Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008

There’s nothing simple about grading job recruitment

THE GOVERNOR’S chief critic blames him for shameful unemployment rates, calls his economic development efforts unfocused and stagnant and pledges to rebuild the economy around knowledge-based businesses. The governor dismisses the criticism, noting that the state has broken previous job-growth records during his administration.

Don’t bother trying to figure out who Gov. Mark Sanford’s “chief critic” is. Mr. Sanford isn’t the governor under attack. The governor was Jim Hodges, and the chief critic was Mark Sanford, who made the state’s rapidly rising unemployment rate one of his central targets in his 2002 campaign to unseat Mr. Hodges.

Six years later, Mr. Sanford is the one coming under fire for an unfocused economic development strategy and shameful unemployment rates, this time chronically high instead of rapidly rising. And like Mr. Hodges, he’s feeling quite put-upon, pointing to record-breaking job growth under his watch. As one Commerce Department official half-told, half-pleaded to me last week: “We really do have an incredible recruitment record.”

I sympathize. As legislative leaders intensify their attacks on the governor, Mr. Sanford finds himself in the simple-statistics trap: By this one number that everybody is fixated on, he is failing. Miserably. Our unemployment rate has been stuck near the top nationally for much of his tenure.

But few things worth talking about are simple enough to be summed up with a single number, and this number truly does fail to capture real progress. (Of course, the same is true of SAT scores — even more so; but that’s not what this column is about.)

South Carolina’s problems, be they our low per capita incomes or graduation rate, or our high number of low-birthweight babies, are the results of more than a century of bad policies and bad breaks, and bad breaks that resulted from bad policies. There is no magic bullet, no one person who can fix things, and certainly no one person to blame for them.

The fact is that our state has been doing better than most states at growing jobs, and Mr. Sanford probably deserves as much credit for that as any governor does for job growth.

But here’s the problem: Mr. Sanford is the one who set economic development as the standard by which he would be measured. He was the guy from the private sector who understood how business is done, who not only laid our growing jobless rate at the feet of his predecessor but introduced a whole new metric to the equation, bewailing our per capita income — just 82 percent of the national average.

He declared that his industrial recruiters wouldn’t try to inflate his success with those irrelevant capital investment figures, weren’t going to ballyhoo announced new jobs, but would talk about actual new jobs in the state.

So what did Commerce Director Joe Taylor use in his op-ed column in The State last week to fend off legislative attacks? Capital investment figures. Announced new jobs. He even said things are better than they seem because a bunch of those announced jobs haven’t come on line yet.

The number you can’t cook, though, is that new one Mr. Sanford added to our eco-devo vocabulary, and the last time it came out, our per capita income was 82 percent of the national average — unbudged since the Hodges days.

Mr. Sanford blames the Legislature for not doing what he’s asked. But even if you assume that would have helped (and I do not), it doesn’t mean the Legislature is to blame for our economic doldrums. The blame lies with the Legislature and the governor. The Legislature didn’t pass Mr. Sanford’s agenda; but Mr. Sanford didn’t convince the Legislature to pass his agenda.

You see, one of the rules of government is that the Legislature writes the laws. A governor who wants to change the laws has to convince the Legislature. That’s part of the job description.

As Mr. Hodges recently told The Greenville News — for an article exploring the long-term damage Mr. Sanford may have done to the office, by easing the Legislature into the habit of ignoring governors — a governor has to give on some issues in order to take on others. “I used to tell legislators,” he said, “‘if my agenda doesn’t pass, rest assured your agenda won’t pass.’” The reverse is also true.

On economic development, as on other issues, Mr. Sanford has trapped himself inside a most pedantic box. He is appalled at the idea of doling out tax breaks to lure individual businesses to the state, and so he attacks the Legislature when it authorizes more; he refuses to follow through on some. And a stalemate occurs.

I share his concerns about the job-buying approach, and I have never been impressed with the way our Legislature handles economic development — from throwing money at Hollywood to refusing to recognize the crucial role that public investments in schools, highways, crime prevention, public health and a host of other public services play in convincing people to make South Carolina home for their families and their businesses. Nor am I particularly comfortable with the idea of legislators taking over the implementation of economic development policy. (I don’t think it was so smart of them to say they were doing that, either, since it relieves Mr. Sanford of this very difficult responsibility.)

But as long as this is the way the rest of the country does job recruitment, and as long as the Legislature is convinced it’s the way to go, Mr. Sanford has an obligation either to go along with it or else to come up with an alternative that he can sell to the Legislature. That might not be easy, but it’s a central part of the job that he spent millions of dollars to win.

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