This just in from Columbia’s mayor-elect, Steve Benjamin:
Columbia, SC – In his continuing effort to bring together a broad cross-section of business, government, neighborhood, and community leaders to help address the key challenges facing our city, Columbia Mayor-elect Steve Benjamin today announced his four Transition Team Co-Chairs as:
· Former Mayor Pro-Tem and Richland County Bar Association President Luther Battiste.
· CoastalStates Bank Executive Vice President & Managing Director and Midlands Technical College Trustee Robert Dozier.
· Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, and director of TheRackesGroup Barbara Rackes.
· Recognized community leader and Columbia Council of Neighborhoods President Bessie Watson.
“Last month, the people of Columbia elected me to bring new ideas, new leadership, and change to City Hall,” Benjamin said. “We have set the bar high. But I am confident that the expertise and dedication these four exceptional men and women bring to this effort will exceed our expectations.”
The four Transition Team Co-Chairs are tasked with making an assessment of the city government’s ability to effectively address citizens’ needs and, in consultation with fellow committee members and city staff, to make recommendations and deliver a report to the Mayor and Council by July 1st.
“This is an opportunity to take stock in the past and to look forward to the challenges ahead,” Benjamin explained. “It’s an opportunity to identify our obstacles while build a consensus so we can overcome them together.”
A full transition committee list including each committee’s chair is expected later this week.
Benjamin was elected on April 20th in a record turnout election and will be sworn in as Mayor of Columbia on June 30.
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS/AP) – Nikki Haley took to the airwaves Monday afternoon to “emphatically” deny a political blogger and former Sanford aide’s claim that he had a romantic relationship with the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2007….
… The Columbia Free Times has “been investigating a story involving an alleged affair between Haley and Folks for several weeks,” and on Monday cited an unnamed source who claimed Folks privately admitted the affair in 2009. “Furthermore, the source … says former Haley staffer B.J. Boling told him Haley had confided in him about the affair around the time Boling was working on her House reelection campaign in 2008,” the Free Times reported.
State Republican Party Chairwoman Karen Floyd criticized the media for covering the story at all, saying in a statement, “South Carolinians deserve a higher level of political discourse than this, and they frankly deserve a press corps that focuses on real, substantive issues rather than on Internet rumor mongering.” Palin also lambasted the “lamestream media” as she defended Haley on Facebook Monday afternoon.
“I’ve been there,” Palin wrote. “Any lies told about you will strengthen your resolve to clean up political and media corruption. You and your supporters will grow stronger through things like this.”
Clue for Sarah Palin: The Free Times is NOT the MSM. It may be a lot of things, good and bad, but it’s not that. I suppose she’s color-blind in that range. But then, she doesn’t read a lot, I hear…
A friend passed me the above video with the commentary, “This is our informed electorate.”
But is it? Really? When I see these kinds of things, I wonder about the selection process. I wonder how many intelligent answers had to be ditched to produce this concentration of utter stupidity. For that matter, I wonder about the initial filter. If a person looks like he or she might have a clue, does the maker of the video simply move on?
If the guy with the microphone saw ME coming, would he bother with me? And if so, would anything I said make the video? Would he keep asking questions until he got me to slip up, hit a vacant spot in my memory, and use only that?
I know that if you ask a harder question out on the street — such as, who is your state legislator — the overwhelming majority of people will not know. I’ve tried sending out a reporter to do that, just to prove a point (namely, that executive power should NOT be vested in the Legislature). I’ve never tried it with easier questions, because I’ve never been interesting in trying to determine whether the man on the street is a COMPLETE idiot.
Finally, if this IS a true picture of the electorate — which I’m still doubting — does it delegitimize the whole republican experiment?
Just to acknowledge the unsavory thing buzzing around on Twitter and the Web this morning (which Doug Ross brings up obliquely on a previous post) — now that the MSM has bowed to the inevitable and reported on it — I provide this place for you to discuss the implications.
I’m not going to mention the particulars. You can find them here, more or less.
Personally, I just hate the fact that I even heard about it. Something like this is to news what “Inglourious Basterds” is to cinema.
At the very last moment, as the DVD was being released, I went to see “Avatar” in 3D last Thursday night.
It certainly wasn’t as good as its besotted admirers would have it. Nor was it as bad as Jeff Vrabel claimed, although I enjoyed his iconoclastic take on it.
On the plus side, I’ve never seen anything like it, in terms of the visuals. It was richly beautiful, in spite of the Viewmaster distraction of 3D. Which is better than it used to be, but still not convincing — yeah, it looks like things exist in more than one plane, but the items that pop out in front seem themselves to be flat, 2D, like figures in a pop-up book, not realistic at all. You are conscious of the artifice of it at all times (not to mention the fact that anything I’m not looking straight at is out of focus — although maybe that was the effect of wearing 3D glasses OVER my prescription specs). If you want to make something seem real, give me the chiaroscuro cinematography of “The Godfather,” which went much further toward making me feel I was there than these cheap tricks.
I’ll also say the premise, the central plot conceit, is also intriguing — the idea of a character projecting his avatar into a reality (as opposed to a computer-generated virtual reality) that he can’t otherwise enter. Although I have to say that it SOUNDED better, when I read it in advance, than it worked in the film.
On the other hand, there’s the plot. As my son said as we left the theater, he thought it was better done in “Dances With Wolves.” I wouldn’t condemn it quite that strongly, since I regard “Dances With Wolves” as one of the worst films ever made (although nowhere near as bad as the David Lynch abomination, “Dune”). The problem with “Wolves” was it’s triteness, exacerbated by the fact that Hollywood acted as though it was profound and original. (Folks, Mark Twain thought the whole “Noble Red Man” theme had been done to death by James Fenimore Cooper in the first half of the 19th century, and I’m inclined to agree.) At least “Avatar” gives it a new twist, and the dazzling visuals help you forget that you’re watching yet another screed on how wicked white men are — especially corporate white men and military white men. Got it. People in positions of power do bad things sometimes. Noted.
It was particularly interesting for me that I saw this in the middle of reading Flags of Our Fathers, a thoughtful examination of a time in which this country actually celebrated its military and its core culture, to the point of exaggeration that was painful to the subjects of adulation — especially the real-life Noble Red Man Ira Hayes, who ended up drinking himself to death back in the days before we invented the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress. (Fascinating anecdote illustrating the complexity of actual heroism: When fellow flag-raiser Rene Gagnon was identified and was about to be whisked from the troop ship to Washington to be celebrated, Hayes warned him that if Gagnon told the brass that he, Hayes, was also one of the flag-raisers, he would kill him. When Gagnon ratted him out anyway, Hayes didn’t kill him, but never spoke to him as he gradually killed himself.)
But if you set all that aside, “Avatar” was quite enjoyable. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, without the distraction of 3D. I’m leaving it in my Netflix queue.
Speaking of Netflix, I’ll say this for “Avatar”: It’s far better than the execrable “Inglourious Basterds.” I’ve never liked Tarantino, but this took my dislike to a new level. Even as satire, even as self-indulgence, this was badly done, as Tarantino went out of his way to trample on any chance that the film had to redeem itself on even the lowest levels. The title, complete with deliberate misspelling, does capture the film perfectly. I’d far rather see a trite re-imagining of the Noble Red Man theme than this desecration of everything in sight, including the Holocaust. That’s all I’m going to say about it.
On the other hand, to end on a high note, the wife and I (thank goodness I wasted my time on “Basterds” while she was out of town) watched “Fever Pitch” — the original with Colin Firth, not the American remake — Saturday night, and it was wonderful. It made me wonder how much better “High Fidelity” might have been had it adhered to the original setting of Nick Hornby’s masterpiece. But then there would have been no Jack Black as Barry, and pop culture would have been poorer…
You know, I don’t know if I can abide seeing one more mailer (such as the one above that came in the mail today) or yard sign trumpeting to the world that the candidate in question is a “Conservative Republican.”
You know, as opposed to all those liberal Republicans running around over here in Lexington County.
This is not new, but in the era of Nikki Haley and the Tea Party (which I’m considering using as the name of my new band, if Nikki will agree to front it), I’m hearing it more and more. And in the more extreme cases, such as with Nikki herself, “Conservative” is being touted as something apart from Republicans, mere Republicans not being worthy, you see.
Set aside the appalling notion that to the voters these folks are reaching out to, ordinary South Carolina Republicans just aren’t right-wing enough. I mean, think about that for a minute…
That’s long enough. Thankfully, S.C. Democrats aren’t given to this sort of redundancy, this rococo gilding of the ideological lily. If I saw one sign in my community that claimed to be for a “Liberal Democrat,” I believe I’d run for the hills. That would be just one extremism too many for me.
Remind me, if I run for office, to put “liberal republican” or “conservative democrat” (note the lower case; God forbid I should be mistaken for an adherent of one of those granfalloons). And I think I’ll refer to my opposition as “fascist anarchists,” to use Ferris Bueller’s term.
Slow news day today. Lots of sort of important stuff going on, as always, but if you peruse the main pages of the biggest outlets, you find very little that would normally make a front page. And there’s NOTHING out there local. Here’s what I find:
Senate Passes Financial Reform Bill (NYT) — This is kind of old now — it happened last night — but I didn’t have it in yesterday’s report, and things are sufficiently slow today that I’m glad to have it.
Drop-side cribs to be banned (WashPost) — “There have been few too many recalls and far too many deaths from defective cribs in recent years,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the safety commission.
Judges Rule Against Detainees Held at Afghan Air Base (NYT) — “A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that prisoners being held without trial in Afghanistan by the military have no right to challenge their imprisonment in American civilian courts. The decision, overturning a lower court ruling in the detainees’ favor, was a victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for extended periods without judicial oversight.”
Clinton’s Road Toward Punishing Pyongyang Runs Through China (WSJ) — “We cannot allow this attack on South Korea to go unanswered by the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said Friday. “The evidence is overwhelming and condemning. The torpedo that sunk the Cheonan and took the lives of 46 South Korean sailors was fired by a North Korean submarine.”
OK, that ended up being a fairly newsy page. I guess I was mostly reacting to the fact that there wasn’t much actually breaking in the last few hours, and I like these things to be timely …
I keep hearing that the Club for Growth is on Converse Chellis’ case for some raises given without performance reviews. I have no idea whether there is a problem there or not (I had trouble finding any elaboration, although I guess it’s out there somewhere).
But I do know this: In my experience (close to 30 years in management), performance reviews are THE biggest waste of time in corporate America. I have wasted YEARS of my life — late nights at the office because of the impossibility of getting this pointless crapola done during the regular working day because there’s actual WORK to do — filling out those blasted things, which sometimes go on for 10 pages or more, with essay question after essay question.
It made for a particularly vicious form of madness when I was a supervising editor in a newsroom and didn’t have a private office. Whenever you saw the metro editor or government editor or photo editor or whichever editor trying to hide in a dark corner of the newsroom at an odd hour, hunkered over a computer muttering, looking like he’d bite the head off anyone who bothered him, he was probably doing performance reviews.
Basically, I always sort of figured that if the employee didn’t know what I thought of the job he or she was doing, then somebody wasn’t paying attention, and probably would ignore the eval as well — because I’ve never been shy about telling people on the spot what I think about what they’re doing.
It particularly became absurd when I headed the editorial department, full of very senior people who usually worked out the kinks in their job performance years earlier, else they wouldn’t have gotten there. Sure, we all have flaws, but at that point in your career they’re pretty permanent, more in the nature of fundamental elements of one’s character. So you end up saying the same things year after year — he’s great at this, she’s not so great at that — and it looks like either you’re a lazy manager (failing to come up with fresh observations), or the employee is obstinately refusing to improve. When the truth of the matter is, the reason you’ve been employing the person all these years is that his or her good qualities far outweigh the bad.
I lessened the pain of doing the blasted things by inventing my own evaluation system, which I got away with in my last few years at the paper. Short and to the point: I’d list three strengths (no more than a line or two on each), three weaknesses, three accomplishments since the last review, and three goals for the coming year. And I’d have the employee do the same, and then we’d sit down and compare them, and come up with a synthesis for the official report. This didn’t take so long, but I still hated it.
Evaluations became even more onerous in recent years when, more often than not, there was no raise attached to them. At least it gave me an incentive to get them done at some point because I knew I was holding up the subject’s raise. With no raise attached, my only motivation was to end the nagging from HR. And I can take a LOT of nagging.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I was thrilled to read a review this morning (in the Club for Growth’s favorite newspaper, ironically enough) of a book entitled “GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW!” An excerpt:
This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities… How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces?
Amen to that. I don’t know anything about the authors, Samuel A. Culbert and Lawrence Rout, but as far as I’m concerned they are geniuses. Someone needs to give them a good review, and a nice raise…
There’s this joke… you’ve probably heard it. Basically, scientists tell God they don’t need him any more because they’ve figured out the secrets of life, from DNA to cloning to whatever, and they know how to create a man from scratch. So God says, let’s see. And the scientists say OK, we just need to gather up the right minerals and chemicals to synthesize what we need, and… God says, “Hold on, there: Use your own dirt.”
Anyway, they’re still using God’s dirt for raw material, but science moved a little closer to making the joke’s scenario a reality, with the announcement of the first “artificial cells.”
The Church (on this blog, The Church is always the Roman Catholic Church) has weighed in on the subject already, with a basic This all sounds very well and good, but do you really know what you’re doing? (“Church warns cell scientists not to play God”) Which I think has merit, as reactions go.
To put it another way, in hyping what a big deal this is, one of the science boffins said the following:
“This is a tour de force and a landmark paper … that is akin to Jurassic Park or Frankenstein,” said Dr. Anthony C. Forster, a molecular biologist at Vanderbilt University who is an expert in the field of artificial life forms. “I think it will probably be regarded as the dawn of synthetic genomics.”
Yeah. Exactly.
I’m not worried about an 8 foot tall guy staggering around with a bolt through his neck. I’m more concerned about a microbe with unintentional effects — saying, wiping out all life on the planet, or other inconveniences.
Oh, I’m sure the scientists are all being careful and oh-so-responsible. But… do they really know what they’re doing? And as the knowledge spreads, and more and more people learn to do it and try different tricks with it, and the probability that someone will screw up majorly increases….
Maybe I’m just a worrier. Maybe I should just adopt Alfred E. Neuman‘s stance, since the toothpaste is already out of the tube.
State Senator Vincent Sheheen has now opened a modest lead over two other hopefuls in the Democratic Primary contest for governor of South Carolina with less than three weeks to go. But nearly one-out-of-three primary voters remain undecided.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Democratic Primary Voters in South Carolina finds Sheheen with 30% support, closely followed by State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex with 22%. State Senator Robert Ford trails with four percent (4%) of the vote.
Twelve percent (12%) prefer some other candidate in the race, with another 32% undecided.
This, of course, is what I’ve been saying here for some time, although I had little to go by other than his leading in fund-raising and my gut — and the fact that Jim Rex seems to have dropped off the radar screen. I’d try to sell him an ad to give him a boost, but at this point I’d feel a little guilty taking his money. But only a little guilty.
I’d had a similar gut feeling about Nikki. Rasmussen seems to be working full-time to confirming my gut impressions.
SC Immigration Hearing Gets Unruly (thestate.com) — Security had to come in to deal with an angry crowd. Which is sort of what you get when you bring up an issue like this for the sake of political theater, with no actual chance of passing anything this year.
May 18, 2010 · Last weekend, the Morgantown newspaper The Dominion Post ran a front-page story about the governor signing into law, Erin’s law. But the picture that accompanied the story has turned into a news story of its own.
The law toughens penalties for deadly hit and run car accidents and is named in honor of Erin Keener, a WVU student from Marion County who died in a hit and run accident in 2005.
The Dominion Post decided to remove from the picturethree delegates who sponsored Erin’s Law…
And why did the paper do it? Get this: “due to the newspaper’s policy not to publish pictures of candidates running for re-election during the political season.”
I kid you not. Now you know why, during my career in newspapers, I was generally opposed to hard-and-fast rules about what we would run and what we wouldn’t. They are no substitute for what SHOULD be an editor’s most important asset: judgment.
What a classic case of rigid adherence to a simplistic rule leading to a stupid, laughable, unethical action.
Watched “The Hurt Locker” last night. It was good. I’m going to give it three stars on Netflix.
But you know, I would think that a “Best Picture” winner would be a four-star, if not five. So I was disappointed on that count. Among movies I’ve seen recently, it was better than “Men Who Stare At Goats,” “Public Enemies” and “The Invention of Lying,” but not as good as “Up In The Air” (which was awesome) or “Lars and the Real Girl.”
Not that I expect much from the recommendation of Oscar. I’ve pretty much discounted the judgment of the “Academy” ever since it chose “Shakespeare In Love” as Best Picture over “Saving Private Ryan” and “Life is Beautiful.”
SPOILER ALERT: While the makers of this film worked hard to avoid conventions and surprise you, I saw the surprises coming, and saw how the director was working unsuccessfully to prevent me from seeing it. For instance, in the first scene, as you’re being introduced to this bomb-disposal unit, the viewer is manipulated into seeing a certain character as the protagonist: The camera lingers more on his face, he does and says more to reveal character, his words and actions drive the action forward. Also, he’s the only actor I’ve seen before, although I couldn’t quite place him (turns out it’s Guy Pearce, who starred in the very impressive “Memento”). And of course HE is the one killed, which hits you with more impact than if he were a faceless extra, and brings home to you from the very start that any of these guys could be blown to bits at any moment through the rest of the show. Well done, but I saw it coming.
Other things are done well: David Morse in a bit part as the overbearingly enthusiastic, ubermacho colonel who is deeply impressed at an exhibition of bravado by one of the main characters. (That guy always impresses me, from the bad cop on “House” to understated dignity he brought to George Washington in “John Adams.”)
It’s arty — which might be what appealed to the Academy. And thankfully, it’s free of antiwar preachiness, which I have to admit I sort of expected, given Hollywood’s enthusiasm. (Yeah, some might see the violence and the constant tension not knowing which of the civilians around you is really an insurgent as being an argument against our being there, but it’s exactly what I expect war to be like. Antiwar folks probably expect folks like me to think war is like a John Wayne movie, but I probably have an uglier picture of it in my mind than they do, because I read and think about it more. I’m reading Flags of Our Fathers at the moment, and rewatching “The Pacific.”)
But in the end — and yeah, I saw the ending coming, too (you knew what that guy was going to do) — I’m just not going “Wow.”
It’s going to be interesting having Steve Benjamin as mayor. His mind is just going a mile a minute spotting opportunities, making connections, such as this one reported by Mike Fitts:
Columbia already has the right major tenant to go into the former SCANA Corp. space on Main Street, according to mayor-elect Steve Benjamin: He wants the building to be the new home of the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Benjamin hopes the school could work out a long-term lease with the Palmetto Center, the building that now has about 450,000 vacant square feet in the heart of downtown. A long-term tenant such as the law school should be appealing to the owners, Benjamin said, and would keep the building in private hands and on the tax rolls….
If the school were there, it would be surrounded by the offices of many of the state’s biggest law firms and several courts, including the S.C. Supreme Court, Benjamin said.“It’s a perfect place for law students,” he said.
Benjamin said he has met with the building’s owner and real estate agent to pitch the plan. The building could be bought by a new owner and renovated for substantially less than it would cost USC to build a new school, he said.
Moving it there “would mean giving Main Street a big old shot of adrenalin,” Benjamin said. He compares the potential impact on downtown to what the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought to that city….
For Haley, a bad day. The tea party simply has not caught on. Haley cannot turn the numbers out nor can she draw the bucks in (with the exception of Mark Sanford’s Club for Growth disreputably non-transparent $400k contribution)….
But on Saturday morning, May 15, 24 days out from the primary, Haley is visably collapsing. Mark Sanford’s cash will make an effort to prop her up, but you can stick a fork in her. She’s done.
I thought that reader was dead wrong, and that the opposite was true, but rather than spend time arguing on that thread, I wrote another post in which I went on at great length about how depressing I found her rally with Sarah Palin to be. I felt that I was watching a candidate coming into her own, surging in confidence and energy. (And the depressing thing is that that is bad news for South Carolina, and I sincerely doubted my ability to persuade her supporters of that — they seemed immune to reason.) But it was just a gut thing, based on all my years of experience. I had no way to back it up.
With South Carolina’s Republican Primary for Governor less than three weeks away, State Representative Nikki Haley, coming off a fresh endorsement by Sarah Palin, now leads the GOP pack.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary voters shows Haley earning 30% support. She’s followed by State Attorney General Henry McMaster who picks up 19% and Congressman Gresham Barrett with 17%. Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer captures 12% of the vote.
Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate in the race, but nearly one-in-five potential primary voters (18%) remain undecided.
The new findings mark a dramatic turn of events for Haley who ran fourth in March with just 12% support.r McMaster earned 21% of the vote at that time, with Bauer at 17% and Barrett at 14%.
Of course, from a national perspective, it would look like the deciding factor was Sarah Palin. But there’s a lot more going on than that. Some reasons why I’m not a bit surprised at these poll numbers:
Yes, the Sarah Palin endorsement, which creates excitement among certain strains of the Republican Party. Mrs. Palin had never been to SC, and her coming her to endorse Nikki was bound to create a sensation.
The support of ReformSC, the organization that exists to promote the Mark Sanford agenda. These folks have money, and they are determined to continue to hold onto the governor’s office, as evidenced by their expenditure of $400,000 on an ad portraying Nikki as a sort of Joan of Arc of transparent government. A very effective ad, far better than the one TV ad that Nikki actually lays claim to, which is terribly off-putting. And note that this poll was in the field May 17, two days before a judge ordered that ad to be pulled.
The Jenny Sanford endorsement (or rather, since Jenny endorsed her sometime back, her active participation of recent days). No, that’s not a positive to me, because I know that Jenny was always the brains behind Mark Sanford and his extreme views. The last thing South Carolina needs is another governor brought to you by Jenny Sanford. But the bizarre thing is that thanks to their family psychodrama, Jenny Sanford’s stock has risen in the public marketplace even as Mark’s has fallen. So having Jenny out there stumping for her is a big plus.
All the coverage in recent days of debate in the Legislature about Nikki’s signature issue, roll-call voting. It’s almost like the state Senate were working in cahoots with ReformSC (which I assure you it is not) to keep Nikki in the news in a way that reflects well upon her.
Just sheer buzz — based on all of the above, feeding upon itself. This has always been a race in which any one of four candidates could win, and no one was breaking away from the pack. So anyone having this much buzz, generated by all of the above factors, this late in the game, is likely to surge. And I suppose I’ve been adding to it in my own small way — I’ve written more about Nikki the last few days than all the other candidates put together. And the reason why was because I thought she was surging, and scrutiny was warranted.
Finally, a change in the candidate herself. Her poise, her confidence, her energy at that Palin rally was something to behold. It was kind of like a scene in “A Star is Born,” or maybe “All About Eve,” in which the shy, demure ingenue suddenly becomes the big star with all the mannerisms of power. This may not have been apparent to most people, but there are two things that made it stand out for me — I knew Nikki when she (VERY recently) emerged onto the scene, and I have a lot of experience watching candidates in person. You get so you can tell when one is on the way up. The aura of confidence, of momentum, is both an effect of rising, and a cause of rising further. Like buzz, confidence feeds on itself.
So now, Nikki Haley is the candidate to beat in the GOP race for governor. And I’m not surprised.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – A South Carolina judge has ordered a political group spending heavily to promote Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley to pull its television ads supporting her campaign.
Spartanburg County Judge James M. Hayes issued the order Wednesday at the request of Haley primary opponent U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett and three donors to ReformSC….
Did you see that coming? I didn’t. I sort of thought the Mark Sanford allies at ReformSC were going to keep getting away with pumping $400,000 into Nikki’s campaign.
As for the legal issues involved, here’s an excerpt from an earlier story by The State‘s John O’Connor:
A rival of Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley said television ads featuring the state representative and purchased by an outside group might violate state election laws.
Terry Sullivan, campaign adviser to gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, said the campaign is studying whether the ads, featuring Haley and her signature issue of roll-call voting in the Legislature, violate state election laws. The chairman of the group running the ads, ReformSC, said he was “very comfortable” with their content….
Third-party advertising, such as that by ReformSC, a 501(c)(4) educational nonprofit, is a gray area in politics. Such groups are limited in what they can say about candidates, with a distinction drawn around ads using so-called “magic words” such as “vote for” or “vote against.” Those rules have been clouded by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including a 2007 decision involving a Wisconsin right-to-life group. That decision requires issue ads “take no position on a candidate’s character, qualifications, or fitness for office,” among other requirements.
Such third-party groups are also forbidden from coordinating with campaigns.
ReformSC chairman Pat McKinney said the group has followed its attorney’s advice, and that the Haley campaign was not aware the group was filming or airing the ads. Haley spokesman Tim Pearson said the campaign did not know of the ads, or that the tea party rally was being filmed. Haley’s appearance at the rally had been advertised for several weeks.
This morning, I was talking to someone about this feature, and explaining the origins of it and the philosophy of news that underlies it, and it occurred to me that I should always begin this report with a link to that explanation. Or at least, partial explanation. I think I need to develop an explanatory page in connection with my upcoming redesign.
Now, for today’s report:
U.S. Inflation at 44-Year Low as Retail Prices Fall (NYT) — I’m leading with this because it’s a financial story I actually understand, as opposed to the one that follows it (which some sites are leading with). Consumer prices actually fell in April.
Besides, I think it’s beyond ridiculous to try to draw conclusions from afar, finding artificial intellectual constructs to impose upon those elections to draw conclusions about unrelated matters — such as the national mood, or what is likely to happen in races that are our business. Such as, a Republican wins a race in state X, and therefore the national electorate likes Republicans and woe unto Democrats everywhere. I happen to believe that people make up their minds for a host of complex reasons that can’t be fully divined even if you’re standing next to the voter at the time, much less from afar. And to draw a conclusion based on how 51 percent of the voters in some far-off place reacted to the very specific choice they had between two very specific candidates, when that result involved separate, independent decisions made by thousands of people you don’t even know, which means it involves millions of unknowable variables, is laughable. Or would be, if the oh-so-serious pronouncements that result weren’t so harmful to public understanding.
And yes, I DO struggle to analyze elections I AM following, and share my feeble reflections so that y’all can shoot at them and maybe, just maybe, that ferment will lead to some greater understanding for all of us going forward. But I am loathe to do it with races about which I know little that would not fit on a bumper sticker.
But since folks seem to love to discuss these things, rather than have y’all go off and discuss it at some unsavory blog where you might pick up some nasty social disease or something, I provide you with this safe environment to have your discussion.
The big news came in the Democratic contest for the Senate in Pennsylvania, where five-term incumbent Arlen Specter — who quit the GOP last year because he was not going to survive the primary — wound up losing anyway, despite the backing of President Obama, Gov. Ed Rendell and assorted party luminaries. Specter, 80, was never able to convince his new party that he was one of them. Much of the credit for that goes to a savvy media effort by his opponent, two-term Rep. Joe Sestak, who ran ads reminding Democrats that six years ago Specter was warmly endorsed by another president, George W. Bush, and that he spent years voting for Republican Supreme Court justices. Those Democrats with longer memories still harbored anger over the way Specter questioned Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas court confirmation hearings back in 1991.
Sestak received 54 percent of the vote to Specter’s 46 percent, ending Specter’s long career in politics. Specter, in conceding defeat, pledged to support Sestak in the general election….
If the Democratic Party establishment took it on the chin in the Keystone State, Republicans got the same message in Kentucky. There, local powerhouse Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, muscled out two-term Sen. Jim Bunning (R) from a re-election bid and helped install Secretary of State Trey Grayson as his would-be successor. But GOP voters weren’t buying, and instead gave first-time candidate and ophthamologist Rand Paul a smashing victory, telling McConnell and party leaders that the old way of doing things was no longer acceptable. Even though Grayson was not the incumbent, he bore the brunt of the anti-establishment anger. Paul, the son of Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, utilized his father’s sizable presence on the Web to make him financially competitive with Grayson….
The results were less definitive in Arkansas, but what happened there can’t be comforting to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a two-term Democrat whose avowed centrism — in a state that gave Obama just 39 percent — didn’t go over well in the primary. She managed 45 percent of the vote, to 43 percent for Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. And because neither candidate received a majority — a third candidate, conservative businessman D.C. Morrison, pulled in about 13 percent — Lincoln and Halter continue their battle for three more weeks, in a June 8 primary runoff.
Just thought I’d bring to your attention Cindi Scoppe’s calm, rational, even-handed take on the Nikki Haleys we have come to know — the appealing, breath-of-fresh-air neophyte lawmaker (vestiges of whom we still see today) and the demagogic ideologue seeking to carry the Mark Sanford banner into South Carolina’s future (which we see far too much of these days).
The value in reading Cindi’s column is that it is rich in specifics, listing Nikki’s positions on quite a number of issues. That’s something you don’t get so much from me. I form a holistic impression of a candidate or an issue, and hold forth on the conclusions I’ve reached. Cindi shares her reporting, point by point. When we went into an editorial board meeting with a candidate, Cindi would have a list of specific questions, so that she could test the candidate against specific positions that we held. I would ask the candidate to start talking (telling us whatever he or she deemed most important), and I would ask questions suggested by what I heard. It made for good teamwork. Cindi made sure we touched all the important bases; I explored unanticipated territory to learn things we would not have learned taking the purely task-oriented approach.
So it is that I think it’s valuable for you, the wise reader, to set my own rambling gestalten observations beside Cindi’s businesslike approach as you move along your own journey in making up your mind about Nikki Haley.
So, without violating Fair Use (I hope), I invite you to go read Cindi’s entire column, which goes from the good…
… She is charming, engaging and smart. She is refreshingly passionate and energetic and not about to put up with the games at the State House. She can explain problems in a way to get voters fired up (“It’s just wrong; it’s wrong all day long,” she says of school administrators’ opposition to a bill that would cost them money by jerking the junk food out of schools). That’s no small thing in a state as apathetic as ours.
She’s all about comprehensive reform — of the tax code, of the executive branch of government, of the school funding system — and her support for those vital changes predates her campaign, and seems far more heartfelt than her GOP opponents….
… to the bad…
… These relatively minor misrepresentations are merely the ones that jumped out at me in a single meeting with our board, and this pattern is disturbingly similar to Mr. Sanford’s signature approach: Take a legitimate problem that’s a bit too complicated or wonky to appeal to the masses, and tart it up to make it look like something it’s not.
Ms. Haley is rigidly ideological. All the Republican candidates support taxpayer-funded “choice” for private schools, but only she would veto a bill expanding public school choice if it didn’t help prop up private schools. All opposed the federal stimulus, but only she opposed accepting the money that we’re on the hook to pay for regardless, because doing so blew the “opportunity” to force the Legislature to make structural reforms….
… to this conclusion:
…When I first met Ms. Haley in 2004, I found her a bit green. But she clearly had a good head on her shoulders and was one of the best new candidates we met that year. As I wrote in our first endorsement of her, she was “so focused on keeping an open mind and being persuaded by facts rather than personality, preconceived notions and party dogma that she’s bound to make smart choices,” and “what she calls a business-like approach strikes us as merely a commonsense, proactive approach that people of any political persuasion should be able to take for granted.”
I wish the Nikki Haley who’s running for governor reminded me more of that person and less of Mark Sanford….
