Friday, Aug. 10, 2007

Treasurer’s race shows how Irrelevant Man became Radioactive Man

HOW RADIOACTIVE is Mark Sanford?

His first choice for state treasurer — the guy he held a big news conference to endorse — didn’t even get nominated when the House and Senate met in joint session last week to pick a replacement for Thomas Ravenel.

His if-you-must-pick-one-of-your-own fall-back candidate got just 24 votes out of 106 cast.

That’s not the worst of it: His second choice was a senator, pitted against a House member, and he couldn’t even get a majority of the Senate vote.

In other words, disdain for all things Mark Sanford is so all-consuming that it now trumps the greatest rivalry in S.C. politics — the House-Senate divide.

There were extenuating circumstances, to be sure.

A Sanford supporter exaggerated only slightly when he said then-Rep. Converse Chellis locked down the votes before the ink had even dried on Mr. Ravenel’s federal indictment. And a lot of his fellow senators find Greg Ryberg to be grating — all the more so since he’s started carrying water for the libertarian, Legislature-bashing governor.

But what happened in the treasurer’s race is not an isolated incident. It is just the most visible example of what has happened as what looked like simple clumsiness in handling those oh-so-sensitive legislative egos has mutated into what is now widely accepted as a deliberate attempt to alienate the people whose votes he must win if he actually wants to get anything done.

“Mark Sanford has done such a horrible job of managing his relationships with the legislature that his voice carries no weight,” the head of a prominent business group that has traditionally been allied with governors in general and Republican governors in particular told me in an e-mail last month. “If anything, his efforts only strengthen their resolve to do what he doesn’t want done.... If he had the relationships with the General Assembly that his three predecessors did, then his vetoes would rarely be overridden, and the budget would now be much smaller. He is simply too arrogant to get the job done, and people have long since tired of his ‘I’m the smartest person in the room’ attitude.”

Mr. Sanford told me Wednesday that more and more legislators are telling him privately that they support his efforts but fear retribution from legislative leaders if they vote with him, particularly on something as important to those leaders as the treasurer’s race, which is widely regarded to have swung control of the Budget and Control Board back to the Legislature. He also says his efforts are causing legislators and the public to think about and talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t — such as why the Budget and Control Board even exists — and that this will pay off eventually.

He argues that reforming our antiquated government or pursuing his other goals would be a hard sell even if he had the best of relationships, because his efforts are so completely at odds with the legislative mindset.

There’s certainly some truth to that. When he dared to endorse Charleston County Council Chairman Tim Scott for treasurer, I got a bristly e-mail from a prominent legislator that illustrates the legislative belief that governors should be seen and not heard:

“So the General Assembly is:

“A: Stupid and incapable of making a decision expressly spelled out in the constitution

“B: Stupid and unwilling to allow the Governor to have Imperial powers

“C: Stupid since we are about to elect a CPA as Treasurer, versus an Insurance agent....”

But that doesn’t explain why legislators who used to support some of the causes that Mr. Sanford has made signature issues have backed away. Why there’s less support for handing power over to governors today than when he took office. Why lawmakers who have been fighting government waste their entire careers have been noticeably absent from his anti-pork crusades.

Lawmakers have four main complaints, all of which were on display in the treasurer’s race:

• Grandstanding. While the Legislature was actually holding the election, he fired a news release off to the media and the blog sites calling on lawmakers to put off the vote so they could make their decision “in a more deliberative fashion.” Although his previous statements had implied such a preference, their focus had been on getting his guy elected.

• Inconsistency. Mr. Sanford believes, as I do, that the treasurer should be appointed. Yet his main argument in support of Sen. Ryberg was that he had run for office, and been the “choice” of voters. If the public shouldn’t be electing the treasurer, then why does this matter?

• Hypocrisy. Mr. Sanford tried to inject the explosive issue of race into the contest, calling on lawmakers to “correct what I consider a very strange part of S.C. history” by naming the first African-American constitutional officer since Reconstruction. But he had a chance to do that himself when the feds busted the agriculture commissioner.

• Manipulation of numbers. His anyone-other-than-Converse-Chellis campaign centered on the need to reform the operations of the Budget and Control Board, because of “the $550 million that the GEAR report identified as savings” at the agency.

Technically, the report released last month did identify that money. But $450 million in savings was dependent on the Legislature making significant changes to the state insurance and pension plans — changes it has repeatedly refused to make. In other words, most of the savings had nothing to do with how well the agency functions, and the new treasurer will play no role in whether they are realized.

As long as legislators see the governor as someone who plays games instead of taking government seriously, as someone who, knowing he can’t shut down much of the government, works to stick his finger in legislators’ eyes, he’s going to be lucky to be considered irrelevant. And that’s a shame, because a lot — by no means all, but a lot — of what he wants to do is just what we need.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

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