The biggest liars of all

5 Replies

There are cynics among you who think that politicians are inveterate liars. I find that by and large this is not really the case. In fact, one of my biggest problems with many politicians is that when they make campaign promises, they keep them — when they really, really shouldn’t.

This is not to say that all politicians are compulsive truth-tellers. I suppose the field has more than its share of liars, particularly when the penalty for telling voters what they don’t want to hear is so steep.

But even the worst politicians are mere pikers, babes in the woods, pure novices at lying, compared to the fiends who record this message for us to hear, over and over and over again, when we try to do business over the phone:

All agents are busy assisting other customers and your call is important to us. Please remain on the line and the next available agent will assist you.

“Your call is important to us.” Yeah, uh-huh. Right.

WSJ: How DeMint betrayed his friend Bob Inglis

56 Replies

Jim DeMint in 2007./photo by Brad Warthen

The best newspaper story on South Carolina politics that I’ve read in some time was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal this morning. Headlined “As U.S. Political Divide Widened, a Friendship Fell Into the Rift,” it is the story of how Jim DeMint betrayed and abandoned his friend Bob Inglis for the sake of DeMint’s all-consuming ideology. It’s written by Louise Radnofsky and Michael M. Phillips.

It’s pretty powerful, and it tells a story with which I am partly unfamiliar. First, since I’ve never had much occasion to track inside

Bob Inglis

baseball in Upstate congressional districts, I didn’t realize how close Inglis and DeMint once were. (DeMint was Inglis’ consultant when he miraculously won election to the House in 1992; they belonged to the same church that Inglis helped found, and on and on.) I even had forgotten that DeMint was Inglis’ immediate successor in the House when Inglis ran for the Senate against Fritz Hollings, although I did recall that Inglis succeeded DeMint when the latter went to the Senate.

But the main thing I just plain didn’t realize was that Inglis, facing an ultimately successful primary challenge this year from another former ally, Trey Gowdy, asked DeMint to help him back in January — and DeMint refused. Apparently the senator wasn’t going to let his perfect record as a kingmaker to extremists be sullied by backing a friend who, while indisputably conservative, dares to think for himself.

I hope you can read the story; you may be prevented by the WSJ‘s pay wall. But at the very least, read these excerpts:

The unraveling of the DeMint-Inglis friendship is emblematic of the balkanized state of American politics after last week’s historic midterm election. The two men fell out over disagreements that to outsiders might appear less significant than the many things on which they agree. That phenomenon now marks the political landscape: Both parties, largely shorn of centrists, are feuding within their ranks in addition to fighting the other side…

In the leafy cul-de-sacs of Greenville, two Republican conservatives—members of the same church and campaign allies since 1991—are no longer friends because of the schisms that have emerged between them…

Mr. Inglis, a real-estate attorney, began toying with the idea of running for Congress in 1991. For a campaign logo, he turned to a local marketing firm whose work he admired. It was run by Jim DeMint. It was at Mr. DeMint’s office where Mr. Inglis made his final decision to enter the 4th District race. Election Day went badly for Republicans, but Mr. Inglis overcame a late deficit to squeeze by a sitting Democrat and into Congress.

“It was a miracle that we won in 1992; Jim was one of the material means of that miracle,” says Mr. Inglis.

Once in Washington, Mr. Inglis established himself as a conservative stalwart, pushing for term limits, tighter abortion restrictions and an end to congressional mailing privileges.

Soon after Mr. Inglis took office, he and his wife began hosting a monthly Bible study group that included Mr. DeMint and his wife, and Dave Woodard, a Clemson University political scientist who had become Mr. Inglis’s pollster, and his wife. Group members shared lists of sins they had committed in the previous week, and discussed the concept of grace: Nobody is above reproach, or beyond salvation, if they accept God.

The inner circle that set Mr. Inglis on the path to Congress reconvened in Mr. DeMint’s office in 1997. Mr. Inglis was gearing up for a Senate bid, staying true to his self-imposed three-term limit for the House, and the group was eager to keep Mr. Inglis’s seat in conservative hands, someone to “carry the torch,” Mr. Inglis told the others. Top on his list was Mr. DeMint, who agreed to run.

Mr. Woodard did polling work for both men. Mr. DeMint dropped Mr. Inglis’s name in fundraising letters.

The night of the 1998 Republican primary, the first congratulatory call to DeMint HQ came from Mr. Inglis. “This is from Bob, this is from Bob,” Mr. DeMint said to hush the crowd, says attendee Brent Nelsen, a Furman University political scientist and friend of both men…

That’s probably as much as I can quote without running afoul of Fair Use. But I hope I can go away with quoting this brief description of Inglis’ moment of epiphany:

In 2001, Mr. Inglis passed out from dehydration at his home in Greenville, and banged his mouth on a bathroom vanity. As he recovered, he says he thought about his own failings. He vowed, if he returned to politics, to be “less inclined to label the other side as Satan incarnate.”…

Note that Inglis didn’t change his mind about issues. He was as conservative as ever. He simply decided to stop regarding people who disagreed with him as the enemy.

And that, tragically, seems to have made him DeMint’s enemy. DeMint’s continuing attitude toward politics was captured in this paragraph:

The day after the vote, Mr. DeMint urged the newly elected senators to stick to their principles. “Tea-party Republicans were elected to go to Washington and save the country—not be co-opted by the club,” Mr. DeMint wrote in an op-ed in this newspaper. “So put on your boxing gloves. The fight begins today.”

Worse for Inglis, worse even than his new distaste for demonizing the opposition, was that he wasn’t always on board with the GOP team. He had always gone his own way, which was apparently fine with DeMint when it meant being more conservative than anyone else. But now, he occasionally broke with the right. He criticized the use of Culture War issues such as gay marriage to divide the electorate. He voted against the Surge in Iraq (something that I strongly disagreed with him on, but respected for the courage it took). He voted with Democrats to censure Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” (Why? Because Joe deserved censure for such a breach of civility.)

And so when Inglis asked DeMint to help him this year, DeMint refused, giving the excuse that he wasn’t getting involved with House races.

You really need to read this story. If you can’t read it online, run out over lunch and buy a copy while they’re still available. It’s really something.

Haley takes big step toward GOP respectability

11 Replies

David Wilkins in January 2009./photo by Brad Warthen

The state Democratic Party is giving Nikki Haley a hard time for choosing David Wilkins to head her transition:

Columbia, SC – South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler released the following statement today in response to Gov.-elect Nikki Haley’s announcement that GOP insider David Wilkins will head her transition team.  Wilkins is a former long-time SC legislator, House Speaker, and ambassador.

“We were hoping Nikki Haley had gotten the hypocrisy out of her system during her campaign, but apparently she didn’t.  David Wilkins’ appointment shows South Carolinians that the Haley Administration isn’t going to be the “movement” they were promised. The governor-elect has given the highest position on her team to one of the very same good ol’ boys she campaigned against.  She can’t move this state forward by continuing to reach backward,” said Fowler.

But I see it as a positive development — Nikki the Tea Party insurgent reaching out to the respectable center of her party. In other words, reaching out to the conservative center of the state GOP.

And that can only be a good thing. If I were one of her typical supporters, I might wonder. But since I’m not, I don’t.

For me, this is sort of like when I found myself reassured by Obama’s national security pragmatism after the 08 election.

Yo no sé que el quiere decir

Leave a reply

I read the 2nd reading at Mass yesterday, in Spanish, and doing so reminded me of something I read on another blog last week…

Just for those of you who still care — perhaps out of morbid fascination — what Will Folks has to say about Nikki Haley, I share this. It was Will’s entire statement with regard to her victory last week:

“Porque ¿qué aprovechará al hombre, si ganare todo el mundo, y pierde su alma.” – Marcos 8:36 (Sagradas Escrituras – 1569)

And no, I don’t know what he meant to say by that, or why he used a Spanish translation. It just struck me as mildly interesting that he chose to respond with a verse from Scripture, and that he chose that particular verse. I can think of a couple of ways to read that, and they are very different, so I’m not going to guess. Unusually cryptic, coming from such a tell-all guy.

By the way, sisters: “Women” didn’t go for Haley

13 Replies

Y’all know how fed up I was during the campaign with all the breathless Identity Politics hoopla, especially in the national media, over Nikki Haley being an Indian-American (gasp!) woman (oh, joy! oh, rapture!). I don’t like all that IP stuff in the best of times, but to watch the way it boosted Nikki over the first Lebanese-American Catholic (to use language they would understand) ever to receive a major-party nomination for governor in this state was pretty maddening.

But if I thought that was bad, that was nothing compared to what we’ve been subjected to since last Tuesday. The next “journalist” who says “historic” in reference to what happened last week is going to get slapped upside the head, if I’m within arm’s reach.

I got my fill of it in the WIS studio on election night, as everyone but me went on and on about it. Of course, on live TV, one reaches for whatever one has at hand to have something to say, I suppose. But ever since then, Tom Wolfe’s Victorian Gent has been in full rant, loudly expressing the Appropriate Sentiment — or as Wolfe termed it, “the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone” –over the allegedly monumental event.

OK, so basically, this was a big victory for women, huh? Well, before the sisters get too overjoyed about this, it would be good to note that “women” didn’t elect Nikki Haley. So much for the solidarity of sisterhood.

Mind you, I put “women” in quotation marks for ironic purpose. I’m using it the way Republicans say “America voted Republican,” or “South Carolina preferred Nikki Haley.” The thing is, a SLIGHT majority of women preferred Vincent Sheheen, according to exit polls. And when I say slight, I mean slight: 50 percent to 49 percent. But hey, it would have been enough for him to win if all the men had stayed home. (But I will say that, even though the exit poll didn’t measure this, I’m thinking Nikki won the SC Indian-American vote. I’m just going by the number that was there dancing at her victory party, so my assumption is unscientific.)

To analyze the exit polls further… If I were the sort who cared about Identity Politics — if I thought being of a certain gender or race or whatever mattered — I would start to wonder about myself. Vincent lost in pretty much every demographic group to which I belong. Except two: Ideology (Vincent won among “moderates,” with 63 percent of us) and non-evangelicals.

Which, I suppose, is why I hate talk of Identity Politics. It doesn’t affect the way I vote, and I don’t think it should affect anybody’s.

How Haley Won (the short version)

2 Replies

On Sunday I had too much going on to read the paper, but I didn’t feel like I was missing much, because the lede headline was, “How Haley beat Sheheen.”

That would have to be shortest analysis story yet, since the entire explanation can be expressed thusly:

“She ran as a Republican in 2010.”

It’s so obvious from the outcome that, since Vincent Sheheen garnered a larger percentage of the vote than any other Democrat running in South Carolina, Nikki Haley didn’t do anything else to contribute to her success. In fact, the numbers indicate that everything else that happened in the fall campaign must have worked against her.

So, a very short story. (And yet my colleague John O’Connor squeezed 2,000 words out of it. My hat is off to him. Editors don’t give reporters that kind of room often, so when they do, any writer worth his salt makes the most of it.)

Now, if you want to talk about how she won the nomination — her transition into the darling of the Tea Party — that might take some verbiage. But there’s not much to say about her victory in the general. She hit her crescendo in June, but the air gradually leaked out of her campaign until she barely squeaked by on Election Day. But being a Republican guaranteed that she could afford to blow a big lead, and still win. So she did.

Way to go! We’re No. 18! (I think)

4 Replies

I don’t remember what I was looking for, but over the weekend I inadvertently stumbled on this Web page listing the teams from the recent Walk for Life, with what I take to be their total amounts raised.

And as I skimmed down the alphabetical list, I saw that “Brad’s Bloggers” had the highest total — $982 — up to that point in the alphabet. (We were 22nd on the list.)

Hey, I knew we had done pretty well — largely thanks to Doug Ross — but this intrigued me enough to run down the whole list and see how many teams raised more than we did.

And there were only 17 teams that did better, out of more than 300 teams. (I counted twice. One time I got 314, the next time I got 304. So I just decided to call it “more than 300,” because I’ve got work to do.)

How about that? And we got a late start. Just think what we could do next year, if we’re just a little better organized.

Anyway, here’s my list of the top 20 teams (if I missed anybody in my quick skim, I apologize):

  1. The Pink Posse — $19,741
  2. Pink for Michelle — $3,900
  3. Steps for Steph — $3,728
  4. Cancer Crushers — $3,715
  5. Keenan Suggs — $2,531.65
  6. Team TWC — $2,522.50
  7. Irmo/Lexington Curves — $2,270
  8. SCBT — $2,105
  9. Positively Pink — $1,730
  10. Lizard’s Thicket — $1,620
  11. Edens & Avant — $1,540
  12. University of Phoenix Columbia Campus… — $1,153
  13. KICK — $1,137
  14. SCANA Legal/Legal Regulatory/Environmental Team… — $1,100
  15. Richland One SNS Boob Buddies — $1,071
  16. Mt. Herman Walkers — $1,005
  17. The Ta-tinis — $1,003
  18. Brad’s Bloggers — $982
  19. Richland One – Forest Heights Deb’s Team… — $900
  20. Crusaders for the Cure — $885

The big, gigantic, huge ideological shift of 2010: About 4.76 percent of voters changed their minds

30 Replies

Sometime over the last couple of days I was talking to a Republican friend who insisted that the American people decided to reject Obama and all his works on Tuesday, that the ideological message was clear and unequivocal.

His view was similar to the one express in this Tweet posted by @SCHotline today:

SC Politics 11/5: America to Democrats: Stop what you’re doi…http://conta.cc/cz79tE viahttp://SCHotline.us #scgop #sctweets#scdem

I, of course, disagreed. I believe that elections seldom express clear messages, for one thing. People have many reasons for voting as they do, and it’s almost impossible to classify or quantify them with any degree of certainty, even with exit polls — which necessarily boil motivations down to explanations that can be quantified. Voters could vote against a guy because, deep down, they don’t like the tie he wears — something a pollster is unlikely to capture.

What happened was that a small proportion of the electorate — a minority of us independents in the middle — voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008, but Republican in 2010. And they are just as likely to vote the other way in two or four years. Believe me; these are my people. I’m one of them. It’s a swing voter thing; someone who calls himself a Republican, or a Democrat — something who really believes all that junk they spout — couldn’t possibly understand.

My friend saw the election, for instance, as a clear, unambiguous rejection of Obamacare. Please. The word may poll well (for Republicans), but most voters couldn’t explain to you what the recent health care legislation actually DOES. Neither can I, unless you give me a couple of days to refresh my memory on it. I don’t even understand how it’s going to affect me, much less the country. If you don’t know what it is, how can you possibly know, clearly and unambiguously, that you are against it?

As a measure of how the country FEELS about the president, sure. But as a measure of a clearly defined ideology, no way. Which is good, since I don’t like ideologies.

Anyway, today my friend sent me this piece from The New Republic (hoping I would consider the source favorably, no doubt), headlined “It’s the Ideology, Stupid.” Well, I was offended at the original version of that phrase when the Clinton people used it; I am no more persuaded by this one.

What I DID like about the piece were the stats provided from exit polls. To begin with, they told me that in 2006, “those who voted were 38 percent Democratic, 36 percent Republican, and 28 percent Independent,” and this year the self-identification was 36/36/28. Well, right there I’m not seeing a big ideological shift. But my favorite stats were here:

We get more significant results when we examine the choices Independents made. Although their share of the electorate was virtually unchanged from 2006, their behavior was very different. In 2006, Democrats received 57 percent of the Independent vote, versus only 39 percent for Republicans. In 2010 this margin was reversed: 55 percent Republican, 39 percent Democratic. If Independents had split their vote between the parties this year the way they did in 2006, the Republicans share would have been 4.7 percent lower—a huge difference.

OK, let’s parse that. Independents are 28 percent of the electorate. In 2006, Dems got 57 percent of that segment, while the GOP got 39 percent. This year, they went 55 percent Republican and 39 percent Democratic. So that means roughly 17 percent of independents switched their preference from Democratic to Republican.

Seventeen percent of 28 percent (the percentage of the electorate that is independent) is 4.76 percent. I make no claims to be a statistician, so y’all check my math there. But I think I’m right.

So… instead of “America” sending a clear message to Democrats, or to anyone for that matter, what we have is 4.76 percent of the electorate voting differently from the way it voted in 2006 — for whatever reason.

“America” doesn’t change that much from election to election, folks. A few people in the middle slosh back and forth. And I think my explanation for why they do is as valid as the grand, oversimplified ideological one: People were dissatisfied in 2006 and 2008, so they elected Democrats to fix the things that were making them dissatisfied. Nothing has yet been fixed (even, for instance, if Obamacare will do the trick — which I doubt — it hasn’t accomplished anything yet), so they’re still dissatisfied, so they’re taking their custom to the other shop.

And that’s what happened.

Oh, by the way — the writer in TNR went on to explain his grand theory that it’s all about ideology in the subsequent paragraphs. I found them unpersuasive. At the very most, he quantifies an “ideological shift” of 11 percent — and I don’t think it’s ideological, I think it’s semantics. I think the word “conservative” feels more comfortable to more people this year. But even if he’s right, that’s an ideological shift of 11 percent. And 11 percent ain’t “America.”

Go read it and see what you think.

It’s not just that he’s black, because he isn’t

28 Replies

On Election Day, The State ran a Eugene Robinson column connecting the Tea Party ire to the fact that the president is, well, black. He was quite moderate and reasonable about it, taking pains to say that “It’s not racist to criticize President Obama, it’s not racist to have conservative views, and it’s not racist to join the Tea Party.” This was followed, as you might expect, by a significant “But…”

And I think he makes a fair, if not airtight, case for the argument that the Tea Party would not be as big a phenomenon as it is if this president were not noticeably different from every president we’ve had before. I think that’s true. And I think for a lot of people, his alleged blackness forms a part of it. But that’s only because most Americans, black and white, seem to buy into the idea, promoted by the president himself, that he is, indeed, black.

But not I. As you know, I’ve never considered him to be black. I set out my reasoning in that double-length column in October 2008, “Barack Like Me” (in which I argued that Obama had as much in common with me as he does the average black American). Rather than revisit every word of it, I’ll give you one short reason why he is not “black” in the sense that it is used as a sociopolitical designation in this country: Not ONE of his ancestors was brought to this country as a slave. Not one. This puts him entirely outside the American narrative of race.

Aside from that, he was not raised as a black American. Blackness was something he personally decided to embrace as a teenager looking for an identity, as kids — particularly kids with childhoods as unrooted as his — tend to do.

And because of all that, I think Robinson gets it slightly wrong in his conclusion:

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious – witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

Obama has made mistakes that rightly cost him political support. But I can’t help believing that the Tea Party’s rise was partly due to circumstances beyond his control – that he’s different from other presidents, and that the difference is his race.

I come up with a different answer when I ask myself that same question — “what’s so different about Obama”? Sure, his being the child of an absent African father and a white mother makes him different from any other POTUS, ever. But so do several other rather glaring factors that may be related to his alleged blackness, but which could exist completely independently of the ambiguous color of his skin. Such as:

  • His name. “Barack Hussein Obama.” It’s extremely foreign. Set aside the connection with Islam and Arabic, and all the freight those carry at this point in history (such as the uncanny closeness to the name “Osama”), for a moment. Just in terms of being different, it’s easily light years beyond the name of anyone else who has even come close to occupying the Oval Office. The most exotic name of any previous president, by far, was “Roosevelt.” I mean, “Millard Fillmore” was goofy-sounding, but it sounded like an English-speaker. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the first Catholic to receive a major party nomination had the vanilla/whitebread name “Al Smith.”
  • His father was a foreigner, regardless of his race. He was a man who spent almost none of his life in this country. He came here briefly, fathered a child, and went home. Show me the parallel to that in the biographies of former presidents.
  • While he never really knew his father (he had to learn about him at a distance, the way we learn about figures in history), he did know his stepfather, who was Indonesian. Young Barry spent a goodly portion of his childhood in Indonesia. In my earlier column I drew a parallel to my own childhood sojourn in South America, but I was there undeniably as an American. Barry Obama lived in SE Asia as an Indonesian, or as close to it as someone of Caucasian/African heritage could.
  • The fact that, to the extent that he is connected to African roots, it is a heritage that is totally divorced from most presidents’ sense of connection to Europe. I didn’t fully realize that until the Churchill bust episode, which caused some Brit to note something that hadn’t fully occurred to me: This is the first president the modern UK has had to deal with who doesn’t have the Special Relationship hard-wired into his sense of self, if not his genes. In fact, quite the contrary: Unlike any previous president (except maybe Kennedy, who spent his adult life living down his father’s pro-German sympathies leading up to WWII), Obama’s grandfather actually experienced political oppression at the hands of British colonialists.
  • His unearthly cool. His intellectual detachment, the sense he projects that he takes nothing personally. Weirdly, this takes a trait usually associated, in most stereotypical assumptions, with Northern Europeans, and stretches it until it screams. He looks at problems the way a clinical observer does. Probably more maddeningly to his detractors, he looks at his fellow Americans that way — as though he is not one of them; he is outside; he has something of the air of an entomologist studying beetles with a magnifying glass.

Bottom line, I think that last trait probably contributes most to the alienation many feel toward him. They sense that detachment, and they find it off-putting, and their minds grope for explanations, and they see all the other different things about him. That last one is one with which I can identify to some extent. I think one reason I’m a journalist (as are a lot of military brats) is that I moved around a lot as a kid, and was never quite of the place where I lived, and tended to look at a given place and its people with the detachment of an outsider. It wasn’t until I moved here to the place of my birth in my 30s (and I was only born here; I grew up everywhere else) that I embraced fully the identity of being a South Carolinian, but as a conscious act of will, rather like Obama’s decision to be “black.” I have a certain claim to it — mostly genetic (my family tree is three-fourths South Carolinian) — just as Obama has a genetic claim to blackness, but it’s nothing like the SC identification of someone who has lived, say, in Cayce his whole life.

As you can see, I still feel an affinity for Barack Obama, as I did in 2008. He has my sympathy, and since he IS my president, I hope he is successful as president — even though I supported McCain. And I in no way excuse the extreme, personal hostility to him among many of the voters who voted the Tea Party way on Tuesday. But I do find myself trying to understand it, based upon available facts. And I think the factors I listed above are at least as relevant as the color of his skin, if not more so.

Worth revisiting: The flaw in tax credit argument

31 Replies

Yesterday I got this kind note from a schoolteacher:

Mr. Warthen,

For years I have quoted an article you wrote for the state newspaper entitled, “Put Parents in Charge isn’t a ‘voucher bill’ it’s something much worse” to my public speaking classes as they begin persuasive arguments and to my friends and family who insist that school choice is fair and responsible.  I continually return to your argument that asks, are we a citizen or a consumer?

I searched The State archives today to find a way to link to your article on my FaceBook page.  In my ever so humble peon public school teacher opinion, I have never encountered a better argument against vouchers.  Public schools are the least discriminatory institution in America—we serve everyone—whether a parent has the money to choose or not, and we are part of the infrastructure of our country.

I hope that you understand…, [but]… I have photocopied your article since its publication in March of 2005.  What is a public school teacher in Lexington County to do??  I have used it to make my students see one side of this issue that they may never have been able to see otherwise.  With the election of Mick Zais, I am truly frightened that this issue is on the table again and more a reality than ever before.  The article, as well as your very logical argument, needs to be resurrected and published again.

She’s got a point. Maybe this would be a good time to revisit some of the basic flaws in the arguments for tax credits (and, for that matter, vouchers). Not because Mick Zais was elected, but because Nikki Haley was. (Think about it: when was the last time you saw a state superintendent lead a significant political fight? The job is ministerial, not political, which is why it should not be elected.) Here’s the column she was looking for. It was published in The State on March 4, 2005:

Put Parents in Charge isn’t a ‘voucher bill’ — it’s something much worse

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

SOUTH CAROLINIANS for Responsible Government, the group advocating Gov. Mark Sanford’s tuition tax credit proposal, criticizes its opponents for repeatedly calling “Put Parents in Charge” a “voucher” proposal.

On this score, the group is absolutely right, and Mr. Sanford’s critics are dead wrong.

This is not a voucher bill. It’s nothing like a voucher bill. It’s something much worse.

It’s worse because of the hole it will blow in state revenues, to be sure. To pass what is essentially a tarted-up tax cut bill without considering its effect on all state services (not just education), would be inexcusable.

But the main way in which a tuition tax credit is worse than a voucher is that it promotes the insidiously false notion that taxes paid for public schools are some sort of user fee.

Whether you agree with me here depends upon your concept of your place in society: Do you see yourself as a consumer, or as a citizen?

If you look upon public schools narrowly as a consumer, and you send your kids to private schools or home-school them, then you might think, “Hey, why should I be paying money to this provider, when I’m buying the service from someone else?” If that’s your view, a tuition tax credit makes perfect sense to you. Why shouldn’t you get a refund?

But if you look at it as a citizen, it makes no sense at all. Public schools have never been about selling a commodity; they have always been about the greatest benefits and highest demands of citizenship.

A citizen understands that parents and their children are not the only “consumers” of public school services — not by a long shot. That individual children and families benefit from education is only one important part of the whole picture of what public schools do for society. The rest of us voters and taxpayers have a huge stake, too.

Public schools exist for the entire community — for people with kids in public schools and private schools, people whose kids are grown, people who’ve never had kids and those who never will. (Note that, by the logic of the tax credit advocates, those last three groups should get tax breaks, too. In fact, if only the one-third or so of households who have children in public schools at a given time paid taxes to support them, we wouldn’t be able to keep the schools open.)

Public schools exist to provide businesses with trained workers, and to attract industries that just won’t locate in a place without good public schools. They exist to give our property value. If you doubt the correlation between good public schools and property values, just ask a Realtor.

They exist to create an informed electorate — a critical ingredient to a successful representative democracy. (In fact, if I were inclined to argue that public schools have failed, I would point out just how many people we have walking around without a clear understanding of their responsibilities as citizens. But I don’t expect public education critics to use that one.)

Public schools exist to make sure we live in a decent society full of people able to live productive lives, instead of roaming the streets with no legitimate means of support. In terms of cost-effectiveness on this score, spending roughly $4,400 per pupil for public schools (the state’s actual share, not the inflated figure the bill’s advocates use, which includes local and federal funds) is quite a bargain set against the $13,000 it costs to keep one young person in prison. And South Carolina has the cheapest prisons in the nation.

Consider the taxes we pay to provide fire protection. It doesn’t matter if we never call the fire department personally. We still benefit (say, by having lower insurance rates) because the fire department exists. More importantly, our neighbors who do have an immediate need for the fire department — as many do each day — depend upon its being there, and being fully funded.

All of us have the obligation to pay the taxes that support public schools, just as we do for roads and law enforcement and the other more essential services that government provides. And remember, those of you who think of “government” as some wicked entity that has nothing to do with you: Government provides only those things that we, acting through our elected representatives, decide it should provide. You might disagree with some of those decisions, but you know, you’re not always going to be in the majority in a democracy.

If, as a consumer, you wish to pay for an alternative form of education for your child, you are free to do that. But that decision does not relieve you of the responsibility as a citizen to support the basic infrastructure of the society in which you live.

Radical libertarians — people who see themselves primarily as consumers, who want to know exactly what they are personally, directly receiving for each dollar that leaves their hands — don’t understand the role of government in society because they simply don’t understand how human beings are interconnected. I’m not just saying that we should be interconnected; I’m saying that we are, whether we like it or not. And if we want society to work so that we have a decent place in which to dwell, we have to adopt policies that recognize that stark fact.

That’s why we have public schools. And that’s why we all are obliged to support them.

A graphic blast or two from the past

2 Replies

Something that Phillip said with regard to his candidates having been shut out Tuesday…

Oh well, life as a liberal in the south. Well, to modify the bumper sticker popular in the mid 2000’s…”H: Still the President.”

… reminded me of a fun little piece of art I created for my old blog, way back when. Remember this?

OK, so maybe you preferred to forget. Sorry.

Oh, and for you Democrats who prefer a different look on your car windows, there was this as well:

This reminds me… I really need to get some merchandising going — sometime after I get around to selling some ads.

How were YOUR election stats? Here are mine

22 Replies

On Tuesday, I almost, but not quite, posted a list of exactly how I voted on everything. Blogs are confessional in nature, and now that I no longer have a newspaper to embarrass, why not let it all hang out?

But then, my latent respect for the confidentiality of the voting booth kicked in. It’s one thing to be honest with people, and to tell them ALMOST everything. But to go all the way? I don’t know. I’m still pondering.

When I was at the paper, by the way, I generally voted a straight editorial board ticket. (This is NOT the same as voting a straight-party ticket, a sin for which the punishment should be immediate, permanent loss of the right to vote. A straight-party vote means the voter has surrendered his right to decide to another entity. The paper’s endorsements largely reflected my own careful discernments, aided by interaction with other smart folks.)  Not always, though, because I didn’t always win the endorsement arguments (and despite what they say about me, I DID sometimes bow to a consensus, even though my colleagues were, of course, wrong). And sometimes I’d do quirky things like decide to vote for a write-in, whereas I had insisted that the board choose the lesser of two undesirable candidates who had a chance. But usually, a straight ticket.

I was conscious of that in the booth on Tuesday, and made note of the degree to which I agreed with my former colleagues this time. And I ran other dichotomies as well — Democrats vs. Republicans, won-lost, etc. I sort of got into the habit of doing this with The State’s endorsements several years back at the paper. And then each year, I’d add new stats to the running totals. One grows tired of people spreading the canard that one’s candidates always lose (when close to 75 percent of the paper’s endorsees won), or that one “always” endorses Democrats, or “always” endorses Republicans (the cumulative over 12 years was almost exactly 50-50, with the Democrats slightly edging out Republicans, but with the paper never breaking its string GOP endorsements for president — although we came very close in 2008). You can see a discussion of those stats back here, and here is my simple little spreadsheet.

So here’s what I found:

  • Here are The State‘s endorsements. Among the very few candidates they endorsed, I agreed on three and disagreed on one. So congratulations, Cindi and Warren, y’all were 75 percent right.
  • Ditto with the four constitutional questions. The paper went “no, no, yes, no,” and I went “no, yes, yes, no.” More about that in a moment. Of course, I agreed with the paper on the sales tax referendum, but since I live in Lexington County, I didn’t get to vote on that.
  • I voted for four Democrats, and seven Republicans. None of the Democrats won. Of course, one was a write-in. All but one — also a write-in — of the Republicans won. (The paper went with one Democrat and three Republicans.)
  • Not counting the two write-ins, which wouldn’t be fair to my stats, five of my choices in contested races won, and three lost.
  • I didn’t vote for either treasurer, where Loftis faced no opposition, or for secretary of state, where I knew nothing about Mark Hammond’s opponent (but knew he would win). I DID vote, however, for Gen. Livingston even though he had no opposition, because I’ve heard many good things about him.
  • About the write-ins… I voted for Joe Riley for the U.S. Senate. Hey, if he’s not going to run for governor, I might as well vote for him for something. Then, trying to think of a Republican (to balance out Mayor Riley) in the 2nd Congressional District as an alternative to Joe Wilson and Rob Miller, I went with Nathan Ballentine. (He does live in the district, right?)
  • Finally, a confession. And don’t tell Cindi Scoppe about this. But I did something I would never have done as an editorial page editor… I voted on a constitutional amendment according to my own political attitudes, rather than in keeping with the larger principle of not cluttering up the constitution with political statements. I voted “yes” on the amendment to make union-vote ballots secret. Yeah, I know it will be invalidated by whatever Congress does, and the constitution is not the place for empty gestures. But I agree with Lindsey Graham on this, and I said so with my vote. Maybe I was influenced by that “Johnny Sack” video I saw a year or two back. I’m kinda embarrassed about it — it smacks of voting my “gut,” which is unseemly — but there it is.

Mind you, I was keeping track of all this stuff, making little notes to myself, having little internal debates on several of the candidates and issues, even while being distracted by that little drama going on in the next booth. So I was in there awhile. I always am. I take my franchise VERY seriously.

Another stand-alone governor? Let’s hope not

14 Replies

Photo by Gerry Melendez/The State

In the newspaper biz, a “stand-alone” is a picture that has no story with it. I’m still looking back at Tuesday night, and pondering a photo that embodies another sense of “stand-alone”…

As we were waiting… and waiting, and waiting… for Nikki Haley’s victory speech that night, someone in the WIS studio wondered aloud why Henry McMaster was the one killing time at the podium (actually, he was introducing her, but we didn’t realize that at first). Well, who else would it have been? said I. He was the only member of the GOP establishment to have embraced her — her only primary opponent to play a positive, prominent role in her campaign. That’s Henry; he’s Old School. If it’s his party’s nominee, he’s behind her, 100 percent.

So who else would introduce her?

And then I thought no more about it. My mind turned to how low-energy and off-key her subsequent speech was. (Something Cindi Scoppe apparently disagrees with, since she wrote, “She made a good start with her victory speech.“)

It was only when I looked at the photos later (and these photos are from The State, where you can find both a Nikki victory gallery and a Sheheen concession gallery) that I thought about the extreme contrast. There was Vincent, with a broad array of people loyally, warmly supporter him in his hour of defeat — while aside from Henry, Nikki stood alone (I’m not counting family; both candidates had that).

First the delay. Then she comes out alone, without political allies, then she delivers that less-than-enthusiastic speech. What was going on?

I don’t know, but I hope it doesn’t stay like this. We’ve had 8 years of a stand-alone governor, and a governor standing alone can’t accomplish anything in this state, for good or for ill.

We’d all be better off if more people were willing to stand with our governor. Of course, it would help if she acted like she wanted them to. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The sort of person with whom more people are willing to stand, and who is willing to stand with more people, is the sort of person that, well, more people want to stand with. That made me dizzy. Let me read it again — yep, that’s what I meant to say…

Photo by C. Aluka Berry/The State

What I said to the telecommunicators

2 Replies

Here are the brief remarks I prepared this morning for my election post-mortem address to the SC Telecommunications Association‘s Fall Conference at the Radisson.

I had planned to just jot down some notes in my notepad over breakfast, but chickened out and, before leaving the house, typed out the following to read.

Of course, most of the time was taken up with questions and answers, which is the way I prefer it. I feel SO much more comfortable reacting to questions than I do delivering a prepared speech. I relax and that point, because I know we’re actually talking about something that interests the audience, or at least a portion of it. But the conventions dictate that your say SOMETHING before the blessed relief of questions, so this is what I prepared, and more or less read:

What happened Tuesday?

Well, not a whole lot.

On the national level, we saw the usual thing happen: The party that did NOT hold the White House gained seats in Congress two years after the president’s election. This phenomenon was intensified somewhat by the fact that the Democrats had gained big for two cycles, and the Republicans were overdue to win some of those seats back.

There was extra emotional intensity this time because of the Tea Party movement, which arose in connection with general voter dissatisfaction in a time of prolonged economic anxiety. There was a lot of anti-incumbent anger out there, and the party in power took a big hit as a result.

What will happen next? Well, what usually happens. Congress will not suddenly become a more highly functional institution. In fact, given the platforms on which many of the newcomers were elected, expect to see a lot more yelling and posturing without anything new actually happening. On election night, I recall hearing one Republican say that the GOP would repeal the new health care legislation every day and send it to the president for his veto. This is not a recipe for getting the public to think more highly of the folks in Washington. And even THAT is going to be pretty tough to accomplish since the GOP didn’t win control of the Senate.

And yes, I realize that threat was probably mere rhetorical hyperbole, but in terms of productivity, I don’t think the result it would produce is terribly different from what we’re likely to see actually happening.

So what will we see happen? Well, in two years, or perhaps four, the pendulum will swing back to the Democrats. And we’ll continue to see this kind of back-and-forth until Americans get totally fed up with the two parties, and some viable alternative emerges.

Here at home, we saw what we expected to see – a Republican sweep in a state where that is pretty much the norm now, especially in a year in which Republicans were winning everywhere.

The forces causing this to happen were so powerful that they caused voters to sweep aside a number of concerns that had been raised about the GOP gubernatorial candidate, from her failures to pay taxes on time to her somewhat sketchy employment record. As it happened, she won, but with a smaller margin than any other Republican running statewide. It will be interesting to see whether she does anything differently than planned as a result of having garnered less than a mandate in a year in which a GOP nominee should have had a landslide.

Going forward, we’re going to see a phenomenon we’ve already seen advance and become more pronounced: With the Republican Party being so dominant, we’ve been seeing for some time the emergence of factions within that party. It’s like the days when Democrats were so dominant: Since essentially everyone in power was a Democrat, factions emerged, and the characters of individual Democrats became more important. Since everyone was a Democrat, just being a Democrat wasn’t much of a recommendation.

Expect a power struggle between the faction of the party that strongly supported Nikki Haley – and her mentor Mark Sanford before her – and the current legislative leadership. The question remains whether the present leadership will be the future leadership. But whether they are or not, the main conflicts we see in the State House are going to be in the future, even more than we’ve seen in recent years, conflicts among Republicans.

Democrats won’t agree with me on this, but in a way I see this as a fundamentally healthy thing. Any trend that causes people to disregard party labels – which I regard as extremely destructive to the deliberative process upon which our system of representative democracy depends – and look at other, more meaningful factors, is essentially a promising thing.

Now, I’d like to go to your questions.

And fortunately, questions were forthcoming, and they were thoughtful. I got engaged in a conversation afterwards with a gentleman who wondered whether the current divide between the largely Democratic urban areas and the generally Republican rest of the country would continue to be worse. I had no idea, beyond agreeing with him that suburbs and exurbs tended to foster GOP sentiments, while more densely packed people tended the other way. And we were probably on the verge of something interesting as we discussed how population density had a profound effect on basic economics (something a man in the telephone industry would certainly understand), it led to different assumptions about what should be done in common via government and what should not. But at that point I had to run to ADCO. I really do have to buckle down and do some real work, now that the election is over.

Saturday morning I speak to a partisan crowd — the Lower Richland Dems. This will be a new experience for me. I have spoken to groups that turned out to be quite partisan, to my dismay, but were not billed that way. The message they get will be essentially the same, although maybe I’ll think of some stuff to add between now and then. It will be interesting to see how they react to it.

Google will do funny things sometimes

1 Reply

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me that if you search for “Nikki Haley” at Google images, you get, amid a sea of actual picturesof Nikki, a picture of Tina Fey linking to a blog post of mine from January 2009.

I forgot about it until I was looking for a certain image of Nikki this morning, and found the same thing. And in fact, as you can see above, it’s the seventh image that shows up out of 353,000. The six before it are actually of Nikki, as are the next 22, before there is the oddity of a picture of Barack Obama.

So, is there some quirk in the Google algorithms that free-associates, going “Nikki Haley… Sarah Palin… Tina Fey…?”

As near as I can tell, the reason this happened was at the top of that Tina Fey post is a link to the post that followed it, headlined “Nikki Haley applauds House action on roll-call voting.” But there is no mention of Nikki in the actual post itself.

Which is reassuring, I suppose. It’s nice to see that even Google can go off on tangents just as weird as the ones we fallible humans let distract us…

Way to go, Elise!

3 Replies

Elise Partin during an April 2010 interview./Brad Warthen

One of the BEST things that happened last night was that Elise Partin won BIG in her bid for a full term as mayor of Cayce.

She did this in spite of being against her own former city manager of many years’ experience, and despite the fact that everywhere she went campaigning, she had to explain to voters, face to face, that the things her opponents said about her were not TRUE before she could talk about her own message. (I learned later that at the very campaign event of hers that I attended, her opponents were working the room trying to poison supporters’ minds against her.)

Or maybe, come to think of it, she won BECAUSE of those things.

You may recall that Elise won a partial term two years ago because voters were sick of the closed, clannish way that the old guard had been running Cayce (particularly the rush to cross the river and annex the former Green Diamond property). Well, after two years of her positive leadership, the voters haven’t changed their minds about her.

In fact, she won by a margin of almost 2-1.

Here’s the note she put out to constituents today:

I am honored that you have re-elected me as Cayce Mayor. The election results were decisive with a win in every precinct.   I feel blessed to have the opportunity to serve you as Cayce Mayor for the next 4 years.

I am so grateful to all my supporters, particularly my team of campaign volunteers who helped spread the word about the progress we have initiated for Cayce.  Thank you.

Results for city council districts #2 have re-elected councilman Skip Jenkins,  and for district #4, Tim James will join the Cayce city council.  I look forward to working with these gentleman and the rest of city council to address the needs of our community.

Now we can continue to work together as elected officials, city staff, and citizens, for the benefit of our city- helping it to become an even GREATER place to live, work, and play!

Please consider putting in an application to participate on a Cayce board or committee. Your involvement and active participation is important to helping our city reach its potential.

I would love to see you at our next city council meeting, re-scheduled due to election day, to Tuesday November 9th at 6:00 p.m.

Thank you for re-electing me as your mayor,

Sincerely,

signature

Congratulations, Elise!

Woulda Coulda Shoulda: Could Sheheen have won with a better campaign?

55 Replies

Last night, when it was all over, I was struck by two things: How much better Vincent Sheheen’s concession speech was than any speech I heard during the campaign, and how much worse Nikki’s was.

As I said on the air last night, that “victory” speech was so… low… energy. The people in the studio laughed, saying, “It’s after midnight!” So what? I wasn’t tired (I didn’t hit the sack until about 3, and then only after a couple of beers). She shouldn’t have been, either. She should have been PUMPED! The crowd that had had the patience to wait for her (the folks in the WIS studio were puzzled she made the world wait for her so long; I told them to get used to it, because Nikki will have no more use for the people of SC going forward, as she continues to court national media) ALSO should have been pumped. But they sounded like an average group of supporters listening to an average, mid-campaign speech.

Maybe she was saving her energy to be on the Today show today. (Here we go again, folks. More of the same of what we got with Mark Sanford, Mr. FoxNews.)

As I urged people on TV last night — go to that clip I posted on the blog of her speech the day Sarah Palin endorsed her. Where was THAT enthusiasm? It’s like she had this finite supply, and it was just… enough… to carry her BARELY over the finish line in a remarkably close victory for a Republican in 2010.

As for Vincent, when he said that line about how he and his supporters “wished with all your might to take this state in a new direction,” it resonated so that I thought, “Where was THAT during the election?” Sure, he talked about not wanting more of what had under Sanford and such; he made the point — but he never said it in a way that rang out. He didn’t say it with that kind of passion.

It’s so OBVIOUS that that should have been his theme. Instead, we had the complete and utter absurdity of Nikki Haley running as a change agent. It’s so very clear that in electing Nikki Haley, the voters chose the course most likely to lead to more of the malaise that we’ve experience in recent years.

But hey, woulda coulda shoulda.

I just raise the point now to kick off a discussion: Is there something Vincent Sheheen could have done that he didn’t that would have put him over the top? Or did he come so close to winning, in the worst possible year to run as a Republican, because he ran the perfect campaign?

I mean, he came SO close. It was so evident that Nikki was the voters’ least favorite statewide Republican (yes, Mick Zais got a smaller percentage, but there were several “third party” candidates; Frank Holleman still got fewer votes than Vincent). I look at it this way: Mark Hammond sort of stands as the generic Republican. Nobody knows who he is or what he does, so he serves as a sort of laboratory specimen of what a Republican should have expected to get on Nov. 2, 2010, given the prevailing political winds. He got 62 percent of the vote.

Even Rich Eckstrom — and this is truly remarkable given his baggage, and the witheringly negative campaign that Robert Barber ran against him — got 58 percent.

So Nikki’s measly 51.4 percent, in the one race with the highest profile, is indicative to me of the degree to which voters either liked Vincent, or didn’t like her.

So the question remains: Could Vincent have won with a better campaign, or did he do as well as he did — ALMOST pulling off what would have been a miracle in this election year — because his campaign was so good?

Discuss.

Where should we go? I’m thinking Mojitos

13 Replies

My good friend Kevin Hall — you know Kevin; he’d probably be state Republican chairman now if a health problem hadn’t arisen (he’s much better now, I’m very happy to say) — was quite pleased with the election results today.

But he was having to face a sober reality on one front: He owes me a lunch. He had bet me that Nikki Haley would win by 8 percentage points. He didn’t realize that Vincent Sheheen would get more votes, and a larger percentage of votes, than any other Democrat in South Carolina (thereby demonstrating that if this had not been 2010, he probably would have won), while only Mick Zais — running for a job that Democrats continue to contest strongly every election — got fewer votes than Nikki among statewide Republicans.

(By the way, the best source for complete numbers remains The New York Times. It shows Nikki at 51.4 percent, and Vincent at 47.1 percent.)

I’m thinking Mojitos. I love that place…

By the way, if you saw me looking down at my Blackberry while on WIS live last night, I wasn’t checking election results. I was gloating over Kevin via text messages:

ME: Where you gonna take me to lunch? Remember, you said 8 percent…

KEVIN: It’s at 5 now so stay tuned. U might still be owing me. 🙂

ME: Bunch of little Dem counties still with 0 percent reporting. Her margin’s not getting bigger.

KEVIN: Patience, Brad. Let’s see…

ME: I’m thinking Mojitos, in the Vista. Nice place. Have you eaten there yet? It’s new…

KEVIN: That works. U still might be buying…

As you can see, I can be pretty obnoxious in victory. You should probably know this about me.

Now you may think if callous of me to profit from South Carolina’s misfortune. And don’t mistake me — my sorrow for the fact that voters went for more of the same yesterday, when we so badly need a break in our state, is undiminished. Yesterday was a dark day for South Carolina (on the governor front; I really don’t much care about the other races, although I’m sad to see John Spratt’s fine career of public service end thus). And eventually, I expect the majority of South Carolinians will realize that. (Only 2.9 percentage points less than a majority realized it yesterday, so we don’t have far to go. One more thing like her cavalier attitude toward paying her taxes or her picaresque work record, and bingo.)

But hey, a guy’s gotta eat. And a free lunch at Mojitos is a free lunch at Mojitos.

Comment on election results HERE…

167 Replies

… and I will do my best to keep up with them and approve them in something close to real time.

Remember, I’ll be on WIS from 7 to 8 tonight, and then again from 11 to midnight, if my voice holds out (I seem to have come down with an untimely cold).

So watch me, watch the returns, comment here, and I’ll try to keep up. I’m not sure what the accommodation will be at WIS for my laptop, but I’ll try to figure out something…

Now, see, THIS is a partisan smear…

13 Replies

There are thousands of people at the polls right now voting for Nikki Haley in spite of all the powerful, objective reasons not to, because they think all those bad things they’ve heard are just some unfair, partisan attempt to smear her. Listen to them; that’s what they think.

That’s because they are either not paying close attention, or they truly lack the intellectual capacity to tell the difference between indisputable facts about Nikki, and a true smear campaign.

It’s a bit late, I suppose, but just for future reference, folks, here’s what it looks like when a bunch of stuff is thrown unfairly at a candidate in the hope something will stick. I got it from Phil Noble at SC New Democrats:

Two Ard arrests on Election Day

Friends,

We’re just getting word that there’s trouble on Republican candidate for lt. governor Ken Ard’s campaign today.  And it couldn’t have come at a more critical time.

After weeks of investigation, six arrest warrants have been issued for Ken Ard’s campaign manager, a Republican operative named Robert Cahaly.  Cahaly will surrender himself to SLED agents Wednesday morning on charges of making illegal robocalls against several targeted Democratic state house representatives. These sleazy Republican tactics are exactly what voters hate about politics.

This comes just hours after Ken Ard’s 20-year old son, James Ard was arrested at 6 A.M. this morning for DUI.

And as of this afternoon, Ken Ard was still on the campaign trail, asking for you to elect him to be our state’s lieutenant governor — #2 in charge.  We think the charges speak for themselves, but the WIS write-up is below.

This is what we’re up against.

But there’s still time.  The polls don’t close until 7PM, so there’s stil time for you to stand against this kind of trash politics.

Just yesterday, Ashley Cooper (Ken Ard’s Democratic opponent) talked about putting South Carolina back in the news for all the right reasons, and now this.

It’s time for a change.

Get out there and vote before 7PM today and have your voice heard!

Thanks again,

Phil

Now, I think Phil is a fine and, well, Noble fellow, and I know he’s sincere. And I have no reason to doubt his facts (even though that link he gives goes to a page that says “The page you requested is currently unavailable.” The actual link is here.)

But it’s unfair to raise those things at this time, and to say, “This is what we’re up against,” because there is no indication here that Mr. Ard himself has done anything wrong, or even that anything wrong has been done in his behalf. And he has no time to distance himself from this guilt by association.

Surely Phil would not want to suggest that no one should vote for Vincent Sheheen because one of his campaign workers was charged with DUI (months ago, giving Vincent time to fire her and let everyone see him firing her, and for the thing to be largely forgotten). Phil would consider such an assertion to be outrageously unfair. Which, until I hear something that implicates Mr. Ard in any way, is what this is.

By contrast, almost every time we’ve looked at anything that bears on the claims that Nikki Haley makes about herself — about what a wonderful accountant she is, or how passionately she believes in transparency — what we find refutes her claims, and raises fresh alarms about her suitability. That’s the kind of thing that is not only fair and relevant, but things that anyone MUST know and understand before voting.

There’s a huge difference.