My ex-colleagues at The State did their annual laundry list of what the SC General Assembly should do in the session that convenes tomorrow, and as Cindi Scoppe acknowledged in her accompanying column, there wasn’t much new to see:
IF THE HEADLINE on today’s editorial provokes in you a sense of deja vu, that’s because it’s the same one we used last year to greet the annual return of the General Assembly. And it’s no different in substance from the year before that. In fact, the need to overhaul our tax code and spending policies and restructure our government have been among the top five issues confronting the Legislature for as far back as I can recall.
I’m not particularly fond of writing the same editorials year after year, but what choice is there? Our overarching problems are unchanged because the Legislature keeps tinkering around the edges or, worse, fixating on red-meat issues that satiate cable-news-engorged constituents but do nothing to nurture a state starved for a government that actually works. A government that provides the services that our state needs, in at least a moderately efficient way, and that pays for those services through a tax system that does not unnecessarily burden our citizens or undermine our values or give special favors to favored constituencies.
Yep, our state’s needs don’t change much from year to year. And neither do our lawmakers’ penchant for ignoring those needs.
If you’ll recall, my very last column at The State (“South Carolina’s Unfinished Business,” March 22, 2009) pretty much covered the same ground. That was almost three years ago. And after all that time, I would only need to reword one short passage:
Raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax by a dollar, bringing us (almost) to the national average, and saving thousands of young lives.
Actually, you wouldn’t even have to reword it — you would just have to add a parenthetical acknowledging that our state has taken a tiny baby step in that direction. Other than that, the column could pretty much run as-is.
Little wonder that I don’t get too excited with the new session rolls around each year…
Late last week the Obama re-election campaign brought to my attention a PolitiFact piece that said something Mitt Romney said about Obama’s NLRB was untrue.
And it was, technically. But what he was trying to say was essentially true.
In the ad, Romney stands in front of workers on a factory floor and says that “the National Labor Relations Board, now stacked with union stooges selected by the president, says to a free enterprise like Boeing, ‘you can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.’”
Here is Politifact’s ruling (and go ahead and read the entire explication that precedes it):
The Romney ad claimed that the NLRB told Boeing that it “can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.”
The NLRB’s complaint started a legal process that could ultimately have resulted in a factory closure, but the NLRB as a whole didn’t tell Boeing anything. What’s more, the legal basis for the action centered on whether Boeing was punishing the union for staging strikes, not that Boeing had opened a factory in a right-to-work state. We rate the statement False.
Bottom line, Boeing had said it wanted to get away from all those strikes, and that’s that got it into trouble. Well, one good way to get away from strikes is to go to a “right-to-work” state, where you are less likely to be dealing with a union.
So… as an editor, if someone had written for publication the words spoken in the Romney ad, I wouldn’t have allowed it. I’d have reworded it. But I would have understood what he was saying.
Gingrich Response to December Jobs Report:
We Need a Reagan Conservative Hanover, NH – Newt Gingrich made the following statement today in response to this morning’s report of 8.5% unemployment for the month of December 2011:
“Three full years into the Obama presidency, and there are still 1.7 million fewer Americans going to work today than there were on Obama’s Inauguration day.
“Today’s new December unemployment figure doesn’t capture the full scale of the tragedy: almost 24 million Americans still unemployed, working part-time for economic reasons, or discouraged from looking for work.
“The Obama experiment has failed, and it is time to look to proven solutions that have successfully empowered job-creators in the past.
“Ronald Reagan enacted historic income tax rate cuts, a stronger and more stable dollar, regulatory reforms, and spending controls. Three years into his recovery, Americans had created about 9.5 million jobs. When we took control of the House in 1995, we moved quickly to balance the budget, reform entitlements, and make the largest capital gains tax cut in history – three years later, 8 million more Americans were going into work every day.
“Now more than ever, America needs a Reagan conservative in the White House.”
###
Now, before you laugh too hard at his desperation to find a dark lining in a silver cloud… Newt definitely has a point. More than one, even. I can attest to the fact that there’s plenty of pain out there. Someone very close to me lost his longtime job just this week — along with most of the people in his office. And there are no statistics telling the story of the tons of people who remain profoundly underemployed, compared to the jobs they had before September 2008.
But still… Newt mentions Reagan here. Does anyone doubt that, if Reagan were in the White House now, Mr. Gingrich would be insisting, vehemently, that we embrace the good news in the report? I don’t.
I don’t know whether the policies President Obama has pursued have helped improve the economy or not, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to know.
But good news is good news. And Obama looks more like a two-term president than ever. And some of the candidates who did not get into this race — Huckabee, Barbour, Christie — are probably quietly congratulating themselves right now.
That's "Chuckles" Gidley in the background, during a 2006 editorial board meeting. See how he got his name?
I was delighted to see this passage in the paper this morning:
Santorum will boast of his focus on the Iranian threat to peace while other lawmakers were fixated on Iraq. He will brag that during his 12 years in the U.S. Senate, he never voted for a tax increase and pushed for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
And he will note he did those things while representing Pennsylvania, a sometimes liberal state, without “giving up his conservative principles,” according to Hogan Gidley, Santorum’s national spokesman.“He did not have to morph and change himself to win elections,” Gidley said, a not-so-subtle jab at GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s record while governor of Massachusetts.
Hogan Gidley! Chuckles! Where you been at, man?
My calling him “Chuckles” dates from when he was handling Karen Floyd’s campaign for state superintendent of education. I’ve seldom had a campaign aide glower at me in quite that way before. Karen hated the camera, but at least she smiled for it now and then.
When I received the above cartoon from Bill Day, it caused me to go look for Robert Ariail‘s latest on the subject (more or less).
There’s an interesting area of agreement there — interesting because, given their political predilections, Bill would welcome the idea of the GOP being led into obsolescence, while the idea of Obama being the beneficiary would be distressing to Robert.
Politics aside, I hope this New Year will be a great one for both of these guys. Which reminds me: It’s past time Robert and I got together again at Yesterday’s. I need to find out when he’ll be in town…
On a previous post, Bud made the observation that Hillary Clinton “seemed much more presentable 4-5 years ago.” (In Bud’s defense, it was one of our distaff contributors who brought up the subject of the secretary of state’s appearance.)
I responded, “All of us were more presentable 4-5 years ago.”
In support of that proposition, I share these photos of myself that I ran across recently, and which made me smile in remembrance.
They are a tad older than four or five years. They were taken in June 1985. I’m not sure why they are Polaroids. Maybe one of our photographers was experimenting with that as a way of checking the image before capturing it on 35mm film. Remember, in the days before digital, you didn’t know know exactly how the image would turn out until you developed it later.
In any case, the occasion for these images being taken was that it had just been announced that I would be leaving The Jackson Sun to become news editor of the much-larger Wichita Eagle-Beacon.
Something about my manic grin caused Judith, one of my best friends at the paper, to assert that I looked like I was telling my new publisher at The Sun what he could do with my old job. (Alas, my relationship with him was not nearly as positive as the one with his predecessor, Reid Ashe, whom I mentioned in my last post.)
I don’t know what I said to that. I think I just smiled — a particularly cocky, self-assured smile.
Yesterday, I heard heard a discussion on the radio about the apparently shocking news that, according to LinkedIn, 19 percent of women (nearly one out of every five!) have never had a workplace mentor.
Which, of course, means that more than 80 percent have had a mentor.
I found myself groping for a place to grab ahold of that and decide whether it meant anything at all. I mean, that sounded to me like a lot of women having mentors. How, for instance, does it compare to guys? I didn’t hear any number relating to that, but Nicole Williams of LinkedIn said this:
we found two different surveys that confirmed that, in fact, men are more likely to get workplace guidance than women. They’re more likely to have a mentor. They’re more likely to be asked to be a mentor. They’re more likely to have asked someone to be a mentor.
Yeah, OK, but I’d sort of like to see those surveys.
Because… and I may be way off-base here… I always thought that mentoring was kind of a, well, a chick thing. In my worklife, I’ve mostly only heard women even talking about it. And I’ve heard them talk about it a lot, and to place great importance on it. And I’ve seen female executives go out of their way to act as a mentor to women below them, and to encourage those women to turn about and do the same for another person of the female persuasion. And I chalked that up to women being more into doing things collaboratively, and helping each other out, while guys tend to be antisocial jerks who wouldn’t go out of their way to help another guy (a competitor!) if their lives depended on it. Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but those are the trends I have noticed, anecdotally speaking.
There’s a feminist assumption underlying all the “mentor” talk I hear from women that goes like this: Guys have their Old Boy Network, so we have to come up with these constructs to counteract that. And so they do. And it’s very overt: Will you be my mentor? Yes, I will. Then there are meetings, and lectures, and goals set, etc.
But maybe guys are “mentoring” (another one of those maddening cases of turning a noun into a verb) each other like crazy without even knowing it, or at least without calling it that.
So I thought back, have I ever had a mentor? Not overtly, to the best of my knowledge. I was regularly encouraged by my boss at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun, right out of college. I can think of two things in particular Reid Ashe said to me. Once he said, “You’re a superstar around here — you know that, don’t you?” Which was kind of a boost. And when I applied to replace John Parish as our state political writer in 1979, and didn’t get it, he created a new position for me (so I wouldn’t quit) in which I worked on special reporting assignments that I pretty much chose myself. Which was cool. The next year, he promoted me to be the editor over all the paper’s news reporters. And one time after that, when I wanted to try some experimental program or other, he told me I didn’t have to ask: “You have the authority to do anything you want to do — as long as you do the right thing.” Some would have found that intimidating, because of the implication that you’d better not foul up (in the sense of being given enough rope to hang yourself), but I was a pretty cocky kid, and I didn’t think anything I wanted to do could possibly be wrong, so I found it empowering. To use another one of those touchy-feely H.R. words.
So there’s no doubt he did a lot go encourage me early in my career. But was that being a mentor — or just having a boss who encouraged me and promoted me (which I don’t think is quite the same thing)? I don’t know. We didn’t call it that. We didn’t have regular meetings. He didn’t give me lectures, or goals. He was more like, “Keep up the good work!” Which I certainly found encouraging. But there was no formal relationship.
Anyway, I just got to wondering: How many of y’all, male and female, have had people you would call “mentors”?
Yesterday, two representatives from Her Majesty’s Government came to see me to talk politics, as they periodically do.
It can be fun to play the local expert, whether for national or foreign media, or in service of the Special Relationship — especially if you’re an Anglophile like me. Maybe I can’t see “Tinker, Tailor” where I live (yet), but I can contribute to a report that might, just might, cross a latter-day George Smiley’s desk. OK, so it’s not very likely, but hey, I can dream…
The temptation is to sound like you really know what’s going on, even if you don’t — like The Tailor of Panama, or Our Man in Havana. But I’m not the type to mislead HMG. Perish the thought.
So yesterday, I had to tell my visitors that I just can’t explain what’s happening in the South Carolina primary, and therefore can’t predict anything. And that’s the unfortunate truth.
I don’t know why Newt Gingrich is suddenly leading by double digits in polls in South Carolina, other than it’s his turn. I don’t know whether that trend will continue, because I don’t understand the dynamics that led her to this point.
And one of the problems is this: I’m not hearing from people who are Gingrich fans. I have to acknowledge that maybe there are things I don’t hear, or am not exposed to, because I’m no longer the editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Maybe that’s why I feel like I understand what’s happening now less than I understood the situation four years ago.
But you know what? So much of what I was hearing and seeing then was through my blog. I wrote relatively little about national politics in the paper, so most of my interactions in that area were online. And to the extent that I was seen as someone engaged in writing about the presidential race, it was online. For instance, a number of the national and international media types who were interviewing me initially didn’t even know I worked at the newspaper; they had come to me as a widely-read blogger.
And I’m more widely read online now than I was then. My monthly page views are at least four times what they were then. And yet…
My traffic hasn’t been steadily climbing in the months leading up to the primary, the way it did four years ago. It hit a peak in August, then dropped a bit.
I haven’t had a request for an interview from national or international sources since I spoke with E.J. Dionne at the start of November, which would be weird anytime, but especially with a primary coming up.
I just don’t run into people who are excited about the upcoming primary, either online or in person. Think about it — beyond Doug’s perpetual support for Ron Paul, who have you seen here who is pumped about a candidate? Well, it’s like that in the wider world. Quick — name five people you know who are eager to vote for Newt? You probably can’t. I know I can’t. People may be saying they’ll support Newt when a pollster asks, but they’re not going around bubbling with public excitement about it.
There were several national and international advocacy groups that had set up SC offices for the duration four years ago — and they had done it months before now. By the summer of 2007, they were up and running. This time, I know of one such group that has started a local office in recent months — One, the Bono group. I know a lot of nonprofits are far less flush with money than they were then, but it’s still remarkable.
Yes, I know that the buzz in SC should only be half of what it was four years ago, since only one party is having a primary. But it’s really much less than half. Things just feel dead by comparison.
I think one reason for that is expressed in that same Winthrop poll I referenced above. It also shows that 59 percent of those polled — and that includes Republicans — believe that Obama’s going to be elected. That, combined with a lower energy level (compared to last year) among Tea Partiers, has led to a really subdued campaign.
In a normal campaign, the fact that Newt is so far ahead, this late, would mean that he had it more or less locked up. This year, I don’t know. The polls give so easily this year, and can so easily take away. And this is Newt Gingrich — a guy with a well-known talent for self-destruction.
Normally, at this point, South Carolinians would be coalescing around the Republican most likely to with the nomination — usually, the establishment. A Bush. Bob Dole. John McCain. Now, the very definition of what it is to be a Republican — much less a South Carolina Republican — is more up in the air than at any time I remember.
So it seems to me there’s a better-than-even chance that SC won’t pick the eventual winner this time. The whole process is too wobbly, and less susceptible to steadying factors than in the past. And if that happens, there will be even less energy, and much less national attention, focused on the SC GOP primary four years from now.
But I just don’t know. When it’s hard to explain why what is already happening is happening, it’s very hard to predict what will happen next.
The National Labor Relations Board dropped a high-profile complaint against Boeing Co., a move that was expected after the aerospace company’s 31,000-member machinists union approved a sweeping contract extension earlier this week.
The NLRB said Friday that it withdrew the April complaint, which charged the aerospace company with illegally retaliating against the union for previous strikes by opening an aircraft-production line at a non-union plant in South Carolina.
The agency had filed the complaint on behalf of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers after siding with the union’s allegations. Boeing contested the charges, saying it had made a business decision and didn’t retaliate against the union. The case drew heavy criticism from the business community and some Republican lawmakers, who said the NLRB should not be interfering with companies’ choices about where to open factories….
The action makes sense — certainly a lot more sense than the agency’s previous position. I kept wondering where NLRB thought it was going with that. I mean, try to imagine the agency actually making Boeing pull back out of South Carolina. A federal agency telling a major corporation where it can do business within the United States? It would have been like nothing that I can recall in U.S. labor history. It would have required a complete rethinking of the role of government in the economy. It would have been way more radical than what GOP politicians seem to think Obamacare is.
Speaking of Republican politicians, this decision has left some of them off-balance. There they were in full outrage mode, and now, “Huh?” They’re like Wile E. Coyote, who suddenly realizes there’s no mesa beneath him.
Lindsey Graham is demanding an investigation:
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is calling for a congressional investigation into collaboration between the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union against The Boeing Company’s decision to build a second 787 Dreamliner production facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Graham’s announcement comes after the NLRB announced it will drop its complaint against Boeing.
Graham also reaffirmed today he will continue to place an indefinite Senate hold on nominations to the NLRB Board. Beginning in January 2012, the NLRB will have just two members. The Supreme Court last year ruled that an agency board with just two members lacks the authority to issue case rulings.
More to the point, the senator said, “For the sake of the Boeing South Carolina workers, I’m pleased to hear the frivolous complaint that has put a cloud over their operations has been lifted. However, it’s hard to celebrate an event which never should have happened…”
By the way, I THINK this is the new Boeing plant. I shot this in North Charleston yesterday, near the airport. There were no signs to confirm, that I saw...
This being a family blog, one doesn’t usually find this sort of thing here. But since I’m told that it actually appeared in a South Carolina newspaper — it was all the talk at the round table of regulars at the Capital City Club this morning — I suppose I should deal with it.
We’ve reached out to the Greenville News copy desk, who hopefully will be able to chime in on how the most hilarious copy editing mistake of the year came to be.
Jim Romenesko spoke to a reporter there who said that the paper was getting complaints already (from people who are apparently no fun) and apologizing to them.
Well, I’ll tell ya…
First, someone appears to have violated a cardinal rule — don’t put anything, in any way, shape or form, into copy, however temporarily or intended for internal consumption, that you wouldn’t want to see in the paper. Ever. It’s tempting to share sarcastic asides between reporters and editors, but get up and walk across the room to do it. Don’t ever put it in the copy, because the chance of this happening is too great. (When I supervised reporters, I told them not even to make the slugs — the internal names — of their stories — anything embarrassing. Because, back in the pre-pagination days, it was way too easy for that stray piece of type at the top to get stuck to the page after it was trimmed off in the composing room.)
Second, the page didn’t get proofed. At all. By anyone. There are a lot of ways this can happen in understaffed newsrooms, but here’s the most merciful scenario: The page was proofed, and “corrected” type was sent through, and somehow had this word in it (perhaps it was the initial response of a stressed editor who had thought that page was gone already), and no one looked at the page again after it was put on there.
But basically, there is no excuse that serves.
It’s easy to blame this, as Romenesko does, on the extreme practice at newspaper companies of having copyediting done off-site. But basically, with this sort of error, if it’s going to happen, it could happen anywhere. The reason having copyediting done off-site is phenomenally stupid is that it increases the chance of an error that no local person would make, and only a local person would notice. And if mid-size to small papers are not locally authoritative, they are nothing.
By the way, something like this happened at The Jackson (TN) Sun when I worked there back in the 70s. We were in that interim stage between linotype machines and front-end computer systems. Copy would be edited and then output onto a rolled-up strip of punchtape. The tape would be fed into a typesetting machine that would roll out the copy on photographic paper. Occasionally, the tape would hang up while being fed through the machine. The result would be a stutter, and a letter would be repeated over and over until the kink worked its way through.
The initial error would not be human. But it was up to humans to catch it and correct it before the page was let go.
One day, that failed. The punch tape on an obit — an obit, of all things, the holy of holies — snagged briefly while going through the machine. Instead of saying that services would be held at the funeral home, it came out, “services will be held at the fukkkkkkkkkk home.”
It was caught partly through the press run, but some papers had already gone out. Including the one that went to the bereaved family.
Our publisher — or was it the executive editor? — personally delivered a corrected copy to that family, along with the most abject of apologies.
Last night, I saw “Back to the Future” for the first time in many a year. And I had to smile at the end. In 1985, it was still credible that we’d have flying cars in 2015. The shocking thing is that that leaves us only four years now. Well, at least it doesn’t take laying down much infrastructure, so I suppose it is conceivable (especially if we’re fueled by a Mr. Fusion).
But today, I saw something that is more likely to be our future — a plug-in electric car. In routine use.
I was visiting Mike Couick over at the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina in Cayce. As it happens, we were talking about sustainable energy (ADCO is working with the Central Midlands Council of Governments and a couple of private partners on a project for local governments). And when we walked outside after the interview, there was some right in front of us.
This Nissan Leaf belongs to ECSC, and is used to drive around the state on co-op business, which surprised me — I assumed it was for local use. How does it manage that sort of range? Mike said all the co-ops have charging stations.
Very cool, I thought.
Mike reminded me that this was really sort of retro, since the original automobiles were electric, before the internal combustion engine decided to eat the world (my wording, not his).
With that in mind, I can’t wait to get back to the future and drive one of these myself. And I’ll pass on the gullwing doors, Mr. DeLorean.
Once upon a time there was a thing called newspapers, and Richard Crowson is my oldest newspaper friend. One of his first published editorial cartoons illustrated a column I wrote for the editorial page of the journalism department lab paper at Memphis State University in 1975. I already knew Richard from working with him at the MSU library.
A couple of years later, Richard joined me at The Jackson Sun, where we worked together for close to a decade, Richard as the editorial cartoonist.
Then, in 1985, I persuaded him to come out to Kansas, where he eventually became editorial cartoonist of The Wichita Eagle. A couple of years after that, I left to come here. Richard stayed.
Richard, being a talented editorial cartoonist, was laid off from his job about six months before Robert Ariail and I were.
Anyway, I only possess a copy of one of his cartoons, the one above from 1982. It’s my favorite. Sorry that the perspective is a bit askew. It’s too big for my scanner, and I had to shoot it with my camera at an angle to get the reflection off the glass of the frame.
Enjoy.
Oh, another thing about Richard. He’s not only a great cartoonist; he’s probably the most talented picker I know — of any stringed instrument you care to name, as long as it’s used in the production of Bluegrass. The first thing Richard did when he arrived in Wichita was go out and buy several second-hand kitchen chairs for his apartment, for his fellow pickers to sit on once he found some. Which he promptly did.
Below, you see him at left with the rest of The Home Rangers, “Kansas’ Premier Cowboy Band.”
Note the camera held high in the right hand. Note the digital recorder with Moleskine notebook held in left hand. Note the dramatic profile. Note the bow tie. That's my Hound Dog tie. It's my favorite.
Jack Gerstner responded, “i wonder what brad does now, other than bog?”
I do indeed have boggy days, but yesterday was fairly dry.
But occasionally, I suppose it’s good to remind y’all that the reason I don’t post a tenth as much as I’d like is that I’m also director of communications and public relations at ADCO.
What does that mean? Well, different things.
Yesterday, for instance — hours before the Occupy Columbia thing pictured above — I attended a meeting over at 2020 Hampton with Richland County Administrator Milton Pope and a number of his department heads. ADCO is working with a couple of consulting companies, Cadmus and Genesis Consulting, to help Central Midlands Council of Governments come up with a sustainable energy plan for the Midlands. We were briefing the Richland folks on where the project stands, and seeking their input on the next stage of it.
This morning at 11, I have a phone conference about that project. Before and after that, I’m working on copy for web pages for another client, intended to tell parents what to look for in a good childcare center.
This afternoon, I’ll be over at Bobby Hitt’s shop. Commerce has asked a number of firms in the advertising/marketing/PR world to work together to help Commerce with a branding project, something that promises to be pretty exciting, and which I hope to learn more about today.
And when I get a minute — between ADCO stuff, nights, weekends — I bog.
After the warning and before the arrests, these were the few chosen to be arrested, waiting as the rain began to fall.
There were about 100 apparent protesters milling about in the dark as the 6 p.m. deadline arrived. People in pools of harsh TV lights being interviewed, others talking on cellphones, others just waiting.
Walid Hakim was, as he has been, a center of attention. He told me — and maybe if I can get it uploaded, I’ll put up video later — that he had just learned that his great-great-great-great-great grandfather had owned the land on which the State House was located. So he said he was just hanging out on the family homestead, waiting to be arrested. He made dramatic statements about how the rights to speak and peaceably assembly that he had defended in the Marines were about to be denied him.
Brett Bursey was there, as he had been earlier in the day. “Do they take credit cards at the jail now?” he asked me. I said they certainly should, this being the 21st century and all. Then he slouched off to confer with others here and there. A few minutes later, I asked how many times he had been arrested, counting this time. He expressed doubt that he would get arrested, and acted a bit like he was being cheated. I didn’t really follow what he was saying was happening. Then he wandered off again.
The cops still hadn’t shown.
Walid and a dozen or 15 others grouped themselves around the Confederate soldier monument, with that “I’m going to be arrested” look in their eyes. At this point, I Tweeted out:
They’re so pumped up, chanting “WE. ARE. THE 99 PERCENT!” It would be rotten of Nikki not to arrest any of them. They’d feel so let down…
Eventually, some of the State House security guys showed up and announced that pursuant to the governor’s announcement, those who did not vacate would be arrested.
By then it had started drizzling. Walid and the other designated martyrs sat around the little fence enclosing the flagpole, and waited. My iPhone and camera started getting pretty wet. I went to stand under a tree. Didn’t help much.
Finally, the officers who had made the announcement came back out onto the grounds with reinforcements — maybe 20 uniformed officers. They formed a skirmish line, donning gloves, and started walking slowly toward Gervais.
I found myself walking backwards with the protesters who would NOT be arrested toward the sidewalk along the street. I realized the working media had stayed behind with those who were to be arrested. The police had simply walked past them, parting around them like a stream around a rock. I thought about standing on ceremony and demanding to be allowed back in with the other media, but a number of disconnected thoughts were running through my mind, such as:
I have no credentials, and this didn’t seem like a good moment, standing in the rain with everyone a little tense, to have a debate with the authorities about how I was, too still a member of the Fourth Estate, even though all I had to show was a bradwarthen.com business card. A damp one.
While I had bought the insurance on my iPhone, that meant I would “only” have to pay $175 to replace it if it were ruined by the rain.
My little Canon with which I was trying to shoot video was likely to suffer the same fate as the one before it, which was splashed by surf and never worked again. No one would reimburse me.
This was all moving WAY too slowly. At this rate, no one would get any cuffs before another half hour had passed.
What are the long-term effects of rain upon a silk bow tie?
What the line of cops wasn’t blocking, the media types still within the perimeter were. I couldn’t see what was going on with Walid and the rest.
I went ahead and crossed the street. As I did, I saw a group of protesters had gathered on the far side of Gervais under a blue tarp. I envied them their shelter as the wind suddenly picked up dramatically.
Then, it came down in buckets. I was entirely drenched by the time I made the door of 1201 Main.
I rode the elevator up, in my soaked blazer and black (formerly gray) pants and drooping bow tie and mop of thoroughly sopping hair. Everyone looked at me as though I were a lunatic. I got up to the Capital City Club and went to the bathroom to try to dry off some with the little terry cloth towels in there.
I went to a window to look back down at the scene I had left. I couldn’t see a thing. The TV lights seemed to be gone, even.
I went on into the Membership Committee meeting from which I was playing hooky. My appearance excited comment. One member asked me whether I was ignorant of the fact that there was an attached parking garage. I mumbled some explanations, sat down, and did my best to act normal.
Here’s a report from reporters who were paid to stay behind and witness the final tedious act of the drama:
Acting at the behest of Gov. Nikki Haley, S.C. Bureau of Protective Services troopers took 19 Occupy Columbia protesters in front of the State House into custody in a driving rainstorm around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Officers escorted small groups of those taken into custody back towards the State House. Officers placed band-type handcuffs behind their back. Protesters did not resist; there was no violence.
“At least you don’t have to be in rain now,” one officer said to a protester as he led a man. Protesters arrested included both men and women.
It was not known what, if any, charges those taken into custody will face.
Haley’s directive was aimed at keeping the demonstrators off State House grounds during the night. She apparently will not order state troopers to formally remove them during daylight hours.
“We the people shall never be defeated!” protesters chanted immediately before being detained…
And so forth…
What? Why are you staring at me? It’s raining…
I couldn’t get my camera to focus on the officers as they prepared to advance.
Clustered at the foot of the Confederate flag, awaiting arrest.
Brett Bursey, the old hand, confers with a colleague.
… but mostly all remained well-behaved while the governor spoke.
They kept doing that finger-waggling thing, back behind the media types.
Laying down the law…
The governor, well protected, makes her announcement.
The crowd that had gathered to hear the governor at 4 p.m.
Walid Hakim, ready for the revolution.
Early in the day, before the governor’s announcement.
Jim Hammond sent this to me today, from the Nephron announcement Friday.
I don’t know what I’m smirking at as I line up that shot on the iPhone. Perhaps I think I’m catching someone in a compromising attitude. Or maybe it’s that I realized Jim was shooting me as I made that shot. Who knows why I smirk? The Cartesian take on it would be, I think, therefore I smirk.
I’m kind of jealous of the quality of Jim’s camera. It does a good job with a backlit subject. I have a really good camera, too — really good — but it uses film. And that’s just too much trouble and expense these days for everyday use.
Oh, and here’s a picture from way back of me biting my thumb — I mean, turning up my nose — at Dan Quayle. It’s from a chance encounter at a banquet years and years ago …
ME: "I'll have you know, sir, that in South Carolina, we DRESS for dinner!" QUAYLE: "All I want is a potatoe."
I was struck by Daniel Henninger’s column in the WSJ this morning. He was decrying the freak show that is this series of GOP presidential debates, and the way they are making our republic stupider by the day.
And then he got to talking about the way Jon Huntsman impressed in an editorial board meeting:
These dark thoughts came forth earlier this week when a group at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page spent some 75 minutes talking to candidate Jon Huntsman. He’s the one they stick on the end of the podium.
Say this: Jon Huntsman may or may not deserve to be the nominee, but he’s better than the back of the line.
After starting with a horrifyingly robotic recitation of his resume (exactly as he’s said in every debate), the former Utah governor took us on an intriguing tour of his thinking on a range of issues.
Mr. Huntsman said the U.S. likely would have to intervene militarily against Iran’s nuclear program in the next four or five years, a remarkable assertion. He said this in an Oct. 10 speech in New Hampshire, but even in our super-saturated media age, trees fall silently in an empty forest.
He supports “regime change in Syria” through diplomatic and covert means. We should try to make Iraq a “buffer” between Iran and Syria.
He supports the details of the Ryan Plan on entitlement reform. Like Rep. Ryan, he says this contest is “not a normal election”; if the Republicans lose, he said, the U.S. could be on course to repeat Japan’s 10 years of moribund economic growth.
There was more, some of it impressive, some not (for ideas on economic policy, he talks to his brother, an entrepreneur). The point is that one left the meeting with a basis to think about Mr. Huntsman as president, rather than the thumbs-down vote he’s gotten from the Roman Colosseum of the TV debates…
You may or may not have noticed that, when Huntsman sat down with The State‘s board recently, he also impressed them as being the guy with the most substance in the field. Or he impressed Cindi, anyway, which takes some doing.
Part of this is that an editorial board meeting is a vastly superior vehicle for assessing what sort of POTUS a candidate might be than the Reality TV formats of the “debates,” especially given what Mr. Henninger called “(t)he assumption that every cat and dog must be in the debate.” If only there were a way to duplicate that experience — sitting down with a candidate for an hour or two or three and really digging into issues, with discussion rather than robotic questions and timed answers.
But maybe there’s also something about Huntsman — something that even the traumatized, extremism-ridden, post 2008 GOP would see if they’d stop sticking him at the far end of the podium, uninvite some of the less-suitable candidates, and give him an extended listen for once.
Jeff Miller and Warren Bolton, outside Yesterday's in Five Points.
Yesterday my phone rang, and told me Jeff Miller was calling. This was confirmed when I answered and heard his voice:
“I’ve got that Dole story for you.”
Except that he still didn’t have it. He was just stringing me along…
The background: I pulled Jeff out of The State‘s Newberry bureau in late 1987 to assign him to cover the upcoming Republican presidential primary here — the one that launched George H. W. Bush toward the nomination and the presidency, and did so much to burnish the S.C. primary as the early contest that picked winners.
I had other political reporters — plenty of them, in those days. But Lee Bandy was up in Washington, and my others who could do the job would be busy with the Legislature by the time of the primary. I needed somebody to work this story full-time, and for the duration. We could see it was going to be a big deal, with the nation’s eyes on South Carolina, so I didn’t want to treat it like just another story. Gordon Hirsch, who was then the news editor, suggested Jeff as somebody who, despite lack of political experience, could do the job. I jumped at the offer, and our state editor lost him from then until after the primary. (Actually, the State Desk have lost him permanently — eventually, he joined my governmental affairs staff for good. I just can’t remember whether he went back to Newberry for a while first. It’s been a LONG time.)
He did a great job, and had a great time, I think. I still remember him talking about being on the bus with David Broder, and what a nice guy Broder was. Jeff was young, and new to all this, and he was really impressed that the legendary Broder would just sit and talk with him like a regular person.
But he wasn’t too starry-eyed to do his job well. I was pleased. There’s just this one beef. After the primary was over, I had one more story idea for him. After all these years, I can’t even remember what the specific idea was, but I thought it was a good one — it was an angle about Bob Dole’s defeat here that no one else had done. Jeff wasn’t so sure. He was also pretty exhausted with writing about that stuff, and needed to move on to his other reporting duties. I kept bugging him about it — just this one more story, I kept saying. I was like that as an editor — even when people had been working double-time for a long time, actually even when they were on vacation, truth be told — and I usually got my way, through sheer insufferability. Not this time. Jeff would say, “Yeah, sure…” but I never got it.
So he owed me.
Today, he paid me back by taking Warren Bolton and me to lunch, on his first visit back to Columbia in a decade. We went to Yesterday’s, of course, because I got to pick (see the ad at right). We had a great time talking about the Dole story (neither of us can remember what it was about now — but it was gonna be good). We talked about the Cosmic Ha-Has, the softball team on which both Jeff and I played (I was the last Ha-Ha left at the paper; all gone now). We talked about the county league basketball team that Jeff and Warren played on, and how neither of them plays any more. (I went out to play with them once. For some reason, they never begged me to come back.)
A lot of the intervening years — I was last Jeff’s editor in 1993 — Jeff was still covering politics, but for other papers. Washington became his home base, and when I last saw him, at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 (below), he was in the Washington bureau of the Allentown Morning Call, if I remember correctly. In 2006 he left newspaper work, but has stayed in D.C. Now, he’s the vice president for communications of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
It was great to see him again. Warren, too. But it’s usually not so long between times I get to see Warren.
Jeff and me on the last night of the RNC in NY in '04. The marathon was nearly over (conventions mean 20-hour days for press types). Like my beard? I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.
A reader Tweeted, as I was headed to a late lunch (1:46 p.m. EST), “Eager to read your thoughts on Spurrier v. Morris.” I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, but now I do. I’ve seen the video and everything. (Interestingly, I could not find anything about it on the mobile version of thestate.com, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the browser version at the time.)
Of course, by that time, the news that the coach, or Eric Hyman, or somebody, had thrown Stephen Garcia off the team — apparently for real, this time. Hyman explained, “For Stephen to return to and remain with the football squad this fall, we agreed on several established guidelines. Unfortunately, he has not been able to abide by those guidelines and has therefore forfeited his position on the roster.”
I don’t know what the guidelines were, as I don’t follow this stuff. But I did see the Auburn game, and a reasonable guess would be that one of his guidelines involved throwing the football straight. Yes, I’m joking. Sort of.
But Micah apparently wanted to know what I thought about the Ron Morris thing. Gee, I don’t know.
I’m not Ron’s editor; never was. If I were, right now I’d be saying, “What the hell, Ron?” Or perhaps I’d use some other, saltier, newsroom expression. And Ron would tell me what was going on as well as he could, from his perspective. Although, based on the performance I saw on the video, it might not be altogether clear to him what it’s all about (apart from the usual animus that, from what I’ve seen, Ron is accustomed to engendering). Anyway, assuming he had the information available, I would have Ron lay out for me his version of the story. Then, I would check it out as well as I could.
If Coach Spurrier had an ounce of professionalism in him, of course, he would already have communicated to me (as Ron’s theoretical editor) what his beef was. Let’s assume he does, and he did. In that case, I would already have had it out with Ron about it and, given the way Spurrier acted today, probably would have told him I’d decided to back Ron. Hence the public tantrum.
Of course, if the coach did NOT try the normal, civil route first, then his performance today was inexcusable. Perhaps understandable on some level given that his QB was just canned after letting him down, but still not excusable in a man paid $2.8 million a year by a public institution to represent that institution.
Speaking of which, if I were Eric Hyman or Harris Pastides, I’d right now be having a serious talk with the coach about his performance — a sort of mirror of the one I’d be having with Ron as his editor. We’d start by watching his game film. Some of the things I’d be asking him:
What’s this really about, Steve? And don’t give me that nonsense about some column last spring. That was last spring; you blew up today. What’s really going on? (Oh, wait: Maybe THIS is the column Spurrier is referring to, in which Morris wrote, “Spurrier poached Horn’s program.”)
What exactly do you mean when you say it’s “my right as a head coach” not to talk to Ron Morris? Is that some special right we don’t know about? Do assistant coaches, or ordinary mortals walking the streets, not have that right? Because one would think that they do; that any human being walking the planet would have the right not to talk to Ron Morris if they chose not to. (Unless, of course, they were working for us, and we were paying them $2.8 million a year, and we told them to talk to him…) So what’s this imperious “as a head coach” stuff? Have we really made you feel that important?
And so on. That would just be for starters. And I’d be doing that in between fielding phone calls from people over at the newspaper asking me, “What the heck?” Because they use language like that in talking to the public.
So, as I say, if I were charged with taking a position on this, I’d be in fact-finding mode now before making a decision. But if you held the proverbial gun to my head (and I’d much prefer that to a literal one), I’d have to choose Ron on this one. And I might get embarrassed doing so — I might later have to run a full retraction on the challenged column last spring or something if it turned out Ron was wrong. But if you forced me, I’d go with him on this, because I know him. Or at least, I know him better than I do Spurrier, whom I’ve never met.
That means I used to run into Ron in the hallway sometimes, and stop to chat. I never actually worked with him. I don’t think he was in the newsroom when I was (pre-1994), and even if he had been, we’d have had little occasion to deal with each other. But he has always struck me as a pretty thoughtful, careful guy.
I knew people hated him — people of the “Cocky is God” persuasion. And I used to wonder about that, but I’ve often had occasion to wonder about really serious football fans. Sometimes, when one of Ron’s columns caused a splash of some sort, I’d actually turn to the sports pages and read it. And it usually read OK to me — of course, I was judging it outside the context of having any particular knowledge of the subject matter.
