapers fall around you.
Watching that movie launched me on many different streams of thought; I could have talked about them all night. What I just told you describes part of my reaction to a single line. As Tom McLean said after one long-winded response I gave as a panelist, I always needed an editor.
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman’s (R) presidential campaign manager, Susie Wiles, is resigning and will be replaced by communications director Matt David, according to the campaign.
Huntsman is announcing the changes to his staff at a meeting this afternoon. Top adviser John Weaver confirmed the changes to The Fix.
“Susie has served the campaign well and was vital in getting it off the ground in such a short time-frame,” Weaver said in a statement provided by the campaign. “In just under three months, Governor Huntsman has returned from China, launched a campaign and created a strong infrastructure in the three early primary states. He’s built important relationships with donors, as well as political, policy and grassroots leaders that other candidates have been courting for half a decade.
High-level staff departures early in a presidential campaign are generally not seen as a good thing, but thus far, Wiles is the only known departure from Huntsman’s team. (Another staffer recently took a leavefor personal reasons.)
The campaign did not expound on the reason for Wiles’s departure. Weaver said the campaign is simply shifting gears…
The thing I’ve thought about is this: Who in the world would want to work on a political campaign?
OK, that’s not quite what I mean… I know lots of people who DO work on campaigns, and who do little else. So the answer to the “who” is easy. But I’ve always sort of wondered about them, and marveled at them.
They mystified me more back when I had a long-time steady job. I just could not imagine anyone deliberately taking a job with such little job security — back when I had been working for the same company for 24 years, with good pay and benefits, and intended to stay until retirement.
Now, I’ve had more experience with the ad hoc lifestyle, and it’s not as scary as I always figured it would be. I see how someone can get used to it. I still don’t see choosing it.
Even if you really, really believed in a candidate… even if that was the only candidate in the world you would work for, and you were willing to give up all the comforts of a steady job in order to help that person get elected… it still sort of befuddles me.
There are problems with the whole campaign-staff career, as I see it, both from the perspective of the staffer, and from the perspective of those of us who want a healthy republic:
Lousy job security, in the sense that the “firm” for which you work — the campaign — is an extremely volatile enterprise. It could become essential to the success of the enterprise (or perceived as essential, which amounts to the same thing) for you to be fired at any moment. And there will be little warning, if any. One day, you’re fine. Next day something erupts that makes in impossible for you to stay.
Even worse job security, in the sense that even if things go well and you don’t get fired, the job only lasts a few months. Yeah, you might get hired by the newly elected official if things go really well and he or she wins, but that’s dicey. That’s like counting on getting hired when your boss moves on to another company. Could happen. Might not. Just as likely, you’re going to be looking for another campaign to work on the day after Election Day.
Once or twice in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to work for a candidate you really, truly believe in (unless you’re pretty indiscriminate). And it won’t last long.
You will probably have to associate yourself, permanently, with one of the political parties. This wouldn’t be a drawback for a lot of people — obviously is not a drawback for the people who actual do this for a living — but it certainly would be for me (speaking as a guy who’s had occasion to think of it since leaving the newspaper biz). The kinds of people who do the hiring for campaigns may run across an independent who is really knowledgeable about issues and politics and messaging and the rest, and really believes in the candidate individually, but they are not likely to hire such a person because there’s a long line of loyal party people wanting the job.
Finally, the big drawback to society of all of the above… It’s bad enough that politicians have trouble leading normal lives. It would be great if they could have some people around them who DO live normal, workaday lives in the regular economy and therefore have a deep, personal, working understanding of regular voters and their concerns. But for the reasons I cited above, the fraternity of people likely to work on a campaign and be in the best position to advise the candidate tend to be rather insular. (By the way, the newspaper industry is the same way — ever since afternoon newspapers died, newspapermen and -women have tended to be people who all work weird hours and therefore mostly associate only with people like themselves. Which is not good, in terms of staying in close touch with the community.)
It would be great if some of you folks who do this for a living, or at least have taken time out from the rest of life to work for pay on a campaign, would weigh in and enlighten us on this. I know there are quite a few of you who read this blog.
The best historical marker in the world is on the Madison County courthouse square in Jackson, TN. It tells what Davy Crockett told a group of voters, standing in that spot, after being defeated for re-election to Congress:
You can go to hell, but I am going to Texas!
Today, we have a similar case in South Carolina. Eleanor Kitzman, head of the Budget and Control board and the most passionate, emotional defender of Gov. Nikki Haley I’ve run across yet, is leaving us to go work for Rick Perry:
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The director of the South Carolina agency that oversees much of state government operations has resigned, six months after Gov. Nikki Haley picked her for the job, to take a role in government in her home state of Texas.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office announced Wednesday that Eleanor Kitzman will start her job as that state’s insurance commissioner on Aug. 15. Her term there is set to expire in February 2013.
“I’m confident that Eleanor’s expertise in the insurance industry will make her a strong advocate for insurance customers in Texas,” Perry said in a release.
Kitzman, a 54-year-old Houston native, did not immediately return messages Wednesday evening.
A couple of years back… actually, to be precise, it ran on the very day before I got laid off from the paper (which really made the part where I reflected on a politician declaring the death of news media, um, interesting)… I wrote a column in which I blasted the very idea of Twitter:
… But so far I haven’t figured out what Twitter adds to modern life that we didn’t already have with e-mail and blogs and text-messaging and, well, the 24/7 TV “news.” Remember how I complained in a recent column about how disorienting and unhelpful I find Facebook to be? Well, this was worse. I felt like I was trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack topped with Pop Rocks, stirred with a Slim Jim…
Then, a few months later, Tim Kelly persuaded me that I could promote my blog using Twitter. So I tried it. And I got hooked on the form, sort of a cross between headline writing and haiku. And Tim was prophetic. My blog gets 3 or 4 times the traffic that my old blog did when I was at the paper — something close to 200,000 page views a month, and sometimes well over that.
The former editorial page editor of The State tweets a lot and has 1,200 followers. He’s often re-tweeted, tweeted at, and he becomes involved in Twitter debates. Sometimes he’ll even play mediator in said debates.
In any case, it’s obvious that while Warthen has been out of the newspaper game for a few years now he still has some pull at the paper. On May 31, he tweeted, “What in the world are these UFO-looking things all along I-26?” Days later, The State ran a story answering this life-altering question under this headline: “What Are Those Green Things?” — Corey Hutchins
So, you just never know what’s going to happen, do you?
