Category Archives: Meetings

Which is worse: cronyism or bad judgment?

Read today’s editorial about last week’s explanation of the Bar exam mess, and then consider the following, about which we had a debate in yesterday morning’s editorial meeting:

Which is worse — the favoritism that many believed had been extended to the children of the connected, or just plain bad judgment, which in the end appears to have been the case? (And yes, I know many of you still believe there was favoritism, but for the sake of my question, pretend that you agree with me on this point of fact, so that we can hash out the dilemma I’m posing.)

I disagreed with my colleagues. They thought the court’s explanation, if one believed it (and we did), described a bad situation, but not as bad as if results had been overturned in response to phone calls by the powerful. I said it was worse. I said adjusting the results in response to calls from a lawmaker (the House Judiciary chairman, no less) and a judge was not inherently bad in and of itself, if those calls did indeed lead to finding some flaw with the system. In other words, if the action itself was not corrupt, it did not matter whether the impetus for the reconsideration gave the appearance of favoritism.

Yes, I know, most folks seem to assume that if the reconsideration was prodded by someone whose name we know, the adjustment has to be corrupt. But that isn’t true. And remember — there had been no substantive disclosure as to whether there was anything wrong with that section of the test or not. In the end, there apparently was nothing wrong with the testing, only the recording of the score in one instance. But most of the talk during the couple of weeks this issue ran was about who said what to whom, not the quality of the test.

But what the court says it actually did is to me worse than taking another look at the test because of some phone calls (which is what most of the hullabaloo was about). It discovered an error — one person who had been recorded as passing had actually failed that section, and therefore the overall exam. To me, there are only two options under such circumstances — let the result stand, and allow that one person to become a lawyer (in keeping with the rule that judgments are final), or give that one person the cruel news (and as one whose child became a lawyer in recent years, I realize how cruel a disappointment that would be) that the celebration had been premature, that he or she had failed.

What the court actually did was so nonsensical that I couldn’t quite take it in from our news account. I assumed I had read something wrong, so that my first question when we had our first post-holiday editorial meeting Monday morning was, "Tell me again what the court did." As it turned out, it had done exactly what I had thought I’d read: It decided to give that one candidate a free pass on that section of the test, and then gave everybody a free pass on that section, boosting 20 demonstrably unqualified people to the status of attorney at law.

When I had read it, I kept thinking that can’t be right. There’s no way that the court would turn 20 "fails" to "passes" because of a mistake on one. And yes, I can see how some would think it logical, and fair — to the test-takers. But the court has a higher responsibility to the 4 million people of South Carolina.

This was a serious error in judgment, and to me, worse than any inherent harm based on who made a call to whom.

Do you agree or disagree?

Daring adventures at Lexington Medical

Scrub

Today, I was reminded of a recent contact report I failed to file at the time. It was our visit to Lexington Medical Center week before last. Mike Biediger, who runs the place, gave a tour to my boss, Henry Haitz; Mark Lett, the top editor in our newsroom; my colleague Warren Bolton; and yours truly. We got to see the hospital’s beautiful new North Tower with its capacious, well-designed rooms. We toured the operating rooms. We saw cool 3D computer scans of people’s vital parts. It was all most edifying, even though they didn’t actually let me cut on anybody.

I hadn’t written about it because I was determined to put together a video show of the tour, and haven’t found the time to edit my footage yet. But I was reminded that I should go ahead and post something today, when I took my Dad home from the place.

Ironically, less than a week after our tour, my Dad was a guest of the hospital, staying in that very North Tower we had toured. He’s been there most of the past week, and I had occasion to try out the comfortable daybeds they have built under the windows of each room. I had a nice snooze yesterday afternoon there; so I can report they work fine. Dad’s feeling much better now, by the way.

A literary footnote: Just before I went to get Dad, I was reading Zorro by Isabel Allende. I bought two copies of the book (one in English, the other in the original Spanish) at a discount sale at the beach over the summer. You might call it Peruvian pulp fiction. I was a huge "Zorro" fan as a kid — I speak of the old Walt Disney TV series. In fact my first watch was a Zorro watch (no Mickey Mouse for me), and I once had a toy épée with a piece of chalk on the end for writing Zs. Ms. Allende’s book was OK for light reading; I finished it just a few minutes ago. (Best part? She included both loyal sidekick Bernardo and lovable nemesis Sgt. Garcia as characters. Worst part? Possibly because it was written by a lady, it had too much romance and too few swordfights.) Anyway, just as I was about to go spring my Dad from the hospital, I was reading a part in which Don Diego was about to spring his father, Don Alejandro de la Vega, from a damp, dirty prison. It seemed like I saw a parallel there. Unfortunately, LMC’s new tower is much nicer than El Diablo prison, and there were no guards upon whom to scratch Zs, so as an adventure, it was a bust.

But it was nice to get Dad home.

The War on Spontaneity

This morning, I had a meeting with Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex, Education Oversight Committee czarina Jo Anne Anderson, and various members of their respective retinues.

That is, I was supposed to have a meeting with them. It was placed on my calendar a couple of months ago (and had somehow neglected to set the Treo to remind me the way I always do), and for a time earlier than I usually arrive at the office, and I didn’t realize it was happening until I was halfway through breakfast, and by the time I got here I was more than half an hour late for it. I can’t remember the last time anything like this happened, and I am very, very sorry it happened this time; it was embarrassing.

The meeting was ostensibly to talk about the 2007 Report Cards, and I missed that part (since Cindi Scoppe had been hosting them, and I rely on her to pay attention and remember stuff even when I am here, we were covered — I just haven’t had time to get Cindi to regurgitate it to me yet). I know that the info they had to share wasn’t amazingly good news, since we had already seen the PACT scores — upon which the report cards are mostly based — and because I saw Jim Foster’s face (see below). Jim’s more of a class clown than I am, always with the jokes. (Long ago, three superintendents ago, Jim worked at the paper.) If he’s looking this glum, watch out.

Anyway, right after I got into the room, talk turned to discipline, and I started to squirm, not only because I’d come to class late and unprepared, but because I was once one of those one or two kids who distract the class, to put it mildly. (So was Jim, I’m sure, despite his severe mien below.) I sat there thinking how very, very lucky I am that I made it out of school before the era of Zero Tolerance. Which suggests a digression…

Honest, I’ll try to come back with some serious info from this meeting once I’ve caught up with it, but for now I’d like to share a piece from this morning’s WSJ about how increasingly unfriendly this country is getting toward kids like me. The op-ed was headlined "Adult supervision." An excerpt:

    The Christian Science Monitor reports that colleges across the country now require permits or permission slips for undergraduate pranks. This was perhaps inevitable: First they came for dodgeball. Then tag. How long could something as spontaneous and fun as the prank escape?
    Educational administrators justify the new prank rules by invoking 9/11, though most college pranks have as much to do with terrorism as a greased pig in the hallway has to do with the invasion of Poland. But the war on spontaneity continues….

At this point, either you’re nodding in smug approval at efforts to get those hooligans in line, or you’re cringing like me. Another taste:

At Mascoutah Middle School in Illinois, 13-year-old Megan Coulter was recently given detention for hugging two friends goodbye before the weekend — a violation of the school’s ban on "public displays of affection." One California school district worried about "bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits" also banned tag, cops and robbers, touch football and every other activity that involved "bodily contact."

You know, when it comes to most things, I try to side with the grownups. Society needs to have rules. Hence my strong disagreements with the libertarians. But at some point, short of engaging in life-threatening behavior of the kind I worried about in my Sunday column, there’s a space where adults should let the children play. And please, please forgive them when they wander in a bit late… I’m sure they feel bad about it.

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Can you read this?

posting via Treo from Rotary…

Our speaker today is Debbie Yoho of the Greater Columbia Literacy Council, talking about the problem of adult illiteracy in South Carolina.

Her Most Alarming Fact sums up why we should care: 52 percent of adults in South Carolina can’t read beyond an elementary school basis. It’s actually worse than that sounds … Debbie explains that what that means is that a majority of adults in our state can’t anything beyond 300 to 500 simple word they recognize by sight. I don’t know about you, but I’m guessing I was at that point sometime during the first grade.

Explains a lot, huh?

Urban League 40th anniversary

Urban_league_028

Thursday night, the Columbia Urban League will be celebrating 40 years of service at its annual Equal Opportunity Day dinner. As a former board member, I will be there, among others sitting at The State’s table at the event.

Today, President J.T. McLawhorn (above), Board Chairman Tony Grant (right), board member Cindy Cox and co-founder of the chapter Anthony Hurley (bottom) came to see our editorial board to talk about the past 40 years.

Some of the points covered:

  • Our guests talked about the particular niche the CUL carved out in the community, which was lessUrban_league_005
    confrontational than other civil rights organizations. The Urban League and J.T. have taken flak for that over the years. Many who might otherwise support the organization griped when former Gov. David Beasley spoke to one of the EOD dinners. Why was a Republican invited, they wanted to know? The answer was simple — the Urban League was about working with everybody, and building relationships across the board. (This year’s speaker will be Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell, who will probably be a candidate for governor in 2010.)
  • Mr. Hurley told of having to soothe apprehensions in the community when he and his wife helped start the chapter in the 1960s. He knew at least of a model he did not want to follow — he told of Malcolm X coming into his office to seek his support in getting his organization established in Columbia, and Mr. Hurley asked him to leave.
  • J.T. and Tony talked about all the people in the community who can trace their success to the organization’s summer jobs program, which has taught many young people how to live productive lives.

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Lunch with Chad Walldorf

Following up on this conversation from last week, I had lunch with Chad Walldorf today. And I pulled Cindi Scoppe along with us, so that someone would remember the details of the conversation. (I’m a, you know, Big Picture kind of guy. And as I’ve said before, I don’t take notes and converse normally at the same time.)

I pretty much came away from it with the same impression I had of Chad before, which is that he is a really earnest guy who wants to be a force for positive change and truly believes he is going about it the right way.

He thought I had some other impression of him, based on the things I’ve said about movements and entities with which he has been associated — school choice, Gov. Mark Sanford, the Club for Growth and ReformSC. Of all those, the most relevant one for discussion here is ReformSC.

Chad wanted to get across to me that ReformSC is first and foremost about government restructuring, and it’s hard to find anything nearer and dearer to my wonkish heart than that. I have no doubt that as far as he is concerned, that is completely true. My problem is with things that are outside the purview of what Chad can control or what ReformSC may or may not intend.

Chad was really upset at the reaction I had to this fund-raising letter, written by one of my favorite people in the Sanford administration. That was one of my problems with it — the person who wrote it. If Tom Davis, of all people, wrote a fund-raising letter for ReformSC that ignored government restructuring and emphasized the whacky anti-government stuff that Sanford is for, that group is going to have a big hole to climb out of to get my trust. In other words, if Tom Davis has gone over to the Dark Side, all Jedi are in danger.

I figured that if Tom wrote that, somebody must have deeply impressed upon him the idea that he needed to push the anti-government stuff, rather than the good-government stuff. For Tom to forget to talk about restructuring in selling ReformSC, it would have to have been crowded out of his head by an awful lot of talk about the other stuff.

Furthermore, even if that was just a mistake on Tom’s part, if people gave money to the organization as a result of that letter, it would be reasonable to believe that they fully expected the group to use their money to push its anti-government planks (from the Web site: a Newt Gingrich video on "Why can the private sector accomplish what government can’t?"), not the restructuring. And what is that likely to make me think the group will eventually do, no matter what its original intentions may have been? Money talks, and that other stuff walks, you know. From what I’ve seen, people who give money for anti-government reasons generally don’t want to see good government. First, they don’t believe there’s any such thing, and second, if government got better, fewer people would hate it, and their cause would lose ground.

Finally, there is the record of the last few years. Here we have a group that is unabashed about its desire to remake the Legislature in the governor’ image, and what is our experience with that? SCRG and CIA, which have spent remarkable amounts of out-of-state money in an effort to replace some of the best and brightest in the Legislature with pretty much any doofus who promises not to stand in the way of tuition tax credits.

All of that made Tom’s letter very ominous.

The upshot? I believe Chad is a fine fellow. I don’t think he wants to destroy public schools, even though he favors a policy that I firmly believe would profoundly undermine the already-weakened consensus in our society that supports universal education. And I don’t believe he wants to arbitrarily shrink government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, even though he is a leading member of the local Club for Growth.

And I believe he fully intends for ReformSC to be an instrument for restructuring state government to make it a better servant to the people of South Carolina. As to whether I believe that will be the outcome … I will have to see something positive that I haven’t seen since Mark Sanford was elected in 2002 before I am convinced.

Emma Forkner, head of the state Health and Human Services department

Here’s what it said in my Treo (copied and pasted from an e-mail from Cindi, who set up the meeting):

The Editorial Board will met at 9 am on Thursday, Oct. 18, with Emma Forkner, the (still sort of) new director of the Department of Health and Human Services. There’s nothing in particular on the agenda, although the agency has been in the news lately over questions about its new private Medicaid transport system. And there is of course the ever-present issue of how our state (and others) pay for Medicaid.

We will meet in the Board Room on the third floor.

And that was what it was, a get-acquainted meeting. But I report it for the same reason I’m trying to report all such contacts, because I want you to know who I’m talking to, and some readers — such as "GreenvilleGuy" on this post — are very suspicious of the supposedly cozy relationships between us and newsmakers.

Since there was nothing in particular we were looking for in the meeting, I had a good time talking big picture, and I was able to launch freely onto digression without Cindi kicking me under the table.

For instance, we learned that while 25 percent of Medicaid recipients were on some kind of managed care plan — translated into private-sector terms, either a PPO or HMO — 75 percent of recipients are on, essentially, a fee-for-service plan. She hopes that, thanks to the waivers GreenvilleGuy decries, those numbers will be reversed in 18 months to two years.

Fee-for-service? I asked. Isn’t that essentially what we in the private sector had 30 or 40 years ago? Yes.

After acknowledging that she was new to this world, I asked why she thought it took so long to institute such cost-saving measures as managed care in the public sector, when out here in the private world, our employers are constantly tweaking our insurance to save costs? (I had spent two hours the previous day hearing how my own insurance will change come Jan. 1.)

She hesitated to answer, so I gave her MY answer: Because whether you’re talking state employee insurance or Medicaid, the public at large doesn’t really want to take anything away from anybody. That makes it tough for anybody who answers to voters, or anyone who answers to someone else who answers to voters, to institute cost savings — whereas private employers can change things as they please, and what the hell are their employees going to do about it?

She agreed. This led to her problems with getting anything done in the civilian public sector. She had come up in the military, where you’re part of an organization that is disciplined to turn on a dime. That makes the military less regulation-bound that the civilian public sector, which for a lot of people is counterintuitive.

Since I grew up in the Navy, and have always thought the military way of running things superior (to ALL civilian systems, public and private), we got along swimmingly.

Mike McCurry for the ONE Campaign

   

Several years back, I went to the White House to visit South Carolinian Mike McCurry when he was Bill Clinton’s press secretary. He had a tough job at a tough time. It was at the height — or should I say, the depth — of the Monica Lewinsky madness. Here’s my column from back then.

Friday, he came to see me at my office, so now we’re even. He was in town on behalf of the ONE campaign. He was brought in by Adam Temple — formerly of the John McCain campaign — and Dave Wilson, the group’s Faith Community Director.

On the video, he gives an overview of what the ONE campaign is about.

My not-so-secret identity

This post will serve as both a daily (sort of) contact report and a reflection on my changing image, as determined by the blog.

Twice this week I was contacted by people who apparently thought of me primarily as a blogger. Since I have a well-over-40-hour-a-week job that puts me in the public eye much more prominently than the blog (so I thought), and seeing as how the blog is just something I do when I can grab a minute — much of it late at night and on weekends — this sort of blows my little mind.

First, there was Peter Hamby, reporter/producer with CNN, who produced this story this week.

Peter had wanted to talk with me about the campaign — I thought because of my position as editorialHamby_2
page editor, because I’m used to that — so I asked him, as I did Doug, to meet me for breakfast Wednesday at the Cap City Club. I ran late, but when I called Peter he was late, too, and as it happened I was the first one there. I settled in to read the paper in the club’s foyer, and looked up each time the elevator let another passenger off on the 25th floor. Once, I saw this kid with the beginnings of a beard get off, start into the foyer, then turn back, and start pacing like he was waiting for somebody. I went back to the paper. Several minutes later, my cell phone rings. It’s Peter. He said he had arrived at the Club, but realized he was wearing sandals, and that that might not be appropriate. Where are you now? I asked. "At the entrance, next to the elevators." Peter was the "kid" with the beard. I told him we’d muddle through somehow, flip-flops or no, and we went on in.

I learned that he was living here until after the primary, that he had time on his hands because the candidates were spending their time in Iowa and New Hampshire these days, so he was trying to write a piece about how McCain was doing. He had found that several of the people he talked to seemed to expect McCain to do better here than conventional "wisdom" — that I wasn’t the only one, in other words.

But the thing that got me was that at one point, when I had been speaking of candidates who had visited with us, Peter asked whether was a member of the editorial board of the paper. And then I remembered that, going by his initial e-mail to me, he had first come to me through the blog:

    My name is Peter Hamby … I moved to Columbia 2 weeks ago to cover the
primaries for CNN. I’ll be here until January writing, reporting, shooting
video, etc …
    Anyway, I dig your blog, and wanted to use you for some analysis in a piece
I’m writing for CNN.com about John McCain’s chances of winning in South
Carolina, in advance of his visit next week…. What do you think?

So I explained who I was. It was weird.

Then, today, I got this e-mail:

Hi Brad,

I’m working on putting together a blog guide of the most
influential political blogs in the early primary states and delegate-rich
states. Anyway, your blog comes highly recommended, so I will most likely be
including it. What are some of your biggest coups (picked up by  national media?
breaking news? causing someone to resign?) on the blog, and  what,
approximately, is your average daily hits? I’m on deadline, so I hope to hear
back from you soon.

Best,
Theodora
—
Theodora
Blanchfield
Associate Editor
Campaigns & Elections  magazine

I responded (and failed to save the response), making sure to drop in the fact that I actually have a jobBcboard_021_2
on the side at the newspaper. I mentioned the recent noise over my Edwards column (190,000 page views on the version on thestate.com, which is the version Drudge linked to), and the week when Thomas Ravenel was indicted (heaviest blog traffic yet). And she wrote back and asked me for a picture, and so I sent her the one shown here, which I thought made me look newspapermannish, rather than like a blogger — even though I’ve never used that photo in the paper, but only on the blog.

Theodora wrote back to say "Love the bowtie!"

Today’s contact report

Keeping yesterday’s promise…

Today, I got a cup of coffee at the Starbucks on Gervais with Zac Wright of the Clinton campaignWrightzac3
(previously mentioned). Zac paid — he owed me. No particular news, except that Tennessee has one less beef grower — Zac reported that his dad, who lives in Martin, Tenn., sold his cattle this morning on account of the cost of gas. The pasture was out toward Gleason, and he just couldn’t justify the cost of commuting to the herd every day. Oh, and we also discussed this Palmetto Poll from Clemson, which I had to admit I hadn’t looked at yet, so Zac saved me the trouble by sending me the link. No surprises.

I then proceeded in a deliberate fashion (I’m thinking of framing these reports in the idiom of cop reports; what do you think?) to WVOC for an hour on-the-air live with Keven Cohen. Did you hear it? If so, what did you think? Keven and I talked about how we both like Lindsey Graham and stuff like that.

Wait — it just hit me that I didn’t ask Zac whether those were dairy or beef cows. I just assumed, which we professional types are not supposed to do. So which is it, Zeke? Or which is it, Mrs. Wright? (I also learned today that his mom keeps track of him on the Web).

Dang! It turns out they were beef cattle, not dairy cows! Well, I’ve fixed it.

A month of meetings

Consider my last post to be the beginning of a perfect record for September.

Way back when I started this blog, I promised to use it as a medium for reporting on the many meetings, some of them interesting, that we have as an editorial board and never get around to writing about. The idea was not only to disseminate stuff worth knowing, but to lower that ol’ drawbridge to the ivory tower I keep talking about. You know, if someone is talking to us and helping shape our world view, readers should know about it. Transparency.

But as I quickly discovered, you can either have interesting meetings or write about them all in detail — a 24-hour day isn’t enough for doing both. I’ve tried ever since then to, at the very least, get a paragraph or so in about each meeting. I have failed, largely because it’s not that much easier to post something short. Often, it’s harder — if you’re trying to represent the session in a comprehensive, yet brief, way. The old saw about not having time to write a shorter letter has much truth in it. You have to go through all your notes and recordings and video to make sure you don’t miss something — which takes longer than the meeting itself, and which is hard to justify to your overworked colleagues if it isn’t going to help the greater cause of filling the editorial pages.

So here’s what I’m going to try to do: I’m going to say something about every meeting in September, even if it’s just something off the top of my head — even if it’s just the fact that we MET. Anything else I say about each of those meetings will be suggested by your comments — your expressed interest, or lack thereof.

And to show that I am indeed serious about this, here is a brief capsule on each face-to-face contact I had (and for which I find evidence to jog my memory) during the month of August. This is made a lot easier by the fact that I was off and at the beach through Aug. 6, then kept my calendar free of extraordinary meetings that whole next week so I could catch up. And so we begin at almost mid-month:

  • Monday, Aug. 13: John McCain. Well, you’ve already read about this, and if you were so inclined, you even watched video clips. Aside from the meeting I reported previously, I went to hear him speak to my Rotary Club that day, but really didn’t have much to add from that, except it was the biggest crowd I remember at Rotary. (Help me out — any Rotarians who were there remember a bigger one?)
  • Tuesday, Aug. 14: Lunch at the Capital City Club with Teresa Wells, S.C. communications director for John Edwards. Teresa and I had a few sensitive issues to talk out — well, really, just one. She was very professional, and it was very amiable, and we left with her determined to get me back together with her candidate, and me open to such an eventuality. Neither of us changed the others’ mind, but it was — for me, at least — a pleasant meeting. To add a little substance to this, Teresa talked about why she went to work for Edwards and believes he should be the nominee and president. She was particularly impressed by a speech he delivered to the DNC Winter Meeting in Washington back in February. At my request, after lunch she sent me links to video and text of his remarks, which I now finally get around to sharing with you. Beyond that, there’s not much to share with you. Teresa wanted the meeting to be low-key, so I left most of it off-the-record and didn’t rush to write anything about.
  • On the way back to the office from lunch that same day, I stopped at the convention center to shoot a little video of Rudy, which you’ve seen.
  • Wednesday, Aug. 15, we met Sam Brownback, about which you’ve also read, and seen video, and heard audio. I felt like I got a lot out of this meeting — enough that I told my colleagues I wanted to step up the schedule of getting in other candidates we haven’t me before.
  • Tuesday, August 21. I was the only member of the editorial board to sit down with Dr. Richard Carmona, the former surgeon general, who was here on behalf of a group trying to raise awareness of issues relating to chronic disease. Increasingly, as we approach an election year with a smaller-than-ever editorial staff, requests for meetings such as this will either be turned down, or only one of us will be there. A reporter also sat in this time, so I was not entirely alone. I posted these clips from the session.
  • Wednesday, Aug. 22. All of the associate editors and I sat down with Nick Kremydas of the S.C. Realtors Association. Why? Because he’s a mover and a shaker on some hot S.C. issues bearing upon our communities and how they develop, taxation, the relationships between state and local government, etc. We had been impressed when we met with him a year earlier by his grasp of issues, and thought he had a fairly ambitious idea of his role and that of his employers. He’s a man of respect. So we met with him for the same reasons Don Vito met with Solozzo, you might say. The main topic this time was the association’s rather creative proposal for an alternative to impact fees. There was some brief, off-the-record discussion of the column Cindi had written about him the year before. Below you find a rough, unedited clip from the meeting (I started to put together a highlights clip, but just didn’t have the hour or more that would have taken today; this way, you can see once again just how boring unfiltered information can be.)

       

  • That same afternoon, I received Her Majesty’s Consul General, Martin Rickerd, in my office. Also, in my book, a man of respect — but not one that everybody on the board needs to know or talk to. Mike Fitts might have sat in normally, but he was so backed up from the Kremydas meeting that it was pretty much out of the question. I probably would have said no myself (and colleagues who advise my on time management would say I should have refused), but I’m such an anglophile. (I had wanted to fly a Union Jack along with the U.S. flag, but my wife, who is Irish, wouldn’t have it.)
  • Thursday, Aug. 23. Mike and I had lunch with Zac Wright of Hillary Clinton’s campaign (that’s Zac atWrightzac3
    right; I shot him with my phone at the Capital City Club). This was a get-acquainted sort of meeting, ostensibly to start talking about dates when the candidate might come in for something more formal. I had a high old time, and Mike was sort of bored, because it turns out that Zac is from Martin, Tenn., which was on the outer edge of the coverage area for which I was responsible as Gibson County Bureau Chief of The Jackson Sun back in the late 1970s. Although we were a generation out of sync (he worked for Harold Ford Jr.; I had written about his daddy), we knew a lot of people in common, and swapped some good stories. Zac and I plan to get together briefly tomorrow for coffee and talk old times some more. Also, hopefully, he’ll know more about getting Mrs. Clinton in for a meeting.
  • Monday, Aug. 27. Breakfast with Zeke Stokes (Cap City Club, sort of my default location). This had come out of one of those usual "we should get together and catch up" exchanges from when he wrote that letter to defend Mr. Edwards from my meanness. That reminds me — Zeke said it would be OK to publish a memo he had sent Cindi Scoppe re ethics, based on his own scrape with the authorities in that area. I need to go find that and put it up. Anyway, this meeting was probably the impetus for Zeke sending me this heads-up, which I think got him into some minor trouble. Sorry about that, guy.
  • That same day, Joe Wilson spoke to my Rotary. I made some notes, but not about anything substantial. I was just trying to keep up, by scribbling notes on a handout left on the table, with Joe’s desperate attempt to recognize everybody in the room that he thought he should recognize, which is a chore with the biggest Rotary in the state. If I find the notes, and they seem worth it, I’ll post them.
  • Tuesday, Aug. 28. Having requested an edit board meeting ASAP, Jon Ozmint came in that very day. I posted about that already.

On Thursday the 30th, I would have dropped by a Mitt Romney event at Adluh Flour, and the McCain official HQ opening, but I was busy (all I missed at the McCain thing was the unveiling of this video). I had taken the day off to: Pick up my wife at the train station in the wee hours, and drive to Savannah and back for a follow-up appointment with my surgeon down there.

Anyway, as I said — I’ll do better this month. So far, I’m at 100 percent.

I believe in miracles

District5

Praise the Lord, for this day I have been a witness to one of his Wonders.

Today, Sept. 4, 2007, the entire, unanimous 7-member board of Richland-Lexington School District 5 came in to visit with our editorial board to express its support for the proposed bond referendum to build new schools and renovate and expand old ones.

Yes, I had read the news that they had voted unanimously to support this effort to deal with the district’s growth while maintaining excellence and meeting new educational challenges. But reading it in black and white and seeing it, in real-life, up-close and personal in 3D — well, that’s a miracle.

The entire board sat and met with us for over ninety minutes, and there wasn’t a single firefight during the entire time. Total harmony. The above photograph, taken just minutes before this post, stands as proof. (Left to right, that’s Roberta Ferrell, Paula Hite, Jerry Fowler, Carol Sloop, Ellen Baumgardner, Ed White, Supt. Scott Andersen and Robert Gantt.)

Don’t tell me the cause is lost in Iraq. Don’t tell me John McCain can’t get back his momentum. Don’t tell me the Cubs can’t go all the way. I know better. I have been witness to a miracle.

Her Majesty’s Consul General

Every four years or so, a British diplomat will pass through Columbia, and want to talk politics — mainly
presidential, but they have some interest in knowing what’s happening on the state level.

For instance, when Martin Rickerd, Her Majesty’s Consul General out ofHmg3_002 Atlanta, came by last week, he had been asking some local folks about our governor. But mostly he was curious about what the presidential candidates were saying when they visited here — Georgia being somewhat less favored in the primary schedule than S.C.

Of course, I did my usual joke about who was he really, collecting political intelligence this way — SIS? That allowed me to segue to John LeCarre novels, which he also enjoys (although he hasn’t read The Night Manager, and he should), and in other ways avoid serious talk as long as I could, which is my strategy in most meetings. But I eventually shared some thoughts with him that I hope were helpful.

In return, he provided an update on how things are faring politically over on his side — which I found helpful because, let’s face it, I’ve been less interested in following such things since Tony checked out.

Here are some video snippets you may or may not find interesting:

There ya go again with the puppy eyes….

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Those who know Energy Party Adviser Samuel Tenenbaum realize that the 55-mph speed limit is not the only thing he obsesses about, not by a long shot. For instance, there’s puppies who lack a good home (which is why he and Inez have opened their home to quite a menagerie).

At tremendous personal risk, I daredPup1
today to forward his latest message to my wife, with the subject line "Look at the puppy!" and carefully worded intro,"Samuel passed on this message, with pictures. Not that I would dare suggest anything; I just thought they were cute…"

Basically, I’ve been warned by my better half that if I so much as suggest that we take on another dog, I’ll be looking for a good home for myself.

Anyway, here’s the original message, as forwarded from Samuel. If anyone does have a good home for this mutt, I’ll be glad to pass you back to him, who will pass you back to this lady, who will pass you to the Battistes, I guess. (Animal lovers seem to have more layers of communication than the Mafia.):

My friends Luther and Judy Battiste found this puppy wandering near USC –Pup4
they have tried to find an owner with no success and are looking for a good
home.  They said this is the sweetest puppy, about 7 weeks old and very well
trained already – seems to be housebroken!  They already have 4 dogs and cannot
keep this one, despite getting attached to it – please help find a good home –
you can contact me if you or someone you know is interested.   Please send out
to all your friends.

Julie
Ruff
Special Assistant to the Mayor

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That infuriating John McCain, or, How do you pitch to a hero?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
HOW ARE YOU supposed to do your job with professional detachment when every time you see one of the main guys running for president, every time you read about him, every time he opens his mouth or takes an action in public, you think, “Hero”?
    How are you supposed to keep your rep when you keep thinking, I admire this guy? Of all things, admire! It’s embarrassing.
    On top of that, how do you do it when so many of the smart, hip, unfettered, scalpel-minded professionals around you snort when the hero’s name is mentioned, and use terms like “has-been” and “loser” and “that poor old guy”?
    It’s not easy. Maybe it’s not even possible. It wasn’t possible on Monday, when John McCain visited our editorial board.
    I presided as usual, asking most of the questions and so forth. But I never quite hit my stride. I was uneasy; I stumbled in bringing forth the simplest questions. It was weird. I’d pitched to this guy a number of times before with no trouble, even in post-season play. And here he was stepping up to bat in my ball park, where the rubber on the mound has molded itself to my cleats, and I can’t put a simple fastball over the plate, much less a curve.
    I kept remembering our last formal meeting with him, in 2000, on the day that we would decide whomMccain3
to endorse in a GOP primary that would either slingshot him onward toward victory, or enable George W. Bush to stop his insurgency cold. I wasn’t out of sorts like this. I had stated my case — my strong belief that we should endorse Sen. McCain — several days before in a 4,000-word memo to my then-publisher, a committed Bush man. I was fully prepared to make it again to the full board once the candidate left the room. And I was ready to lose like a pro if it came to that. Which it did.
    But now, 9/11 has happened. The nation is at war, and bitterly divided, even over whether we’re “at war.” And I keep thinking — as I sit a couple of feet from the candidate, aiming my digital camera with my left hand, scribbling the occasional haphazard note with my right, glancing from time to time at the audio recorder on the table to note how many minutes into the interview he said such-and-such, so busy recording the event that I don’t really have time to be there — this is the guy who should have been president for the past seven years.
    The odd thing is, a lot of people who now dismiss the McCain candidacy also believe he should have been president — that we’d be less divided at home, more admired abroad, more successful at war. But they talk like the poor old guy missed his chance. It’s like candidates have “sell by” dates stamped on them like bacon, and his was several years back. Too bad for him, they say. But I think, too bad for the nation — if they’re right.
    The best thing for me, as a professional critic, as a jaded observer, would be for those people to be right. I have no trouble assessing the relative merits of the other candidates in either major party. I even like some of them. Life could be good, professionally speaking, if that old “hero” guy really did just fade away.
    But he doesn’t. There he is, sitting there, being all honest and straightforward and fair-minded and brave and admirable. Dang.
    Go ahead, get mad at him. He’s let the moment get away from him. You can’t take a man seriously as a leader when he’s blown all that money only to lose ground, when he can’t stop his hired rats from diving overboard. Focus on his mottled scars. Murmur about how even the best of men slow down with age.
    But then you think about how this guy aged early. You look at his awkwardness as he holds his coffee cup, and you think about how the North Vietnamese strung him up by his broken arms, and all he had to do to end it was agree to go home. But he wouldn’t.
    That was then, of course, but it’s just as bad now. Think about how you asked him several months ago why he thought he had to do something about immigration now, when the only people who cared passionately about the issue and would vote on the basis of that one thing were the ones who would hate him forever for being sensible about it. He had no excuse; he just thought it was the right thing to do.
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    You think of all the Democrats and “moderates” who egged him on when he was Bush’s No. 1 critic (which he still is, if you actually listen), but who now dismiss him as the president’s “lapdog” because he (gasp!) — supports the surge and actually, if you can stand it, thinks it’s working! These political goldfish forget that their favorite maverick criticized Bush for not sending enough troops, so of course he supports a “surge” when the president knuckles under and implements one.
    Oh, but don’t speak of such people dismissively. This ridiculously admirable guy at the end of the table, who long ago forgave both his communist torturers and the protesters at home who would have spit on him given the chance, won’t have it. When I speak less than flatteringly of the impatience of Americans on Iraq, he corrects me, and relates a list of perfectly good reasons for them to be fed up.
    So when it’s over, you try to produce a McCain column for Wednesday, but you can’t. Wednesday, Sam Brownback steps to the same plate, and your arm is fine. You interrogate the guy, assess him, reach a conclusion, and slap a column on the Thursday page. Three up, three down. You’ve got your stuff back.
    But Sunday’s deadline draws nearer, and it’s gone again. Desperate, you think: How about a bulleted list of what he said Monday? There’s plenty of it. Naw, that’s a news story, not an opinion column.
    And you know, you just know, that the one thing you can’t write is the truth, which is that you just admire the hell out of this infuriating old guy. The fans won’t stand for it. You can hear the beer bottles clattering around you on the mound already.
    But it’s no use. You just can’t get the ball across today.

For actual information regarding the McCain interview, and more, go to http://blogs.
thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

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Sam Brownback of Kansas: The Beatific Conservative

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
TO SAM BROWNBACK of Kansas, a “kinder, gentler” America is more than just a line from a speech by Peggy Noonan. It’s about who he is, what he believes. It’s about the kind of America he would like to lead.
    The bumper-sticker take on Mr. Brownback is that he’s the Christian Conservative in the GOP presidential field — or one of them, anyway. But in his case, we’re talking actual Christianity, as in the Beatitudes.
    Or maybe we’re talking Micah 6:8 — as president, he says he would act justly, love mercy and walk humbly.
    That’s what drew Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson, a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, to the Brownback camp. He was disillusioned by “some of the so-called ‘Christian Right… I was looking for someone who exhibits, and walks the walk that they talk, and that’s a rare thing in politics.”
    When Sen. Brownback met with our editorial board Wednesday, I was impressed as well. I was struck by how interesting things can be when you get off the path beaten by national TV news and the covers of slick magazines. You find a guy who brings “Christian” and “conservative” together in ways that belie our common political vocabulary.
    Sure, he’s adamantly pro-life. But for him, that means being “whole life” as well — “Life’s sacred in the womb, but I think it’s also sacred in Darfur.” He’s just as concerned about genocide or starvation or slave traffic in Africa or North Korea as about abortion clinics in Peoria. Did he get there, as a Catholic convert, via the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life?” No — he explains that initially, he was more influenced by “the great theologian Bono.”
    This sort of atypical association plays out again and again. His plan for Iraq is the same as Joe Biden’s, quite literally. (You know Joe Biden — the Democrat who has campaigned in South Carolina the longest and hardest, the one who’s arguably the best-qualified candidate in that field, but you don’t hear about him much on TV? Yeah, that Joe Biden….) Their bill would partition the country more along the lines of the old Ottoman Empire.
    I have some doubts about that plan, but let’s suppose it worked, and we achieved some sort of stasis in Iraq. What about the next crisis, and the next one after that? What about Sudan, Iran, North Korea? What is America’s proper stance toward the world?
    “I think we’ve got to walk around the world wiser and more humble,” he said. It’s an answer you might expect from Jimmy Carter, or a flower-bedecked pacifist at an antiwar vigil. Sure, the true conservative position, from Pat Buchanan to George Will, has been one of aversion to international hubris. But Sam Brownback carries it off without a tinge of either fascism or pomposity, and that sets him apart.
    “Africa’s moving. Latin America is moving,” he said. “That’s where I’m talking about walking wiser and humbler. The first step in Latin America is going to be to go there and just listen.” Why is it, we should ask ourselves, “that a Chavez can come forward with his old, bad ideas, and win elections?”
“People in Latin America are saying, my quality of life has not improved.” And as a result, they’re willing to go with a dictator. “I think we need to go there and say, what is it we can do to help these economies grow…. It’s our big problem with Mexico and immigration.”
    Back to Africa: “This is a place where America’s goodness can really make a big difference to a lot of people in the world, and it would be in our long-term vital and strategic interest.”
    Asked about domestic issues, he cites “rebuilding the family” as his top concern. That may sound like standard, right-off-the-shelf Christian Right talk. But he comes to it more via Daniel Patrick Moynihan than James Dobson. He said he’s had it with beating his head against the brick hearts of Hollywood producers, and draws an analogy to smoking: Sure, people knew there was a connection between cigarettes and their nagging coughs, but Big Tobacco had room to dissemble until a direct, scientific line was drawn between their product and lung cancer.
    Just as the government now puts out unemployment statistics, he would have it gather and release data on out-of-wedlock childbirth, marriages ending in divorce, and the empirically demonstrable connections between ubiquitous pornography and a variety of social pathologies. He’d put the data out there, and let society decide from there how to react. But first, you need the data.
    His second domestic issue is energy (push electric cars) and his third is health care (he would “end deaths to cancer in 10 years”). He’s a conservative, but by no means one who wants government to butt out of our lives.
    “Humility, as a nation or as individuals, is an effective thing,” Mr. Stevenson said in explaining his support for Sen. Brownback. “It’s the right thing, and it’s also a Christian principle.”
    But that doesn’t mean you don’t take action. The Kansan summed up his attitude on many issues, foreign and domestic, in describing his reaction to Darfur: “Well you look at that, and you know that’s something that ought to be addressed… I mean, you’re the most powerful nation in the world… you can’t learn about these things and then say, well, I guess I’m just not going to do anything about it.”
    Well, some could. But it reflects to Sam Brownback’s credit that he says he could not.

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Energy Video III: Bill Barnet


Bill Barnet is the former business leader who helped start the education accountability movement before he ran a write-in campaign at the very last minute for mayor of Spartanburg … and won.

He’s one of those guys who doesn’t need his job, and in fact doesn’t need politics at all. He does it to try to make the world a better place. That’s why he came to see us with Joe Riley to talk about global warming.

Energy Video II: Joe Riley


This video has been available to you since this morning, but you may have missed the link from this column, since there was no graphic link.

So I’m drawing a little more attention to it.

The Charleston mayor came to see us with Spartanburg Mayor Bill Barnet to talk about the global warming issue from a municipal leadership perspective.