Loftis, Byrnes, Tillman, Thurmond... Flair?

In some respects, Lake City has come a long way.

In 1898, Lake City's African-American postmaster and his infant daughter were murdered after a terrible lynching incident. Thankfully, we don't have incidents of this sort anymore.

Rather, Lake City is known today as the birthplace of astronaut Ron McNair and university benefactor Darla Moore, as well as a trio of professional athletes, Derrick Burgess, D.T. Cromer and Tripp Cromer.

McNair is memorialized with a statue at the Lake City Public Library; in my opinion, his monument ought to stand on the State House grounds, as his character and service exemplify what is best about South Carolina's people. Similarly, Moore is known for her generosity to the University of South Carolina, on whose board of trustees she served until Governor Nikki Haley was elected and found the service of a campaign contributor more to her liking.

This is not to say that Lake City has overcome all of its challenges.

Census data reflected at Wikipedia suggests that Lake City is still a poor community:

As of the census[1] of 2000, there were 6,478 people, 2,409 households, and 1,705 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,365.0 people per square mile (526.6/km²). There were 2,704 housing units at an average density of 569.8 per square mile (219.8/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 71.43% African American, 27.18% White, 0.08% Native American, 0.34% Asian, 0.28% from other races, and 0.69% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.10% of the population.

The median income for a household in the city was $22,534, and the median income for a family was $32,111. Males had a median income of $26,316 versus $19,679 for females. The per capita income for the city was $14,452. About 26.9% of families and 31.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 45.0% of those under age 18 and 25.3% of those age 65 or over.

Per capita income of $14,452 is terribly low. A median income of $26,316 for Lake City's men is low, and for Lake City's women, the median income of $19,679 is low. I imagine that most of Lake City's population takes care to spend its money wisely.

That is probably the advice given last week by State Treasurer Curtis Loftis to the seventh-graders from Lake City's Carolina Academy.

Students from The Carolina Academy got the opportunity to see government up close recently during an excursion to Columbia.

The seventh grade students from John Wall’s history class toured the monuments on the grounds of the State House and were tasked with documenting why the monuments were placed there and their importance to South Carolina’s history.

The students assembled in the balcony of the General Assembly and were introduced individually to the members of the State House of Representatives by Representative James H. Lucan, House Speaker Pro Tem. They were also greeted by our district representative Rep. Lester P. Branham, Jr (District 61).

In addition, the students had the opportunity to meet and talk with Curtis M. Loftis, Jr., South Carolina State Treasurer.

“It was a pleasure to meet with seventh graders from Carolina Academy in Lake City today. I tackled questions like ‘how much money does the office handle’ to ‘how much does the state spend’ to the always tough question from one boy: ‘Have you heard of Ric Flair’,” said Loftis.

For the record, yes, Loftis had heard of Ric Flair, a world heavyweight champion professional wrestler who is also known as “The Nature Boy”.

Mm. Ric Flair.

I remember my first visit to Columbia. Candidly, as a studious sort, I did a lot of reading about the place ahead of time, so I would know about the monuments there before I got to see them. I read about Governor Jimmy Byrnes and his service to Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, even his service on the U.S. Supreme Court, and how he pushed the legislature to approve huge investments in building schools to demonstrate that separate-but-equal could be a valid policy.

I read about Governor "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the murderous racist who was successful at organizing farmers to overthrow the Bourbon Restoration, and who took advantage of opportunities to build Clemson and Winthrop to further break the Charleston aristocracy's hold on the state.

Then there was the Confederate War memorial. I wonder how many people know that a bolt of lightning destroyed the original monument less than three years after it was erected in its State House location? And that the original head -- knocked by the lightning across the State House grounds -- now resides in a museum in Richmond, Virginia?

That visit had a powerful impact. A walk through our State House grounds is a walk through some awful history.

But I digress.

As I understand it, Carolina Academy is a Lake City success story, an oasis of comfort in a desert of poverty. Opened in 1967, during South Carolina's segregation academy boom, it appears to have thrived for these past 45 years. Indeed, tuition to Carolina Academy is $4,400 per child in grades 1-12, $2,900 per kindergartner, with a 12.5 percent reduction for a second or third child from the same family. Tuition is eliminated for fourth and subsequent children from the same family, a legacy policy that must strongly promote stability in its student community.

Carolina Academy is to be commended for giving its students an opportunity to visit the State House and meet with its state officials.

If I could wave a wand, I'd make certain that all of the 700,000 students enrolled in South Carolina's public schools could have the same tour of their State House grounds, and meet with their state officials.

Haley: I don't want to pay for your kid's education

If it weren't for simple mathematics, Governor Nikki Haley might've succeeded at portraying herself as a compassionate conservative. Unfortunately for her, thanks to hundreds of thousands of fine math teachers across the land, Americans -- even we South Carolinians -- can comprehend simple arithmetic.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said her proposed budget for 2012-13 increases money for public schools, but a closer look shows her recommendations would actually decrease state funding by nearly $80 million.

"You'll see education gets an increase," she said in releasing her first executive budget last month.

The Republican governor is partially correct, but only by disregarding some pots of money. Her proposal represents an increase in recurring money for K-12 schools, when factoring in all state revenue sources - chiefly, the penny of the state sales tax that goes directly to education programs.

However, Haley's budget proposal does not include anything funded this school year with one-time money.

That includes $56 million legislators added to the budget to boost the so-called "base student cost" to $1,880 per student - money they added over her veto. Superintendent Mick Zais has asked legislators to at least maintain that key funding source, which primarily pays for teacher salaries, by funding the $56 million through recurring sources, plus adding $15 million to account for student population growth.

By doing neither, Haley's budget would reduce that per-student amount to $1,766 - in a year the state formula calls for it to be $2,790.

Educators call it disappointing.

This is not new. Educators have been disappointed for a decade now.

If a condition lasts a whole decade, can't we call it chronic? Are we suffering chronic disappointment in our state's leadership? Are our state's leaders guilty of chronic neglect of public education?

And what a stirring demonstration of commitment to the rule of law in South Carolina! The Education Finance Act and its formula for a base student cost, adopted in 1977, dictates that this year's appropriation should total $2,790, is absolutely ignored.

An untrained monkey can observe that Haley's budget shows public education is not a priority for her. It reinforces the position that many educators put forward in 2010, in actively supporting Sen. Vincent Sheheen for the post Haley occupies, that when data demonstrates a woman hasn't supported public education in the past, we might reasonably predict that she won't suffer a blissful epiphany once ensconced in the chief executive suite. Better candidates deserve our active support.

Yet educators remained divided then -- oh, I don't like politics; it's so dirty. And, we can't get involved in partisan bickering and make people angry at us; there's no telling what they'll do in retaliation when they get into office. And, let's face it, we're a conservative state; best to ask for what you want, be thankful for what you get, and work with everybody.

Result: Governor Nikki Haley.
Base student cost: $1,766.
State of the education professions: Demoralized.
Quality of public education: Suffering.
Value to long-term right-wing agenda: Priceless.

Here's a prediction: When educators organize, educators win.

Legislators say there's no chance they'll restore the base student cost to $2,790, which would cost $553 million, but they could provide some increase.

"Some increase." This is laughable. A base student cost of $1,800 would represent an increase, and it would still leave us at education funding levels somewhere near 1996, the year that Bill Clinton was re-elected to the presidency.

The extra $913 million projected for 2012-13 follows several years of budget cuts due to the Great Recession.

It's due to a surplus from the fiscal year that closed June 30, along with more money coming in this fiscal year than legislators budgeted, plus continued growth. However, required increases - including property tax relief, health care and reserve funds - gobble up most of it. And those surpluses from the current and last fiscal year are what's considered one-time money. Former Gov. Mark Sanford long railed about using that to pay for long-term expenses.

Yes, we need property tax relief, because high taxes on beachfront property discourages wealthy retirees from relocating here to shelter their nest eggs; it's the primary reason we've seen in-migration drop off so precipitously in the past two or three generations.

Haley has long complained that more money needs to go toward the classroom, rather than administration.

As Zais points out, that's precisely where the "base student cost" - considered a bellwether for state support - goes, in the form of salaries: "We ought to try and at least maintain funding for classroom operations."

"While the governor and I disagree on the dollar amount directed to the base student cost, we're in complete agreement that recurring dollars should be used to pay for recurring expenses," Zais said.

Sophistry: the tool of confidence men, fortune-tellers, magicians and pickpockets.

Try this: While the superintendent and I disagree on the need for public education funding, the Constitution and I are in complete agreement that the legislature is specifically empowered to raise the revenues necessary to fully fund the state's essential obligations and institutions.

Haley's budget also does not annualize the $20 million in one-time "hold harmless" money sent to districts to cover shortfalls due to an adjustment to a state funding formula. And it reduces lottery money to K-12 schools by $11.3 million, in order to fully fund lottery-funded college scholarships.

Items Haley highlighted when releasing her $5.7 billion budget plan include further tax cuts - reducing revenue from state and corporate income taxes by $140 million - and the addition of about 100 law enforcement officers. She would put $75 million of one-time money toward encouraging counties to take over the maintenance of some state roads.

The conservative South Carolina Policy Council says Haley is right to insist that education by funded only with recurring money.

"If increasing base student funding is a priority, it should be treated as a priority, not a benevolent afterthought," said spokesman Barton Swaim, who formerly worked for Sanford. "All this confusion highlights the fact that our funding structure doesn't make sense. Our K-12 education system isn't underfunded - it's funded inefficiently."

Translation: It isn't that we're not feeding our children enough, it's that we're feeding them a little bit from four major food groups, three times a day, when one Flintstones chewable a day would be more efficient.

On the plus side of the equation, Haley would give the statewide public charter school district an additional $10 million.

"The problem that I think we've had in the past with government is we tend to just look at the dollars that go into education."

Yes, I can see where that's a problem. When citizens can look at a budget document and see how many or, har har, how few dollars go specifically to public education, it tends to impede the governor's ability to undermine, dismantle and privatize public education and other services. Apparently, parents want their schools to be funded at ever-increasing levels, similar to the annual increases in cost-of-living, inflation and the forces of the free market. It's as if they take to heart that old saw from the King James: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I don't want us to do that anymore. It's not what we get; it's how we spend it," she said, adding that's why she put more money toward charters.

Hm. Sage advice. It's not what we don't have, it's how we manage the void.

I can see Haley telling a poor family at Thanksgiving: It's not important that you have no turkey and dressing with all the trimmings, it's important that you have a whole afternoon free, since you won't be napping from turkey overload.

Or, telling poor children at Christmas: It's not important that Santa Claus brought you no toys, it's important that you swallow your disappointment at those in whom you previously placed your trust.

Or, telling slaves on our old antebellum plantations: It's not important that you're deprived of freedom, and of learning to read and write, it's only important that you have plenty of time and opportunity to get your work done.

Hilariously, even Haley's own charter-school lieutenant undercut her specious argument:

Superintendent Wayne Brazell said that money would only cover student growth in his statewide district, which consists of charter schools that chose not to organize through their local district.

Remember, several years ago, when local school boards were refusing to approve charters for fly-by-night bands and snake-oil salesmen to open charter schools in their districts -- and siphon precious public dollars from their district budgets -- former Governor Mark Sanford pushed lawmakers to set up a statewide charter school district with its own board of trustees.

So Haley's generosity toward charters in this budget proposal only benefits the charters who couldn't get approved by their local boards and had to resort to the Sanford dodge to open their doors. That's nice. It sends a good message to the children: Play by rules and lose; create loopholes and win! Yay!

The $10 million would be on top of the $25 million legislators added in the current school year, to help make up for the fact its schools get no local taxes. Ironically, since the district otherwise relies on base student cost, Haley's budget actually reduces per-student spending on its schools.

Haley redirected some money that comes in through the penny sales tax added under the 1984 Education Improvement Act. That penny funds specific things such as gifted and talented programs, summer school, student testing, 4-year-old kindergarten, and bonuses for teachers with a national certification. Both Zais and Haley recommend closing that incentive program to new entries.

The penny is expected to generate an additional $42 million over the recurring amount legislators budgeted for this year, to nearly $607 million. However, after factoring in a one-time allocation from a previous surplus, the extra is less than $9 million.

New programs she funds include $2 million toward Teach for America, which puts top college graduates who didn't major in education into low-income schools, and $1.75 million to launch a STEM curriculum, which stands for Science Technology Engineering Math, aimed at preparing students for careers in technology.

Education Oversight Committee director Melanie Barton praised the additions of those EOC initiatives.

"Having successful leaders in the classrooms of our most challenged schools is critical to change the expectations and culture of many of our schools," she said.

This hurts my brain.

The leader of the Education Oversight Committee affirms that "having successful leaders in the classrooms of our most challenged schools is critical." Yet she praises the Haley plan, which (1) reduces per-student spending, (2) eliminates incentives for National Board certification, a program to improve the quality of classroom professionals, and (3) diverts funding from four-year-old kindergarten to pay for Teach for America (aka Teach for A While), a program that "puts top college graduates who didn't major in education" into the most critical classrooms for only two years.

This is praiseworthy? I understand that the EOC isn't really a body of educators -- even some of its "educator appointees" are business people rather than education professionals -- but praising an anti-education budget for its scraps and crumbs is weak.

Haley also added $10 million for technology and $2 million to help failing schools while eliminating money for some university-sponsored programs. She puts $5 million toward leasing school buses, as she pursues legislation transferring bus responsibilities to districts.

"I don't want to buy any more school buses," Haley said.

Well, that's what it's all about: What Haley wants.

I don't want to look at how many dollars we spend, she says. I don't want to buy any more school buses. I don't want to pay for any more textbooks or dictionaries. I don't want to hire any more teachers. I don't want to keep SCETV on the air. I don't want to pay retirement benefits to our public employees. I don't want to provide health insurance to anyone. I don't want to build any more schools. I don't want to read criticism from newspaper editors. I don't want to talk to reporters who print what I say and make me look foolish. I don't want my support for Mitt Romney to count against me. I don't want to learn about Caesar's wife from John Rainey. I don't want Darla Moore to overshadow me. I don't want to hear any more about transparency. I don't want anyone to question me. All I want is to be obeyed.

Her spokesman Rob Godfrey used that as an example for how her budget increases money for K-12: "It doesn't burn tens of millions of dollars on buying buses, which are expensive, which rapidly depreciate, and which we don't need to own anymore," he said.

The state hasn't spent "tens of millions" on buses in years.

Oops.

Yeah, that's right. Scrapped school buses from Alabama and Kentucky and Tennessee don't cost tens of millions of dollars; those states may even pay us to come and take the buses off their hands.

The current budget designates up to $12.3 million for new buses from unclaimed lottery prizes - the first designation for buses since 2007. The education agency has received about one-third of that, said Zais, who added he's fine with decentralizing buses.

Zais did request $36 million to buy enough new school buses to comply with the state's 15-year replacement cycle law, to get buses from the mid-80s off the road. Legislators have ignored that law since passing it.

Of course they have. This is South Carolina, where the law is a mighty rubbery thing.

Will Haley's book feature a chapter on veto overrides?

Really, a book?

Her Excellency, Governor Nikki Haley, has been in office slightly more than five months.

In that time, she has booted the state university's largest benefactor in history from the board of trustees and replaced her with a campaign contributor. See Moore, Darla.

She fired the state's popular and effective retirement system director and quickly named a replacement without notifying key officers. See Boykin, Peggy.

She has presided over a rise in the state's unemployment rate, seeing it return to double digits. See Job Creation, Lack of.

Though millions of South Carolinians, with jobs and without, stretch the weekly groceries bill with ground beef and Hamburger Helper, she has lived well on the public grace, enjoying "menus with Peruvian squid tubes, rabbit loin, shiitake mushrooms and other exotic ingredients," plus "small amounts of Fresh Market Chilean sea bass at $25.99 a pound and Yellowfin tuna at $21.99 a pound, and a number of Publix sushi platters," as well as spending public funds "to buy a Riedel wine decanter and Riedel cabernet/merlot wine glasses." See "Let Them Eat Cake."

She has offended lawmakers in both parties with petty slights, withholding invitations to a Governors Mansion from some, turning another away at the gate. See Brown, Boyd; also Howard, Leon; also "Petulance and Pettiness"; also Not the People's House.

She injected herself gracelessly -- and has infamously sought to drag national candidates -- into a dispute between a federal agency and a corporate campaign contributor operating in South Carolina. See Boeing.

She has fueled a well-publicized feud with another elected executive officer, declaring him "irrelevant" to the state's official business. See Loftis, Curtis.

She bungled an agreement made by her predecessor's economic development team with one of the world's largest companies, who had begun construction on a location in South Carolina but shut down and withdrew when she engaged in a foolish game of chicken over tax breaks. See Amazon.

After campaigning on a platform of "transparency," she has conducted closed-door meetings with national bond-rating agencies and shut the state's retirees out of discussions about their retirement system. See Griswold, Sam.

She embarrassed the state by ignoring the President of the United States during a briefing of governors in the State Dining Room of the White House, and checking email on her iPad instead. See Reuters Photographer, Caught by a.

She provoked legal action from the President Pro Tem of the state Senate by issuing an executive order in contravention of constitutional powers and state law, losing the fight before the state Supreme Court. See McConnell, Glenn. See also Supreme Court.

She earned a stunning rebuke from the full legislature by issuing 35 vetoes and having all but nine overridden, just as quickly and spectacularly as were the vetoes of her predecessor, and garnered an especially raw accusation of double-dealing and dishonesty from a lawmaker from her own home legislative delegation. See Bingham, Kenny.

And she bragged, oblivious, to a small audience of fans in Florence this spring that she hadn't made any mistakes while in office. See Hubris.

All the while, apparently, Her Excellency has been writing a book, no doubt expounding on the highest principles of governance and her nascent, derivative political philosophy. (See Sanford, Mark.)

S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley has a book deal.

Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group (USA), said Wednesday that Haley’s “Can’t is Not an Option” will come out in January.

Haley, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, was elected last year. At 39, she is the country’s youngest governor and only the second Indian-American governor.

In an interview in March, Haley said writing had been “therapeutic” and that she would cover everything from growing up in rural South Carolina to her contentious 2010 campaign, when she faced — and denied — allegations of infidelity.

Haley said she was not planning a run for national office. Her literary representative, Washington attorney Robert Barnett, has negotiated deals for Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Notice the names that her "literary representative" has aided in the past: Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, all presidents of the United States, including two two-term presidents. What is it that governor-for-five-months Haley has to offer that compares with these political giants? A Newsweek magazine cover?

The title is particularly trite: "Can't is Not an Option." Here's what "cant" is: "cant" is "empty, uncritical thought or talk."

"Cant" is also the "jargon of a group, often implying its use to exclude or mislead people outside the group."

"Cant" is also "insincere, especially conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness, or piety."

Yes, I know. She's using the word "can't" as a contraction for "cannot," as in "Haley can't play well with others" or "Her Excellency can't understand why people won't just do as she instructs them."

Here's a fun project for readers: What do you imagine will be the chapter titles of Haley's book?
Example: "Voters Would Soon Learn What Hit Them, Hard"

Here's another one: What do you imagine would comprise Haley's top ten list of governing principles?
Example: Reward your campaign contributors early and well.

Or another: What should be the subtitle of Haley's book?
Example: "Can't is Not an Option: If You Can Read This, We're Spending Too Much on Education"

Rainey: Haley "most corrupt person to occupy the Mansion"

The immediate past chairman of South Carolina's Board of Economic Advisors, John Rainey, issued a scathing indictment of Governor Nikki Haley to a national magazine this week, declaring that Haley is "the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction."

Rainey is no lightweight; he is "a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years," writes Corey Hutchins in the June 15 edition of The Nation, in a blistering article titled "Nikki Haley's Pay-to-Play Politics."

A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”

Hutchins's report examines the balance between Haley, the rising star in national party politics, and what Hutchins calls "a series of land mines -- IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations -- any one of which threatens to blow up her political career."

Haley's profile in The Nation isn't the first to examine her, but it may be the most cutting to date. Hutchens seems to leave no scandal unturned. He begins with a general overview of alleged cronyism:

When Haley took office in January, her backbencher status gave her no support structure in state government. Since then she’s appointed a surprising number of cronies and loyalists to bureaucratic functions in order to construct such a network. Many state boards have staggered terms to prevent unilateral decimation of institutional knowledge, but because former Governor Mark Sanford left so many appointees in place when their terms expired, there was a glut of personnel for Haley to dispense with as she pleased. At an early stage in the bloodbath, the capital city daily newspaper, the State, pointed out that of the fifty-nine she had already replaced, twenty-six were donors to her campaign.

Such wholesale housecleaning was not only sharply at variance with what the last GOP governor had done when taking over from a member of the same party; it also reeked of the kind of favor trading Haley had run against on the stump.

And he gets quickly to the decision to oust Darla Moore from the USC Board of Trustees, and the way it was done.

In March, without announcing it, Haley quietly excised the most generous benefactor of the University of South Carolina, billionaire financier and philanthropist Darla Moore, from the school’s board of trustees, replacing her with a campaign contributor and little-known lawyer from Haley’s district. When the alternative weekly Free Times broke the news of the move -- which led to student protests and a broader public backlash -- Haley was deceptive about her reasons for having made the change.

Haley’s office initially said she had wanted a “fresh set of eyes” on the board; Haley later told Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker that she’d ousted Moore—who’d given $70 million to the university whose business school bears her name—for not returning Haley’s phone calls and postponing a meeting. E-mails and correspondence from Haley’s office, later made public, revealed, however, that Haley had chosen Moore’s replacement a month before trying to meet with her.

Hutchens notes that Haley's choice of Chad Waldorf to succeed Rainey as chairman of the state Board of Economic Advisors carries its own hint of backroom dealing:

To chair the state’s revenue-projecting Board of Economic Advisors -- one of the highest positions in state government that doesn’t require Senate confirmation -- Haley appointed Chad Waldorf, co-founder of a barbecue chain called Sticky Fingers. Waldorf also happens to be co-founder of a group that paid for a $400,000 pro-Haley ad buy during her gubernatorial primary campaign; the ads were pulled off the air by a judge who said the group appeared to have improperly coordinated with her campaign.

Meanwhile, after Haley lifted a hiring freeze set by Sanford, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism created a job for the wife of Haley’s chief of staff, Tim Pearson. Pearson, who is being paid $125,000 -- $27,000 more than the man who held the post in Sanford’s office -- is a former Sanford aide who managed Haley’s campaign.

And in case anyone was wondering about the passion that Haley has shown in defending Boeing Corporation against a complaint by the National Labor Relations Board, Hutchens connects some dots:

Haley has ended up on Think Progress’s list of pay-to-play governors who solicited money to fund inaugural parties from corporations with vested state interests. One of them was Boeing, which last year moved an expansion from unionized Washington State to South Carolina, a right-to-work state, which earned the airline manufacturer a lawsuit (still pending) from the National Labor Relations Board. Haley has lately made national news by asking the GOP presidential candidates to stick up for Boeing.

And Hutchens uncovers a new issue that is fraught with ethical questions, this one around Haley's hiring of 32-year-old Christian Soura of Pennsylvania to help develop the "Department of Administration" she is pushing the legislature to establish. Soura is paid only one dollar year by the Haley administration, but there's a twist:

A bill currently moving through the state legislature would make the department a cabinet agency under the governor, allowing a governor-appointed director to oversee much of state administration.
...
While the dollar-a-year arrangement gives Soura access to state government, he’ll draw his real compensation from a newly created think tank, the South Carolina Center for Transforming Government, which doesn’t have to disclose its funding.

The murky nature of Soura’s presence has caused headaches for the new state treasurer, Republican Curtis Loftis. Loftis accuses Soura of undermining his authority, violating established protocols and circumventing the treasurer’s office by contacting services that determine the state’s credit rating behind Loftis’s back. “We don’t have any knowledge of who’s paying him or what his motives are,” a frustrated Loftis said recently. “We have an unknown dollar-a-year man.”

The article reviews the allegations made by two men who claimed to have had inappropriate relationships with Haley during her legislative career, and the questions swirling around her previous employment as a fundraiser for the Lexington Regional Medical Center, all of which can be read here for yourself.

But what seems to capture Hutchens's, and his sources', attention is Haley's political intentions. "Haley seems to be angling for a spot on a national ticket," he writes. At age 39, he notes, "She is already penning her memoir."

“Every governor we’ve had since Carroll Campbell has had national aspirations, but with her it’s more naked and obvious,” says Brad Warthen, a Columbia advertising man who until 2009 was the longtime editorial page editor of the State. Warthen endorsed Haley in two legislative elections and chronicled her rise beginning about seven years ago. In that time, he says, she has morphed from a naïve newcomer, to a politician he thought could become a good force in the legislature, to something approaching megalomania.

“I think she’s had her head turned by discovering where demagoguery will get you,” Warthen told me. “I don’t think that’s totally who she was before. I think she has developed in this direction. It’s a B.F. Skinner behavioral reinforcement thing; she has been rewarded and rewarded and rewarded. This has worked for her. And she continues to charm the national media. Because you know what? They don’t care. It’s just a story.”

But the story that’s been told nationally has a different tint in Dixie, one that belies any claim that white voters in South Carolina, which is nearly one-third black, have cast aside hang-ups over race by electing Haley. During her campaign, she embraced the most conservative ideas right down the line: laissez-faire capitalism, hostility to social programs and labor unions, cutting taxes, starving government.

“Nikki Haley could have been perceived as a black person in South Carolina because of her skin color and her eyes and so on, but she’s gone out of her way to say indirectly, ‘I’m not black, I’m white. I dress white, I talk white, I have white friends, I have white ideology,’” says John Crangle, a retired lawyer and political science professor who has run the state chapter of Common Cause for twenty-five years. “The subtext of everything she says is that we need to do less for black people in South Carolina, and that appeals to your traditional white Southerners -- the same people who voted for Nixon and the same people who are the base of the Republican Party now. But it also appeals to all these retirees that come in because they don’t want to pay taxes.” In the Palmetto State, it seems, an antigovernment stance that by default is anti-black still plays well at the polls -- especially when peddled by a minority politician.

Undergirding the trajectory of Haley's rise, Hutchens seems to suggest, is an overweening sense of hubris, a mixture of pride and arrogance that has come from the positive reinforcement Warthen mentioned and that seems to presage nothing but success in her future, at least in her own mind.

Hutchens concludes:

In late April, at a stop in Florence, during a series of speeches Haley was giving to commemorate her first 100 days, she told the small crowd, “There really are no mistakes we have made.” It was an astonishing claim, given the nearly daily reports of infidelity, dishonesty, conservative cronyism and pay-to-play politics. But the people of South Carolina are beginning to realize they’ve been duped. The question is whether the rest of the nation will get that same privilege.

Rainey: "Intoxication of power has overwhelmed Nikki Haley"

Anderson attorney John Rainey has a unique perspective on South Carolina: In 2001, he recruited former Congressman Mark Sanford of Sullivan's Island to run for governor. When Sanford was elected, Rainey accepted the governor's appointment to chair the state's Board of Economic Advisors, which seeks to guide lawmakers' decisions on the budget and economic decisions. Throughout Sanford's numerous missteps -- including the implosion of his personal life in 2008 -- Rainey stuck by him. But when Rep. Nikki Haley won election to the governor's office last year, Rainey saw the handwriting on the wall -- their economic philosophies are contradictory in that Rainey has one -- and he left the Board of Economic Advisors before he could be fired from it.

It turned out that his expectation of being replaced wasn't unfounded, as Haley demonstrated last month when she unceremonious dumped another longtime public servant -- financier Darla Moore -- from the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees.

That move -- and others, like being photographed attending to her iPad during a speech by President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House -- has earned Haley national media attention. Bloomberg News Service has just published its own critique of our new governor and her early choices, and its reporters sought Rainey's input, which he happily gave.

“Darla Moore is a game changer and game changers don’t come along very often,” said John Rainey, a lawyer in Anderson and a Palmetto director. A Republican who led the state’s economic development board for eight years, Rainey said Haley showed arrogance in removing the university benefactor, in a telephone interview last month.

“The intoxication of power has overwhelmed Nikki Haley probably quicker than anyone I know,” said Rainey, who is financing a review of Haley’s work history.

Bloomberg focused much of its attention on the decision to remove Moore and noted that in an interview, Haley referred to Moore as just a "big pocketbook."

Darla Moore, a financier who had donated $70 million to the University of South Carolina, was taken off the board by Haley. She was replaced by Thomas Cofield, a lawyer who gave $4,500 to Haley’s campaign for governor, state records show.

“We are changing the way we fund higher ed, and I needed someone I could count on to fight for me,” Haley, 39, said in an interview. As for Moore, “a big pocketbook doesn’t need to be on the governing board because all of a sudden, the big pocketbook becomes the only voting member,” the governor said.

The report suggested that Haley has a history of forcing things to go her way, even in her personal life.

When she met her future husband at Clemson University, he went by Bill. She got him to start using his middle name, Michael, as he didn’t fit her image of a Bill. Now she’s Mrs. Michael Haley.

But the Moore decision -- and its aftermath -- illustrates something significant and yet undefined about Haley's character.

Haley said she replaced Moore, 56, a trustee since 1999, to make the board more responsive to her. By then, Moore had become the most-generous financial supporter of the university in its history.

Moore, an executive vice president at Rainwater Inc., the private investment company started by her husband, billionaire Richard Rainwater, declined to comment on the governor. She said that her commitment to the state and the university is unfazed.

“I’ve been working in this arena for 12 years,” Moore said in a telephone interview. She is a 1975 graduate of the university and a former Chase Bank managing director.

On March 24, after Haley had removed her as a trustee, Moore pledged another $5 million for the school to help set up an aerospace research institute. In a speech before hundreds of students in Columbia, she spoke about the board, improving educational opportunities in the state and leadership.

“Neither you nor I need to be on the board of trustees to make this happen,” Moore said. “We need simply to hold our leaders accountable and tell them we understand that they may not help us, they may not be able to help us -- but we demand that they not hurt us.”
Matching Funds

Moore, a South Carolina native, asked the state to match the amount for the aerospace center.

Haley opposed making the allocation in the state budget, and the House left it out of the spending plan it passed last month.

Which leaves us to wonder what could be Haley's message to South Carolina's students? And what will be her next move, and will it help or hurt an already battered and bruised state?

Ousting Moore nets national attention for Haley

Governor Nikki Haley's replacement of state icon Darla Moore with an unknown campaign contributor on the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees caught the attention of the Washington Post last week, as Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker weighed in with the solemn question, "Has Nikki Haley doomed her promising career?"

Has a breathless quality, doesn't it? I hear it in Vivien Leigh's voice.

For those who appreciate Parker's perspective, I'll get to it. But I can offer a fairly good answer to her question:

This is South Carolina. We elected Mark Sanford, twice. And Andre Bauer, twice. And Thomas Ravenel. And a laundry list of other lesser lights whose collective twinkle won't ever rate space in the firmament, and they variously embarrassed, humiliated, violated and defied themselves, us, common sense, the spirit and letter of the law, and the memories of our mutual ancestors. We continue to elect and re-elect men and women to our legislature whose chief attribute is mere consistence -- consistence in protecting self and allied interests, consistence in starving the least among us of vital services, consistence in vowing at home to do their best for all their constituents and in forgetting the vow by the time they've arrived at the Clarion on Gervais.

Haley has already made a smattering of stumbles and misjudgments, any three of which would have led another state's chief executive to beg forgiveness and demonstrate the lesson learned. But, like her predecessor Mark Sanford, Haley hails from a time, a place and a generation that wears self-confidence in abundance, righteousness by the bushel and superiority by the barrel. We average South Carolinians learned from the Argentinian saga of 2009 that it takes much more than mere stumbles and misjudgments to doom a promising career in South Carolina. Violent crime committed in broad daylight may -- may, I say, not will -- do it. Federal indictments may do it, after they've led to a conviction. The only thing sure and certain to do it is affiliation with the wrong side of the political spectrum.

But Parker asks the question in the Post's pages, and spends a bit of the Post's ink budget to answer it, so we honor the effort.

"This jaw-dropping move has created a furor," she writes, "prompting a statehouse protest and an anti-Haley campaign that has some talking about her political ruin. Others, such as former state Republican Party chair Katon Dawson, shrug and say that 'there’s a new sheriff in town'.”

With a tin badge, no doubt.

“I say there is a new governor in high heels doing what she told the voters she would do and willing to let the chips fall where they may,” says Dawson. “Elections have consequences.”

Ain't that the truth.

Parker has a flair:

As stories go, this one has, dare I say, good legs. It doesn’t hurt that both women are attractive — a Snow White and Rose Red pair of Southern sisters who are politely engaged in a war of, well, roses. In the nicest possible way, they are at each other’s throats.

She aims high:

Speaking to about 400 students on the University of South Carolina campus Thursday as she announced her latest donation, Moore began disarmingly: “While I quickly admit to enjoying the occasional opportunity to talk about the wonder of me, this is not about Darla Moore.”

And then she commenced, without mentioning Haley’s name, to shred the governor: “Neither you nor I need to be on the Board of Trustees to make this [improving higher education] happen. We need simply to hold our leaders accountable and tell them we understand that they may not help us, they may not be able to help us — but we demand that they not hurt us.”

But she takes Haley's talking points:

As Haley explains events, Moore lost her seat basically because she didn’t express sufficient interest in keeping it. She didn’t return Haley’s calls, as the governor tells it, and when Haley tried to meet with Moore, there was a three-week wait.

The governor told me she couldn’t wait. She has only one voting member on the board and, says Haley, “I have to pick one who will report to me and return my calls.”

That's the new sheriff talking. Don't take her calls, and she'll take your seat on the Board of Trustees. Don't care who you are. Or how much money you've given to USC. And to Clemson. Bottom line: You don't give contributions to the Haley campaign, you aren't owed a thing. Better be nice to the new sheriff.