Daily Archives: June 21, 2012

Do you really think Obama’s that much ahead?

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I don’t. And even if he is, it’s a long way until the election. But I’m curious what y’all think of the Bloomberg survey everybody’s talking about:

Barack Obama has opened a significant lead over Mitt Romney in a Bloomberg National Poll that reflects the presumed Republican nominee’s weaknesses more than the president’s strengths.

Obama leads Romney 53 percent to 40 percent among likely voters, even as the public gives him low marks on handling the economy and the deficit, and six in 10 say the nation is headed down the wrong track, according to the poll conducted June 15- 18.

The survey shows Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has yet to repair the damage done to his image during the Republican primary. Thirty-nine percent of Americans view him favorably, about the same as when he announced his presidential candidacy last June, while 48 percent see him unfavorably — a 17-percentage point jump during a nomination fight dominated by attacks ads. A majority of likely voters, 55 percent, view him as more out of touch with average Americans compared with 36 percent who say the president is more out of touch.

I haven’t seen anything happen out there that suggests we’ve moved away from our dead-heat impasse in American politics. But maybe it looks different from outside SC…

Rielle Hunter: The assignment I declined to take

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Sunday, I was having Father’s Day dinner with my two sons (all my daughters being out of town), my daughter-in-law and two of my grandchildren at Yesterday’s, and my phone rang.

It was The New York Post. If you’ll recall, I represented that paper at the infamous Mark Sanford confessional press conference in June 2009, and they have called me since then from time to time when pursuing a story in SC. I’m generally glad to help when I can. Working with those folks can be an interesting change of pace.

This time, when the editor heard I was having Father’s Day dinner, he said he’d let me go, which I appreciated. But my curiosity was piqued.

A couple of hours later, he called me again, and asked if I could do a job for them. I asked what job.

Basically, they had heard that someone in this part of the country had advance copies of Rielle Hunter’s book. They wanted me to obtain a copy, read it quickly, and file a story that night.

I declined, and offered them someone else who might be interested in doing the story for them.

Part of it was that I was behind on some stuff I had meant to get done during my week off, and needed to get done before heading back to the office on Monday.

But part of it, I confess, was… well, you know the adage, You couldn’t pay me enough to do that? I’d rather have my gums scraped with a rusty screwdriver than read a single page of a tell-all book by Rielle Hunter. Every second I would spend doing that, I’d be acutely aware of all the good books out there that I probably won’t have time to read in my lifetime, and the sense of wasted time would be like a physical pain. I don’t even want to spend time passively listening to someone sum up her book in 25 words or less, much less spend any of my finite time on this planet reading anything that she might have to say. Just the thought of the exertion required to pick up such a book made me recoil.

I see they got somebody to do the story. Good. Especially since it wasn’t me.

I hope this doesn’t mean they won’t call me when they have something I would jump at (like the Sanford thing — I was burning with curiosity to know where our gov had been). But if so, having dodged any contact with a book by Rielle Hunter would have been worth the loss.

Back to the days of unlimited, unregulated spending on political campaigns in SC

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Free Times reporter Corey Hutchins really needs to get himself a job at a daily newspaper (before they’re all gone). A weekly publication just doesn’t provide enough outlet for his energy.

Corey calls my attention to another of his freelance pieces, this one for the Center for Public Integrity. It’s about how the rules changed to essentially free up third-party committees to spend whatever they want in SC elections, with no accountability. An excerpt:

In 2010, a little-noticed ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Terry Wooten in Florence, S.C., kicked the regulatory teeth out of a key statute in the state’s campaign finance laws and opened the floodgates for untraceable political spending by many of the groups seeking to influence elections.

The case revolved around a seemingly mundane sliver of minutiae — how the word “committee” is defined under South Carolina law. But the effects of Wooten’s ruling were far-reaching indeed, and that’s likely just how famed conservative lawyer James Bopp — the star of the case — wanted it. In the Palmetto State, suddenly all bets were off when it came to independent expenditures meant to influence elections. And they still are.

“Until we clarify it, it’s the Wild West to a certain extent,” says Wes Hayes, a Republican lawmaker who chairs the S.C. Senate Ethics Committee. “Until we get that clarified we have no law.”

State legislators, ethics regulators and good government groups here haven’t yet been able to put back the pieces — not in last year’s legislative session, and not in the one just finished either.

Unless and until they do, many worry that South Carolina will remain in a state of anarchy in regard to secret money and its effect on campaigns — with a high-stakes election just five months away…

I urge you to go read it. As Corey said in calling attention to it:

Ready to re-live the days of unlimited, untraceable, undisclosed political spending of the video poker barons in the late ’90s?
It’s already happening post primary, and is bound to get worse. This story shows why.

Thanks for your loyal patronage last week

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I’m pleased, but surprised, to peruse my readership numbers for this month.

I more or less took the week off from blogging last week, and yet my number of page views was higher every single day than the daily average (8,171) from the month of May. Even on Saturday and Sunday, when I posted zip.

And even though I haven’t really gotten totally back up to speed this week, I’ve been gratified to see the numbers in five digits every day so far:

  • Monday — 11,128
  • Tuesday — 11,487
  • Wednesday — 10,121

Something different has been happening lately with my blog traffic. Used to be, whenever I took a day off, there was a precipitous decline in readership, and it took days to climb out of it. Now, the dropoffs are less, and tend to be followed by periods of racheting upward. Part of it is that conversations continue over the course of several days. If I don’t post one day, y’all hardly seem to notice, as a conversation from a previous day continues at a lively pace.

This has caused me to wonder whether the classic linear blog structure, with the latest post always at the top, is the right one for this medium. But I haven’t entirely decided what should replace it.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me, even when I slack off briefly. I’ll keep trying to be worthy of your interest.

J. Jonah Jameson was right! (Of course he was — he was the editor!)

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"I'll prove that wall-crawler's a menace if it's the last thing I ever do!"

Forgot to post this yesterday when I saw the news:

Peter Parker isn’t the only man trying to hide his identity by donning a Spider-Man mask.

A robber wearing the web slinger’s mask was spotted in two robberies June 11 in the Midlands.

In the first incident, the masked man and an accomplice swung into Computer MD in the 4400 block of St. Andrews Road, swiped four laptops and ran out the front door, Lexington County deputies say.

The store’s owner tried to chase them but couldn’t catch the men before they made off for the woods…

This, of course, vindicates J. Jonah Jameson, who’s been telling the world that webhead is a crook for years.

We editor types always know what’s really going on.