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Creating Jobs Or Creating
Political Issues?
Issue Creation. It is a political technique often used when your
opponents message is gaining traction and you and you need something
to attack him with.
Early on, Democrat Gov. Jim Hodges, appointed a committee
of business leaders to study the Department of Commerce practices and
implementing its recommendations.
Last fall an internal investigation discovered some wrongdoings
into the department and sought the resignation of the department's
chief of staff Wayne Sterling and marketing director Beth Braswell.
But last week, the Republican controlled legislative Audit
Council, which began investigating the Commerce Department in June
2001, released a report saying there had been widespread spending
abuses through last summer.
Although the governor had appointed new people to
Commerce and his internal investigation had already cleared up many of
the abuses, Republican candidate Mark Sanford suddenly had an attack
issue and he promptly blasted away saying the recent report proved
Hodges lacked leadership abilities.
In his first response to the attack, the Governor called
the recently released audit report "old news" and said
"we fixed the problems that were there." "We've
had a good run at job creation and we're working hard in difficult
economic times to generate more jobs," said Hodges, Speaking from
North Charleston. "Ultimately, good leadership is about when you
find problems, you try to fix them."
Also, he said he has "good people" running the
department, Charlie Way, its chairman, and Jim Morris, who was
appointed chief of staff last fall.
It was over a year ago when Republican House Speaker David
Wilkins and about 50 other Republican state legislators asked the
Audit Council to investigate spending practices at Commerce. The
Council did not study spending prior to 1999, when Hodges took
office. Although much of their findings have been known to the
Council for some time, it waited until am opportune time, during an a
governorıs race, to release itıs findings. Issue created.
Guest Editorial
-- Robert
Rosen
Denmark Vesey is
part of our history
Earlier this
year the
Arts and History Commission of the City of Charleston debated thematic
approval of an application by a committee of Charlestonians who want
to place a statue of Denmark Vesey in Hampton Park. Commissioners
debated whether Vesey, a free black Charlestonian who organized an
aborted slave revolt in 1822, should be honored by a monument. Vesey
and 34 of his followers were executed for planning "to riot in
blood, outrage, rapine ... and conflagration." Vesey and his
followers, the authorities charged, planned to murder every white man,
woman and child, and burn the city down. Vesey's plot and hanging
"lit a fuse to Fort Sumter," according to some historians.
Should Vesey and his followers be honored as
heroes? Should City Council have appropriated $25,000 toward the
monument?
White Charlestonians certainly cannot be
faulted for having reservations about honoring Vesey. Black
Charlestonians, however, see him differently. The committee's
application states that the monument will serve a fourfold purpose:
1. To call the attention of the people of the
Lowcountry and visitors to the efforts of African Americans to secure
their freedom.
2. To give contemporary recognition to the
Denmark Vesey conspiracy, an event for which antebellum Charleston was
so well known and to place it in its historical perspective.
3. To educate and promote an abiding
understanding of the African American experience.
4. To demonstrate the universality of men and
women's desire for freedom and justice irrespective of race, creed,
condition or color.
Many undoubtedly agree with Rolla Bennett, a
co-conspirator of Vesey's, when he said Vesey "was the first to
rise up and speak, and he read to us from the Bible, how the Children
of Israel were delivered out of Egypt from bondage." Officials of
the NAACP believe Vesey was a "hero and martyr." Certainly
the applicants to the Arts and History Commission believe Vesey should
be honored for his resistance to slavery as did Frederick Douglass and
Union Army officials who included Vesey's son, Robert, in the ceremony
raising the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter in 1865. "The execution of
Denmark Vesey elevated an obscure carpenter into a national martyr and
a symbol of struggle for the African-American and abolitionist
communities," Douglas R. Egerton wrote in "He Shall Go Out
Free."
Who is right? The answer is that there is no
answer. History can be used for any purpose. The British view of the
American Revolution certainly differs from ours. Presumably, Egyptians
have a different view of their pharaoh than the Children of Israel do.
Dr. Martin Luther King had an answer:
"My people were brought to America in chains," he told a
Jewish audience, "Your people were driven here to escape the
chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common
struggle." South Carolina was populated by English Protestants
seeking a better life, French Huguenots escaping religious
persecution, German Lutherans fleeing oppression, Irish Catholics
escaping poverty. Our unity is born of our common struggle.
The Vesey project was granted preliminary or
thematic approval, not because everyone agreed that Vesey was a hero,
but because he is a hero to many of our fellow citizens whose heritage
includes resistance - even violent resistance - to slavery.
A monument to Vesey and others will likely
stand one day in Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton, probably the
richest planter and largest slaveholder in the South and a Confederate
general. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gov. Hampton tried
his best to heal the racial divide in South Carolina by protecting and
helping the black citizens of South Carolina. When he died in 1902,
his last words were "God bless all my people, black and
white." A monument to a leader of slaves in the park named for a
leader of slaveholders recalls Dr. King's famous words in Washington
in 1963: "I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down
together at the table of brotherhood."
There is no way to reconcile the different
views of history in the ongoing debate over the Civil War, the
Confederate flag or Denmark Vesey. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the NAACP
and others do us all a disservice by equating the Confederate flag
with the Nazi flag and racism and calling monuments to the Confederacy
"symbols of immorality and wrong." Those charges are
unfounded and wrong-headed. This negative rhetoric conjures up images
of the French Revolution when monuments to the Old Regime were
destroyed, religious images were smashed, and even the calendar was
rewritten in order to symbolically replace the old France with "a
whole new world of morally cleansed images." In Revolutionary
France, history was used, like a powerful drug, filling people with
bitterness and anger. Surely Jackson and the NAACP do not want to do
the same here.
We need not to go down that path. History,
like any branch of knowledge, can be called upon, for good or for ill.
To paraphrase Lord Acton, history can deliver us from the undue
influence of both other times and our own times. What all South
Carolinians deserve is respect for their different heritages and
histories. "Tolerance Avenue," state Sen. Glenn McConnell
wrote correctly, "is a two-way street."
At Clemson University, the tallest building
on the campus is Tillman Hall named for "Pitchfork Ben"
Tillman. Tillman was instrumental in creating what is now Clemson
University for which he should be honored. But he was also a racist
demagogue and, as senator from South Carolina, he defended the
lynching of blacks on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He was a
participant in the Hamburg Massacre when armed white men killed
unarmed black men. Should Tillman Hall be renamed? There are
monuments, streets and towns all over South Carolina named for white
men who oppressed black men. Are we going to rewrite, cleanse, censor
and edit our history? No. It is what it is.
Our history includes Denmark Vesey, Wade
Hampton and Ben Tillman. It includes Confederate monuments and black
leaders of the Civil Rights movement. Maybe Denmark Vesey should have
acted more nobly. But maybe Wade Hampton and Ben Tillman should have
also.
Rosen
is the author of "A Short History of Charleston" and is
chairman of the city's Arts and History Commission.
NOTES: Feb 21--That
George W. Bush ran to the "right" in South Carolina is a
truism. Indeed he began his campaign "over the fence"
beyond where respectable right wingers call home, Bob Jones
University-- the last bastion of racial purity, and home to homophobia
and even Catholic phobia. GW began to define himself there symbolically
for the local primary. He had complained that John McCain
"defined me in New Hampshire," and he said daily during the
SC campaign, "I'm no gonna let that happen
again."
And while protesting with moral outrage when McCain compared him to
Bill Clinton, Bush did what all good republicans remember Clinton
doing--he stole McCains message. He became the
"reformer" when McCains message of reform was selling
well. And he co-opted McCains campaign finance theme. (more
to come, shortly)
NOTES: (Feb.
15) George W's firewall,
as his campaign staff used to refer to SC,
was meant to prevent John McCain from undoing the
coronation--so
called. In December surveys showed Bush leading by 30
points in SC. Today the Bush campaign appears to have gone lame;
and we face the awful specter of the Republican Party's panicked
apparatus laboring feverously to drag its limping horse over the finish
line. Their campaign strategy, more desperate--and more evident with each new
negative attack ad--is to cut the legs from under their opponent.
Voters in SC, now outnumbered by off the plantation Republican
campaigners for GW, appear to be
ignoring their efforts entirely.
The local
"country club" Republican's who people George Bush's SC
campaign organization, (I first
heard that phrase on Meet the Press), have engineered recent wins in
the state by devotedly singing the "hallelujah chorus" for
religious fundamentalists and, of course, by regularly bashing the
NAACP. That core coalition has worked well for
Republicans for decades. The strategy's symbolism is unambiguous
in the paragraph below.
George
W. Bush opened his South Carolina campaign in the  upstate
at Bob Jones University. His entourage included former
SC Governor David Beasley, Charles Condon, the SC Attorney
General and former VP Dan Quayle--all speaking on family values
and being born again. The national media all pointed to
the fact that Bob Jones University is an ultra-fundamentalists
school where inter-racial dating among students is dealt with
by expulsion.
excerpted from a CDN News article (2/5) |
"Let the
devil take the hindmost as we say around here."
Unfortunately for Bush the SC Party leadership is strongly identified with this the
fundamentalist (anti-abortion obsessed) wing of the Party. Bush
may be damned by the company he keeps. Moderates and
independents are simply
ignoring their plaintive calls as well.
McCain is running straight down the middle of the road, leading an
enthusiastic parade of SC Republicans and independents who don't make
their bread and butter political decisions based on the
"heritage" of the Confederate flag or on abortion issues.
O'Hara--notes
Confederate Flag Flap It just gets curiouser
Columbia - The State House, as South
Carolina's capitol building is called, flies a Confederate flag over its dome, in addition
to the US flag. 
Many in the state, African-Americans at the lead, have labored to have "The
Flag" removed. They believe that it is an inappropriate symbol for state
government, and that it is racially divisive. Now, Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, an enthus- iastic
Confederate flag waver, and Rep. Robert Ford D-Charleston, an African-American civil
rights activist who has agitated to bring down the flag, have agree that it should stay
up.  Their compromise calls for the Black "Liberation
Flag" to join the Confederate flag atop the State House.
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