Mark Sanford vs. the Good Old Boy Party

The popular governor, a Republican who bucked the Democratic tide in 2006 and was reelected overwhelmingly, is in casual clothes. More often than not, he appears in public without a coat and tie, and that’s the case today. He wears a Polo shirt, slacks, and loafers with tassels. His home–when he’s not in the governor’s mansion–is on Sullivan’s Island, an upscale suburb of Charleston on the fashionable South Carolina coast. Sanford is not a country boy. He has an MBA from the University of Virginia.

With a poised and polished politician confronting outdoorsmen (and women), you might expect a culture clash. But there is none. These are Sanford’s people. The issue he’s addressing in what he calls “an impromptu town hall meeting” is their issue: the state legislature’s insistence on cutting the sales tax to 3 percent from 6 percent for two chain stores specializing in hunting and fishing goods, Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. The small shop owners won’t get the tax break, which is partly why Sanford vetoed it, only to have his veto overridden.

If this controversy strikes you as inconsequential, that’s perfectly understandable. A tax break to encourage retailers to open stores–nothing unusual about that. Most states offer incentives to lure corporations and investment. South Carolina was famous, while Republican Carroll Campbell was governor in the 1990s, for piling on the financial favors to attract a sprawling BMW auto plant to Spartanburg.

Yet Sanford spent an entire day in mid-July flying around South Carolina to spur opposition to far less lucrative tax breaks for two retail chains. How come? Two reasons. First, Sanford is a unique governor, not given to the normal give and take of governing. He’s idealistic and principled and visionary. He loathes easy compromise and special interest handouts. He doesn’t court or hang out with legislators. Second, the tax issue lies at the heart of his struggle with the legislature for power and influence in South Carolina.

Sanford, 47, aims high. He’s not only committed to overhauling the structure of the state government and slashing spending, he also wants to reform and modernize the state’s political culture. Then there’s his breathtakingly ambitious plan to drive his opponents in the legislature out of office next year by beating them in primary elections. “He truly believes if you’re to begin to change South Carolina, you have to change some of the people in government,” says senate majority whip Jim Ritchie. All this seems an impossible task, but Sanford is undeterred.

“My strength and my weakness is that whatever I believe, I really believe,” Sanford told me. “I can be completely wrong, but I’ll really believe it.”

Sanford isn’t wrong. He understands, and has since he announced for governor in 2002, that South Carolina’s government is antiquated and cumbersome. It’s literally premodern, having been established by the constitution of 1895 under the guidance of racist ex-governor Pitchfork Ben Tillman and made even worse in 1950 when Strom Thurmond was governor.

Now here’s the rub: Sanford’s fight is not with Democrats but with a legislature controlled by his fellow Republicans. “The good news for South Carolina is Republicans run everything,” says Republican senator Lindsey Graham. “The bad news is we run everything.” And that, Graham says, inevitably leads to tension between the governor and the legislature.

It’s worse than that. Sanford and the leaders of the legislature are as different in ideology and style as Jack Kemp and Strom Thurmond–Kemp the smooth-talking, tax-cutting reformer, Thurmond the Democrat-turned-Republican conservative whose long career in South Carolina politics was rarely associated with reform or modernization of anything.

Sanford’s chief antagonist in the legislature, Hugh Leatherman, is another former Democrat. Leatherman, 76, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and his idea of the role of government is deeply at odds with Sanford’s. He likes to spend, particularly to help people in his hometown of Florence. Sanford prefers to cut, and not only spending but the size of government.

Leatherman is a close friend of Don Fowler, the former Democratic national chairman and now the wise man of the state Democratic party. Fowler says Leatherman “just can’t abide the governor, and I think the governor feels the same way.” Indeed, Sanford does.

The governor “is a very nice guy personally,” Fowler says, “but he believes government functions should be minimal in every respect. The people of South Carolina want government to do things. A lot of Republicans in South Carolina agree. Ideologically, the legislature is no different from the legislature 50 years ago when it was Democratic. They changed partisan identity because that’s the way the political winds were blowing. But it’s no different than it was 50 years ago.”

A Sanford aide describes the state’s politics similarly: “In South Carolina we have the Republican party, the Democratic party, and larger than either of them is the good old boy party. They’re interested in one thing–keeping the status quo.”

This is precisely what infuriates Sanford. “We don’t have a conservative majority in the senate,” he complains. It’s filled with former Democrats. Leatherman spent 25 years as an elected Democrat, Sanford says, and has “shifted parties in name only.” State senator Greg Ryberg, a rare Sanford ally in the senate, echoes the governor. “Most of the Republicans in the legislature aren’t Republicans,” he says. “They’re RINOs”–Republicans in name only.

What’s new in South Carolina is a governor like Sanford. “He’s the one who’s different,” Fowler says. “It’s not the legislature. Sanford is a maverick. He’s an anomaly among South Carolina governors, Republican or Democrat.”

True enough. Sanford’s governing philosophy is close to being libertarian. “Whatever government does, it ought to do well,” he says. “Whatever government doesn’t have to do, it should let the private sector do.” It rankles Sanford, for instance, that the state runs golf courses. “This is not something the state has to do,” he says. But he’s so far failed to privatize the golf courses.

Five years into Sanford’s governorship, Leatherman and his legislative pals are winning most of the skirmishes. South Carolina was blessed with a $1.5 billion surplus this year. Sanford wanted to “get the money out of town” as tax cuts. “If they keep it in town, it’ll be spent,” he told me. “They want to spend every dime of it.” And they wound up doing just that.

Legislators treated Sanford’s vetoes with contempt. He vetoed 243 bills, which represented less than 3 percent of the state’s $7.4 billion budget. Only 15 vetoes were sustained. Logrolling prevailed. The senate, Leatherman’s turf, didn’t bother to debate the bills or even have a roll call vote on each override. Glenn McConnell, the president pro tem of the senate, insisted this was Sanford’s fault. If he hadn’t vetoed so many bills, the senate might have had more time to deliberate.

There was an element of payback in this. In 2004, after his vetoes were given short shrift, Sanford took two pigs up the stairs of the capitol and into the legislature. One was named Pork, the other Barrel. “The boys and girls in the legislature were outraged at this insensitivity,” says Dan Hoover, the respected political writer for the Greenville News. “The public loved it.”

Sanford has been a popular figure since he ran as a political neophyte for the U.S. House seat from Charleston in 1994. He defeated Van Hipp, the ex-Republican state chairman who’d been heavily favored. In Congress, Sanford joined forces with small-government conservatives and radical budget cutters. In 2000, he kept his promise to serve only three terms and retired.

Two years later, he was back in politics with a visionary campaign for governor. He carried an easel and charts around the state, and his speeches amounted to nerdy but persuasive lectures. He said the state must slow the growth of government, reform the bureaucracy, attract investment, and create jobs. His key proposal: a plan to eliminate South Carolina’s regressive 7 percent income tax over 18 years. He also endorsed a radical school voucher scheme.

Sanford easily ousted Democratic governor Jim Hodges, but his agenda was thwarted from the start by the Republican legislature. Leatherman, among others, prefers smaller, targeted tax cuts. So while the income tax rate is stuck at 7 percent, groceries have been exempted from the state sales tax and the tax rate on small business was cut to 5 percent from 7 percent.

The governor has made no deals on taxes or spending. And South Carolina remains relatively poor, with high taxes and government spending 33 percent higher than the average state. This, in Sanford’s view, is a recipe for keeping the state uncompetitive in a global economy. Today the state’s jobless rate, 5.5 percent, is well above the national average.

In his speeches these days, Sanford refers to Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, which argues that Asians and other foreigners compete with America in technology and services, not just in providing cheap labor for factories. He also cites The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida to make the point that South Carolina must offer an appealing lifestyle to attract smart people to the state.

For Sanford, the core of the state’s problem is the structure of its government. South Carolina is a “legislature state.”

It has a weak governor and a strong but provincial legislature. This was the intent of the 1895 constitution, drafted to keep power in the hands of whites if a black happened to be elected governor. It shattered statewide offices into nine pieces, none of them beholden to the governor and all reliant on the legislature for funding.

When V.O. Key Jr. wrote about South Carolina in his seminal book Southern Politics in 1949, he cited “localism” (aside from anxiety about race) as the chief characteristic of the state government. State legislators saw their overarching duty as steering funds to their home county. Today, many still do.

With the creation of the Budget and Control Board in 1950, the governor lost even more power. The board has five members: the governor, comptroller, state treasurer, and chairmen of the senate finance committee and house ways and means committee. The board is unique in state government, mixing legislative and executive powers, controlling roughly 10 percent of state spending, and administering state agencies.

“For four years of my life, we fought this thing and always lost 3 to 2,” Sanford says. But after Thomas Ravenel was elected treasurer in 2006, Sanford began to win 3 to 2. However, Ravenel resigned last week after being indicted on a cocaine charge. The legislature will appoint his successor, no doubt someone satisfactory to Leatherman.

Sanford would scrap the board and bring the entire bureaucracy under the governor’s control. He has a long way to go. Campbell started this process when he was governor, reining in nearly a dozen state offices. But he was aided by a scandal in the legislature. An FBI sting called Operation Lost Trust led to the indictment of 28 legislators.

Since then, Sanford has made some small progress. This year, he stared the legislature down and won partial control of the department of transportation. But again, victory was attained only in the wake of a highly publicized audit that found widespread waste in the department.

For South Carolina to become prosperous and competitive, the legislature–indeed, the state itself–must abandon its obsessive focus on local communities and adopt a statewide perspective, Sanford believes. “We can’t afford this Balkanized, feudal approach to governance and compete in the 21st century,” he told me.

At the moment, there’s a huge impediment to achieving Sanford’s vision–South Carolinians. As popular as he is, Sanford has been unable to rouse the public to demand sweeping reform and toss out the older generation of Republican senators. Ritchie, the senate whip, says Sanford is right in casting his adversaries in generational terms. The older Republicans “were conservative Democrats who believe in the power of government to effect change rather than rely on the people and the market to make us competitive.”

Sanford has the financial means and a strategy for targeting them. He spent $6 million in his reelection race but has $1.8 million left over. And he’s term-limited and won’t be running for governor again. Besides, he is a phenomenal fundraiser.

He has friends. The South Carolina Club for Growth backs him fervently. It has a political action committee and is run by Sanford supporter Chad Walldorf, who founded the Sticky Fingers restaurant chain. There’s also ReformSC, an issue organization (also run by Walldorf), plus an educational nonprofit, Carolinians for Reform, and another PAC, Carolinians for Change, all of them concentrating on the reform agenda.

So Sanford is loaded for bear. Yet many in the South Carolina political community are dubious about his determination to wage a strenuous, uphill political battle. Will he recruit a candidate to challenge Leatherman, for example, in next year’s primary and campaign aggressively for him? We’ll see.

Sanford is relentless when he wants to be. He is a stickler for principle who doggedly refuses to settle for weak compromises, which is why he vetoed an open enrollment bill masquerading as a significant step toward school vouchers. He has vetoed the tax break for Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops three times. As a further irritant to legislators, Sanford personally writes lengthy, serious veto messages.

The tax break (along with other subsidies) for two chains, he wrote in June in a single-spaced, three-page message, “does what we should never do to small business in our state–take their money to subsidize a large corporate competitor that could well put them out of business. We have never before used sales taxes in this way. . . . It’s extremely unfair.”

Sanford pinpointed the larger issue at stake. “It’s inefficient and ultimately disadvantageous to have 170 ‘secretaries of commerce’ rather than one secretary negotiating deals on behalf of the state,” he wrote. By doing so, “the legislature forgoes the kind of full exploration needed to formulate an economic strategy beneficial to the entire state.”

That was Sanford’s way of saying the legislature is locking the state in an economic stone age. And that, if he has his way, is what must change.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.