TheState.com: Brad Warthen

The Obama Effect

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:13 EDT

WEEKS SUCH as the one just past — in which I am still mired as I write this — do not lend themselves to complete, extended thought of the sort that leads to coherent columns.

But when have I ever let that stop me?

We’re in the middle of candidate interviews for the June primaries — 50-plus meetings with folks seeking their respective parties’ nominations for the state House, state Senate, county councils, sheriff, clerk of court, and on and on ....

But as disparate as these candidates and their goals and issues may be, sometimes themes emerge, or seem to emerge.

Here’s one, which I’ll call The Obama Effect, just to have something trendy to call it.

Act your age: Join the Grownup Party

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:54 EDT

YOU’VE HEARD of the “UnParty” and the “Energy Party” — at least, you have if you’ve kept an eye on this space for any length of time.

But I have yet another name for my never-ending battle against the foolishness of the Democratic and Republican parties: the Grownup Party.

What is the Grownup Party? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t based on age. If it were, John McCain would win the party’s nomination this year, hands down. But John McCain recently proposed something that violated everything the Grownup Party stands for: a summerlong gasoline-tax vacation, which treats the voters of this country like children: You don’t like paying those mean ol’ nasty gas prices? Awww. Here’s a lollipop. Hillary Clinton likewise offended GP sensibilities by endorsing the McCain plan. Barack Obama, the youngest candidate out there, was the only one acting like a Grownup. (Although he did vote for a similar tax holiday as an Illinois state legislator. Presumably, he’s matured since then.)

Why do Grownups not like the gas tax vacation? Sigh. Because they understand that if it has any effect on the market at all, it will encourage more fuel consumption during the busy summer months, which is bad enough in itself, but even worse in that increased demand leads to higher prices. And that way the money will go to the oil companies (it was reported last week that investors were disappointed because Exxon Mobil made a profit of only $10.9 billion in the first quarter), to petrodictators and to terrorists, instead of into the U.S. Treasury — that is, our treasury.

Which brings us to something else about Grownups — they understand that in America, the government is us, rather than being some menacing thing out there, and that we’re very fortunate to live in this country at this time rather than in Russia under the czars — or under Vladimir Putin, for that matter. And we’re especially fortunate not to live in a place where there is no government, such as Somalia under the warlords.

Act your age: Join the Grownup Party

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:04 EDT

YOU’VE HEARD of the “UnParty” and the “Energy Party” — at least, you have if you’ve kept an eye on this space for any length of time.

But I have yet another name for my never-ending battle against the foolishness of the Democratic and Republican parties: the Grownup Party.

Waiting for Pennsylvania to buckle down and decide

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:16 EDT

LATE ONE Monday morning several weeks ago in a small-town diner in central Pennsylvania, I looked up from my paper to see that I was the last customer at the counter. Just the one waitress, the coffee pot and me.

Filling the silence, I asked for a refill. Then I asked for her thoughts on the upcoming titanic battle in which she and her fellow Pennsylvanians would get to choose the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

She didn’t have any. Yeah, she knew there was something like that going on, and that some people were really excited, but she had made no effort to follow it. She wasn’t dismissive, and she was willing to hear me talk about it, but to her it was neither here nor there. Some customers want coffee. Others don’t. Some want to talk politics. Whatever.

This was disconcerting. I looked around the way you do when you’re thinking, somebody back me up here. But it was just her and me. And there was something about the moment — she was so matter-of-fact — that made me feel like I was the one who had to explain himself.

So I did, at some length. I even confessed that I actually made my living caring about elections and such, thinking and talking and writing about them, which as I said it sounded ludicrous. She just nodded. Some collect stamps; others watch birds. This guy’s into politics. Whatever.

Why can’t we be smart like our sister?

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:16 EDT

THINK OF South Carolina as a restless schoolboy. He doesn’t test well, but he’s got loads of potential; everybody says so. He’s a well-meaning kid, but has an attention-deficit problem. There he sits, as far to the back of the class as he can get away with. As the teacher drones on about science and stuff, he wonders whether he can get away with spending his lunch money on candy again. Then, just as he’s turned to calculating the number of days left until school is out and he can go to the beach (he’s very good at this sort of math), his reverie is rudely interrupted.

The teacher stands over him, her eyes just boring into him over the glasses on the end of her nose. She speaks directly to him, demanding to know, “Why can’t you be smart like your sister?”

The poor kid hears that a lot.

My own rather feckless, aimless mind (I was born here, you know) has been running along these lines all week, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how well our smart sister has applied herself. Not my sister, personally, but South Carolina’s. Her name is Queensland, and she’s our sister state in Australia.

Her former premier, Peter Beattie, spoke at my Rotary meeting Monday, although I didn’t realize it at the time because I slipped out of the meeting early (I’m telling you, I am that boy). Mr. Beattie is the one who suggested the whole “sister-state” economic development relationship when he was in office back in the ’90s. He got the idea after a visit here in 1996. He had come to study how our state had taken advantage of the Atlanta Olympics, serving as a training site and hosting the women’s marathon trials. He hoped his state could do the same with the Sydney games.

On Saturdays, you’ll find us on the Web

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:14 EDT

SINCE YOU’RE reading this, we can assume you found us in our new location. Actually, Page D2 is sort of an old location for the Sunday editorial page. We were here for many years before jumping to the A section a little more than a year ago.

Being back on D2 feels like home to me; I hope it will make our pages more convenient each week for you as well.

But my purpose today is not to talk about a change already made, but one coming up. And this one is going to feel a lot less familiar to all of us.

Starting six days from now, we will no longer publish opinion and commentary pages on Saturdays in The State. Instead, we’ll unveil a new Web page featuring content of the sort that we would have published in the paper, only more of it. The new page will be called “Saturday Opinion Extra.”

Why are we doing this? Two reasons, which I’ll keep as simple as possible:

An ‘exit interview’ with the governor’s right-hand man

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:12 EDT

MY BEST CONTACT in the governor’s office left Mark Sanford’s employ last week, which is bad news for me. The jury is still out on whether it’s a good thing for South Carolina.

The jury in this case will be the voters of S.C. Senate District 46 in Beaufort County. Tom Davis, formerly chief of staff to Mr. Sanford, will oppose Sen. Catherine Ceips in the Republican primary in June. I have no idea which should win; we’ll have our hands full on the editorial board just trying to endorse in primaries for Midlands districts.

But Tom dropped by our offices on his way out of town last week, and I thought I’d share with you some observations from what one might term this “exit interview” — less for the light it sheds on a Senate contest, and more for what they tell us about the guy who’s been the governor’s point man for most of his time in office.

You will have gathered from previous columns that I am, shall we say, disappointed in this governor. But Tom Davis has always impressed me with his passionate support of his boss. He is so earnest and so insistent in his faithful advocacy — from taking flak from lawmakers without resentment to sending me e-mails so intensely detailed in their rebuttal of criticism that I have to set them aside until I can find the time — that you can’t help but respect and like the guy, even when you disagree.

The five issues he says he most wants to address distill some of the best things the governor has at least theoretically stood for (with a hint here and there of the worst). They also remind us how little has been achieved under this governor, despite Tom’s efforts:

The hottest City Council race money can buy

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:13 EDT

MY QUOTE of the week — I don’t usually name a quote of the week, but I’ll make an exception — is from Charles T. “Bud” Ferillo:

“We will not be outspent.”

Bud was speaking in his capacity as campaign consultant to Belinda Gergel, who is seeking the 3rd District Columbia City Council seat being vacated by Anne Sinclair. This will, by all accounts, be the most expensive City Council district race ever in Columbia, with most of it spent by Ms. Gergel and rival Brian Boyer. A third candidate, Reed Swearingen, is running a much lower-key campaign.

Mr. Boyer started running a TV ad Wednesday depicting photos of him as a Dreher High School athlete and Army officer serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In all, he plans to spend $50,000 on television between now and the April 1 election, out of a total campaign budget of $130,000 to $140,000.

Belinda Gergel has raised $164,000, and had not intended to use any of it for TV, but that changed this past week — her own campaign commercial started airing early Friday morning. (You can see both ads, plus video from our endorsement interviews with the candidates, on my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.)

Tax cigarettes more, but not because a poll said so

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:57 EST

WHAT DO YOU think of the results of the latest Winthrop/ETV poll of South Carolinians, released late last week?

Here’s what I think: Thank goodness the founders of this country bequeathed us a republic rather than a system of direct democracy, and those who devised our state system sorta, kinda went along with that.

You say that’s not what you thought? Well, let’s look back at a couple of the poll’s findings:

• Almost three-fourths of respondents approve of raising the state’s tax on cigarettes. Given a choice between using the proceeds to pay for health care for the poor or the governor’s proposal to reduce income taxes, five times as many chose paying for Medicaid.

• Asked whether the governor should be allowed to appoint executive agency heads who are now popularly elected, three-fourths said no, they’d rather keep electing them.

Sanford fails to derail progress — this time

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:13 EST

LATE WEDNESDAY, I thought I had come up with an excuse to say something encouraging about Gov. Mark Sanford.

Such opportunities come so seldom that I didn’t want this idea to get away from me. I sent a note to my colleagues to enlist their help in remembering: “Should we do some kind of attaboy on the governor using his bully pulpit for this good cause (as opposed to some of the others he is wont to push)?” I was referring to his efforts to jawbone the Legislature into meaningful reform of our DUI law.

Moments later, I read the governor’s guest column on our op-ed page about a flat tax, which was his latest attempt to slip through an income tax cut, which at times seems to be the only thing he cares about doing as governor. This chased thoughts of praise from my mind.

For the gazillionth time, he cited Tom Friedman in a way that would likely mortify the columnist and author. His “argument,” if you want to call it that: Since The World Is Flat, folks on the other side of the world are going to get ahead of us if we take a couple of hours to pull together our receipts and file a tax return. Really. “Rooting around shoeboxes of receipts” once a year was going to do us in. (And never mind the fact that most paperwork is done on the federal return, with the state return piggybacking on that.)

Then, he argued that his plan for cutting the income tax (which was his point, not avoiding the onerous filing) was necessary to offset a proposed cigarette tax increase. The alternative would be “to grow government,” which is how he describes using revenue to get a three-to-one federal match to provide health care for some of our uninsured citizens.

The real split in American politics

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:13 EST

LATE ON SUPER Tuesday, I was typing on my blog in one room while Hillary Clinton was addressing her supporters on the TV in another.

I couldn’t hear every word, but the ones that did cut through were telling:

Now, we know the Republicans won’t give up the White House without a fight. Well, let me be clear — I won’t let anyone swift boat this country’s future.

“Republicans.” “Fight.” “Swift boat.” Terms calculated to stir the blood of the Angry Faithful. Then, later: “Together, we’re going to take back America.”

There was kinder, gentler stuff (if I’m allowed to borrow language from that other side) in the speech, about health care for all and supporting our veterans and helping the powerless. But Barack Obama talks about that stuff, too. Since these primaries are about choosing one or the other, one listens for the differences.

Give me that old-time conservatism

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:15 EST

THE IDEOLOGUES in the Republican Party — you know, the ones who don’t care who can actually become president, as long as their candidate thinks exactly the way they do about everything — don’t know whether to spit or go blind with John McCain as their presumptive nominee.

And I gotta tell ya, I’m loving it. My happiness will be complete once the “anger” faction of the Democratic Party is similarly discombobulated by having Barack Obama as its nominee. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves on that.

My other favorite candidate, John McCain (The State has endorsed both him and Sen. Obama), may not quite have the Republican nomination sewn up, but he’s close enough to it to give the more objectionable elements within his party considerable indigestion. True, Mitt Romney is doing everything he possibly can to stop the McCain bandwagon, spending $1 million on ads in California alone.

But while this moment of promise lasts, let’s savor it.

A colleague who listens to such things says right-wing talk radio is abuzz with apocalyptic rantings about the End Times for the GOP, which sounds lovely to me, UnParty adherent that I am. But I content myself with reading about it in the papers. Let’s take just one day (Thursday) of one newspaper (The Wall Street Journal) widely associated with Conservative Orthodoxy. Under the headline, “McCain Takes the GOP Lead,” we read:

Living down our history

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:17 EST

MY GRANDMOTHER used to tell a story about when she was a very little girl living in the Washington area.

Her family was from South Carolina. Her father was an attorney working for the federal government. One of their neighbors was a U.S. senator from South Carolina. When her parents learned that she had visited the senator in his garden, sitting on his lap and begging for a peek under his eye patch, they were shocked and appalled.

The senator was “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the state’s former governor, and a vehement advocate of lynching who had participated in the murders of black South Carolinians as a “Red Shirt” vigilante.

Grandma’s people were of a very different political persuasion, as were of the founders of this newspaper, which was established for the express purpose of fighting the Tillman machine. That’s a second personal connection for me, and one of which I’m proud: We still fight the things that race-baiter stood for.

Ben Tillman launched his rise to power with a fiery speech in Bennettsville, the town where I was born. But we’ve come a long way since then. Two very different politicians have spoken in Bennettsville in recent days.

Obama inspires board, offers hope

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:15 EST

A remarkable thing happened this week to The State’s editorial board — again. For us, it was the equivalent of lightning striking the same place, twice in the same month.

After difficult, agonizing discussions over presidential primary endorsements in both 2000 and 2004, we arrived at a quick consensus on endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for the S.C. Democratic Primary on Saturday.

We met with Sen. Obama Monday morning, before he and the other candidates spoke at the State House. (Neither Hillary Clinton nor John Edwards ever met with us, despite long-standing invitations — repeated invitations, in Sen. Clinton’s case.)

Our decision was made easier by the departure of Sen. Joe Biden. We might have been torn between his experience and foreign policy vision, and fresh hope for the future offered by Sen. Obama.

As it was, Sen. Obama clearly stood out as the best remaining candidate — and he had always been the most exciting and inspiring in the field.

Which do you want, JFK or LBJ?

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:13 EST

BARACK OBAMA and Hillary Clinton decided last week to put their spat over MLK, JFK and LBJ behind them. That’s nice for them, but the rest of us shouldn’t drop the subject so quickly.

Intentionally or not, the statement that started all the trouble points to the main difference between the two front-runners.

And that difference has nothing to do with race.

Now you’re thinking, “Only a Clueless White Guy could say that had nothing to do with race,” and you’d have a point. When it comes to judging whether a statement or an issue is about race, there is a profound and tragic cognitive divide between black and white in this country.

But hear me out. It started when the senator from New York said the following, with reference to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:

Just one more day

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:33 EST

AT TIMES this week, it has seemed as though, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the media themselves were the message.

For me, the apex of absurdity was achieved Monday morning, when I sat in a conference room here at the paper shooting video of a guy from French television who was shooting video of me talking about Saturday’s S.C. Republican presidential primary. You remember how, in old-fashioned barbershops, you could see yourself sitting in the chair in the mirror in front of you, reflecting the mirror behind you, and on and on? It was kind of like that.

After the interview, the Frenchman followed me to the Columbia Rotary Club, where I had been asked to speak about the newspaper and its endorsement in said primary. In case you missed it, we rather emphatically endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in Sunday’s paper. See more about that at my blog (address below).

As I was stepping down from the podium at Rotary, a Danish journalist gave me her card, saying she wanted to interview me later. She had followed Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson to the meeting. Poor Hal. I had been sending some of the national media who were calling me to him, as a good, thoughtful example of the “religious conservative” kind of voter they were so eager to talk to. Now here he was, dragging journalists right back at me. (Just keep looking into the mirrors. Whoa ... is that what the back of my head looks like?)

On Tuesday, Michele Norris of NPR’s “All Things Considered” called on her cell while traveling across South Carolina, and we spoke for 53 minutes. But that was just the preliminary; we’ll tape the actual interview this morning. I’m also supposed to be on local public radio with Andy Gobeil this morning — and Andy and I will be on ETV live for primary results Saturday night.

What it was really like at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:17 EST

ON MAY 20, 1967, Air Force pilot Jack Van Loan was shot down over North Vietnam. His parachute carried him to Earth well enough, but he landed all wrong.

“I hit the ground, and I slid, and I hit a tree,” he said. This provided an opportunity for his captors at the prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”

“My knee was kind of screwed up and they ... any time they found you with some problems, then they would, they would bear down on the problems,” he said. “I mean, they worked on my knee pretty good ... and, you know, just torturing me.”

In October of Jack’s first year in Hanoi, a new prisoner came in, a naval aviator named John McCain. He was in really bad shape. He had ejected over Hanoi, and had landed in a lake right in the middle of the city. He suffered two broken arms and a broken leg ejecting. He nearly drowned in the lake before a mob pulled him out, and then set upon him. They spat on him, kicked him and stripped his clothes off. Then they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and bayoneted him in his left foot and his groin.

That gave the enemy something to “bear down on.” Lt. Cmdr. McCain would be strung up tight by his unhealed arms, hog-tied and left that way for the night.

This time, a quick consensus

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:16 EST

THIS TIME eight years ago, The State’s editorial board faced a choice in the S.C. Republican primary between a visionary, “maverick” lawmaker with an inspiring resume and a governor who said he’d take the CEO approach, delegating the vision to the team he would build. We chose the self-described executive type, much to our later regret.

This time, we’re going with the hero.

Our board — Publisher Henry Haitz; Associate Editors Warren Bolton, Cindi Scoppe and Mike Fitts; and I — sat down Friday morning and deliberated for about 90 minutes before emerging with a clear and unequivocal consensus: We like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a lot, but we have no doubt that Sen. John McCain is better-prepared to be our commander in chief.

As our lead editor on national affairs, Mike framed the discussion, speaking at length about each of the Republicans. As others joined in, it quickly became apparent that each of us had reached very similar conclusions.

You may not think that’s remarkable, but it is. Ours is a diverse group, and we struggled through remarkably grueling disagreements over presidential primary endorsements in the Republican and Democratic contests in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Those debates led to outcomes that some of us were never happy with. This time was very different.

Each Republican faces a different challenge in S.C.

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:16 EST

TO ALL THE candidates seeking the presidency of the United States of America: Welcome to South Carolina. Iowa is behind you; so is New Hampshire, and we understand that we are to have your undivided attention for the next couple of weeks, which is gratifying.

So let’s take advantage of the opportunity. The South Carolina primaries have little purpose unless we learn more about you than we have thus far, so we have a few matters we’d like you to address while you’re here.

Let’s do Republicans first, since y’all face S.C. voters first (on the 19th) and come back to the Democrats (after the cliffhanger night Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just went through, they could probably do with a rest today).

We’d like some specifics beyond the vehement claims that pretty much each and every one of you is “the real conservative” in the race.

We’ll start with John McCain, the big winner in New Hampshire Tuesday.

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:46 EST

ON TUESDAY, New Hampshire votes. On Wednesday, presidential candidates will descend on South Carolina in such numbers as we’ve never seen, and stay for the duration — the Republicans until the 19th of this month, the Democrats through the 26th.

Time for us to get busy on The State’s editorial board. Not that we’ve been slacking off, but our pace starting this week is likely to make the past year look like a nice, long nap.

Watch for more columns than usual from me on this page or the facing one. And between columns, keep an eye on my blog (address is below). But the main work of the next two weeks will be interviewing the remaining viable candidates and writing our endorsements. Our plan, from which we will deviate only under the most extreme circumstances, is to endorse in the GOP primary a week from today, Jan. 13, and to state our choice in the Democratic contest Jan. 20.

But, asked regular gadfly Doug Ross on my blog last week, our endorsements have “already been written,” right? And as another writer, who goes by the pseudonym “weldon VII,” asked, “Why would Romney waste his time coming to see you, Brad?”

Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board.