Benjamin pays $81.87 fine; ready to move on

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OK, that headline sounded a little too brusque. Obviously, the mayor-elect isn’t going to put this behind him in the sense of forgetting Ms. Ruben and her serious injuries. He makes the point repeatedly that she is in his prayers, and he would like a chance to see her when it’s OK with her family.

A phone photo of a copy of the citation; sorry about the quality.

But legally speaking, Steve’s mouthpiece James Smith says that now that the fine for driving without his headlights on has been paid (this morning, at a magistrate’s office), the case is done as far as any culpability for the accident on Mr. Benjamin’s part is concerned.

At the less than 15-minute press conference at City Hall, Mr. Benjamin’s aides distributed copies of a series of written statements by him regarding the accident, plus a traffic ticket he was given yesterday, and the original incident report. (I’ll scan those into a PDF for you when I’m home where my scanner is, or link you to them if someone beats me to it, which seems likely.)

As for how he could have been driving without his lights on in a high-tech Mercedes SUV, here’s the salient part of the statement:

My wife and I stayed at the Hilton Hotel in the Vista after the conclusion of the events of election day and election night, April 20, 2010. I was scheduled to be interviewed by WLTX on the April 21, 2010, 6:00 a.m. newscast. I awoke and prepared myself for the morning. I went to the hotel lobby at approximately 5:30 a.m. I had to retrieve the keys for my wife’s vehicle from the desk as there was no valet on duty and the valet had parked our vehicle th day before. I spoke with the front desk clerk and she gave me the keys to my wife’s vehicle. I prepared a cup of coffee and exited the rear of the hotel and walked into the parking garage. I located my wife’s vehicle, got in, started the vehicle, put on the seat belt and exited the parking garage. My wife’s vehicle has automatic lights. I did not adjust the light setting. As I drove the vehicle, the dashboard was illuminated and I was able to clearly see my path of travel.

Steve was reluctant to elaborate on how the lights could have been off, repeatedly referring reporters back to the statement. We were left with the implication that someone other than he had switched the lights off of automatic mode without his knowledge, but he hesitated to come right out and say “The valet did it.”

Other items from the statements and answers at the press confab:

  • He had the green light.
  • He was in the left lane of the two lanes heading east on Gervais at the time of the collision.
  • “I was not impaired at the time of the accident.”
  • “I was not fatigued at the time of the accident.”
  • “I slept approximately 10 hours in the two nights prior to the accident. The night of the accident I went to bed shortly after 2:00 a.m.”
  • At about 11:45 the night before, a supporter bought him “a vodka and tonic or soda.” He said “I cannot remember if I took a sip or two sips, but I drank a little just to be polite.” He later had a drink of Malibu rum and orange juice, just after midnight.
  • During the 24 hours before the accident, he had a biscuit with meat and coffee at 7:20 a.m. on election day; baked chicken and green beans for lunch, with water; snacks and candy at various times during the day; missed dinner at the usual hour but ate fruit and vegetables with some water at the convention center celebration.
  • He had the sips from the vodka drink at the Liberty Tap Room, where they had hoped to get dinner, but the kitchen was closed.
  • He and family and friends moved on to the Sheraton, where “I consumed a cheeseburger, fries,  non-alcoholic iced tea and one Malibu and orange juice at approximately 12:12-12:30 a.m. He said he also had some appetizers. Then there was the coffee the next morning.
  • Other than the sips of vodka and the rum-and-orange juice (which I’ve got to say sounds like a nasty drink), he acknowledges drinking no alcohol during that 24 hours.
  • He says he did not make or receive any phone calls while driving that morning. Nor did he send or check text messages. But he adds, “I did check my voicemail and listened to messages using my speaker function of my cell phone.” The statement is unclear whether that was WHILE driving and no one thought during the press conference to ask that question. Sounds like it was. He concludes that statement, “I was not distracted at the time of the accident.”

That’s what I’ve got for now. I didn’t have my camera, but I’ll have a phone photo or two for you shortly. I’ll post PDFs of the statements and other documents tonight.

Oh, as the “move on” thing in the headline. James said this concludes Benjamin’s part in any legal matters having to do with the accident. As for the city police, their final report won’t be done until the state Highway Patrol is done reviewing it.

The mayor-elect himself made several references to his transition team and the 8 issue areas they are concentrating on, and said he hopes to get as good a media turnout as he had today when the team is ready to unveil their findings on those issues. In other words, he’s anxious to get started doing the job.

Tea Partiers onto something: Repeal the 17th!

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Put this in the category of stuff that looks like I’m just trying to be provocative to get a rise out of y’all, but I thought I’d share my surprise at learning that the Tea Party has a controversial position that I share.

The  New York Times says the idea should be “unthinkable:”

A modern appreciation of democracy — not to mention a clear-eyed appraisal of today’s dysfunctional state legislatures — should make the idea unthinkable. But many Tea Party members and their political candidates are thinking it anyway, convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.

… which I take as a challenge. Let’s think about it anyway.

So some Tea Partiers want to do away with popular election of Senators — an idea that is doomed to go nowhere, of course, because once you let the people elect an office, even if it’s an official they can’t name (walk down the street and ask everyone you meet to name the state agriculture commissioner, or the secretary of state, and then tell me they need to be popularly elected), that privilege will never be revoked. Try, and someone will demagogue you on it, and that’s the end of that.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. The Framers constructed a system of checks and balances that was based in part in the fact that each branch — or in this case, each branch of a branch — was elected via a different process. Politicians tend to dance with the one that brung ’em, and this ensured that each one was brung by someone else.

No, wait, that analogy doesn’t work, because ultimately the source of these elections was the people. Rather, each official was chosen by a different method, which was bound to make them look upon their constituency in a different way. The House of Representatives was always to be the People’s House, in that it was the one body most directly (and most often) responsive to the public whim of the moment. The president was supposed to be somewhat insulated from those same political winds by being chosen by the Electoral College — a method that required him to get wider support, as opposed to merely winning a few population centers.

Judges were to be nominated by the executive, with advice and consent from the Senate — which is about as much as you can insulate them from politics while still having their selection rooted in the public will over time.

And the Senate — well, the purpose of the Senate was to represent states. The House represented aggregations of individuals, and to keep the more populous states from running roughshod over the less crowded ones, each state got exactly two senators. And since the idea was that they represented states, of course they were chosen by the bodies that made decisions for the states as states — the legislators who make the state’s laws.

The balance of differently formed constituencies making their decisions through different processes was a thing of beauty. Not that all the decisions thus made were beautiful, but that’s the thing: The Framers expected human beings to be fallible, and that included the almighty People themselves. So you constitute different constituencies and play them off against each other. Checks and balances.

Of course, the NYT thinks it settles the matter when it appeals to everyone’s contempt for their state legislatures. Well, if you really think the legislatures would make worse decisions than the electorate at large, you haven’t really paid attention to some of the warts who get elected by the all-knowing People. Let’s give it a try; it couldn’t get worse.

Instead of what the Framers envisioned, now we have the representatives and senators chosen in the same way (OK, it’s statewide vs. district, which is something, but not as different as the old way), going after the same money sources to finance their campaigns, and consulting the same polls, their fingers ever in the wind to make sure they’re doing the popular thing at every moment. And no tough decisions get made.

No, it’s never going to happen because no one today is about to do the unpopular thing, and this would be very unpopular. (And hey, maybe if the Tea Party endorsed more unpopular, politically counterintuitive ideas such as this, we wouldn’t hear about the Tea Party any more, so I want to encourage them in this.) But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

How is it that Benjamin’s lights weren’t on?

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If I can get away in time I’m going to run over and catch Steve Benjamin’s press conference on the subject, but I find myself puzzled by the news that police say he contributed to the wreck by not having his headlights on.

I thought he had one of those fancy new cars that automatically took care of stuff like that. Even my beat-up 2000 Buick Regal turns the lights on automatically when it’s dark outside.

And now that we know this, what happens next?

I hope to find out…

CNN’s birthday: And a dark day it was, too

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Kathryn brings my attention to a piece headlined, “The Day 24-Hour TV News Was Born.” To which I can only reply, and a dark day it was, too:

At first, it seemed an odd experiment, the sort of thing that a quirky gazillionaire could afford to blow his money on just to see what had happened. Who, after all, wanted TV news 24 hours a day? Well, Ted had the last laugh on that. And this piece concentrates rightly on CNN’s dominance of such huge, breaking news events as the Challenger explosion and the Gulf War in 1991.

But when you say “24-hour TV news” to me, I think of the harm that CNN and its imitators have done — and did pretty much alone before folks started getting their news via Twitter and the like.

Once upon a time, boys and girls, news organizations — even TV news organizations, which were always sort of on the fringes of journalism — had what was called a “news cycle.” What this meant was that a given medium would report to you, the reader or viewer, at given times each day. The rest of the day was spent reporting. And while it was all pretty rushed, there was time in the day before deadline to do at least some modicum of making sure you knew what the hell you were talking about.

Not any more. Now, something happens, and the 24-hour cable outfits start “covering” it, and what you see is a bizarre mix of raw legwork tarted up as reporting, and commentary based on pathetically insufficient information. The commentary comes in, not to put things in perspective for you, the viewer, not to foster an informed conversation in the society, but to fill dead air while we wait for the latest half-baked “fact” to come in.

How does one provide commentary under such circumstances? There are a number of techniques that work. One is to further blur the line between news and entertainment. Another — and this is the one that concerns me the most — is to embrace the most mindless kind of reflexive partisanship. You have a “liberal” and a “conservative” on and let them shout prefab opinions at each other — opinions that are in no way dependent upon the facts of the unfolding story; the talkers bought them off the shelf and brought them along to the studio. This is called being fair and well-rounded.

Gradually, all political discourse in America has taken on this kind of mindless, prefab, artificial conflict approach — talking not to reach some sort of conclusion, or synthesis, or consensus, but each participant playing a rigidly predefined role depending on which pigeonhole he allows himself to be identified with.

This approach became refined and concentrated in the blogosphere, which joined the 24-hour TV “news” crowd and the interest groups and the parties themselves in constantly spinning the wheel, oversimplifying everything as left or right, black or white, up or down, and so forth.

Daily journalism was never overly burdened with sober reflection. But now, what little thought went into the news has been subordinated to these pre-fab conflict dialectics.

And we are worse off.

Virtual Front Page, Tuesday, June 1, 2010

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In keeping with my anachronistic philosophy of what makes a lede story, here is my first pseudo-front page coming off the long weekend:

  1. U.S. Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Gulf Oil Spill (NYT) — While the crude just keeps on spewing.
  2. Israel to deport detainees captured on Gaza ships (WashPost) — Normally, I go to the BBC first for international news. But not when it’s about Israel. That would be like going to Fox for news about Obama. The WashPost was more evenhanded. Israel has screwed up enough on this one without spinning it. OK, I think I’ve provoked enough for one brief news item.
  3. Al-Qaeda No. 3 Yazid reported killed by U.S. drone (WashPost) — This time, al Qaeda confirms.
  4. Columbia Cops Complete Benjamin Crash Probe (WIS) — It’s been turned over to the state Department of Public Safety for review.
  5. Al And Tipper Gore Decide To Separate (WashPost) — After 40 years of marriage. Meanwhile, in unrelated but coincidental news…
  6. Global Warming Makes Everest Unsafe To Climb (BBC) — Well, there go my summer vacation plans. But wait — wasn’t the idea behind climbing it that it was, you know, unsafe?

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?

We do NOT have the nation’s dumbest drivers

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Actual SC car, seen parked behind a Lizard's Thicket near my home. You may recognize this as a former header image.

Seems like everywhere I’ve lived in this country, I’ve heard the complaint that that place, wherever it was, had the dumbest, worst drivers anywhere.

You’ve no doubt heard that about South Carolina drivers. Perhaps you’ve said it. (For that matter, maybe it’s been said about you.)

But finally, I see, someone (GMAC Insurance) has decided to quantify it, and we are NOT the dumbest. Not even close. In fact, we come in 30th out of 51. Where are the dumbest drivers (measured by a written test of the sort they give to applicants for a learner’s permit)? New York.

And the smartest are in Kansas. This is probably due to the fact that their written test is one of the hardest. I’ve taken drivers’ tests in several states, but Kansas was the only place where I had to retake the test after flunking it once. (And no, it wasn’t stupid stuff. It was stuff like, do your headlights need to illuminate the road for 400 feet or 600 feet. Esoteric stuff. But it sure made me study the book before going back.)

Sad news about the Gores

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Well, this is sad news to read:

After forty years of marriage, Aland Tipper Gore are separating, the couple announced in an e-mail to friends Tuesday morning.

“This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration,” the former vice president and his wife said in the email first reported by Politico. “We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further.” Gore’s spokeswoman later confirmed the validity of the e-mail.

The news stunned many political watchers — the duo’s mutually affectionate manner on the campaign trail did much to enliven Al Gore’s stuffy image — but also good friends.

“I’m shocked — beyond shocked,” said Chris Downey, a close friend for many years who said she spoke to Tipper last week. “This is the least likely course of events I could imagine.”

I certainly can’t say I was close to them — I never met Tipper, even though I got to know her husband fairly well covering him for years back in Tennessee. But knowing Al, and watching her from afar, she always seemed like the more approachable, open and personable of the pair. I always respected Al’s intellect and command of issues, and was glad when my paper endorsed him for the Senate in 1984, but he wasn’t exactly a guy to light up a room. Which suggests that the big loser in this split is Al.

And of course, their family and all those who care about them.

SC Policy Council advocates spending (in other news, a cold snap in Hades)

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Did a double-take when I read this on The Nerve, the S.C. Policy Council’s online publication that exists to tell us how awful government is:

Although S.C. Senate and House members apparently think nothing of giving their respective chambers a combined $5.4 million budget hike next fiscal year, their fiscal generosity hasn’t extended to victims of domestic violence or drunken driving.

As part of their proposed state budgets for fiscal year 2010-11, which starts July 1, both chambers would eliminate all general funding for prosecution programs for first-offense criminal domestic violence (CDV) and driving-under-the-influence (DUI) cases in the state’s magistrate courts, where most of those cases are heard.

The proposed budget hikes for the House and Senate chambers would more than pay for those programs….

Yep, the S.C. Policy Council is propagating something that at least implies that not spending on a government program is a bad thing.

Even more startling, the piece implies that federal stimulus funds served a useful purpose:

No general funds were appropriated for the programs this fiscal year, though the CDV program received $1.6 million in federal stimulus money, said William Bilton, executive director of the S.C. Commission on Prosecution Coordination, which disperses program money to the state’s 16 judicial circuits. He said his office plans to apply for the same amount of stimulus money for next fiscal year.

“When that runs out, it’s back to square one,” Bilton told The Nerve last week….

I hereby put the area’s animal hospitals on notice: They’re likely to get a rash of cases of dogs coming in with man bites.

Now, to be serious: I agree with the Policy Council that these programs should be funded. Whether it was a bad thing that the House and Senate budgets were increased, I don’t know. The piece, which made the case very well for spending on CDV, didn’t actually explain what the increases in the legislative budgets were for. I assume that if I did know, I’d still agree that the CDV program was a higher priority. But I’m still curious what the case, if any, would be for the legislative spending.

Nicholas Kristof is a traitor to his gender, God bless him

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My wife called my attention to this Nicholas Kristof column the other day. In describing it, she said Kristof had gotten fed up with an unpleasant truth about why aid efforts in poor areas of the world fail to save children: Their fathers blow what little money they earn on booze and prostitutes.

I just got around to reading it a few minutes ago. I expected a rant, an angry diatribe using the kind of slashing language that, well, that I tend to use when I’m fed up about something.

But no, Mr. Kristof was as carefully rational as ever. If anything, I think he undersold his point by being so mild about it. An excerpt:

… Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that…

This tracks with what folks who give microloans to the poor in backwards parts of the world have learned: That if they want the loans to go to better the family’s plight, they need to lend the money to the mothers.

Nicholas Kristof, who uses his own bully pulpit to keep us mindful of the plight of the world’s least fortunate — and in doing so shows no respect for the orthodoxies of left or right — has now blown the whistle on guys everywhere. The man is a traitor to his gender. And God bless him for it.

A Memorial Day truce, and other reflections

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As I was firing up the grill about midday, between rainstorms, I glanced at Twitter and was pleased to find this:

RT @AntonJGunn: Remembering my brother Cherone Gunn and his ship mates this Memorial Day.http://twitpic.com/1srfpw

For those of you not yet addicted to Twitter, what’s going on there is that Joe Wilson was reTweeting — that is, sharing with all of his 14,000 followers, Anton Gunn’s sharing of his memory of his brother, Cherone L. Gunn, who was one of the sailors killed on the USS Cole when it was attacked by al Qaeda the year before the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, that was Joe “You Lie” Wilson honoring the brother of the same Anton Gunn whom GOP candidate Sheri Few attacks as a dangerous socialist.

So it is that we set aside our pettier conflicts in the memory of something higher and better.

We all marked the day in our own ways. Burl went by Punchbowl to honor his parents and Ernie Pyle. For my part, I cooked out burgers and hot dogs for as many members of my family as could make it (only three of my kids, but all four granddaughters). Then I made another run with the truck to help one of my daughters get moved out of an apartment. Then I took a nap.

When I woke up, just a little while ago, I watched the end of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.”

It ended a little differently from the book, which I just finished reading last week. It ended with the scene of young “Doc” Bradley and some of the other boys splashing in the surf at Iwo Jima. After they had raised the flag over Mt. Suribachi, in a brief interlude in the fighting, some officer had the quirky idea of letting the guys go for a swim. There were weeks of nightmarish fighting against an unseen enemy yet to come, and three of the six flagraisers would be killed before it was over.

The point the narrator was making as we watched them was that they would probably rather be remembered that way, rather than as heroes. Yes, they were heroes, although not for raising a flag. They were heroes for all the other things they did on Iwo Jima, before and after that. Doc Bradley won the Navy Cross for exposing himself to withering enemy fire to treat a wounded Marine (he was a Navy corpsman). He never told his family about the medal; they learned about it after he died in 1994. He didn’t want to be known for that. He just wanted to live his life, build a business and raise his family.

The narrator closes with some words about how they didn’t perform their acts of heroism for flags, or their country, or for abstractions. They did it for each other. Which is what researchers who have studied the way men act in combat have discovered over and over. It’s all about the guy next to you. It’s about your buddies. Nothing profound about that, except that most people who’ve never been in combat probably don’t know it. The implication in this case is that once you’re separated from those buddies, by death or distance, the “heroism” doesn’t mean so much. And it’s just plain bizarre to be celebrated as heroes in the midst of the hoopla of the 7th Bond Drive, the way Bradley and Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes were. Ira never could handle it, and ended up drinking himself to death. Rene never could get over the fact that his fame didn’t lead to fortune, and was disappointed. Only Doc Bradley seemed to get it together and live a normal, full, satisfying life after the war. Even though he would whimper and cry in the night, and never tell his wife why.

When forced to speak before crowds in the years after the battle, Bradley and the others would tell the people that they weren’t the heroes; the heroes were the ones who didn’t make it. Guys like Mike Strank — or, to go beyond the six, the most famous hero to die on that cinder: John Basilone, who had received the Medal of Honor for his actions on Guadalcanal and never had to fight again, but insisted on going back, and died on the first day of the battle for Iwo (earning the Navy Cross in the process). But that’s the conventional notion of a hero, and not necessarily what they meant.

Talk about messages… The instant I turned off the DVD player from watching “Flags of Our Fathers,” the TV switched to Henry’s “Vultures” ad, just to remind us of the nonsense facing us in the coming week.

What a bringdown, from heroism and the finest selflessness our nation is capable of, to that, which is if anything an appeal to the opposite…

Punchbowl National Cemetery in Punchbowl crater on Oahu.

Military’s impact on the Midlands

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Just got this note from Mayor Bob Coble:

Great article by Jeff Wilkinson in The State on the impact of Fort Jackson, Shaw and McEntire on our economy. Ike McLeese has done a tremendous job leading the effort locally, as has Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom on the State level. The Rhoads Group has done an outstanding job for us making sure the Pentagon has all the information about the strengths of Fort Jackson. The BRAC decision in 2005 was a big win economically for the Midlands and South Carolina.

The piece does make an important point, and I know Ike McLeese has done yeoman’s work over the past decade keeping the military engaged in the Midlands.

I’m just not believing this stuff from Henry

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Shortly after I posted the thing about Henry’s “Vultures” ad, I came home, and in the mail was this flyer.

I’m just not believing Henry. He’s been such a sensible, grown-up attorney general after all those years of Charlie Condon’s pandering, and now this.

What office is he running for, anyway? Some office I’ve never heard of, some kind of super-sheriff to clean up Washington, and save it from Obama and the other godless commies?

“Our Founding Fathers Would Be Ashamed?” Yeah, I think maybe they would.

Let’s make the totally wild supposition, just for a moment, that the things he’s saying about Washington aren’t totally loopy. What on Earth does it have to do with the issues facing South Carolina?

Definitely not what we need in a governor.

I see that The State endorsed Vincent Sheheen Sunday, and made a good case. Presumably, that means the GOP endorsement will be this Sunday. The way things are going, I just don’t see how a credible case can be made for any of these folks. Not Henry, not in this mode. Not Nikki, the darling of BOTH the Tea Party and the Sanford crowd — and a sincere imitator of Sarah Palin. Certainly not Andre. That would seem to leave Gresham… who thinks we need an Arizona-style immigration law in SC.

I didn’t expect us to be here at this point. I figured by now, at least one of these folks would come across as acceptable, so that we could have a real choice in the fall. But most of them seem to be trying so HARD not to.

Virtual Front Page, Friday, May 28, 2010

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Continuing to carry the torch for my woefully outdated philosophy of what makes a lede story, here is my pseudo-front page for this evening as we head into a long weekend:

  1. Obama, in Gulf, Pledges to Push on Stopping Leak (WSJ) — Anybody else flashing on an image of W. facing the camera with Jackson Square in the background? And another vast plume is discovered.
  2. Pakistan mosque attacks in Lahore kill scores (BBC) — Simultaneous raids on two mosques of the minority Ahmadi Islamic sect in Lahore.
  3. CPD officer pulls woman from burning car just before explosion (WIS) — Nice to celebrate heroism among our local cops after recent news.
  4. Police: McMaster death threat mentioned ‘Jesuits’ (thestate.com) — OK, here we go, profiling on the Catholics again…
  5. White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race (NYT) — Normally, I pay zero attention to these politics-elsewhere stories. I actually had to look up “Sestak” to remind me who he was when this broke this morning. But this looks like it’s turning into something, as this WashPost blog indicates: “Sestak story challenges Obama transparency vow.”
  6. Child Star, ’70s Icon Gary Coleman Dies At 42 — Unlike Art Linkletter yesterday, this was not a celebrity of my generation, but some of you may have watched the TV show that made this little guy famous.

Have you seen that absurd McMaster ‘vulture’ ad?

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I hate to pick on Henry when he’s dealing with death threats — and I hope and pray that comes out OK for him — but I forgot to mention this after I saw it a couple of days back.

Have you SEEN that thoroughly outrageous new TV ad of his? After having put out a fairly reasonable piece recently (which contrasted nicely with some of the stuff his rivals were doing), he now comes out with yet another bid to out-extreme the other Republicans.

I would compare it to the infamous 1964 daisy petal/mushroom cloud ad, except it actually contains MORE radical distortion of reality. To quote from the text:

They’re circling…After bailouts and takeovers…The Vultures want more. Our healthcare… our hard earned money… our liberty. South Carolina’s sovereignty is under attack… by politicians preying on our freedoms. Henry McMaster is leading the fight for the conservative cause….

Say what? If I believed half this nonsense about the Dems in Washington (who are not, near as I can tell, running for SC governor, so why is Henry running against them?), I’d say it was time for SC to fire on Fort Sumter again.

But I don’t. And I don’t see how anyone could.

Young lawyers vie for Kit Smith’s council seat

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Scott Winburn

Quick, what do Seth Rose and Scott Winburn have in common that makes them both look like smart, capable candidates?

Yes! They both advertise on bradwarthen.com. That, of course, should be all you need to know, but then, how could you choose between them?

What else do they have in common? Well, they’re both young lawyers who happen to be Democrats. I interviewed each of them over breakfast this week. And both of them are running for the 5th District Richland County Council seat being vacated by Kit Smith.

They are not the only candidates running in the Democratic primary for that seat (which by the way IS the election, since no Republicans are seeking it). Moe Baddourah and Kayin Jones are also on the ballot, and Mr. Baddourah has some catchy signs you may have seen around town. For all I know, one of them could end up in a runoff, but without any polling or anything else to go on, my sense is that most of the energy in this contest belongs to Rose and Winburn (a Free Times piece this week on the back-and-forth between Rose and Winburn didn’t even mention the other two candidates).

So, what separates the two candidates? Quite a bit, actually. For instance:

  • The Kit Smith factor… Rose started running for this seat before Kit Smith said she was ready to vacate it. Why? Because, he says, he didn’t think she was visible enough in the community. He says his model for a good council member is his city council rep, Belinda Gergel — whom he says he sees everywhere at community functions. By contrast, Winburn — who didn’t announce until Mrs. Smith decided not to seek re-election — has her endorsement.
  • Last time I looked, Seth seemed to have a lot more yard signs than Scott. That could be because he’s raised a good bit more money.
  • Scott may not be old Columbia, but he’s old South Carolina. My uncle knows his mama and daddy up in my hometown of Bennettsville. In fact, my uncle called me last weekend to tell me to expect a call from Scott. (Initially, Scott had wanted to talk to me to get advice on how to get The State’s endorsement. I had to break it to him that The State wouldn’t be endorsing in his race. The overworked remnants of an editorial board are only endorsing for governor, attorney general and solicitor.) To cite another connection I have to him: My uncle serves on the board that supervises Scott’s father, who is Director of Disabilities and Special Needs for Marlboro County.
  • By contrast, Seth never knew his father, and his mom was 18 when she had him. He was born in West Virginia and raised in Florida by his mom and aunt. His grandfather was in a pipefitter and a union man, which Seth credits with helping start him down the path to being a Democrat. He also credits his background with having instilled in him a strong work ethic.
  • Seth went to USC on a tennis scholarship, and he made All-American. Scott went to Clemson, like fellow Bennettsville Democrat Doug Jennings.
  • Since I mentioned that I have indirect personal connections to Scott, I should mention that Seth is in my Rotary Club, and like him, my Dad went to a South Carolin college on a tennis scholarship (Presbyterian College). Dad still follows SC tennis, and when he saw his yard signs recently, asked, me, “Isn’t he the tennis player?”
  • Scott is in private practice with Rep. James Smith. Seth is a prosecutor in the 5th Circuit solicitor’s office.
  • Winburn claims the support of both Smiths (James and Kit), as well as former Gov. Jim Hodges and such conservation activists as Ann Timberlake. (He has in the past worked for Hodges and the Coastal Conservation League, and clerked for Ed Cottingham.) In contrast to that constellation of white Democrats, Rose cites the backing of Todd Rutherford, Chris Hart, Vince Ford and I.S. Leevy Johnson. I’m not saying there’s a racial thing going on, but it did strike me that there was that contrast among the first names each cited when I asked who was supporting them.

As for the “issue” that has emerged between the two… Winburn supporters have accused Rose of the “Don Tomlin candidate” because the developer has given his campaign $1,000. This, of course, is muttered darkly by the conservation-minded folk who back Winburn and have long supported Kit Smith. Rose indicates this all took him by surprise. First, he doesn’t personally know Don Tomlin. Then, once the name came up, he did a little research and found that Mr. Tomlin has given to other Democrats as well — including James Smith and Kit Smith, in 2006.

As an issue, that sounds kind of like a wash to me. I see no indication that Rose is another Brian Boyer. Mr. Boyer, if you’ll recall, was the young veteran who actually was in Tomlin’s employ when he ran against Belinda Gergel in 2008. By contrast, Rose is a great admirer of Mrs. Gergel, the historic preservationist. He also says he has worked to obtain limits on development in his community.

So I think those of you who live in Richland County’s 5th District will have to make your decision on the basis of something else. Check out their websites, which are linked from their ads, and from the first reference to their names above.

Seth Rose

Leighton Lord picks up support

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Just had lunch with Leighton Lord, who I hear (according to unpublished polls) is leading the GOP race for attorney general. As we were eating at the Palmetto Club, the news broke that Andy Brack’s Statehouse Report was endorsing him:

In the race for state attorney general, Columbia lawyer Leighton Lord stands out for his vital

management experience. The lead lawyer for bringing Boeing’s billion-dollar investment into the state, he has run a major law firm and knows how to oversee the needs of a multimillion dollar operation like the attorney general’s office.

Lord’s opponents tout their experience in the courtroom, but it’s rare for the state’s chief prosecutor to get before a judge or jury often.  The attorney general’s role is, rather, to pull together the disparate roles of police, prosecutors and other legal entities as a team to fight crime and improve safety. Lord has the pragmatic credentials to get things done and make our state safer without simply locking up more prisoners and throwing away the keys.

That took some of the Republicans at the gathering aback somewhat (Andy Brack? Isn’t he a Democrat?), but Lord was pleased to get the boost.

The gathering was a lot like a Columbia Rotary Club meeting: Gayle Averyt was the host, and was joined by Laine Ligon, Jimmy Derrick, Crawford Clarkson, Martin Moore, John Denise, John Durst, among others. I was there as the guest of ADCO’s Lanier Jones, who had been invited by Gayle.

Now that I’m back at my laptop and can see the item, I see that Andy’s also endorsed Frank Holleman and Brent Nelsen for superintendent of education, and Converse Chellis for treasurer.

These are real people we’re talking about

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This morning, as I was headed to the office after breakfast, a guy on the elevator recognized me and introduced himself. It was a cousin of Will Folks.

Like Will’s Dad, whom I’ve also met, this cousin (whom I’m not going to name because I didn’t think to ask him if he’d mind, and it’s certainly not his fault that his cousin’s in the news) seems to be, and almost certainly is, a nice, reasonable guy who just lives his life and means no one any harm.

And chatting with him I was reminded again of how totally innocent people get splashed by these scandals that they have nothing to do with. Not that this guy complained about his cousin; he did not. But he spoke of how the family was having to make a special effort to keep their 97-year-old grandmother from seeing the news this week. And I sympathized.

I see this all the time, and to some extent, it keeps me grounded. When other people are gleefully chortling over the latest scandal, and presuming to assign the worst motives and actions to everyone involved and dismissing them as though they were abstractions — fictional characters invented for their entertainment or the furtherance of their cause — I remain conscious of the fact that they are real people. And they have connections to other real people who feel the heat from the spotlight.

We’ve all been guilty of such objectification of people in the news. For someone who’s spent a lifetime doing this, dark humor is a sort of defense mechanism against feeling too strongly the human tragedies that we deal in. But something has happened in recent years, with the ubiquity of sources of information, and with the removal of the last vestiges of respect for people’s personal lives: I’ve seen the average consumer of news, particularly the denizens of the blogosphere, become FAR more cynical than most news people.

One reason for that is that journalists actually know the newsmakers. Or writers do, anyway. I’ve noticed since early in my career that the biggest cynics in newsrooms are the editors who are tied to their desks. They see the people whose names appear in headlines as abstractions, as characters in stories, and nothing more. Reporters are more likely to have a complete, flesh-and-blood knowledge of those same people, and to care more about how what they write affects those people. This is at the root of the alienation between reporters and headline writers, for instance. Headline writers can get lazy and exaggerate; reporters have to deal with the fury of those who are mischaracterized.

Anyway, it’s considerations like this that make me absolutely hate stories such as this Haley/Folks mess, and wish I didn’t have to read or think about it (but since it bears on who will be our next governor, I can’t ignore it). I know Nikki. Yeah, I’ve been appalled at the change I’ve seen in her as she has been seduced by demagoguery. But I still hate to see her and her family in this fix. As for Will — well, he’s a somewhat less sympathetic character, no matter who’s telling the truth, and that’s because Will is one of those bloggers who show the most contempt for the human beings he writes about (like the ones I complain about so much). But Will is still a person, and there are other people who are certainly innocent in all this who are effected.

And while I don’t always succeed, I try to keep that in mind.

Virtual Front Page, Thursday, May 27, 2010

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In keeping with my woefully outdated philosophy of what makes a lede story, here is my pseudo-front page for this evening:

  1. Obama Pushes for More Regulation, Extends Oil Drilling Moratorium (WSJ) — Meanwhile, the BBC spin on the story is that “Obama defends oil spill response,” while back at the WSJ‘s opinion pages, Karl Rove is gleefully writing that “Yes, the Gulf Spill Is Obama’s Katrina.”
  2. Setback Delays ‘Top Kill’ Effort to Seal Leaking Oil Well in Gulf (NYT) — Meanwhile, in a related story… “Gulf Spill Bigger Than Valdez, Estimate Shows.”
  3. New U.S. Security Strategy Focuses on Managing Threats (NYT) — It has plenty of slap-Bush lines for President Obama’s own peanut gallery, but also contains strong elements of the pragmatic continuity that I’ve praised in the past (and which drives his base nuts).
  4. Apple Tops Microsoft in the Market (WSJ) — OK, yeah, this is now more than 24 hours old. But I missed it yesterday, so I’m just gonna man up and admit it and run this stale story on my front anyway, because it’s huge. Of course, this still doesn’t mean that Mac won out over PC. It’s a measure of handheld mania, and the fact that Apple always has the hottest such gadgets, from iPod to iPhone to iPad to iPhedupfromhearingaboutit.
  5. ‘Kids Say The Darndest Things’ Host Linkletter Dies (NPR) — Yeah, I didn’t know he was still around, either. He was 97, so he’d been retired awhile.
  6. Website Editors Strive To Rein In Nasty Comments (NPR) — Now here’s a talker that’s near and dear to my own heart.