Category Archives: Working

I, too, demand that the Senate vote on… Dang, they already did…

Dang it! Like the president, I, too meant to demand that the Senate vote on extending job benefits — knowing, as did the president, that they were going to — so that when they did, I could revel in my power.

But they went ahead and did it before I could set out my ultimatum. I was gonna do it in no uncertain terms, too.

But now I just look foolish. That’s OK, I’ve had lots of practice.

Hey, the president looked pretty silly, too, with his faux partisan showdown talk. From this morning’s AP story:

WASHINGTON – With a new face and a 60th vote for breaking a Republican filibuster, Senate Democrats are preparing to restore jobless checks for 2.5 million people whose benefits ran out during a congressional standoff over deficit spending.

But first, President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are pressing for maximum political advantage, blaming Republicans for an impasse that halted unemployment checks averaging $309 a week for those whose eligibility had expired.

Obama launched a fresh salvo yesterday, demanding that the Senate act on the legislation – after a vote already had been scheduled for today – and blasting Republicans for the holdup.

“The same people who didn’t have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle-class Americans,” Obama said….

Hey, I agree with President Obama on this. We needed to extend those benefits. But that partisan showboating was beneath him — and ridiculous, given that it was so transparently unnecessary.

Cindi’s column on Lost Trust, 20 years on

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I missed Cindi Scoppe’s column over the weekend reminiscing about Lost Trust (which broke 20 years ago Sunday) until a reader mentioned Cindi’s “shout-out” to me:

If anything happened in the next year that wasn’t related to the sting, I can’t remember it. While I dissected the ethics proposals, my editor Brad Warthen led the newsroom on a yearlong examination of how the Legislative State produced not only corruption but a hapless government that answered to no one — laying the groundwork for one of the primary focuses of our later work on this editorial board.

Pushed along by Lost Trust, Gov. Carroll Campbell and Brad’s “Power Failure” series, the Legislature voted two years later to hand a third of the government over to the governor. Lawmakers unleashed the powerful State Grand Jury to investigate political corruption cases. They passed a reporter shield law after a judge ordered me and three other reporters held in federal custody for two days for refusing to testify in a corruption trial.

It was interesting to read Cindi’s memory of that from her perspective. I had forgotten a lot of the intrigue that my reporters — particularly Cindi — had to go through to find out what was going on. But then, I was mostly experiencing it second-hand, being the desk man that I was. Cindi and the others would come in with this stuff they had garnered in encounters reminiscent of Bob Woodward’s meetings with Deep Throat in the parking garage, and we’d figure out which outrageous items were worth pursuing to try to confirm immediately and which ones to set aside. And then, how in the world to nail down the relevant ones.

For me, at the epicenter of The State‘s coverage, it was a time for keeping a couple of dozen plates spinning, and was a daily challenge to an editor managing finite resources in the midst of stories that seemed to have an infinite number of branches, each one of which was a hot story in itself.

Mind you, Lost Trust wasn’t the only government scandal breaking that summer. We had the final act of the Jim Holderman collapse, a purchasing scandal involving a major agency (I don’t even remember which one now), the head of the Highway Patrol directly personally interfering with the DUI of the head of the local FBI office, and those are just the things that I remember sitting here. There was more. Fortunately, the governmental affairs staff in those days amounted to something (I may have been slightly down from my 1988 high of 10 reporters, but not by much), but there’s only so much that even that many people can do when so much is popping at the same time — and during the time of year when things are usually quiet.

And Lost Trust itself, alone, without those other scandals, would have totally consumed us days, nights and weekends. A full 10 percent of the Legislature indicted? Heady stuff.

We were well out ahead of the competition most days, and I felt proud of my team — Cindi and the others. Then the executive editor, who was new in the job (Gil Thelen), one busy day stopped by my desk to say it was all very well and good that we were staying ahead of the story and beating everybody on it, but what about the future? What, out of all this mess, might we be able to offer readers to give them the sense that something could be done about the dysfunction of SC government? I probably stared at him like he was a lunatic for wanting me to think about anything ELSE on top of the mad juggling I was doing at the moment, but I did think about it. And the result was the Power Failure series. I spent a year on it, supervising reporters from across the newsroom in producing a 17-installment opus that explained just how SC government was designed to fail.

And as Cindi notes, the themes developed at that time resonated through my work, and hers, for my entire 15 years on the editorial board.

Getting Sirius about Alvin Greene

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OK, it wasn’t such a surprise when NPR wanted to talk with me about SC politics. But this request took me aback a bit:

Hi Brad,
This is Dan Pashman, I produce Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer on the Martha Stewart channel on Sirius. It’s a general interest talk show, and we’d like to invite you on to talk about Alvin Greene. I’m sure you’re very familiar with his story, but the intrigue surrounding it is just starting to break through on the national level, and we’d love to get the local perspective. How did he win the primary? Is this some kind of joke? Is he really as unlikely a candidate as it seems? What are folks in the state saying about him? And are you sure this isn’t some kind of joke? We’d like to do this today at 6 pm eastern, you could do it from a land line phone and it would take about 15 minutes. The show is lighthearted and fun, we do some politics and the hosts are curious about Greene, but it’s definitely not wonky. The hosts also talk a lot about dating and celebrities, etc, so we cover a lot of ground and this interview can definitely have a fun element to it. Please let me know if you’re available.

Thanks,
Dan

Anyway, I’ll be on tomorrow (we moved it back a day) at 6, if you can listen. I can’t not having satellite radio.

By the way, Dan wrote me later to ask if I could answer his questions above so that he could prep the stars of the show. Here’s how I replied:

How did he win the primary?

No one knows. These were all factors in what happened, though:

— No one was paying attention to that race because whoever it was was expected to be a sacrificial lamb and lose to DeMint in the fall.

— The candidate expected to win, Vic Rawl, didn’t campaign all that much. He thought he had it in the bag. And indeed, if you had asked me who was going to win that, I would have said, “Vic Rawl.” Not that I cared. I assumed that Vic Rawl would be the guy to lose to DeMint in the fall, that that was that. (I’ll tell you, I did not vote on that race. I saw Rawl’s name there, and recognized it, but decided I didn’t know enough about him to vote for him — of course, I’m used to knowing more about candidates than most people, and in this case, I hadn’t even met the guy.)

— Alvin Greene’s name came first on the ballot. Never underestimate the power of that in the absence of name recognition.

— “Greene” is considered to be a “black” spelling of the name. So it’s assumed that lots of black voters, not knowing either of these guys, chose him because he sounded like the black guy.

— Bottom line, his winning makes all the sense in the world to Alvin — he ran, right? so why wouldn’t people have voted for him? — and totally blows the minds of everybody else.

Is this some kind of joke?

Not to Alvin Greene. He’s serious as a crutch.

Is he really as unlikely a candidate as it seems?

Yes.

What are folks in the state saying about him?

Democrats are saying as little as possible. Republicans are saying “Greene-Sheheen,” loudly and often. Vincent Sheheen is the Democratic nominee for governor.

And are you sure this isn’t some kind of joke?

Yep. To folks outside the state, and to Republicans inside it, it IS a joke. But not to other South Carolinians. We’ve had enough embarrassment.

Greene media juggernaut cranks up (snicker!)

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Two things to share…

First, this photo, which may or may not be legitimate; I have no idea. It was brought to my attention by Scott English, Mark Sanford’s chief of staff, via Twitter. He got it from the Washington Examiner. PhotoShop or reality? Either way, it’s a primo example of the current rage in political comedy, the item that allows us all to sneer at Alvin Greene. (Speaking of PhotoShop: I not only cropped the picture before posting it here; I also lightened it up and increased the contrast. We have standards here at bradwarthen.com.) The knee-slapping cutline that came with the picture:

This sign is from US 521, near Greene’s hometown, and hotbed of support, in Manning, SC. No signs for Republican Sen. Jim DeMint were spotted anywhere near the area, suggesting that Greene has opened an imposing lead in the early-advertising race.

Yuk, yuk, chortle, snort.

Which brings me to my second point: At what point does mocking Alvin Greene simply becoming mocking a man for being poor, black and unemployed and from a small town in South Carolina? At what point do the Republicans who are LOVING this, or the mortified Democrats who hide their faces in shame that THIS is their nominee, or smart-ass bloggers who post satirical photos (real or fake; irresponsible bloggers just don’t care, do they?) get called on the carpet for the so-far socially acceptable practice of running down Alvin Greene?

Food for thought, there…

“It’s not a joke,” says Greene of his “GI Alvin” plan

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Lest you be dismissive of the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, first check out his plan for bringing jobs back to South Carolina, as reported by The Guardian (which, last time I checked, was not part of the SC MSM that should be covering this election):

“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That’s something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It’s not something a typical person would bring up. That’s something that could happen, that makes sense. It’s not a joke.”

No, I’m not making this up. It’s not a joke. A new twist on GI Joe. That’s his plan. You know, as a guy who was unemployed for a really long time, I’m resenting the picture he’s presenting to the world of guys like us. And for the record, I have NOT shown any dirty pictures to co-eds.

But as a Mad Man, I think I smell a tagline in the making. He could build his whole campaign around it: “It’s not a joke!”

And you know what, it isn’t. Not a funny one, anyway.

Backup tagline: “It’s not something a typical person would bring up.”

And as I could tell the client in all honesty, there are plenty more where those two came from…

Blast from the newspaper past

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Bob Ford shared this old newspaper page with me over the weekend. How old? So old that it’s from before I even worked at any newspaper, much less The State. My career starting in 1974 as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal. But this is from Nov. 3 1972 — the Friday before I voted for the first time.

And yet — there are several people pictured here whom I would later work with, or at least come to know in the community after I arrived at The State in 1987 — Levona Page, Kent Krell, Margaret O’Shea and others. In fact, when I became governmental affairs editor in ’87, one of them was still on the beat and working for me: that hepcat Lee Bandy (dig the hair!).

This ad boasts of the resources devoted to covering politics, and indeed, back then newspapers had reporters spilling out the windows, and newshole to burn. It was still that way when I started covering politics myself in ’78. But then the long decline began, and finally newspaper finances went over the cliff this past decade.

One might also reflect on how different the SC political scene was in those days. First of all, there were no Republicans, except Strom Thurmond and Floyd Spence. So the Democratic primary was usually the election. Then there was the fact that the color barrier had just been broken in the Legislature, with a handful of black House members (but none in the Senate yet). This was two whole years before the legendary Pug Ravenel campaign, which idealistic then-young Democrats speak of today as though it occurred in the misty time of Camelot, or of King Elendil who wielded the sword Narsil before it was broken.

Anyway, I thought some of y’all would enjoy looking at it, too.

Cameras in Supreme Court? That worries me

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When I was a reporter, I used to wear an old Navy leather flight jacket of my Dad’s that was a little roomy on me (I’m a 40, it’s a 42), which was convenient. It had a map pocket on the inside, where I kept my notebook. And I slung my old Nikkormat SLR on my shoulder under the jacket. I could quickly swing it forward and use it, without removing the jacket.

This arrangement allowed me to hold back from displaying the notebook or the camera until needed.

As a journalist, I’ve always been of the fly-on-the-wall school. I didn’t like to interact with the subject until it was unavoidable. I wanted to see what was really going on first. If I could keep the people in the room from noticing that a reporter was present — or at least from being entirely sure about it — all the better. It minimized the Observer Effect, wherein observer and observed interact through the process of observation.

I wanted them to be honest. I didn’t want them holding back or grandstanding for me.

I didn’t misrepresent myself. At some point, I would need to step forward and ask someone a question, and of course I identified myself. But the longer I could observe the meeting, or event, or whatever, in its unspoiled state, the better. Or so I believed, and still do. So I avoided taking the notebook out until the last possible moment.

Of course, most of the time the main participants — the newsmakers, the people I’d be quoting — knew who I was. But even in a situation in which you know the subject knows who you are and what you’re there for, the moment when you take out the notebook changes everything. Most journalists can tell you of the tension of chatting with a source who’s being very natural and open and giving you stuff that’s truly golden, and you want to pull out the notebook so you can get it down — but you don’t want to break the spell.

And cameras have their own unique effect. Especially TV cameras. A lot of “news” is staged completely for television cameras rather than occurring spontaneously. Wherever there’s a video camera, frankness and candid expression are diminished, and an element of the pervasive falsity that characterizes “reality” TV creeps in.

So the journalist with a camera (or a notebook) is faced with a Catch-22 sort of situation. We want the things we cover to be open and transparent — to be fully available to us so we can inform our readers. And yet by pulling out the notebook or camera, by displaying the implements of coverage so that we can get it down accurately, we alter the thing. And TV adds another dimension. When a TV camera is trained upon a subject, he begins to act, to some degree. (The difference between being on TV and being on radio is very marked, at least for me when I’m the subject. Radio is pure expression. Put me on radio and I can just flow, and am not distracted by looking at the person I’m talking to, or anything else. But on TV you’re conscious of being watched, and everything changes.)

In our desire to break down barriers between the people at their government, we’ve opened most proceedings to the public — which means opening them to us, and our notebooks and cameras, and eventually TV cameras. And mostly, that’s all to the good — although it really creeps me out when I watch a video of a member of Congress delivering an impassioned speech… to an empty chamber. Talk about phony. Of course, in Congress there’s not much honest debate anymore. Just vote counting. The Democrats have this many, and the Republicans have that many? Then the bill will pass. Who needs speeches? Who needs listening to each other? It’s tragic.

But courtrooms… courtrooms are the final frontier, and they should be. When I covered trials back in the day, I knew I couldn’t bring the camera out until I left the courtroom. Once, I thought I had a good deal with the judge, who had told me (when I was covering a particularly sensational murder case) that I could take pictures of the main participants during recesses. But I nearly got thrown into jail for contempt when I whipped out the camera immediately after the guilty verdict to get the reaction of the accused. Hey, the gavel had come down, so we were adjourned, right? Didn’t matter; the judge didn’t approve, and jumped down my throat.

But I respected that. While I was trying to do my job, the judge was doing his, trying to maintain decorum (not to mention a little respect for human dignity, something reporters sometimes forget when they’re in the throes of getting a story). And Lord knows, if we can’t have some of that in our courts of law, then we really have gone to the dogs.

What ill could come from cameras in the courtroom? Look no further than the O.J. Simpson trial, in which everyone from the high-priced defense lawyers to the judge himself were playing to the cameras, and the result was a travesty, a theater of sensationalism rather than a place for rational discernment.

So it is that I read with some reservation that Elena Kagan thinks cameras in our most hallowed court would be “a terrific thing:”

The Elena Kagan confirmation hearings continue today with hard questions from lawmakers, about her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to briefly bar military recruiters from the school’s career services office because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and about her White House years.

But The Federal Eye’s ears (!!) perked up when Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) asked about allowing television cameras into the high court:

“I recognize that some members of the court have a different view, and certainly when and if I get to the court I will talk with them about that questions, but I have said that I think it would be a terrific thing to have cameras in the courtroom,” Kagan said at C-SPAN cameras rolled (see above). “And the reason I think, is when you see what happens there, it’s an inspiring sight. … I basically attend every Supreme Court argument. … It’s an incredible sight, because all nine justices, they’re so prepared, they’re so smart, they’re so thorough, they’re so engaged, the questioning is rapid fire. You’re really seeing an institution of government at work really in an admirable way.”

“The issues are important ones … I mean, some of them will put you to sleep,” she said later to laughs. “But a lot of them, the American people should be concerned about and interested in.”

If she gets confirmed, Kagan is certainly in the minority on this issue. But still, hear, hear.

Yes, it’s an inspiring sight — if it isn’t changed by the cameras.

I’m a journalist. I’m about openness. I’m about there being no barriers between the people and the functions of their government. But the different branches have different roles, and are accountable to the people in different ways. And when we talk about something that could interfere with the effective functioning by causing Supreme Court justices to act like … well, like members of the political branches … it gives me pause.

Next thing you know, they’ll be rapping their opening statements.

‘The new iPhone’s here! The new iPhone’s here!’

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In the 20th century, it was Navin Johnson and the new phonebook. (Phonebook! How utterly primitive!)

Today, it’s whatever the latest gadget Steve Jobs happens to be pushing.

If you check out the blog I help ADCO maintain (and yes, there will be more posts once the new Web site is launched), you’ll see a picture of my colleague Lora Prill using her old iPhone to take a picture of her new iPhone. Really. You can’t make this up.

And she is far from alone.

Personally, I think the grapes are sour, because my whole family is on Verizon, so unless I want every personal phone call counting against my minutes or whatever, I’m stuck with my Blackberry.

iPhones are cool, I’ll admit. But get a grip, people…

Today begins the great Convergence!

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Folks getting ready for ConvergeSE at ADCO last night. You'll note that I am, indeed, the only one around here who dresses like a Mad Man./Brad Warthen

No, I am not the Keymaster, and I am not awaiting the Gatekeeper. This convergence is a little less cosmic, but only a little.

I mentioned yesterday that I’m working at ADCO. Well, today things are fairly quiet here because the ADCO Interactive folks are over at ETV hosting a series of extremely advanced workshops in Web development and convergence and other mysterious new media stuff. These confabs are being conducted by some of the leading kahunas on the forefront of new media.

I’d be over there, except Gene Crawford (the jefe of ADCO Interactive) told me it would all be over my head. I am, however, allowed to attend the speeches that will be given tomorrow over at the Swearingen Center. Supposedly, they’ll talk down enough to me for me, a mere blogger, to follow.

If you want to know more about this event, check out the Web site. Or if that’s too inconvenient, here’s an excerpt from the press release:

ConvergeSE 2010 is intended for Web designers and developers, business executives, marketing professionals, content creators and students. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or a newcomer to the Web, you’re sure to discover something that will spark your creativity and get you motivated.

The conference, a southeastwide expansion of last year’s successful ConvergeSC, will feature such speakers as Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Robert Tolar Haining of Condé Nast Digital, Aarron Walter of MailChimp and Brandon Eley of brandoneley.com.

The conference “will take you from front-end design to the development technologies used to build websites and web apps, then also help you learn strategies to sell your services or application as well as build community around it,” says organizer Gene Crawford of unmatchedstyle.com and period-three.com. “It’s that well rounded, multi-disciplinary approach to Converge that makes it a little unique I think. We give each speaker 30 minutes to get their point across and then it’s off to another topic, fast and furious.”

Who should attend ConvergeSE 2010? “Anyone who works with the web or on the web,” said Crawford. Which today means pretty much anybody.

When and Where is it?
Friday, June 25, 8 am-5 pm, Workshop Day
ETV
1041 George Rogers Boulevard

Saturday, June 25, 8 am-5pm, Conference Day
University of south Carolina
Amoco Hall
Swearingen Engineering Center
301 Main Street

Yes, I DO have a job, thank you very much

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Where does Superman go when he’s not saving Lois and Jimmy? Well, sometimes he’s hammering out a story for Perry White in order to uphold his cover. Sure, he can write at super-speed, but not when others in the newsroom are watching. And sometimes they must see him being Clark Kent to believe in that identity.

So it is with me. I can’t blog ALL the time, and sometimes I’m actually working for a living.

“What? You? Work!?!?” you say, your voice rising in pitch on that last word, as did Maynard G. Krebs’.

Yes, indeed, and you shouldn’t be so shocked. I have been known to do work frequently. I even used to do it when I was with the newspaper, even though I was “in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working,” as Jake Barnes so rightly noted.

What am I doing now? Well, I’m in the ad game. I’ve joined ADCO, a full-service advertising and marketing firm here in Columbia. I’ve been ADCO’s director of communications/public relations for quite some time now. I joined in mid-February.

So why haven’t I mentioned it before? Well, it’s not like I’ve made a secret of it. I’ve announced it in some public forums, such as when I’m speaking to civic groups (they gave me a big hand at Rotary when I told them, probably because they were thinking, “Never thought he’d get a job.”). But mostly I haven’t done it because ADCO is undergoing a lot of very exciting changes (see how I’m learning the flack lingo?), and I sort of wanted to wait until all the pieces were in place. There are three big things happening with ADCO as I type this:

This year is our 20th anniversary, since Lanier Jones and Brian Murrell started the company in 1990.
Over the last couple of months we’ve been putting together a new (very exciting!) venture with Periodthree, a Web design and development firm. Gene Crawford and his gang have physically moved into the building with us here at 1220 Pickens, and will henceforth be known as ADCO Interactive. This greatly expands what ADCO can do on the Web.
The addition of Yours Truly. This, of course, is a big thrill for everyone, especially the aforementioned Mr. Truly. What will I be doing? Oh, this and that. Business development, for one. Writing stuff (such as some of the copy for the new Web site). Marketing consulting (which is remarkably like what I did at the newspaper — you’d be surprised; it’s all about shaping message). But the very coolest thing, as far as y’all are concerned, is that Lanier and Brian and Lora and the gang very much encourage me to continue doing the blog. Not many jobs I looked at over the past year would have encouraged that. In fact, most potential employers shuddered at the thought, which makes ADCO rather special.

The Period Three — that is to say, ADCO Interactive — team has been working on a new Web site that will incorporate all of these changes. For instance, if you go look at the old site, you won’t find me or any of the new Interactive folks. The new one goes live in a couple of weeks. So I haven’t wanted to refer you to it until all that was ready.

Also, if I told y’all I had a job, I’d have to go rewrite my lede on my “About” page, and I haven’t thought of anything I like as much as “Brad Warthen is an unemployed newspaperman, until he finds something else to be.” It’s way existential. I think it ranks up there with “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Or “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” You get the idea.

Call me Ishmael.

But what the hey; I’ll worry about that later. I thought I’d go ahead and scoop the new ADCO Web site, if only by a bit.

By the way, to address what I’m sure you’re wondering about, this is just like “Mad Men.” Except that as I type this in my office, I’m drinking a Samuel Adams Summer Ale rather than a martini (I am not making this up — Gene and the gang are celebrating the fact that ConvergeSE happens tomorrow, and I “just happened” to step out of my office just as they were opening a few bottles in the corridor). And I’m the only one who dresses like it’s 1962. In fact, one of the Web gurus here for ConvergeSE just said “nice tie” to me in the hall — and it’s really not one of my nicer ties (hey, I know when these hepcats are being ironic; I’m way perceptive). And if you ask one of the young women in the office to fetch coffee, she just doesn’t hop to it the way they do for Don Draper. I figure I’m not saying it with the right tone or something.

But other than all that, it’s just like “Mad Men.” And I’m really getting into it.

Oh, ‘whine, bitch, moan…’ just write us a letter, why don’tcha…

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Hey, since I am no longer with the MSM, I don’t have to listen to your whining, bitching and moaning about us.

So it is that I don’t have to be diplomatic, and can now answer your feeble complaints with the full disdain that characterizes the finest traditions of the MSM.

Such as when our valued friend Kathryn brought our attention (see how easily I slip back into the royal, editorial first-person plural?) to this article, headlined “Journalism monopoly was also a market failure,” and particularly this passage:

“If your neighborhood or community or issue didn’t interest the newspaper, it might as well have been banned from the community agenda. And if you had something to say, and wanted the community to hear or read it, your options were to pray you could get a letter to the editor published, or an even-rarer Op-Ed piece, or put out fliers around town. “

Added Kathryn, who passionately cares about Columbia and is always getting involved up to her elbows in the nitty-gritty of community issues, “I found this to be true, far too often…”

Oh, yeah? Well, now hear this:

I’m sorry, but we in the MSM are too busy to care about your esoteric, narrow personal concern. If you’d like to hire a consultant who can write us a press release about it, sexing it up with great quotes and some cool graphics, and maybe work in Gamecocks football, we may put it in the queue. But keep it simple — left-right, liberal-conservative, whatever. Don’t confuse us with gradations of meaning. Stuff like that makes our heads spin like that girl in “The Exorcist” — yeah, the one who threw up the green pea soup.

Meanwhile, write us a letter. But keep it short. And include your full address and a daytime telephone number, a photocopy of a picture ID, at least, three references, and annotated supporting material to back up your assertions. And pick a number between one and 1,000, and we’ll let you know whether your number wins. If it doesn’t, we will grind your epistle up with the other 999 and turn it into compost, so that it will be useful to us.

We’re making one heck of an international impression

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It’s just not the sort a sane person would want to make.

As I was getting out of a vehicle to walk to the State House right after lunch today, I got a call on the Blackberry from Paris. Caller ID said the number was … well, there were 11 digits. To summarize the phone call, I quote from the e-mail I found when I got back to the office:

Good Morning M. Warthen,

I am a french journalist, working for a french national private media
called Radio Classique.
I am working today on a story about Alvin Greene and the democrat
candidacy.
It would be very interesting for me to talk to you about that and may be
doing a short interview by phone.
Is it possible ?
It would be great.
May be within two hours or tomorrow morning your time ?

It would be great and very interesting.

thank you very much.

Best regards.

Marc Tedde
Radio Classique

I asked if he also wanted to talk about all the Nikki Haley stuff. He didn’t know about any of that. Just as well.

Just what South Carolina needs.

Anyway, we’re going to do the interview tomorrow morning — afternoon, his time, morning our time. I’m going to let him call me again, rather than vice versa, I assure you.

Tech system funding, by the numbers

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A little more perspective on the governor’s three vetoes of Technical College operational funding, courtesy of Midlands Tech President Sonny White, who spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club this afternoon. (He only mentioned the vetoes in passing; I got the rest from him in an interview afterward.)

When the Technical College system was founded at the behest of Gov. Fritz Hollings (who got the Legislature to go along by buying Sen. Edgar Brown a bottle of bourbon and helping him drink it, which shows that in an altered state of consciousness at least, our lawmakers can be forward looking), the system was paid for thusly:

70 percent of funding came from the state
10 percent came from the counties served by the 16 schools — this went to physical plant and other local operating costs
10 percent came from students — which made sense, since this was about providing a bright future to folks who did not already have good income
10 percent came from auxiliary services such as bookstores and the like

In the 2011 fiscal year, the breakdown will be:

70 percent will come from students — some of it from Pell Grants and lottery-funded scholarships, but it will still be up to the students to find the way to come up with it
10 percent from the state — which is just so many different kinds of pitiful that it defies words
10 percent from counties — Sonny expressed his appreciation that counties have at least kept their part of the bargain over the years.
10 percent from auxiliary services.

Oh, and by the way, the technical system has seen a 20 percent increase in enrollment during this period in which unemployment has hovered around 12 percent.

So now you know.

“Where Have All the Reporters Gone?” Duh…

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Doug T., back on this thread, kindly brings our attention to a piece by Walter Shapiro on Politics Daily headlined “Nikki Haley and Rand Paul Races: Where Have All the Reporters Gone?” An excerpt:

On the cusp of her historic landslide victory in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, Nikki Haley swooped into Hartsville last Saturday afternoon. More than 100 Tea Party activists waited in the scorching heat for the Indian-American state legislator, who had fought off two public but totally unproven accusations of adulteryand survived a Republican state senator castigating her as a “raghead.”

It was the perfect political scene to cap the weekend’s campaign coverage less than 72 hours before the state’s most raucous, riveting and, at times, repugnant gubernatorial primary in decades. Hartsville (population: 7,465) may be a small town in the Pee Dee region, but it is just 70 miles northeast of the state capital (and media center) in Columbia. But still there was one thing missing from the picturesque scene — any South Carolina newspaper, wire service, TV or radio reporters.

What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul’s decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.

Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina’s largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found that newsroom staffs across the country have declined by 25 percent since 2001.

Actually, those numbers underestimate the problem. At the start of the decade I had essentially 8 full-time people in the editorial department (actually 7, but I had a part-timer whom I could work full-time in a pinch without getting into trouble with the bean-counters). There are now two full-timers, folded into the newsroom. As for the newsroom — a separate department on a separate floor reporting separately to the publisher (although that separation exists no longer) — I cannot speak with any accuracy. But it’s easily more than 25 percent.

And near as I can tell, that’s pretty typical of the business. The people left are busting their humps, but can only do so much. So it is when the business model underwriting an industry evaporates.

And we see the effects daily. Our democracy is suffering from a lack of anyone to play the Fourth Estate’s traditional role. Yeah, you can get interesting stuff here and there from enterprising independents who go were the MSM reporters ain’t (which isn’t hard). But you don’t get wall-to-wall coverage, you don’t get “newspaper of record” coverage that lets you in on the totality of what’s going on.

I should add that when Shapiro writes of the “slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism,” it’s actually been much slower, much more gradual, than he describes.

When I was a reporter (oh, jeez, here we go; the old guy’s gonna tell us again how much better it was in the olden days), we actually had something that you could call “statewide campaign journalism.” I cut my teeth on state politics in 1978 in Tennessee covering the gubernatorial contest between Lamar Alexander and Jake Butcher. I was working at The Jackson Sun, a 37,000-circulation p.m. daily. For the last month of that general election, we had somebody with each of those candidates all day every day, traveling with them across the state, riding on the campaign plane and in the cars with them (and reimbursing the campaign on a pro rata basis). We went everywhere with them; we shared their meals. The only breaks they got from us was when they were sleeping, and we probably would have watched them then, too, but we had to write sometime. A typical workday ran about 20 hours. Your metabolism adjusted. Then, of course, we’d call in new ledes for our stories on the run. No cell phones, of course — you’d go to a phone booth, call the city desk and dictate the new lede — based on the latest thing the candidate had said or done — off the tops of our heads. (This, of course, required skills now extinct.)

This was an unusual level of coverage, even then, for a paper that small (how small? Think Florence Morning News). I remember a reporter from the Tennessean once saying — condescendingly, but I think he was trying to be nice — that the Sun was the “little paper that did things in a big way.” But it was fairly typical for the big paper out of Nashville and Memphis.

By the time I arrived at The State in 1987 the standard of coverage across the country had diminished considerably. But still, we had the horses to cover most of major candidates’ important appearances. We didn’t get them with their hair down as much as we had a decade earlier, but the coverage was still pretty good. And if we ran short of political reporters, we had a deep bench. For instance, in 1988 I pulled Jeff Miller in from the Newberry bureau to be the lead day-to-day reporter for the GOP presidential primary, so that the State House reporters didn’t have to take their eyes off the State House. Today, there is no Newberry bureau — and no Camden, Sumter, Florence, Orangeburg or Beaufort bureaus either. The last of them closed in the early 90s.

Nowadays, reporters will catch a big campaign event if it’s in town, or if it’s big enough run to Greenville or Charleston for a high-stakes debate. But sticking to a candidate one-on-one throughout the campaign? No way. In fact, some of today’s few remaining reporters weren’t even alive back when we did that.

But yeah, the big cuts have happened in the past decade. Things started out bad for the industry in the first six years (killing off Knight Ridder, which used to own The State), then got dramatically worse starting in the summer of 2006, with the bottom falling out of what was left in September 2008.

So no, you shouldn’t be surprised if the South Carolina MSM is missing from a campaign rally in Florence. Or from the Alvin Greene story. Or from comprehensive coverage of the battle over the state budget. This is the way things are now. The army’s largely been disbanded, forcing a lot of us to go guerrilla. You’ll get coverage, and sometimes it will be inspired and even in-depth, but it will be spotty.

Where was The State on Alvin Greene TODAY?

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As I’ve been saying to anyone who asks, the nomination of Alvin Greene is a failure with enough blame to go around to everyone. The voters, of course (as politically incorrect, as anti-democratic, as it is to blame the precious voter). The Democratic Party. And definitely the media — both MSM and the vaunted, tell-you-everything (according to the hype) blogosphere. Apparently, bloggers were too busy telling you who they’d slept with to check out who the hell this guy was. (And yes, I include myself — not on the kiss-and-tell part, but on the not-checking-out-Alvin part.)

As for the MSM — well, it’s awfully easy to beat up on them on this. And they deserve it. That is NOT to blame the reporters and editors who are busting their butts trying to get the job done with grossly inadequate resources. It’s to blame the media as institutions that have failed as businesses to stay viable enough to do their jobs properly. Sound self-interested, since the failure of newspapers is why I don’t have a job with them any more? Well, yeah. But as a former newspaper exec, and an editor for three decades, I know whereof I speak.

True, newspapers have long ignored noncandidates. And they have long ignored, to a lesser extent, primary races to nominate a sacrificial lamb to go up against an invulnerable incumbent. Not because that was the right thing to do, but because when you’re covering scores of races, you have to set priorities, and the hotly contested ones get most of the ink.

But that traditional bias against the boring has been exponentially exacerbated by the emptying of newsrooms via the layoffs of recent years. Now, it’s not a choice; some important races simply are not going to be covered.

This year, you pretty much had to be in the governor’s race to get the media’s attention. And even then, if your name wasn’t Nikki Haley, it was hard to get free media. After he withdrew from the race several months ago, Dwight Drake told me that he had expected it to be hard to raise money (and it was so hard for him that that’s why he quit). But what surprised him was that the media was not to be found. As an old political hand, he was stunned at the lack of coverage.

But still. For none of us — not even people like me, who TRY (but often fail) to keep up with as much of it as possible — to know anything about this Alvin Greene guy is just outrageous. At the very least, even if this noncandidate was ignored, Vic Rawl should have gotten the minimal coverage necessary to give him the name recognition to win. But he didn’t.

OK, so at any rate, at least the media has jumped all over this story now, right? Mr. Greene has TV crews chasing

Finally, I found it -- at the bottom of Page B3.

him. Mother Jones had a story about him on Tuesday (a day earlier would have been nice, but then it’s not Mother Jones responsibility to inform SC about its own candidates). Everywhere I go, people are asking about him. “All Things Considered” called me this morning to get my thoughts on how all this happened.

Well, yes and no. Yes, he’s getting a lot of coverage now. But… and I really hate to say this about my old paper, because I love it and wish my friends still there all the success in the world … The State was weirdly negligent on the story in today’s paper.

When I read my paper this morning, it was the first thing I looked for. On the front page, of course — that’s where I put it. But it wasn’t on the front page. OK, on the Metro front — nope, not there. OK, so it’s packaged with the jump of another election story… nope. All right, back to the front page, to read the cutesie “winners and losers” story that I had initially bypassed about all the quirky little water-cooler talker stuff from the primary. I mean, it’s weird that this didn’t TOP that story if it was in it, but maybe it’s down farther… nope.

I gave up at that point, because I needed to leave to keep my appointment at ETV. But bewildered, I searched the paper again after lunch… and finally found it as a brief on page B3. Not in a roundup of election briefs, but just generic Metro & State briefs. It wasn’t even the first item. It was below a crime brief. As for the content, it was essentially the same brief I had seen on the Web site the day before.

I’m sure the paper will have more complete coverage of this tomorrow, and play it better. Even in the good old days of full staffs, things tended to be disorganized on the day after all-out election day coverage. I see Clyburn’s intimation that it’s all a foul GOP plot is getting some play at thestate.com now.

But I was really disappointed this morning.

If I were endorsing, I’d endorse Vincent Sheheen

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Ignore what I wrote in that last post. It does Vincent Sheheen a great disservice, by suggesting the reason to pick a Democratic ballot and vote for him tomorrow is simply because of the mere absence of negativity in his campaign.

He deserves a much more positive endorsement than that, for the simple reason that he is far and away the best candidate running for governor in 2010, a year in which we badly need new and visionary leadership in the governor’s office.

Of course, I put myself in a bind a couple of months back, when I sorta kinda decided not to endorse candidates as a blogger. I had all sorts of good reasons not to: No one was paying me to take all that aggravation. No longer representing the voice of the state’s largest newspaper (at least, that’s what it was when I was there), I had no institutional obligation to do it. And while doing it for the newspaper was business, if I did it on my own blog it would be personal, with all the many levels of messiness that entails. Then there was the unstated reason: For the first time ever, I found myself in a situation in which there would be a personal cost of sticking my neck out. A year’s unemployment had shown me how reluctant employers can be to take on someone with as much well-documented baggage as I have (much of it from having taking a stand FOR this powerful person, and AGAINST that one). And I was about to start trying to sell advertising, with the only thing I had to sell being my own brand and how it was perceived — and there is no surer, more infallible way to infuriate close to 50 percent of the public than to choose one candidate over another. Did I not owe it to my family to try to launch this enterprise on a sound footing, and not undermine it by making arrogant (at least, that’s how a lot of people perceive endorsements) pronouncements that would inevitably alienate? After all, I could be honest about what I think about candidates without taking that formal, irrevocable step.

Lots of good, solid, self-interested reasons not to endorse, right?

Well… sometimes one must stand up and be counted, even when one is not being paid to do so. Remember how, when Grace Kelly demanded to know why Gary Cooper had to make a suicidal stand against Frank Miller and his thugs when he wasn’t the marshal any more, he explained “I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing.“? Full of nuance, that Gary Cooper. Anyway, this is an “I just gotta” moment for me, minus the gunplay (we hope). There are things more important than my own self-interest, or the good of the blog. One of them is South Carolina’s crying need for new leadership at this point in its history.

Ours is still a poor state. On all sorts of measurements of economic and social and physical well-being, from income to health, we continue to be last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last. We continue to have a political culture, and institutional structure, that reinforces that dynamic, and resists change more steadfastly than the government of any other state. Our government was designed by landed slaveholders to preserve the status quo, because that’s what benefited them. Those men are all gone, but the system of government designed to serve them still exists, and holds us back.

We are also held back by a lack of trust of each other, and a lack of faith in the idea that together, we can overcome the challenges that face us. This manifests itself in the phenomenon we see being played out so dramatically in the Republican primary this year, as the candidates — even candidates I would think would know better — compete to see who can be the most negative, the most rabidly anti-government. What does it mean to be anti-government, in this context? It means to deny faith in our ability to get together, people of different attitudes and philosophies, and work through our differences to build a better future to share.

The radical individualism that all of the Republican candidates embody this year — especially Nikki Haley, the front-runner — has been tried in South Carolina, over and over. Our current governor, Mark Sanford, is easily the most ideologically pure manifestation of that philosophy ever to hold that office.

It is painfully clear after eight years of Mark Sanford — whom I enthusiastically endorsed in 2002 — that such an “I, me, mine” approach to governance does not work. One cannot govern effectively when one holds governing in contempt. That should have been obvious then. It’s certainly obvious now.

Vincent Sheheen offers the positive alternative. Not the “big-government, liberal” alternative that the propagandists of the GOP will accuse him of offering (not because of anything he advocates, but because that is their reflexive, automatic reaction to everything), but a sensible, moderate South Carolina-friendly approach unencumbered by radical ideology of any kind. Before he began this campaign, he was pushing his own proposal for restructuring our government to make it effective and accountable for a change. It is a pragmatic approach that would actually have a chance of becoming law if a governor were behind it. Rather than throwing unacceptable ultimatums at the Legislature and reveling in lawmakers’ rejection, Vincent Sheheen would actually work with lawmakers of both parties (he has a proven ability to do so) to make his proposal a reality. Instead of a governor who can’t even work with his own party and doesn’t want to, imagine how wonderful it would be to have one who works amicably with both?

Now, many of these same things can also be said of Jim Rex. He, too, has a positive, teamwork approach. He’s worked across party lines in advancing his public school choice initiatives, and has formed alliances with some of the most conservative Republicans in trying to improve the way schools are funded in South Carolina. But, because it’s been his job, his policy experience in office has been limited to education. And while better education may be the thing South Carolina needs most, it’s not the only thing; Vincent Sheheen’s experience with public policy is broader, despite his youth.

And in this election, when we have such a need for new beginnings, his youth is an advantage.

That I would say that would surprise some people who have worked most closely with me. I was the grumpy eminence grise on the editorial board who would ask a young candidate, “How old ARE you, anyway?” with a tone that suggested they hadn’t lived enough to be ready for the office they were seeking.

But it’s time now for a generational change. And among the 39-year-old Sheheen’s strengths is the fact that he offers us that.

An old friend, sensing I was leaning that way — because I’ve been honest about what I think of candidates, however much I’ve resisted a formal endorsement — asked me several weeks ago why I would choose Vincent over Jim. I answered as follows, after protesting that I was not, repeat, NOT going to endorse:

Now between you and me, I’d go with Vincent. So you inferred correctly.

Several reasons:
1. You know that with me, it’s seldom about the sum of policy positions. I would be hard-pressed to tell you [off the top of my head] what their policy positions are, beyond the fact that nothing has jumped out at me as bad. Rex has a plan for spending cigarette tax money that I’m not sure about, and I know Vincent’s all about restructuring, to cite a couple of differences that jump to mind. And the restructuring is a biggie.
2. So that leaves us with character, and I think the character of both is fine. But I’ve seen Vincent grow during this campaign in terms of his ability to connect with voters, while Rex is still that trustworty elder statesman who I’d be OK with as governor, but who isn’t likely to inspire. Vincent generates a newness, a sense of a new generation taking over from all the nonsense of the past, that is appealing. And he wears it well; he has his head on straight.
3. Vincent could work with the Legislature. He’s one of them, and that helps make up for being a Democrat. He would come in with lawmakers knowing that about him. He could make a difference. Rex is the guy that they’re accustomed to thinking of as “that ONE statewide Democrat,” and they just won’t be as likely to want to engage with him.
4. Vincent could win in November. Normally I wouldn’t mention that, but this year it’s important. The Republicans are all running so hard to the right, trying so hard to convince us that, in varying ways, they will be Mark Sanfords — even Henry, who should know better — that this year I just don’t see anything good coming out of any of them becoming governor. We so desperately need a break from what we have. And that makes it vitally important that the Democratic nominee not only be someone who’d be an improvement over what we have, but who could WIN in the face of the odds, which are always against the Democrat.

Let me stress again the generational factor. South Carolina needs a fresh start, a real break with its recent past. Vincent embodies that the best. This is a decision I’ve come to gradually, in my own holistic, intuitive way, but I’ve tried to spell it out as systematically as I can for you.

To elaborate on that: Rex radiates the aura of a civic-minded retired guy who’s willing to “give back” if there’s no one else to do the job. Vincent wants to build a better South Carolina, the one that he and his young children will live in. Makes a difference.

It occurs to me that I do my readers a disservice by sharing those thoughts privately with one friend, but not openly with them. So there it is. It may seem to be high on intangibles and low on specifics, but that’s because I had already reached the conclusions that on the specifics, I’ve concluded that Vincent is sound. That makes the intangibles — the ability to inspire, the ability to be positive rather than negative — of great importance. We didn’t worry about the intangibles (such as his aloof manner, his sleep-on-the-futon quirkiness, his hermitlike aversion to the company of other Republicans) with Mark Sanford, and look where it got us.

As I’ve explained before, none of the Republicans is offering us anything positive for our future. That puts me in the unaccustomed position of not having a preferred candidate on that side. But there is no doubt that there is a Democrat who stands well above them all, as well as being a stronger candidate than any in his own party.

That candidate is Vincent Sheheen.

At least, that would be what I’d say if I were endorsing.

OK, now The State paper has gone too far…

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All right, I didn’t take it personally when you laid me off. After all, as a vice president of the company, I had been looking at those horrific numbers like all other senior staffers. There was no way the paper could keep paying all of us; no way at all. Some of us had to go; and my salary made me a very attractive target.

And yeah, I was kind of ticked off when you wouldn’t let me take my old blog with me, after all the nights and weekends I poured into it for four years, building it from nothing. That was a classic case of corporate lawyer B.S., insisting upon retaining the rights to content even though something called “Brad Warthen’s Blog” could have pretty close to zero value to you going forward. (I would say “zero,” but it continues to get a surprising number of page views — 15,000 last month — considering that I haven’t posted anything since March 2009. Possibly because I regularly send readers back to it. So that’s of SOME value to your advertisers, I suppose.) But I went out that day and bought the rights to “bradwarthen.com,” and never looked back. It had 132,000 page views in April, and I’m now actually getting income from it. (See the latest ad, from Vincent Sheheen?) So I’m over that.

But now, The State has gone TOO FAR. This I cannot forgive. After we’ve been drip-tortured for months by the GOP candidates with their conservative-this, conservative-that ideological monomania, the same moldy cliches over and over and over and over, to the point that I did something yesterday that I’ve never done before in my career — told my readers that NO GOP candidate is fit to be our governor for the next four years, because I for one just can’t take it any more…

… after all that, The State actually poses this question to the GOP candidates, in print:

There are voters who accuse elected Republicans of abandoning their conservative principles. What makes you the Republican most capable of representing the party in the fall election?

Imagine that! PROVOKING them to give it to us with both barrels! Just setting it right up on a TEE for them!

So of course we were treated to an absolute orgy of… As I’ve said from Day One I’m a conservative a true conservative my daddy was a conservative daddy my mama was a conservative mama I’m a bidnessman meet a payroll don’t take bailouts lazy shiftless welfare takers the key is to starve ’em before they reproduce 100 percent rating from conservative conservatives of America my dog is a conservative dog I don’t have a cat because cats are effete I eat conservative I sleep conservative I excrete conservative I got conservative principles a conservative house and conservative clothes take back our government from the socialists even though we don’t really want it because who needs government anyway they don’t have government in Somalia and they’re doing alright aren’t they National Rifle Association Charlton Heston is my president and Ronald Reagan is my God I will have no gods before him I go Arizona-style all the way that’s the way I roll I will keep their cold dead government hands off your Medicare so help me Ronald Reagan…

And on and on. That’s just to give you the flavor; I’m just reciting from memory. Read the actual stuff if you prefer, but my version has more life to it, while in no way being a disservice to the original.

You know what would have endeared me so much that I would have dropped all my objections and endorsed one of these candidates on the spot? If he or she had had the sense of perspective, the sense of the absurd, the appreciation of irony to say something like:

Actually, I’m a liberal. A liberal all the way. I drive a Prius, I love wine and cheese parties with the faculty, I think America is a big bully in the world and no wonder people hate us (I’d be a terrorist, too, if I didn’t abhor violence so), and I never saw an abortion I didn’t like. My spouse and I have an open marriage, so scandal can’t touch us, because to each his or her own. I’m a white, male heterosexual and the guilt just eats me alive; I wish I belonged to a group that was more GENUINE, you know? The first thing I’d do if elected is raise taxes through the roof, and spend every penny on public education, except for a portion set aside for re-education camps for people who now home-school their kids. Then, if we needed more money for excessive regulation of business and other essential government services, we’d raise taxes again, but only on the rich, which is defined as YOU or anybody who makes more than you. Probably the best word to describe my overall tax plan would be “confiscatory.” And my spending (OH, my spending! You’ve never seen spending until you see my spending!) would best be termed “redistributive.” If elected, my inaugural party will have music by the Dixie Chicks and the Indigo Girls, and then we’ll all bow down to a gigantic image of Barack (did you know it means “blessed”?) Obama, the savior of us all, and chant in some language other than the ultimate oppressor language, English. French, perhaps. Or Kiswahili.

Or something along those lines. And if The State ran a response like that, all would be forgiven…

The non-impression Gresham Barrett makes

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Remember what I wrote about Gresham Barrett in my last column for The State? Actually, it wasn’t the last column that ran in the paper, but it was the last I wrote. I’d already written the piece about Robert Ariail, who was leaving with me, and my “unfinished business” piece that ran the Sunday after we left.

But I was determined to get a Gresham Barrett column written, if only because I’d been frustrated trying to get ahold of the guy. I had decided to do a column on each gubernatorial candidate as he or she announced, and Barrett was the second to come along (I’d already written about Vincent Sheheen). I was doing this because I regarded the choice that voters would have to make in 2010 to be so important that I wanted to help the conversation along as much as I could — even if I weren’t around to do columns on any of the rest of the candidates.

The weird thing about this one was that I had been trying to get Barrett on the phone to interview him for a couple of weeks. That may not sound weird to you, but it was a unique experience for me in the 12 years that I served as editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. I couldn’t remember when it took more than a few hours to reach anyone who was serious about wanting to be governor. It’s not that I was so special; it’s that they were that eager for the free media.

But I don’t think I’d ever have gotten Barrett if I hadn’t made a nuisance of myself. On that Wednesday morning, I told his aide B.J. Boling — who had always been so helpful when he handled media for the McCain campaign in 2008 — that this was it. I didn’t want this to be the last piece of mine ever to run in the state — I wanted it to be one of the other two previously mentioned. Which meant I had to reach him that day, and write it the same day for Thursday’s paper. Even then, B.J. was unable to get him on the horn until 5 p.m., which meant I had to make Cindi Scoppe stay late to read behind me. But I got it into the paper.

Since I was writing it in such a rush, I was wary of my own irritation with the candidate. So I held back from fully expressing just how unsatisfying that interview was, beyond noting that he was “light on details,” and that his “crowning achievement” from his time as a legislator in Columbia was a partial-birth abortion plan. That was the biggest thing he did, “absolutely, without a doubt.” Being a pro-life kind of guy, I’m all for such bans. But I would not list the need for one as being among the burning issues of South Carolina. Against the blank backdrop that his career seemed to me to be, that was pretty disappointing.

Beyond that, I dutifully listed each fact I was able to draw out of him, thin as it all was.

Anyway, I have since referred to just how blank a slate Mr. Barrett seems to me, and been taken to task by B.J. And I accepted service. He’s right; I haven’t interviewed the guy since. And with that in mind, I called B.J. the other day hoping to get some time with his candidate. But B.J. hasn’t called me back. He probably thinks I’m calling about something else.

Bottom line, since I haven’t talked with the guy for a year, I’m not qualified to judge. But I read with particular interest Cindi’s column last week in which she describes the results of a 90-minute interview with the guy:

I HAVE A HUGE problem with Gresham Barrett.

It’s not his political positions or his rhetoric. It’s not even that frenetic thing he does with his hands in his TV commercial, though if I watched more TV ….

It’s that I can’t figure out what I think about him.

I can’t get a clear impression of what distinguishes him from his opponents. Even after he spent nearly an hour and a half with our editorial board earlier this month, answering every question I could think of to try to help me and my colleagues form some opinion, I came away empty. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

This is both disappointing and bizarre.

Disappointing because I had such high hopes for him. It’s no secret that I’ve been impressed with the job Henry McMaster has done as attorney general, and came into this campaign thinking he would be my favorite Republican. But when he went over the top on tax policy and I had that whole bizarre conversation wherein I couldn’t get him to give me a clear answer, and then he started blurring the line between candidate and attorney general, I started hoping for a better choice. Since I have had the least interaction with Mr. Barrett, and since the main thing I could recall his having done in the past few years was to change his mind and act like a grown-up by taking the least evil of the two horribly horrible positions on the TARP, he was the obvious place to pin my hopes.

Bizarre because usually I get the most out of meetings with the candidates I know the least about. First impressions and all that.

So it’s not just me.

With me, you could chalk up a lack of results from an interview to my loose, let’s-see-where-this-goes style. But Cindi is a high-organized, task-oriented interrogator. She goes in determined to get answers to questions X, Y and Z, and woe to the subject that stands in her way.

So this struck me as interesting. Is Gresham Barrettt the Zelig of this campaign, the “curiously nondescript enigma” of 2010?

EVERYBODY’s watching porn on the job. I feel left out…

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Now we know why the oil rig disaster happened:

WASHINGTON – Staff members at an agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted tickets to sports events, lunches and other gifts from oil and gas companies and used government computers to view pornography, according to an Interior Department report alleging a culture of cronyism between regulators and the industry.

In at least one case, an inspector for the Minerals Management Service admitted using crystal methamphetamine and said he might have been under the influence of the drug the next day at work, according to the report by the acting inspector general of the Interior Department….

First the SEC, now this. I demand answers! Specifically, how does one go about procuring one of these jobs?

Death to the performance review

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I keep hearing that the Club for Growth is on Converse Chellis’ case for some raises given without performance reviews. I have no idea whether there is a problem there or not (I had trouble finding any elaboration, although I guess it’s out there somewhere).

But I do know this: In my experience (close to 30 years in management), performance reviews are THE biggest waste of time in corporate America. I have wasted YEARS of my life — late nights at the office because of the impossibility of getting this pointless crapola done during the regular working day because there’s actual WORK to do — filling out those blasted things, which sometimes go on for 10 pages or more, with essay question after essay question.

It made for a particularly vicious form of madness when I was a supervising editor in a newsroom and didn’t have a private office. Whenever you saw the metro editor or government editor or photo editor or whichever editor trying to hide in a dark corner of the newsroom at an odd hour, hunkered over a computer muttering, looking like he’d bite the head off anyone who bothered him, he was probably doing performance reviews.

Basically, I always sort of figured that if the employee didn’t know what I thought of the job he or she was doing, then somebody wasn’t paying attention, and probably would ignore the eval as well — because I’ve never been shy about telling people on the spot what I think about what they’re doing.

It particularly became absurd when I headed the editorial department, full of very senior people who usually worked out the kinks in their job performance years earlier, else they wouldn’t have gotten there. Sure, we all have flaws, but at that point in your career they’re pretty permanent, more in the nature of fundamental elements of one’s character. So you end up saying the same things year after year — he’s great at this, she’s not so great at that — and it looks like either you’re a lazy manager (failing to come up with fresh observations), or the employee is obstinately refusing to improve. When the truth of the matter is, the reason you’ve been employing the person all these years is that his or her good qualities far outweigh the bad.

I lessened the pain of doing the blasted things by inventing my own evaluation system, which I got away with in my last few years at the paper. Short and to the point: I’d list three strengths (no more than a line or two on each), three weaknesses, three accomplishments since the last review, and three goals for the coming year. And I’d have the employee do the same, and then we’d sit down and compare them, and come up with a synthesis for the official report. This didn’t take so long, but I still hated it.

Evaluations became even more onerous in recent years when, more often than not, there was no raise attached to them. At least it gave me an incentive to get them done at some point because I knew I was holding up the subject’s raise. With no raise attached, my only motivation was to end the nagging from HR. And I can take a LOT of nagging.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I was thrilled to read a review this morning (in the Club for Growth’s favorite newspaper, ironically enough) of a book entitled “GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW!” An excerpt:

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities… How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces?

Amen to that. I don’t know anything about the authors, Samuel A. Culbert and Lawrence Rout, but as far as I’m concerned they are geniuses. Someone needs to give them a good review, and a nice raise…