Scoppe: Curtis Loftis won’t run for governor — unless he does

CURTIS LOFTIS is flitting too quickly from one allegation of state agency mismanagement to the next for me to even catch the connective tissue, much less ask him to fill in the details with which he assumes everyone is intimately familiar, when — launching into the first of several conspiracy theories involving the governor — he introduces and immediately dismisses the conventional wisdom that has enveloped the State House almost from the moment he was sworn in as state treasurer in January.

Gov. Nikki Haley managed to get the attorney general to torpedo a budget proviso that would have let the treasurer follow up on audits of state agencies, he charges, “because Alan Wilson wants to run for governor and Nikki wants to run for reelection, and they both think I’m running.” After the briefest of pauses, he adds: “I don’t have any interest in running for governor.”

He insists that the proviso would not have let him bring legal action on behalf of the state, which Mr. Wilson objected to as a violation of the constitution. But then he notes that the attorney general gets to hire all the state’s lawyers and so “gets contributions from all the lawyers,” and says that “they were aware that if somehow this gave me the authority to hire the lawyers, they’d give contributions to me.”

Where to begin? No interest in running for ? Really?

“This morning at 4 a.m., I was out walking my dog in my boxer shorts behind my (privacy) fence” on his heavily wooded, eight-acre lot, Mr. Loftis says. “You can’t do that in the governor’s mansion. I have no interest in being governor.”

Disavowing this interest is nothing new. He’s been doing it since he challenged Ms. Haley for working out a deal with two other members of the Budget and Control Board to hire a new director without even bothering to mention it to him and the fifth member of the board. And for holding private meetings with the two legislators on the board, which constituted an illegal quorum. And for unilaterally canning the head of the State Retirement System. And for the fact that it has become nearly impossible for him to get straight answers out of the agency over which he is supposed to have equal say with the governor.

But during our meeting last week, which his office requested as part of a summer tour of newspaper editorial boards, the long-standing denial comes with a caveat. A huge caveat.

“Of course, I had no interest in running for treasurer either,” he continues. “I got mad at Converse.” That’s Converse Chellis, who was an obscure House member when the Legislature, exercising a power that practically no one realized it had, elected him to finish out the term of Thomas Ravenel after Mr. Ravenel got sent away over his fondness for using and sharing cocaine.

Mr. Loftis doesn’t even know if he’ll seek re-election. “If I get everything done that I want to, I might run for something else,” he says. “There are a lot of offices that need to be cleaned up.”

But not governor?

“If nobody will run against Nikki because she’s the incumbent,” he says, “I’ll do it.”

He emphasizes that he won’t run if “good people” will take her on, and then launches into how he has the freedom to run for office because he doesn’t have a wife and kids — and at his age he’s probably too set in his ways for anyone to want to marry him anyway, he says — and charges that “they go through my mail, they go through my trash.”

“Who is ‘they’?” I ask, and rather than answering, he recasts his allegation: “People go through my mail.”

When my colleague Warren Bolton asks why he’s convinced that someone needs to challenge Gov. Haley, Mr. Loftis abandons the niceties he used after their initial run-ins. “She’s completely and utterly untransparant and unaccountable,” he says.

Let the campaign begin?

If Mr. Loftis is still a mystery to most South Carolinians 14 months after he won statewide office by defeating Mr. Chellis in the Republican primary (no Democrat ran for the office), it’s not because he has been sitting quietly behind his desk poring over spreadsheets.

He has been poring over spreadsheets, and agendas, and using what he found to become the governor’s most tenacious critic. He’s out-Nikkiing Nikki Haley on her signature issue — from calling her out for engaging in the very sort of secrecy that she campaigned against to posting his entire weekly calendar online (her office merely releases a weekly summary of activities it chooses to highlight).

On a more substantive level, he’s digging in to problems at agencies she controls, and working overtime to cash in on the cash-flow crisis at the Transportation Department. He says Ms. Haley’s transportation secretary refuses to give him solid numbers and speculates that the cash crunch could be worse than we realize. If he’s right, or even if he’s not but the story stays alive, it could be particularly useful to him, because it has enabled him to move his attacks beyond the murky shadows of the Budget and Control Board and onto the agency whose work touches the life of practically every South Carolinian, every day.

The gulf between the governor’s transparency talk and her often-opaque actions makes an irresistible target for two kinds of people: those who are looking for any excuse to attack her, and those who care passionately about transparency.

I’m not sure which Mr. Loftis is, and I have no idea how effective he might be on the campaign trail. Gov. Haley does a good job at making critics sound whiny, and Mr. Loftis plays to her strength by speaking in what can sound like a foreign language to anyone who doesn’t inhabit the byzantine world of the Budget and Control Board. But he demonstrated an impressive ability last year to connect with the populist instincts of tea party voters, who might not be particularly forgiving if someone can convince them that their golden-girl governor isn’t living up to the outsider ideals that endeared her to them in the first place.

This story was originally published August 17, 2015 at 7:45 AM with the headline "Scoppe: Curtis Loftis won’t run for governor — unless he does."