A real horse race'Interesting' times ahead for campaignsBy Bill Davis, senior editor
AUG. 28, 2009 --There’s an old Chinese curse that goes something like this, “May you live in interesting times.”
 Well, South Carolina, judging by the current gubernatorial race, you are indeed living in interesting times.
For the first time since 1994, back when even Charleston Mayor-for-life Joe Riley still had statewide aspirations, the seat will be open without an incumbent fighting for his political life. And that, combined with a host of political and economic reasons, is making for a unique political showdown with all of the drama of a bad soap opera.
This week, on the heels of questions of how Gov. Mark Sanford may have used or misused the state plane and his reelection funds, several Republicans politicians called for his resignation or impeachment.
Included in those were Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, already a candidate for the governor’s office, who offered not to run again if he were allowed to finish out Sanford’s term. The chorus also included one of Sanford’s previously most loyal allies in the state House, Rep. Nathan Ballentine (R-Irmo).
Changed political landscape
When GOP state Attorney General Henry McMaster took a swipe this week at Sanford’s scandals in his announcement to run, it underscored how different a political landscape the gubernatorial race had become.
 “Let’s face it, when was the last time you saw so many Democratic candidates for the governor’s race in South Carolina?” asked Bauer, referring to Sen. Vincent Sheheen of Kershaw, Sen. Robert Ford of Charleston, lobbyist Dwight Drake, Charleston lawyer Mullins McLeod, and an expected run from current state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex.
An open seat always brings out more candidates, according to several political scientists. Erskine Professor Ashley Woodiwiss said open seats bring on “a sense of change and new beginnings. And many aspirants tend to think ‘if not now, then when?’”
Sanford’s record in the office may have emboldened more Democrats to throw their hats into the ring, according to several observers. But will the job Sanford’s done and the scandals that are unfolding have the same effect on the electorate that former President George W. Bush’s administration had, arguably paving the way for President Obama’s victory?
“I don’t think so,” said Sheheen, “because the political dynamics are so different between the national and state levels.”
Only one woman running
One candidate, Republican state Rep. Nikki Haley of Lexington, may be the most affected by Sanford’s latest troubles, as she was the GOP candidate most linked to the governor. Neither Haley, McLeod or U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett responded directly to interview requests.
“Only in South Carolina” would a sex scandal like Sanford’s not benefit a female candidate, according to Lynne Ford, a political science professor at the College of Charleston who now occupies the office left behind by the recently deceased Bill Moore, one of the “deans” of the field in the state.
Ford further lamented that Sanford’s foibles had not increased the number of female candidates in other, “down ticket” races, which she found disappointing since South Carolina remains the only state in the nation without a solitary female state senator.
Money is always an issue
Another factor that will definitely affect the campaigns will be money. In a down economy, politicians and professors alike said they knew people would me more focused on putting dinner on the table at home than attending a fundraising dinner for a candidate.
But few interviewed expected the amount of money eventually be spent on the governor’s race would be that far off from 2006, which was estimated to have been close to $14 million. None would say how much candidates would need to raise to win.
Political observer John Crangle, executive director of the state office of Common Cause, worried the trend of state candidates looking outside South Carolina’s borders for political donations might not only continue, but intensify in a tight economy.
He said that could bring undue pressure from residents in “New York City and Connecticut area,” referring obliquely to kingmakers like Howard Rich.
Crangle also said this year’s tight economy might mean that for the first time in state history, a well-heeled candidate like staffer-turned attorney-turned lobbyist Dwight Drake could self-fund a campaign.
In an interview, Drake thanked Crangle for thinking so highly of him and his bank account, and said it was not his intention to stop public fundraising.
“This will be a raucous, wide-open race, but that won't be due to any one factor,” said Winthrop professor Scott Huffmon. “A lot of political observers may try to distill it down to ‘this’ factor or ‘that’ one. However, the real truth is that it is a combination of all of these factors -- and yes, some are semi-unique -- will add to the craziness.”
Crystal ball: The next governor of South Carolina may well be Andre Bauer – before the November 2010 election – if current investigations turn up bigger problems than the state has already seen splashed across its newspapers. But, if that’s not the case, watch for an interesting dance of all those running, distancing and attacking the Sanford legacy, while at the same time embracing its core -- accountability, restructuring and frugality.
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A look at meetings ahead
Members of both the House and the Senate will at least twice in the coming weeks.
At 11 a.m. Monday, the offense classification workgroup of the Sentencing Reform Commission will meet in 209 Gressette.
On a potentially bigger note, the state Taxation Realignment Commission (TRAC) will meet the for the first time the following week at 10 a.m. Sept. 9 in 105 Gressette.
In related state meeting agendas, the Budget and Control Board will meet at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, in the Governor's Conference Room on the first floor of the Wade Hampton Building to consider the budget cut issue carried over from the last meeting.
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Impeachment on the agendaA Statehouse insider confirmed this week that GOP lawmakers would discuss the possibility of impeaching Gov. Mark Sanford this weekend during a party retreat in Myrtle Beach.
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A thousand cuts
Word coming out of Columbia this week was that a certain Statehouse reporter (not one of ours -- drat!) has a sheath of new scandals with Gov. Mark Sanford’s name on it.
If that pans out, then expect the legislature to shift gears and accelerate possible impeachment hearings for Sanford. The stimulus fiasco, the Argentine lover, pending Legislative Audit Council investigations into the cabinet-level state Department of Corrections and a potential state Ethics Commission investigation into use of the state plane and left-over campaign funds will drag on for Sanford in the coming months.
If the Ethics Commission digs up some real dirt, look for the legislature to really go after the governor. If legislators moved forward, the House would go first with an impeachment proceeding. If Sanford were impeached, which is similar to being indicted by a grand jury, then the Senate would conduct a trial over an impeachment. Perhaps the biggest issue then would become whether the Senate would want to have a lengthy fight dominate its agenda when people across the state are yearning for leadership on jobs, education and health care.
No love from Lt. Gov.
It seems like the only person in South Carolina not asking Gov. Mark Sanford to resign was First Lady Jenny Sanford, and that might be because they aren’t speaking.
This week, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, not the closest friend or ally of the embattled governor, called for Sanford’s resignation. Bauer promised, again, to not run for governor in the coming year if he were allowed to complete Sanford’s current term. The offer, however, would expire if the resignation did not come within a month.
Sanford criticized Bauer’s call as “political.” Well, duh. Bauer’s offer may be a shrewd political move, although some Statehouse observers say it is little but a meager attempt to repair Bauer’s political negatives among voters.
Lagging behind both fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Congressman Gresham Barrett and state Attorney General Henry McMaster in fund-raising, Bauer may know that this is his best chance at moving into the Governor’s mansion, albeit temporarily. He won his current office while being outspent, but Barrett and McMaster, the former head of the state GOP, are big-time political talents. But once in office, Bauer’s profile may rise enough to get the money coming in. Or, as another observer said earlier this week, he could be positioning himself for a better run in 2014, or maybe even earlier for Congress.
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Roundup: Santee Cooper, Sanford and KennedyBy Andy Brack, editor and publisher AUG. 28, 2009 – News this week that Santee Cooper was suspending efforts to build a 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant in the Pee Dee found conservationists and environmentalists giving a lot of high fives to each other.
 As the utility spent hundreds of thousands of dollars beating the drum about the need for the new plant, grassroots and greenie organizers mobilized support against the facility. But while their efforts were helpful, the shelving the plant basically was the result of one of the utility’s biggest customers, Central Electric Power Cooperative, deciding to buy more power elsewhere than the proposed plant would have produced in the years ahead.
Voila – the need for the extra power plant here vanished because Central Electric plans to get electricity from Duke Power in North Carolina.
What wasn’t picked up by most of the media this week was the doubletalk by Santee Cooper about power and money. On one hand, the company said it ended the plant for three reasons: reduced demand for electricity due to the recession, proposed federal regulations that would boost the cost of the plant and Central Electric’s reduced needs.
An Aug. 24 news release noted, “[Chairman O.L.] Thompson added that Santee Cooper customers could benefit from the decision, because they may not need to bear the capital costs of constructing the proposed Pee Dee facility.” It later noted that the utility’s “sales” were down 5 percent.
 In a completely separate news release delivered in the same e-mail as the one above, Santee Cooper announced “an overall 3.4 percent base rate increase beginning Nov. 1, 2009 to offset rising costs of operating and maintaining the utility’s generation, transmission and distribution facilities.”
So on one hand, customers will save money (over the long term), but they’ll face immediate increases to level out the company’s decreased revenues. Truth certainly is stranger than fiction. Thanks, Santee Cooper.
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So Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, in an apparent attempt to repair his political negatives, now wants Gov. Mark Sanford to resign over the whole mess over his love affair and plane trips. Bonus: If done in the next month, Bauer won’t run for governor. Translation: Bauer is pandering.
As some outlets have suggested, Bauer has reinjected politics into the Sanford scandal just as it was kind of simmering down. Yes, the press continues to scrutinize flights, but they’re finally reporting that other governors upgraded seats when flying on state dime.
We like most what U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, observed – that all of the continuing focus on Sanford’s peccadilloes with talk of impeachment, resignation and whatnot – is allowing state lawmakers to keep their eyes off the real ball. The state has horrible unemployment and our leaders need to be focused on getting a lot of people jobs, not fiddling with the one job of a washed-up politician.
While we’ve never been a Sanford fan, he should stick to his guns now and not be “railroaded” out of office by political stunts. Lawmakers should focus on jobs, not a leader they haven’t really enjoyed working with anyway.
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Kennedy |
The passing of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has played a lot in the news, but little has been said of the liberal senator’s lasting impact here in South Carolina. Due to his hard work, he changed lives of regular people in major ways. Here are just three:
- Health care. If you are one of 300,000 South Carolinians who gets health care through one of the 22 federally-funded community health centers, you can thank Teddy Kennedy and former U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings.
- Minimum wage. If you make a $7.25 minimum wage today, you can thank Ted Kennedy, a tireless advocate for raising the minimum wage. Without his efforts, you’d probably still be making $5.15.
- Disabilities. Kennedy is largely responsible for legislation that makes it easier for the disabled to participate in our communities.
If you wonder whether Teddy Kennedy’s impact will be missed in Washington, all you have to do is ask any one of several Republican senators in Washington who enjoyed working with him.
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Students deserve better By Steven H. Coe
President, S.C. Chapter of the American Institute of Architects
Special to S.C. Statehouse Report
AUG. 28, 2009 -- The current economic crisis is affecting school districts across our state. A letter by State Rep. Don Bowen, R-Anderson, touts the benefits of using “stock school plans” as a way of saving taxpayers and strapped school districts thousands of dollars in design fees. In return, he argues that having nine standard architectural plans would generate savings that can be redirected to classrooms, increase teacher salaries and eliminate the need for portable classrooms.
Coe |
While reducing costs and increasing salaries are great ideas, using stock plans is the wrong approach. Experience shows the best way to reduce costs is to design a facility specific to a district's needs and individual goals.
Bowen’s proposal isn’t a new idea. More than 25 states, including neighboring Georgia and North Carolina have attempted to use standardized plans. All have abandoned the idea finding little to no savings. Moreover, the states that tried standardized plans discovered they ended up with inferior, inefficient and inflexible schools. Stock school plans would not create cutting-edge schools, but would result in "minimally adequate" schools designed to a standardized program with little flexibility.
The reasons stock plans don't work are simple. Each site has unique soil and environmental conditions which have a dramatic effect on a building's design, structural safety and energy efficiency. Using a stock school plan would require modifications to the existing plans. Altering those plans is going to cost money. No matter how similar two projects may seem architects and engineers would still need to be involved to make these modifications including surveying the property, designing drainage systems, laying out roads, designing foundations properly designed for a particular site's soil conditions and modifying the design to work for a given site.
| If more than 25 states have abandoned the idea of stock school plans because they found costs were not reduced, shouldn't South Carolina take notice of this fact? |
By using stock school plans issues of professional liability becomes extremely complex. An architect could easily be held liable for failures or design flaws from stock plans they did not design. Studies have shown that professional liability insurers agree that using stock school plans could result in poorly-adapted designs, increased litigation and higher insurance premiums. These increased costs would add to the total project costs.
Competition among building material suppliers would be limited, likely resulting in increased costs. Standardized plans also have been shown to become outdated and are not flexible, thus obsolescence would be a problem. In a culture of rapidly changing technologies and methods, the last thing we want to do is limit ourselves to nine plans that would be quickly outdated and unchangeable.
Bowen also suggests a contest among architecture students to develop the nine designs. But there’s an inherent problem: Do we really want unlicensed designers, who have limited knowledge of building and life-safety codes, designing facilities for our children to spend most of their time in? Thinking back to the time when I was an architecture student, I probably then would have thought that I could have designed a good school building. Looking back now after having designed schools, I know I wouldn’t have been prepared to design such a critically important building such as a school. The reason the profession of architecture requires a license is to protect the health, safety and welfare of the general public. Allowing schools to be designed by students is a bad idea.
If every district has the same design, scholastic and civic pride would be lost, reducing one of the most important institutions in our society to a mere shell which houses students. If more than 25 states have abandoned the idea of stock school plans because they found costs were not reduced, shouldn't South Carolina take notice of this fact? Eliminating the services of licensed architects will not save money and will keep South Carolina’s schools being described as “the corridor of shame” for years to come.
Steven H. Coe, AIA, LEED AP is an architect practicing in Charleston and the current president of the SC Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. If you'd like to submit a MY TURN commentary of up to 600 words on a state policy or political issue, please send to: feedback@statehousereport.com
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Up, down and in the middle
 Jackpot! Former state employee Solomon Jackson wins $259 million in state Powerball, the largest jackpot so far. (Watch out, Solomon, your former employer, the Department of Revenue, may be calling you for a loan.) More: The State.
DOT. $5 millllllllionnnn for rummmmmble sttttttrips willl saaaaaavvve liiiivessszzzz. Ahem. More: Post and Courier.
 Pile on. Hordes of politicians across the state are calling for Sanford’s resignation. Where were they when he was just governing poorly?
Santee Cooper. Scrapping plans for a Florence-area coal plant may save the environment, but the decision may cost rate-payers nearly a quarter of a billion dollars anyway. More: The State.
 Banks. Mortgage defaults are driving profits down in state’s banks. More: The State.
Jenny. First you ask the media to back off, then you do a spread in Vogue, and now you got your buddies taking up couch space on the “Today” show? We get it: you’re mad. But it’s time to move on or shut up. Weren’t you the one who cried for privacy?
Identity. South Carolina native and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke was a victim of identity theft. More: Newsweek.
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